I decided to try growing some peas this year. I have found that planting such seeds as mice enjoy (peas, broad beans, etc) tends to result in them being eaten before they get a chance to germinate. For peas in this situation, I read that the thing to do is to plant them in guttering, let them germinate under cover, and then slide the resulting plants off the guttering and into their place on the veg patch, a bit later on.
I never managed to find bog-standard, half-round, plastic guttering in France. Perhaps it exists but I never found it. However, I was given a couple of lengths complete with end caps, a few days ago. Cool.
I drilled some holes in the plastic for drainage. I'm hoping it's not a crime to inflict GBH on innocent building materials. I fitted the end caps, and filled it with compost, a mix of shop-bought potting compost and sieved soil from the compost heap. Then planted the peas.
Fingers crossed.
When I first started work as a "thick sandwich student", at the grand salary of £13.50 a week, I decided that I would expand my almost non-existent music collection; every week I would buy a record. And so it was, that every week I would go to Smith's and buy a record, and most weeks I would take last week's back to change it because it had turned out to be scratched, crackly or bowl-shaped.
I gave up on classical records because the quiet bits often sounded like someone was frying chips in the background, and when, some years later, I got wind of the fact that a new digital medium, the Compact Disk, was going to be launched, I stopped buying records altogether and waited.
I bought the first commercially available player, the Sony CDP 101. It sounded pretty bad, (it only had one DAC so the central instruments appeared in the right-hand channel momentarily before centering), but my hifi wasn't up to spelling this out, and hey, I could listen to classical music without getting an unexpected yen for chips. To celebrate, I bought a CD of Stravinski.
Once you have a CD (or record for that matter), the question arises of what to do with it once you have digested its contents. The obvious answer is to store it since it will always be available to listen to again, if and when the urge arises. And so, over the years I have slowly built a collection.
The arrival of MP3, FLAC and other music encoding trechniques means that music can now be stored on computer-compatible media, and so I recorded my CDs into FLAC format. About 6 a day unless I really couldn't face it. I started by doing them as MP3s but when I was about half-way through my collection, FLAC arrived, and that was better, being lossless, so I did them all again. Took me a couple of years, but now all my CDs are in digital format, backed up every which way to Sunday.
My portable FLAC player takes two micro-SD cards, one terrabyte each (maybe it supports cards of up to two terrabytes, I'm not sure). One such chip is holding all of my CDs.
I still have a CD player and I like to browse the CD rack from time to time. It's a different experience from looking them up on the Media Monkey software, although that comes a very close second. I use a streaming service too so I don't buy as many CDs as I used to; mostly second-hand ones cheap at car boot sales, but at least I own them and if one day the streaming services shut down, I will still have what I think are the best tunes. And if I really like them on the streaming service, I buy either the CD or a hi-resolution download.
We had a frost last night, and it's interesting to see that it didn't freeze the ground nearest to the stone wall. This would be due in part to the thermal intertia of the wall itself, and in part by the fact that it is backed by a solid bank of earth that will also retain some heat.
This is relevant for me, since I am looking for somewhere to plant a fig tree that is growing from a cutting. I haven't had a lot of success with fig tree cuttings; they either die before they root or I manage to kill them if they grow. Last year's failure was one I planted in front of a different wall, that died of thirst in the hot Summer. Perhaps if I put the next one here beside the veg patch where I will see it, I will remember to water it.
Here is the lone surviving fig tree cutting just starting to leaf out after Winter hibernation. I'll plant it outside at the end of May when the frosts will be over.
A scandal in the village. The throbbing metropolis of St Pierre sur Erve is proud of its classification as a Petite Cité de Carcatère, and as such augments its attractions for tourists with sundry artworks dotted around the village and its surroundings. One has been vandalised.
The statue entitled "Temps Libre" (free time) is owned by the village, it wasn't cheap either, and is of a man walking nonchalantly while whistling. He is now quite unhappy.
The perpetrator is known, and the village comité des fêtes met recently to Decide What Must Be Done. After much debate a solution was found that satisfied everyone, mostly, was suitably geared towards the challenges faced by the individual concerned, and includes, amongst other things, that he be asked to do works of general benefit in the village. Maybe it will work.
We have stopped preparing meals for our gîte guests. From now on, they will have to cater for themselves, or use a traiteur. It was fun while it lasted, but we're getting on a bit, and are finding the hassle to be too tiring to be worthwhile. The arrival (finally!) of our UK pensions had a part to play in this decision too.
The gîte sleeps 30 people and we rent the whole thing out to one group at a time; we don't do B&B, nor B&B with evening meals. So it tends to get used by groups at weekends, for family reunions, birthday and wedding anniversaries, and the occasional small marriage. These are fun events (at least if the families get on; not always the case), and catering for them means that we are part of the celebrations. We have often been invited to join in with a glass of champagne or wine, and cake.
We learned early on that the price of food ingredients is a tiny part of the costs involved in running the gîte so we were able to provide meals with classy ingredients at a reasonable price. Most guests who went for the "special" menu chose, from the options available, a starter course of scallops wrapped in bacon, and a main course of fillet beef, perhaps because these are generally considered the most expensive of the options, but perhaps also because they're tasty. Anita is a gifted cook.
We did get price objections of course, some clients being suspicious of our (brits) ability to provide decent food and wine. Some elected to bring their own wine, in exchange for a small discount, but we never found guest-brought wine to be up to the quality of that which we would have provided. And we always used to choose wine to go with the menu. But never mind.
On the upside, no late nights in the kitchen followed by early mornings, no menu planning, no food shopping. On the downside, no sharing in the celebrations, limited interaction with the guests, and only preparing the gîte, cleaning it after and checking for damage.
On the whole, though, it's a relief.
