Crooked House

A country life in France

A Streak of Blue

This morning, Nell and I took our first lengthy walk in what feels like forever. It must be almost three months since she last visited her frog pond, which is now simply a patch of mud.

It was cloudy this morning and feeling cool, though apparently up to 24 degrees today. A measure of how hot it has been recently when today felt cool and refreshing by comparison. Nell did quite well but I noticed her stumble two or three times. She’s finding things more and more difficult, it seems.

The Crooked Man stayed home to do some vacuuming – it has been too hot for housework and things were becoming a little dire. I took Nell off because she is a great hindrance when it comes to cleaning. Such a Collie!

I decided to give my domestic help a wide berth and plenty of time. It’s best that way as I have a hard time managing both my guilt (at not doing the job myself) and my control tendencies (because it’s not being done “right”). Plus I get time alone with my camera.

New camera in hand, I wandered about for a while and took a few snaps. When we arrived at the lake I was writing the blog post in my head – commenting on how little life there was today, just hordes of pond skaters with no dragonflies about, no coypu… and that was when the Kingfisher flew up and there was an electric blue streak across the water. No, of course I didn’t raise my camera, far too busy just gawping. That’s the first sighting of a Kingfisher down there. I hope that we shall see more.

Very quiet today
The hot dry weather has been taking its toll
There’s a very promising crop of sloes up the chemin, much better than last year.
One of the sights
Beautiful heart-shaped leaves

A simple salad meal this evening, just using stuff up – ham and goat’s cheese, mainly. Trying to avoid shopping…

Still warm enough to eat outside (and the dining table is still full of Millennium Falcon, so it’s a good job).

We would have gone off in the van today and made the most of the cooler weather with a coupe of nights away but we have to phone the vet tomorrow and make an appointment. Dusty and Nell need their immunisations and passports updating by the 12th August.

I can’t quite believe that it is August already. So much of this year has been lost to lockdown. Odd that the time has sped by rather than dragging. We have already begun to toss around ideas for our end of August celebration, which we usually tie to the British August Bank Holiday. Incredible to think that this year we are marking 21 years of being a couple. It seems like only yesterday.

Got something to say?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: