Vita barks to be let out ...

 ... of the door and immediately doubles back into the kitchen as the wind across the terrace hits her in the face. I know how she feels.

I tried some gardening for a while but then retreated inside, having watched a barrow load of carefully pruned and swept up dead twigs and dried grass disappear across the lawn. Too much like hard work!

But it is (at last) excellent grass drying weather, so I may venture forth after lunch with the strimmer and small mower and start attacking the banks and lawns around the cottage.  Who knows, we may have some guests this year after all.

It's also a good day for continuing to dry out the Skoda, which is sitting on the drive with all its doors open. We knew we had a leak but it was only after the January rains - when we found that the water in the driver's footwell (apt name under the circumstances) was coming over the pedals - that we realised just how bad it was and perhaps we ought to do something about it.  Once the electrics began to misbehave we knew it was very serious.  So the windscreen has been replaced and (hopefully) sealed properly. In the meantime, the water that's already in the car needs getting out.

Five full bucket-loads of our industrial vax hoover and there is still a squidgy feeling to the carpets, though no longer a pond. The solid foam underlay seems to have an infinite capacity to retain moisture, hence leaving all the car's doors open in the blustery wind.  I've also resorted to a hair dryer in an attempt to speed up the process.

Although coming from the south, the wind may be too strong for the cranes who are embarking on their annual journey up from Spain back to northern climes.  We were witness to some five to six thousand right overhead one late afternoon during the week.  Wave, after wave directly over our rooftop. A welcome promise of spring, as are the little daffodils that I am uncovering from under the dead twigs and grasses.  Their small size means that their golden heads remain defiantly upright, whatever the weather throws at them. 

For the fourth time in the thirteen years we have lived here ...

 ... we witness what is supposed to be a "once in a lifetime" event - the flooding of the Garonne River.

Yesterday, the sirens in town sounded as the water rose to over nine meters (nearly thirty feet).  We have had so much rain in recent weeks and the ground is so saturated there is nowhere for the water to go except out over the flood plain.

I stand on the esplanade next to the bandstand and, with the town at my back, look out across an inland sea.

And Marmande, this morning.  We have never seen it this bad.

Tod asks me ...

... "Is it Sunday?"

I have to think about it.  The days, weeks, months are beginning to merge.  We have friends who used to rely on church on Sunday to put a marker in the week.  Now, not even that.

We had visitors last week, actually in the house, for the first time since heaven knows when. Was it Wednesday they were here?  Or Thursday?

Two Orange technicians came to install our new livebox, connecting us to their new, super-dooper optical fibre network.  They were both young, one overweight and coughing, which did not reassure as it seemed most of the time he wandered round with his mask tucked under his chin.  

They decided they needed to bring the new cable into a different corner of the house, which required climbing onto the roof of a small shelter at the back where we store our lawn mowers.  The young fat one managed to break ten tiles - easy to do as they are old and frail.  At least he confessed and then (I think, because my French gave out at this point) went into a long sob story about how he would have to pay if we made a complaint.  I tentatively climbed the ladder (ours, which he borrowed) and decided life was too short to complain.  His thinner, lighter colleague finished the job.

Having lived through most of December and the first part of January with hardly any internet at all (some local builder seems to have put his digger through a main cable somewhere and then water got into the repair) we would have been grateful for any restoration of our three megabyte (on a good day) service.  It is somewhat startling to discover that we now have well over three hundred megabytes.  We're not quite sure what to do with the all extra, though there is now the joy of occasional one-upmanship when we mention what we have to friends and acquaintances who mournfully say their installation is years away. 

We need to be careful and remember Boris and vaccines - smugness is not an attractive quality.

Mind you, talking of vaccines, we're unlikely to see any our way for the next couple of years (if then).  There are going to be many more days, weeks and months that gently merge into a seamless whole. At least, (hopefully) we will have high speed internet to keep us in touch with some sense of what day it is.

Despite These Strange Times, May This Season Be Special

 

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.