First up I took it apart. There are the three trays of compost – ready-to-use, worms in progress , and the new scraps layer. In the photo below the finished ready-to-use compost is in the yellow bucket.

Closer look at the end product of the wormery. It’s a little coarser than the shop stuff but it’s home-made and very ecofriendly, so who cares. It does the job of enriching the soil every bit as well.

Here’s the top layer which we’re putting scraps into now.

You can see coffee grounds and filter paper, egg shells, corks, teabags, tisane sachets and some chicken manure above. I may stop putting egg shells in as these take a long time to break down. However, the soil and plants don’t seem to mind them.

Here’s the base of the wormery. It fills up with a very soil-friendly gloopy liquid which you can tap off, dilute with water in a watering can and use to give your plants a treat.

Now onto bad things for plants. Here’s current public enemy number one. This one was in the polytunnel.

And so was this one. Not good.

They’re not being allowed to stay.

We must set up some slug traps as soon as possible to deal with these varmints.

And to finish, a rather nice photo, if I say so myself. Here’s a bee-like bug I spotted at the Pierres Jaumatres this afternoon. More about this trip soon …

Elastration.

And yes, it probably is what you think it sounds like. Elastration (from “elastic” and “castration”) is a bloodless method of castration or tail dockign used in animals. It involves putting a very tight elastic band around the relevant body part until it drops off. It’s a popular method because it’s cheap, doesn’t require anaesthesia and pretty much anyone can do it.

A tail docking kit – for a very large herd! Note the pliers…

We finally found a packet of elastrator rings for April’s tail and looked up what to do with them. I discovered that elastration is best carried out as soon as possible so April at eight weeks is now too old. However, some findings show that applying the elastrators to lambs the moment they’re born may mean that don’t ingest enough colostrum because of the pain. So in that case it’s best to wait for a few days beforehand. But whatever time you chose, it’s still very uncomfortable for the animal, as you can probably imagine.

I started doing a lot more looking into the matter. According to some sources it’s more traditional than necessary. On sheep the tails are docked for cleanliness and to help prevent flystrike (blowfly). We lost little Bertie the llama to flystrike last year, and had to treat Amélie the alpaca, Lambo and Mrs Suffolk with aggressive chemicals to rid them of their afflictions. It’s a very nasty thing to happen to an animal. However, there’s a lot of literature saying that tail docking isn’t the main prevention of flystrike, keeping your animals’ rear ends’ clean by controlling diarrhea and generally hygiene is more effective. And flystrike can start in wounds and in any patch of damp, thick wool as we know, not just around a daggy (the unfortunate – for us anyway! – term for a dirty) butt.

There are pros and cons for tail docking. But whether sensibly or not, April gets to keep her tail. As well as missing the right time, we also didn’t realise that we needed special pliers to put the elastrator rings onto a tail with. Possibly we could have improvised with something else, but I imagine you have to work quickly and accurately with a wriggling lamb attached to the tail. No room for error.

So, since there are no more lambs arriving here this year, we have until next spring to decide on our tail docking policy, or non-policy.

There was a short shower so I’m glad I took my photo of these lovely crepe paper flowers that were decorating the whole village when I did. They looked very sad the next day after their soaking.

On Sunday morning there was a service at St Clair’s church, which Chris and I cycled down to. It involved lots of singing and some bread blessing, and then there was a procession down to our miraculous spring. The water is reputed to cure eye problems. One of the statues from the church – I’m guessing St Clair although she looks rather too masculine and bishopy – led the way (carried by four men so I’m guessing it was pretty heavy).

Three people carried baskets of the cut-up blessed bread which was shared around after a prayer down at the spring. It was rather nice, if a little baffling. I’m not quite sure where the bread came in, but it was very tasty.

In the afternoon I cycled down to Nouzerines again, this time with Caiti and Rors to have a poke around the stalls and amusments. Disappointingly there were a lot fewer of the latter this year, possibly something to do with there having been a big falling out amongst the committee members earlier in the year. Five out of six of the officials suddenly resigned, so a new group had to be quickly assembled and didn’t have much time to get things organised. I’m grateful they managed to get anything done. Rors felt hard done by as he’d be coaxed into coming for the ride by the promise of chips, but there was no one manning the food stall. We browsed at the vide grenier stalls, but there wasn’t anything we took a fancy too, and let’s face it, we have enough clutter of our own so don’t need to buy anyone else’s! We had a quick look at the old motorbikes on display too.

And on the subject of village-organised events, every year there’s a collection of .thanks to the Mairie. Following some breakdowns we had a dishwasher and a washing machine to get rid of, plus a couple of smaller items. Thank goodness for the tractor! Here’s the stuff being loaded up and taken up to the gate to await collection.

