Rural Life

Heat and Fire

I've lost count of the number of official heatwaves we have had so far this year.  The current one - is it 5 or 6? - has been going on a long time and still has a day or two to go, although we are past the peak, thank goodness.  Everyone is getting bored and tetchy with it all - the continual heat, the challenges of keeping the house faintly cooler than outside, the restrictions, are all wearing people down. 

The latest heatwave has brought in local restrictions on access to woodland areas and what you can do in or near them.  This is a sensible precaution as there is a breeze, everything is tinder dry, there is little standing water outside of major lakes and water courses and we still see the ravages of the big forest fire from 3 years ago.  The Prefet has therefore banned all access to woodland areas between midday and midnight from Friday 15th August to Tuesday 19th August.  This has upset a lot of people.

This is because at Vernoil le Fourrier every 15th August there is the Festival of Hunting.  The grounds they use are, I gather, rather spectacular, on the edge of a major forest and partly wooded to ensure shade for horses and dogs (and humans).  It runs from 10am in the morning, with demonstrations, stalls, exhibitions, feasting and drinking, and is rounded off by fireworks before closing at midnight.  Despite arguments from the organisers that they had lots of tanks of water around the site, that all their visitors were responsible human beings, that it was all a bit unfair and "nanny state", the Prefet was unmoved, and they could only open for 4 hours, from 10am to 2pm.  The weeping and wailing and calling it all unfair has swept across social media and the press.

Not far from the land that we rent, there is a rather splendid chapel - Notre Dame de Montplacé.  The 15th August is a bank holiday in much of Europe for Assumption, celebrating Mary's ascent into Heaven, if you believe in such things.  There is therefore a pilgrimage to the chapel, and a well attended Mass is celebrated at 11am, drawing in the faithful from a fairly wide area.  It isn't too close to woodland, but it is surrounded by fields and copses. 

When we left that area on midday on Friday (tending our plants and cats, not attending Mass), there were lots of cars parked up at the chapel, and yesterday when we left that area, we found that there had been a scrub fire at the end of the track leading away from the parking area.  Today we stopped to look and photograph the damage. 

It would appear to have been a car fire, burning furiously hot (chunks of melted metal and evidence of totally destroyed tyres), which spread into the surrounding grassland, fortunately stopped by broadleaf scrub and presumably some form of fire extinguishing intervention.  Certainly the bulk of the car has been taken away.

I'm not at all sorry the Hunting Festival was brought to a halt at midday.  If a few pilgrims can lead to a small fire, what could a few thousand people on the edge of woodland do?

The heat is doing great things for the garden, however!

This is becoming a daily standard of what gets harvested.  OK we don't have aubergines every day, but the tomatoes are becoming a challenge commensurate with the courgette problem that has been going on for some 6 weeks now.  Then there are the Victoria plums - I've picked loads, and loads have fallen off, and still the tree is overloaded!

I've made jam, I've made crumbles for the freezer, I have a recipe to try for plum fool, and I have a burping barrel in the cellar that takes anything that isn't perfect or that falls on the floor.

And while it is still only mid-August, there are signs of autumn creeping up on us.  Trees that like nice moist soils (poplar, willow) are giving up and their leaves are turning colour and falling.  The swallows and house martens are starting to think about who they want to travel south with (the swifts are long gone).  The evenings are drawing in - while we aren't allowed to water vegetable gardens until 8pm at night (and only until 8am), the gap between 8pm and sunset not long after 9pm gets ever shorter.  The smoke from the wildfires in Portugal has also shortened the light at dusk, which doesn't help any either. 

However a happy harbinger of autumn is also appearing, as cyclamen flowers appear in the lawn, hedgerows, and woodland (when you are allowed in).  Such a pretty flower!

Next weekend is the Comice and Sunday is the parade of decorated floats, and I'll be on ours.  So the blog will not appear until Monday, because I will be way too busy to do anything else next Sunday!

Wish me luck, not least with the weather, and 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!

 

 

A plague on carriers of disease!

