French Summer Idyll

As M is now back at school after the LOOOONG summer break I thought that it would be a good time to look back at the holidays.  So, what did we do?  Well after the canal boat jaunt  (See here) we returned to a fairly sunny but horribly horribly dry France.  Having missed the patronal festival - much to the children's disgust (there is a roundabout, just one)  - we realised that we had three days before the end of the Souvigny medieval fair.  No time was to be lost.  The Souvigny fair is fantastic.  Set in Souvigny with its abbey and beautiful church where several Ducs de Bourbon are buried, the whole of this small medieval town makes a great effort to become as authentically medieval as possible while still keeping it fun.  Geese are herded through the streets, street jugglers, fire-eaters and musicians perform on different corners, soldiers march through the town and a few horsemen try to avoid trampling the crowd.  There are stalls a plenty  and the  hypocras flows.  Many people go in costume which adds to the crowd of street artists.  We go in full medieval dress too which is just so much fun! Anyway here I am;

Apologies for the poor quality but in the attempt to stay as authentic as possible we left the big camera at home and relied on J's mobile phone cunningly hidden in a deep pocket, but the settings were wrong.  There are loads of photos here if you are interested, but not taken by us.

The rest of the holiday flew past and what we did and when we did it is now a bit of a jumble. There were quite a few afternoon teas, an apero that ended at midnight, picnics down the country lanes and the ever present brocantes.  We had a lovely day out in Charroux - a pituresque village full of little artisan shops and a fantastic new restaurant that serve the very best smoked salmon "galettes" (french savoury pancakes) with a pink grapefruit salad that I have ever tasted.  And to finish of in style an old friend came over from Scotland and we enjoyed 10 more days of frolics.

In the Sioule gorges 

  Donkey walking

And finally there was time for a last go in the park as the leaves are now beginning to fall.  Back to school we go - and UP a class.  But that's a whole new adventure and another day to tell.

The Houdini Hen

I like Chickens.  I like their egg production, their lack of neediness, their ability to put themselves to bed and their quiet clucking and scratching as I garden next to them.  However, I have never really admired them for their intelligence.  I have seen them come in through my kitchen door and them flap around in panic unable to go back out through it when I wave a broom at them.  They also don't seem to have remembered that they will be chased by a maniac female with a broom as soon as they put their beaks into the kitchen.  But be that as it may I am being bettered by a chicken, a hen a Gallus domesticus.

 The story so far;  I wanted chickens.  I wanted them scrapping and pecking round the garden, I wanted free range happy hens who could come and go as they pleased.  My neighbour didn't.  She wanted tulips.  And a lawn.  And open french windows, without the risk of chicken dropppings in front of the television. Bizarre I call it but hey, there we go.  My chickens did not confine themselves to my garden and therefore needed to be penned with a run.   All was well, relations with neighbour were restored to their pre-chicken state and my hens were happy enough in their shed and fenced off field. Until a chicken went AWOL.  Just one. She disappeared one morning and returned that evening.  Neighbour one made no comment, I stayed quiet and hoped that the children had just left the gate open.  Then it happened again.  And again.  I re-fenced higher, I doubled the wire round the gate, I blocked up the tiny gap between the fence and the wall.   Hen went happily to bed dreaming of tulip bulbs no doubt and I relaxed.  The next day she had gone.  Neighbour two (a chicken lover I am relieved to report) has now christened her Charlotte and Charlotte makes herself quite at home over there during the day, coming quietly home with the dusk.  The only problem with this arrangement is that neighbour one returns from holiday next week and I need to find out where Charlotte the Houdini hen is getting out.  I have watched her (but she sits contentedly in her garden while I observe her) I have set other spectators to check "but watch discretely" I find myself saying to them "she knows that you're spying on her otherwise".  They are similarly baffled.  There are no remaining holes, the fence is too high to fly and I'm pretty sure that they haven't been tunnelling.  I would now believe that she could open the gate except that even I can't do that from the inside! And it is securely shut in the morning.  The chicken is looking smug and I am looking a fool.  Any ideas as to how the hen does it would be gratefully received.

Charlotte, the Houdini Hen

A life afloat

It's been a while since I last updated the blog, but with good reason.  This being July/August and the school holidays we have been away !  After the wetness that was the first two weeks in July I was crossing everything I had that the sun would shine for us in England, you see this year we had opted to join my parents on their canal boat, cruising the inland waterways of Great Britain, (you can actually follow them here)  As Mum has discovered, rain, on a canal boat, is fun for all of half a day, we were staying two weeks.  My prayers, it seems, were answered, and while we did not enjoy blazing sunshine for the entirety of the holiday, it did beam upon us for a substantial part, and the rain held off until the very last day.

