Out of touch

I've mentioned before about how out of touch I feel sometimes living in France. I'm not blaming France for that, but our lives have changed since we moved here. 

A perfect example of being completely out of touch happened this week:

this picture melted my heart and I'm sure I'm not the only one!

Robbie Williams became a Dad!!! I had no idea that was going to happen, and apparently he's been married for 2 years! Funny that's exactly the same amount of time we've been living in France!

I think in England my main source of news and gossip was Radio 1, or generally from the TV, or friends at work. I miss Radio 1 so much, I could listen to it online, but I never think to do so.

French TV is crap.

We've never been people to just have the TV on in the background, and so because there's rarely anything decent on, our screen stays blank. We can access UK TV via a VPN server, and catch up online or watch some channels live. At the moment I'm catching up on The Great British Bake Off each week, I love it.
Even Francois, and actually a lot of French people admit the TV is rubbish here, especially if they've had a taste of British TV which really can be exceptional. Francois misses the documentaries, science programs and comedy quiz shows!
The problem is, we never really know what's on and so don't know what we're missing or should be catching up on, until it's too late. It's quite often through a UK friends facebook status that I'll find out what's on TV. People like to put what they're watching as their status a lot, ever noticed that?! Apparently X Factor has started again, I have no idea where it's up to, and so for the very first time I probably wont watch it. Of course if we were sat here twiddling our thumbs on an evening, we could look and find something to watch. We have a stack of DVDs we were given last Christmas and probably some from the Christmas before, which are patiently waiting for us to watch them! The only DVD's we tend to watch are Dora, Charlie & Lola, or Ben & Holly. Recently though we've been allowed to watch the odd film with the kids, Tangled was great and Toy Story 3 seemed very funny, we need to watch it again without the kids as we missed so much with them talking over it!

A lot of Brits in France have Sky TV so they have British TV in their homes and don't miss a thing. We don't have this. I think we will one day, and now we're in our own home we could get a satellite dish installed, but it will probably just get added to the long to do list we already have!

One thing I do keep up with is the news on the BBC website, this is for work, I need to be up to date with the world in order to hold an adult conversation! And speaking of work, as this is what I spend most of my evenings doing, I don't actually have much time to watch TV anyway!