This & That

It's been a while since I've written and as I type now I am sat in an empty bedroom with pink and white flowery wallpaper, wooden floorboards and a marble fireplace looking out through a flaky old window to a view of lush green scenery out on the horizon and down below some chickens trying to take cover from the rain under a large bush. The cockerel looks 'dampened', is that a word? I'm not sure but his feathers hang low and he doesn't look as regal as he usually does. He could simply go into his house and keep warm and dry but I can only assume that as that is not part of his routine usually, he couldn't work out that perhaps just for today, he could in fact make it part of his routine. And why are all the Hens under the bush but the Cockerel isn't? Is he looking after them, making sure that they have shelter before he does? Or perhaps he's a picnic short of a sandwich; I prefer to think that come what may he will be hunter gatherer for his brood and that hopefully when he comes back to the nest they won't be put off by his sodden & bedraggled looks and that they will let him serve them for his efforts.

It's been wet, very wet for quite some time now. Not every day - we have an interlude of sun and when it does come out it's extremely hot, but the common theme during most weeks seems to be a downpour of magnificent proportions - not just a light shower, this is serious rain. Obviously we do have the rain to thank for all the wonderful lush greenery around but come on - this is June, it's summer isn't it and we decided not to move to Wales or Scotland because it rained too much! Have we made a catastrophic mistake? It would be the law of sod that each time I check the weather forecast for England, there seems to be sun. I'm sure when I lived in England the sun was always in Limoges and the rain was just outside the window. I could be at the British Hearth Foundation now sweltering in a British Summer and chatting to all the old dears buying their Mills & Boon about how Britain has never known a summer like it. Oh well, for now I will enjoy letting the rain do the job of watering the garden and bringing on my lettuces and runner beans and in August I'll gloat that we are in the pool when the British Summer has already come to an end and the beginning of a new school term is just around the corner.

Since I last wrote we've had two sets of visitors. The first was my dad who arrived just before his birthday at the end of May. Seeing as he was filling his retirement with silly little things like racing round Nurburgring in exciting fast cars, doing charity work and having lots of social engagements booked up each weekend I decided to give him a job. He is now Head of Electrics at Muck to Merlot, Chez Watson, France. The job is a grand one and I won't hear anything to the contrary - although he was on site by 8am every morning, didn't leave til around 10pm most nights, worked a 6 day week and had a team that consisted of him, him and him - he was fed and watered impeccably (other than the odd 2 Euro bottle of plonk which didn't really go down that well), he had his washing and ironing done for him and of course the company was great. The electrics have come on leaps and bounds, most importantly the old fuse box with furry little cables, with no earth whatsoever is now pretty much out of action and we have a shiny new plastic fuse board up on the wall with loads of wires going off here there and everywhere - it looks great! I have a washing maching and a fridge which has made my life considerably easier and we even have light - such a simple thing we take for granted, but we can in fact now see which walls we are knocking down and which should be left. Phew!

We celebrated dad's birthday on the 30th with two new arrivals - Kat & Ben. They drove down like the proper townies that they are (& we almost used to be) in their BMW Coupe, armed with posh wellies and an even posher BBQ. They did the journey in record time and arrived early enough for us to cart them off to the local campsite for their first shower in France as we were one nut & bolt away from sorting out our plumbing and all the shops were shut on Sunday - so we had a night of no shower. We baked a cake and had a feast from the barbie and sang Happy Birthday to dad, it was a lovely social evening and our first proper gathering in our new home. Kat & Ben tucked in that night to the tent in our front field, which Kat described as 'Glamping' rather than Camping as they had a full double bed, base, mattress the lot, table & Chairs, kettle, tea and even a heater wired from the house. They said they wouldn't use it as they liked to rough it a little more than that, but I'm pretty sure it was on by night two! They were fantastic, they stripped wallpaper, cut down trees and moved huge boulders from the barn floor - they worked like trojans followed up each night by a meal outside with a fire going next to us. Good friends, good food & good chats; it was over all too quickly as by the Thursday they were back to boring things like work, paying the mortgage..you know - stuff like that. The best bit was that we didn't put them off and they have already booked to come back and we can't wait.

