The rains arrive, and so do the words.

The rains arrive and I fetch up with doggies who are not too impressed by the lack of sun. Bools, above, and Gussy below. Having been on a long two hour trek, all they want to do is laze away the day stretched out sunbathing. No chance of that today.

Actually Gus us waiting to have a look-see under the tarps which has been my project of late: cutting the old tarps up ready to burn when the weather permits. The boxes you can see house Hubs's collection of wine bottles for when he decides to uptake his on-off hobby of winemaking. The removal men, when packing up our home in the UK prior to moving us down here, obligingly packed these large glass bottles so they wouldn't break. In newspaper.

Well, you remember that we seem to have a bit of a problem with mice. It would seem that the building blocks for their homes came from the contents of these boxes. The newspaper is all shredded up. Not only that but there is a very neat round hole in the bottom of one of the boxes, suggesting that the mice were using it as their downstairs entrance and exit.

Not wanting to do a raid on their houses, the boxes have been left. They are now soaked.

And this is the state of our courtyard, looking windswept but minus some heaps of stuff which has been filling the space up. In between showers I have been having a go at tidying it up. You wouldn't think so, would you! Ah well.

There has recently been an empty space in my head where the words for these blogs should have been. Unlike some people I know, who can think up a subject then wrap text round that thought, I can't. If the words come into my head I can write them down. If they aren't there then I can't. For the blogs this isn't so bad, but when writing my books this is a problem. I sit at my PC with an empty head. Then from out of the emptyness comes the words. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Where do these words come from! Not out of thought. If I plan what to write then the words come out stiff and dull. But if the words arrive in my head, to be written down immediately or else they are gone for good, they carry a fluidity which I cannot own. And yet they come from me. But from where inside this head of mine.

The inside of my head is like the photo of the courtyard. All higgley-piggley most of the time, despite my best efforts to get it straightened up.

The rains have arrived. The river Adour is busy rearranging the efforts of the men with the diggers who took our river beach over to the other side of the river. Gus is minus his plastic collar, and is starting to find confidence with living here despite being batted around like ball beneath the eight feet of two huge alsations into whose garden he thought it a lark to wander into this morning, Bools is continuing to try and discipline him into behaving but is most times OK with him, Hubs is up on some scaffolding in the halfbarn at the moment filling in the holes in the wall. Hopefully the bats who we have just realised live in those walls, would have vacated said holes in the wall. Last night, upon squirting some water into a hole in preparation to filling it, Hubs was surprised to receive a sharp string of expletives from the inhabitant. He filled the hole anyway. I have not checked to see if a hole was remade signalling the safe withdrawal of its occupant.

No bats tonight. They are either avoiding the cold weather, or decided to evacuate our halfbarn. And as I write this, (10 pm) I can hear, up in the starry coldness above my head, the geese. Flying south. Towards warmer climes. Yesterday another great flock of other birds passed by overhead. For ten, fifteen minutes, that is the time it took the flock to fly past. I wished them well. I love that I am on a migration flight path. I love that those little creatures are making that most magnificent of efforts to follow a need to be somewhere else.

So wet doggies were towelled off, and given a lovely roast infront of the fire. That, I think, was almost as good as a dollop of sunshine to them.

And a thought: It is good to have a head which wants to do things, wants to explore things, wants to say things because it keeps a freshness in one's life which the years cannot diminish.
Au revoir mes amis.

Ps. I don't think that it was Gus who upset the wild boar who swam across the river and ran across Claudine's garden and then Bruno's field with Fleur in full chase behind it. I don't think it was. Even though the direction from whence it came was the very same direction in which we had been dog walking that very hour.