Decisions

One storm over and another to come So far I have not noticed any damage to property in this area, but there were plenty of broken branches, some very large scattered around the perimeter of the fields where I walked Tim yesterday. Windfall apples  - yes, plenty of those. Acorns scattered far and wide anywhere there was an oak tree, so I picked up  a few and lobbed them into the hedgerow where a tree had died or there was room for it to grow. I don't suppose many of them will, but it is a nice idea that even if only one grows, it will be there three hundred years after I've gone. That's if the world is still turning. I say that because right now we seem to be in a hell of a mess, Brexit wise.
On a personal level I'm off to get a hair cut at lunch time. I mention this because I have not been to a hairdresser since my long time friend abruptly closed his shop due to medical reasons immediately after Christmas 2017. My hair is now quite long and very annoying as the short bits that were once a fringe are forever in my face! But over the year I must have saved £250 or £300. Time fo a splurge? Possibly, but my immediate problem is explaining to the new hairdresser what it is I want her to do. An even deeper question is what exactly do I want? Who knows what I shall look like by 2pm?

Storm damage

Saturday 7^th July, 2018

What a week! We had the night of the thunderstorm on Monday 2^nd; violent thunder and lightning all through the night, with power off from about 11pm until about 8am Tuesday morning. On Wednesday 4^th, it started rumbling off in the west mid-morning and faded away again. Then late afternoon, back it came with a vengeance – not only thunder and lightning, but torrents of water and a howling roaring wind that thrashed the trees round about the mill in a scary way. The power went off again almost at once.

Dh was downstairs checking the electrics and I was sitting cuddling Tim when there was a bang, a crash and the windows behind me blew open with another crash. The wind had blown open the shutters in the balcony room (they were pulled closed but not fixed and the windows were open because of the heat) The gust of wind slammed the door in the hall and knocked out a small pane of glass and the big windows at the end of the living room banged. I leapt up and ran to secure the shutters and found the floor of the balcony room very wet where the rain had blown in. DH arrived upstairs at the gallop wondering what all the noise had been.

Fortunately the only damage was the small pane of glass from the lovely old hall door. The rest was mopping up and fixing all the shutters properly, which meant we were in semi-darkness, so there was a hasty rummage in cupboards to find candles. Then dh found water pouring through a conduit into the same cupboard as the electrics…. after a hasty mop-up there, we traced that back upstairs and found the downcomers from the roof – and it is a huge roof – had carried all the dust and debris into the drain that runs along the bolly and then plunges down under the house. It was blocked and the water was backing up. So we unblocked it and next morning we spent a good hour cleaning that out.

The storm final moved off, but by then it was too late and dark to do anything. Next morning everything seemed quiet. I took Tim for his early morning trot around the lake and discovered three, maybe four big trees damaged. Two big walnut trees in the garden have lost major branches, the old quince tree by the well has a broken branch and at the far end of the lake by the log store, a huge tree had snapped, fallen and broken another tree in the process. One branch has speared through the log store roof.

None of those will be dealt with until some sort of mechanical power is used. There are hundreds of smaller branches littering the ground and those we can move, we will. There are other, smaller trees that have fallen or partially fallen within the woods but luckily nothing had blocked the drive.

The real problem was no power. Friday morning we made contact with the neighbours and heard that the high tension line that supplied power to the area was down, and no one knew how long it would take to repair. In a way it was a relief to know that it wasn’t only us without electricity, but that didn’t solve the problem. We had several days food supply in the freezer and the fridge and by Friday it was starting to unfreeze.

There was nothing for it but to cook everything on the gas barbecue, and we spent a couple of hours doing that on Friday around 6pm. We braved another cold shower (my second and dh’s third, since he had been unlucky enough not to have had his shower when the power went out on Wednesday!) and retired to the balcony room to read. The pool is filled with leaves and dirt, but there’s no power to clean it. No tv, no computer, and my ipad was down to 19% charged. Things were looking dire. We retreated to bed about 9.30pm while we could still see what we were doing, and suddenly dh saw the electric clock had sprung back into life. 9.40pm and we had power! We could look forward to a cup of coffee and a hot breakfast in the morning!

Thunderstorms

More cloudy days. Today (28^th June) the rain and sunshine alternate. The dark clouds that went west down the valley yesterday are now travelling east again and we’ve just had some crashes of thunder. Luckily Bill did a hedge-hacking stint early this morning and I did one after lunch. So the work progresses in spite of the weather.

No sign of the farmers today. But Bill did find the tomato plant – with one single tomato - that our friend planted in the garden way back in March! I took a photo of it. Unfortunately we have no idea what a courgette plant looks like, so we haven’t found it yet.

I got three chapters edited this morning. Sometimes I wonder if they are too short, but hey – what is the optimum length for a chapter? I think it all depends on the content and when the moment comes to pose the question so the reader wonders what happens next. 

Lee Child has an interesting note at the end of Night School on How to Create Suspense. My copy doesn’t have it, but the copy here does. He thinks it’s a misleading question, as if one were to bake a cake and success depends on the best ingredients. Authors then set about creating interesting characters with dangers and peril etc whereas he thinks the author should try and make the reader hungry and then make them wait hours for dinner. ie Novelists should ask a question at the beginning of the story and then not answer it. Page to page, line to line, imply a question and then answer it later. That way, people get to the end of the book because they want to know the answer.

Changes

More cloudy days. Yesterday (27^th June) we did what I call the monastery circuit. We walked up the hill to the Gite Rural, along the top road towards the monastery and then down the hill to meet the road to Laurent de Batons. We met two other dog walkers, one Dutch, one English and Tom whizzed by in his van. By the time we walked along the bottom road it was ten past nine and starting to get really warm. Tim has been quiet all day after that walk but it totalled on 7,200 steps on my pedometer.

Early evening the thunder storm began just as we were sitting down on the bolly to eat our lapin casserôle. Tim was frightened, but then became so interested in the rabbit stew that he ignored the thunder crashes. Later still the rain started, but it wasn’t the full on rainstorm we’ve seen here in other years.

 I’ve intended to try cooking rabbit for a ong, and finally did so. I followed a recipe in the Slow Cooker recipe book and marinated the meat in fruity red wine. It turned purple in colour and looked truly revolting, but frying it improved the colour to a dark brown – nothing like the photo in the recipe book! How they got it to be golden brown after a red wine marinade, I have no idea. After four hours in the slow cooker on the bolly it smelled delicious. We found it very tasty. Not unlike a meaty chicken, but not as dry.

Farmers were rushing about collecting hay bales while the thunder crashed. It has rained through the night and today the pool is rather full and the fields are greening up almost as we watch. I doubt we’ll go far today, but I should get lots of editing done.

Stormy times

After days of 35 and 38 degrees we woke at 4.45am to thunder and lightning which rolled around for an hour gave a couple of monster cracks which sent Tim scuttling out of his basket and into my arms - and put the electricity out. That meant dh had his trek downstairs to flip the switch again. Those last two cracks were the end of it but we have half the sky dark and grey and the other bright blue. Odd. Do you remember I sent a sock up into a tree and it stuck there? Well, the wind has brought the sock down to ground again in the last half hour. So we don't know if we're going to get a thunderstorm or not - so far there has been no rain - also very odd.

The picture was an early morning shot a couple of days ago when the sun was rising and lifting the mist off the lake.