Perhaps a bit of company as well.

It has turned chilly and we are snuggled up indoors having just come in from an investigatory trip up into the garden to see where we could put a couple of mobile homes now that the Maire has said, yep, we can do what ever we want on our land. It is now that reality sets in and the project planning and cost evaluation begins. We looked up the cost of buying a septic tank in France and at a cool four thousand euros we looked at the cost of buying it in the UK instead then added the cost of the ferry, but take off the added value of visiting our Mums in the process and you can see that the simple concept of putting in a holiday destination to earn a few bob starts to get scary and decisions need to be made.  I called EDF to ask how much to put a new electric spur in at the back of the garden separate from the house as we have little enough supply coming in for us, let alone a  hair drying, shower mad holiday maker as well, and the cost for that, Madam, will be one thousand five hundred euros. Gulp.

We also have the OK from Monsieur Le Maire, Daniel to us, to put a tile patterned tin roof on the barn and now that Mike has his scaffolding to hand we can buy the panels as and when we need them making sure of course that they match and do this in a more organised and relaxed mode.  That makes a list as long as your arm of things we are getting involved in and we probably need to make three lists, Important, Not important, and Irrelevant then we can decide where to start.

Yesterday morning as I came off the field I saw that one of our hens was down, head up but most definitely down. We brought her into the warm and she was pretty much comatose but still with us so being British we bed her down into a box with a soft covering of hay so that she might die in peace and in the warm, nothing worse than going and feeling cold and abandoned. I know, and I hear you loud and clear, it’s a chicken, but we have eaten her delicious eggs for three years and we owe her a bit of compassion. Mike held old chikilicks whist I cleaned her botty and gave her water through a pipette and she responded a little then we left her in her box in the kitchen by the fire and I watched her all evening. At ten o’clock last night she stood up, opened her eyes and looked decidedly perky and took water from her bowl and looked us both in the eye as Mike lifted her and I did all my chicki chick noises. This morning she was again comatose and at midday she died. I am not sad, she had a good life and she rallied long enough last night to say bye bye. I went up to break the news to her mates and they couldn’t give a monkeys so I am really pleased that we did, and that she had a comfortable passing.

Tomorrow we go to a mobile home seller who goes to the UK and buys up all the ten year old vans that get kicked off sites and has found a lucrative business based in Caen.  Mike has been nurturing the idea of a mobile home on site for a few years now as we initially thought it a good idea when we hoped we may have the kids coming and that they would be happier in their own accommodation, so some of the investigative groundwork is done, we now need to decide if using our savings that are yielding nothing at the moment would be best spent on a project that will give us a little bit of income, and perhaps a bit of company as well.