Time for an Ark?

January and February always seem like long months - the endless nights, and the cold (sometimes), and the dark.  This year has also been marked by the Wet, with record floods further south and rumours of a possible breach in the levee of la Loire towards Angers.  In this week alone, we have recorded 87.5mm of rain - for those who do Imperial measurements, that is 3 and a half inches.  No wonder there is a pond in the chicken run!  Earlier in the week, when it was too wet to leave the nominal shelter of The Shack, I spent a happy while trying to photograph what I used to call rain fairies when I was a small child.  This was my best effort.

It wasn't as though it rained all day every day either!  Thursday was slated to be vile, but there was sunshine at first, and the rain held off where we happened to be, which was really good news.  Thursday was special as we had a day at the Races, at Angers Hippodrome.  A nice course tucked behind housing estates and just off the motorway, but with a good sized circuit, stabling for over 100 horses and three different tracks, including the obligatory (for France) all weather trotting track.

We were there to see Legend Race do his thing, for the first time since we last saw him a year ago.  His trainer, Louisa Carberry, said he was looking good, but that she didn't think he would win, but should get round.  He had grown and filled out since we saw him first this time last year.

Like I said, the facilities are excellent and there is a nice big screen so you can watch the action all the way round the track.

In the end, we didn't need that to admire Legend Race's progress.  He was way too keen and over-confident, misjudged the water jump and dropped his jockey at the second obstacle!  He then carried on to do a good three to four circuits of the track before he could be persuaded he had had enough fun and that his hay net called.  Both he and the jockey were fine, but we gave him a bit of a talking to when he was back in his stable!

Louisa had two other horses running that day, and we were able to stand on the owners' mound in the parade ring for a different race to admire the horses again.

Here the horse of interest was number 8 or the one in the middle.  He had a replacement jockey (the one that Legend Race ditched), as his intended jockey had fallen earlier, won his next race but was feeling a bit off.  The replacement jockey had to be called back as he had started to go home, but was back in time for the ride, which was a good thing, as he won!

Yesterday was also not actively rainy, so we were able to do a bit of work in the One Acre Wood.  The lower of the two clay ponds now has water in it - hopefully the local newts and salamanders will enjoy that.  I suspect that after today, which has been totally wet, the upper pond may also start to fill up.  Broken branches are providing a good ecosystem for fungus - this example was rather beautiful, if difficult to photograph well in February murk.

Hopefully next week will not be quite so outstandingly wet, but the weather forecast holds little promise of a day when I can dry the laundry outside.  At least I have exercise classes twice a week or I would be feeling like Jabba the Hutt!  Anyway, for now, I am going to do battle with a kidney, to see if I can recreate one of John's favourite dishes - steak and kidney pie!

Have a good week!

Winter is waning

I'm afraid there was a glitch and the layout is all to pot this week!

There are signs everywhere that winter is waning, even if we are only just into the second week of February.  The big question is whether it will come back to bite us on the bum, but for the moment the February forecasts are just for ever more rain.  While that doesn't do much to help the soil dry out for gardening and planting, it does help a bit with energy bills.  

It's not just the weather that says things are on the move.  Winter's guilty pleasures of being curled up on the sofa with a rug, a cat or two and undemanding TV are slowly coming to an end.  The deep winter pleasure of the Dakar Rally and nutters racing through deserts is long gone.  The 17 week binge of pure trash TV that is Star Academy finished last night with a new winner crowned, who will hopefully not be a major provider of lift and supermarket background muzak - they are promoted ruthlessly for about a year across most French radio and TV platforms.  While the mental preparation for spring, with watching 30 well built men throwing balls around in muddy conditions started on Thursday as the Six Nations kicked off.

In an effort to keep our local pub alive, we watched one and a half matches down there, with the luxury of a HUGE screen and not having to fight for the sofa with a stroppy old cat.  France versus Ireland was a pleasure to watch, England versus Wales not so much.

