Swallows and Spitfires....

It's going to rain tomorrow. I know this because the swallows told me. There I was, drinking a beer on the terrace of a music café, and then they zoomed into view. Three of them.

Swallows are excellent flyers who change speed and direction at almost vertiginous speeds, particularly when they sense rain coming. They are beautiful to watch, so graceful, elegant, playful and delicate. They are my favourite birds.

Anyway, in they came like Spitfires fighting Stukas. Banking and rolling to escape each other, turning on a wingtip and accelerating, ducking and diving, slowing down to be overtaken, spiralling down towards the ground at breakneck speed, shooting up vertically like rockets. A real dogfight.

Except that, unlike warplanes, swallows don't try to shoot each other down. They just love their freedom and like to have fun. No cannons, no bullets, just the joy of living....

Snow and Silence

Hi, I took a drive out to the country today to see how work is progressing on the two small houses on the same largish property in the country that a friend and I are having renovated (more here). Things are moving along relatively smoothly so all's well there.

Having checked the work there wasn't much else to do elsewhere and outside because it has snowed recently and the ground is frozen. So I took a few pictures because the snow looked pretty out there in the fields. Here are three of them.

 This was taken from the terrace of one of the houses. Garden in front of it, veggie garden next, behind the first fence, and there will probably be a couple of donkeys in the field beyond that. It all looked so peaceful and there wasn't a sound to be heard anywhere in the cold thin air....

Here's a view over to the left. The rather ramshackle outhouses (want of a better word?) were chicken coops in the past and there's a lot of clearing up to do both in and around them. One of them shall be welcoming new chickens and fresh eggs when the big move from Lyon comes, towards next summer. There's a field on the far side of the coops, its future use as yet undecided.

As I said earlier, it was quite cold although at -5C it was bearable but still, it was cold enough to freeze the water dripping down off a disused rain gutter. I took this photo because I liked the various shades and qualities of the blacks and whites and greys. The gutter, the bushes, the sky, the snow, the translucent icicle...

I know there are many more colours to be seen during spring, summer and autumn, much more life and energy too, but I appreciate the sort of solitary peace and calm that winter imposes and that nature must wait through patiently while winter does its cold, hard and lonely work of quietly preparing the land to receive each new year's plants and crops.....

Autumn trees, birds, statues, a bear and largish cats...

The weather was wonderful this afternoon so I put on my coat and went for a long and leisurely walk in the Parc de la Tête d'Or. It's one of France's biggest urban parks. Trees here are beginning to shed their leaves in preparation for winter and that means that the park is particularly beautiful at the moment.

There weren't many people there because I arrived at about 4:30, when many people are still at work, but I didn't mind. It was almost as if I had the whole place to myself.

Here are some photos I took whilst walking around.

The park has several entrances and this is the first thing you see as you go through on of the smaller ones.

There is a lot of birdlife in the park and some species are not what you'd usually see in your back garden. Apart from the ducks that is.

Here is one of my favourite statues in the park. I appreciate its simplicity and it has been tastefully situated.

I wanted to take some pictures of trees and my route towards the most wooded area of the park went through the zoo. I'm not a big fan of zoos, but what can I do, they are there, so I thought I'd snap a few pixtures of some of its inhabitants. There's a bear....

...and some big cats too. The male lion was roaring and although I've heard lions roaring many times in my life it never fails to impress me. The leopard was prowling around quietly.

But I had come to see the trees as they changed colour and I took lots of photos of them. The first one looks like it's growing out of the top of the drinks and snacks stand and as I walked around I saw many other splendid colours.

But of all the many thousands of beautiful trees in the Parc de la Tête d'Or this is my favourite.

May I wish everyone an excellent evening.

Towards the quiet life life in the countryside

After fifteen wonderful years spent here in Lyon I have decided to move out to the countryside. I still very much enjoy living here, but as I'm nearing my sixties some aspects of what the city has to offer - bars, clubs, rock concerts etc - have witnessed a steady decline in my presence over the years and I have been spending more and more time in the country at friends' places because I appreciate the serenity of being out of the city.

And so it is that I am buying a house just outside a small village not far from the Alps with a very good friend I have known for many years. In fact it's not really 'a house', but two houses and several outhouses on a fair-sized chunk of land. 5,250m² to be exact. Neither is very big but we will be able to live our own lives whilst both looking after the animals we intend to have as well as tending to the land. There is a lot of renovation to do but we both know enough tradesman to get most of the work done at a reasonable price. Scheduled move-in date is next August.

Here are some photos of it all taken on two separate occasions, starting with a couple of views from the lane outside.

My place, with hers to the left in the background

Both houses under a beautiful cerulean sky

A view of the mountains with the houses behind me

Here they are again, this time taken from within the garden.

Hers, complete with balcony, and..

..his. No balcony this time, but a lot of weed-clearing to do!

The views from the windows are great. There are almost no other houses in sight and the only thing which breaks the silence is the birds chirping away and someone's donkey braying. That is going to make a change from Lyon, where as I type these words I am looking at an apartment block just over the street from my apartment. The road is busy all day long.

Once cleaned up there's going to be a table and chairs in the shade out there

From a bedroom window

This view takes in some of the extent of the land, which goes down to the trees, although there is more to the left with a couple of ponds and a henhouse. It's separated into a garden, then what will be a vegetable garden, and then a field for two ponies and, when needed for grass-cutting purposes, the neighbour's sheep.

Oh, and there's a functioning well too, on the left. That'll need building up

 My place is going to be a three-room affair basically, with a salon-american kitchen and a large walk-in-shower-cum-WC-cum-dressing room downstairs. There may eventually be a bedroom in the loft. It used to be the farmer's abbatoir and as such will need a fair bit of work, but although it looks in a hell of  mess right now the work won't take that long.

Half of the living room

Half of the bathroom

The surrounding area has several nature trails and bicycle tracks. Not surprising really because it is very pretty indeed. Here are a few views from within a two-kilometre radius.

A tributary of the river Rhône, looking upstream...

...and downstream

Looking over the fields towards the nearby village

Finally, I found a lovely wild rose growing on top of a wall where it meets my house during my last visit. I hope to be able to leave it untouched during the renovation work in the hope it will come back next year.

Simple, and beautiful

 Meanwhile, off I pop to get on a crowded metro network for a meeting. Ah well, not for much longer...