Either that cold was a real humdinger or we had Covid, either way, the extra symptoms and issues just keep on coming!  I have never before had to phone the doctor's surgery here for a medical appointment that wasn't routine, but yesterday I did manage to get an emergency appointment to look into symptoms.  Thanks to Google, I was convinced I had a failing gall bladder or pancreas - actually it turned out to be acute gastro, so unpleasant but solvable. 

Then last night I became convinced that someone was trying to kill me by forcing a knitting needle into my ear.  Despite serious pain killers, sleep was elusive at best and my ear is seeping gunk.  This time Google tells me it is an anodyne ear infection and to take painkillers until it sorts itself out.  Much of the earlier part of the week was spent trying to fool myself that the bugs had gone - all in all, I'm not impressed!

Still, we did get one thing sorted out, and that was very purposeful.  Twenty years ago, when we moved over to France, we realised we needed a decent outdoor table and chair set, so went to Casa and invested.  The chairs lasted perhaps 3 or 4 seasons, but the table has only just fallen apart.  Actually it is still doing service as a place to put plant pots, so not dead yet.  It took a while to find something we liked - most stores go for the metal and plasticised fabric things, but we wanted wood.  We also prefer to buy locally, but sometimes you can't, and the internet helped us out.  Of course it needed to be varnished before being put into use, which meant that Poirot took against it until I put a bit of hardboard on it, but we now have our new outdoor table.  Let's hope it also lasts 20 years!

The week has been very hot, which made the session on Thursday sticking paper flowers onto cardboard panels rather uncomfortable, to say the least.  Actually I blame that heat for the gastro, but I could be wrong!  Anyway, progress was made and that was the important thing, as while the Comice isn't until the 23rd August, the time will fly between now and then!

The hot weather is suiting the Mediterranean vegetables although they are now starting to ask for water as well, which is an issue as we haven't had much rain for 3 months now.  The progress the courgettes are making is really rather scary and this year I might have overdone the number of plants!

This weekend, the local business support group, Baugé Entreprendre, has its regular Fair or Exhibition.  I am always stounded at the range of artisans we have in the area, much smaller than a British district council.  There were a number of people who upcycle things - leather, furniture, tyre inner tubes as below ...

There is a guy who makes lovely shelves from offcuts of wood - I will invest in one shortly!

And of course there was a furniture restorer and a lady who does lovely upholstery, who will be getting our custom in due course.

Not only was it fascinating to see the inventiveness and skills of local people, we also met up with a load of chums as we wandered round, making it a very convivial occasion as well.  Hopefully this spotlight on local talents will ensure that they pick up more work and provide an excellent economic base for the area.

Well, I hope that next week's offering is more interesting and less full of complaints about health.  The weather forecast is set fair for a beautiful late spring/early summer, and over the last week, the douceur angevine once again spared us from devastating storms.  Long may that continue!

Have a good week!

Summer colds and cherries

When I was in the queue for the till at Aldi just over a week ago, there was a handsome man ahead of me, necking a litre bottle of orange juice while waiting his turn.  In between urgent gulps of juice, he spent a happy time coughing repeatedly.  I might have wondered if it was juice with bits and they were annoying: I might have idly wondered about whether the new strain of Covid was anything more than tabloid click bait.  I did not expect to spend most of the week trying to breathe without sounding like a pig with its snout in a trough of tasty sludge.  Silly me!  Half the week seems to have been blurry, seen through eyes partly obscured by mucus, interspersed with periods of great clarity and purpose.

Much of that purpose has been driven by greed.  For the first time in over 5 years, we have access to a crop of cherries!  There are two trees with tasty red ones, and I found one today that has lovely ripe yellow cherries too - or what we used to call white cherries back in the orchards of Kent of my youth.  Shortly I must go and stuff a kilner jar with as many ripe red cherries as I can, then top it up with (home produced) kirsch to be useful in the autumn and winter.

