Sunday 25th March – (Still) Waiting for Spring

Apologies that there are no photos with this blog – there seems to be a problem uploading them to WordPress (the platform I use to write the blogs).  If anyone is a WordPress expert any advice would be greatly appreciated …

I can barely believe that when I was writing last week’s blog it was snowing heavily and last Monday we had 15 – 20 centimetres  of snow on the ground.  Thankfully, by Tuesday it had pretty much all melted away although that only added to the saturated ground!

Owing to the snow, I worked inside Grange on Monday and made a start at clearing out what will become the games room although I didn’t make much progress.  In fact that was the pattern of the week and, while I there wasn’t any day when I wasn’t working on something, there haven’t been any major milestones met but a lot of ‘bitty’ things completed.

Some of those bitty things included finishing off the cladding inside 3 of the garage parking bays.  Where I had started the internal walls previously I hadn’t completed them until the ceilings were done.  Having finished those a couple of weeks ago, I was able to finish the internal walls until I ran out of volige planks.  Unfortunately I couldn’t finish the entire job as having visited the DIY store on Thursday there were no planks available so it will have to roll over to another week. 

I was able to spend a bit of time outside and cleared all of the wood I had recently cut but which I had to leave on the lawn as it had been too wet to clear it away.  We managed to cut down another couple of trees on the boundary with our neighbours and I have planted the third of our 3 cherry trees that we had bought.  Having felled a poorly apple tree a couple of weeks ago, yesterday we replaced it with a ginkgo biloba which we had acquired in 2015.  Since then it had been sat in a pot never looked very happy. Hopefully it will like its new permanent home and thrive – if we ever get the spring.

On Friday we were delighted that the Auberge  du Menez reopened for the season with a new owner and chef, Yann Le Grand.  We were very lucky to get a reservation for Yann’s opening night all in the name of research of course(!) and while Yann is the third chef at the Auberge since we arrived, based on our experience on Friday he has more than maintained the quality of the restaurant (in fact it’s even better than last year).  We wish him well and hope he has great success – we will certainly be going again and can confidently recommend him to our guests.

It’s always useful to attend these local events as it gives us some useful information for other things that are going on in the area.  We learned that the Leclerc Foundation which housed a Picasso exhibition last year is hosting a Henry Moore exhibition between 10 June and 04 November this year.  For fans of sculpture and Henry Moore this would be an excellent opportunity to view more than 100 of his sculptures and 80 drawings in an uncrowded environment.  Kergudon would make an excellent base for your visit.

As ever work next week is very weather (and volige availability!) dependent but with the clocksgoing forward last night at least the evenings are now light until 9pm! 

Kenavo.