RECENT PHOTOS

Latest knitting project (a scarf).

Lunch in the Auberge in the village.

A couple of recent sunsets.

Latest watercolour project (autumn colours).

Fish finger sandwiches for lunch.

 The latest supermarket bag.

CONSTRUCTION, DESTRUCTION, PAPERWORK, IFFY WEATHER AND A RARE SIGHTING.

Nick returned from a scheduled visit to our UK house a little while ago.  While he was there he did a lot of gardening, replaced and repainted some damaged fence panels and replumbed the downstairs toilet.  He was kept very busy and the weather was mostly very good.

While he was away the weather here in France was mostly miserable!

While he was away I tackled some of these little blighters.  We had noticed that one of the bushes in our hedge had developed loops of webbing full of clusters of small green caterpillars.  Within days there were virtually no leaves left on the bush and the critters were spreading to the next one along of the same variety of plant.  In a rare interval between rain showers I hacked away all the affected branches, which was not a pleasant job, but too late to save the bushes I fear.

Our journeys to and from Limoges airport used to always be entirely uneventful but lately there have been numerous incidents.  I wrote last year about the wild boar that wandered into the road in front of us, which was after the journey where the tree fell into the road and before the (suspected) ambush.  This year has been just as exciting.  So far we have had the incident with the three cows in the road as we rounded a bend hotly followed by the one with the farmer attempting to recover three huge round bales of hay that had clearly fallen off his trailer minutes before.  This trip, when I went to fetch Nick from the airport, there was a car in the ditch and people all over the road looking at it.  It was, amazingly, the right way up and facing in the right direction, which is not normally how it turns out.  It looked for all the world as if someone had parked it there - usually they end up in the ditch upside down and pointing the wrong way!

Then, when I got to the airport, there was a thunder storm of biblical proportions.  As I pulled into the car park the heavens opened and unleashed a huge amount of rain, hail, thunder and lightning.  There was an enormous thunderclap and flash right overhead and I stayed in the car for a while, hoping the storm would end.  It didn't.  Well, not for a long time anyway.  I finally decided to make a run for it, arriving in "arrivals" like a drowned rat.  I found Nick (Limoges airport is not really big enough to actually lose anyone) and we stayed in the café for a while until the rain eased off.  The lightning had taken out the traffic lights and presumably everything else in the village.  

As we drove through Le Blanc on the way home the river was just inches below the level of the road.

Since Nick's return we have been preoccupied with completing our very first French tax return.  I shall write more about it later but believe me, it's a mammoth task.  We had guidance from a lady who does this kind of work for numerous bemused expats faced with the mountain of forms and without her help we would have been completely lost.  Apparently the very first tax return has to be on paper but subsequent ones online.  Something to look forward to!  This exercise has so far cost us about 50€ in printer ink!!

Frustratingly, the day we spent filling in and signing over and over the vast pile of forms, the weather was very pleasant.  With our paperwork finished and lulled into a false sense of security, we headed for the picnic shelter and finally got round to putting up our new fairly lights.

It was nice to be able to sit out until after dusk, to watch the swallows performing their merry dance followed by the bat formation team.  But it was not to last and after a couple of days the miserable, damp and grey weather has returned once again.  We headed off to Loches n the rain this morning to hand in our tax return at the tax office only to be met with a long queue of people waiting to be seen.  We gave up and shoved the well stuffed envelope in the letter box instead, denied the satisfaction of handing the weighty fruits of our labour to an actual person.

Not to be defeated by the miserable weather, this afternoon we headed north away from the rain showers and went for a walk along the "voie verte".  This is a converted railway track that runs from Descartes to Tournon and is well used by cyclists and walkers.  We frequently do bits of it with Hugo as in wet weather at least we don't all come home covered in mud.  Today we did the bit just north of Abilly but wherever you start along the track there are interesting features.

We passed the site of the old chocolate factory in Abilly, which burned down in 1927.

I'm always amazed at how many decent looking properties seem to be unused all over the region.

This one may of course be a holiday home and buzzing with life later in the year.

Flowering plants were enjoying the strange spring weather, even if we weren't.

Every few hundred metres along the voie verte there are old railway buildings, stations or signal houses that have been converted into homes.

The horrid clusters of green caterpillars were also at work.

 And these things are cropping up in every village.

We dodged the rain and got back home just in time.

The weather has been decidedly iffy for us but clearly our garden is loving it.

You can't beat a bit of colour in the garden to brighten any dull and rainy day.