As far as I remember, the cherry season is short and intense.  It is a battle with birds who feel the need to eat some and damage as many as they can before I can get to them, and with the weather, which even in a record dry spell, will produce a downpour of rain to split the best, biggest and ripest of fruit.  That is without the, for us, new threat of people just wandering into the field and helping themselves, and the more familiar threat of deer, boar, pine martins, and badgers scoffing what they can, depending on craftiness and height.  The branch of cherries below shows the range of challenges, including a bit of mildew also making its presence felt.  Commercial cherry farmers should be feted for getting any to your table at all!

Fruit gluttony aside, the vegetable plots are starting to provide the odd side dish, and indeed meal.  Yesterday we had a small portion each of the tiniest petit pois to encourage the plants to keep producing.  I actually grew the peas as something to graze on while at the plot, as I love fresh peas, raw, direct from the pod.  The summer cold from hell has made raw peas about as appealing as eating pebbles, but lightly cooked and served with a bit of farm butter, they were close to heaven last night.  Tonight we have new potatoes and broad beans to accompany our extra fatty and skin on pork chops (fat is most appealing at the moment), and while the product of one plant isn't vast, we didn't eat all the potatoes from the 56 we planted last year, so eating some early this year is not going to deprive us during the winter I reckon!

The pumpkins that we set off from seeds from one that we bought during the winter for soup have suddenly decided that they like being planted in soil that is 50% kiln ready clay and 50% top grade compost and are sending tendrils everywhere.  Encouragingly, they are also sending out lots of female flowers, although if I am right, these three have not been fertilised and will come to nothing.  The hint being that the stems are yellow rather than green.  But it is still early days, and I would hope to have some set and growing nicely by the end of June.

The courgette plants in the ratatouille bed look as though they are getting ready for world domination.  Given that they were tiny when planted out, and some with very poor root balls, they have taken to the bed really well.  Rather better indeed than the expensive and posh pepper plants, which have yet to put on a new leaf in four weeks, and are now being cossetted with a protective cover!  The aubergines are also looking sulky, but I find they do that until late June and then become ravenous triffids.

Talking of triffids, it put on 20 centimetres in a week...

Anyway, cherries don't put themselves in jars of alcohol, so I'd better go and help them out.  Have a good week!

 

Between two events - apologies for the delay!

Last week I was a few hours early posting, before heading off to tend bar at the village Trout Fishing Day.  This week I am a day late after being one of a handful of stall holders at the village PTA car boot sale.  In between there have been all sorts of excitements with a poorly cat, a septic tank issue and wild orchids - it's hard to know where to start and what to include!  Perhaps at the beginning, with a picture of a lovely sunny day for trout fishing?

Yesterday was rather a contrast, dull skies, rain in the night, a third of the booked places not taken up due to the weather and few punters for all the goodies spread out for their delight.  We did alright during the day in terms of large and/or heavy items sold, as well as a lot of smaller stuff, but the heavy rain at lunchtime scared off buyers, and while we hung in to the end, we did little business in the afternoon, despite lovely sunshine.

There is nothing exciting about septic tank inspections, so I will gloss over that, other than to praise highly the integrity and helpfulness of the local inspector, who tried her best to approve things, but where they couldn't be approved, is helping us to find cost effective solutions for my client.  

Much more exciting is that the bee orchids are finally putting in an appearance, possibly stirred into action by a very small amount of rain at the start of the week.  They have mostly cropped up in or very close to the recently mown path through the orchard.  This kind of confirms my view that bee orchids need either grazing animals to keep the grass down or a simulation of that (mowing) in order to push up their flower spikes.  They don't much like competition and it seems long grass and tall weeds are not their friends.

Another orchid related excitement was the discovery of a new (to us and to the location) type of orchid, this time relatively happy in the long grass.  I've not had a chance to look it up yet, but it is some form of pink pyramidal orchid.  I've not seen any like it in the area, so I'm not sure how it arrived, and John says it is nothing to do with his mowers!

Early in the week I met the biggest caterpillar I have ever seen in the rough grass in the country - large, and on some level rather disturbing.  Way back in the 70s there was a Dr Who episode called something like the Green Death, which involved giant maggots, and I have been iffy about maggots and caterpillars every since, particularly that size!  The Peugeot key fob gives an idea of scale.  I hope it grows up into something nice!

