Chez le Baron: Christmas and New Year

We headed off to our lovely workman-free house for Christmas and the new year; it may be storing things that we want to bring over once Brookside is done (and so appears like a junk shop in places), but it was a lovely respite from thinking about what we need to do in the UK...

And particularly from working in cold, smelly, dusty/dirty conditions!

We have a wonderful gizmo attached to the boiler which responds to text messages, so in winter we send an SMS once we have fuelled up in Calais to tell it to turn up the heating, and by the time we arrive (4½ - 5 hours later), the house is warm/warmish (depending on outside temperature). We could send the message earlier, and it would be warmer on arrival, but the main reason we do it is to take off the chill. The first thing I do when we get there is to light a fire in the poêle, which usually has the temperature in the living room in the low 20s by the time we go to bed.

A couple of days, and we are opening up the door, and if it gets particularly cold we occasionally put a log on the fire before we go to bed. But mostly that's not necessary.

David did a bit of tidying [hoed the garden, and pulled some weeds from around the edges; it's clearly been warm and very damp since our last visit] before the wet stopped play. I had a complete rest, for which my shoulders are immensely grateful; I've gone from constant pain and being unable to even lift my left arm to being able to do a couple of hours ceiling painting before the burning sensation forces me to stop. I also did a lot of eating, lying around reading trashy "chick lit" [my guilty pleasure is collecting Christmas-themed stories and binge-reading them at Christmas (well, until I can't take any more and 'need' a decent murder)], sleeping, and having a drink or two. We went for a few, shorter, walks, and did a couple of bimbles in the car. It was all very low key, and just what we needed.

I hadn't comprehended quite how stressed I had become until a day or two before returning to Maidstone, when I realised I was no longer suppressing the urge to scream...

I can't wait till our next visit, because that will mean that we have moved house, and doing an hour or two on the house will no longer entail an hour's travelling in each direction and working in an unheated, damp building. It feels like we've come full circle: it seems ages ago that we were doing our 36 hour round trips for a three hour meeting in France before returning to a warm flat in London, and now we're visiting our lovely snug home in France having done plenty of commuting to do work in England.

Snippets:

Our water leak turned from "we'll get that sorted at Christmas when we get the boiler serviced" to "quick, find a plumber, the valve we used to be able to close has developed a crack!" - time for action... About the time that we discover that Schwartz no longer do plumbing/central heating. I pushed David to bother Jean-Loup, and I'm glad I did - he called the plumber the same evening, and got a next day emergency call out [one of five or six the guys were doing that morning], and by 10.30am on Monday the valve was replaced and we could go back to just turning on a tap in our bathroom; bliss.
Bernadette is undergoing chemotherapy again. I think that they are feeling positive/hopeful, but needing a further course is a massive worry, as it means the cancer has returned. We're wishing fervently for a happy outcome.
We saw several flights of cranes, passing over the house/garden; we are so lucky that they are incredibly "chatty" in their travels - if they could get to the lakes silently like geese seem to manage, we would never know they are there. It's lovely seeing their passage, so I'm glad they alert us to their presence.
We arrived to find two germanica irises in bud, and one was in flower - it seems a crazy mixing up of the seasons when irises and hellebores are flowering at the same time; a symptom of climate change? Still, the weather became more seasonal, and the frost/snow killed off those bud pretty quickly. It was -10°C at 8am on the Monday after Christmas, and the weather went from 'late autumn' to 'winter' really quickly. Fingers crossed the cold continues a decent length of time, and doesn't return to kill off my bulb iris flower buds like it did in 2014.
Having been disappointed in my yearning for a white Christmas, I was delighted to see snow falling on the evening of the 27th, and we had a light coating by the 28th - wonderful for going for a walk with blue skies and crisp air; even the cat that had been pleading to come in came along for a while. We're guessing "Ginger"'s owner returned that day, as he vanished without trace after a couple of days of begging for snuggles. We didn't dare let him in, in case he snuck in on his own some time and ended up locked in the house for a month or two; doesn't bear thinking about that happening, so like the swallows and redstarts, his presence indoors was firmly discouraged.
We conducted a taste test of my comparison liqueurs (from this time two years ago; the last ones I made), and David [who detests whisky] was pleasantly surprised to find that sloe whisky tastes nothing of whisky - he guessed it might be gin. I don't know that that helps any, but I now feel perfectly happy making a flavoured whisky, should I be so inclined in the future. I made him sign a disclaimer, in case he regretted the tasting in the morning [the last time he had whisky (a proper "nosing") he did regret it the next day]. I'm really looking forward to life settling down a little [or, preferably, a lot] and I'm hoping that I will feel like foraging and making other hedgerow concoctions in the not-too-distant future.
We have occasional discussions on what our superpower would be [assuming we have one, which (sadly) we don't]. These are often triggered by a repeat of various episodes of The Big Bang Theory, and I admit that it's more my game than David's. But he surpassed himself one day and called me "Stary Spice", for my "legendary" ability to out-stare cats and small children. Well, it made me smile!