Printemps

Spring is definitely here. Grass growing. Sun shining. Blossom blossoming. Supermarkets full of gardening gear and Easter eggs. Compared with Manchester, there are definite seasons, at least in my limited experience, so far. Autumn was colourful, misty and wet. Winter was bloody freezing - all the time. And now, after three days of sunshine, it's all popping out: grass, leaves, lizards and traffic. There's a kind of manic work fest going on. The road menders are mending, the builders are throwing up houses, gardeners are digging industrial-sized heaps of manure into their vegetable plots. Instead of hibernating behind their closed shutters, huddling by their wood stoves, people are driving about everywhere, we actually had to stop and pull in to let another car pass on our lane the other day - that's the first time that's happened since we arrived.

I don't want to risk too much stereotyping, but in this part of the French world, people seem to like things to be clearly defined, to be as distinct like the seasons. Many people still have a midday sit down meal that lasts two hours with the family and so the shops shut for two and a half/three hours. But then they open at eight thirty and shut at seven and if someone comes and does work in your house - an electrician or a plumber say, they don't stop for tea or coffee. Work is work and lunch is lunch. In a similar way, winter is the time when not a lot gets done, when you stay in and don't drive places much unless you have to. Now they're all making up for it, hence the spring mania.

And it's not just the people we have to worry about. Apparently there are one million boars in France and the local paper is warning motorists to watch out as boars get frisky in spring and start jay-walking. If you run one over you can take it home and eat it but I think I'll pass on that.
Maybe this is going to be like one of those cruel Northern English weeks in March, you know the kind, when the sun comes out, and you think yes, here it at last, and then it goes again, the sun and the warmth and doesn't come back again until June. If then, let's be honest. So, yes, maybe this absolutely glorious spring weather in Correze will shift back next week into three fleeces and woolly-hat weather. In a perverse kind of way, I wish it would. This is too beautiful, too definite and distinctive a season. How will I ever bear to go home if it stays like this?

Come back rain. Come back snow.