Personal Blogs

The weather was so odd this morning, there was a warm breeze blowing and when I drove back from yoga I noticed the temperature outside was 22 degrees. There was a darkening sky and strong wind tossing leaves and branches across the lanes which I had to swerve to avoid. After a while I managed to get behind a truck which flattened all the debris on the road ahead of me. It was very eerie. Back home I checked the weather forecast, it seemed that half of France was on a weather alert, many homes without power and we were just on the fringes of the gales. We ate lunch on the terrace, watching the huge trees in the garden bending in the wind and the leaves swirling across the lawn. There will be lots of tidying up to do, but none of the trees came down, not even a long dead sycamore, we were rather hoping it would, so we don’t have to pay a tree surgeon to chop it down. We moved back to the main house in the afternoon, I took advantage of the warm wind to open all the windows to warm up the house, now there are leaves carpeting the hallways. The cats are getting a bit confused about where to find us.

A trip to the garden centre in the afternoon, all their trees and plants had fallen over, but they didn’t seem too worried, I left a paraffin stove to keep the stall holders warm for their charity do tomorrow, then made another 70 odd mince pies in the evening, they look slightly better than the first batch, but I’m sure if they would sell at a euro each, they want to maximise takings for the charity, but at that price they might not sell at all.

We received the results of our first bit of course module today, I was quite excited about mine until I saw a first class degree with the Open University is over 85%, so that will be forever out of reach, but I’d be very happy with a 2:1. Then again, given the marked piece is only 1% of a degree, maybe I shouldn’t be banking on that yet!

I had a wasted trip to the market, the Irish soda bread stall wasn’t there and the agency office was closed so I couldn’t stop for a gossip. I was looking for some fabric to make some pyjama bottoms for our daughter but on the fabric stall it all seemed to be rolls of polyester and plastic tablecloths. I saw our elderly neighbour Jeanneau who told me about Claude’s tree planting project, I noticed he’d planted more fruit trees and dug a row of holes in readiness for a few more. Back home I hunted round for some good pyjama material and found a new duvet cover which looked suitable. There’s no room for a big table in the barn, so I cut them out on the coffee table, then sewed them together encumbered by a cat on my lap, it seems he loves the sound of the sewing machine. I was quite pleased with the results, there’s enough material in a duvet cover for 3 pairs, I’ll wrap them up and put them under the tree.

There were ten of us doing yoga in the evening.  I always try and get there early, when people arrive they are obliged to greet everyone in the room with a kiss on each cheek, so by 7pm there is a circle of pupils standing on the end of their mats waiting to start and  the new arrival has to do a complete circuit of the room.

We are thinking we might need to get a dishwasher for the barn, currently we carry all dirty dishes in a laundry basket to the main house and use the dishwasher there, and then find that we’ve run out of plates etc on this side, annoying if I want a cup of tea in the middle of the night and it’s pouring with rain.

I spent the whole day on the sofa after something creaked in my back when bending down to put a plate in the dishwasher.  So, as I was unable to move, I wrote a illustrated guide on how to use iplayer outside the UK, legally, with proxy servers etc. French TV is not very exciting, the only good thing is that unlike in Britain they use older female news readers (in France the term ‘une dame d'un certain age’ is used, it sounds so much nicer than middle-aged)

Philip has started putting up Christmas decorations in anticipation of the arrival of the children. The plan is to dig up last year's Christmas tree, put it in a pot over Christmas, then plant it out again. I am not sure if there is a limit to how often one can do that, I suppose the limiting factor is the size of the root ball, we will try & leave it intact.

We did some more organising of the barn, to avoid having to pad backwards and forwards to the main house in the middle of the night. In fact we decided it was sensible to have two of everything, like tea, coffee and milk, bread, butter. We have a small fridge this side, so it is still quite eco. Philip finished wiring the new lights in the kitchen in the main house. Having a well lit kitchen is wonderful, by painting the ceiling and adding a few more lights; we can now identify foodstuffs on the shelves without having to wander over to a light to read the label. I was busy on my sewing machine all afternoon rehashing an ikea room divider with some Indian fabric; it looks very good, and can be used in various places to shield lights, useful for an open plan existence. Etienne’s dog ran into the garden and I went out to see him, we chatted by the gate and asked him about the accident on Wednesday evening, it was only one car, they brought out a fleet of fire engines on standby as there was petrol on the road. It was an elderly couple, the driver had been blinded by the evening sun and gone off the road but neither were seriously injured. Further up the road last week there had been another incident, a speeding driver knocked down and killed six goats and injured a border collie belonging to the shepherd who lives in the valley, he was herding them along  the road at night, as he does every evening, we always hear the bells. The poor chap doesn’t have much luck, another farmer shot one of his dogs a few weeks ago for attacking sheep. It seems collies do that if left unattended and very hungry. Etienne also asked me what I was doing for a living now as I was so often at home. I guiltily told a white lie, and said that I was still doing some estate agency work, but the market was very quiet. It is difficult to tell someone who is busy all day every day that you don't work for a living.

