… Lhude sing Rudolph and all of that. The temperature has been slowly dropping for the last few days and last night it reached a low of 5.6 degrees. You might think that that is cold, but on checking my stats I find that apart from last year when we had to wait until mid-October, the other years that I have been here (2007 and 2008) have been the same. So there!

But today was an interesting day, to say the least. It was the mobile phone ringing that woke me up. Who the h*ll was ringing me at that ungodly hour? So the phone stopped – and five minutes later it rang again. And then stopped. And five minutes later …….
“Arrrggghhhhhhh”.
Yes’ I’d slept right through the normal alarm and it was the alarm on the phone going off – at … errrr ….. 10:40 am. What happened there?

So with the morning knackered, first thing that I did was to go outside and check on how the pointing from yesterday was looking now that the cement has dried. There’s definitely some progress, although it’s not as quick as I would like.

Once I’d done that, I had breakfast and then went shopping. They had a few exciting things at LIDL such as a hammer-action stapler which will really come in useful, and then I came back here for lunch

Once I had had my lunch, I went round to Rob and Nicolette’s. They are the people who bought Claude’s old place. Now Nicolette (on the right in the photo) is an artist of no mean repute and they have turned Claude’s barn into a studio for her where she can display her paintings. 

It was the official opening of her studio today and the whole village as well as everyone else was invited. We even had the mayor doing the formal unveiling too

>But upstairs in the barn, the transformation is magnificent. You wouldn’t believe how much work that has taken place up there in just 6 months since they bought the place from Claude.

And you can see by the paintings on the wall just how much of an artist that Nicolette is. I have to admit that I’m not a big art fan, especially not of surrealist images, but even I can see the quality in these paintings.

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