And this too shall pass away...

Where have all those interesting snippets gone from Facebook? There was a time when I saw something every day - at least one thing I didn't know or had never thought about. These days it seems to be all about videos of animals or people sounding off about American politics or politicians or silly "can you think of a city beginning with E and ending with A?" games. Perhaps I have picked up a lot of unintentional  "friends" by accepting "friends" who have 795 "friends." Maybe I should be doing a little judicious weeding, and then I may get some interesting posts again. .

I hope Twitter hasn't gone the same way while I've been on holiday. I haven't been Twittering - its gets too complicated about passwords sometimes to bother with everything. Plus which I haven't been on the internet  all that much - far too much to do out in the fresh air and sunshine. Everything is so small on a laptop! I can't wait to get back to my big screen.

The feeling is growing on me that Blogging is not as ... how shall I say? as interesting as it used to be. More and more people have stopped blogging and readers seem to be fading away too. They've probably all migrated to something else that I've never heard of so far. There is a feeling of change in the air, but is it mega or only the usual drift away for the holiday season? Who knows?

The Last Time

Just returned from a long walk up the hill, along the top of the valley  and down by the La Peyrouse complex. We took a side path to the through the woods too, and it was cool under the trees. Coming back out into the sunshine for the march along the bottom road was hot and sticky work. Never mind; Tim is fast asleep on the rug, so it the exercise has done its job.

We're starting to think in terms of doing things for the last time before we leave on Wednesday. Tomorrow we have an appointment with the vet. to comply with regulations about taking Tim back to England. Then Wednesday morning we'll be off early for the long drive back to Abbeville, our overnight stop.We don't want to go through Rouen so I think we're skirting the extreme western edge of Paris. A tunnel is blocked in Rouen and it led to road closures and  mayhem among the traffic, so we want to avoid all the angst we had on the way south.

The weather weather broke a week ago and since then it has been warm but grey and cloudy with several thunderstorms and lots of rain. After a thunderstorm in the morning and a deluge of rain, the mist rose on the hay field last night and looked very creepy as it advanced on the mill. Today we've had patches of sunshine, but nothing lasting. At least the rain has the virtue of making the grass seed sprout and green over the bare earth the diggers left behind. Sleeping is a trial; the duvet is far too warm, but with only a sheet and a coverlet, I was cod last night. Got out and wriggled into "pyjamas" - a sweatshirt and leggings - and fell asleep right away. All in all, I think it is time to go home.

Rain, accidents and gatehouses

Torrential rain today. To go out is to come back drenched. I could go swim in the pool but it wouldn't be much fun without the sun on my back when I got out. I''ll have to settle for indoor activities. Thank the Lord for the laptop and writing as a hobby.


I dare not smile at anyone because I bit down on a piece of crusty bread and pate yesterday - and the French know how to make wonderful crusty bread and delicious pate - and my front tooth snapped. It was a crown, not a real tooth, but still I'd rather have it than not. The gap  left behind feels a mile wide and now I'm terrified to eat anything that isn't smooth and easy to chew. And  of course, when I smile, which I often do because I forget about the gap, people flinch and look away. I e-mailed my dentist yesterday, but so far she has not replied.




When it is too hot, Tim has to make do with running around the mill grounds, which is not a hardship as they're far larger than our garden at home. But when it is cool we take him for walks on the lead, just to remind him what a lead is in among all this running free, and a couple of days ago we walked past this magnificent resident which has its own little gatehouse on the roadside. It isn't used, and there isn't even a gate there any more, but it is a nice reminder of how things were long ago. Imagine the carriages sweeping in, and the gatekeeper eating his French bread and cheese as he guards the entrance.