As we head towards the end of no-mow May - something I rather disapprove of in general - I thought I would highlight how you can do it sensibly.  Make nice wide paths that are kept mown through the area you are interested in.  This has been particularly a thing with us this last week, as it is a bumper year for tics and we are picking off a good number each week from the Country Cats.  One of the cats has developed anaemia and the vet thought it was entirely possible that this was due to the number of tics he has picked up.  The blood tests to diagnose the problem were costly, although not as much as if we lived in the UK (expensive is relative I guess), and there is a prolonged course of medication and a long way to go until he is back to full Spooky Power.  

And here is the anaemic patient in his cat carrier at the vet's - Spooky the indomitable.

So keep checking for tics - you and all your loved ones! 

Well, that is it for this week, and it promises to be a quiet week so I should be back to the normal schedule next week.  Have a good one!

 

More mundane activity than recently

The unseasonably hot weather has gone, leaving us with mild spring conditions, much more conducive to the French resident's annual May bugbear task of sorting out the tax return.  It is an existential grey cloud that hovers over you, with panics about declaring non-French fiscal instruments of all sorts, trying to decide which pensions are classed as private or public (not as obvious as it sounds), where to put that charity donation and have you got the paperwork to back it up if audited, and as a special for this year, how to do a tax return on 19 days pre-decease for my Mum. 

Actually that last one was so much easier than I had feared it would be, as naturally, the state was already aware of when she died and kept telling me it was just a 19 day tax return.  The only problem was the bit about "do you still live at the address we have for you" - I don't think the lawyer's office counts as heaven, hell or purgatory in the eyes of the French state.

The cooler, but still quite warm, conditions make it easier to get moving on the gardening tasks that are becoming urgent - mowing, planting, sowing, pruning.  We've done a lot of all that!

All bar one of the potatoes we planted are now up and the first ones are starting to think about flowering.  I am hopeful that we will have some new potatoes in June.

[photo of growing potatoes] - This photo just will not load - somewhere an AI bot has decided that it really is too dull, but the others are now there!

Last weekend I bought tomato and pepper plants and I have been able to get those planted now all fear of frosts has gone.  I regard tomato plants as the ultimate heart breakers, as I put them in so full of hope, and quite often by mid-July I am prepared to burn the wretched things as they are full of blight or broken and twisted.

While watering the peas, I noticed a bit of movement around my feet - a rather unsteady Red Admiral.  My Dad used to tell me lovely stories about a Red Admiral and a Painted Lady - I think they were very much stories on two levels as my Mum used to like to listen too.  Sadly he never wrote any of them down.

Once all the hard work had been done today, I walked round the grounds listening to birds and met a rather pretty damsel fly - it would be nice if this photo worked, as the only one to go on so far is of a boring vegetable bed!

So there she is!  I'm pleased that one worked, and perhaps tomorrow I can get more uploaded and the blog republished, but clearly the internet is clogged up with French people doing their tax returns on a Sunday afternoon and I guess I have to respect that.  Alternatively, I need to get signed up for fibre and then I won't have this problem (in theory).

Have a good week!

 

An aestival interlude

Actually I would spell it estival rather than aestival, but I think the American spell checker objects!  Whatever, April and the first couple of days of May have been a wonderful foretaste of what summer should be like, but wasn't last year.  We wait to see how this summer pans out - I have little faith in the long term forecasts peddled by the tabloids. 

We started the week with aperos in the garden with our elderly cat, and on Friday had a book signing on the pub terrace with a renowned Anglophone historian and writer (click on the Eighty Years Ago this Week link on the right of the screen when you have finished reading this for more information about Adrian Phillips, author of, among other titles, Winston's Bandits, the book being signed here).  What a week!

In between, there have been markets, a bank holiday with picnic, a final afternoon at the Mairie making paper flowers, and an extremely hot and sticky session in the Comité des Fêtes's hangar, taking down last year's cabin structure and building the new frame for this year's tableau - very hush, hush for the moment. 

