Winter's Here

Well winter has arrived and, as with every year, it comes as a surprise to me. Although we had our first frosts in October as usual, the weather has been very mild the last few weeks, I went to the market in Cluny in my shorts last week, but yesterday we awoke to a fine layer of snow and I had to admit defeat and put long trousers on. The girls who run the Dutch cheese stall in Cluny market even commented on the fact that I wasn’t wearing shorts! After lunch in Cluny (Café du Centre for a change) we came home and Cees went off to his painting classes in Cormatin. I have taken to going for a walk on Saturday afternoons while he is out and today I decided to go up the hill to Taizé and I was treated to a lovely view of La Tuilerie with a light sprinkling of snow. I walked into the shop in Taizé to look at the pottery, browse through the books and cards and warm up a bit before the walk home though the woods. It is lovely circuit, mostly on footpaths, hardly walking on any roads at all and I even bumped into Frère Alois in the woods obviously doing the same walk but in the other direction.

Finally before Cees came back I had to do my chores for the day, drain the water down out of the gîtes. As we don’t rent them out in the winter, we don’t heat them and so there is always the risk of burst pipes. I emptied the water from the campsite a few weeks ago and now with the temperature at –4 degrees last night and no sign of warmer weather in the next week, it is better to be safe than sorry. I even switched the TV on for a few minutes before Cees came back, very unlike me, but after the disaster with the transfer to digital TV, I keep feeling that I need to check that everything is still working. It is so nice to be able to watch the quiz again in the evenings and our favourite documentary “Les Racines et Les Ailes”. Fortunately we have discovered that we can get reception through the single glazed windows in the kitchen, so we don’t have to have the living room (double glazed) windows open to get a signal (a bit chilly to say the least) and even though it looks a bit weird to have the huge new aerial in the kitchen, it isn’t really in the way now that Cees has built a very smart new wooden structure to support it! We will have to come up with a more permanent solution at some stage, but that can wait.

More details about our gites and campsite are on La Tuilerie Website.