These are a truly French biscuit. They’re made by LU, a company that goes back to 1846 and which today is owned by Nabisco, which in turn is owned by Kraft. But back then, in Nantes, it consisted of husband and wife team Jean-Romain Lefèvre and Pauline-Isabelle Utile. I bet you can see where LU comes from now!

Originally they made fancy biscuits which they packaged nicely and sold to be given as gifts. Over the years as the company passed down through the generations, it morphed into large-scale biscuit production.

LU had an astute eye for advertising, commissioning top artists of the day to paint pictures that they could use as publicity. One of the most famous of these is Firmin Bouisset’s Petit Écolier (little schoolboy), which he created in 1897. It’s a painting of his own son eating a petit beurre biscuit, made, of course, by LU.

However, it wasn’t until 1983 that the Petit Écolier biscuit arrived on the scene. This is a petit beurre biscuit topped by a slab of chocolate that has the famous painting moulded onto it. It comes in milk, white, dark and extra dark chocolate, all equally delicious. They’re a very popular after school nibble for hungry kids off the school bus. There are plenty of cheaper imitations of these biscuits, but none of them have the little schoolboy picture on.

Ruadhri had a couple today after we came back from playing and ice trucking on the frozen lake. (No school today since the school buses were all cancelled again because of the weather.) We used the sledge to haul wood across from Ragondin Island over to the far bank where we can collect it with the tractor. Here’s Ruadhri with a load.

We messed around too, taking it in turns to tow each other. Here’s Rors pulling me! He deserved his Petit Écoliers after that!

Snow covered frozen lake

The phrase froid ressenti is appearing on the weather forecasts a lot these days. It translates literally as ‘cold felt/experienced’ but is pretty much the same as refroidissement éolien (wind chill factor) – nothing to do with windmills (éoliennes) this time!) Frequently the froid ressenti is 7 or 8 degrees colder than the actual temperature. I imagined that someone was estimating this, but the computation of wind chill factor is based on very sound science.

Wind chill is the felt air temperature on exposed skin. The first wind chill formula was created by Paul Siple and Charles Passel while working in Antartica. You can see what must have motivated them! They expressed wind chill in watts of heat lost per square metre of skin.  This didn’t catch on terribly well, so the formula was revised a few times by other people and these days it reflects the notion of equivalent temperature. This is what the formula looks like:

T_wc = 13.12 + 0.6215 T_a – 11.37 V^+0.16 + 0.3965 T_aV^+0.16

where _w is the wind chill index in Celsius, T_a is the air temp in Celsius V is the wind speed at 10 metres (standard anemometer height), in kilometres per hour (km/h).

Simple! So, the figures appearing on the météo each day have been carefully worked out after all.

Caiti hijacked Rusty Deux briefly!

There wasn’t too much noticeable wind chill today, which has been a balmy minus 4 actual temperature wise, although that’s dropping fast now that evening is coming. We fired up Rusty Deux the tractor to deliver hay bales to the llamas, sheep and goats. Then we drove down to the cabin to fetch the gas bottles. Our central heating is dodgy so we might need to get the gas heaters going.

One way to carry gas bottles around

I love the passenger seat on Rusty Deux. You get great views from up there. It’s quite deadly trying to take photos though, since it’s a bumpy ride and the seat is a small square of metal with a tiny bit of rail behind it so very easy to slip off!

And I did the famous End To End Ice Walk today – my death defying walk across our lake. It’s used to be a Christmas Eve tradition (the rest of the family were nobly prepared to share my pressies between them if I fall through the ice) but the last two years we haven’t been iced up by then. So it’s slipped back a bit. I don’t know how long the lake is exactly but it’s a 10 acre lake so it’s pretty big! It’s also pretty deep so I’m very careful on the way. Any cracks or strange sounds send me scuttling to the bank right away.