The natural flowers are an absolute joy this year.  At the bottom of one of our downpipes we always have a good display of campanula growing out of the wall and a bit of tarmac, but this year is the best ever I think.  They should keep going for another week or so.

The peas I sowed in pots to keep them away from marauding mice all came up and those have now been planted into the vegetable beds, with columns of sheep netting to climb up.  The last three days have seen all of them pull away gratifyingly and I am hoping for tasty snacks of extremely fresh peas in early June.

Down among the ponds, there is one place where there is a large bank of wild marsh iris, and we have the best ever display we've seen of flowers on them at the moment.  Soon the other foliage will completely block the view of them for the rest of the summer season.

The unseasonably hot weather brought on the flowers on the false acacia rather more quickly than usual - I hope this doesn't adversely affect the honey harvest.  The trees themselves are awful - covered in sharp thorns, they spread by suckering and are a non-native invasive species, practically impossible to get rid of.  But for a couple of weeks in May or June they are coated in tumbling white flowers with a heady, honey scent, which makes them borderline tolerable.

The favourite orchid featured last week continues to flower beautifully despite being mugged by surrounding oxeye daisies, linseed and various meadow grasses.  While I tried to bash my way through to my favourite cultivated irises, I found a second example of the orchid, possibly more spectacular than the first.  Well, see what you think!

The weather has changed in time for the UK bank holiday.  We have another ourselves on Thursday, with Victory in Europe day, which will be full of reminders of the end of the Second World War.  Sadly it seems we are gearing up for the Third World War, but I will not pursue that line of thinking, this week anyway. 

Have a good week!

 

Bells and cats and stuff - version 2

It had taken me half an hour to write 500 words and load up 4 photos, and then we had a 15 second power cut and the whole lot disappeared.  There should have been a draft saved on the server somewhere on the West Coast of the USA, but while it had three versions of last week's blog, it had nothing of today's.

On a rather dull Easter Monday morning, I have decided to try again - we'll see how it goes!

This stage of April brings bluebells dotted around the garden.  They all came from my parents' house in Kent.  There they were rampant, and once we had bought the house in France, if Mum was doing some gardening and found a few bulbs, she put them in a bucket for us to take away and plant here (you could do that pre-Brexit).  Here they battle with irises and brambles and chickens and are not so rampant, but are always delightful when they bloom.

During one of the less lovely days last week, I started to scan old transparencies I found in my Mum's desk.  Remember them?  It always took about 4 goes to get each one correctly oriented in whatever viewer you were using, and of course some were good, in focus, well composed and with a good balance of light and colour, and some were not.  They all date to before I was born - Dad gave up photography, and with his artistic talents with a pen or pencil, why bother indeed?  I did find some fascinating ones of the winter before I was born, 1963, and the snow surrounding the cottage where the bluebells came from and where I grew up.

To keep pretty flowers out of the reach of the chickens (a k a feathered vandals), we put things in pots and planters.  Sometimes the chickens get in and then they are all destroyed, but some things survive, including this rather pleasing variegated periwinkle.  We top up the soil with used tea leaves and tea bags, which is why the contents of the container look a bit weird, but only one chicken likes to eat tea bags.

With spring comes all the rutting and flirting and hormones that Nature uses to ensure species continue.  The bird song at the moment is incredible for example, and in the evening the cuckoo is incessant.  The local feral cats are also around posing and trying it on with anything that moves.  We had two boys in the next garden over singing the Song of their People very loudly until we went to throw something at them.  So a timely reminder - if you have cats, please ENSURE THEY ARE NEUTERED.  These boys are likely to end up under a car while in thrall to their hormones, and also make a horrid smell.  The photo of the two boys in question is not very clear, so to illustrate this bit, I offer a photo of a neutered male cat, Monsieur Clause, one of the Boys in the Country, suitable edited to cover his shame, because he does like rolling around on his back on any surface.