The canals in England are something of a family love affair, although having now spent a winter and very wet Spring and Summer on the boat Mum is maybe a bit less enthusiastic now- it is also her job to do the locks........  But for us on a two week only break they are fantastic.  I love the bridges; (577 photos taken and a weighty proportion are bridges - I am not alone in this, Dad has hours of film of them, no really.)  the locks (no honestly, I like doing them, for a fortnight) and I love that within the space of a few minutes you can move from the uber modern 21st Century cities into the rural idyll of England (although this is actually just a clever illusion sometimes, the boat doesn't travel very fast and you are pretty much still in the city centre, you just can't see it)  You get to travel through factories, tunnels that drip on your head and under the most secret parts of the motorway.  The flowers and lilys pour into the water and crowd over the boat fighting each others colour and smell, the days are spent dreaming away at the front of the boat as you drfit through networks of water, never seeing and often never hearing anything other than the chugging of the boat.  We enjoyed it - here are a few photos from the 577 taken.....

The dreamy duvet cover dress

No button holes No hem!

This is my first ever tutorial!  But having been encouraged by my friend Charlotte I am testing the tutorial waters and sharing with you my dreamy duvet cover dress!  Guess what I made it out of!

If you want to read all of the long long long tutorial click on the "read more" thing underneath!

Lavender's blue dilly dilly

The lovely lavender is all of a bloom at the moment, and, anxious as I am to have little idyll smelling all purple, I am loath to cut it down.  The secondary reason being that in my vast jug collection I don't actually possess one that suits a large bouquet of lavender (problem that will be solved this summer, it is now my hunting objective in the brocantes) However, the more important consideration is, in fact, the insects, bees and creatures who are loving it.  And it looks lovely in the garden.  So when I finally reached for the scissors and headed for the herbatious border  (actually I am not sure if it is a herbatious border but I have always wanted to say that) and found this little fellow having the meal of his life, I swapped scissors for camera and happily snapped away while he continued his lunch.

 Lavender bags and bouquets will wait.

We go together like rama lama lama ke ding a de dinga a dong

The vet said "wait a month".  I did.  Sophie and Caramel have been able to touch noses only across the wire divide.  Sophie has been getting wet in the storms, and hot in the sun, with little shade and no shelter whatsoever.  Caramel has been hogging the barn and so finally I decided that this weekend he would learn to share.  

I took Caramel out of his pen and led him towards Sophie's field, he got increasingly excited as he realised that for the first time in seven years he was going to be allowed to live with another animal.  He thought he had reached paradise, he thought that all his dreams had come true, he couldn't believe his luck.  Sophie called to him, he strained to reach her, they touched noses, then Sophie kicked him in the teeth and chased him four times flat out round the field.  

Caramel has not really been a Derby donk but despite the unexpected exercise he wasn't going pass up the only chance he's ever had at meeting a female .However, after the third kick in the teeth he lowered his head, bowed to queen Sophie, and accepted that she was in charge.  She condescended  to sniff his ears and rub his neck.

The rules are now established, peace and harmony have been restored to little idyll, I have a dry pony and a donkey who, at the mature age of seven, has found his first herd.

Saturday morning idyll

A lovely sunny day today! I suppose the exclamation mark is slightly uncalled for since the weather has been dry and warm, but still the sun actually came out and decided to beam upon us rather then the more resentful "oh I'll shine if I must but would rather just stay in bed" type of sun that we seem to have been having of late.  So what did the children chose to do, having been cooped up for the last few weekends?  They sat and played cars.  Until I decided that I wanted to be outside and chivvied them out to enjoy themselves.  (I worryingly suspect that I am going to be one of those mothers who turfs their teenagers out of bed at 9 o'clock with a cheery"it's a lovely day shall we all go out for a picnic?"  Whilst whipping back the curtains amidst shrieks from the vampires in their beds, but time will tell)

And enjoy ourselves we did;

The donkpon were brushed till they shone, M suggested that Caramel would win competitions - she's so loyal, the poor donkey has hoof problems following laminitis and still has half a winter coat that he refuses to shed, but his little owner thinks he's beautiful.

Then they relaxed in their field whilst we pottered,

 I admired the garden and the children polished off another bowlful of cherries.

,

See Mummy was right! But I do now have cherry and dirt stained clothing to deal with....  Hope your Saturday was sunny too.

Cheery cherry picking.

What a horribly wet and miserable month June is proving to be this year.  We had a pretty awful May aswell with only one weeks relief from leaky clouds.  Luckily that was the week that the vet was available and our fruit picking season began with two rather large plums being pruned from poor old Caramel.  He didn't appreciate it and the vet had a rather tougher time with him than he'd had that morning with a draught horse. A sedative, TWO general anesthetics and a local were needed to knock him out, and even then, after the deed was done, and the vet confidently predicted that he'd sleep it off all night, he was up and wobbling on his legs a mere hour after the vet had left. The donkpon will still have to be separate for another month though because it takes at least that long for the testosterone to drop so poor old Soph is in her field in the rain as she is waterproofish whereas Caramel is not - so he gets the barn.