Rural life

Finally have the internet again. Felt very lonely without it! No way to update my blog, get my stats or do any promos. Concentrated on Wimbledon instead, and not overjoyed to see Rafa go out this afternoon. OTOH, Shreikapova was ousted by Kerber, and Lisicki is still going. Seems like all the modern coaching, training, nutrition and knowledge means that players reach their peak at around nineteen. Or, as Tracey Austin says, they’re fearless at that age. No expectations, no nerves, no reputations to uphold, they can take a swing nd they’ve nothing to lose. I expect Kyrgios will be like all the others who break through in a big match – he’ll not get through the next round.

No workmen for a week, and then they turned up this morning and put some top soil on the patch behind the mill. The digger is still here, parked up like a sleeping dinosaur, so they expect to return at some point. It seems that nothing gets done in a rush here.

Bill seeded the patch before the mill pound with meadow grass, so now we’re watching it every day expecting bright new blades of grass to burst through. I’ve been coppicing the trees and cutting off broken branches left behind by the diggers. I couldn’t sleep, so I finally got up at 3.30am and crept into the living room (difficult to do on a creaky wooden floor). The frogs are croaking outside, making a hell of a din. Made myself a cup of Marmite and ate a chunk of bread and jam and began writing this.

When we drove into Vergt this morning I noticed tiny paw prints on the windscreen  - a squirrel has used the car as a vaulting horse. The birds and the deer are eating all the berries, quinces, plums and cherries they can find, and we find little piles of excreted stones everywhere. A bird flew into the house one day this week, panicked and started excreting indigo droplets instead of the usual white stuff. Another has dropped a bomb on the edging of the pool as it flew over, so there’s a nice deep blue stain on the limestone edging. I’ve no idea what will bring that off!

What to do on holiday

Holidays are a good time for reading. My latest is, or was, The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill, all 550-odd pages of it (in paperback format). It was interesting, with a slow-burn curiosity rather than a gripping must-know-NOW feel to it. The opening chapters hung together but only just and in the weirdest way that is only explained by the very last chapters. If I had not been on holiday, with lots of leisure, I might not have continued with it, though having one of the narrators be a criminal psychiatrist was an interesting touch.

It is 10.15pm and the light has finally gone out of the sky. I forgot to do my blog this morning and the reason for that is Wimbledon, so I'm doing it now. There is always something to keep an eye on, hence the pic on the right. The days are busy with small things, such as walking Tim, weeding, swimming, making meals and sweeping the dust out of the house every day. With the heat so tremendous, we have most windows open all the time, and the dust blows in, especially if the digger boys are here, as they were yesterday afternoon. Today - not a sign of them. It would be good if they would just finish the job, and then we could do some tidying up once they've gone. But one digger is still here, poised by the pond, no doubt frightening the frogs into fits and the hay field is reduced to blank soil. Behind the house, the patch called the garden - more in hope than reality - is like a rough sea, all hills and hollows. It obviously needs more work.

La Brande - restaurant

I'm loving Wimbledon. I was struck by the American habit of giving their female players forenames I think of as surnames -  Sloane  Stephens, Taylor Townsend, Madison Keys to name but three. I'm also wondering if tall children are positively encouraged to be tennis players. They all seems so huge these days. We desperately need a top-up on groceries tomorrow and I was tempted to join dh for the drive to Vergt, but maybe I'll stay behind and get everything done so I can watch the tv. After all, Rafa and Fed are playing tomorrow. By 11am it is too hot to do anything more than laze in the sun, and after a half hour, there's a real danger of sunburn. So I don't feel bad about being indoors.

Happy Holidays

So far, we haven't seen a single mouse. There are few lizards, which Tim chases, so they keep out of his way. I’m pleased to report he hasn’t caught one yet.

The kites, the herons, the foxes are still about, and there are rumours of “a big stag” wandering about the area. DH saw a roe deer walking down the drive early one morning. Evidently there are red deer here, too.