And to round the evening off, we spent some time watching a HUGE wild boar, all by itself, foraging in the field behind the house.  We have never seen one so close before and it's hard to grasp how enormous they are.  About the size of one of our sofas I reckon!

JIGSAW PUZZLE WEATHER!

Last weekend we were fooled into thinking Spring had arrived!  We got the outdoor tables out and I oiled the wooden chairs and benches.  We went to the garden centre for some new plants and even had a barbecue!

This week we’re back to winter.  Yesterday it rained all day and was blowing a hoolie. Our lovely daffodils are blasted to bits and the wind even blew a whole mistletoe plant out of a tree.

Still, Yvonne was very happy to lend a hand with a jigsaw puzzle!

Today I have made a "school cake" and poached some chicken ready for making six litres of cock-a-leekie soup for an event in the village tomorrow.  Time passes pleasantly, in spite of the 'orrible weather!

GARDEN WORK AND A DAY OUT

The weather has finally settled into proper autumn mode.  The endless rain is now behind us and we’re getting some sunshine.  Time to get to grips with some gardening and outdoor chores!

Nick has pruned shrubs, trimmed trees, cut the grass and hedges.  It’s all looking very neat and tidy.  Inside the barn however it’s a different story.

The barn is on the right with the small woodshed attached to it.

The "little house" is the barn that does look a bit like a house, with the picnic shelter attached to the end of it.

The barn and the "little house" have gradually become dumping grounds for all kinds of stuff.  My dad used to call this kind of stuff "rammel".  Some of it is good stuff, i.e. tools and equipment.  A lot of it is junk, i.e. stuff that we don’t want to throw away but don’t really know what to do with.  Because the barn and little house are so huge, a lot of stuff has accumulated and we have not made the best use of the space.  Things have stayed where they landed rather than being put away.

In case you're wondering, the "little house" is not a house at all but another barn.  When we moved here we hoped that one day we would convert it into an actual dwelling.  The previous owners had the foresight to install a window upstairs when the new roof was done, many years ago.  The upstairs is really just a beam structure holding up the roof and there is no actual floor or staircase.  The size of the building would make it ideal to be converted into a one bedroom house; living room and kitchen downstairs with a bedroom and bathroom upstairs.  The thing that has stopped us from doing it so far is, quite simply, the cost.  Inside there are only bare stone walls so everything would need doing.  We did however run pipework to it when the new septic tank was installed, just in case.

The covid years took their toll as we were able to spend so little time in France.  Enjoying ourselves took priority over housework, although we did manage to keep the garden tidy.  At the same time we have had building work going on for all the time we were here for the last three years and that has taken up a lot of our time.  We therefore plead mitigating circumstances to explain the dire state of the barn and little house!

The barn and little house are watertight as the roofs are sound but the way they were constructed leaves a gap between the roof and the walls that allow birds, insects and bats to fly in and out and also leaves and other rubbish to blow in.  Mice can also easily get in so storing things in such a way as they will stay clean and inaccessible to rodents is a challenge.  When the rain had stopped for long enough to take down our lovely new umbrellas we found they were full of wasps so we left them overnight resting on top of the trailer in the barn and by the next day one of them had already been chewed by mice!

It can be repaired but we were mightily annoyed!  The umbrellas now reside inside the house in the little bedroom until we can find a better resting place for them but we were also concerned about Nick's golf bag.  So off we went to Leroy's at Tours and bought three cupboards that look like they will keep the little blighters out!  One large and two small so that stuff that really needs to be kept clean and pristine can go in there.

There have been a couple of frosty nights recently so all the geraniums are safely tucked up indoors and we have planted some nice winter flowers.  In previous years it's not been worth it as we haven't spent the winter here to enjoy them but of course, this year is different.

All work and no play makes for a dull life so we took a day off from the barn project and went to our favourite town, Chinon, to check out the brocante.  This is a dealer's market which takes place every third Sunday of the month.  The prices are consequently higher than at the average village brocante but it's nice to see good stuff instead of all the usual rubbish.

We managed to resist buying this rather fetching sideboard!

The stroll along the river was as always delightful but it was very odd to see the square so empty.

Joan of Arc was looking splendid.

The only thing we bought was a couple of old copper pans.

They were soon hung over our little woodburning stove in the kitchen, for decoration.

TRAVEL, TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESS

A quick trip back to the UK for me did not get off to a good start. Apart from the helping hand given by Yvonne in packing my case, that is!  She is very different from Daisy in many ways but in others just the same.

