May = Summer

May = Summer
It's been a good few days. Today is muguet (lily of the valley) day in France (and celebration of workers, etc, of course). But driving the short distance into Buis I saw several roadside vendors of bunches of lily of the valley. Traditionally, you give it to your beloved on the 1st May here. And Chelsea got a good result in Barcelona!

Steve, Jo and Mana came round to eat a curry and that reminded me that the French have no taste for chili. I put none in it but the cloves and ginger had Mana gulping glasses of water although she declared the curry to be very good. When I cook a curry here, I hold on the chili and put a little bowl of cayenne pepper on the table for those with more tolerant and chili-friendly palates. I think Indian cuisine is still something the French as a whole have to discover.

The weather, after a spell of being changeable but dry, has really started warming up and the roadsides have begun showing their full range of colours. The coronilla are still providing a blanket of yellow on the slopes and the broom is about to join in. Judas trees (I've never seen one in England, don't know if they have an English name) and tamarisks are joining in as also are amalanches, which grow wild as small bushes rather than trees here, and the early valerianne which generally seems tot be coral red rather than the more pervasive pink which shows later. At closer to ground level, poppies are now abundant and show well against the type of euphorbia, with lime green bracts, that grows all over the place. The purple salvias are out and I first saw today the blue wild chicory. White campions are everywhere (I've never seen the pink variety here, which is much more common in England) and irises of course. Ladies slipper is abundant as also is vetch and star of Bethlehem, which again I have never seen in England. A few are now residing in my back garden. Against that, the show of blossom on almond, cherry, apricot and peach trees is now over and I'll have to wait a month or two to see the results of that in the market; cherries first and then peaches and apricots.

I haven't done a lot in the garden other than water, prick out some seedlings and plant the star of Bethlehem. However, I did dig the little trench needed for one side of the arch I want to put in. It really needed to go down 18 inches but, a foot down, I hit solid rock. So a foot it is going to have to be, with some concrete around; it should do the job as there won't be much growth up it this year.

And I've started playing around with possible formats for the brochure that will contain my English translation of J-F Colonat's guided tour of the village. Single rather than double column, the column running ~2/3 across a landscape A5 page with French and English pages facing one another seems to work best and I think it can be all made to fit, with photos and maps, on 16 pages of A5 but.................On decent paper, people will probably pay a couple of euros for that, which will get the production money back. Double column A5 portrait, will require 24/32 pages, which is what Daniel originally had in mind, so I may have a persuasion job on my hands.