What a week it has been. There we were expecting another quiet week in rural France when a van load of Aussies descend upon us. Strewth! Actually they were 4 adults and a 14 year old who had booked into the gite for 4 nights and we didn’t know until they phoned to let us know their arrival time that they were from Australia. It turns out that they were on a 5 week tour of France and arrived with us from Paris. We were half expecting tinnies everywhere and constant barbies. Enough stereotype...

A quiet but interesting week in which we were very surprised at the sudden return, to Loic’s field next to the gite, of 21 cows seemingly returned from the dead. You will recall that the cows went off to the abattoir a couple of months ago and the field was left for the grass to grow for hay. Or so we thought. Now as far as we can tell the bullocks are the same ones that were here before. They look the same and have the same numbers. Either they have returned from the dead as zombie cows or...

After a quiet week the chaos that seems to surround our lives in France has returned with a vengeance. The sun arrived at long last and we have had a gorgeously sunny week. Now that May has passed I could safely don my shorts again. There was of course a risk that the reflection might cause temporary blindness to the surrounding populace, but it was a risk I was prepared to take.

One thing I have discovered in France is that the French discuss and moan about the weather just as much as in Brit...

It was always going to be a quiet week after the departure of the red ramblers on Tuesday. After our epic weekend Mrs. Parish and I returned to the more mundane everyday tasks of living in France. But first we had to get rid of the vast volume of waste and recycling after the weekend revels. The waste was not too much of a problem. Her in rural France we don’t have collections of waste, so we have to take our rubbish to communal bins at the end of some of the lanes around us. It does mean...