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Come on baby light my fire...

I have an old and ancient French wood burning stove that came with the house, it's a deom or as I prefer to call it Demon. It's pretty useless except as an incinerator, there's no glass door so you can't feel cosy viewing the flames and the wood goes in the top. I hate it with a passion.

This week I've been struggling to [...]


Wart

This is my new house guest Wart. Wart used to live outside in the garden but he has recently decided that he doesn't want to live outside with all the other toads, no Wart has decided that he'd rather enjoy the comforts of home.

On cold nights Wart crawls in [...]


The art of queuing
Well summer has arrived in Brittany with a bang and today the temperature must have topped 30c. It was the kind of afternoon that really should be spent at the seaside with your toes dangling in cool water. I did think of driving down to the coast but I had a few things to sort out in town first, just a few things that really shouldn't take more than half an hour - but this is France so dream on!

First stop the bank (yes the one that charges me 11 euros just to clear a sterling cheque t [...]


Enter the Twilight zone - two by two

By accident I found a new walk through the forest a while ago - well there's not a lot else to do round here. The path follows a circular route which is a bit more interesting than walking there and back if you know what I mean.

Anyway...

Day 1

I take the path through the woods, miles from a [...]


If you go down to the woods today...

I live on the edge a forest and often take my dogs for a walk there, spring is the best time to explore as in the summer you have to beat off the ticks with a stick (one summer I looked down to find about 20 of the damn things crawling up my jeans) and in the winter you run the risk of being mistaken for something edible and shot by hunters.

The Log Pile

All forms of heating in France are gynormously expensive!

If your doing up a house make sure you insulate every conceivable part of your house and then add more just to be sure! We thought we had adequate insulation and naively thought that just a wood burner to heat the house would [...]


Irony

In a tiny step toward self sufficiency I decided to spend most of yesterday picking blackberries for the freezer, lots of scratches and stings, a close encounter with an unfriendly goat with very big horns and several kilos later I made an enormous blackberry crumble and served it up with cre [...]


Ronflement, Ticks And Other Mundane Happenings In Brittany
Yes it's late again and I'm awake. What do you do when your other half snores? Do the French have any cures for snoring? Is there a cure?

I've just realized that my only 2 posts in this blog have mostly been about bugs, well there's a lot of them in Brittany.

Nasty beastie encounter number 3
Found tick on the dog, very close to a delicate place. Yuck! Had to remove it, never done it before and the only tweezers in the house were plastic ones. Three hours [...]


Plagues Of Locusts
Oh my god! I didn't think you got locusts in France- Just read in the news that some parts of France are being hit by plagues of locusts because of the heat and drought, it all sounds very biblical - I'll be keeping an eye out for the 4 horses of the apocalypse.


When I was little my brother brought [...]


Too Hot To Sleep
It's too hot to sleep. They told me Brittany had a climate a bit like south west England damp - they lied, well not really it does rain a lot, sometimes for weeks on end.The last few weeks have been really hot, I can take the heat but the humidity gets to me, at the moment it's at 94%! So not being able to sleep I though I'd have a cup of tea and talk to myself on here.

Yesterday it was Bastille day, it reminded me of history lessons at school, I ended up spending the day think [...]






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