It was that time of year again; so much to harvest and process from the garden; tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes, peppers, beans……… And it’s been so hot for so long, seriously hot, 45°C in the shade one day. So we get up early to work in the garden for as long as we can, then spend the afternoons blanching, freezing, drying and bottling our produce.
It was also the season for thunderstorms.

And so it was that I was in the arrière cuisine one day, chopping veg for ratatouille, vaguely aware of a bit of thunder rumbling around, but it didn’t sound very close; when suddenly there was the most enormous crack. I dived for cover, wondering who’d been shot. When I’d recovered a bit I had a look out of the window; everything looked quite normal and two men walking up the road were unarmed and harmless looking. One of them asked if I was ok, as apparently he’d just seen one bolt of lightning land just in front of the house and another just behind; oh, and had I seen a white cat anywhere?
We looked around the house; no burning smells, the only apparent damage was to the internet box, which was completely dead. Later that night we discovered that most of the lights in the house had been frazzled and two days later that the water heater had also suffered and was no longer working.
Of course August, when this happened, is holiday season; businesses are closed and it’s impossible to get anything done. Everywhere I phoned I had to leave a message, most promising to ring back at the beginning of September, though only two actually did so. Fortunately the electrician who wired the house had taken his holiday early and rang back within a week; he fixed the lights and was able to repair the water heater when the part arrived; he ordered it with express delivery so it “only” took 10 days. Thank goodness we’ve got a second water heater in the gite, so we didn’t have to visit neighbours, begging for showers.
All in all, we were lucky, it could have been a lot worse. It rained a bit here, but some places nearby had hailstones, leaving fields full of maize shredded and vineyards, almost ready for the harvest, stripped bare of both leaves and grapes; such a sorry sight.

I wrote this blog weeks ago, before we’d discovered that the lightning had also fried the mother board on the PC I use to post it; so I had to wait for Kieran to visit and replace the damaged part.