Happy New Year?

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We’ve been back in Laroque for 6 days now, and life has been full of incident. Our crossing from England was rough, and it turned out that this was an indication of things to come. Since we arrived, there’s been rain of the kind that Noah would have been quite familiar with during his time on That Ark, lasting hours at a time. But that turned out to be nothing compared with what happened on Saturday, the day that south west France went on Orange Alert (if you lived round here), or Red Alert (if you were slightly further north west, or in Perpignan, where they had 185 km. per hour gusts). It was bad enough here. We didn’t dare go out, with roof tiles, corrugated sheeting, and whole trees all whizzing through the air as they became dislodged. We found this morning that the roof of one of our garden sheds (well, ok, lean-to, then) had completely come off, but luckily, that was all for us. Down the road, the DIY supermarket lost its roof, and several trees were uprooted in our local park. La Dépêche du Midi, the regional paper, is full of pictures of much worse stuff than this. This morning, driving near Montségur, we had to avoid rocks and boulders that had cascaded into the road during the storm.

But today the weather is lovely. Our rambling group cancelled today’s walk: the roads local to where we were going were impassable because of snow and fallen trees. Never mind! Malcolm and I took ourselves off to Montferrier and had a hearty hilltop workout.

All this rain and storm has meant we’ve got on and achieved in the kitchen. If you’ve visited us here, or if you’ve been following the story of our painfully slow progress, I hope you’ll notice that we are now approaching an efficient working environment. If only we didn’t have the plasterboarding and painting of our serpentine walls still to do……

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