Tomorrow we’ll profit from the big freeze to do some tidying up along the banks. There are over hanging branches that need sawing off. It will be a lot easier doing them standing on the ice than from the rowing boat, which is what we’d thought we’d be having to do this winter since it started so mild.

Icicles over the stream

We anticipated at least some pipes freezing up, and that’s what has happened upstairs. Our old farm cottage faces optimistically south with the back wall taking the full brunt of the wickedly cold north winds that make Creuse winters so memorable. Despite thick layers of insulation on the inside, and the layer of enduit (plaster) on the outside that Chris applied during the summer, and not forgetting the two foot of stone and mud in-between, the cold gets through.

I had a nice hot bath on Thursday night, and the water is still sitting there on Saturday morning. It won’t drain away. Chris has drilled, poked, prodded as far as he can up the offending pipes but there seems to be a lump of ice just beyond his reach. The kitchen wastewater pipes have frozen too with some washing-up water joining my lurking bathwater before we realised what was going on. And I can’t use the washing machine for similar reasons so I’ll have to wash through the kids’ clothes for school next week the old-fashioned way this weekend. Rors gets through so many socks!

And last night, for fun, the electrics in the kitchen decided to stop working for reasons we can only imagine are connected with the extreme cold. Luckily, the kitchen is currently colder than my fridge at about six degrees (that French window facing north is the main culprit), so at least food won’t be going off! The main worry is that someone will trip over or strangle themselves in all the wiring and extensions Chris has strung up around the place to bring some power there.

I cancelled my trip with Caiti to Grenoble for the journée portes ouvertes at the University there because of the adverse weather. It was disappointing for us both, but sensible. Last night I took Rors into Boussac to see Le Chatpotté (Puss in Boots) at the cinema. I was well out of my comfort zone driving in, as the D2 had sheets of black ice over it in places. Specifically in places where certain farmers have taken down the trees and ripped up the roadside hedges. Why can’t the leave them alone? I didn’t go over 50km till we got to the main Boussac road, which is one that’s maintained by the Département, as opposed to the commune, and was blissfully clear and salted. The minor roads are dealt with by the communes and so subject to widely varying standards of treatment. It doesn’t look like Bussière does anything. Their stretch of the  D2 was worse even than our tiny little road which the maintenance guy at Nouzerines had bulldozed with his multi-purpose tractor/digger/hedge-distructivator.

Anyway, the film was fun and Rors got his long-promised treat, and a second one one when he saw a huge rat scuttling along the pavement! The things we do for our kids. (OK, my gesture doesn’t quite match Sarko’s action in flying his tummy-bug struck son home from Turkey in a private jet at a cost of €35,000 to the taxpayer, and a huge carbon footprint, but hey.) I survived the stress of the drive. But I don’t think I would have driving 500 km to the Alps in ever dropping temperatures. So hopefully we’ll be able to get Caiti up to Paris next week to visit the two universities there that she’s interested in. I hope so but the extreme cold is continuing for the next ten days with more snow on the way. So we’ll see.

All three lakes are well and truly frozen now. At least that will keep the cormorants off them. We went down to inspect the big lake and found hundreds of little roach wiggling around in the mud just below the ice. We’ve never seen this before in the yearly lake freezes. The fish seem to be displaying spawning behaviour by shoaling together in the shallows. We’d noticed some going on a week or so ago, when it was still unseasonably mild. But why they should be doing it in such cold, I’m not sure. They don’t seem to be stuck there, although the cold is making some of them dopey. Most of them wriggle away after a while. It’s quite a mystery.

Nessie wasn’t bothered by that, and was happy to sit on the ice and watch the world go by, with a couple of metres of very cold water underneath her!

First up, we’ve brought the generator indoors so it’s handy if things go black. We’ve lost the power before during bad weather, many times, so we’re being prepared.

