
Fields of Gold
Bonjour
I hope you have all had a lovely week?
The cuckoos are singing their familiar song and the sun is shining. For the first time in the last week (see below to find out why), I went out for a longer walk on Thursday. We are surrounded by fields of gold at the moment as the farmer has planted rapeseed – a glorious sight.
We had lunch in the garden today as it was 24°C – perfect. A cup of tea or glass of wine with this view anyone?

My very early flowering French lavender is buzzing with bees and, along with some beautiful irises (flowering for the first time since we bought the house) give the garden a fabulous splash of colour. As we plan the planting in the garden, I am making note of which flowers, shrubs and trees bloom each month, both in this garden, but also in other gardens locally. Many plants flower earlier in SW France and I really want to try to create a garden that has some colour all year round.


If you saw last week’s post (Contretemps with the Cat) you will know that I had a bit of a mishap. What a saga. Honestly I had no idea a cat’s bite was such a drama. To keep detail to a minimum, in summary the bitten finger got infected, after a few days of antibiotics I was no better and struggling with pain, numb fingers and feeling rubbish, so was despatched by the doctor to have my hand x-rayed to exclude bone infection and possible surgery! I also had vast quantities of blood taken for a complete set of blood tests (I am not good with needles) and await the outcome. Well sort of – the system here is quite different and I actually already have all the results and x-rays. Whilst I do pay for the required top-up health insurance, the efficiency is amazing. I had a second doctor’s appointment at 10am on Tuesday, by 11:15 I was in radiology at the Clinique Toulouse-Lautrec (great name, local boy) having my hand x-rayed. I left 20 minutes later with the doctor’s report and x-rays. The nurse came to the house next morning at 8.30am to take my bloods, by 2.30pm the results arrived in my inbox! My appointment with the doctor this morning has resulted in another 15 days of antibiotics as part of my finger is still infected, but generally she is happy with the progress and all results were fine. Thank goodness. Big lesson learned and honestly if the lovely Raoul wishes to stay outside at night, so be it!

As an aside x-rays are amazing – my hands look almost slender and designed for playing the piano – if only that was true!

I can now move the other fingers on the bitten hand but not my middle finger yet. It is enormously frustrating in terms of typing, dressing, eating and everything! Still my writing with my left hand is now almost legible so I have made some progress from 3 year old writing to that of a five year old. Poor Max is still having to do pretty much all of the cooking and washing up.
I also mentioned last week that in my magpie style, we acquired some further items for the garden. Well we picked up the rusty wrought iron chair to repaint and the old Parisian tree protector and also acquired a few plant pots and garden bits. I am a huge fan of second hand, repurposed, recycling things to give them a lease of life. As I have said before, one person’s rubbish…


Lots of projects to do and this last week has set me back a bit. Hopefully by the weekend I can get going again properly, not to mention start planting out all the plants I have before they die.
We have so many plans and, like others renovating, it can get a little overwhelming when you look at the giant and ever extending to do list. The trick is to focus on one job at a time. Often easier said than done as one thing leads to another or another thing falls apart, or one half of the renovating team gets bitten by the cat and is out of action! A bumpy week but sometimes you just have to take a deep breath.
This week we did manage to tick off one huge job – getting the attics and cellar insulated. Not a sexy job at all but vital. We were hugely lucky to be accepted onto a government scheme to reduce energy loss from houses and have the insulation work now booked in for May. In the hope we have heating next winter, we may even have a cosier home but at least are doing a little bit towards stopping what little heat we do have from escaping into the atmosphere.
So this week in the absence of any great renovation progress, a little more about the house.
Some time back we started tackling what I hope one day will be the cutting garden. Actually it was an unusual mound around some trees in front of the covered terrace.

So we started digging, initially thinking leaf mould for the garden. We then discovered lots of enormous stones and bits of metal pipe amongst other things – even an old stone lintel. The covered terrace was formerly a scullery or back kitchen (une arrière-cuisine), attached to the old kitchen – now the souillarde (a type of utility room). The arrière-cuisine would originally have been used for washing dishes, some cooking and maybe storage of china, pots and pans. We worked out that when the outer walls were demolished to create the covered terrace, all the rubble was just dumped by the trees. Over 20 or so years it got covered with falling leaves, weeds and so disappeared. Lucky for us as we need stone to rebuild the wall at the top of the driveway. The best find so far in this hidden treasure trove (our own field of gold) was an old stone évier (sink), sadly cemented with tiles but we will try and chip those away to hopefully leave us with another glimpse of the house’s past. We have a lot more stone to dig out before any planting, but what a fabulous (and free) supply of material for the wall, plus the stones were also part of the fabric of the house which is even better.
I have been doing a little more digging around into the history of the house. In 1663 the granddaughter of Raymond D’Agens (the illegitimate son of a lord – see post ‘Through Hidden Doors and Corridors) married Jean de Ginestel. It appears that this allowed the house to stay in the D’Agens family. They then had 2 daughters who married two brothers, both apparently on 31/1/1706. Curious. Certainly one of them remained at the house. My quest continues! We visited the village cemetery but found no evidence of any of the family names that have been associated with this house, nor curiously any graves from before the mid to late 1800s. No idea why. In terms of families that lived in the house, it might be that they were buried in family graves elsewhere as that seems to be what happens here. There is an older part of the graveyard with some very worn headstones, but not many. The mystery deepens. Where were people buried? We have been put in touch with another local history expert and once lockdown is over will visit the Mairie to have a proper look at the old registers, which date back to the 1790s, just after the Revolution. Maybe they will shed some more light on the inhabitants of this house. I will keep you posted.
On that note I will bid you au revoir and leave you with the amazing dandelion puff – we have lots of them in the garden. They have a habit of lying down when Max is mowing the lawn and just as he finishes they pop back up again. The flowers are great food for bees, so deserve a place in the garden and I think the puffs (seedheads if I am being more sensible) are a work of art and a feat of engineering. Nature is so clever.

Until next week.
A bientôt
Ali xxx

