Sanglier!

Best Christmas present! Some local hunters that I chatted to in one of our fields a few weeks ago dropped of a leg of wild boar that they killed nearby. I have made it in to some roasts, some ‘chops’ (medallions maybe) and some stewing/mincing pieces. The bones are boiling for stock and some of the stewing bits are in the oven in slow cooking in red wine. We had some fried for lunch. Delicious! Very tender and tasty.

Doug said of the bread 'Did you make this! I thought it was real bread'! Must be getting better at making baguette!

Equestria in Tarbes

There is a horse show every year in Tarbes called Equestria. A friend writes articles for the paper and kindly took us along as her 'assistants' one day. This meant we got to park in the competitors parking and we got in for free!! She also took us for a wander 'back stage' where it was interesting to see people warming their horses up and lots of horses just standing around in their stables resting.

We wandered around a bit, there are various arenas with shows on and stalls selling food, horse related souvenirs as well as saddles and other tack. We then stopped for lunch in a restaurant by one of the arenas. That was an excellent idea as you got to sit down and had a front row view of the various acts. Poppy wasn't impressed by some of them and tried to run away from a very high action vaulting show (gymnastics with a horse) with a man with a whip.

She also barked at a number of them, but luckily the music mostly drowned her out.

Not lazy! Visitors!

I haven't updated for a while, Janet (Doug's mum) has been visiting and somehow there hasn't been time! We did some nice touristy stuff (Lunch at Auberge de Beyrède, Labassère donkey festival, Line dancing display, Château de Mauvesin, wandered round Bagnères de Bigorre etc) as well as useful things around the farm (continued the battle against the grass and weeds, planted various things, lots of eating and drinking)

Donkeys at Labassère

Line dancing

Line dancing

Château Mauvesin

Janet and Doug - Poppy wasn't impressed with history I think

Social life

I don't write much about our social life, as the blog is more about what we get up to and it is hard to know what people will mind having written about them. In London a lot of our social contact was with people at work, although of course we met friends evenings and weekends, but as we got older that was far from every day. We were a bit worried coming here that we might go mad with only each other for company, however we have been lucky enough to meet quite a number of english (speaking) people here who are equally as mad as us and even a few French ones. Far more people just drop in to see us than ever did in London - where it probably took hours to get from where they live 2 miles away and it wasn't worth the risk we might not be in. We go out to lunch and dinner quite often - and have people round here. I bump in to someone I know (French and English) almost every time I go to the supermarket which only rarely happened in London. So thankfully, although we spend much more time together than we did when we had full time jobs, we also spend plenty of time with other people and are unlikely to go cabin fever mad.

I killed a chicken!

We didn't eat it though.
A friend's chicken has been ill for quite a few days and as it is at least 7 years old she decided it needed putting out of its misery. She couldn't do it herself and for some reason we sprung to mind as cruel heartless people who could! Well to be fair she knows we are planning on eating some of ours and will therefore have to manage to do the deed.
Initially I volunteered Doug for the job. But as I was staying home while they went out for a ride  I decided that I shouldn't be such a wimp. If I can't kill someone else's chicken I am never going to be able to do one I hatched from an egg and have fed and cared for for ages... Plus this one I didn't then have to pluck and gut as we decided not to eat it given it's great age and unknown illness.
I used our 'culling pliers' for the first time.

You put them round the chickens neck and squeeze, the spikes are to stop the neck sliding out the edge. The 'blades' are not sharp, they are rounded and blunt. The theory is that they push between the vertebra as you squeeze, forcing them apart and snapping the spinal column. If you are going to eat the bird, you wait for it to stop twitching madly and then chop its head off and drain the blood out before plucking and gutting.

There is a lot of debate on the internet about the most humane way to dispatch a chicken. I would say that the consensus is that chopping it's head off with an axe is. However the downsides of this method is
a.) It takes some practice to manage to get the chicken in a suitable position without traumatising it (easier with 2 people)
b.) Blood tends to be sprayed everywhere because of the mad convulsive twitching that happens after death. There are some quite gruesome videos on youtube. I would not advise watching them unless you want a lesson in 'how not to'. There is one with some hillbillies demonstrating chopping the head of and then the headless body bounces and runs around the garden spraying blood is a quite delightful way. Euurgh.

As long as you use a firm squeeze (I doubt you could squeeze too hard and mush it's head clean off unless you have a really strong grip) this method seemed pretty quick and not too traumatic (for killer or chicken).