Head of Electrics still had another week before his return home, which was great because there was lots more to do not only with the electrics but he also stepped in to help with other jobs. We put a gate up in preparation for our puppy, and also had to whack out all of the ground level floors with a deadline for the machine hire. Each time Stu and I reached the point of not being able to dig anymore, dad did a stint on the machine - we all spent most of that week still shaking when we went to bed and having to unfold each limb out of bed the next morning. Still we did get the machine back on time and we have kept to our schedule of digging all floors up. By the end of the week we were all pretty shattered, but we needed to find enough energy to collect a beautiful little puppy and go to a local party before dad went home.

Chickens

The farmyard gets bigger….

The following day we had some more animals to collect; only this time we were far less aware of what we were doing. We had found another English couple an hour away who were breeding birds, some as layers and others as meat – Stu had spoken to them and agreed to have a trio of one Cockerel and two Hens. When we arrived we met Jill first, she was a well dressed lady – didn’t look like a Chicken Farmer at all. We sat in the sun having a cup of tea whilst their ducks wandered past us, the Jack Russell fought for our attention and the Geese made lots of noise in the background. Jeff also sat with us and talked about their life in France and their kids in the UK, how prices had gone up and it was because of the English. As we were talking, I guess he was summing us up in his mind because he decided to bring out some ducklings and gave us a ‘gentle sell’ to try and get rid of some birds. I gave the little thing a cuddle as he looked at me making a funny squeaky noise. He was cute and I loved the idea of some ducklings, but I wasn’t as confident as I was with the kittens and felt that we were already in deeper than we could swim so we should take small steps. I gave him back saying that although we did want ducks this was something we would leave for a while. Jeff took us over to the three birds we had agreed to buy; they were waiting in a very small cage for us. We looked them over as though we knew what we should be looking for, I just saw feet that reminded me of dinosaurs, beaks that looked like they could be painful, a few feathers tufting out on the Cockerel - was their such a thing as ‘tufty feather disease’, perhaps I should be taking this salesman up on my findings, or maybe I’ll just stay quiet in case it’s nothing. We told him we were happy with them and he said he’d show us the rest of his Bird Fleet. We walked up to a dusty area, where we had lots of long pens built from a simple wooden frame and chicken wire attached to one another. The first pen had a Cockerel in it that looked four times as big as it should be, I would have been scared if it had come anywhere near me. The second had some beautiful beige birds – Buff Orpingtons I think they were. I liked them; they were pretty and fairly small. The next pen had quite a few birds in it and they were all pecking at a dead hen, I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. How could they be doing that to one of their own? It wasn’t a pretty sight. He moved us on and showed us a few birds that he recommended would be good for us, but I was nervous. Stu and I agreed that we should go home with three and come back another time for some more. We paid our 50 Euros, he put them in a box for us and off we went with our Chickens in the boot. When we arrived home we put them into the house Stu had built for them and put some food down in their little garden area, they pecked around and seemed fairly happy with their surroundings. A little later I was working in the house and I heard a cry of excitement from outside, I ran out only to find Sash looking at me with a big grin on her face – I ran over to the chicken house and she told me to look inside. It was our first egg. Not any old egg either; it was the first bit of produce from our farm, a beautiful warm egg, a blue egg. That night, we decided we better put the Chickens into the house ourselves to show them the night time drill. This seemed like a good idea at first – Sash headed up the team as we talked tactics before entering the Chicken garden. I had a broom, sash had a stick and Karen and Stu just made themselves big with their arms stretched out. We all walked slowly, following Sash’s commands herding the Chickens towards their house; they didn’t like us and they definitely didn’t want to be anywhere near us. Just as we thought we had them close they applied their own tactics similar to the Red Arrows darting off in different directions, just testing how agile we really were. We weren’t as agile as them. The evening went on and the situation didn’t change, the birds outsmarted us every time. Finally Karen, driven by tiredness and a no desire whatsoever to spend the entire night trying to put these birds to bed, mustered up some sort of inner strength and focus to catch a bird. She went for it, cornering the Hen getting two hands around her belly and not letting go as she flapped her wings and struggled, she got her over to the house and in she went. One down, two to go. She didn’t stop there; surprised by her own skills she went on to do the same with the second Hen, only this time Karen did scream a bit but we managed to get the Hen inside before bursting into a fit of laughter. A camera would have been ideal and £250 would have been coming our way from ‘You’ve been Framed’. Just the Cockerel left and he was a much scarier proposition, plus he had found an area behind a building which was difficult for us to get to. Sash and I got into the undergrowth and tried to move him back where we wanted him but in his bid for freedom he flapped his wings so hard that he managed to get over the fence and was heading through the Lilac bush towards our tent in the front field. This wasn’t good, 6 acres and we could have been chasing him all night long. Sash and I shouted to Stu to get round the other side of the Lilac bush and he, like Karen was now at the point of ‘do or die’; the Cockerel needed to get safely into his house so we could go into ours. Stu climbed through stinging nettles and brambles and finally caught the bird, he flapped and squawked but Stu held on tightly and got him back round to the Chicken garden and safely into his house. We locked the door and laughed at ourselves praying that the Chickens would learn to go to bed on their own before too much longer.

