My new book will be published on May 21, 2021. It's available in all the usual places: Amazon, bookshops, other online outlets. For anyone who has read my previous novel The Healing Knife, this one is a kind of follow-on. While the story is quite different there are some characters who reappear. I write about things that interest me, and the law is one of those things. In a nation such as mine, we take its operation for granted - but should we?
Once more in lockdown, we have had to rely on photos sent by our builder, and these were received with great interest as you might imagine. The work was eventually started in early January, and took five weeks rather than the original estimate of two; but as we weren't there, no doubt the weather was a factor and other jobs may well have been done at the same time.
Here's a reminder of what it looked like to start with:
The site cleared, and the resulting sea of mud! (It was winter, after all.)
The slabs are laid and the path gravelled.
The path as it leads down to the house.
It's a bit like buses - you wait for ages and then three come at once. My blog is in the doldrums for months, and then I write three long posts in rapid succession!
Following our drive to render our French acre less of a jungle and more of a garden after the months when we were forced to neglect it, I thought I would share our plans for the building that collapsed last autumn. This disaster I covered in a post dated 21 November 2019. But perhaps I should begin by showing you what it used to look like when more or less intact (it's always been a bit dilapidated.)
Towards the end of August we returned to France. Under the regulations then (and now) current we knew we would have to self-isolate for a fortnight on our return, so we decided to stay for a month to make it worth while.
Now battle was joined in earnest.
I should note that my husband is not a young man - next week he will be 78. I am younger, but by no means young, and we both have joint problems. But to see him in action in France wielding heavy, awkward machinery and working for hours at a stretch you'd never believe it. First he had to get the worst of the grass down with the wheeled strimmer, which has an engine but still has to be pushed. After that the grass was low enough for the mower. To clear the orchard, which slopes steeply downwards, he first towed the strimmer to the top of the garden on the back of the mower. Then he strimmed down as far as the drive. He then walked back up and mowed down over the roughly-cut strip - a sequence repeated many times over several days. Because the grass was so long, mowing resulted in swathes of hay everywhere which if left would have killed the grass underneath, so after mowing he had to attach the hay collector to the back of the mower and pile it all up in heaps. Here he is doing just that. The very long untouched grass is visible in the background.
All this while I was not idle! I wielded the small strimmer in awkward spots, clearing round the shrubs and making space, as well as cutting back and weeding. We were blessed with the weather: it rained only twice during that month, but it was hot, and we got very sticky and dirty. Here's the bank from which in years past I evicted a huge mass of brambles and on which I then planted other things - invisible till I strimmed it.
What to do with all this hay and clippings? Over the weeks we were there, apart from regular trips to the dump, we must have had 6 or 7 bonfires. Here I am, nattily dressed as always, feeding the blaze.
As well as clearing the garden we were also working on the small outbuilding which collapsed last autumn. This involved getting rid of floor-to-ceiling bundles of mouldy twigs which in decades past would have been used to fuel the bread oven. I lost count of how many barrowloads we shifted.
We left our French house at the end of February, after a couple of weeks cutting down trees. I am a big fan of trees in general and we have planted quite a number over the years, but these were almost-defunct cider apple trees which dropped their fruit every autumn creating a slippery mass of rotting apples, dangerous and unsightly. There was a time when our neighbours would pick the fruit and make it into cider, but the only licence to do this was held by our neighbour's mother who died recently, and our neighbours are no longer able to pick the fruit. So we decided to cut the trees down for firewood. Two of them we logged and stacked, leaving just the twigs on the ground. The third we cut and left on the back garden in its entirety, having run out of time. 'We'll be back in a month,' we said. 'The grass won't have grown much.'
How wrong we were.
For this was 2020, the year of rapidly-escalating infections and restrictions on movement. In normal times we wouldn't ever have left our French garden at the time of maximum growth, but these weren't normal times, and we didn't get back until July.
The grass was thigh-high, dry and brown. My little shrubs were invisible, the bigger ones just battling to get their heads above the rampant growth. It was a daunting sight. Here's the whole cut tree as it lay
awaiting our efforts, and the view up the garden before we began:
July saw some of the hottest temperatures across Europe, and we spent a lot of that trip pulling dead twigs and branches out of long, tangling grass, cutting them up, taking some to the local dump and burning others before logging the big branches and the trunk. We did the whole tree and the twigs from one of the others. It was hard, rough work, and when we had done all we could I said, 'If I never see another twig, it will be too soon.'
Of course that wasn't all that was horribly overgrown. We turned a blind eye to the towering hedges, but I couldn't let my old enemies the brambles get away with their takeover bid. This is what they looked like sprouting unchecked out of a small hedge adjacent to the covered laundry area:
And even when strimmed, using the big wheeled strimmer because the grass was too long for the ride-on mower, it still looked rough:
