Rural Life

So many changes!

It's been an odd week, with a number of changes, so I feel a bit fuzzy with it all.  The weather has changed big time - from heat and sun to mixed, with rain, cloud, cool breezes, sometimes too cool, and unpleasantly sticky conditions from time to time.  In the past week we have had more rain than we did in the whole month of June I think!  As we are always being told to beware of providing conditions for tiger mosquitoes to breed and take hold, I was amused to see what could catch and keep rain!

Once the excitement and tiredness of the Diner Champêtre was over, I could no longer put off the day when my faithful old computer had to be turned off and the new one installed.  I procrastinated for as long as I could and hoovered all the nooks and crannies exposed by the removal of the old machine, but in the end, I had to get it out of its box and position it. 

That was when I found I had ordered a computer with a glass side!  No wonder they kept asking if I wanted to include lights in it!!  After rolling around on the floor pushing USB and other connections into the various slots at the back of the machine, it was time to press the on button. 

Quietly it sorted itself out, asked to be named, loaded up all the various updates issued since it was tested about 4 weeks ago, and tried to sort out my life in cyber world.  At this point I found I couldn't remember how to move my email files over, so had to set up the old machine again, borrowing a screen and cables from John's computer, in order to move things around properly, and find missing passwords.

I wish I could say it was all sorted, but it isn't, although most things are working, and the other issues, like loading photos onto blogs, are down to the internet connection I fear.

The change in weather has brought wind, which has done for the path between the Orchard and the Meadow.  The dead walnut tree by the gap is shedding branches which have brought down the hedge growth on either side, effectively blocking the gap.  In the autumn we will have to get in there with chainsaws and strimmers and clear it all out.  The wood will at least keep us warm this winter!

July is a funny time of year to be picking blackberries, but that is exactly what I am going to have to do tomorrow, to take advantage of the bounty of this year's crop.  It is an amazing year for fruit and it is rare to get enough blackberries to do anything worthwhile with them.  This year I will have to decide between jelly and liqueur unless we have a good, long season.

There are loads of plums around, although sadly my Victoria plums seem to have all been infested with bugs - I have yet to eat a whole plum without a bit of extra protein!  The quantities are such that we have two burping barrels going in the cellar, one for generic plums of any sort, and one purely for mirabelles.  It won't be a huge amount of product, but it is a rare opportunity to try for such a specific eau de vie.

Friday sees Vieil Baugé hosting Convivial'été - a local festival that over a period of three Fridays in the second half of July, goes around the villages.  The commune pays for a couple of reasonable and fairly local bands to turn up and provides a certain amount of kit, and the local Comité des Fêtes provides the food outlets and the bar.  Next week is our turn, for the first time in a number of years (it halted for Covid of course).  So that's going to keep me busy, before, of course, the final rush to get the float ready for the Comice in August.  It's all go!

Have a good week!

 

Standard July stuff - but still jolly good

July - the month where anything below 25ºC feels cool enough to make wearing jeans and socks an option.  Of course we do get cold, damp spells (today for example), but in the main, July is about watering plants, eating fresh produce and the Comité des Fêtes' Diner Champêtre.

Watering has taken on epic proportions this year.  The pots in the garden and on the terrace by the front door require doing once a day, some need twice a day when we have very hot temperatures, and with the second half of July, I sometimes wonder why I bother?  Except that the lilies that are now fading have bulbs that need to build up stocks of energy to put on another amazing display next year.  Among the annuals, the sunflowers tend to be the star performers.  This single flower specimen is rather fabulous.

From the same batch of seed (about 10 I purloined from an oil seed sunflower in a field by a friend's gite), another produced multiple flowers, so you never can tell!

The vegetable patches need more water in volume and nearly every day too.  The courgettes are producing 6 or 7 new fruits on average per day, and if I miss one, I end up with a marrow for the chickens in no time!  Today we ate the first of the yellow miniature plum/pear tomatoes, which I failed to photograph before we tucked in, and I picked the first ripe chilli of the season.  We even have a couple of small and nearly ripe pumpkins - I'll not pick them for another week or so to ensure maximum sweetness.

The middle of July also brings the village Diner Champêtre, food, music, dancing and fireworks on the first Saturday after the Fête Nationale.  While we have been planning it for months, the first signs on the ground are on the Friday when the first marquees, the dance floor and the stage are erected by different teams through the day.

