Bird

Posted on 20 December, 2008 by Val

This is a picture of the little redstart that had taken to roosting at night on our thermometer in our porch, a couple of weeks ago. As it sheltered from the endless rain, on its precarious perch, I took pity on it, and decided we should build it a proper nesting ledge.

I found some appropriate bits of wood, and some wall brackets, and discussed with Simon the design of the new redstart abode. Having run out of time before heading off on our house-hunting excursion in the Cold Heart of France, we agreed that, if the little bird was still a-roosting in our porch when we returned, we would build the bird-home first thing the following day.

Little bird!

It wasn’t.

Perhaps the sudden arrival of my sister’s two cats in the house had frightened it away. Perhaps it had succumbed to the uncustomarily harsh winter weather that assailed Roquetaillade during our absence. Perhaps it had relocated in a sulk, disgusted at our failure to provide its upgraded home before we left on our travels.

I guess we will never know. But I do know that I will miss it.

A birdless porch is a bereft place.

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A good name is better than precious ointment. *

Posted on 13 December, 2008 by Simon

After long deliberation, a consultation exercise worthy of New Labour (i.e. we’ll present a limited number of pre-vetted options to those who are likely to give us an answer we want, then decide whatever we want, and then tell everyone how we have responded to public opinion), and much debate in the car, across the dinner table, and in bed . . . . . .  the baby has a name.

She is henceforth to be known as Lilas. As Val has already explained, this is pronounced leela and means Lilac. So, you might think we have chosen it because of the baby’s delicate beauty, like the flower which fits with our name ‘theme’:

lilac flower picture

Well, no.

She has, of course, some colouration which could be seen as having a lilac hue – though this could turn out to be grey/brown in adulthood. But she is not the soft, sweet flower that her name could be seen as implying.

In fact, she’s a right little bruiser. She still comes charging into the catch pen with all the grown ups each morning, and stands right in the middle having a pee. Then she goes around barging into the peacefully munching adults, as if to say “Give me some attention, NOW!” When we are standing quietly, watching the llamas, we often feel something pulling at us from behind. Yes, it’s the baby, chewing on a handy piece of clothing. Boot laces are a particular favourite, and she is also working on how to open zips.

Picture of Turanga LeelaThis is a more fitting image for the name! Turanga Leela is the lead female character in the animated television series Futurama. According to that great research tool Wikipedia, she is “a cyclopean human mutant, designed as such as a deliberate subversion of the sex appeal normally associated with women in science fiction.” Despite having only one eye, “Leela is very athletic and in great physical condition. Most males in the series find themselves unable to match her in physical combat.” Now that sounds very much like Elif, Lilas’ mother. Like mother, like daughter. And the lilac hair is right too . . . .


Oh well, maybe not.

Whether or not there’s a good model in the flower world, or in TV fiction, Lilas still seems right. And it did receive substantial support in the consultation. Well, yes, it did come second to Violette . . . . But it still does seem right. It’s a good name.

So, Lilas it is then. OK?

*[Ecclesiastes 7:1]

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La Petite Maison dans la Prairie

Posted on 12 December, 2008 by Val

We have just returned from a three-day trip to the Frozen North where we have been searching for somewhere nice to start the next exciting stage on our journey through Life. Before descending into my customary ramble through the dusty corridors of the Mansion of Musing, I would like to say a Big Thankyou to my big sister Linda and husband Pete, for so splendidly baby-sitting our animal family while we were away (and without whose help this trip would not have been possible), and to Mike and Sue (Llama-Purveyors Extraordinaire) for providing us with a warm bed, lovely food and listening ears between our mind and body-numbing house-hunting excursions in the misty, snowy wilds of the Allier.

There is no doubt about it, the Allier is not a warm place at this time of year. The fact that we are even contemplating a move from the sunny Aude – the pink and yellow, olive-tree, lizard-land of long blue-sky summers – to somewhere brackeny-brown and greeny-wet, that is even colder than England in the winter, sometimes strikes me as a little odd. And house-hunting in the sleet and rain, when every drive between venues opens up glorious 10ft-visibility views of fog-laden fields, and every wellington-clad exploration of neglected fields and junk-filled barns results in chattering teeth and chilblains, would seem inauspicious to say the least. Could we really be expecting to find the next house-of-our-dreams in this sun-forsaken heartland of farming France?

