Yes, this week we have been mainly chopping down trees (or at least collecting bits of chopped down trees) but, contrary to Monty Python, we’ve resisted the inclination to wear high heels.
We’ve had a great week in the hills of the Cevannes. We are staying with Jan and Dave, a retired English couple, in a converted silk farmhouse nestled in its own valley and hidden by woods on all sides. We have been given luxury accommodation in a flat at the top of the farmhouse and Jan is a trained chef so our meals are fantastic and plentiful. Dave likes a drop of beer with his lunch and vin rouge with tea and we’re more than happy to accept his invitation to share!
They have 25 hectares of woodland and much of the work concerns the constant battle to prevent the woodland encroaching onto the house and the processing of timber into fire wood. For us city folk this is all something of a revelation. Collecting firewood is not simply a case of collecting sticks from the wood. Fallen trees or branches in the wood need to be cut into manageable lengths. These need to be left for anything up to 3 years depending on the type of wood to let them dry out. We have been collecting these dry lengths from the wood and moving them down into stockpiles ready to be sawn into short lengths for the fire. The evergreen oak for the open fire goes into one pile and the strawberry trees (arbutus and yes its berries look like strawberries) goes in another pile for the wood burning stove. We leave the chestnut wood as this spits and generally doesn’t burn so well. The short lengths are left to dry out some more before we carry them down to the farmhouse and stack them up in the wood shed for winter.
‘I’m a fire starter – twisted fire starter!’, as the Prodigy once sang and whilst I may not be so twisted I have been starting an awful lot of fires this week in a bid to keep the forest at bay. It’s unlawful to start a fire between March and October and having seen how quickly relatively damp bracken goes up I can see why. I now know that ivy leaves (even green ones) are highly flammable and burn with a surprising ferocity and that if you leave a 2m high pile of damp bracken to smoulder then by morning it will have entirely turned to ash.
Tegan seems to be enjoying her new place (and the chocolate pudding that she had this evening!). She has recently added “croissant” to her vocabulary and has made friends with the dog – Mally, cats Bill and Ben and the three goldfish (all with names starting with F that I can’t remember). Other new skills acquired include the ability to count (there are a lot of steps for her to practice on), although the sequence generally goes 1,2 6,9 and sometimes 11! I don’t suppose there is any reason to stick to convention at this stage. She has also been doing some weeding today – pulling up some of the dug up weeds and adding them to the pile, very productive. In general she is on good form, although she does have some new teeth coming through and definitely has moments of being a real toddler when she displays a strong independent streak. The whole change of lifestyle and the moving about can’t be that easy for her to get to grips with, but she seems content to soak up all the new information around her like a little sponge. We also make sure we give her extra cuddles and attention now and again just to let her know that everything is ok (and mummy and daddy aren’t completely mad!).
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