Le Couvent Diary

With 20 huge old olives to prune, I set off for our bit of land shortly before lunchtime today. A nip in the air and a lifetime of pleasure in real fires had me setting up a heap of burning vine stocks in the fireplace of our little mazet.
Armed with a flask of coffee, a saw and some shiny new secateurs (thanks Mum) I was set to do a few hours work. After giving lots of air and light to two of the olives I noticed the odd flake of something kind of wet. Surely not sleet? It was 17 degrees last week. After a few more minutes the olives looked like this:

Oh crikey, we have another vine-pruning lesson tomorrow, after which lots of people are going to be coming to the mazet for lunch and a bit of work in the vines. At the moment it looks like this and Ali tells me tomorrow's supposed to be worse. Ho hum. I'll let you know how we get on.
Meanwhile, we've had my Mum and her husband, John, here for a fortnight. Thankfully, they are happy to sit around and witness our lives rather than have us chauffeur them all over the place. At one point I brought in a chainsaw and strimmer to mend. It was cold out so I put them on newspaper on the kitchen table. "I'm rather glad you left home" observed my mother.