Four seasons in one day...

The mornings here in Northern France have turned misty this last couple of weeks and there is quite the definite nip of Autumn in the air. I love these kind of mornings, I go outside in time to see the fading sunrise glowing pink over the trees, the pale sun trying hard to burst through the mist and then I see the most magical thing, a simple spiders web hanging heavy with the morning dew is transformed into a thing of beauty as it rests there on the fence, it's not fooling even the most short sighted of insects.

What to wear?

I am reasonably sure that each morning will develop into a beautifully sunshiny and hot day, but right now, the Autumnal chill is too much and I cannot resist my snuggly argyle jumper.
By midmorning, it's springtime, the sun is gently wiping away the morning dew and making me feel a little too snuggly in my winter woolly.

Mid-day brings a tremendous heat, summer is not over after all, she's just having a lazy morning.
The children come out of school for lunch, most of them wearing long sleeves and turtle necks, baking in the sudden heat.
The evenings are long, the kind of evenings which were made for barbecues and al fresco dining.
As the light fades and the sky becomes black, the air cools once more and I wonder where I discarded my warm jumper....and jacket.

Tonight will be a full moon in a dark, cloudless sky with millions of stars, the effect is amazing, it's as bright as day until the moon sets again, but the clear sky means that the temperature plummets, making an icy cold night, just how I like it. As I lie in my toasty warm bed, I can still see the stars and as I watch them, my nose becomes colder, I can hardly bear to close my eyes to sleep.
Winter.

It's been a busy time here in our little corner of Normandie, the building work is coming to a crescendo with the distinct nip in the air to remind us that winter is just around the corner. We intend moving into the main living area before winter is upon us.
To the untrained eye, it still looks like the building site it always was, but with the advent of an upstairs floor, our possessions are no longer scattered far and wide, it only needs a floor, walls and power and we will be good to go!!



Last month saw the completion of a bathroom....welcome to the 21st century family Lemur. From now, my long suffering hubby is spared the task of the twice weekly journeys into the neighbouring town to empty the toilet.



...and what have I been doing all this time? I have been in my studio, enamelling, hammering and creating to bring you this.


...and this


Florentyne is my latest design, at the moment I have the bracelet and pendant, ring and earrings will be arriving soon. What I love about this bracelet is the tapered link, it fits exactly to the contour of your wrist....and of course the colours, I love, love, love the colours that you get with kiln fired enamels, so bright, clear and juicy, they always remind me of the sweeties I used to like as a child.

I'm also working on another shape of linked bracelet, with enameled insets. This one is even brighter than Florentyne...photo's to follow.
Oh, while we're on the subject of sweeties, who want's some lemon rock?



that's the name of one of my latest rings...because the 'rock' is the colour of lemons

My other ring is called 'Waspie' which is a good name for two reasons:
1 It is a ring with a wasp-like waist
2 2010 has been the summer of the wasp, they have been everywhere, in your drinks, food, clothes. Unfortunately we are surrounded on all sides by ripening fruit trees, which is wasp heaven.
I risked life and limb to bring you a photo of the wasps devouring a rotting apple, but the pic is still in the camera, the lead is in the shed and it's 4.30 am....maybe it will wait for morning.

Today, my little family and I were given the honour of being invited to a French family get together. We have seen rather a lot of Chantal and Thierry in recent months and they arranged a soiree in order for their eldest two daughters to meet us.
We have the most amusing Franglais type conversations, where I start a sentence and someone else will finish it, or when things move beyond my command of the language, trying to get the finer points of an idea across using the words you know can be challenging. I love to try. I don't even have to plan out what I'm going to say, I have enough confidence just to go for it, sometimes that approach works just fine, and sometimes you're met with the three second silence when they are trying to put meaning to the 'word soup' you've just delivered.
I find I'm really learning a lot in a short space of time which I'm so grateful for. but, the thing is, what do they get?
I'm not conceited enough to assume that it's as good for them as it is for us, even being the anglophiles that they obviously are.
They are now hooked on good 'ol English tea, the French stuff being virtually unrecognisable to us Brits.
They find the fact that we don't mind (too much) living in a caravan whilst we work on enough of the house to live in bemusing...and I have to admit here that I'm losing sight of why this seemed such a good idea, now that autumn is just around the corner.
All in all, I think we've been really lucky in meeting Chantal and Thierry and becoming good friends with such lovely people. I know that we've found in them, friends that are always ready to step into the breach and get their hands dirty, something that's becoming more and more rare in our modern, insular society. <3

Country Life

Now that August is upon us and the vegetable garden is laden with promise, I realise that Mother Nature has played a big trick on me.
On looking around at the bountiful treats in neighbouring gardens, I am less impressed with my flowering courgettes which seem to only produce the male flowers, my baby runner beans which will measure three whole inches if I use my husbands 'fishing' ruler.


