Snug and blue

The house has its new shutters, of a lovely cobalt, and looks beautiful from the outside. Inside is coated in stone dust and chippings and will take a few days to get clean, after which I shall take the camera round.

Silly me, it was only on seeing the shutters from the inside that I realised that the colour plan for the living-room won't work. I so much wanted the pale turquoise of the friezes from the palace of Darius. but it won't go with cobalt.

The shutter upstairs enhances the character of the window: you can see its odd shape more clearly now, and it looks like the window of a medieval castle.

Snakes and ladders

There is a whip snake living next to the terrace. I dont usually see it, because whipsnakes are very shy and very fast (their speed is the reason for the name), but a few days ago it was napping on the warm tiles of the terrace. It has been named Monsieur Etienne Whippy, a combination of suggestions, some more obvious than others. Unfortunately I didn't have the camera handy, and as soon as it heard me it scurried off to hide.

Brendan is currently fitting the first of the new shutters to the mezzanine window. He had to make several trips up the ladder, as he had carefully cut the shutter to fit the window-space which is by no means rectangular, and then didn't know which side was which. Denis, who was taking a stroll around Le Rivalard wearing his new shades, came to help by holding the ladder, which was looking most unsafe on the stony path.

Denis asked if I was going to the Foire des Célibataires. Apparently it's an annual cattle^Wmarriage-market of all-day festivities. The website has a rather sweetly mistranslated English version, though sadly it needs updating.

Barbecue, buzzing, and bombes

The broken window was replaced, at a much lower cost than Casa Nova, by Brendan-from-Charente. He is back here now, making shutters. He also brought a load of vine-wood and fired up the barbecue, and we had an English-speaking evening with three local couples who are his old friends. As it went dark, the solar lights came on. Pretty. Then the terrace lights were switched on, and a hornet arrived. And another. And... at least eight. We discussed the recent fuss about Asian hornets invading southwest France and murdering honeybees, but it no-one wanted to get close enough to see what kind of hornet these were.

Most of the guests said don't bother them and they won't bother you. The hornets stayed up in the roof area - until all the guests had gone, around midnight. And then one landed on my skirt. I whimpered and tried to shake it off, but it clung tightly. Brendan flicked it off, and it went only a few inches... upwards. Now it was on my top, over the left breast. I don't remember when I started to scream. It was moving towards my face. In utter panic, I tried to pull my top off without taking it over my head. Thank goodness that was when Brendan managed to knock the hornet off me and onto the floor.

I felt so embarrassed about the shrieking. None of the neighbours has mentioned the noise, but Ginette and Denis turned up this morning for a slightly more formal visit than usual.

They found the hornet nest (they are European hornets, yellower and bigger than Asian hornets but not so aggressive). It's in Yggdrasil the giant ash tree! It is apparently possible to get rid of the hornets with a Bombe but I may have to phone les Pompiers and ask them to make a Sortie.[0]

Yggdrasil is tinder-dry, and I'm worried about it.

[0] "Sorties des Pompiers" is an amusing section in the local paper giving a list and little report of each time the firemen have been called out in the week.

La Rochelle

Marvellous place, La Rochelle: massive stone structures, fascinating market of stuff from all over the world, good food, ships and bridges, and street entertainment on every corner.

Next visit, I shall go on one of the Yelo solar-powered ferries, or "bus de mer"; they glide so smoothly, like swans. Might sample one or two of the nine museums, too. The marine museum is on a ship!

One of the busking groups was Les Boeufs Troquistes. At first I didn't get why they were wearing white overalls with black splotches, but when you see their introductory song (performed with actions), all becomes clear. Excellent musicians, and funny too.

Fruit again

This morning I had nectarines for breakfast. Straight from the tree. In fact, sitting under the tree.

Weh hey!

Alas, poor shrew, I knew him

I was sitting on the steps last Thursday when something ran behind me. It looked like a mouse, but a few seconds later one of the terrace-geckos ran the same route and I thought I must have seen the other one... and added fur... um... cracking up... Later one of the visitors saw a large shrew in the long grass. Aha!

That evening we had a barbecue and invited neighbours. The people next door have a young fox-terrier bitch with good manners but the inevitable love of hunting: she was quite excited at finding some small beastie in the grass. Next morning the shrew was on the stone tiles, shivering and clearly not able to move easily: it had a bite-mark on its back. It hobbled slowly off into the grass. Yesterday $current_visitor found it, dead.

Gardening by numbers

The grass is not so long now. Mme la Galloise, at the barbecue, was shocked to hear how much I'd paid to get the grass cut and volunteered to bring their lawnmower and do it herself. Payment? "A glass of wine, but as you don't drink, we'll bring the wine ourselves." It was the first time she'd used the lawnmower (M le Gallois is at present out of his skull on painkillers while waiting to go to the hospital to get sciatica fixed). She did the whole lot in less than an hour and a half - after knocking together a spreadsheet for my financial calculations (she's a mathmo and does this kind of thing for amusement).

It seems that I should acquire a Bosch Rotak 40, or something similar.

Fruits of the earth

The Secret Garden has a lot of shrubs, some of which I don't recognise and I haven't got round to finding out what all of them are. That's my excuse: it appears that one of them isn't a shrub at all - it's a baby damson tree! It had produced three damsons. Tasty.

The melon plant has one melon on it; the cornichon plant gave up after I left its one fruit to grow to cucumber-size (also tasty). The aubergine plant is rather more enthusiastic, with one fruit almost ready, another growing well, and more flowers. The strawberries have decided to go for a second fruiting. Gold tomatoes doing well, too. And the nectarine tree is somewhat overburdened. How do you tell that nectarines are ripe before they fall on the ground?