Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
hand was most put out and slunk off to my 'office/cubby hole' where I found her later watch-
ing the photos on my laptop screensaver, a judgemental look on her face like Brian Sewell in
a provincial art gallery.
It was all too calm and as a family, we just seemed to be waiting for something to wake us
up. Obviously I'd come to France in search of peace and this inactivity and all-round som-
nolence should have suited me down to the ground - but it didn't feel like peace at all, more
like an uneasy truce, the calm before the storm. It felt like the end of a siege and we were all
getting a little stir crazy.
Even my weasel seemed to have upped sticks and left, staying only briefly to rid us of the
rat, he had now gone, his mission complete; an itinerant dispenser of justice, The Weasel With
No Name. At least the horses were showing signs of spring in that they were moulting; every
few yards there were big piles of hair in their paddock as though there had been a hairdress-
ing competition and nobody had bothered to sweep up. You'd think of course that this might
put Junior in a friendlier mood, but no. Manuel and Natalie had been building a new fence in
preparation for the building work (the builders quite rightly having refused to work until we
could guarantee that Junior wasn't going to take a lump out of them) and so now he had taken
to just standing there most of the day angrily staring at the new, unbreachable wooden fence
and snorting the French/Horse equivalent of 'You Bastards'.
His mood isn't helped by Natalie frequently standing behind him with an empty wheelbar-
row hoping to break the world record for 'World's Fastest Manure Delivery'. It's an arresting
sight and clearly confuses the poor animal who although he dotes on Natalie, obviously feels
that the whole wheelbarrow thing is a bit of an imposition.
'Why don't you just tie a bag to his arse?' I said, venturing outside briefly in the hope of
annoying someone.
'Don't be silly,' she replied, by now impervious to my winter-induced 'looking for a fight'
mood. 'A little bit to the right,' she continued cajoling the horse to greater accuracy.
Despite almost terminal boredom, job creation isn't in my nature, especially if it involves
eccentric methods of animal-dropping entrapment. Natalie, however, is an artist at work all
year round. There is to my mind absolutely bugger all to do outside on days like these. They
are cold, frequently wet and the sky is usually dirty and grey, like an old smokers' beard, but
she'll be out there all afternoon until it gets dark, humming away to herself, talking to the
horses and wandering around the place planning for spring when there will be genuine work
to be done. In winter, she's like a horticultural snooker player, planning in advance the next
colour and where exactly it will go, only breaking from her reverie to peer in the window and
tut at me for my continuing inactivity.
Even when it's dark she will still be working on the garden; at one point just as it seemed
winter would never actually end she came in and started cutting out pictures of roses and
sticking them on to cardboard, completely in her own world. I watched her for a while, not