My dwarf variety peas are a full 8" tall and produce two or three pods per day. The star of the show are the haricot verts who are very forgiving of the hot drought conditions and are giving me lots of beans <3 <3



The chilli plant is being very endearing in that the pods have formed 'couples'...one straight pod and one curled around it's middle,just like ballroom dancers, how sweet is that?



As I'm working in my workshop, I can enjoy the view of my miniature garden set out in front of me, I can almost smell the swaying sunflowers in the garden next door which is a sight to behold. OK, they are around the corner, but I can imagine them. There were a couple of them in a vase in my studio until yesterday, when a child of mine...who will remain nameless, knocked the vase off the top of the desk and emptied a couple of pints of water into the paper slot in the back of the new printer. Still waiting for the thing to dry out before I dare switch it on to suss out the damage.

Vive La difference.

I simply love noticing the little differences between our old life in England and our new one in France, for me, it's never about trying to find each of the products and services that I liked about the UK to create a 'Little England' right here. Nor about trying to hold on to every ex-pat that you meet, I want to try my hand at becoming French.
I'm never going to convince anyone that I was born here, but I want to be able to live my life not worrying about who I may be called upon to speak French at.
Today, I decided to revisit the local La Poste, who always denied that the cheap international tariff that I requested even existed! For a couple of months I'd been going to one a little further afield who just sold me the service and thanked me for my custom, but today I decided that I would try again at my local branch, maybe I was just spoiling for a fight, but they agreed to sell me the tariff today,they must be cursing that 'borrowed' postie from another branch, they can't back down now, can they?
I know I won't!


If you ever find yourself faced with Rampants, this is the perfect antidote, in such a lovely colour can too.
We discovered it quite by accident. We'd moved all our stuff into the caravan for a few weeks during the warmer weather, only to find that someone else had similar ideas.
On opening the food cupboard,I discovered the 'fourmis' or ants to the English speaking world were already sitting down to lunch. In a fit of pique..Panic... Disgust , I quickly threw all our food through the window into a perfectly placed wheelbarrow, all except for the breakables which were carried outside and placed on a table. 'Oh, are you having a picnic?' our French neighbour asked, watching me set down the jam and the bread. You have to laugh! We joked about eating 'A La Carte' as our food was fetched from the wheelbarrow




After weeks of patiently waiting and lots of digging, sawing, hammering and sorting of slates, my new studio is finally finished, everything is moved into place and I made my first set of rings there today.
I love that the workbench has a really nosy window, I don't have to crane my neck to see who's coming and going...and why! When I'm not watching the folks going about their day, I can watch the cows at theirs, but they stare back at me almost as much as I'm staring at them.
It's great to feel that I can get my teeth into some real work and get the collection made that I've been threatening to do for months.
Jewellery is going to be the way we earn our money, or we're gonna die trying anyway.
Incidentally, there's a competition to think of a name for my darling little shed over at http://mrlemur.blogspot.com but you must be quick, it ends tomorrow!

A peek into history

For the past two days, Marcus and I have been digging out the foundations for the shed in the garden. Not your ordinary potting shed I hasten to add, but a rather more palatial 6m x 3m workshop/studio with mezzanine floor which will provide us with enough space to earn our living right here at home.

I know that digging is hard work, but if you only do it every now and then, you do tend to forget just what a strenuous job it is. The loosening up of the soil, the filling of the barrow and the wheeling it away seem to never end. the only thing that kept me digging was the occasional finding of a piece of pottery.



Now I'm no expert in this field but I am very interested in the subject, so it was with great excitement that each piece of pot was gently unearthed and studied. It's amazing to think that I can run my fingers along the same traces in the pot made by man several hundred or even a thousand years ago.
A couple of the pieces look as if they could be from the same pot, you can almost begin to see the shape that the pot once was. A couple of others have a very faded and worn glaze that looks like it was once red.
With a quick Google search, I found out that the first people to start using a red glaze instead of the traditional black was the Romans.

This description of Roman pottery from Mariamilani seems to describe the ware that I found.
Roman coarseware was just that: coarse. The intended use of this type of pottery was to be found in everyday needs, especially in cookery. Given the use it was put to and its tendency to chip and break in the kitchen meant that it was produced cheaply and in greater volumes.

This meant that the clay used was less refined and included rougher (coarse!) inclusions and impurities. The walls would tend to be thicker in order to make the wares more resistant to kitchen use. From a materials point of view it is likely that the inclusions would make the wares more likely to break and therefore also contributing to a need for greater thickness of clay.

Firing was less careful and generally done in a closed furnace, which would tend to consume less fuel. The "reducing" atmosphere in these ovens ie smoky and short of oxygen, tended to make the baked clay go brown/black in colour. Darker patches on the earthenware surface would also arise where one pot touched another in the furnace.
The general size, weight, finish and shape of coarse ware was strongly driven by the utensil's intended use. Pots for storage, cooking, eating and so on all had their particularities. A rough grain surface on a plate intended for semi-liquid poultices would hardly be impermeable and certainly not easy to clean! A "slip" would generally be used to provide a smoother finish when required.



