Interlude- a cut-off point

  I had promised you a further episode on our mountain holiday, but an urgent task was undertaken this morning, Toto the ram needed his annual shearing. Ségolène the elder ewe has already been done, but the hot weather since we returned has made the task of shearing the other two sheep urgent. As Toto is the easier of the two, we tackled him first. I believe Aussie shearer  scan rip a sheeps fleece off in seconds, but we take at least a couple of hours to do each sheep. We have never succeeded in standing them up on their bum, so I hold the sheep still, while Kim shears off the wool. At least Toto has horns which do provide a convenient handhold, but every now and again he makes a sudden lunge for freedom, especially when one is doing those little delicate spots... Still, all is now finished, he is comparatively crew-cut, washed, rinsed and liberated to his wondering harem, who seemed reluctant to welcome a soaked sheep, shorn of his crowning glory. Just the youngest, Rosie, to do tomorrow when we have regained our strength.

  bye for now, drinking a cooling Panaché.

Mountain Air.

Well, we're back home after a fantastic week in the mountains near Argeles Gazost in the Pyrenees. As usual, we were staying at the  Centre de Vacances ´Vers les Cimes ´ for the Camp des Aînés. We spend the mornings in a Bible study, among other things, and in the afternoons, we set off for a hike in the incomparable scenery of the mountains. The holiday camp is owned by the Protestant Church at Orthez and is used most of the summer by young campers, often in tents, but for many years a camp for the older campers has been organised before the main season starts. The centre is high up in the hills behind Argeles and, as you can see from my header, the high peaks of the Gabizos mountains dominate the site, what a view to see in the morning when I open the door at the end of our corridor to walk the dogs. yes, we did take Jilly and Laika with us, leaving Toffee with our house-sitters, as he is getting a bit elderly to walk in the mountains. The dogs sleep in the car as they are well used to and as this year we have the Berlingo, rather than the much smaller 106, they had more room to stretch out.
   The weather was a bit mixed this year, but it never stopped us walking, though we had to re-arrange the programme some days to take the walk in the morning when a storm was due in the afternoon. We didn't have much actual rain in the day, though. We did have a couple of hairy storms at night.
    And didn't we eat! One of the attractions of the camp are the excellent but volunteer catering staff. If it were possible, I would have put on stones. It was also very pleasant to meet again all the other campers, some of which we have known for years now, together with some new faces who blended in well, a real feeling of a shared community with similar interests.

Instant Cake Recipe (Well almost)

   My friend Christine at Matha recently introduced us to an amazing new recipe which only takes ten minutes to produce a delicious chocolate sponge. I have always been in favour of cooking that produces the goods in a short time, I cannot stand recipes which take hours to prepare to be eaten in five minutes. I have invented a term I call the Preparation to Eating Time Quotient, which divides the time to eat by the cooking time .If  this is negative, I am not impressed.
   So when I tried out Christine's cake I ' Felt like some watcher of the skies,When a new planet swims into his ken'  Well, after this build-up what is the recipe, I hear you ask. Well, here it is in all it's simplicity.


     100 grams melted black chocolate
      100 grams marg ( melted)
      100 grams sugar
      100 grams self raising flour (or flour plus half a sachet of  chemical yeast.
      3 eggs

    Stir all ingredients in a bowl, turn into a plastic box lines with cooking paper and cook on full power for 4 minutes (5 if your micro wave is 750 watts like ours ).

  That's it, your cake will be ready to eat when it cools. From start to plate in 12 minutes!! And it does taste delicious...

Of course, I have already started to play with the basic model. Try omitting the chocolate and adding one and a half table spoons of Nescafé  for a coffee cake Mmm. According to Christine, the cake freezes well, too.

  Bye for now, going to eat a slice of cake....

