La Belle France en confinement! – Beautiful France in lockdown!

We missed the first confinement in our sleepy little French hamlet, instead being locked down in the UK, first in Plymouth a normally bustling Devon city, and then in Whimple, always it seems a sleepy little East Devon village, although in less strange times one of the pubs does put on live music and then there’s the annual Whimple wassail, where the cider orchards are fed toast soaked in cider and the assembled masses sing to the trees and it seems a good time is had by all!  I look forward to it when the world has hopefully returned to some sort of normality, albeit what people are calling a “new normality.”  Although, those of you who know me well, will possibly question any notion of normally, but I digress!

But we were here for the second confinement, although the announcement took us, and most of the rest of western France, a little by surprise and we were away in the caravan near Pornic, when the news broke!  So, we beat a hasty retreat home, without the necessary “attestation”, as we don’t have a printer with us in the caravan.  Fortunately, with the first weekend of the confinement being the Toussant weekend, when families traditionally put chrysanthemums on the graves of departed loved ones, meaning many people had already travelled away to their childhood homes,  some leeway was given for returning home, during what otherwise was to be a strict and long confinement with very rigid rules and possible severe fines for those who didn’t abide by them – we even needed a paper attestation to leave the house to go shopping or for a walk and were then restricted to an hour’s walk within a ONE kilometre (not much over a 1000 yards) radius of the house!

But in many respects, we were very fortunate, living as we do in sleepy rural France, well off the beaten track, with just a few houses tightly packed together, which meant we saw neighbours to talk to over the garden fence, and were cushioned from the worst of the obnoxious virus that has affected so much of everyone’s lives for the best part of the last year.  What we really needed were projects and as the DIY shops remained open, we decided to start the renovation of both our small Tolkeinesque shed at the bottom of the garden, previously a rather tumbledown glory hole and the haunt of the odd snake or two!  Then, there was the barn attached to the house, which needed sorting and something doing to it to make it useful.  This project had been on the back burner for some time, although being mulled over from time to time.  What it really needed was the back two thirds or so to be levelled in some way – either with a raised decking like floor, dismissed largely due to the underneath becoming another favoured haunt for our local, not very uncommon reptiles (grass snakes and western whip snakes of up to 2 metres, non-venomous but somewhat scary all the same!).  Or more favourably the floor needed to be built up on one side by a good 50 cm and levelled across with suitable rubble to allow some sort of floor to be laid.  The former was potentially cheaper and easier, the latter requiring us to locate and transport some two to three tons of infill before even thinking about the floor surface.  But help was at hand in the form of an industrious new neighbour who had moved into the old mill opposite us, formerly an old mill and in need of some updating.  The neighbour had amassed a very large and expanding pile of rubbish waiting to go to the tip, much of it consisting of old walls, plasterboard, tiles and all things eminently suitable for levelling a sloping barn floor!  Better still, it was local much of it already bagged up and more importantly free!  As it was destined for the tip, and would save the neighbour multiple trips there and lots of precious time, he even helped us to move the first lot, after I had constructed a retaining wall and Linda had done the massive job of pointing or chauxing all the interior walls, it was a job that ended up mutually benefitting us and them!  It’s finished now, awaiting the sand and paving stones for the floor, we now joke with the neighbours that we are going to turn it into a disco room, and as both sets of relatively new neighbours are younger than the rest of us, they’re quite excited!  The shed is also finished and usable and as snake proof as I could make it, although I still think I’ll bash the door and walls a little before venturing in for the garden tools!

So, we haven’t been idle during our confinement and certainly for us some good has come out of the terrible situation.  However, towards the end of the works, whilst putting the finishing touches to the shed in early December, I did think as I looked around the hamlet that perhaps the confinement was taking its toll on both us and our neighbours as on this particular day we seemed to be regressing slightly back to our childhood!  First there was our forty something new neighbour, in the house behind us, she had taken up tree climbing and was some way up her old and rather large apple tree in the middle of her garden.  Then, the young neighbours from the mill, from whence came our underfloor, had started to play with water, and despite some weak winter sunshine, it wasn’t really warm enough for that sort of thing!  Moving on round, our older neighbour in the other house opposite our front was in his garden playing with fire, although there seemed to be more smoke than flames, but as the saying goes “there’s no smoke without fire”, although the rules in France forbid both – but the French and someone very close to the keyboard writing this seem very good at forgetting the rules!

Further afield, part time residents higher up the hamlet were playing house with the next-door neighbour and other part time residents in the wooden house around the corner were playing hide and seek in the long grass of their large and wild garden.  And, me I’d regressed to making mud pies and getting thoroughly messy!

Actually, perhaps it was only me that it was getting to, as the neighbour up the tree was pruning it, those playing with water were putting in a new water feature at the front of their house and the fire was all the bits of a tree that had been cut down and were no use for firewood!  As for the home makers, that is exactly what they were doing helping the neighbour get the house he was renovating ready to move in to, so he didn’t have to spend another winter in his draughty old living caravan!  Finally, the neighbours in the wooden house were in fact scything pathways through their large wildlife garden that has been designated as a small bird sanctuary, and at least one of them welcomes any snakes we send their way, and me, I was mixing up the last bits of cement to finish off the floor and lower walls of the shed!!  So, it wasn’t childhood regression, but rather a case of “C’est la vie” as they say around here – It’s life!