The two hour drive to Limoges was hard enough in pelting rain without the added excitement of a wild boar crossing the road at a leisurely pace only about a hundred metres in front of us just outside Le Dorat, but we still got to the airport in good time.  That’s when the fun really started.

I was the last person in the bag drop queue and five places behind the person who took twenty minutes to fail to pay the excess baggage fee for his suitcase.  He went off to speak to someone (presumably to ask for money) and had to be literally fetched back by the one lady on the desk.  He returned empty handed, a few more tetchy words were exchanged and he was sent away with suitcase to the security line so I presume he got away with it.  

Then there was the family comprising mother, grandmother and toddler in pushchair where the mother took ten minutes to find the right page on her phone to show their boarding passes.  

In the security line the family of grandparents, parents and two little girls caused a hold up because they either hadn’t read, didn’t understand (or maybe thought they would just get away with it) the rules about what you can and can’t take in your cabin bags and which items have to be removed for inspection before passing through the scanner.

I was behind yet more people who couldn’t find their boarding pass on their phones (why don’t they just print the damn things out as instructed to do on the Ryanair website so they can show it when asked, or at least have the right app/page already open) but finally got into my window seat on the plane.  

The plane however wasn’t going anywhere.  It was clearly brand new, not a scratch on its pristine interior, but when thirty minutes beyond our departure time had passed the pilot made an announcement.  There was a mystery warning light showing in the cockpit that they couldn’t persuade to go out. Another thirty minutes later I was in conversation with the couple next to me about likely outcomes if the flight had to be cancelled at eleven thirty at night when the pilot made a second announcement.  The proposed solution was to switch the aircraft off, wait ten minutes and switch it back on!

This appeared to solve the problem although the next announcement didn’t exactly say as much in so many words.  Another twenty minutes had suspiciously elapsed by the time the pilot said we would soon be leaving the runway, having permission from "the boss" to fly as fast as the plane would go  - but only after they had persuaded the tanker driver to get out of bed and bring more fuel.  Switching off and restarting an aircraft uses quite a lot of it apparently.

My guess is they decided to stick a bit of tape over the offending warning light and go for it.  Better than spending the whole night waiting for a spare plane to arrive or being bussed to another airport!

Once back in our little UK bungalow I was relieved to find the house dry and unaffected by the flooding elsewhere in town but not without a few issues.  For some reason the fridge freezer in the garage had clearly defrosted itself then refrozen.  I discovered this when searching for something to have for my dinner only to find that the bottom drawer was stuck fast because of a frozen puddle of melted strawberries.  The freezer had obviously been off for quite a while. This suggested there had been a power cut but not so.  The other freezer in the garage was fine and there were no flashing clocks anywhere.  An internet search suggested that modern freezers will go into automatic defrost mode if they are over full and the fan mechanism obstructed, especially if they haven’t been defrosted for a while.

Guilty as charged! I threw away all the contents, cleaned it out and while I was at it cleared out the other one as well, throwing out some well out of date bits of saved pastry and portions of casserole.  We've been in the habit of saving leftovers as a handy ready meal for one for our individual return trips and it’s worked well so far but we’re back to a blank canvas now!

The UK weather has been pretty miserable but not as wet as in France.  On a fine, dry Sunday morning I fished the table and a chair out of the shed and had breakfast outdoors.  The grass was dry enough to cut but sadly I couldn’t persuade the mower to start.  Rats!

I had low expectations of this trip.  The weather has been as grim as I expected, the potholes and traffic just as bad as usual and the litter everywhere just as unsightly as ever but it hasn’t bothered me as much as before.  It’s been lovely to catch up with friends and family and despite the general gloom and doom that hangs over everything people seem to have an air of resignation and cheerfulness.  Or maybe I've finally got the knack of turning a blind eye to all the rubbish and finding a bit of joy here and there instead.  

I confess that I can no longer bear to watch or read the news.  Feeling powerless and anxious about things which are well beyond my understanding, at home and abroad, was not doing me any good at all.  I’ve adopted a formula of doing my best to live well and spend time with those who mean a lot to me.  It’s worked before.

Nick has reported that back at chez nous there has been an improvement in inter species relations.  Yvonne can now tolerate being in the same room as Hugo without necessarily growling and hissing at him and has started venturing into the living room to explore and sit on the sofa, even occasionally on his lap.  Progress indeed and excellent news!