Blog in France

I’ve never talked much about our fish on this blog, and since it’s animal week, then they should get a look in. We have three carp fishing lakes. Carp – ciprinids – are cool fish. Izaak Walton said so in his famous book, The Compleat Angler. To be precise, he...

Gigi has just brought another mulot into the house, and been quickly chased out. Mulot is the colloquial term round here for any sort of small country rodent. The usual suspects are campagnols or field rats, which is what they used to be called. It was my friend Georges-Louise Leclerc...

Look at the photo carefully. Can you see him? I spotted this large écrevisse, crayfish, at the dam end of the middle lake yesterday. He’s the biggest one I’ve seen for a while. He was covered in silt and lying low in the water so I couldn’t make out if...

The gite garden has never been so well maintained as it has been this year – thanks to our guinea-pig gardeners! It wasn’t intentional. Back in the spring, the male guinea-pigs bust out of their run on their lawn and evaded capture for a few days. Once we were certain...

During the last gite changeover, I had, sadly, to vac up a lot of dead ladybirds off one of the windowsills. It’s the time of year that they start to wander indoors, looking for somewhere cosy to spend the winter. I’m not sure why this lot all perished. When I...