Walnuts, anyone?

 

5^th September

Thunderstorms at 11.20pm last night. Almost continuous sheet lightning that lit up the entire mill, front, back and sides at the same time. Thunder but no rain, or so little rain that we did not hear it. Perla being totally deaf is lucky in these situations as she slept right through. Tim would have been bouncing around – totally alert, half afraid and half aggressive.

Dh drove into Vergt and did a shop that is supposed to last until we leave for home. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t, but it is not a worry as we have to go into Vergt on Monday to see Monsieur le docteur le vétérinaire to get Perla’s worming tablet and her Animal Health Certificate signed off. Then we have a few hours to get to Calais and through the tunnel back into England. (Out of interest for anyone thinking of taking their dog to France, we were charged £65.) Considering the £225 in England for the AHC before we went, and £65 in France, it is an expensive option – thanks to Brexit! Bah humbug.

The mornings are noticeably colder now, and likewise the evenings. A good time to get work done – it was far too hot when the temperature was in the high thirties, but low twenties is ideal. The nasty little biting creatures seem to be gorging on us as if to fatten up for the winter. I don’t see them, but I have several nasty bites, and they have attacked Perla’s paws as well. The pool is not quite so inviting now, and the leaves are turning yellow gold. I sweep the fallen ones from the bolly every morning. Sadly, the walnuts are not falling yet, but they are growing.

The very first Sunday of September and a hunter was out with his dogs, shooting at goodness knows what. Possibly deer, rabbits or boar, none of which we have seen, though we have seen signs that tell us they are around. It must be a struggle for them to find water, for the stream that runs through the mill land is still just a trickle and seepage. The spring that feeds the pound, however, runs as it ever did, so they will always find water here.

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.