My first blog....

Today seems like an auspicious day to start my blog. My darling husband hereinafter called DH is is tuxed up and living it up in Luvvieland at the BAFTA awards in London while I am 800 miles away in La France Profonde, cleaning out the bedroom of my darling pre-pubescent son (DS), complete with crusty old underwear hidden behind the bookcase, empty glasses under the bed growing the cure to most known illnesses and more dust than I know what to do with and wondering if that bloody cockerel will ever stop crowing.

That's me... living the dream... not!

So where am I? A question I ask myself regularly! Home for me is a crumbling 200 years old farmhouse with a kitchen so old you'd probably have to carbon date it. Said kitchen lacks one important element... an oven. Who on earth designs a kitchen without an oven? So I have one in the barn next to the house (well, why not!) Cooking in winter time is interesting to say the least. Our lovely ensuite bathroom, of similar age to the kitchen, is a former (some may say still is) pigsty, complete with 14 single glazed windows all round and no ventilation. What illnesses can't be cured by the bacteria growing in DSs bedroom can certainly be cured by the black mould growing incessantly in there. I'm sure half the old farmers in the vicinity hide down the lane from our house to catch a glimpse of me in the altogether through one of the many large, curtainless windows.

After two years of freezing winters, due to the discovery last year that there is absolutely no insulation in our roof, we fitted acres of reflective aluminium stuff all over the roof, giving the house the feeling of sitting inside a space station.

Outside are my 5 cats, neurotic golden non-retriever, and my small flock of hens (do hens come in flocks?) consisting of YamSing, my lovely Peking bantam, Daphne, his erstwhile and very put upon wife, Neige, the only survivor of my original Three French Hens and Forrest, the Charolaise cockerel who arrived a couple of weeks ago, supposedly as a mate for Neige, who can't stand him - well would you when he crows approximately every 40 seconds!

Somewhere outside too, is my darling daughter (DD) who is romping in horse poo with our neighbour's daughter. Oh to be 10 again!

Well, I must finish and go and sort out my 35 sets of sheets. Why on earth do I need that many? Another question to ponder as I watch the hens copulating in the front garden. It doesn't get any better than this.....!