The weather broke rather on Thursday evening and we have had perhaps 8 millimetres of rain since then, as well as grey skies and colder temperatures.  We have also had the amusing phenomenon of pollen rain.  The colza (or rape) is currently in full bloom.  It is dramatically and almost artificially yellow, and produces an awful lot of pollen, as any allergy sufferer knows.  When it rains, the pollen gets stuck on rain drops and then falls to the ground, where it accumulates as the water runs away or evaporates.  This is in the centre of town so some 4 kilometres from the nearest field in full flower.

While the unbroken sunshine we basked in for 10 days was lovely, for a really interesting sunset, you need cloud as something for the sun's rays to bounce off as it sinks into the west.  This was a rather lovely example from earlier in the week.

Well it would appear that America has woken up and it is now taking ages to load photos and they take a few goes to get right.  So it is clearly time to stop, and go and have some lunch, and hear about a nice old man, who died after meeting an American...

Have a good week!

 

 

Longer days

Last night here in the Northern Hemisphere, and more particularly Europe, the clocks sprang forward an hour.  We lag behind the Americans I think on this, as they went earlier in the month and for the past three weeks I have missed Martha Quinn in San Francisco and her afternoon show that ends at 3pm, or midnight in our terms.  It'll be good to hear her dulcet tones again from tomorrow!  

Normally there are lots of stories on TV news about how changing the hour affects your health and how it will kill you in the long term.  Although as someone who used to commute to the UK regularly and therefore went through the change of hour twice every trip, I think that is something suitable for feeding growing vegetables.  What about those countries with multiple time zones - do their citizens die because they have to travel east to west and back again?  Much more interestingly, we discussed the issue of summer time at the weekly flower making session on Tuesday.

I have to say that normally, what is discussed in flower making, stays in flower making, but this was an interesting perspective.  Here in western France, in the height of summer, it doesn't get dark until 11pm, but it doesn't really get light much before 6am.  The view among the group was that actually lighter mornings are preferable as there is so much to do and some are up at 5:30am so a bit more light then would be nice.  Who, they asked rhetorically, wants to be up and outside doing stuff every evening until 11pm?  This is a fair point.  Getting children to bed when it is light is always a challenge (from my memories of being a child and difficult to get to bed when it was light), but they are still in school in June when we have the longest evenings and part of July too.  It's great for holiday makers, but for this group of pensioners, it was a doubtful blessing.

Just to explain what you can see on the table there - I was cutting out circles of paper the size of a CD.  You then take three circles, put a small button of some sort in the middle and secure it with an elastic band, then open up the resulting "flower".  We will be making some 4,000 paper flowers, if not a few more, for the village float for the Comice in August.  If you don't know what a Comice is by now, look through past blogs for August!!

On Tuesday, we went on one of our very rare visits to Angers to do a bit of business.  Last time we went in was November last year, to get a train, driving in from a different direction.  I'd not gone my old favourite route for a couple of years.  The second tram line has changed the road system a lot, and accessing the familiar car park was a bit more of a challenge.  John was convinced we were going to get mown down by a tram.  We also could not find the entrance to the ground level car park so had to go underground.  As we weren't there for long, less than an hour, it was free though, so one good thing!  When we got above ground, we admired the law courts - Justice at it's most impressive!

Weather-wise it has been a weird week, with one day fine and warm, the next moist and dull (see above), but next week promises to be fine and dry and warm - we'll see if that is the case.  The spring flowers are coming on most prettily.

It also means that I no longer have any good excuses for not planting the rest of the potatoes and even more onions, while waiting for seeds to germinate so I can plant them out and start the next batch.  After last year's dismal failure at getting anything very much to grow in the vegetable garden, we have invested in over a tonne of high quality organic matter to feed the soil and break up the clay soil.  Let's hope it works!

Another labour of love has been weeding and feeding the asparagus bed - frustratingly, we won't be able to eat any from here this year as the corms are yet to really settle in, but next year, it could be different!

It is therefore time for me to publish this and go and prepare myself mentally and physically for a week's hard graft in the gardens.  Besides, it is taking ages to load each of these photos - too many kiddies playing computer games and taking up band width I suspect!

Have a good week!