While the trees are mostly behaving and not doing much at all for the moment, spring bulbs are doing their thing.  The snowdrops are amazing in that the flowers keep going for such a long time.

My favourite miniature narcissi are starting to come through and should put on another good show I hope.

The vegetables are starting to look interesting - the cauliflowers are looking a bit pregnant - the curds should appear in about 5 or 6 weeks time I think, and the plants don't seem to have suffered at all from being frosted.

The broad beans are starting to pull away, and with any luck, will start to flower in April.

I fear the leeks are never going to fatten up however - they suffered from drought big time in August and September last year, and by the time there was ample water, there wasn't enough daylight or warmth for them to really develop.  I guess they will make a nice hors d'oevres though.

I am still working my way through the bird feeder camera files - there are only 6,600 in the folder now, or 4 Gbytes of "stuff", most of which is rubbish.  I have still only spotted robins, blue tits and great tits, but since they are what I heard and saw on every visit to the garden in January, I am guessing that is no surprise.  Here is one proving that there is actually food in the feeder.

Butterflies are to my mind pretty well impossible to photograph well for the amateur, so the fact that I was buzzed today by three Brimstone butterflies, daring me to waste my time trying to capture their image was rather trying.  On this photo, there is a little spec of acid yellow - that is the Brimstone saying "nah nah ne nah nah" at me.

The forecast for the coming days is wet, so I expect next week I will be writing about and sharing more photos of birds on the feeder.  Have a good week!

Review of my latest trail camera

Actually, although I got it from the same place as my good trail cameras, this is actually a bird feeder camera, as I rarely get much good bird footage from the trail cameras of birds other than pheasants, ducks and the very occasional woodpecker.

The camera is quite small (and was on offer, which says something), and takes perhaps 150g of bird seed at a time.  It has solar panels to keep the batteries charged up, which seem to be very effective, and takes a 32Gb SD card.  We have it strapped to a redundant lamp post in the middle of the Garden by the Shack.

I first installed it at the end of December 25, and brought it in during the week to clean it out, see if it had done anything and to check that the solar panels keep it fired up - spoiler alert, they do.  Getting it programmed isn't as easy as I had hoped, hence the date/time stamps on the following photos being rather weird, and there are no videos, although it will do them.  Having said that, with 10,218 photo files to go through from about a month in situ, I think the burst of photos are probably all I need to go through!

So, what have I seen?

Well, as  you can see, tits are inquisitive and hungry.

They also like to pose and know which is their good profile.

And the good profile isn't the same for every bird.

Occasionally, you get a really good action shot of an arrival.

Or leaving.

And there are occasional excellent shots of a bird in flight, like this.

Or this.

But there are an awful lot like this - perhaps 90% of the photos - which just need to be deleted.

So far there is a very limited range of birds using the feeder: there is the great tit.

There is the blue tit.

And there is the robin.

Or at least that is who was using it for the first 2,000 files that I have been through thus far.  If I spot anyone else, obviously I'll let you know!

And a reminder - here is what the camera looks like in situ.  Overall, Num'Axes have done me proud again.  The feeder will be out now until the end of March, when we stop feeding birds and let them raise their young naturally.

I'm not sure what this week will bring, but I hope you have a good one!

January stuff

January is such a long month!  While it only has 31 days, they seem to last longer than any other days in the year, but as we drift towards the end of the month, there is a hint of  improvement as slightly longer afternoons become evident if the day isn't totally cloudy.  The harbingers of spring are putting their heads above ground too, as bulbs start to do their thing, and our small clump of snowdrops in the garden put on their annual show.

Over in the country, the first signs of the narcissus fest are also starting to show in the Meadow, with leaves for the less showy daffodils coming up around the edges.

Other plants too are obvious at this time, including the lichen that cover any surface they can get a toe-hold on it seems - trees, plastic seats, gates, fence posts - all seem to be suitable hosts for this rather mysterious plant.

