Weather

We arrived in September and it was still summer. Sun almost every day. Warm, reliable sun. We sat outside on the terrace. We happily ate lettuce – well at least I did. We said the kind of things you say when you come from the North of England. Wow. Sun! It’s hot out here. Isn’t this great. Isn’t this fantastic. Look, it's sunny again.


Lizards sunned themselves on the
terrace. Bees buzzed. Grasshoppers jumped. Ticks ticked in the grass. For the first two weeks of October, you’ve guessed it, there it was again. That lucky old sun had nothing to do but roll around heaven all day.


Then it snowed. In October. Our close neighbour Monsieur B shook his head apologetically and said, ‘Ce n’est pas normale.’ ‘Yeah, right,’ I thought.

One or two people back home have sent us gloomy, self-sacrificial emails, saying that we’ll be happy to know that the weather’s horrible there, that it’s dark and wet and cold. Et cetera. We appreciate the thought. But it’s winter here too. This is Limousin, one of the wettest places in France. They drain lakes as big as Windemere so the rivers won’t flood when the snows melt. We’re in the foothills of the Massif Central, and not far from here you can see the icy peaks of the High Correze and Cantal in the distance.

In November, it rained, Manchester-style, for days on end, the clouds resting on the treetops, small rivers running down the lane outside our house. In December, it snowed again, this time with more welly, and our lane was blocked.

Before I go on, let me just say that although what I’ve written above, and what I’m about to say below, about this winter weather, sounds like moaning and complaining, it isn’t. Or at least it’s not the same kind of whinging I usually do at home.

We deliberately came in September, so that we’d experience the autumn and winter first, so that we’d get a feel, a taste of the place – it’s hard to put into words - as a private French village, shutters battened down, going about its ordinary life. And that’s what we’ve got, although much of it isn’t at all what we thought it would be, for which we are grateful and of which more later. The weather-whinging comes naturally to us, we wouldn’t be true Mancs otherwise, but we do love it. Serious rain, proper snow, mists that fill up the valley like pure white seas: you see them coming and going. Somehow they matter more here.

Local French people seem just as obsessed with the weather - le temps - as people in the UK. Madame La Boulangiere says ‘Il fait froid,’ practically every time I go in. Mind you, she’s well aware that anything more linguistically complicated is likely to reduce us both to mindless smiling. And she’s right. At times, it is certainly froid, much froider than we usually experience in the centre of the city, even a city as poorly performing on the weather front as Manchester. Minus 4. Minus 6. Minus 8. We may be 1000 miles south of Manchester but we are are 1200 feet above sea level. I am wearing quaduple layers which is nearly all my winter wardrobe at once and it’s getting very itchy in here. In December I bought 3 hot water bottles.

We have central heating and a woodburner and it’s beautiful watching the oil level drop like the value of the pound and the logs burn. It’s a long time since I had a proper fire and I’ve missed one. This particular fire is designed to burn in two areas of the living space, which is a clever idea and also beautiful. The fire is big, like the barn, with two huge well insulated glass doors which do a fantastic job of showing the flames roaring up the chimney, and an almost perfect job of keeping the heat from coming THROUGH THEM! This is a big house, an old converted barn. It’s very barn-like. Brilliant beams, open staircases and lovely big windows. As well as being big it’s also high, full of lovely cold air. I sit by the fire and look up at the rafters. I think I bet it’s lovely and warm up there, under the tiles. Birds probably perch on the roof ridge to defrost their claws.
When we came to visit in February last year to look at the house, we met H, a lovely German chap who has lived here for 13 years and is in love with the place. We asked him about the winters here:
Does it snow much?
Nein, nein, he said. Hardly at all. And when it does snow, it hardly ever stays.
Just like Manchester, I thought. The odd light sprinkling. A frost or two. So far we have had five snowfalls, three of which stuck for days and one of which snowed us in. The forecast for tomorrow on Meteo is neige. Compared with what they get in parts of Germany, this probably is a light sprinkling. We’ve bought snowchains.