The process by which people decide on a house to buy is fascinating. We have entertained ourselves with vicarious house-choosing exercises, courtesy of the profusion of property programmes like Relocation, Relocation and A Place in the Sun over many years. Like the TV property agents, we have tried to get inside the confused heads of would-be purchasers, and tried to predict what they would go for, and which of the invariable ‘couple’ would have the Final Say. And yet, despite our frequent success in understanding what other people want, and knowing what other people will choose, we find ourselves befuddled-and-confused, and woefully uncertain about what is The Most Important Thing on our carefully constructed list of dream-home criteria.

Of course, the Trouble with Estate Agents is that they want to sell you something, everything, anything, and they don’t much care what it is, so long as they get their commission. So even though we had painstakingly drawn up a list of essential and desirable requirements (price range, amount of land, situation…) which we sent to them all in advance of our visit, we still found ourselves being taken on a magical mystery tour of very interesting but in-the-end inappropriate possibilities. If we had had more time, this would have been an absorbing way to spend a chunk of our ‘holiday’ time.

There’s a funny thing that happens when I walk into one of these places. For a moment, I can completely forget what we are actually looking for, and slip like a child into the make-believe world of living in a play house. I imagine a whole different life, constructed out of the bricks and mortar of whatever fantasy the property evokes, complete with grand designs that will never happen, and peopled with visitors that don’t exist. I am possibly every estate agent’s worst nightmare. As I wander from cellar to attic, opening cupboard doors and lifting the flaps in my imagination, popping up enthusiastic evocations of convincing future-life scenarios, they must think that I will want to buy every house I see.

But five minutes down the road on the way to the next house, the last one is forgotten. Unless it really has kindled a spark in the hearth of my dreams.

Over two and a half days, over two departments, criss-crossing an area of 4000 square miles, we saw eleven properties. And every one had its story. We saw the house where the estate agent had found a dead man hanging in the wood-shed and was now too frightened to visit with clients. We saw the house with six bedrooms, five fields and three barns, that had been a rest-home where a 100 year old lady had sat all day in one chair in one small room. We saw the hippy artist’s eco-friendly house with a composting toilet, a donkey, two horses, three chickens, two wells and a computer with broad-band internet in the attic. We saw the old yellow house-on-the-hill with three new extensions, a cellar full of old wine, and stunning views of the mist-filled river valley. We saw the enormous uninhabited house with the enormous attic strewn with trainsets, football tables and childhood memories, and 15 acres of fields strewn with the nearby sounds of a gravel quarry. We saw the ancient L-shaped house with geothermic heating and a barn that smelled hushed like a church. We saw houses abandoned through divorces and failed dreams. We saw houses that were stepping stones to new futures.

And we saw three houses that we thought we could happily live in. And one house that made our hearts flutter, just enough, even though it didn’t quite match any of our criteria quite properly.

So we’ve been thinking and not thinking. We’ve been feeling, and ruminating, and talking and being quiet. We’ve been being rational and irrational. We’ve been being realistic and optimistic. We’ve been being practical and playful. We’ve narrowed our choices down to two. And one of these is the sensible house that offers us everything on our list. And one of these is the not-so-sensible house that tugs at our heart-strings.

And one of these two houses is the House of Our Dreams.

House 2   House 1

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Fairy Cows

Posted on 4 December, 2008 by Val

On Monday evening, when we were on our way to pick up Simon’s daughter and her husband from the train station in Carcassonne, I was surprised by a sudden glimpse of a white cow-shaped object, looming in the edge of the headlight glow at the side of the road, in the entrance to the track that climbs the hill behind the Fairy Wood. I replayed the image in my mind, and could only conclude that I had just seen a cow. Now of course, in many settings, this would seem yawningly commonplace. But here, in the middle of wine-growing territory, far-far-away from any grazing land or animal farmers, and actually on the edge of the main road from our village to Limoux, a cow is a very Unexpected Thing.