Still not sure I can do a rabbit though. They are awfully cute.

Misunderstandings

We are thinking about buying an investment apartment in Bagnere rather than trying to convert some part of the barn in to a gite as we think it would be more cost effective plus having the benefit that the people staying there are not on our doorstep. We went to look round a place a few weeks ago, bref - as the French say - meaning 'to cut a long story short'. We wanted to put an offer in, someone got in before us, I mortally offended the nice agent lady.
She very kindly translated her emails in to English. Here is a short example. Generally we could just about make out what she was trying to say, but it would have been easier in French
'I is sent to you an e-mail on Monday, April 29th for you exliquez what take place, the customer wait to make a decision, it does not have to refuse mine. He(it) have to confirm me if it was made with the other customer because he(it) he(it) waited his(its) answer'
When she told us that the owner had another offer I replied in English 'That's a shame'. Normally I wrote to her in French but I was in a rush and I was frustrated as we had waited a long time for this news as she (and most of France) went on holiday for a week as May is pretty much all bank holiday in France.
I would translate this in to French as 'Il est dommage' or something like but google translate translates it as C'est une honte. I am not sure the sentence is good French, but honte means shameful or ashamed so the nice estate agent lady thought I was telling her she was shameful or something like that.
She sent me a long email explaining how she had done the best she could and she had nothing to be ashamed of etc. I sent her one back explaining where I thought the translation had gone wrong. So everything is ok now! We are probably going to see a couple of other flats with her next week.

We do use google translate a lot when communicating with people by email, but we are always very careful to use it just for certain spelling and conjugations rather than just putting the rambling you have written in English in and giving it free rein. It is an amazing tool, but it can come out with a lot of nonsense too!

Nice long ride

We went for the longest ride we have been on yesterday. It was a tad longer than planned due to a dodgy short cut!
We passed through many valleys and villages we had never seen before and did not know existed. Although we were tired by the time of the dodgy short cut, it was very scenic and good to see what was there. The ride has given us a lot of ideas for other rides. We also met a french girl who stopped us and asked if she could come riding with us another time. I have emailed her, and hopefully we will set something up. She lives just up the road and has a small feisty 21 year old white pony that we have passed several times going on rides.

Poppy couldn't come as she can't be trusted on the road off the lead. So Tigi's riders husband kindly agreed to look after her while we were out. Allegedly she behaved very well, she went for a walk with one of their dogs in Bagnere. She came back very tired which is good!

Chantier collectif

Our Architect is building a house in Bagnere (our nearest town), he is having various 'Chantier collectif' (collective building work) sessions where people help him and he will help them back. Apparently there are many such works in the local area. We agreed to help because he is using various eco insulations and finishes that we are interested to learn about.
Today was straw and earth insulation (and the rest of this week and next week - we may do another day next week too so we can see how it is getting on).
We spent the morning dunking straw in to watery mud (or muddy water depending how you look at it). 5 buckets of mud (washed from stones in the local quarry) and 8 buckets of water was the recipe in this case, it depends on your mud how much water you want. Apparently you want the resulting mixture just to stick to your hand if you dip it in, making a 'glove of mud' and when you coat the straw you don't want it to be too muddy, just a thin coating of mud. The insulation won't be very good if there is too much mud/clay in the mix. We were told some stuff about telling how clay-y the muddy mix is too.

The house and garden

The mud and water mixing station

The covering mud in straw station

In the afternoon we swapped over and moved on to installing the straw in to the walls. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of this as I kept getting distracted by peacocks every time I got the camera out. They were very loud, if I lived there they might suffer some kind of tragic accident.

Basically we were filling in the holes in a timber frame wall with the wet muddy straw. Planks are screwed to the front of the frame while you pack the straw in and removed afterwards leaving the straw filling behind. This will eventually be plastered with earthen plaster. It was hard work as it had to be really packed down so it doesn't settle with time leaving a gap at the top of every section.
Despite the effort involved, we enjoyed it, as it was a chance to meet some new people (French and British) as well as rule out one type of insulation for our house! Far to labor intensive. The five of us probably did 2 feet up one rather small wall in the whole day - although we did make much more of the muddy straw than we used.

Active day - In Doug's words

I have stolen Doug's words from an email to describe today as I am a bit knackered and cannot think of my own (I got up earlier than usual to give someone a lift to the airport)! Thanks Doug!

