The end of a good holiday is always sad, but particularly so for Izzy yesterday; she’d had a wonderful time, learning to speak a little French, getting over her fear of all things animal, she made good friends with Julie and Adrian’s dogs and even better friends of our chickens, who she loved feeding. She’d also been walking and sledging in the Pyrenees, played with the Flemish speaking children from up the road (one of whom told her mother she thought Izzy must be speaking Chinese!), helped Grandad cast concrete lintels for over the workshop windows, done some woodwork and had driven the mower whenever possible. So there were tears on Saturday morning as they left for the airport.

Our hens haven’t started laying yet, so each morning while she was here, Nick put a couple of eggs from our neighbour’s hens in the hen house; Izzy loved going to look for them and having them for breakfast. But on Friday, we’d run out of “real” eggs and had to use some from the shops; there was a big debate as to whether or not Izzy would notice the date stamp, but we thought probably not. WRONG! She brought the eggs in to the kitchen, saying that there were some marks on them which looked just like letters. She wouldn’t be distracted as Nick took them from her and surreptitiously tried to scrub the date stamps off; even when he’d finished, she insisted on showing them to me, assuring me that the pink smudges had really looked just like letters when she got them out of the hen house! Eventually we managed to distract her, and hope the memory has faded.

The second week of their holidays wasn’t blessed with the sort of weather we’d had at the beginning; we had quite a lot of wind and rain, though it didn’t stop us having the odd barbecue. It’s much needed rain as France as a whole has had 25% less than it should have had this winter and the aquifers are well down; but that doesn’t mean we have to enjoy it! The plus side (apart from not having to water the garden)  is that there have been some quite dramatic views over the vineyard, sunlit in front of heavy, charcoal grey skies. Graham took some amazing photos which I’ll put in the gallery when he sends them to me.

For the rest of us now, it’s back to work. The bathroom needs finishing, windows need putting in the workshop walls, the rubble piles in the grange need relocating and we need to contact the builder to see when he can start on the major works. It’s going to be all go….