During the day on Saturday, tables and benches, fridges and beer pumps, cooking materials and supplies are brought in so that when the volunteers start to gather at 5pm, there is enough to do while also reorganising what has been done to date, and having multiple goes at deciding who does what in detail (we are already divided into bar teams and food teams).

It will be jolly quiet for quite a long time, apart from the odd pensioner asking how soon they can eat, but not coming along with their ticket until about an hour and a half later.  Then it will get crazy as 250 people descend on the food line (rather more at the bar), demanding their dinners.

There is one group of people who every year are the last to come forward for their meals, making a joke of it quite often.  However, as the volunteers can't eat until all guests have been served, by which time the first served are bringing back their trays and demanding their deposit for their dinner plates, it is beyond annoying.  This time they also took all the chairs for the volunteers, so we ended up perched on crates and boxes, as we ate our late meal.  Having said that, it is always a great atmosphere, although this year my patience with the Late Diners did wear rather thin!

If you are looking for a tip on how to time your dinner at an event like this, I would say an hour after the advertised start time at the earliest, and a good hour and a half or more before any fireworks!!

The fireworks were very good, but my photos aren't.  I will have to try to get a video stream onto YouTube but as it is taking a good 5 minutes to load each photo today, I'm not going near that!

We now have about 10 days off community volunteering, until the next event in the village, Convivial'été.  A very clever play on words there.  The commune provides a bunch of material, a couple of pre-vetted groups and a bit of support, while we provide the food, drink and ambiance, but not until 1st August.  So now we can concentrate on vegetables, fruit, burping barrels and what to do with the 30-odd courgettes I have in the kitchen.

Have a good week!

 

 

A Day at the Tour

Well that was a day out!

Yesterday was a pretty memorable day.  I've seen a Tour stage end (underwhelming, but it was a sprint finish), and a couple of passages when the Tour has come close to Baugé and I've been on the side of the road, so a stage start was a bit different.  The organisation of the Tour is a huge and well oiled machine.  Hotel rooms had been booked solid for nearly a year, and in any case, Chinon does not have enough rooms to cope with all the teams, organisers, media, sponsors and other aspects of the Tour.  So our first impressions as we were still on the motorway over to Chinon were of being overtaken by team vehicles and a batch of motorbikes in formation, all doing a steady 115kmph, and squeaking "oo look, UEA support staff" and similar!

Our second impression was disbelief at all the cars and the challenges of finding somewhere to park!  In the end I took an illegal turning off the bypass, parked on the edge of a field near a bottle recycling point and we walked up and over into the town.  It might only have been a kilometre or two, but it was 30ºC in the shade, so quite an effort.  Fortunately there was an Aldi half way, doing a massive trade in drinks and snacks.

Then you arrive in the main area of town and the largest town square is taken up by the rather exclusive race compound that you can't get into unless you are friends and family, media, or a sponsor.  We could just look at the outside.

Sadly a combination of Typepad, Microsoft and Norton do not believe that you are allowed to see my photo of the official compound for teams, sponsors and media.

Once we were past that, it got more interesting.  There was of course the official merchandise stand - 130€ for a cycling jersey in yellow, or 30€ for a yellow t-shirt, plus all the other official colours of shirts.  I was tempted by a t-shirt with red spots, but not enough to stand in the queue for 10 minutes!

I tend to think the Tour is more about the freebies you can get and we missed the publicity caravan, so didn't get any.  We could see at a distance the screen and podium for introducing the teams to the public, but couldn't get near enough for a sensible view.

As you can see, it was all very crowded, but luck was on our side as a friend of my brother's has a house overlooking the official teams paddock, so we were able to go and lean out of his first floor windows and get an excellent view of various riders doing their warm ups.  Yesterday's holder of the red spotted jersey went past a few times.

Pogacar, the holder of the Yellow Jersey, also made a few turns along the road, much to everyone's delight.

These professional cyclists are tiny compared to normal people!  Narrow shoulders, not an ounce of spare flesh on them, and they look so frail!

Anyway, eventually it was time for them to line up for the race start further down the road, so batches of cyclists went past doing weird things, like adjusting their clothing, drinking, stopping to chat to friends and family and the like, in advance of the day's race.

And then they were off, followed by a long cortege of cars with loads of spare bikes, motorbikes, team coaches, medical teams, support vehicles and police outriders.

