The new household

Fred and Ginger are prize-winning visions of sleekness their home is full of toys and play towers

Fat boy and Fluffy are the hobo cats who live outside - Fluffy  is timid and has a very tiny head on her fat grey body, Fat Boy is her father - an enormous tiger-striped champ with a broken ear, his wide eyeballs give him an air of shockedness

I have been instructed to take care of all these cats - there is an entire room full of food for them including a fridge and a freezer packed with prime cuts of beef and chicken from the butcher.

This is Black Pete, the one-eared neighbourhood pirate cat - we are all scared of him

Testosterone Poisoning?

2nd June
We're all in a bad way at the moment - not me obviously because I'm a girl, but the boys have all got bad legs or fingers or something, one of the Camera Boys is so badly affected by hay fever that one eye is bandaged up and he appears to be out in soldarity with Pirate Cat. Ms Woolsfoot is concerned that we have succumbed to Testosterone Poisoning.


The Director has something snuffly - what could it be - Man Flu? ... no worse,

Swine Flu? ... worse even.

It must be Swan Flu!!!!

Watch out - it's coming to a menagerie near you.

Milk And Beans, Beans And Milk

26th May
There's a farm nearby that sells milk hot off the cow’s teat - on my previous visits I'd turned up at the wrong time (too early they're still milking, too late the milk lorry has taken it all away). Today when I arrived at the dairy a woman was swabbing the floor, we chatted in French at first, then she asked where I was from and she started speaking to me in English Canadian which was nice and interesting so my return was considerably delayed - but I did have several gallons of milk with me.

When I finally got back to the house I discovered that Mme Costaud had cycled by to tell us about a bees nest up a tree in the woods that was all open at the back. I was mortified to discover that The Director had shown her my potager. Like everyone around here Mme Costaud's potager is massive and immaculate - mine is a mess, the beans especially, are weedy and smothered with aphids. The Director thinks that she gave him some advice about pruning but I suspect she was telling him to set fire to it and start again.

I returned Mme C's visit and found her dressed in her husband’s clothes picking her way through a field of tree-sized broad bean plants. M. Costaud was in the back yard, wearing a lady's veiled sun hat and chopping wood. I joined in with the bean-picking and was sent home with very large sack of beans for our household.

Inept Cat Scaring

20th May



















Bowing to overwhelming demand (well one from French Fancy)
I present my actual, real life cat-and-children-scaring footwear

Hive Shopping

Following our recent bee fiasco I went and threw myself at the Maire’s mercy.

Where can I get a bigger, empty hive so we can make holes, then put bees in it?*

The Maire is quite mumbley and said something that I translated as
hhrrrmmmhmmm … later mmhm…nhmmn are you at home?

I wasn’t sure what this meant exactly but I said yes then went and lurked around the house wondering if he was planning to turn up today, tomorrow, next week... I really needed to go off and buy bricks and more plastic sheeting. The boys had gone filming at a lake and were out for the day. I ended up trying to intimidate a feral cat who comes round and terrorises our cat Julie - the invader is white with a black pirate’s eye patch. I made monster-claw hands at her and hissed, she flattened her ears, and made low blood-curdling growls like in those devil films. Monster-claw hands obviously weren’t going to work so I turned the hose on her.

The Maire turned up after lunch and I got in his car (still no idea what the plan was). He took me to a commercial apiculturalist – a very short man who was quite severely disabled, he swung himself about on a pair of crutches and gave me a tour of a machinery-filled shed where the honey is separated from the combs, it was quite gruesome - all dripping sticky after the morning’s honey-processing, with a surprising amount of dead bee debris around.

Honey Man and The Maire exchanged money for new wax sheets and a big wooden hive. The Maire refused my attempts to reimburse him and put me and the hive back at the Lovely House. He say’s he’ll be round when the weather is suitable to transfer the bees.

*The bees that the Maire brought round earlier this month were a small colony in a half-sized hive, as the colony grows they can be put into a full-sized hive (like repotting a plant)