Van Gogh countryside

The hot weather continues, we have become creatures of the shade, out for walks in the evening shadows, along fields of Tournesol

 

Paul and Tracey are finishing my terrace, just a few planks to screw down and it will be ready for a balastade -our present choice is for steel rails, acrylic and wire, hopefully available from LeRoy Merlin.  

Collected the first egg from the new hens this morning, and the cockeral has a good but quiet crow -perfect. 

Summer stuff

Another heatwave day in Le Gers. Paul and I were at the market early, lots of local fruit, bread, cheese and flowers for sale in cool of the Halle.

 

So good to have a pool to cool down in, this one is for us, fully equipped with lilo for lazing and skimmers to chase!!

 and yesterday Tracey and I bought one for the dogs. Not a total success -Cookie ignored it,  and Crumble and Macca thought it was just another (bigger) bowl of drinking water. They were unpersuaded to paddle in it but Ali, the latest addition, was fine, splashing around and trying to catch the splashes. No camera to hand then but here she is this morning investigating the hosepipe. 

She is, unsurprisingly very puppy-ish, loves being cuddled, tries to eat everything and delightfully is always getting under our feet.

In the cool of my sewing space I'm getting ready for some quilting, lots of upcycling in the past few days, fabric, fleece and batting to quilt for small items like bookwraps - here's one I made earlier - and then one quilt to finish.

Review: Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng

This book was a find in my local charity shop, and not one I expected to find so very good to read. Its a powerful and very engaging account of repression and human endurance. Cheing achieves a sensitive balance between reporting what happened and her feelings when she's writing about the personal was impressive. 
I struggled with the long passages about Chinese history but learnt  a lot about a political system that I know very little about.

I'm writing this in a French heatwave and its far too hot to have a laptop on my lap, time for another visit to the pool. I've learnt how to get on the lilo and wondering if I can read while it floats me around  and around. More on this later ......

Reading catch-up

Hot weather is really useful for reading so my to-be-read pile is a lot smaller after this wonderful sunshine.  Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife provoked lots of chat and laughter when my library book group met last week in the cool of my garden ... a good choice for those who were new to poetry and so nice to read again for those of us who'd read it before. We all agreed that the idea was so very good, that the poems were all accessible and, as said, many made us laugh out loud.

My other book group also met in my garden this month, just four of us on Thursday discussing Solschenizyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. We all agreed a good choice, spent some time comparing different translations, and debating how we would fare in that cold, grim place.

I've also read A. N. Homes's This book will save your life ... very funny, authentic parody on modern American life. A really enjoyable book, thoughtful, sparky, and with a good dollop of wisdom.

Finally, I have the stitches for another pair of socks on my needles ... now I know the basics I'm trying a spiral pattern with some soft bamboo yarn.  Its nice to knit in between making petals (yes, petals) for some book covers, and catching up with the applique Merry Christmas blocks ... good job I made no promises which Christmas this quilt might be ready for.  Some projects just seem to go on and on .......