It's been a funny old summer. I'm sitting here in a fleece and the quilts are back on the beds. The windows are resolutely shut and we have a big panel of corrugated asbestos standing outside our kitchen window channeling the rain water from the broken gutter away from our house. And all this is making me feel a little "cheated". This is the south of France. One of the main reasons for moving here was to escape rain. I should qualify that by saying over abundant rain. Rain is good. A few weeks ago I was begging for some as I hauled buckets of water from Kepler's bath to water the cherry, kaki and apple trees that we had planted in the autumn and spring. I want rain just not rain that never seems to stop. A shower here and there would be good. Like in the tropics. Heavy but over quickly.

Today became the fourth day of endless 24 hour rain. No repite. It drifted between monsoon and drizzle but it didn't stop.

It is afternoon now and the clouds have been wrung dry. The sun is back out so hopefully we will not leave summer only to go straight into dark, damp winter.

Anyway, weather aside the summer seems to have been short. Kepler is back in school and life seems very quiet. He goes in before 9am and we don't pick him up until 4:30pm. It feels like a long day for me. I miss his chatter and active little presence. I miss him following after me with his shears cutting everything in sight. His wheelbarrow is lying, unused half full of water as though it has just been washed up from some far away land. He doesn't feel the same way as I do, thankfully. He likes school just "not going to school". I have to find something to do that fills the time. And there areso many things that I have to do that it is, at times, a little overwhelming and so I end up doing a bit of this and a bit of that and accomplishing nothing in particular. I'm a little lost.

Anyway, the plums were abundant and lots of jam/fruit leather was made, the apples are tumbling of the tree at the rate of a barrow a day, the rhubarb became a little jungle, the tomatoes have finally died back and we actually had to buy some and the figs were gorgeous.

They are rotting on the branches now because of the damp, but last week they were magnificent. There is something wonderful about going outside your door, scrabbling around in the untidy branches of the fig trees, fingering their velvety skins to make sure that they are ripe and plucking one off and popping it into your mouth. Mostly they are just good but sometimes, and I don't know why - they are on the same branch of the same tree - but sometimes their taste is far beyond description. Nectar sacks.

I wasn't brought up with figs. I think the only figs we had were in Fig Rolls (american translation: Fig Newtons) but they are a very poor relation indeed to the real thing. Later in life I used to occasionally buy them in M&S and they were ok, but straight of a tree? I've become spoiled. There is no other way.

I have been holding back, trying not to eat too many, remembering something that I had heard about them being bad for diabetes. I am not diabetic but I certainly don't want to head that way if I can avoid it. But it turns out that figs are healthy masses of fibre, potassium... this ends here... I'm just going out to get one - or three - before summer is over and they are gone.