FOUR DAYS IN WINTER

On Sunday morning we awoke to a deep frost.

It was very pretty but bitterly cold.

The frost clung to everything making beautiful patterns.

On Monday we awoke to snow and an even deeper frost.

Frost upon frost.

It's unusual to have snow that lingers for more than a few hours here.

We're glad to have plenty of food in the freezer and plenty of wood in the woodshed.

More by luck than good management.  

This is the first time we remember such a long spell of frost and snow here.

It is very cold.

We have to keep both wood burning fires going to keep the house warm.

Later in the day on Monday, the sun came out.

It was all very pretty.

The roads were dry and perfectly safe to drive on.

We went for a drive to take some pictures. 

The moat at Le Châtelier was completely frozen.

There seemed to be quite a bit of warmth in the sunshine but not enough for the frost to thaw.

On Monday evening there was a beautiful sunset.

The next day, Tuesday, we braved the cold to go to the supermarket.

We left it until the afternoon when the roads had been used.

They had clearly been salted in most places.

We have been keeping the bird feeders stocked and the bird bath clear of ice.

The birds seem to appreciate it.  There are always plenty of customers.

Today, no pictures.  It's day four and we're glad we went to the shops yesterday.

We awoke to freezing rain.  

The roads were treacherous so we didn't venture out until much later when it all began to thaw, just enough.

During our confinement to indoors we have been tackling a very tricky jigsaw puzzle.

Yvonne is as always on hand to help.

It all brings back not so fond memories of winters in Derbyshire.

Time and again we would wake up to two or three feet of snow and would have to dig our way out in order to try to get to work.

The last person I worked for said that if I didn't get in before lunchtime I would have to take the day as part of my annual leave.

I replied that in that case I would stop digging and retired a few weeks later!

I absolutely do not miss the stress of having to get to work in the snow plus the worry of how on earth I would get home again.

A NEW WASHER, CHEESE, AND A VISITING CAT

Our washing machine had been on the blink for a long time.  Sometimes it would spin normally although noisily, sometimes it struggled and rattled like hell, and sometimes it just refused to spin at all.  It was a good quality Bosch machine but eleven years old and had been great until the last year.  So the question was, whether to try to get someone out to look at it and see if it could be repaired or whether to not risk spending good money on an old machine and buy a new one.  Plus the risk that one day it would simply conk out when full of wet washing, which has happened to other people I know and which complicates the problem no end.

The decision was made when I spotted a bargain in a local branch of SuperU.  700€ is a lot of money but 300€ off made it affordable.  We decided to go for it.  The old machine now resides forlornly at the corner of the déchetterie alongside other discarded machines.  Curiously, the man that mans the déchetterie seemed remarkably thrilled to take it, and didn't swipe our users card (twenty goes a year),  for which there must be an explanation but I can't imagine what.

I am very, very pleased with the new machine.  It hardly seems to use any water and washes things beautifully, spinning them much better than the old one.  RIP.

We recently discovered a number of previously unfamiliar cheeses at the cheese stall on the market.  We were having visitors and lashed out a ridiculous amount of money on an eclectic mix of hard and soft goat and cow's cheeses.  I took photos of them knowing I would never remember what they were otherwise

This one was my favourite.

They all went down well with our visitors who also were not familiar with any of them.

We couldn't resist this one, called Belper Knolle, because Belper is the name of a small town in Derbyshire close to where I grew up and a knowle is another word for a village or hamlet.  It was jolly expensive.  

I wondered how on earth cheese made in a Derbyshire town could end up on the market in the middle of France and was disappointed when the cheese lady told us it was Swiss.  However, it was worth buying as it's delicious.  The idea is to serve it grated like you would a parmesan, on salads, pasta dishes and in soups, and in fact it tastes much like parmesan only better.  I sprinkled it on the soup I served for dinner and it was much appreciated.  

We now covet the wooden cheese grating device that the cheese lady used to give us a taste.  

We have a visiting cat.  We had seen the cat in the field behind the house (once the farmer had cut down the triffid like weeds) occasionally over the last few months.  I wondered how long it would be before it ventured to our house and sure enough, I smelled the tell-tale odour of tomcat in the little barn.

Shortly after that Yvonne appeared one day without her collar and with a scratch on her face.  We found her collar (it's a quick release type) in a flower bed amongst a clump of flattened dahlias so we suppose that's where an encounter took place.  A few times she growled and hissed when looking out of the glass door and once she hurtled into the house via the cat flap and hid under the stairs, eyes like saucers, hissing and spitting.  Then we spotted the cat on the drive and found it on the beams in the little barn.  It's a handsome cat with a fluffy tail and looks nice and clean.

It is nothing like the vicious cat we had visiting before.  That one found its way into the house and terrorised Daisy, attacked both of us and would not go away, returning every night to take food.  This one seems much more friendly, is obviously well used to humans as it came towards us, purring and rolling over on the beams.  So far it has not attempted to get into the house and we therefore presume it's well fed and lives in one of the neighbouring farms, just doing the normal tomcat thing of wandering a fair distance from home every so often.  We haven't seen it for a few days now that the weather has turned and hope that it is in fact well cared for and has somewhere warm and cosy to spend the nights.