Log fires burning

Log fires are irresistible. There's a quality about the heat along with the glow of the flame that warms the spirits as much as the bott, knees and other chilled parts of the anatomy. And a log fire quickly brightens up a grey day.  We got back to French grey-dom on Thursday after nearly two months of English grey-dom. The house was fine, but definitely needed a few burning logs to take off the edge. We keep our supply of logs in our garage along with a chain saw. Not an item I ever thought would feature on our list of domestic essentials. Chainsaws, at least in my mind, are associated with remote living and lumberjacks. But here, our log supplier chops and delivers in large pieces, so we need a chainsaw to cut them to a more practical/usable sizes.  Log fires are the norm as the main heat source. Modern houses like ours have central heating, but the cost of electricity is pretty high compared to the cost of logs so like everyone else, we had a stove installed and it's brilliant. Really does the job.  Mike has become a real dab-hand - avoir le tour de main - with the chainsaw and lighting the fire, I am a novice by comparison.

So Thursday morning, after an overnight crossing, we arrived with loaded car.  Our move to France has officially begun. It was so loaded with household paraphernalia, I'm surprised we weren't doing wheelies all the way back home to Cravant. Wasn't sure how 'wheelies' translates in French, so looked it up. There are a couple of options. Le wheeling or la roue arrière. I prefer Le Wheeling. It's more succinct and fun. I suppose it would be used with faire (+le wheeling). But translator sites seem to come up with la roue arrière as the primary expression. So. . . I'm surprised with the amount of gear that we had loaded in the car, que nous ne faisions pas la roue arrière sur le chemin du retour en France. We had boxes and cases with clothes, shoes, books, crockery, musical instruments. If customs had done a spot check on us we'd have been pretty pissed off having to unload that pile. Fortunately in all the time we've been coming to France, (twenty-five years including holidays and work) we've only been spot-checked once.The customs officer looked in the boot and found a large teddy bear staring back at him. Mine of course - Beeton, whose slightly rotund proportions suggests the digestion of one too many of his namesakes recipes. Hope he doesn't read this!

Anyway everything is now unloaded and scattered about the place, and being unpacked bit by bit, as we attempt to reorganise cupboards and pick out the things here we want to get rid of.  We've caught up with neighbours, had calls from friends. I've been to a committee meeting for one of our Anglo/French groups, and can now confirm a photographic exhibition in October for two weeks from Sat 5th. There are five of us involved. Steph, the only female chef in town who owns and runs La Treille in Chinon, which is a hotel as well as a restaurant and strangely, without a website, had her first baby in November, just after we'd left. Yesterday we saw and met Juliette for the first time. She is so pretty with dark brown eyes, a real shock of dark hair - un amass de cheveux châtain foncé. We bought a Galette des Rois - a traditional 'cake' for Epiphany of puff pastry and frangipane from our favourite Chinon boulangerie in Place Mirabeau. Light as a feather and a perfect level of sweetness with a little trinket inside -as our Christmas Puddings used to have & perhaps still do? Being commercially made, our trinket was a tiny pink china macaron. Real macarons are very popular here and locally made, with a fantastic choice of flavours and colours. Today we're into Chinon again for the 'small in winter' Sunday morning market and lunch at Café des Arts. 

So - we're off to a good start in 2013. Hope it's started well for you too.