Gerbil power.

This winter we made a ‘giant leap’ of our own. We pulled out the old central heating boiler which ran on gas from a tank buried in the garden, and installed a new boiler, that is ‘carbon neutral’ and runs on Gerbil food.

That’s right, amazing but true, you too can heat your home for less [...]

Visitors

We get lots of visitors who want to see what progress we have made in the house, so they pop in when they’re passing, and the more savvy of them know that we stop work for a tea break at 4pm, which means cakes and imported English tea. Hence I always have cakes in the [...]

Spring – it's for the birds

Today is a red-letter day or should I say a Redstart day. Around about this time every year the redstarts arrive from their winter grounds. For us it is an inkling that spring is not far away. These colourful and charismatic birds that have nested in our garage for the last four years, arrive [...]

Brocante season in France

The ‘vide grenier’ or ‘garage sale’ season is my favourite time, when they close all the roads leading into a village, or even a town, the locals put out tables in the street, and sell anything that they don’t want.
Market a definition

mar·ket (mär’kĭt) pronunciation
n.
1. A public gathering held for buying [...]

Snow photos from our Flickr photostream.

I thought you might like to see the depths that the snow here can reach!

When minus 26°C seems bearable…..

We live in the mountainous, rural, de-populated centre of France, where seemingly unaffected by climate change, there are 4 distinct seasons in the year, and the snow can last from Nov to April. Our house is at the same altitude as Snowdon, in my native Wales, (1000m/ 3000ft) above sea level. That is cloud in [...]