I must be spending at least an hour a day just filling up water buckets with hot water for the animals as the current supply either freezes or is drained by thirsty animals. They’re all indoors eating hay and that makes them drink more than normal. When they’re eating grass, llamas go for days without needing water. The watering cans are staying in the kitchen between uses to keep them warm. Relatively speaking, that is. It’s been around 8 degrees C in the kitchen today, and that’s with the radiator on. Putting French windows in the northern end of the room wasn’t our best idea!

All the animals are either in or have access to shelter. It’s a bit crowded in the corner stable where Denis the llama and Maisy the goat have been temporarily joined by Dude and Dudette (aka Cuppucine and Zebulon, the two small alpine goats we inherited for reasons that still escape me!) D and D drive us insane since they’re typical goats and a right pain, but we haven’t been driven to turning them into curry yet!

A bit crowded but cosy

White Bun is looking after herself just fine. She spends most of her time in the hay barn but comes to nibble grass every now and again. The guinea pigs moved into the barn a while ago and are keeping cosy in there.

The cats spend a lot of time trying to get into the house and generally being rebuffed, unless they look really pathetic, but for the most part they curl up in one of the stables in the hay. The chickens and turkeys refuse point blank to come out of their stable any more, so I keep them topped up with straw, grain and water. Even the sheep are staying in their shelter, despite their mega thick woolly coats.

So all the animals are warm and coping well. As for us, we’re keeping the fire stoked up and wearing a lot more clothes than normal. Gloves, scarfs and socks get wet regularly since we’re sloshing so much water ar0und, and trudging through deep snow, so there’s always some drying in front of the fire.

And we’re eating a lot of pumpkin soup! The grand froid isn’t getting us down. (Well, maybe just a little since we have some frozen pipes …)

Caiti bought this book of traditional French recipes, in French, for Chris a couple of Christmases ago to extend his culinary repertoire and also his linguistic abilities. It has entire sections of recipes featuring a particular winter staple – such as, you guessed it, pumpkin. But there are also recipes using endive (chicory), topinambour (Jerusalem artichoke), noix (nuts), poireaux (leeks, you’ll remember) and more lavishly dattes (dates), mangue (mango) and extremely extravagantly truffes (truffles).

Chris plumped for Soupe Auvergnate today and duly began the exciting task of peel pumpkins this morning. Ruadhri happened into the kitchen, and, as with the mince pies back in December, announced a desire to help. At lightning speed he found himself with a knife in his hand and a small pumpkin on a chopping board in front of him. He happily chopped away for ages and without inflicting any wounds on himself, I’m glad to say.

Chris's soupe Auvergnate

The great pumpkin soup cook-off ensued. Chris produced a large pan of his Auvergnate while Ruadhri, helped by his dad, plumped for ad hoc herby pumpkin soup. Both are very nice. No one can remember what Rors put into his, but here’s the recipe for Chris’s.

Soupe Auvergnate

1.5 kg of pumpkin flesh cut in cubes

3 small leeks

Veg oil

1.5 litres of chicken or veg stock

150 g of grated Cantal or Bleu d’Auvergne cheese

1/2 litre cream or fromage blanc

Sauté the pumpkin and leeks in the oil until soft, then pour on the stock. Simmer away for half an hour. Just before serving mix in the cream/fromage blanc (optional) and the cheese. (Now, I can’t eat blue cheeses since I’m allergic to penicillin, and that’s the only cheese we had in the fridge, so Chris sprinkled his over his bowl of soup rather than mix it in. It worked well like that.)

Ruadhri's herby pumpkin soup

We’ll be eating the soup for several more days but that’s OK. It’s all part of the winter experience chez les Dagg.

And a couple of unrelated snippets to finish. I’ve very kindly been given an award for my blog, the Leibster award, by awesome blogger and freelance writer Vanessa, for which I’m very grateful, and will blog properly about soon. Also, if you have a mo, do pop over here and read a guest post I’ve written for an upcoming fantasy author, Gary F Vanucci, whose short stories I recently had the pleasure to edit.