Simon was driving and, being sensibly focussed on the road ahead, (and not being blessed with the superior peripheral-vision abilities of the female) didn’t see it. Given my tendency to flights of imagination (many’s the time I have seen camels, buffalo and crooked old crones during twilight walks with the dog in Markeaton Park), I did wonder if it had been nothing more than a perception-tricking lump of road-side rock. But as I pondered the relative likelihoods of differential explanations, a vague aural memory of a mooing sound somewhere in the distance when I was walking back from the llamas the previous day sprang into my mind. Absolute proof then. Convincing corroborative evidence.

We saw no trace of the phantom beast on our return journey, and in an effort to convince sceptical by-standers that I was not insane, and also because I thought it would be a Very Nice Thing, I willed the cow to exist and to turn up at the village the next day.

Tuesday dawned, wet and muddy, and Nikita and Tateru donned intrepid spirits and borrowed wellingtons (several sizes too small for comfort) to accompany us on our llama-round and meet the creatures they had read and heard so much about. After visiting and feeding the Breeders and admiring the latest addition to the family (STILL unnamed….keep those comments coming!) we trudged through the sticky clay, with increasingly heavy feet, to meet the Walkers. Given the treacherous conditions, we decided not to attempt a mass walk with all the llamas, and only to take Valentine for a slip-and-a-slide around the squidgy countryside.

Nikita and Tateru walk Valentine

And in the heat (cold) of the llamery moment, and the ensuing busyness of entertaining our visitors, the phantom cow was forgotten.

Yesterday morning found us seated around the kitchen table conducting interesting eggsperiments to determine the variations in taste and texture between different sized and aged eggs. (Conclusion: very fresh eggs are hard to hard-boil, and much harder to shell than week-old ones, but they all taste lovely). As I glanced out of the window to admire the view (an inescapable by-product of living in this house-on-the-hill) I noticed some whitish blobs in the valley, where whitish blobs didn’t ought to be. I hurried off to get the binoculars. Sure enough, there at the bottom of the hill, ambling around contentedly on the grass verges of the tracks between the vineyards, was a whole, there-for-all-to-see caboodle of cows.

Cows on the loose

We watched, and wondered where they’d come from. We watched, and wondered if anyone else in the village had noticed. We watched, and wondered what would happen to them. And then we decided to leave for the airport a few minutes early, so we could take a detour past the errant oxen, and capture them on camera for posterity and the blog.

There were thirteen of them. One behemothic bull, a bevy of females and a straggle of youngsters – a happy little family group. A bumbling, unfolding pack of free-range bovinity, drifting inexorably down the gradient in the direction of the Fairy Wood.

They're all over the place

Of course, by the time we returned from the airport drop-off trip (and the oh-so-exciting purchase of a flat-pack wheelbarrow), the Cows had vanished.

Disappointed at their capricious disappearance, I decided to console myself with a damp, windless late-afternoon dog walk down into the valley. And at the lowest point of our promenade, where the streamless stream crosses underneath the track, and red squirrels can sometimes be seen cavorting in the rattling poplars, I came across a cluster of puddled cow-prints. Max and I traced the prints back along the track to where we had seen the cows earlier in the day. The prints were all headed in the same direction, towards the little streamless crossing point where I first saw them.

I turned around and retraced their path, hoping to discover what might have become of the vanished creatures. But under the trees at the crossroads of the streamless valley, in the grassless mud, the footprints of the vanished cows came to a halt. And, try as I might, searching in the impressionable mud radiating from that point in various directions, I could find no trace of where the cows had gone.

Away with the Fairies and back to the Otherworld perhaps?

Posted in Environment, Life, Llamas, Visitors | Tagged , | 2 Comments

If Names are Not Correct…

Posted on 30 November, 2008 by Val

It occurred to me a couple of days ago that, for a blog that purported to be about ‘raising llamas’, we had posted precious little about said animals in recent weeks. So Simon got out the video camera and accompanied me on my usual morning jaunt to the Breeders, to get a little updated footage of ‘The Baby’.

No, we STILL haven’t decided on a name. Somehow, all the names we’d considered just don’t seem right anymore. I had the same issue with naming my children actually. I don’t know how or why, but sometimes you can just look at a child (or llama) and know deep down, with absolute certainty, that they simply are not a Terry or an Evelyn. Don’t ask me how you can tell anything about a child’s (or cria’s) personality in their early days in this world. But somehow, once you’ve seen them in the flesh, so to speak, and heard their distinctive cry, and touched them, and even smelled them, you can tell if the name works. I guess it’s just an intuition kinda thing. But, whatever the reason, I can’t be happy until the name fits. As Confucius (that ol’ barrel-of-laughs) used to say:

If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things.