The week started with the annual ceremony of good wishes from the local mayors.  As there will be local elections in March, they can only look backwards at the achievements of the year and of the mandate, as anything that happens later in 2026 could be someone else's project.  For us, it was a slightly sad event, as our village mayor (as opposed to the mayor of Bauge en Anjou) is standing down at the elections.  She has been a good mayor, very understanding and supportive, and not afraid to get her hands dirty on the food line with the Comité des Fetes.  However the work of a mayor in France is varied and challenging and I can understand the desire for a quiet life after (I think) 14 years in the role.

We have spent the week with two recurrent themes.  It has been Truffle Week for us, as 100g of the black gold arrived last Saturday.  Some has been steeped in sunflower oil for a week to provide home made truffle oil, some has been inserted into a mild cheese to create our own truffled cheese, and much of it has been eaten in the usual scrambled eggs, cream sauces and risottos.  We have one day left and then we wait another 12 months.  The photo is leek and mushroom risotto with monkfish and truffle - very tasty.

We have also enjoyed watching as our neighbours had their roof replaced, or at any rate the side of the roof that looks towards our house.  There was much jollity at the Ceremony of Voeux last week as all slates had been removed and all that protected them was a tarpaulin, but from Monday, the roofers were on the job, putting up new timbers to support rather heavier slates than those that were taken off.

Then the insulating membranes were fixed in place with battens.

Before a happy day of putting on the new slates - this is half finished at lunchtime, as when it was all done, apart from being shinier and blacker than before, you wouldn't know the difference from the outside.

From Monday, the roofers will do the other side of the house, which we won't get to see.  The neighbours are very happy with the work.

Friday night was the Comité des Fetes AGM, with the volunteers' dinner afterwards - another of those lovely village events that leave you somewhat fuzzy the day after.  This week will be quieter - perhaps I can get some tidying up done, and find the material for the "new" living room curtains.  I know I saw it when we moved in over 20 years ago...

Have a good week!

Wildlife activity

I brought in one of the wildlife cameras for its regular check up - I clear off the files and recharge the batteries (or change them - I've only got one working set of rechargeable batteries).  Going through the files takes quite a time, even if there are only 400 (!) this time round.  I delete the obvious ones - pictures of my feet and bottom as I go to and fro around the camera - or where they are blurred or where there is no wildlife.  A second pass is required for me to be more critical and determine whether or not I have enough photos of the rear half of badgers and boar, enough blurred pine martens and sufficient retreating deer bottoms.

Some files need a bit of examining to see exactly what I have captured - the ones where the camera is attacked by randy great tits being a case in point!  While others need a bit of editing to show the true beauty of a wild animal in its natural habitat - getting rid of the extraneous background that might give too much detail of the location of the camer for example.  There were some good photos in the first 150 files on the camera!

This badger was rather nice.

While I don't like coypu, this photo is not too bad.

Birds are the hardest to get it seems and I think this is the short-toed treecreeper that I often hear identified on the Merlin bird app.

The videos also need careful triaging - with the camera on a crossroads, you often get the tail of something disappearing, or the backside heading into the distance.  I hope the following selection are of interest.

This one is of a badger just checking things out.

And then there is one with two badgers checking things out together.

There is a red squirrel being acrobatic.

There is a video with a bird and a squirrel!

There is a pine marten being phenomenally cute.

There's a fox checking things out.

And there is a dog fox doing what all canines do.

What a fine brush he has!

We are also in the process of cleaning out the bird boxes before we put them back.  The really cheap tiny one had an acorn left in it by a squirrel, but the other two had fine nests in them so they did their job.  Once we have done a fire clean on the inside, they will go back up for the next season.

And yes, I'm afraid we evicted the spider!

The truffles arrived yesterday, so next week should be all about my culinary adventures with black gold.

Have a good week!