Exciting day today. Made hard standing/limited grass area for Daisy-horse this morning. Then we were moving the sheep off the drive (mainly to make it easier to get Daisy out for rides) when our new cow turned up! She is extremely cute.

Some friends turned up almost simultaneously to meet Daisy, so we bunged the cow in with the sheep, admired her for a while, went and admired Daisy for a while then settled down to tea & cakes on the lawn (its almost like summer here!). I then noticed that the cow was no longer still in the enclosure with the sheep... She led us a merry dance all over our neighbour's fields trying to recapture her! Poor thing in a strange new place, no mummy, strange people chasing her! Luckily cow-man had told us to leave the head collar & lead rope on her so eventually I managed to get close enough to step on the rope & recapture her... Phew! She is now in the orchard - it has permanent deer fences all around, not flimsy powered-off elec fencing!

 Then (after more tea & cake of course) we tacked up Daisy & sent a friend off on her for a ride (she is very horsey & came to see Daisy on our first trip there) while the rest of us & dog walked along behind. She loved her & thinks she is a very nice ride too. All v tiring, but have now retired to the sofa with a glass of vin sauvage.

Busy day but no skiing

Red sky at night, skiers delight.
Or perhaps not because there was so much snow the resort couldn't open! But the sunset fhs night before was pretty anyway.

Instead of skiing we did a number of useful things.
We popped round a friend's and cut up a tree that had fallen on their drive. The council luckily did the hard part of cutting it from over the telephone wire and we just cut it in to logs. It was good to be useful as they have been very helpful and lovely to us, looking after the animals when we have been away and looking after Doug while I was away as well as generally being helpful about where to buy things around here.

We then had the roofer round to look at a few bits of the roof that are leaking in the never ending rain and snow. We are keen to get bits fixed as soon as possible so we can make sure it is water tight before we insulate under it and can no longer see what is going on. Apparently when it is windy we will always get a little bit coming in as it blows up under the tiles, but if we can minimise it then the vents that are going to be put in should deal with the little that does get in.
There are a few things allowing the water in. The pointing on the chimney isn't good which means water is leaking an around the chimney flashing, one corner catches the wind which means the rain is being blown in to the corner and through the tiles and finally one of the chimneys doesn't have a shelter on it. So the roofer is coming back 'soon' to repoint the chimney, add some flashing to the offending corner and measure up for a cap for the chimney that doesn't have one.

Finally we spent some time inspecting and fretting about the driveway as there is one particularly dodgy bit that is getting worse fast. Earlier in the day I managed to drive in to the ditch just beside the dud bit because I was so busy inspecting it out the window. Oops. So then we had to unblock the ditch as well. I will write about our conclusions separately when I have taken some photos.

Beer and Birthday party

We have put a couple more beers on to brew in an attempt to get ahead of ourselves so we can age some for longer. One is a brown ale (apocolypse brown ale) and the other is a mild (goat tag mild - we brewed it on the day we helped tag goats). We will see how that goes.

I mentioned a little while ago that we brewed some for a birthday party, the party was yesterday. Don - who's birthday it was - is also a keen brewer so they had set up a little pub with our beer as the 'guest beer'! Our beer seemed very popular. A number of people expressed some enthusiasm for brewing their own too so they could get something closer to 'proper beer' than you can get round here.
We met a number of people that we have heard about (from other british people we know) but not yet met and some new people too.

Ear tagging goats

Some friends/neighbours of ours have miniature goats, like our sheep (which we haven't done yet) they have to be ear tagged. We volunteered to help them do it as it is quite tricky managing to attach them to frisky naughty goats.

The spike that gets pushed through the ear is quite vicious at about 1/2cm thick. I don't fancy that being punched through my ear!

I was the lucky volunteer to do that actual deed while the other 3 held the goats still.
The first one was a bit stressful as I had no idea how hard I was going to need to press to get the tag through the ear and of course one wants to do it quickly to keep the screaming don. It turned out that they go in quite easily considering how big the end of the spike it. I was also worried I would get them in the wrong place and the poor goats would go around either looking silly or in agony for ever more.
I think it went fine in the end though, one bled a lot but it seemed to stop quite quickly and I think it was because the goat caught it on something rather than because I did it wrong.
We should now be in practice ready to get our sheep done. This will be a somewhat tricker job as the goats are much tamer and friendlier than the sheep (by nature - we keep trying to make friends with the sheep to make things like this easier but they are quite standoffish whereas the goats are very inquisitive and interactive)

