The wheel of life

It’s been a week of catching up with old friends and sadly, the loss of a little one too. Willy, my tiny Roborovski hamster passed away quietly on Wednesday night. I can’t say we had a very tactile relationship in the almost 3 years we spent together but he knew my voice and I had gotten used to the monotonous sound of his exercise wheel squeaking throughout the sleepy hours. Denis and I buried him in the new flowerbed under the apartment frontage – his little house marking his grave. I didn’t add the wheel, his spirit might wake the neighbours.

Speaking of neighbours or should I say, the neighbourhood, everyone’s been out in their gardens over the past few days to soak up the glorious early Spring warmth. Mowers humming and beer caps popping as shorts were pulled out of drawer depths – they’ll be returned to their winter lodgings tomorrow however as we are set for a wet and windy week ahead. Just in time for the Easter Weekend. I have to keep reminding myself that March winds and April showers are to be expected and we still really need the rain but I do prefer flip flops to work boots. The short burst of sunshine however has given my tomatoes a boost – they may be tortoises but slow and steady they rise. And I managed to make a start on painting the tractor house wall, luckily I’m taller than D so he’s only got the top of the wall to do – unless I sneak out the ladder whilst he’s not looking. We’ve shot through our to-do list mind you, ambient temperatures and blue sky abundance tend to get the work done – I just wish I’d decided to the pool leak last Thursday instead of the one coming. Ah well, wetsuit it is.

And with the nights more on the cool than chilly side, I hosted a dinner party out on the terrace on Friday evening. Denis cooked a traditional chicken and olive stew and I provided the vegetarian tatin de tomates. Sixteen were very well-fed and equally, well drunk and all had a thoroughly good evening. I only wish that I could have had everyone over last night instead as my good friend and once grooming mentor arrived yesterday for a stopover on her way to her holiday home near Málaga in Spain. It’s been wonderful to see Heidi again after almost 9 years and to meet her stunning Standard Poodle Tiffany and travel gal pal Lindy. Naturally they’ve had a guided tour of Rouffiac d’Aude, which takes all of 15 minutes and a drive around Carcassonne to see La Cité and St-Hilaire to see the Abbaye de St-Hilaire. We didn’t do any actually walking around as Tiffany is a little on the shy side but the views seem to impress her human counterparts. I do love having visitors and being able to show off this little corner of France (subtle hint to all those who keep promising to pop in, ahem).

As mentioned, Easter is almost upon us and then it’ll be April and hopefully, Spring. This year seems to be whizzing by or perhaps I’m just getting old. I still have another 5 chapters to finish which I’d like to get done before the summer so I can put the wretched thing in the hands of the experts to refine so to speak. It’s not that I don’t like writing it, it’s just that I have itchy feet and want to get on with other projects – ones that don’t require so many brain cells. On the subject of itchy feet, Callum’s is much better he tells me so he’s off being touristy for a couple of weeks around Taz before getting back into the work mode. Life’s all about getting the right balance and getting off the hamster wheel…

““Friendship’s the wine of life.” ( Edward Young)

Fruits of our labour

Spring is in the air and everything garden-wise is blossoming forth – except my tomatoes. Denis’ however, have started to pop their little green stalks upwards which makes one of us bounce up and down with glee at the prospect of winning the competition. My spinach, my lettuce, my chillies and my herbs are all reaching for the sky but zip from my reluctant entries. I told D his were hares and mine tortoises, I’m just going to have to be patient.

Patience has never been my strong point but with the must-do list getting longer, I’ve got several jobs to finish in several different locations. There’s a side table in the garage that I’m revamping for Mumo, 4 doors that need stripping in the carport, two chairs to be reupholstered in the downstairs bedroom, two outside walls to be painted and a leak to be mended in the bloody pool. And let’s not start on all the planting. I blame my toing and froing on my recent obsession with Chateau DIY, it gives me far too many ideas. Watching one of the programmes ended up with me deciding to change the flowerbed in front of the apartment by building a low wall around it – I’ve never built a wall before but it’ll be educational I’m sure. Denis and I took Jacqui and Terry next-door to the garden centre in nearby Couffoulens so that they could buy some floral additions for their plot and I came back with half a dozen colourful purchases to put in the new brickwork. There’s plenty of foliage there already but one cannot go into horticultural heaven and not come out without at least one pot.