It's a lovely notion that our garden could have been home to a roman settlement, and I would love to believe it to be true, but being a realist, until I see evidence a little more based in fact, it remains just a romanticnotion.

The evil deed is done.

The van was finally loaded and the house emptied so I phoned Alison in France to check the arrangements.
The fact that no-one had been able to enter or leave the village for two days did not deter Mr Lemur from his plans. The ferry crossing was booked and we were going ahead as planned to drop all our worldly possessions in France.

We kind of decided that it would not turn out as bad in reality as we had been warned, the main roads were bound to be free of snow by now, so down to Portsmouth we went....happy to be giving Dover a wide berth.

We woke the following morning to find no snow at Le Havre and none on the roads, so despite the fact that we were driving a fully loaded 7.5 tonne truck, it felt good.
Our good friend Alan helped load the truck for two days in the UK then bravely offered to accompany us to France to lend a hand on the other side.

The house is located in rural Normandy and after about two hours of driving, wet approached the outskirts of the village.
As soon as we left the main road, we encountered the snow, not too bad on the flat but a bit of a white knuckle ride on the long downward hill into the village.
I tend to worry on the snow because never having driven this truck, I don't know if we're asking for it to deliver something out of it's comfort zone.
Anyway, we were nearly there and what other choice did we have than to have a go at negotiating the twisty, winding, icy slope?


I needn't have worried about the lorry in the snow, Mr Lemur negotiated it faultlessly and we arrived at the house ready to start day three of the move extravaganza.
At this point, Alison arrived from next door with promises of hot coffee, I didn't need asking twice, anyway, there was always the possibility that the others would arrive to say that the unloading was done.
Didn't happen.

Unpacking the truck was much as you would expect really, until we came to the range cooker. It went in easily enough...with a fork lift. it came out very laboriously, the four of us wondering how we could possibly lift the thing without the weight being taken bt the thin sheet steel on the bottom. Luckily it was a cooker on legs, Guy, our French neighbour (on the other side) suggested tying a rope around the bottom of each tapering leg to fashion a handle. This worked and we could move the cooker six inches per lift as far as the door and over the threshold, then came the fun stuff, we screwed the feet of the cooker onto planks to make skis and then dragged it into position. Easy peasy. Just took about an hour to move, that's all.
As soon as we finished unloading, the temperature plummeted and all the melting snow started to re-freeze.
Thankfully a canny one amongst us suggested moving the lorry into the main village before the road turned to glass, which is exactly what happened. We would have been stranded ourselves until who knows when had we not done it.

It became apparent that someone 'up there' decided that we deserved to live in France...for whatever reason. Had we started out a day earlier or later, we would not have found it as easy a journey.

A quick but heartfelt thank you to our good friends who helped us, to Mom and Dad, Alan, Helen, Alison and Guy....you're the best.
...and Alison, I nicked your picture, thanks, hope you don't mind.

Look at the photo's on www.cheekylemur.blogspot.com

A moment of clarity...a place to behold

This past week has seen three new prospective buyers come to look over our house...and one back for a second viewing. Even though the market is deflated and the banks are asking for crazy deposits, it's looking possible that we could find a buyer.

This has brought a whole set of thoughts and feelings to the forefront of my mind. Thoughts that are easy to push away when nobody wants to buy the house, and there's no chance of having to emigrate to France.

I love France, the people are fantastic, as are the neighbours (hi Alison), culture, food....the list goes on. The thing that worries me is living in a caravan for the foreseeable future whilst the house is being finished. A four berth caravan (containing 4 people) is ok for a week or two in the summer when you are outside for large amounts of the time, but when the winter weather starts and we are all living on top of each other, nowhere to dry the clothes, having to take the chemical toilet into town for emptying, then you can see how we might start falling out if no end is in sight.

Then today, we had one of those moments of clarity, the clouds parted and the sun illuminated the way.

We would build the workshop first and it could be a place to live, with an upstairs workspace so that we have the means to earn some money. We were going to do it sooner or later, but with a tweak of the plans, it could be a place to behold, not just your average shed for keeping the garden tools.

This little beauty from Norm is the project we have in mind, maybe tweaked slightly, we're waiting for the plans to arrive as we speak.

Back To Life

Just spent a glorious two week holiday in France, the weather was hot, the company was great and we travelled around the Normandy countryside discovering little pockets of perfection.

The one thing that really rings the changes for me between the town and the countryside is the wildlife that seems so abundant in the places that mankind leaves alone.

The 300 year old barn that has been our ongoing renovation project for the past four years is a veritable sanctuary.

Sitting quietly in the half light in the barn, you notice that you are no longer alone. You can hear the soft flapping of wings taking flight in the eaves above your head, then the bats move out from the shadows and you can see them against the squares of light that are fading fast from the windows.

Just a quick glimpse, tantalisingly close then disappearing as fast as it came.

This is the moment that I write a quick mental addition to my Christmas list for night vision goggles....so Santa, if you're reading this.....