While the town of Chinon kept activities going for the rest of the afternoon, once the race was away, the Tour organisation swept into Pack Up And Go mode, and an hour after the departure, much of the official enclosure was already down and being packed onto lorries, to go to the next Stage Start town.

Sadly a combination of Typepad, Microsoft and Norton do not believe you are allowed to see the amazing transformation after an hour of the official enclosure for teams, sponsors and media - I've tried for 15 minutes to load the photos and it just won't happen.

After some refreshments, we headed back to find the shuttle bus that would take us to near where I had dumped the car.  We stopped to admire a structure across the river made of barrels.  We thought it was some sort of game for the clients of the guingette, but in fact if we could have seen it from above, it was a bicycle wheel in wine barrels for the benefit of the TV helicopters and drones, set up by the wine producers of Chinon.

So we headed home, and about 8 kilometres from our house, the heavens opened and the temperature fell by some 10ºC with the rain, making life a lot more comfortable for watching the stage end on the TV at home.  The Yellow and Red Spotted jerseys stayed the same.

Clearly I was not well positioned for photos of the race start or classic views back towards the chateau, so I have borrowed photos that were shared today by the town of Chinon.  The first is a screen grab of the riders lined up ready to start, while the second is with the Race Director in his red car, as they came off the bridge, heading south towards Richelieu.

 

If you can, it is worth going along to the Tour, but don't underestimate the challenges and the number of people who also want to be part of it - the France TV estimate is 10 million spectators during the three weeks of the Tour.

Next week, we have our Diner Champêtre to celebrate the Fête Nationale, which should be fun for the punters, but will be very hard work for the volunteers.  I'll still try to share some interesting photos and anecdotes though!

Have a good week!

 

Respite!

This photo was taken (not by me) in our garden on Tuesday afternoon at about 4:30pm.  This was the height of the latest heatwave and I have to confess to being slumped on a sofa, in front of a fan blowing air over 3 5 litre cannisters of ice.  The weather was uncomfortable, the Heath Robinson air con worked!

I finally went outside at about 10pm to lock the chickens away and do a bit of watering, as well as my regular stroll to the top of the hill in front of the house.  I was rewarded by a lovely sunset.

Today that all seems like a distant memory, with rain, soft, gentle, wet rain, and much cooler temperatures.  It won't last but today we are enjoying the change!

Yesterday we were in Chinon for dinner.  Next Sunday morning, the town will be the focus of the cycling world as the Tour de France sets off from there, for its ninth stage, heading south towards Chateauroux.  Naturally we will go along and see the spectacle, although how much there is to really see will be interesting.  We saw a stage finish once in Tours, and it was 2 to 3 hours of standing around for 10 seconds of whoosh!  The town is festooned with yellow bunting, flags and other decorations, and a line painted on the road for the official start line when the four jerseys line up behind the lead car.  The real start is about 10 kilometres out of town, but it is all about the spectacle in town.  One of the pharmacies had a suitable window display.

On Thursday morning, a bunch of us braved the metal convection oven that is the Comité des Fêtes storage barn to crack on with the float for the Comice.  My illness and successive heatwaves had slowed progress considerably, but we are on a deadline and fortunately a strong team of 7 were able to do all the panels that were prepared.  I have checked the photo and I'm not giving away any secrets when I show our admirable team at work.

One more session is all we need to get the panels finished!

A combination of heatwaves and the arrival of a new computer have encouraged me to deal with a trail camera - down in the corner where the Meadow meets the Plantation.  I was delighted to see that the hare uses this corner quite a bit, or was using it in March anyway!

It is very much an area where deer like to hang out - it provides cover and food and yet also allows a good view in the "vulnerable" directions.  This stag had a pretty impressive rack of horn in April and used his antlers to trash the trees and greenery a bit.  They are a menace when you have young or vulnerable trees, it has to be said!

By June, the results of a previous rutting season were around.  When very tiny, the fauns are stashed in long grass or cereal crops, but as they grow, they follow Mum around learning to feed themselves, and being left in slightly more interesting places, like among the trees that edge the Meadow.  These were learning to feed.

There is a water source nearby, which is also an attraction for the deer at the moment.  Some of the ponds are looking very dry, but two are fed by tiny springs that don't seem to fail, and keep the local wildlife going.

Next week may be all about the Tour, depending on the next bout of heatwaves and the speed of my internet connection (we will soon go over to fibre, but there are Things to be Done before that can happen), so may be a day late.  All very conditional I know!  Anyway, have a good week!