Late autumn often brings nasty surprises - tax bills for example - and we have had a number this week. The last, but most impactful for me is a virulent head cold, which is making every task seem much larger than it really is and more painful too. It will go in time - taking seven days if I use treatments, and a week if I let it run its course - but I am on day 3, normally the worst, and feeling sorry for myself.
Yesterday (so day 2 of nasal misery) I came face to face with another nasty surprise, an over wintering House Slug. Not a normal slug: in its resting mode it was a good four inches (9cm) long and half an inch (one and a bit cm) wide, so clearly a flesh eating House Slug. It was resting on the side of the pot that holds my tiny mango seedling, grown from a pip of a fruit given to us by our new neighbour, and it is the first time I've managed to get one to germinate. The seedling was living quite happily in the garden until it got attacked by a slug or snail, so I put it indoors to be guarded by the Country Cats. We had a discussion about how they were slacking, but they paid no attention. I evicted the slug and hope it was found by a questing fox or buzzard.
We have had two nights with a slight frost this week, enough to further chill down the house after an October that hit the record books for being one of the two dullest (i.e. lack of sun) on record. It was a relief on Monday to see a strange yellow glow in the sky, but it didn't last long.
But in amongst all this gloom, there are some truly French things that remind me why we live here.
There was a note in our post box a couple of weeks ago - "come along to my garage on Sunday morning for a wine tasting (there will also be nibbles)". A neighbour has a chum with a vinyard over the border near Chinon, and once a year, they lay on a tasting of bottled wines and wines "en vrac", i.e. buy a canister and bottle it yourself. We weren't much taken with the bottled offerings, but the "en vrac" was rather splendid, so we put in an order. The word on the street was that the wine would arrive on Saturday evening. So yesterday evening, along with a bunch of others, we strolled down the road with our wheelbarrow and brought back our 20 litres of finest Chinon red.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I am going to take my festering head cold away from my freezing cold office and down to the warm, where I will help bottle 20 litres of red wine, which seems a very sensible way of spending a November evening!
Have a good week!
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