But we’ve had some other piglets born – guinea-piglets. Two litters of three each have arrived, thanks to Cleo and Cupcake, the mothers.

One of the first batch

One of these piglets is Pico Pig, the tiniest baby guinea-pig I have ever seen. He’s about a third of the size of his brothers, sisters and cousins, and they’re not huge since we seem to specialise in producing small guinea-pigs. We joke that we’re on our way to producing nano-pigs.

Pico compared to his brother, who’s only small himself

Twice Pico has pushed his way through the small gauge wire on their cage. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but he can do it! We’re trying to help build him up with some doses of sugary water to make sure he’s got enough strength to get hold of mum’s teat occasionally. Guinea-pigs only have two teats yet generally produce more than two babies. Fours and fives are quite common. So not a very good design and one which puts the weaker babies at a disadvantage. We tried milking one of the mums (we’ve milked alpacas and llamas, so why not a rodent?) but it didn’t work. However, Ruadhri announced that the milk was very sweet after he licked his sticky fingers. We’ve also tried holding Pico to his mother’s teat but either she’s too stressed to co-operate or he associates contact with us with the sugary water now and isn’t that fussed about getting any milk.

Pico getting his extra rations

We’ll just have to see how he gets on. He’s very tiny but he seems fairly tough so fingers crossed he makes it. We have guinea-pigs to spare and then some, and we’re not soppy about our animals, but we’ve got to give the little guy a chance.

chelou: this is the verlan (French slang that reverses the two halves of a word) for louche = shifty, seedy, weird

choupinet = cute, sweet

flash-mob = well, flash-mob ie a group of people who organise via the internet or mobile phone some sort of display in a public place

Googliser = to use Google to find information

nomophobe: great word this! It describes someone who is addicted to their mobile and can’t cope with being without it.

textoter = to communicate by text

préquel/le = prequel, as in Star Wars!

hashtag = #

vingtenaire = someone in their twenties

speed dating = same thing!

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a generous smattering of Franglais appearing? Looks like the old Académie, that official moderator of the French language, is losing its grip a little.

Every minute, across the world, 100,000 Tweets are sent. And now French schoolchildren are sending them as part of their lessons. Twittclasses are being experimented with by 300 teachers in primary schools. The idea began on a school trip when a teacher noticed how kids were sending Tweets to their parents on their mobiles to let them know how they were. The kids had to be clear and succinct when communicating, which are useful skills. And so the Twittclasses began. Each day one child in the class sends a Tweet to another Twittclasse in France, or abroad, telling them what they’re doing, or asking a question, or even giving a move in a game of Twitter chess. Knowing that quite a few people are going to read this Tweet, the pupil writes very carefully so as not to make mistakes and obviously has to keep it brief too (less than 140 characters).

This sounds a rather cool idea and maybe I can use something like this in my English Club. Hmm.

And here’s the verb Tweeter in all its permutations that only the French could think of!

In 1912 another tennis competition started up, the World Hard Court Championships, which was open to anyone, and this encouraged the French Championships to open its doors to anyone. In 1928 the event moved to the Roland-Garros stadium where it’s been ever since. The Stade de France offered the tennis authorities the three acres of land on the understanding it was named after this famous French aviator. Roland Garros went on to become a pilot in the First World War, shot down a month before the end of the war and a day before his 30^th birthday in 1918. He was involved in the development of Fokker’s interrupter gear which allowed planes to shoot machine guns forwards, in synchronisation with the propellers.

Roland-Garros, the tournament, is famous for its bright orange clay courts. The surface is made from crushed brick. Two wealthy English twin brothers, Ernest and William Renshaws who had many wins at Wimbledon, were on holiday in the south of France in the late 19^th century and drove along a crushed brick road in the Alpes-Maritimes. They were looking for an alternative surface to grass for a tennis court and thought this would be perfect. The idea spread from them. In the early 20^th century Charles Bouhana perfected the technique of laying the clay court. It consists of five layers. The top one consists of 2-3 mm of crushed brick. The other layers are limestone, clinker, pebbles and stones in descending order, giving a total depth of around 30 cm.

William and Ernest Renshaw

The French Open is hugely popular in France but the main reason I like it is that it means Wimbledon isn’t far away. I enjoy watching a bit of tennis, but the end of Wimbledon heralds the start of the Tour de France and that, for me, is the best sporting event of the year.

The Fren

My two new members today swore blind that Madame CPE (Conseiller Principal d’Éducation – i.e. Principal Education Advisor, person who keeps the school going) said that if it was OK with me, it was OK with her for them to join. I’m suspicious since this doesn’t sound like Mme CPE at all, or reflective of the French approach to anything which is very formal and restricted, but it’s fine by me. If they want to come, then that’s great!