Yesterday I cleaned the steps from the upper level to the lower patio. There were so many ferns and weeds choking the steps that it was only a matter of time before someone broke an ankle. The wild strawberry plants spread out tendrils that can catch the unwary. In the fortnight we’ve been here, the weeds had grown long the edge of the bolly, so I culled those too, and then started on the drive. An excess of energy! Now part of the drive is as wide as a three-lane motorway in comparison to the unculled half. I think the driver of the loader that brought the digger would have liked the whole of the drive done. He's taken to driving across the field instead! I hope the farmer doesn't mind.

Two diggers worked all day Friday and made huge changes to the field and pond. Saturday was quiet, and so was Sunday. DH found a small frog in the pool filter Saturday morning, whirling round and round in a six-inch circle. He was dead, but whether it was the dizziness or the chlorine, who knows? Sunday morning another frog was motionless at one of the filter inlets, but he was luckier. The filters were switched off, and he was still alive. I suspect there will be an outrage of frogs unless something is done to control them. We’re told that there should be carp or pike in the pond to eat the frogs. 

The weather has been glorious since we got here, but this afternoon we were melting in the heat when it suddenly began to rain. Oh, the relief! It didn’t rain long, and not very hard, but it certainly lowered the temperature. There are thunderstorms forecast for tonight or tomorrow morning, and I’m looking forward to them. In the middle of the day we’re comatose, Tim included. It makes me long for rain and cool air. When we go for a walk, we creep from one patch of shade to the next and amble about when we’re in the sun. Even at 7.30pm we come home longing for a cold shower. 

The thunder and lightning came overnight and woke us up. It also switched all the power off in the house. DH had to go downstairs, torch in hand, to throw the switch again. Creepy, with thunder outside!

Today, after the storm, it is grey and cloudy. Half a dozen baby frogs, some less than an inch long, were in the pool. It's beginning to look like a plague of frogs now that the mice have vanished.  

 One digger has been removed from the site, but otherwise, no work in progress this Monday morning. Annoying not to have it finished today. I shall concentrate on Matho and his edit, which is coming along in a very satisfactory way. I’m not rushing it. I want to get it right. The internet connection here fails with appalling regularity from midday onwards, so if I don’t get my PR and social networking done before them, it’s gone for the day. Must be very annoying for the locals, and certainly makes me appreciate what I have back home.

Also, Wimbledon begins today! Yippee! Wine, Pringles and Wimbledon! What could be better?

The tallest tree in the valley

Today is going to be noisy. There are two diggers working outside, one pushing down trees and the other smoothing out the "spoil heaps" that was excavated when the pond came into being. They do look like spoil heaps, too, because the land here is rocky with limestone. Farmers in England would think it was terrible soil, but it seems to grow exceptional crops. Tim is mad to be out racing round and round the machinery, but obviously we can't allow that, so he's pacing about indoors like a caged lion in spite of the fact that he's just had along walk up the hill to the Gite Rural. 

I waited and waited to get a picture of the old tree coming down. The two lads who were trying to fell it must have thought I was an idiot. I waited the best part of an hour while the digger pushed and battered and the lads chainsawed the old stump into submission. Then one of the lads darted away, Tim barked as if someone had come calling at the door, and I went to look out. There was no one there. When I got back to the window, the stump was down. Call me paranoid, but I think it was a plot...

It had been a beautiful tree. Two years ago, when we were last here, it towered over the mill, the tallest tree for miles. The leaves constantly whispered in the breeze that drifted along the valley. Now it is a grey wreck beside the pond, and an old stump that went several rounds with modern machinery before it finally gave in.

So I'm sitting here behind open windows with closed curtains, writing my blog and drinking a small bottle of Kanterbrau beer. It's a biere blonde at 4.2% alcohol, so I don't think I'm in any danger of being drunk when dh arrives back from Vergt with the groceries, The thing is, the beer is beautifully cold out of the fridge, and I was hot after my walk with Tim. Better than starting on the wine at 9am in the morning, don't you think?
Time to get on with my novel,

Into the water we go...

