Here's a puzzle...............

{The supermarket cafe}

Visiting the supermarket for hot chocolate last week culminated in meeting with our former holiday house neighbours (who now live in Embrun) inviting us to dinner on Sunday evening past. It would be a raclette - that way they can feed me without having to go vegetarian for everyone.

If you're unfamiliar with raclette it consists of loads of cheese (special cheese which melts into a kind of creamy deliciousness), boiled potatoes, cold meat, and in this case, a bowl of courgettes. The idea is to melt the cheese under a heating element (usually called a raclette machine) in little individual pans. Our friends also served us a really good salad, and some quail's eggs.

Anyway, back to the puzzle. 

We arrived and had 'nibbles' and some Lagavulin. John is gradually educating the local population about good whisky. Lagavulin is probably my favourite whisky so that was a good start to the evening. The conversation for these 'soirees' is, of course, all in French.

One of the topics for the evening was the notion of  'le fair play'. We (well, John really) explained about cricket and rules and gentlemen not cheating etc. It appeared to go down well. Then came the crunch question....

A friend of theirs had been discussing what the English do when someone at a dinner table starts to tell a story they've told before. Apparently one should indicate that the story is a repeat by placing one's teaspoon across one's cup. The question was -  is this the case and how did this bit of etiquette work in practice. Oh dear!

First of all, we'd never heard of it. Secondly, we'd no idea how it would work and thirdly, we'd still no idea!

I think it just added to the mystery for the French afterall it had been a Frenchman who had uncovered this piece of weirdness on the part of the British. And now we (the British) couldn't help with any information.....that just made us even more weird!

Even after searching on Google later we have no idea where this notion came from. The only reference to placing a spoon across a cup seems to be American etiquette to indicate that you don't want any more tea!

By the way, we had a wonderful evening, with excellent hosts and some interesting, shared conversation.

I just wondered whether anyone else has come across this teaspoon messaging system - I'd love to hear (read) your comments if you have..........

{Our local plan d'eau - also frozen - we walked around this on Saturday}