From ten years ago, a stark warning of the dangers of leaving home for any length of time… The Unkindest Cut You may not even have noticed – and I wouldn’t pretend or presume that, in the great scheme of things, it makes any difference whether you have or not – but of late there’s not been…
Here’s another one for you, this time from May 2015. You can tell that I was really building an audience by that stage, two and a half years into my blogging career, because it has had 17 views over the past ten years. Yay me. As background, I should explain that for a while I…
As part of our continuing commitment to keep the expat community informed of significant goings-on in our lovely commune of Faire-Le-Dodo (87), we’d like to take this opportunity to provide a list of things to look out for to provide reassurance that, here in the heart of rural France at least, spring is just around…
Being the latest despatch from the front line of one man’s war on terroir…. Our rural idyll here in the heart of la France profonde is lovely, but there’s one problem. Nature rather objects to us having muscled in and wants to take our little piece back – which it tries to do relentlessly throughout…
I don’t know about you, but I find that the older I get, the lower my boredom threshold sinks. And the shorter my attention span becomes…. Sorry, what was I saying? Oh yes: boredom. Perhaps a jaded appetite is simply an inevitable consequence of having been shuffling around this mortal coil for a long time,…
Whoever put together the WordPress ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’ was getting positively frisky by this stage: “Turn, turn, turn. For many of us, winter is blossoming into spring…which season do you most look forward to?” Here in France, the four seasons are quite distinctive, which I suppose makes a pleasant change after our ten…
Last year, in an escalation of the ceaseless struggle against ever encroaching weeds – if you wanted to flaunt your French vocabulary, you could call it the war on terroir – I traded up from an electric to a petrol-driven lawnmower. Despite my initial concerns, this has actually turned out to be rather effective: to…
From ten years ago, a stark warning of the dangers of leaving home for any length of time… The Unkindest Cut You may not even have noticed – and I wouldn’t pretend or presume that, in the great scheme of things, it makes any difference whether you have or not – but of late there’s not been…
After a mild winter, the life cycle of the flora that surrounds us here at Tranquility Base is already well advanced. The forsythia is budding, the Narcissi are in bloom, the air is filled with birdsong. And the grass needs cutting. This year, we have a new weapon in the unending war against nature. I’ve cranked up the shock…
the only deadhead in the hameau 