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.