We’ve just had us a most impressive storm down here in the sud-ouest. There was no thunder or lightning, it was a wind storm. And with gusts of 110km here in Mazeroux and up to 200km on the coast, it was deemed aggressive enough to earn itself a name. Tempête Liev started around 6am on Saturday. It mainly hit our western neighbour departments which were on red alert, but the Dordogne was on orange too. We’ve never known wind like it in all the time we’ve been here: it felt like the whole house was being shaken.
By afternoon it had calmed down but it staged a repeat the following afternoon, albeit slightly less ferociously. Neither us or anyone we know has suffered any serious damage, although we had to brave the gale to take down the fence around our veggie plot that was getting mangled – not an easy task. Miraculously, there were no fatalities anywhere, though there were some close calls reported with fallen trees just missing houses and cars.
Apart from that drama, it’s been another mostly quiet week here. We’re both still mostly busy and I’ve even managed to put two websites live this week – a rare occurrence these days! Matt’s back is showing more signs of being on the mend as he was able to go swimming this week and didn’t appear to suffer any after-effects, so that’s encouraging.
Not much else to be said for the week, so onto the weekend, which kicked off with a friday curry delivery. We were invited out the following night, so decided to just order for ourselves and stay in. In the end, we didn’t even have the curry as we had some leftovers to use up, but we had our samosas and bhajis as a starter.
The gale awoke us early the next morning. Well, more precisely, the gale and its effect on Smeagol and Louis woke us. We spent the day sitting out the storm and keeping warm and in the evening, headed out Lee & Richard’s for the evening. Richard is – yet again – back in the UK, so we were one host down. In his stead was Glenda, a good friend of theirs that, due to her frequent trips out, we see a lot of. We went out for a meal in a nearby pizzeria, and were joined by some other local friends of theirs, and Lee’s mum who lives not far away. It was a nice place and the pizzas were good if not excellent. Afterwards we went back to Lee’s for what turned into quite a number of drinks, and a very late night. Quelle surprise, I hear you say.
It was Glenda’s last night, and both Lee and his mum were also going back to the UK on the same flight. As the boys have on several occasions taken us to Angoulême for our UK trips, we took them all to Limoges the next day to save them the airport carpark fees. We set off after a fry-up that unfortunately didn’t do much to alleviate the hangover, on what was quite a long drive. It was 5pm when we made it home on the Sunday, just before Liev came back for its encore. We vegged out in front of the TV, had our delayed curries, and then crashed out for 10 hours of much-needed sleep. And that’s about it from me.