More Cry than Wool

  It's that time of year again, a bit late, in fact, due to the wet and cool weather this year, for shearing our sheep. I hasten to add, for the benefit of those new to the blog that the header photo isn't of our flock, which consists of only three sheep, Toto, the ram, Segoline the oldest ewe and her daughter, Rosie. As Sego is the most tricky to shear we started with her yesterday, finished cutting off her fleece by the evening and returned to her this morning to wash her down and snip off forgotten tufts. We also dealt with a wound to her ear which she seems to have cut on the fence somehow and clipped her over- long claws. The next will be for tomorrow, when we have the energy.
  Shearing is hard work, although we have been given an old set of electric shears for sheep by a retired shepherd. A real shearer can do a sheep in a few minutes but I confess it takes us hours! The professional flips the sheep onto its backside and leans over it to shear but we don't have the knack and carry out the job with the sheep standing with the spare personnel holding her by the collar, an item not often seen in wilder sheep! Kim finishes off the awkward spots with her dressmaking scissors....
  Well, Sego is now short-haired, clean and smelling strongly of Dettol, so we are drinking a well-earned cuppa and looking forward without much enthusiasm to the other two. Organic mowing doesn't seem so labour-saving at this time of year!

   Bye for now, going to massage each others' aching backs!

The sky's the limit

Earth Station `La Mort Limouzin`

I tell you, the Ark is getting more and more up-to- date! Not to mention our two superannuated Apple computers and Kim's more modern lap-top, we now have my I-Pad as I told you a few Arks ago and recently we have actually invested in a satellite English TV! Not that we invested very MUCH of our finances, as we obtained the second- hand Sky-box and an old-fashioned CRT type TV from Alan and Elaine at the Field Emporium, which I can thoroughly recommend. They helped us fit the new units and now our Ground Station receiver dish, firmly attached to the barn stares fixedly at a point just above next door's palm tree where the satellite floats 35,700 km above us. We can thus get five UK television stations, which is quite sufficient for our tastes. Why, when I was a kid, you could only get one, and that was black-and-white!
   We have resisted getting English TV since we came here twelve years ago, as watching French TV, especially the news, is excellent for learning French and increases fluency and understanding amazingly. However, we felt we were reasonably fluent now and pined a bit for our favourite programmes, so we sold out but will still watch the French set quite often.

  But then, a couple of days ago, disaster struck and our enjoyment was put at risk. We were sitting watching when Mumu the half grown kitten caused chaos, for with a noise like the crash of doom, the set fell from its TV table onto its face on the floor!! I doubted if it could survive the impact, but on being put back and the various leads put back in, it actually powered up. However, something had shifted inside for the colours were disturbed, towards the bottom half of the screen, faces turned a strangely cyanosed blue. Watching was not the same at all....

   Well, it was a question either of getting a TV engineer to call at 50Eur an hour or locating another old English TV, no contest really. Kim went onto Facebook and quickly located two fairly close to us. We collected the first, which had been stored in a barn and had no remote. The price was right, though, free! We did donate a bottle of wine, though. However, when I connected and turned on the unit, it ran for a few moments and quit... Not the donor`s fault, they did say no guarantee that it was working.

  We therefor collected the second TV yesterday. This was a more hopeful unit as it had been used in a spare bedroom and was indoors and with a remote. Much to my surprise, the set worked straightaway, without any need of tuning so all the TV characters have regained their normal colour faces. Hooray, we were back in business at a cost of two bottles of wine. And as a bonus, we were able to visit two charming families, I am tempted to invent another `want` to enable us to meet more!

     Bye for now, going to watch the telly....

Laïque or not?

   It's strange how France is a country of charming contradictions. The  French pride themselves on their lack of religion in national government since the Revolution, but they have more religious public holidays than even in Britain, nominally Christian! Easter, of course, but also Ascension on 25th of May, Pentecost on June 8th, Assumption on 15 August and All Saints on 1st November. You can ask people to give up their religion, perhaps but steer clear of suppressing their hols!
 
 Bye for now, pensioners are always on holiday, they say!

Water, water everwhere...

Yesterday, we bought two second-hand water tubs to collect more rainwater for later in the year when it might get dry. Luckily, the Berlingo is ideal for transporting these large objects, we would have had to tie them to the roof of the little 106. Again luckily, I was inspired to place them in position yesterday evening, inspite of it being hot and dry.
  In fact, since then it has scarcely stopped raining and the first tub is already full and the second is well started.! Kim's plants will not be parched later on.
 Kim and Sophie have been furiously planting out the seedlings we bought at Lezay market a week ago, so we shouldn't lack for something to water!

  We've had rain, thunder and lightning all day, but it's finally calming down. Long may it continue.

 Bye for now, going to see if that's really sun I can see outside!