We were amazed to see the conservatory man, he arrived at about 7pm with a van load of conservatory pieces. It was so exciting, we helped him unload them onto the concrete foundation, and he’s told us he’ll be back next week to assemble it. I wonder. It would be wonderful if it was in place for Christmas, with ten house guests they’ll be able to spread around and keep warm.

For some reason I thought it was Thursday and drove off to collect a neighbour on the way. In fact she was still in her dressing gown, and pointed out it was Wednesday, so I just stopped for coffee. I think it’s the lack of sleep; the cats knocked over the large piece of kitchen worktop wood blocking the cat flap last night and came in to find a warm duvet to sleep on. In fact one or two cats would be manageable but there were five of them.  Anyway I didn’t mind reverting to a Wednesday routine, I drove on to the market, and dropped in to see a friend in the local estate agency to catch up on who is buying and selling. Like us she enjoys cats but over the last two years 8 of hers have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Then last week she came across one of the disappeared on the outskirts of the village, blinded in one eye and with raw shot gun wounds. They’d had her x-rayed and treated at the vet, she showed me the x-ray, the cat’s head was full of lead shot.  Her story is quite disturbing and of course has affected how they feel about their village and the local hunt. The gendarmerie tried to persuade them not to file a complaint, but they did anyway and have written to the president of their chasse. I am glad we don’t have a yob element in our local chasse, I met most of them at the chasse dinner last month and they didn’t like the sort of people who would shoot pet cats.

I went to the yoga class in the evening. There had been some awful accident on the valley road and it had been blocked off, there were dozens of blue lights flashing in the darkness, a fleet of fire engines and ambulances and a line of cars backing up to the junction. A couple of ambulances passed me at high speed when I did a detour through the village. I’ll find out tomorrow what happened, people always drive so fast along that road, it is unlit and not quite wide enough for two cars.

The trouble with entertaining is that one feels awful the next day. So not a productive morning, but after lunch we drove the van to our favourite diy shop and had some discussion with the owner about what to use in our newly converted barn to protect the wall from the heat of the wood burning stove. In the end we just went for heat resistant plasterboard and drove home with it hanging out the back of the van. There’s a lot to spare if we get it wrong the first time. In fact Philip just cut it in half and we propped it against the wall and I lit the fire. That was 4 hours ago. We brought the thermometer in and watched the temperature rise from 11 to 18 degrees as we made up the beds and had supper. The barn is filled with smoke but we are hoping that’s because it’s a new stove and not because of the builder has done something odd with the chimney pipe. It’s quite exciting, we can think of it as going on holiday. The cats are all enjoying the change of scene, they’ve already worked out how to use the new cat flap and go up the spiral stair case to the mezzanine. The stove heats the whole barn. We can even get the internet in here. We just need to collect our toothbrushes and a few basic necessities from the main house. Now we are equipped to cope with the coldest of winters without huge electricity bills.

We have friends coming over for supper tomorrow so advance preparation was needed, lots of shopping and cleaning. As we drove over to Castelnau we could see fresh snow on the mountains, but not enough to open the ski resorts, it must be hard for the ski related businesses and towns. There’s no snow in the alpine resorts either. The market was quiet, the number of people shopping is always directly related to the temperature and it was cold. The stall holders must find it difficult to keep warm, standing in the same place all morning. I bought my usual loaf of soda bread. In fact this soda bread cropped up in conversation at last week’s book club, the mystery being how to make them taste so delicious. One of the girls had asked the Irish woman who made them for her recipe, but she wouldn’t give away any secrets. Philip has tried various permutations of flour, but it’s not the same as the one from the stall. We bought lots of vegetables, for what will be a vegetarian meal. Oddly, most of the British people moving here seem to be vegetarians, so they find eating out in restaurants very limited. The French haven’t really discovered vegetarianism.