Marble & Scamp

We’ve arrived.

After a very long journey towing the tractor we finally arrived at our new home on Sunday 16th May. We travelled with Stu’s Mum - Karen and Sister - Sasha and we were all tired by the time we arrived. We had two car loads and the tractor to unload and dinner to think about, which all seemed too much for me at 5pm having left the UK at 4am and driven straight through with no driver swaps. The tractor started straight away so we had some fun and cut the back field. Stu had the first go of course and it ran like a dream, he dropped his hydraulics at the back lowering the topper to the ground and then selected first gear, gave it some revs and with a few chugs, off he went. Then Sasha had a go, she sat on Stu’s lap and steered Percy up and down the field with a huge grin on her face. It was my turn next, and call me controversial but I just can’t stand all those perfectly straight lines up and down the field, so as soon as Stu stepped away, I twisted and turned all over the field making circles and zig zags everywhere, Stu was shaking his head at me, but I was quite amused! Then Sash had a go on her own, Stu took great pleasure in showing her how everything worked before she zoomed off round the field – enjoying the idea that zig zags are the new straight line. We made it to Macdonalds at 9pm, it was all we could manage.

On Monday we had a Kitten to collect – his name is Marble and we had heard about him through an internet site. These kittens were free to a good home and they had one grey & white one left, which we thought sounded lovely, so we agreed to come and take him off their hands. We arrived at a typical French Farmhouse and a very pretty welcoming lady was outside gardening and waving madly at us. Her name is Jenny and she used to breed Birmans in the UK, unfortunately her beautiful pure bred Birman had it off with the local Farmer’s black and white moggie and she was stuck with a load of kittens to deal with. She welcomed us into her home where we found 4 beautiful kittens curled up on the sofa. Three of them were black and hard to tell apart, the fourth was Marble who stood out with his lovely grey and white coat and piercing blue eyes. Jenny offered us all coffee and we sat and chatted about her life and how she ended up in France; so many stories to hear from so many people searching for something more just like us. Jenny seemed lonely though, she smiled as she chatted about her home, her cats and her friends, but I felt she was missing something in her life. We played with the kittens who had slowly woken up as we chatted – Marble was funny playing with various toys around the sofas and coming up on to our laps every now and then for a cuddle. I had a black kitten in my lap who laid fast asleep for almost the whole time we were there, another kitten stayed curled up on the sofa and didn’t enjoy being picked up. The last kitten was busy playing, being cuddled and looking after his brothers cleaning them. Sash liked him, she said he was a good natured kitten and that it was a good sign he was cleaning the others. He was pure black with white markings underneath that looked like he was wearing a bikini. Needless to say Marble was packed into the cat box with a brother by his side, the kitten temporarily named ‘Kini’ came home with us too and it didn’t take us long to realise that ‘Scamp’ was a much more appropriate name for such a lively inquisitive kitten. The brothers have taken to farmyard life very well; they love the long grass and all the barns to explore. They use the litter tray even though we’ve moved it a couple of times and they sleep all night long snuggled up together in their bed. They entertain us and talk to us and give us lots of cuddles; we love having them as part of our family.