Caramel's is not the only 'fruit' we have been picking this fortnight, as despite dire forcasts about lack of fruit and appalling harvests our early cherry tree is bent over with the weight of cherries on it.  So the children and I had an initial pick of the cherries last week and managed a 3kg haul, and that was just the first ripe ones that we could reach.  A second forey gave us as many again and now it looks like I'll have to get the 'secateurs on a pole' tool out (it probably has a name but I don't know it) or the birds will have eaten all the ones above hand height.  I have 18 pots of jam and the glut of cherries added to the nonstop egg production from the chickens has prompted husband to demand a clafoutis, I will try.  I don't like them so at least it will help my diet, I can't actually think of anything else that uses them but go ahead and google receipies for fresh cherries for me  - we do have three and a half more trees to get through

Jubilee time

Living in France means that we don't get to celebrate with street parties whenever there is a big national event back home.  And here there don't seem to be that many french occasions to celebrate, Presidential elections somehow just don't capture the hearts of the french in the way that fairytale royal weddings do in Britain..  I wonder why?!  So I try to do our own little thing in little idyll even if, to outside eyes, it seems faintly ridiculous. Children need balloons and bunting and any excuse does for a party.  The diamond Jubilee was thusly celebrated in our house, and we added flags (to wave at the television and to drape "tastefully" from the beams) princess dresses, and cupcakes.  We had fun decorating our own crowns, colouring in the queen and making paper chains.   The children were delighted to be watching the real queen floating down the Thames and my poor suffering french husband rolled his eyes and tied up the balloons.  He did enjoy the afternoon tea though.

The big arrival

The big day finally arrived, and at half past five I was up and cleaning the kitchen because we weren't leaving until half ast seven and I'd already got everything ready the day before!  Father-in-law and horse box arrived and we were off!  Until halfway there the car decided that it had had enough and stopped.  And could not be persuaded to continue.  We were brought home, minus the horsebox, which had been hired for the day and was now in a garage an hour and a half away.  So change of car and off again.  Luckily this time we made it there and even more relief when the animals decided that maybe the horsebox was not to be feared too much.  The way home was also quite eventful with near zero visibilty through thunder storms in the mountains.  Father-in-law remained stoic and at half past seven, a mere twelve hours after we first set off,  Caramel and Sophie were welcomed into their new house by pyjama-ed children and a relieved husband.  Here are a few little pictures of them.  Enjoy.

Caramel

And Sophie

In her field

Introductions

Brocanting

The weather had been glorious, until Sunday.  And that's a big problem for us.  Because Sundays are brocante days, car boots, yard sales, call it what you will.  But brocante days they are to us and we all get excited.  So after slaving away in beautiful sunshine in the donkpon shed for the past four days we were all for giving ourselves a day off bargin hunting.  So imagine the disappointment when we awoke to RAIN.  Glum faces all around.  Not only that but we couldn't get on with anything else either and the prospect of a Sunday cooped up inside with dampness seeping into our souls was not a merry prospect.  Hence why as soon as there was the slightest break in the downpour the children were wellied and raincoated and we attempted the brocante anyway.  Not huge this year  - and the few brave souls who had ventured stalls were tentatively unwrapping their wares when we arrived.  We did enjoy ourselves, mooched around, persuaded the children that a go on the slide made up for us not buying another toy car, ate our customary croissant and coffee and haggled over the price of a jug.  Another one.  Look

So Sunday aftrnoon was okay afterall. Cooped up inside I was at least cheered up by the sight of my new blue jug shining at me from the shelf. And it only cost a euro.

A breakthrough!

Yay, we've found a floor!  We had a lovely surprise when we dug under where the oil barrels were and discovered a stone floor.  On the down side it meant that there was actually alot more rubble and earth to move than we had first thought because the floor is substantially lower inside than out.  There were two options either hire a mini digger and scrape it all out or dig it out by hand.  We had to go for the second option, at least I could get on with it during W's naps.

So finally, barrow after barrow, we have cleared it.  By hand.  Have a look now.

And this was some of the stuff we pulled out;

It looks like my donkpon will have a shelter after all.  And thanks to the children collecting hay they shouldn't get too hungry on the journey either;

10 days to go.....................

The next adventure.

So after seeing a cute looking donkey on a "please rescue me" site despite not actually planning to own an equine in the near future I bundled the family into the car and headed off two and a half hours down the road, on a bank hoilday, ignoring that fact that there were several donkeys for sale in our area. I was promptly smitten.  Obviously.  Now, I have two children and a large field, donkeys like friends, the only option was buying a second hoofed companion, great, the man was also selling a pony.

So we have a month before I, sorry, father-in-law, has to drive back to collect them and nothing was remotely planned let alone started.
Here is where their shelter will be

 please note lack of roof, infestation of ivy and crumbling walls.  We have started to clear fifty years of rubble, and earth, a complete roof (broken) and father-in-law (again!) has done two trips to the recycling tip with two trailer fulls of rusty oil barrels! - Why were there oil barrels?

On a more positive note under the barrels we did discover an old drinking bowl and I suspect that there is a stone manger under that broken beam there.

Finally though they will have a lovely view from their bedroom door once they arrive