Many moons ago, when we first moved to the Corrèze with baby daughter and retired cat, a kind man with a funny piping voice and a name like Peugeot caught me struggling with a winter’s worth of wood one fine autumnal day. He watched with wry amusement as I tried to steady the volatile logs before chipping in with the Gallic equivalent of, ‘No, you don’t want to do it like that; you want to do it like this’. He taught me how to log-pile, yodelehehee!

This was the same kindly…

Let’s face it – we haven’t had much of a spring, have we? Sunshine-wise, spring has barely sprung. And yet there is something wonderful about all this rain. Unquestionably, we need it. Only the other day it seems, I was sitting in my favourite old-style coffee house in Brive, sipping a café coursé and glancing at pictures in Le Montagne of parched reservoirs in the Corrèze, which could have been pictures of the Gobi Desert.

All this rain has also resulted in a riot of…

‘You mark my words, there’ll be blood on the streets within a year,’ a politically moderate woman of Antillean origin told me at the start of the week, just after the presidential election. She spends her days immersed in the news on her computer and I think she was suggesting that our new president won’t be sufficiently severe with France’s North African population to keep them in check and prevent wholesale blood-letting.

It was a text early on Monday morning that informed me of…

Today, a wet Sunday, is Election Day in France. Seconds out, Round Two. Since I don’t have the right to vote, even though I pay my taxes and social contributions here, I’ve found other ways to occupy my time.

After a leisurely breakfast – during which I finished reading the novel that I’ve been stuck with for longer than I would have wished (pride demanding that I finish it, since I found the hardback copy in a Glasgow Poundland and don’t want to admit to myself that I should…