The group continues to meet every Thursday morning, at members’ houses, numbers attending varying according to members other commitments. Owing to illness I have missed a number of meetings, but attended the last before this report.

We read and translated a report in “Sud Ouest”, a French newspaper, about 34 gold ingots with a value of about a million Euros being discovered in a cellar by three workmen renovating a house in Loir-et-Cher in July 2015.

Soon after the discovery the workmen, their employer, and the property owner decided how to divide the value and everyone seemed satisfied, but in 2017 the workman who had been using the pickaxe, went to law and after four years of legal proceedings the Court of Appeal in Orléans decided that he and another using a shovel should share one half of the value with nothing for the third workman. The workman with the shovel was not satisfied with this and appealed further, resulting in him being awarded the whole of one half the value.

We followed this with a printed quiz on our knowledge of common or familiar phrases, many of them colloquial or slang. Some we knew or could guess, others not. They are difficult to remember unless one comes upon them frequently, or gets in the habit of using them. One most of us knew was “j’en ai marre”, meaning “I am fed up with it”, but where the noun “marre” seems to have no literal meaning. Much food for thought.

Brian Caulkett