Rhoda is in the UK

I am currently in Woodbridge with Lorna so not blogging on farm things.
Doug has been having lots of visitors while I am away.
First there was someone we bumped in to collecting chestnuts on our land one of the times we were searching for escaped pigs. He was mortified as he didn't realise the previous owner had sold up and he had permission to collect chestnuts from the previous owner. He came round with lots of myrtille (blueberries) and myrtille products (jam etc) by way of apology.
Next the previous owner came round. He was going to move abroad but after a few months decided he had made a mistake and has now bought a new place close by - he has promised to invite us round once he is moved in.
Finally there was one of the (french) neighbours who brought round some cepe mushrooms which he had picked on our land to show us what they look like. The french are obsessed with finding cepe. There are some poisonous ones that look similar so it is good to have a local show you what you are looking for.

Hectic social whirl

There are a number of people we have been promising to go and visit for ages. It became clear we were never going to get round to just popping in, so we set up a number of dates with people.
We have been to visit two couples and had another to dinner this week so we feel extremely sociable. Poppy has had a ball too as the first couple we visited had two other dogs visiting them from their neighbors, the second couple have a 10 month old puppy that recently adopted them and the people who came to dinner have 3 dogs (but only brought 1 with them). She got on particularly well with the 10 month old puppy (Leo) and had a great time running around like a mad thing.
She should be able to wave to Leo and invite him over to visit as he lives just across the valley, this is the view of our house from theirs (see the red arrow)

Yoga in French

A friend took us along to a yoga class in Gerde (which is just on the edge of Bagnère de Bigorre), it was in a little hall, maybe part of the school judging by the noise of children having break time. We had yoga and French lesson in one, as there was lots of talking about different parts of the body and breathing etc.
I haven't got a photo of it, but here is Doug looking very relaxed afterwards enjoying our new hedgeless view in the lovely sunshine. It has been cold at night, but lovely weather during the day for a few days now.

Goats

We went round to visit some neighbours who have a new goat. They are minature goats and v cute.
We are not tempted to get any (honest) as they take a lot of fencing to keep them in and are a bit of a menace if they get out - eating everything in sight.

The new boy

His ladies

Market day

On Saturdays we have been going to the market in 'the city (Bagnère de Bigorre - population 8000). Partially because it is a nice French thing to do and partially because we need to get Poppy used to lots of people, dogs, cars etc and it is a good place to do it. Food is quite expensive at the market so we don't buy much. Marinated (pickled?) garlic are nice and so are olives.

Wearing our nice town clothes

Secret parking (busy on market day)

The Halle ( indoor bit with fruit/veg/meat)

Outdoors market

Edge of the market

Nice café for lunch (we only go with visitors though)

View over Bagnère

Walk after the market to calm down

How to win friends...

We were invited to dinner with some (English) neighbours, partially so that Poppy could meet their two (sisters just coming up for a year old). Poppy behaved well in many ways in that she made friends with their dogs (who are a bit shy) and didn't bite anyone or jump up too much, however she commited a few crimes

• Pulled over a pot plant which was a poor unfortunate plant that had only just survived being eaten by their goats and had been on its way to recovery until Poppy had a go at it. This rilled up their dogs to dig up another plant and eat it's roots
• Had a drink from their fish pond - which would have been ok except one of the fish was discovered to have died a bit later in the evening. They assure us they don't think it was Poppy's fault, but we are not sure.
• Dug up the geraniums around the fish pond in a really manic way, they plants could be replanted but there had been a nice arrangements of pebbles over the soil which is now ruined.
• Ate the reeds round the fish pond
• Dug/ate a hole in their door mat
• Stole their dogs toys off them
• Ate their brush
• Got in to the dog food and ate some of it
• Battered on the guinea pig cage (fortunately none of them died)
• Stalked the budgies

 They still seemed to think she is cute and promised we would be allowed back through.

New Neighbors

We went looking for them, but the field is very big and we couldn't see them anywhere.

You wouldn't think 10 cows would be too hard to find!
Ah, here they are sheltering from the rain (photo fails to show that - not to put to fine a point on it - it is pissing down)

A local farmer who is a friend of the previous owner has put 10 cows in one of the fields. Good for us as it will get the grass under control and good for him as his cows are getting lots of lush spring grass.

Aidan and Doug demoing the length of the grass