The sunny weather has continued for another week and, with
no rain, we are watering the plants daily.
This is a welcome chore as it gives us one more thing to do each day during
our lockdown which is now in its sixth week.
Ironically we do find that time seems to fly by and, although we are up
by 7.30 at the latest each day, it seems we have only just finished breakfast
and mid-morning coffee break before we realise it is practically lunchtime. In
a similar vein, it is often nine at night before we sit down and relax for the
evening.
There are plenty of butterflies around including what seems
like more Holly Blues than usual. One
took an unusual liking to Buddy the other day.
He had just finished cooling down by standing in the River Marne when one
was attracted to the drying mud on Buddy’s back. This behaviour by butterflies is often seen
as they imbibe moisture/minerals from the edges of puddles and, less attractively,
from fox poo.
 |
| Buddy’ s Holly Blue |
Whenever Karen returns from her walk, she always has something
to report. I suppose that with each day
being the same, anything away from the norm tends to stick out. For example, Wednesday’s highlight was seeing
a breakdown truck with a car on its flatbed.
Nothing unusual in that she thought, until she noticed the car driver who,
rather than being seated next to the truck driver, was still sitting in his car
on the back.
The next day she was stopped by a gendarme and had to show
her attestation and ID. She was told she
was in a forbidden area and was asked to leave it. She knew it was forbidden as it was a public park but had only gone a
dozen feet or so into it to dispose of a poo bag in the requisite receptacle. As she was stopped after making the deposit,
she found it difficult to describe what she had been doing as we have never learnt
the French to describe what she had just done!
 |
| Buddy cooling down one morning |
I know there has been a lot of talk about the increased use
of group video calls for family and friends during the lockdowns and we have
been doing exactly that with our children.
During the week we had our first ‘friends’ session which turned out to
be good fun – talking with fellow boaters, Chris & Sue Hutchins and Mike & Lesley Fielding in the UK. One of the questions that
came up for us was, ‘How is your French coming on?’. This brought home to us
that we are not talking French at all this year as we are not able to meet
people. At the most, we do supermarket
French: ‘No we don’t have a store card’ and ‘Yes, we will pay by card’. This is almost less than tourist French
when all you need to know is how to order drinks in a bar 😉
It seems likely that the general public will have to wear
face masks when the restrictions start being lifted over here so Karen took an
hour or so out to make a couple of masks.
The other reason for making them is that we would want to wear a mask if
we catch the virus.
 |
| Our homemade face masks |
The good weather has meant that I have had no excuse but to
carry on with the boat paintwork prep, although I haven’t found it too strenuous
as it has to stop before lunch as the steel boat becomes too hot to touch
on the outside by then. A new excuse has arisen
over the last couple of days though: the wind.
It really has been too breezy to risk paint specks appearing on the girls’
boat next door. We remember someone
painting next to us on the towpath in the UK a few years ago and realised a few
days later that we had specks over our boat which could only have come from our
neighbours.
I mentioned last week that we had been watching up to ten
herons fishing at once along the waterfront next to our mooring. This only lasted for three days and we are
now lucky to see more than three or four at a time. We have no idea why the numbers have gone
down, is it the wind direction, the clarity or otherwise of the water or what? What we have seen though, are two more dead
deer, one on the towpath and one in the cut itself. They were both too far gone to see if they
had been shot or not.
When anyone in the port goes shopping, they always ask on the
port WhatsUp group if anyone else needs anything. This is very useful if you suddenly realise
that, due to a miscalculation, you have run short of something as it saves
risking meeting people during an unwanted trip to a shop. When Jan asked the group on one day, Karen
responded saying she wanted some epinard (spinach) but something went wrong in
the message delivery as Jan came back with blettes (chard):
It did allow Karen to keep to her, ‘One new recipe a week’ notion
she is following during the lockdown.
That evening we had a delicious chard, lemon and cheese pie:
Another thing mentioned last week was that we had both found
an Orange Tip butterfly egg apiece. We
have been checking them every day but, sadly, on Sunday they had both
disappeared. They seemed to have
completely gone as we couldn’t even find caterpillars that may have
hatched. As a sort of compensation, whilst
continuing the search, Karen found a batch of Large White eggs on a nearby
plant.
 |
| Eggs of the Large White butterfly |
Our plants have started flowering, especially the petunias,
and Gorete has made the pots even more colourful with the addition of some
windmills. The nasturtium and sweet pea seedlings are coming on well and we are getting close to having to pot them on.
 |
| Our colourful pontoon |
We celebrated the end of another week of lockdown by sharing a meal with the girls on Monday evening, during which we realised that our weekends have extended to include Mondays 😊
Now it’s time say goodbye until the same time next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment