life in the Limousin

As you may have noticed (anybody who is still bothering to look at this), the blogging has come to an end for a while whilst batteries are recharged and we all find something to say which doesn’t involve snow.

We were supposed to be having a party tonight at ours but the snow has been so bad for the last couple of days that the roads are pretty much impassable so we had to cancel it this morning and reschedule it for next week - when hopefully the weather, and we, will be more organised.
Alfie and his mate are on decks in the middle barn.
‘Mate’ came back from England the day before yesterday and mentioned that he’d picked up some old vinyls over there that I might like ….as he’d got them from his gran! It was said without an ounce of irony, the cheeky scoundrel. For perhaps the first time it struck me just how old we are to people 20 years younger and the danger of the territory we are about to embark upon ….. which is rave dancing in our house with our son and his friend as DJ’s.
Really it could go either way and either he will or will not ever speak to us again. Either way we win.
Anyway here are some photos of the weather.
I can report that this is the wrong type of snow for making snowballs, igloos or snowmen, but everyone seemed to find something diverting to do with it nevertheless.

‘I’m sure I brought some legs with me’

Half sloth, half poodle :

Kids in snowball rage incident with Mr Roche the neighbour:

Today has been one of the biggest wind-up days in a long while. It largely began at the Mairie in Oradour, with Elodie the secretary trying to get in touch with the head of the DDE, Mr Gouhaud, who is systematically either ‘en retard’, ‘ en communication’ or ‘en congé’. This morning it transpired that he was ‘en reunion’ and proceeded to be for the entire day.
The day ended at another Mairie, on our home turf in Champsac, where I went to try and change the carte grise for the car that Matt bought in England.
Although it has a Bordeaux immatriculation, because the dodgy Greek guy we bought it from in Luton wasn’t au fait with the French system and didn’t forsee the urgent need to change the carte grise to his own name for the duration of it’s stay on his forecourt ( in England), it officially doesn’t exist.
‘You’ll need to go to the Prefecture and see what they say’, said secretary n°1, which is like a kidney punch at the best of times, to be followed by the body slam from secretary n° 2 saying :
‘Well good luck. They’re ‘en greve’ at the moment and when they’re back at work there’ll be a huge back log.’
Inspiring words.
In between these two events we met the Mairie of Dournazac who is a lovely woman but can talk for an hour without taking a breath. We met at Bort with a notaire who was making a valuation on the house next door to the one Alfie is living in.
If a picture paints a thousand words then the rest of the day needs no explanation. If Munch was trying to capture the mindset of the day ( with a camera) he would have come out with something like this.
It’s worth considering too, when admiring the integrity and simplicity of this French paysan lifestyle, that the man whose house this is was living there but months ago before he was carted off to the Maison de Retraite from which he is still trying to escape so that he come back and live in this room of shoes.
You may notice the lack of any toilet. Not a problem when you have a corrugated iron wood shed…..with no door.

I was going to be posting a highly entertaining Youtube video this evening of Alfie, Matt and Laurent putting the granite top on to the fireplace that Alfie’s carved for Negrelat - but having waited over an hour for the video to download (at which point it was still only half way done) I accidentally closed the window so have had to start all over again. I can’t say that the action was particularly rivetting even at the time …..more scary than anything - but a reminder of why people nowadays use modern materials in building.
Instead some random photos taken on the dog-walk this morning….all a bit on the blurred side but that’s a hazard of the job when one hand is attached to a hound with a scent in his nose. As you can see from these pictures the weather was very mild again today. Perfect mushroom weather, although the cepes remain as allusive as ever.

A fantastic tree:

This is the fireplace….a prelude to what’s to come tomorrow:

