Why am I sitting at the keyboard when I should be out putting the Acanthus Mollis in the perennial bed, finish planting the last seeds, popping a few lettuce in where the butternut squashes will be?

Cos it is RAIning and blowing a GAle and beLOW 10 degrees See that is why.
Will someone remind me why we came to France?
Do I blame the volcano?
Or the interminable winter when the sun disappeared in early December and, apart from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when we weren't here, didn't re-appear until mid-March, around the same time that the North wind set in?
I am not moaning, really, as hibernating like the French can be pleasurable. Light the woodburner, make soup, listen to wall-to-wall Radio 4 - or 6Music when it's the Afternoon Play or the journos get too excited about the Election...
But it is a too-sudden return to enclosure just as all the Events started, the interesting and varied DIY entertainments that are crammed into the 4 fine-weather months.

We kicked off with the first Soirée of the year held by the Aquitaine French/English cultural social group. Bring and share food and wine and dance from 7.00 til 11.00pm. The dances are Line Dances, (my how the French love 'Danse Country', they dress up and everything,) but the music is jiveable, jiggable, twistable, so around the edges of ragged, hopping lines, peeps do their own thing, happily colliding as lines suddenly grapevine into them.

The next day, getting up and down the stairs, (still cardboarded, another story I may get to,) was a tad difficult, but off we went to the French Vignerons who are Easterly neighbours, for their open day.
1st of May, le premier Mai, Porte du Bonheur, when men give their ladies Lily of the Valley and the good weather switches on.
Well it sort of did, bright and breezy, cool after a summery week. We didn't join the dozens eating at long tables in the vines, but looked at all the craft stalls and bought the aforementioned acanthus, or Bear's Breeches, and a hawthorn called Paul's Scarlet, then back for a cuppa before setting off West for our English Vigneron neighbours at Domaine Chater, (google 'em,) for a Quiz Night.
Les Quizerables, as our team are known were miffed not to win as
a) we often do, and
b) the prize was a crate of the Chater's best wines.

The following day, a Vide-Grenier, literally 'Empty Attic' in English, a Car Boot, at Soumensac, but rain chilled our enthusiasm for abandoned household effects and rusting farm tools and we set off for a drive, in the vague hope of finding a beer. but it being Sunday, Lot-et-Garonne was shut. It's the children that mystify us, how do the French keep their children shut up all day? Why are there no 12 year-olds riding around in decreasing circles on bikes? Where are the little ones playing on the garish plastic swings that litter gardens? How do les Ados get together for a whine, a whizz about on those annoying mopeds and a crafty smoke?.
The next Vide-G is next Sunday, at Agnac, after a Saturday Fete Day of walks, boules and cyclo-cross and a lot of eating and drinking; I hope it gets fine for them

Right, Eddie Mair is on and he is my signal to cook dinner, (6.00pm here,) so I'll post this - the cardboard on the stairs saga will have to wait.