 

That review of 2025 I promised

Well, we are through the snow, the freezing rain and the storm (which wasn't much around here, but others suffered big time).  Even more amazingly, we have survived the conversion to Fibre, so now I revel in 92Mbps here at my computer at the end of a 20m ethernet cable.  Down by the modem, it is rather more like 520Mbps, but we haven't really noticed the revolutionary new speeds.  The TV still whirls around from time to time, waiting for a signal, and the radio glitches sometimes too.  But I guess that's not the point.  Anyway, 2025?

It started in fog, murk and dankness - the first two months were dominated by the Dunkelflaute and its spirit sapping dullness and depressingness.  It was also very, very wet, and le Loir flooded up at la Fleche for example.

Such weather is of course a breeding ground for germs and other nasties, and we lost a chunk of February to 'flu and feeling sorry for ourselves.

But then with March, the clouds lifted, the skies dried up, we started to feel a lot more vigorous and enthused and started to prepare for a new gardening season.  Mother Nature also seemed to think that actually 2025 might be alright and the blossom fest started.

We bought in loads of compost, and got stuck in to making 2025 more flowery and more fruitful than 2024, including actually doing something with the cheap bulbs you can buy from Aldi (other discount stores are available).  Therefore in April, I started to reap the benefits of that and could admire my whimsical wellies - the only way I would stop wearing my much loved and very broken old wellies was to use them as planters.

2024 was a horrid year on many levels, and in particular the weather.  We only had the cover up on the gazebo for about 5 weeks and even then it got torn in high winds.  But 2025 was warmer, sunnier and so by May we had the cover mended and up so that we could enjoy a sneaky glass of something in the garden before I started to cook dinner.

One of the sagas of the year was the courgette harvest.  In 2024, I bought a packet of 12 seeds, planted them all, 9 came up, 6 were eaten by slugs, 3 were planted out, one then died and on the other two we had perhaps 4 courgettes.  In 2025 I bought another packet of 12 seeds and planted them, 10 came up, none were eaten by slugs, none died in the transplanting phase, and we ended up with over 372 courgettes harvested over the season.

The men's Tour de France is contested in July, and after many years of not coming anywhere near us, in 2025 there was a stage start in Chinon, so we had to go.  We'd not been to a stage start before.  The crowds were huge and it was only as someone knew someone with a view over the paddock that we got anywhere near seeing anything, but what we did, was Brilliant!

August is Comice time and this year I was on the float for the village with 3 chums and we had a lot of fun on the procession, with surely the prettiest tractor of the lot (not that you can see it on this photo).

In September the harbingers of autumn really come into their own and the cyclamen in the One Acre Wood were outstanding this year, lasting right the way through to late November in places.

October is the month of the Communal Challenge Boules de Forte tournament.  This year the team I was part of (Comite des Fetes Women) did bizarrely well.  Rather than forfeits, we actually won games, much to the disgust of some of our opponents who took the whole thing rather more seriously.  In the end we were demolished in the final by a team of council workers, and very well done to them.  Even so, it was weird to do so well.  I'm still not taking it up as a serious sport.

In November I dashed over to the UK for a few days to see family and repair an heirloom chair which had a broken seat.  I hadn't done any real canework in about 20 years, so it was fun to find out I hadn't forgotten how, and a real sense of pride in getting a whole seat done in about 5 hours.  If I'm being really pickie, it's not quite as perfect as it would have been when we did this semi-professionally, but I'm still chuffed with it.

December brings all the fun and games of the end of year festivities, and this year was remarkable for being in the right place, and at the right time, to meet these magnificent dancing Arctic Fox puppets.  They were just amazing and it was a joyous parade.

So that was 2025 as I remember it in photos, and it was a rather pleasant year with a bunch of enjoyable outings and activities, decent weather, a lot of garden produce, and meeting up with friends and family.  2026 has a lot to live up to - we'll see how it goes.

During the week I brought in a trail camera that had been out for a couple of months, so perhaps next week I will have some stuff from that to share with you.

Have a good week!