I found The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro on the shelves at the mill, published in paperback in 2013. The cover did not attract me, but the back blurb did, and I was not disappointed with the story. It is one of those dual time stories set partly in 1928 and partly in 1955, and it keeps shifting between the two. It is fairly easy to guess the main thread, but discovering how it all came to pass keeps the attention. "...a journey which takes Grace through the streets of Paris and into the seductive world of perfumers and their muses..."

Vergt was quiet and peaceful yesterday morning. I took a couple of pics from the car as we zoomed through the countryside, and they'll appear here in due course. I have no idea what was in the big box on top of the van - in fact I was so busy taking the pic that I didn't notice the box until I looked at the photograph later! A new, very sophisticated kiosk selling home-made pizzas has made its appearance since we were here last, and a brand new veterinary practice where I had good fun trying to make an appointment for the 8^th July. French numbers always confound me, but fortunately the receptionist had an appointment diary in front of her, so I could see the correct date and time.

We got the PH+ and put it in the pool and later I had a brief swim in the heat of the day. Most refreshing, but it took me ages to get into the water. The steps into the pool were deeper than I expected, and I wanted to find the depth before I plunged in. Cautious, that's me. Once I was in, it was fine, but each new bit of skin shrieked at the shock of cold water. Yet it wasn’t really cold! Odd how the mind works. I can't remember when I last went swimming, but fortunately, it is something once learned, never forgotten. You just don't swim as far...

A new week

Sunday was a quiet day, and the sun clouded over about midday.  Gusts of cold wind gave warning that change was on the way, and we retreated indoors, opened a bottle of sparkling Saumur wine and watched the men’s final at Queen’s Club. The day was cool enough to give Tim two normal walks on the lead, which we both enjoyed.

Monday morning is sunny, but seems a few degrees cooler than the past fortnight. The farming family are already busy picking asparagus and it is only nine o’ clock.  Tim is barking furiously at the farm dog which has had the temerity toll on his back in the dry grass cuttings on the drive. 

We plan to go into Vergt today to get some PH+ for the pool. (These swimming pools are so demanding!) Vergt is the nearest small town about ten minutes away in the car, with a population of about 1,700, though that number may include the whole commune rather than just the confines of Vergt. While we are there we plan to make the acquaintance of the vet, since we must see him before we return to England.  As I understand things, it is a case of a formal check to confirm the dog is healthy, a tapeworm tablet, and a signature on Tim's pet passport. Oh, and a fee of 50 euros. 

Until I've been and taken some pictures with my trusty little camera, why not type Vergt, France into your browser and look at the images that come up? (The link to it was so long it kept breaking in the middle!)

Lazy Saturdays

Saturday morning and we expected a quiet day.No such luck! We woke at 6.15, went back to sleep, got up at 7.15 and took Tim for a walk while it is still wonderfully cool. By the time we came back, there were three men working around the mill. For third day in a row, Marcel the fireman was back to incinerate yet another pile of dead, years old wood. Tom and Rob had come to continue putting up the boar/deer fence, and Rob had brought his new puppy - Tara.
Tim, naturally, was very keen to make Tara's acquaintance, but she was only seven weeks old and so tiny we had to put Tim on a leash for a while. By the end of the morning, they were making tentative gestures at being playmates.

The heat continues. The sun has blazed down ever since we got here and by last night we were just about comatose with it. Farmers are working long hours getting the hay cut. Tom and co work until 11am and then knock off for the day when it is this hot, so now we have the mill to ourselves again. Peace reigns. Except for the frogs croaking in the pond. Or maybe it's the jays squawking in the trees. One thing is for sure - we rarely hear a car. A tractor, maybe, or a thing that cuts the hay and lays big rolls bound up tight behind it. I saw two cyclists steaming along the road in the afternoon heat yesterday, and thought them mad fools. Perhaps their speed cools them down...they were dressed in skintight lycra in pink and white and black, with helmets to match. It's too hot to sunbathe, but at last the pool is ready to use, colour me cool today.

