Not much of an Indian summer.

No ‘big’ news this time, more of a progress report. The recent collapse of the long hot spell through summer has brought us back into continuing renovation work on the house and land. We started with the fitting of a new abri for our pool. This is a big metal-framed structure on wheels that rolls out of the way or sits over the pool to protect it better than the original cover that came with it. I've restarted work building the walls of the grange formal garden area, plus concreting the fence base panels on our north boundary with our neighbour’s, and putting up the fence near the south end of the pool. So off to the builders’ merchants for more lime, sand, gravel. The part of the grange wall outside the gates is now looking like a wall rather than a pile of rubble and is over half its final height. Wall building with random stone is an incredibly slow process.

Our health continues quite well really, compared to many of our friends and acquaintances out here. Several have had new knees, hips, and other joints, heart problems, eyesight and hearing problems, as well as the normal ageing we all go through, so we’re not complaining. Together with the collapsing pound/euro exchange rate many are re-considering their future here – businesses and incomes are suffering badly and one of the English shops – in Saintes – has closed. The other one nearby is up for sale. Even the boulangerie in our village has closed this week. The anglophone expat community over a very wide area seems to be keeping the café-bar open with weekly pub nights and monthly quizzes, but the boulangerie serves a much smaller community and hasn’t survived.

The vendange – the harvest of grapes to ultimately make cognac – has been under way for the last couple of weeks and now seems to be complete, and the harvest of maize has been going on during the last few days. Our own grape vines did badly – the worst we’ve ever had from them; we just got one bowl of fruit from the whole row. But our walnuts are now falling and they seem to be doing better than expected. I cracked a few open for the chickens and they love them!  The grass is, however, growing well again and when I started up the lawn tractor to mow the fields the battery was almost flat – just shows how long it was out of use during the hot summer weather. Not much of an Indian summer with not much sun, but a few days with some rain has brought many of the flowers back into bloom. We have suffered a bit with harvest mites over the last few weeks though, but thankfully they’re disappearing now. Our French next-door neighbours gave us a bucketful of huge quinces from their tree that Jeanne has made into a couple of pots of quince jelly and some sweets rather like turkish delight. The sweets are very tasty but we're not sure what we're supposed to do with the jelly!

Socially we’re still having quite an active time. Our last visitors, Janice and Allen from Florida, went home after a happy stay, I think, and we loved having them here – great guests. We’ve currently no further firm bookings this year apart from Rosie – a cocker spaniel belonging to friends – in December but the airlines are still flying and offering very good prices, especially Ryanair and Easyjet from the UK for certain last minute and advance bookings.  We have a lovely set of close friends in the region that we’re able to spend more time with again now the holiday season is over. So for now we’re into aperos, afternoon teas, lunches and dinners as well as our work on the house, and the local winter programme of events has started up so we’ve a couple of bookings for musical evenings already. We’re amazed when people ask us what do we find to do all day/week/month etc. out of the holiday season when there are fewer Brits about as most of the part-timers have gone home for the winter. For us we’re delighted to never have time to be bored (or to get ill, we hope!) as winter means more opportunity to socialise with the French and British permanent residents here as well as to get on with house improvements.