TEFL preparation is taking me about three hours for every hour of teaching but I guess I’ll speed up. Plus once I’ve got lessons organised, I can reuse them in the future with or without a little adaptation. I found out during the first session that the kids are very reluctant to speak English so I’m concentrating on oral activities for now. Wenlock comes in handy. Rather than go round the class in a predictable fashion, we throw Wenlock around between us to choose the next person to speak.  

We did a wordsearch today that they enjoyed. It was based on books. They had to find English words and then give the French translation of them which they found quite tricky. This was despite the fact that there’s a lot of correlation between English and French words in this field. There’s a lot in general as I pointed out to them the first week. There are up to 15,000 true and semi cognates between English and French, all due to William Conqueror bringing his culture and language with him along with 7,000 soldiers when he invaded. Don’t believe me about the similarities. Here are the words we used: Cognates – page, fiction; semi-cognates and very similar – author (auteur), illustrator (illustrateur), chapter (chapitre), title (titre), cover (couverture), story (histoire); trickier – word (mot, and lots of kids thought this was world and put ‘monde’), write (écrire, an most kids mistook this for white and so put blanc), bookshop (librairie), ebook (livrel, and none of them had one which was a surprise to me), and paperback (livre de poche).

I’m overcatering with activities for each lesson but that’s better than running out of ideas, although since I have a huge fund of campfire songs at my disposal due to my many happy years as a Brownie, Guide and Ranger we’d never be left twiddling our thumbs. And the library is proving popular. We have so many books I thought I’d provide a selection of them for the children to borrow if they wish. Hopefully I’ll get them back but it’s not too drastic if I don’t. It’s worth the risk.

On the farm front our pregnant animals are steadfastly refusing to give birth and I’m beginning to think that the first piglets will be guinea-piglets. We left the tiny boar, the latest baby, in with the females too long and a couple of them are definitely bulging. Cute photos coming soon I think! The poultry have settled in well and already responding to ”chook chook” which is an all-purpose command that they associate with food. It’ll provide the wherewithal to round them up in the future once they start free-ranging.

And it’s still raining…

Still, the exercise blew the cobwebs away and the rain washed any remaining strands off. Rors would have been happy to read all day, which is commendable but little boys need exercise.

It’s also Eurovision tonight. Now that’s good and bad. Good, because I love it, and bad because I’ve got into the habit of doing the income tax return on Eurovision day. So, that day has come. Actually, it’s not too much of a hardship. The forms are prérempli – pre filled in – with a few details, such as how many children you have to save you the bother of counting them for yourself every year, and also with the various amounts of interest on bank accounts and whatnot that are tax free. Other than that we don’t have a lot to fill in ourselves. Being an autoentrepreneur, I have to send in a statement of our earnings and the requisite cotisations (social charges) once every three months, so all that side of things is always up to date. It’s working out where to put everything that’s tricky. There’s a fiendish coding system using a number followed by two letters – clearly chosen completely at random so that they have no connection at all with the item they denote – which you have to match in various places. I was stumped today. I was meant to put a total from one form onto another at the point marked 8TA but I can’t find the bugger anywhere and I’ve been through umpty times. They’ll have to put it in themselves, assuming it actually exists, and if anyone’s going to get thrown into jail for not being able to find 8TA it’ll be Chris since he’s head of the household. I’ll visit him and take him cookies, never fear!

Now, lots of people love to hate Eurovision, but as I hinted earlier, I love to love it. People say the music’s crap but it’s not. It might at times be weirdly foreign to non-natives of that particular country or simply not to your taste, but that doesn’t make it rubbish. The performers are oozing with talent, most of them are also stunningly good looking and there are some pretty nifty stage routines too. Surely you remember the French Olympic athletes from last year? It’s a real pro-Europe thing and it’s educational. I mean, when else would you hear Azerbaijani or Icelandic, for example? (Unless of course you live in those countries.)

It’s a fun, energetic, positive, optimistic, brilliant event so just enjoy it! I will.

I’ve ordered nine again – three whites, three blacks and three greys, like last year, as that seemed to be a good combination and has kept us going until this week when the last frozen turkey portion became a pie.

The whites are twice the size of the others.

Here are the whites and greys (bronzes)

I bought two brown chickens too, either for the table if they start crowing, or for laying if they don’t.

The black turkeys are the youngest and smallest

They seem happy enough in their super, duper poultry house. In fact, they look rather lost in it! They were in a state of bewilderment to start with but soon started pottering around and have found the food and water.

Settling in

So once again the stables are full of the strange popping noise that turkeys make and their little whistles. The gobbling won’t start from any males we have for several more months, not till they’re mature.

The chickens are very perky

I still hope to one day get some fancy Ardennes red turkeys since I think they’re splendid birds but these guys will do me nicely for now.

And here’s the smart one of the group – he or she was first to the food bowl!