Working in the heat

If you like the kind of holiday that visits lots of new places and eats in lots of different restaurants, then this isn’t the spot for you. The mill is set beside a small river in a valley north east of Bergerac and there are no diversions anywhere close at hand. If we want a good meal we would drive to Lou Peyrol, but because this is Tim’s first visit to France, and he’s not very old yet, we will forgo that pleasure. Leaving him on his own in a strange house would not be kind. Apart from that, we mow grassland, hack at the accumulated greenery, divert springs, build bonfires and cook our food on the barbie. I have to say it is healthy food, too. DH did the shopping last week, and to this day, a sweet biscuit has not passed my lips. He didn’t buy anything from the patisseries counter, either. So the diet has been fresh meat, salads and fruit. Oh, plus a morsel of cheese with coffee.

The mill’s owners have not been here for six months due to a health problem, now happily solved, and boy! does it show. I swear trees have grown twenty feet since we were here. It doesn’t help that we didn’t come last year because we’d just got Tim, so we are looking at two years growth and change. Some trees have died, some have fallen, a lake – a hundred feet, not yards as I think I said earlier – has been formed. Lots of change, yet everything is the same, except for the pool.

Left unattended for six months, a pool of sludgy green slime had collected in the pool cover.  Once the cover was off, the pool had to be cleaned, scoured, hoovered and the filter system has been running constantly since we got here. “Three days,” they said, “and it will be clear. You should be able to see the bottom.” 

Well, we can just see the bottom of the pool now, but the water still isn’t crystal clear. It seems to me that pools are a lot of work.  “If you are here all the time, no problem,” we were told. “If you leave them, much work.”

We were gently kippered yesterday, and it looks like the process will continue today. A man has come to burn les bois. There’s a huge stack of dead wood in the middle of the field. Dead trees, odd fallen branches and no doubt some rubbish lurking in the middle. Within minutes of this man’s arrival there was a huge bonfire and clouds of smoke coming back toward us on the breeze. He stayed with it for four hours, patrolling to see the fire didn’t get out of hand. At midday he left, and I should think he was pounds lighter than when he arrived. So much heat! I was perspiring just sitting in the sun. I stood on our balcony and watched the local farming family picking their asparagus by hand and felt hot just watching them.

What's a bolly?

The day before yesterday was blazing hot – 32 degrees C. Too hot to work by 11.30am, so we lazed about and dragged ourselves through the day.  Yesterday we woke to a grey overcast sky  and got to work right away after breakfast on hauling away all the overgrown shrubbery we had cut back from the drive over the last two days. The drive is now a good third wider, and dh is getting more confidence in driving the tractor. 

The temperature was reasonable  ~ 23 degrees indoors, so probably a bit more outside, especially when the sun shines. But there is hazy cloud cover, which gives some protection to delicate skins like ours! I'm happy to say that the channels I dug have drained some of the big puddles that are a result of the spring, which means less mud for Tim to splatter about. I enjoyed myself splodging about in wellies, wieldsing trowel and spade ~ perhaps I should have been a water engineer instead of a librarian.

I stayed up until 10.20pm last night finishing off the Jack Reacher novel. Persuader, first published in 2003 in the UK. This must be about the fourth Reacher novel I’ve read and I’ve only just noticed that they are written in the first person.

I looked at the first page again and it is only when I got to the last line that  that the personal pronoun “I” appears. Everything Reacher sees and thinks is described, and described in detail, but it is definitely first person narrative.

It gives me an interesting slant for the action sequences for Matho. I’m thinking I’ve maybe glossed over the action and ought to give more detail. Not that I can write reams about Glocks and Uzis as Child does ~ talk about info dumps! But there must be some detail about sixteenth century weapons I can latch onto. And it is about time I got down to doing some writing - Ive been here a week today.

The  picture is of the bolly, or half of it. Most old French houses in the region have one and they are a boon, because  the family can sit out there and enjoy the warm  weather without frying to a crisp in the sun. A bolly is all about shade, built out of green oak  and extends the size of the house. It's like an outside room. I took the picture on the first night here, and the bolly wasn't exactly the tidiest place, but today it is much neater! We sit there for our evening meal, and enjoy the view across the fields.The view you see in the pic leads to the drive.

