It's the Rentrée

It's that time of the year when the days are getting noticeably shorter, traffic becomes more dense at around 4:30pm, and people start to look busy and important - the Rentrée!  

News programmes are full of it - the challenges of finding the right, new school bag for Emile or Clotilde, all the choices of pens, exercise books and gym shoes, and how to budget if you don't earn much and have 6 children to equip (actually the State is pretty generous in those circumstances).  Services that have been moribund as everyone is on holiday suddenly come to life and expect you to jump because they are back from leave.  And the bills start to arrive - tax, council tax (taxe foncière), water, while you wait for the heating bills to kick in from October.

This late period of August has also finally brought rain and a relief from eternally blue skies with a frying sun.  While the cyclamen have started to bloom from late July over the past five or more years, this year they have only started to come out in the last 10 days.  Some corms have shown quite how pent up the urge to flower has been, putting on a ridiculous display.

In fact, in the last two weeks we have had the same amount of rain as in the whole of June and July!  This is making a huge difference in the potager.  We finally have female flowers on the cucumber plants!

I doubt they will do anything, as now we have no male flowers, but at least there is the potential for fruit, which there wasn't before.  The rain has altered my careful rationing of water for the tomatoes, so that with all the extra moisture, they have grown bigger and split their skins.

Some things cannot be helped.  The apples are falling, the pears are nearly over, and some of the walnuts, while healthy, are looking ready to fall a good month before they are due.  Size of nut may be an issue, but we shall see.

On the bright side with fruit, the quince are having the weather they were bred for some 2,000 years ago in Persia and are looking huge and relatively bug free.  Now we have to hope for some autumn sun to turn them sweet and yellow before autumn gales blow them off the tree.

The increased cloud also makes for beautiful sunsets, something we have been missing these last few months, but for me are a feature of Anjou.  I caught a couple of fine ones this week, first this one looking West.

Then this one, looking East.

So, back to school, back to work, back to gym classes twice a week - whatever your Rentrée, I hope it is a good one.  

While holiday is good, it is nice to get a bit of routine back into life (although not too much), and to be able to talk to services about things that are needed, without being told that the person concerned is on leave and won't be back for 3 weeks!