Summers' end

It's been a while, a summers’ interlude, the garden has grown and flourished, the pumpkins lie swollen and bloated on the manure heap, the guests have come and gone, many and varied, the snow fell and capped the mountain tops in July and again in September, in August the temperature held steady around 30C and still the sun shines as the days shorten. 

Spring guests arrived as soon as the ski season finished in April, held back in May and returned in June. July and August brought summer holiday visitors, the pool filled, and we had to decamp. A troupe, a legion, a bevy (is there a collective noun for a dozen octogenarians?) out talked, out ate and out drank us in September leaving us feeling pretty ancient and decrepit ourselves. 

These delicious little fancies were brought by some friends, and gobbled up pretty quickly.

For those who like to hear about the activity side of things we walked and climbed a fair amount locally, and further afield followed lots of sheep’s bottoms, some 250 of them, up through deserted Italian villages to the alpine pastures at 2000m, eating a huge amount of sheep’s cheese along the way, but we didn't make the summit of Mont Blanc, although we did practice Afghan breathing (you might well ask) and some parapenting and I learnt to ride a mountain bike.

  

In early summer the rodeo came to town with cowboys and line dancing, in July there were fireworks (and since the French really like their fireworks all throughout the summer), and in August a choir of 400 singers filled the square and everyone sung the songs of the French sixties and seventies late into the evening,  mountain bikes came flying down 1600m of descent and a dozen drummers from Burkina Faso pounded away and got the audience dancing . The Mont Blanc car rally brought the summer to a grand finale and left us marooned all day behind officials and red tape as cars hurtled around us on all sides. The marshals sat down to lunch with two young ladies who had  positioned their chairs for a ringside view and laden the table with good things and bottles, the French loyalty to their lunch and their laissez faire approach to health and safety still reigns.

Now it's time to think of putting the garden to bed, harvesting, making pumpkin soup, leek soup, courgette pickle, raspberry jam, plum chutney, and gathering the fallen walnuts which drop with a muffled clang onto the corrugated iron roof next door – throughout the night.

 



And soon the snow will come again....