Mud and frogs

The first casualty discovered yesterday. A large lizard - well, about twelve inches long had his tail had been intact - was discovered in the filter of the swimming pool. The poor thing must have got in when the pool was being built and then found himself trapped. I have no idea how long ago that was, but certainly some months. On a happier note, dh rescued a small lizard - about three inches this time - flopping about in the pool itself. Maybe they can swim, but I doubt it would have got out unaided even if it found the steps. These swimming pools are lethal to wildlife.
David and Jenny talked of a pond they'd excavated, and I imagined something about fifteen feet across. I ought to have known better.  The pond is something like 200 yards long and  thirty yards across. Already frogs are populating it. We thought the croaking came from ducks, since there are plump mallards around, but were told this morning it is the bullfrogs making such a to-do. A man with a digger is supposed to arrive today to level out the "spoil heaps" of excavated soil and rock and insert a land drain from the spring to the pond, so the frogs had better watch out. On the other hand, he was supposed to arrive on 15th May, so we'll not hold our breath. The spring is draining naturally, as it has for years, and causing a wetland area which Tim discovered with great glee. He romps through the mud and green slime and splatters frogs in every direction. I ought to take a photo of this black dog who tries to leap on us until we get out the hose pipe and hose him down to find the white dog underneath. A man further up the valley captured a thousand frogs - don't ask me how - from his pond, and sold them to restaurants. It seems even frogs can be a cash crop.
I'm happy to say Mr Greener is back. He's been missing for a year or two. Mr Greener is a chaffinch (I think) and he has a distinctive line in song, which repeats over and over. The last line always ends in the phrase "it's greener." I know, its stupid of me, but I'm glad he's back.

Sizzling hot days

Another blazing hot day. I feel some sympathy for the ladies final in Paris where Shriekapova plays a young unknown from Rumania, but hey! they're getting well paid for an afternoon's work. OK, so it's a fortnight's work, but its still a darn good rate of pay. I wish someone would tell Shriekapova to stop shrieking. I avoid watching her, and many of the women, because of the racket (sorry) they make. Somehow the men's grunts don't impinge so much, probably because they're so much deeper toned.

The pool is gradually clearing, thanks to Tom's work. The fence to keep boar and deer out of the pool is going up. I can't imagine a deer or a wild pig swimming in our pool, but there you go. Local laws say that the pool must be fenced for safety reasons. but the workmen who were due to smooth out the rubble left from excavating the pond have not been. Nature is gradually taking care of the job instead.  There are frogs and I saw two small fish swimming about today. I've done some washing and it dried in half a day. DH mastered the tractor and grass cutting machinery, so we now have somewhere that looks a little less like a wilderness than when we arrived.

I am glad to report DH suffered no after-effects from his snake bite. I've been ultra careful about walking through long grass since that incident. What am I saying? - it's all long grass here. I take a stick, but what would I do with it? Still, I feel better for having it with me. The way Tim leaps about in gay abandon, no self-respecting snake would stay within two miles of him. At the moment he is flat out, dead to the world. The heat is getting to him. We've drunk a few bottles of French wines since we arrived, and tonight we'll be doing duck steaks on the BBQ.

I have a Jack Reacher story to read, do I ever get to it, Just before I came away I read a new Sarah Bolton called Like this, For ever. Very good thriller done from a juvenile viewpoint and the cop's viewpoint, and there was a twist in the tale that surprised me.  I tried to load a picture to the blog, and the laptop could not cope. So now I've reduced the pixel size to almost nothing to see if it will upload a photo.
 PS No matter what I did Explorer would not upload a picture to Blogger. So now I've changed to Google Chrome and have just uploaded a picture of the drive leading away from the mill - before the grass had been cut!