November Flowers

Took some photos in the garden yesterday before the frost.  Just as well.  Some are not looking quite so happy today.

First Frost

 Our first frost is early this year.  

Often we get through to January before I am worrying about protecting the summer flowering plants around the cottage.  Sold as annuals most, in fact, will survive the winter if they are kept safe.

We are planting more young trees in the field.  Especially now, it feels like a promise for the future. And against a cold wind and in fading light, as I put stakes in the ground to support a bare-rooted lime tree, I hear the cranes coming out of the north east.  Their V-shape, way, way up in the clear sky, passes directly over my head.  Moving too fast to count them properly I roughly guess - five, ten, twenty, forty ... about a hundred and fifty of them.

After supper, in the dark, I make my way with a torch back down to the cottage, take the fleece out of its summer storage in the shed, cover the most vulnerable pots and close all the shutters.  

The inky black sky with a myriad stars and a low crescent moon to the west promises a frosty night.

The Covid Sofa

 Apparently, lockdown has forced people to look long and hard at their sofas, which have been found wanting - much to the delight of furniture retailers such as DFS.

In a previous life, with French lessons and Alexander classes, and bridge and photography we rushed in and out past where we live and closed our eyes to our surroundings.  Not any more.  Since March our life has been no more hectic than walking the dogs, visits to the shops and, occasionally, the doctors, the pharmacy and the vets.  Since March, apart from us, only two people have been in our house - an emergency plumber and the guy who managed the company that did our groundworks.

So, like those with unsatisfactory sofas, we have been looking at what we have around us and found some of it wanting.  Notably, the terrace.

When we bought the house all those thirteen years ago, the terrace floor was enchantingly quirky - a mass of crazed old tiling that just reeked age.  In the intervening years our busy lives (lessons, bridge, photos and so on) have meant that we have marched backwards and forwards over said tiles.  The terrace is our way in and out - our route from the kitchen to the cars and our life beyond. So the delightfully crazed tiles have moved, come apart and crumbled.  No longer charmingly quirky, they just look sad.

They are not so easy to replace though.  Modern tiles are different dimensions.  So, one option is to just remove the saddest tiles and replace them with the ones that came out of the cottage and were stacked somewhat haphazardly on the floor of what was once a tobacco drying barn, til it was taken down by the previous owners. The stacks of tiles are now smothered in brambles and young trees are pushing their way up through the barn floor.  They are still get-at-able though - just.  They are mossy, damp, the undersides covered in mortar, but usable - just.

So I ask for advice on a forum and the suggestions from those who know how to manage the process terrify me, starting with using an angle grinder and progressing from there.  

But then I remember.  Twelve years ago, our second summer, we had a big lunch party at a long table on the terrace and I realised at the last minute that some of the tiles where the chair legs would be were badly broken. I had little or no time, so I just cleared out the old tiles and laid new ones in their place on sand. Looking at them now, twelve years on, they are still there, undisturbed, most still in one piece. So, with a bit of luck, just using sand to bed in some replacement tiles may give us another ten years or so before we have to do the terrace properly.

So yesterday I had a go.

Yesterday, in bright sunlight ...

... as we headed down across the field,  Vita rolled in something odorous. Normally Vita's rolling would provoke an "Oh no!" as she proudly wafts around in her new perfume. But on this occasion we smile.  She has not done this in months.  She struggles to her feet against the slope - her back legs collapsing under her - but finally manages.  

This is progress.  It has been a hard year for her, with the emergence of full-blown epilepsy and then three violent bouts of high fever over the same number of months.  Slowly, slowly, she is regaining strength, aided by the lovely Doctor Sophie in Bordeaux with her acupuncture and her colleague who administers osteopathy.

Vita had followed us as we headed down towards the far corner of our terrain to plant a new liquidambar tree.  I needed Tod to hold it in place while I decided exactly where it would go exactly, in the line of sight to the right of the dark green cypresses and to the left of the more distant golden leaved silver birches.

I hope the new addition, which will have the most spectacular of autumn foliage, will be a flame red - the label only offers a vague promise of purple or red or yellow.  In a few days we will know.

This morning, an increasingly robust Vita announces at six am it is time to get up and go for a walk.  Only today it's five.  So we pretend not to hear and she finally curls up and snores gently on a rug in the kitchen.  Daylight saving quite throws a girl's routine. 

The rain tinkles on the metal frame of the tall ladder ...

 ... propped longways beneath the window of my study.  The drops are falling from the hundreds of seed pods dangling from the wisteria - their removal a future task for a cold, bright January afternoon when the low sun has crept round to the west.

For the moment, we huddle indoors, gossiping, spending too much time on our computers and making endless cups of tea.   Storm Alex is working its way across swathes of Europe and we are (probably) catching a soggy, blustery trailing edge.