Back at home I tackled the cobwebs, every room has beams crisscrossing the ceiling so it is a spider’s paradise, or was, I have swept them all away, one of the guests we’ve invited I know is extremely house proud, her house is always spotless, she even irons sheets, so thought I’d better make an effort. I vacuumed and cleaned all the rooms upstairs. Even unused rooms accumulate dust and dead flies, at least I won’t have to do that again before Christmas/ News Years Eve house guests arrive. It was all quite exhausting.

I don’t usually have such an action packed day. It started with a French lesson at 10 am over at a friend’s house in a nearby village, with three other women. Amazingly the woman that was the weakest of our group a few months ago is now so much better than the rest of us. That is what comes of having a French lover, in fact her neighbour, it all sounds very romantic and they are so happy together, finding love in their sixties. So really she doesn’t need to come to the class anymore, but it’s a social event as well as a lesson. Back home and then to our favourite restaurant in Samatan with our Kenyan friends who are leaving for Nairobi this weekend, I sensed the husband is a bit worried about it. He is over eighty and isn’t as enthusiastic about travel as his much younger wife. Nairobi isn’t an easy place to live, with the traffic jams and crime, but they will be warm over the winter. The waiter shakes our hands when we arrive now we are regulars. As always, it was a delicious meal, salmon quiche, chicken and fresh potato crisps, and then chocolate sauce in a pancake. We went back to our friends’ house for tea afterwards and said our goodbyes; they’ll be back in March. Book club was at another friends house this evening in a remote hamlet, we’d read How to be a woman by Caitlin Moran. I think some of the older members were a bit shocked by parts of it, I suppose I was too, but some passages were so funny, she writes the kind of things that we might think but not articulate, a modern take on feminism and a much lighter read than Germaine Greer, teenage girls would love it. Driving home along windy country lanes, I realised I shouldn’t have drunk a second glass of wine, a thick mist had descended, visibility was very limited. Now back at home and the six cats are all complaining, in the interests of economy they are now only allowed tins in the morning and dried food in the evening, so they are all feeling very sorry for themselves.

I did some OU work this morning, the problem sitting still is that despite many layers of clothes, it gets cold, even with a log fire burning. I feel happy I have done the Tma, it still needs a bit of refining, the hardest thing was reducing the number of words to 500 to avoid being penalised. The sun came out this afternoon, rather than blow and rake the leaves off the lawn I got out the grass cutting machine, mowing the lawn is my favourite gardening job, driving up and down and working out the best route to cut the lawn, the turning circle means it is more complicated than simply driving up and down in straight lines. I also get to discover lots of interesting and often colourful mushrooms to identify.

I took down the polytunnel. After doing some research I found there really isn’t much use for it over the winter, things need more daylight hours to grow, I have left it too late for this year and there is a risk of it blowing away if we have another tempest. I don’t think any number of large rocks would hold it down. I’ll wait until March and grow all my vegetables from seed as I did this year.

Philip sanded all the smaller beams in the kitchen; I’d thought it would take weeks. Cleaning up afterwards was a major task, not so much the dust created by sanding that settled on the floor and work surfaces, that was easily vacuumed up,  but I realised that I’d never cleaned the tops of the cupboards or the walls, the dust clung to the grease and settled on all the cobwebs in the corners and on the ceiling which I hadn’t realised were there. It took hours, but now I am so pleased with the new look, even before the beams have been painted, just getting the brown gloss off the woodwork and having clean cupboards and walls has made a huge difference.

There was a thick mist again this morning. I ventured out to Castelnau market, it was quite scary as visibility could only have been about 20 yards, the roundabout at the start of the town was a big surprise as it suddenly loomed towards me. I didn’t do much shopping, just keeping the Irish stall in business with a purchase of soda bread. While I was out Philip made a start on repainting the kitchen ceiling; the beams are currently painted with a dark brown gloss which needs sanding off before anything else can be applied. Sanding beams is the messiest of jobs, especially in the kitchen. I can see the next few weeks there will be a ladder set up permanently with bits of sand paper and brown dust everywhere, on the floor and all the work surfaces, but it has to be done.

