Yes, it is summer not spring but I wanted to make full use of my new flickr account. Actually I have been using Flickr for about 2 years but somehow when Yahoo bought them out they decided that they were going to toy with my levels of patience each and every time that I tried to log in. I found myself going around in an unholy circle of sign in screens, forgotten passwords, unknown account and when I would finally break through that and emerge on the other side there would be a message asking me to "merge" my Flickr account with my Yahoo one. Something that I had done six months ago and sighing and merging yet again I would find myself exactly back where I began. It was easier just to begin again.

I love it though. After all a picture is worth a thousand words especially, if like me, you find it difficult to write even one hundred.

Anyway, Spring passed in all it's glory and it was glorious. We left France for Morocco in the damp, cold, dark winter and arrived back, three weeks later into a warm and golden wonderland where nature had formed rousseau-esque fantasies in our garden. Actually, we arrived back at night. No moon - pure inky blackness. But I was so curious to see the garden again, especially given the strange phantom visions that I had seen projected in front of us by the car headlights so I found a torch and went for a wander. Strangely the grass hadn't grown. Everything else was fecund and abundant a small mystery resolved the next morning when I realised that our neighbours had really kindly mowed the grass for us. "Oh, yes," they said "it was so high" and they indicated waist level "so we thought that we should do it for you." Isn't that beyond mere nice. We are lucky to have such good neighbours. Even naturism is totally acceptable in the light of such magnaminity.

And with the blooming of the flowers, the lush, drooping wisteria, the plump roses (which we had planted ourselves) and the garlic poking through everything seemed so much better and we set too and cleaned out the "tank" (an old water cistern) which was heaving with mosquito larva and salamanders and put in a little tribe of goldfish. We have a good survival rate at present considering we don't feed them. 24 out of 25. Strimmed some of the wilderness. Painted the pink columns, first a brown rather too reminiscent of a bad bout of amoebic dysentery and more recently a deeper, more chocolatey brown. We planted flowers bought a compost maker, although, to be honest, it is way too small for the sheer volume of vegetable matter that is still waiting to be culled (the two heavingly maggot ridden piles up in the forest where I throw our left overs are much more effective. They literally melt into the ground before I have time to avail myself of the rich, black humus.) Laurel and Hardy finished the roof. Sorely trying but it's done now, except that, when they said "Oh, yes, the wood and the beams are in good shape" what they really meant was that they are rotten with woodworm but since "we are roofers, not carpenters (well we are but we're not very good at that either), we can't be bothered telling you - we'll just cover it over, eh?". We visited little village fairs and "vide greniers" literally "empty attics". Visited "old" friends in Bordeaux for weird dinosaur adventures. Amazing how much money you can make with some moth-ey rubber "rexes" and low lighting. I catagorise our friends as old and new. For old read anyone we have had contact with for over six months (and like!). New? Anyone at all. Well, anyone who wants to chat and be friendly. This is a new life after all, where everything is compressed into days, weeks and months rather than years. And so we made some new friends too. Had friend/family visit - Ole and Marion and her family. And lastly, not leastly, ate vast quantities of locally grown asparagus. It was a good Spring.

Next up our visit to the US.