Almost overnight the weather changed.  We had a couple from Germany in the cottage for two weeks.  They arrived to a pool that was a pleasant twenty-six degrees.  By the time they left on Thursday the temperature had dropped to eighteen. Even so, he went for a swim.  Somewhere in the middle of those two weeks it rained and rained and rained.  They assured us they were content - more so once we'd put the underfloor heating on - and over those grey, no-point-in-going-out days, she knitted us multi-patterned socks as a gift, left socially distanced in the pool house for us to find after they had gone.

Some of our computer time is spent (reluctantly) addressing what may be the impact of Brexit, now only three months away.  Firstly, it was the UK banks.  Are they going to close our accounts because we live full-time in France? Now - it looks like fun and games with our cartes vitales, which show our entitlement to healthcare here.  Maybe it's as well it's raining.  I would really resent dealing with this if I could be out in the sun gardening.  

With the new short hairdo ...

 ... I emerge from water looking less like The Thing From The Swamp and I decide I can risk heading for the sea.

Bordeaux and the Gironde are categorised a "red zone" in COVID terms.  Not really sure what that means in reality but it seems like a good idea to avoid it and I decide to head south and cut across the Landes to the coast.  

Mimizan Plage looks like a good destination and Google optimistically tells me the journey time is just over two hours, with the road more or less in a straight line.  Three hours and several wrong turnings later, I emerge from the endless kilometers of gloomy pine trees (people choose to live here in these dank clearings) to a small, cheerful seaside village. 

German voices mingle with French. Taut-muscled tall young men come for the surf but - unlike in August when it is heaving - the place feels delightfully half-empty.  Strolling the main street, I'm reassured to see most people are wearing masks as they hunt for end of season bargains on the clothes rails spilling out on the pavements. Middle-aged, overly-tanned women finger floaty beach wraps and strappy long dresses while their husbands perch, bored, on the walls of municipal planters.

I'd thought to head for a remote beach, but there's no need.  From the esplanade I can see acres of deserted sand, so I happily descend the steps, trek to an empty space and pitch my socially-distanced tent. Towels, swimming costume, sun hat for when I wander back into town later for an ice-cream, Lidl's small cool bag, complete with ice packs and what's left of lunch (most of it eaten out of boredom on the interminable journey through the pine forests), Kindle with a Julian Barnes novel I'd forgotten I'd down-loaded. The occasional foray into the sea with my new, sleek hairdo and I am blissfully set up for a long, lazy afternoon.

For the first time since, well it must be ...

 ... at least March and possibly even before Christmas, I have had a hair cut.

It was beginning to look fairly wild.  I could have auditioned for Back to the Future - The Musical.

I felt it had finally become safe to approach the salon in the Leclerc entrance hall where I usually go. The tourists have left, children are back at school and Tuesday lunchtimes once again are a haven of tranquility. 

Arrows on the floor in one direction only, alternate reclining seats by the basins blocked off, disposable capes, carefully wiped combs and scissors and (of course) the obligatory masks.  I recognise the stylist's eyes over her mask - she's cut my hair before.  No glossy style books to look at, which are usually my visual aid: "I'd like that one (pointing) but the length more like that one (on the following page)."  I struggle to explain through my mask and wonder does "dégradé" mean layered?  Anyway, she seems to understand and steers me towards the wash basins. 

It's all more functional - no relaxing head massage - just get the client in and out as soon as possible.  I ask her how it's been and she says, "you get used to it", with a typical Gallic shrug. The mask elastics over my ears hold no fears for her.  I wonder how she avoids cutting through them, but she has done this hundreds of times by now. 

And the final result?  Well worth it. I'm now more Michael J Fox (albeit not that hair colour) than Doc Brown.

 

They've Left!

 And Samantha, she of the doe eyes and recently lost eyelashes, has gone with them.

Our courteous Dutch guests have departed. Not for Rotterdam - as I had assumed - but for Soulac-sur-Mer, where they will be spending a week surfing.  And the holiday continues for one very pink seahorse.

We did not see them go - social distancing favours minimum contact - so we have no idea whether she fitted in the back along with the teenage daughters, or had to be deflated and stowed in the boot.

Now the cottage will be left to "rest" until Tuesday morning.  Shutters are ajar, windows open inside, and (if they have remembered to do as I asked) empty wardrobes, drawers and cupboards left open to air.

The last of our English guests, due to arrive next Saturday, have deferred until next year their month-long holiday, in light of the new quarantine regulations.  But we will prepare the cottage as if they are coming.  I have opened my calendar again and, who knows, maybe some family this side of the Channel looking for a tranquil last minute holiday will find us.

If not, we will not be concerned.  Having the place to ourselves through the rest of August and September has its appeal. And I'm glad I don't have to make any tough decisions about what to do with Samantha.