The mist cleared by lunch time, but it was just a bit too cold to sit on the terrace. After lunch I set about finishing the job Philip had started, spreading and digging in the pile of cow manure in the vegetable garden. He’d left me to do the most inaccessible patch, a narrow strip behind the purple sprouting broccoli. The broccoli plants will stay there all winter in the hope they’ll produce some purple florets in the spring. I had to get wheelbarrow loads of cow manure around them without knocking any plants over. A very sticky job, then all the tools, wheelbarrow & wellies had to be cleaned. Next task was getting the polytunnel up. We spent hours wondering why very few of the poles fitted together; the ends were nearly all the same size. Happily (after emailing the manufacturer for some instructions) I discovered another bag of small pieces needed to slot the poles together.  The cover is on, we’ll anchor it tomorrow, I just hope the wind doesn’t get up tonight. The plan is to grow some winter salad plants in there.

Butternut squash & red lentil curry for supper, a rather good recipe from the guardian.

Back from a few days in Bristol, it was another world, full of students and busy, purposeful people. Bristol is my second favourite city after Edinburgh. I didn’t hire a car, so spent 5 days walking between our younger son’s student flat in Clifton and my sister’s flat in Redland where our other two children stayed for the weekend. Rather than go grocery shopping I did an online order and had a delivery of lots of Christmassy things like mincemeat, christmas pudding, crackers and other things that are difficult to source in France. We enjoyed a meal out on Saturday evening, the children made a roast lunch on Sunday after a run on the Downs (I walked). Christmas shopping in John Lewis on Monday, then on Tuesday we went for an early morning swim in the university pool, on the way we passed a row of cars with smashed windows and a young woman weeping next to her vandalised car, a reminder of the downside of city life.

When checking in at Bristol airport to fly back I discovered my sister’s bathroom scales had miscalculated the weight of my bag and I had to transfer all the heavy items to my hand luggage (while being closely watched by a long queue of fellow passengers) to avoid being charged a huge sum for excess baggage, I wasn't even allowed one excess kilo, and despite lots of repacking had to ditch the strong white bread flour which probably wasn't necessary anyway, there must be a local equivalent.

Despite the unseasonably warm weather in the UK, it was even warmer when I arrived back home. I was slightly disappointed that the cats didn’t seem particularly pleased to see me, but very pleased to find that Philip has dug in most of the large pile of sticky cow manure into the vegetable garden and finished painting around the new windows. Today was the monthly lunchtime book club, the chosen book was Monsieur Montespan, Le Montespan was a Gascon whose chateau was not far from here, it wasn't a work of great literature but full of the sort of details of personal hygiene and explicit language that children and my fellow book club members really enjoyed, there was some debate about how much of the plot was true, La Montespan sounded like a most unpleasant character. We had such an enthusiastic discussion that the hostess forgot about the pumpkin soup she was preparing for our lunch, until smoke filtered through to the salon. So we just had salad with bread and cheese. This evening our French neighbours dropped in,  with perfect timing, I had just mopped the kitchen floor and vacuumed everywhere so hopefully they’ll think this is how we normally live, an hour earlier and I would have been embarrassed, Philip hadn’t done any housework in my absence . I opened a bottle of wine and we caught up with the news, it’s Saint Catherine’s Day tomorrow, we toasted our fete day in advance, (our neighbour is also a Cathy.) It’s also an important date in the gardening calendar as the optimum day to plant all bare rooted plants and trees, garden centres do their biggest trade at this time of year. Philip came back from walking in the mountains and after we’d exchanged our news about happenings in the village we talked about dogs and which breed to get, I think we are getting gradually closer to becoming dog owners.

The builder came this morning, straight from his dying father in Ariege, and has promised to start work tomorrow, installing the wood burner in the barn. A trip to the recycling bins and I called in on Fatima to return the empty egg boxes and admire her chickens. After lunch we walked the circuit then Philip finally finished sanding the new plaster around the last few windows, so every surface in the house was uniformly coated with a film of white powder. Just the painting to do now, which is a relatively clean process, so I did some vacuuming and mopping. It was well timed as our neighbour dropped by with the commune municipal bulletin and came into the recently vacuumed hallway. The bulletin is interesting reading, it gives a breakdown of everything spent in the commune on trees and planting, parking , upkeep of the mairie etc and a list of forthcoming activities. I said I’d be happy to organise a table of bridge players for the games evening but now see it starts at 9pm, I might find it difficult to stay awake, but have committed now.