Of course, our crazy notion of naming all our future llama offspring (females anyway) after French flowers does tend to be a bit limiting. Especially if, like Simon, you insist that the flower name should also already be a recognised (French) child’s name. And because my French accent is so rubbish, I’m keen to avoid anything with an ‘r’ in it (which seems to rule out about fifty percent of the remaining possibilities). So we seem to be down to a shortlist of four.

In the spirit of interactive blogging, we’d like to invite comments on our shortlist (preferably not rude ones, unless they are also incredibly witty and amusing). I’m not saying we’ll go so far as to let the majority vote decide – democracy has so many flaws – but interesting and constructive comments will be valued, and possibly acted upon. In the immortal words of an erstwhile manager, “this is a consultation, not a referendum”.

So here are the possible names, with some thoughts of our own:
Lilas (pronounced Leela) meaning Lilac. The darker patches in her fibre have a sort of mauve-tinge.
Violette (pronounced Vee-o-lett) meaning (not surprisingly) Violet. Same reasoning as above – but Simon thinks Violet is an old lady’s name.
Molène (pronounced Moll-enn) meaning Mullein. She looks like she’s going to grow into a big, tall thing (like her Mum, Elif). Mulleins are wild and hardy, with woolly leaves. They have a tendency to pop up unexpectedly, grow very tall, and survive in poorly cultivated conditions. Molène can be shortened to Molly for everyday use.
Silène (pronounced Sill-enn) meaning Campion. White campion of course – a wild, hedgerow flower. Or possibly even Bladder Campion (as you will see from the video below, she has developed an irritating habit of weeing in the catch-pen every day on the same spot). Can be shortened to Silly for everyday use (as if we would…).

(To leave a comment, click on the Comments link a couple of lines belowthe title of the post, if you are seeing this on the main blog page. As a special one-off aid, you can also click here.)

Speaking of the video, I was actually (apparently) supposed to just be writing a commentary to it, rather than drifting off into the usual rambling discourse, so…..

Things to look out for in the video:
1. Baby is already very good at hoovering up dried leaves to eat. Not only do llamas make excellent lawn-mowers and hedge-trimmers, in the spring and summer. In autumn and winter they also act as leaf-vacuumers, and debris-clearers. The perfect four-in-one garden tool.
2. In the background, Pedro is being taken to be tied to the gate for his daily grooming. He would be more willing, if it wasn’t for the ever-presence of Fatma and Elif, who will not clear off when they think they might be missing out on something tasty. (Pedro gets rewarded for his stoic acceptance of the annoying process, with a little extra handful of concentrate).
3. Baby llamas love nibbling shoe-laces. And clothes. And rope-ends. And hair. Just about anything that gets within the vicinity of their mouths actually. Like teething toddlers, I guess.
4. Hungry baby llamas will have a go at suckling from any milk-producing adults that happen to be around. They don’t get far though….
5. Yes, that is a cannabis leaf on the yellow carrier bag full of food hanging on the fence-post. This might partially explain the funny looks I get when walking through the village on my way up to feed the llamas.

The player will show here

Shortly after Simon filmed this bit of footage, crazy baby had one her mad half-hours, charging around the field and boinging up and down in a fast, fiery and very physical celebration of her criahood. “Excellent – this’ll make a wonderful video for the blog!”
Simon ‘filmed’ it all.
Only he didn’t.
When he came to look at what he’d recorded later, he discovered that, in the excitement of the moment, he had pressed stop when he meant go, and go when he meant stop. So he’d actually recorded bits of the ground and his feet doing nothing, in between the bursts of cria-action, which he had so carefully and consistently followed with a non-recording camera.

Best not give up the day-job, eh? Oops…too late 😉

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Soirée

Posted on 28 November, 2008 by Simon

The Club du Jeudi is a weekly gathering at the Mairie of old ladies, to chat, knit, sew etc. On their behalf, at least one event is organised each year . . . .

And so, next Saturday, we are going along to the village hall, to be entertained. I can’t wait for the magic accordion!

Soirée poster

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