Wow! Where did all that time go?

Here we are on the 29th December, a whole month since I lasted wrote anything here. Well, I hope everyone has had as good a Christmas as us. We stayed here at the lovely convent and did a hundred practical things and read brilliant books. (I have just finished We Need to Talk About Kevin which is just too good not to read.) Ali had a wonderful time prancing round the new ancient floor with a huge tin of wax and an old electric polisher. Now her floor looks like this:


To really appreciate these tiles you have to know that every one (over a thousand) was taken up, the floor beneath them removed (it's one floor up), the beams beneath replaced, a new concrete floor poured, all the tiles soaked for weeks then an inch of hard mud was chipped by hand from the back of each one by Ali, then cleaned and stored. 60 square metres was relaid by my brother, Justin, then sealed and polished by Ali. A labour of passion. And don't they look magnificent?

OK - so that's it for the tiles for another 400 years. END.

While Ali was doing that Josh and I made solitaire puzzles out of a bit of old french door - the one to Jean de Pouzolle's grenier, in fact. (The rest had been used to make the blue shed in my garden last spring) Josh was suitably pround of his, and this is the one I made and gave to Poppy for Christmas. Needless to say she learnt how to solve it flawlessly in a matter of minutes.


Whilst on the subject of making things, Justin (AKA Freddie) and I had a go at making a Christmas decoration out of some lights and a couple of wire coat-hangers. Of course it looked like coat-hangers and lights when we'd finished but it used up an hour very pleasurably.


Come Christmas Day the dogs and I woke early, as usual, and Kit was insistent on getting Ali up early too. Though not as early as nephew Josh, who, despite being nearly 15, took his parents tea at 3.30am, coffee at 4.30am, did the spuds and made a yorkshire pudding, then fell asleep on the sofa until 9.30am when the rest of the house got up.


Niece Poppy took a shine to a Ralph Lauren brown pinstripe suit of Ali's so spent Christmas looking rather too smartly dressed for a 12 year old in a tiny french town.



Gouttiere, the cat, however, took a shine to the geese which we shoved in the oven before she could haul them off.


Somewhat worryingly, since she's not a very affable cat, she's also taken a shine to Flynn the husky's bed. As you can see he's none too keen on chucking her out. He values his eyes too much.