There isn’t a problem writing the blog tonight - it’s something to take my mind off putting up the christmas decorations. Is it really still too early?
Apart from the modern perennial of the father christmas on neon ladder set-up, hanging randomly from the occasional wall, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of anything else. The fir trees which are donated by the commune to each of the shops in the village remain baubleless. I think everyone’s waiting for it to become more wintery before taking the plunge but apart from getting a tiny bit colder it still doesn’t feel that christmas is only a couple of weeks away. Not even the Marché de Noel that we went to yesterday in St Laurent sur Gorre, where father christmas, sporting a nylon wig that was on the bluer side of white, rode around the streets on a camel could do the job.
When I was growing up in Manchester, where people seemed to go early with the tinsel, the christmas tree was always put up on the 5th of December because it’s my birthday but when it came to taking the decorations down life seemed so dull without the glitter having lived with it for so long that now I try to limit the fun to 2 weeks max.
Time spent not putting up decorations was then, this birthday, spent in bed eating chocolates and drinking tea until past 11am, a bit of post lunch toing and froing to football etc with the kids, followed by a televisual odyssey which began at 5.30pm with Come dine with me, travelled past You’ ve been Framed, Harry Hill, the X Factor finally arrived at Being Alan Bennett late in the evening - all washed down with Matt’s Saturday night speciality of Magret de Canard in an apple jus, a bottle of Champagne and more chocolates. I defy anyone to invent a better birthday than that. In fact don’t bother - it can’t be done. In fact the only thing that could have made my day even more complete had already happened the week before when I received my Michael Winner christmas card, signed in thick blue felt pen by the old pantomime dame himself. He’d mentioned in his Winner’s dinners column a couple of weeks ago that if people sent him their address he’d send them a card and he’s nothing if not a man of his word. It has taken pride of place in the card collection ever since - but as we only have 4 it isn’t that difficult. I shall, of course, be framing said article when the festive season comes to an end so that life retains some of it’s glitter.

Well guilt has finally got the better of me and it’s time to put fingers to keyboard and write some stuff. Hopefully in doing so I’ll remember some of the things that I should have put in my diary - which I haven’t written up for ages either. Sadly that’s the way of it now. Once I would have been writing down things that were happening in the future but now it’s all reminders of things that have been because I’ll have forgotten in a couple of days. Not great from an organisation point of view but interesting to read at the end of the year.
So what’s happened in the last two weeks? Tons of stuff.
Most of the time (in between the normal round of life with it’s associated seasonal illnesses, working to pay the bills and needy children) has been spent concentrating on the land at Les Ollieres, which we need to get in order before the weather turns. It’s amazing how much tidying and burning there is to do there. It all looks in order from a distance but closer up it’s a different story and incredibly hard work. One day we may even get round to filling the lake up again - now that the grass seed has started to grow on the banks. We went there yesterday and all of a sudden it’s sprung up from nowhere which is is great news because apparently we need to leave it for 6 months to settle before putting any fish into it. Hopefully Alan and Neil can come over in the summer and fish nap our carp back from Ian Grey’s lake next door which has been their home for the last year and a half, although it took Ian days to catch even one fish last time he was over so it may take more than two of them. Apart from anything else they’ll both be legless on homemade cider by about 11am and scaring the pond life away with raucous laughter.

We planted an avenue of 30 sycamore trees there too at the weekend which was incredibly satisfying work, especially for me who was doing a bit of light digging and filling in the holes- less so for Matt who had to put in the 2m20 chestnut stakes with a lump hammer.
We managed to plant 16 whilst the kids were playing football and missed Etienne’s ( who is a defender) glory goal of the season and perhaps his whole footballing career. Matt’s shoulder was killing him for days after so we got Alfie in to help later in the week with the other trees and he did them in about half the time with youth and a post driver on his side. For the first time ever Matt has conceded that it’s time to pass the mantle to the next generation and butt out of trying to do anything physical. He spent the day plastering yesterday and couldn’t move either of his shoulders today. You know it’s getting serious when it’s a struggle to pick up a glass.
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Talking of Alfie - he found treasure in the chimney of the fireplace at Bort the other day. He saw something glinting in the chimney breast and thought it might be a Napoleonic coin or something as exciting.
Everyone who has bought an old house in France will have been through the same thing at some point in their renovating career as the air is thick with rumours of peasants bricking up their treasures behind fireplaces and then dying and leaving them there.
Sadly we’ve never found even a centime but Alfie got his tools out and after a lot of patience(which is a first for him), managed to work the coin out, only to discover that it was an old freemason’s token with exactly the same hammer and chisel motif on it as the ones he had used to work it free.
Obviously he took that as a sign that he was destined to claim the house as his own, which is handy. It has a view of the Chateau of Montbrun and he was asked over by the owner last week to see about repairing a stone cross for the roof.
The whole area round there is full of mystery and glamour. Not only are the innards of Richard Coeur de Lion to be found under a burial mound at the side of the chateau but it was also there that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie twice visited with a view to buy and things don’t get much more glamorous than that in these parts. I think I mentioned in a blog at the time that the neighbour was telling us that Brad ‘Pip’ had been spotted in La Taverne - the Chateau’s bar/restaurant

Anyway I’ve got to stop writing now - there’s an increasingly irrate queue for the computer.