I know I say it a lot but we really do live in the most beautiful part of the world. Now that the hunting season has finished, Arry, Alice, Sherman and I can change our running routes once more and with the sun getting out of bed when we do, I can see where we’re going. And the views up there above Rouffiac never fail to take my breath away, not that I have much in the way of puff left by the time I’ve climbed the several kilometres of continuous uphills with no down dales. But it’s worth the leg ache when you get to the top and look out over the vines and woodland towards the Pyrénées. Still covered with snow, they rise above the dark green canopy like meringues dusted with pink and orange as the sunrise hits their peaks. Never less than spectacular to see. My tomatoes should take a tip or two from them.

Mind you, if the forecast is anything to go by, that snow won’t be there for long – there’s warmth weather predicted for the week ahead although I don’t trust the météo as it has a habit of changing its mind every 5 minutes and we’ll probably get hailed on. We’ve got away with a pretty mild winter so I’m not changing my wardrobe just yet. I did however help Mumo clear hers yesterday and we filled a couple of bin bags full of clothes for the next vide grenier or car boot sale. And because I’m all about recycling, I took a few items for me – ones that should not be worn for gardening for once, Mumo bought me a new pair of jeans the other day and made me promise to keep them unsoiled for nights out. All my other pairs are tattoed with oil spots and grass stains. It’d be nice if I got a bit of tomato juice on them too…

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt” (Margaret Attwood)

Tractors and tomatoes

What a drizzly cold day it is today. It actually feels like February even though we are almost at the end of the month – one that has, so far, been more balmy than brrr. Denis reckons we are in for a nasty start to Spring which I really hope isn’t the case as the garden is definitely thinking about all things bright and beautiful. My little serre is busy producing tiny spinach and salad shoots and I’ve relocated the infant carrots to the makeshift nursery beside it. Graham donated one of those plastic covered clothes rail thingies which Denis ingeniously lay flat with zipper side up and dumped a few inches of fertile earth into its middle. This has also given me space to hatch my competition entries. Yes, the tournament of the tomatoes has begun. D has his contestants at his house whilst mine are tucked away in the sweaty confines of the poly tunnel. Naturally, I did as was decided and carefully poked 3 or 4 minute seeds into each hole – 30 of each type as per the rules whilst Denis just scattered his lot willy-nilly into pots. I’m taking the scientific route, he isn’t. July is the deadline for showing off our prize toms and Saba will be the judge. My fellow cheval du feu.

Working outside in mostly dry conditions has been just the ticket for blowing the cobwebs from my sleep-deprived grey cells. I finally managed to get 4 chapters off to Sally having nailed myself to the laptop every night. I do wish my writing muse had a bit of respect for my necessary 8 hours deep snoozing, she seems to have an aversion for working during the daylight ones. Still I’m over half-way, less the re-writes which my editor has a fondness for so I’m shooting for that distant last line one one exhausting evening at a time.

The past week wasn’t just about punishing my mentals, D and I finally managed to move Callum’s beloved Massey-Ferguson out of the car port and into its new home in the tractor shed. Its only taken 3 years to get it the 100 metres or so from the front to the back of the garden; one because we had to build the shed, two as we had to remove the giant fig root from its lodgings under the building’s roof and three, the little red tractor doesn’t go vroom. It hasn’t gone vroom since the day Callum pulled it out of the river after the L’Horte flood of 2018. The battered old girl needs a lot of fixing up as well as a couple of new back tyres. Anyway, we cabled her up to the back of the blue ride-on mower and with me driving and Denis guiding, heaved her surprising weightiness the short distance betwixt the two abodes. D was very impressed with my skills at getting both machines out of the mud half way down the back, I may have once been a city girl but those heady holidays spent at the former family homestead that was L’Horte gave me an education in manoeuvring motorised vehicles across mulchy meadows.

At least that was one thing ticked off the very long list of ‘must do’ chores, actually I managed to highlight another couple too. I made it through the annual vaccinations of Neo, Mo Cridhe and Coco Loco unscathed thanks to D’s help and very gentle young vet recently added to the clinic’s practice. She wasn’t the slightest put off by Mo’s eyeballing and Neo was a complete lamb, he didn’t even mind her cutting his back dew claws – something I hate doing as its like playing Russian Roulette with his ‘will I won’t I bite’ looks. And speaking of bites, I had a visit to the dentist so she could check on my new teeth. One in which she told me I wasn’t cleaning my extortionately expensive purchases properly and I needed to buy one of those dental water spray thingies. Which I dutifully did and managed to douse more of the bathroom walls than those inside my mouth. They’re quite powerful little machines you know? Mind you, if Denis thinks showing his bottom to his tomatoes will make them turn red, my soon-to- be even more dazzling dentures will give my lot sunburn…

“A tomato may be a fruit, but it is a singular fruit. A savory fruit. A fruit that has ambitions far beyond the ambitions of other fruits” (E. Lockhart)

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