With that, I’ll shut up and go and eat soup!

Nessie surveys the scene

It’s not the snowiest it’s ever been here at Les Fragnes, but it’s pretty impressive. We were on vigilance orange (orange alert) for snow all of yesterday, but it didn’t start falling till we were walking back with Rors from Nouzerines around half past five last night. And it just kept going. Announcements were made online and on the radio in the evening that school transport was cancelled in Creuse for the 31st Jan so Ruadhri went to bed happy in knowing that he’d be skiving off next day.

Ruadhri in the snow

The animals have varying reactions. Nessie loves it. The young cats were wary at first and aren’t massively impressed but are taking it in their stride. Suddenly Wendy doesn’t look quite so white any more.

Wendy looks a bit grubby!

The camelids are being wimpy so far. They’ve been hanging around the stable and not venturing far. But that could have something to do with the new bale of hay we put out for them in there two days ago. Llamas and alpacas are equally greedy.

No one's going far

The chickens and turkeys don’t like snow. Limpy has found a cosy place to shelter.

Limpy Chick and Number 28

We had a walk round the big lake after we’d sorted out the livestock. The trees are beautiful down there.

And finally my attempt at an artistic shot!

Off to check out what the road is like next and then after dinner I think a bit of sledging is in order. Usually we sledge down the hill and out onto the frozen lake – great fun. However, the lake isn’t frozen yet so we need to remember to brake in time!

Stay safe and warm if you’re snowy too.

A slightly snowy scene

OK, Snow White first. The first proper snow of this winter has started to fall. It’s rather slushy snow and I can’t see it hanging round long, but at least it’s snow. Rors is delighted, the youngest cats are puzzled, since it’s the first they’ve seen, and the chickens are decidedly unimpressed. They don’t like snow. I’m not fussed either way. So long as I can get a top-up food shop this afternoon and Chris can get back safely from his pig-keeping course tonight, then I don’t mind being snowed in for a while after that. We’ve come to expect that here in Creuse, at least for a week or so each year.

Now the Seven Arts. It’s the annual BD (comic book) festival at Angoulême this week. This is a massive event. Bandes dessinées (or bédés) are big business in France, bringing in around 350 million euros to publishers every year. (I’ve written a bit more about this on my Books Are Cool blog here.)

BDs are reckoned to be the neuvième art (ninth art). I’d heard cinema referred to as the septième art (seventh art) a few times but not been interested enough to find out more I’m ashamed to say. However, now that there’s a ninth one, it’s definitely time.

Poster for BD festival

Étienne Souriau, a French philosopher and aesthete who lived from 1892 to 1979, came up with the idea of the Seven Arts in 1969. He wrote about it in his famous book La Correspondance des arts, Eléments d’esthétique comparée. So what are they?

1. Sculpture and architecture

2. Drawing

3. Painting

4. Music

5. Dance and pantomime

6. Writing

7. Cinema.

Seven seemed to him quite enough at the time, and it’s as good a number as any. It’s popular for groups of things after all – the seven seas, seven colours of the rainbow, seven wonders of the world, seven days of the week, for example, not forgetting the seven odd socks in Ruadhri’s drawer. But we’re now up to eleven arts. Sauriou’s list has been augmented with:

8. Television (including radio and photography)

9. BDs

10. Bizarrely video games and model railways are lumped together, and

11. Multimedia.

To become an official member of the list, a particular art form has to stand the test of time and be popular with the public. However, I haven’t managed to find out who the bureaucrat officially charged with keeping the art list up to date is. There’s bound to be one somewhere.

It’s an interesting idea to classify the arts, and exemplifies the French need to categorise everything, but doesn’t seem to serve much practical purpose other than to give me something to blog about!

And a final non-related photo. Here’s Rors being given his yellow-white belt at judo last night after passing his grading.

So Les Fragnes is finally in full winter mode. The lakes have almost completely frozen over, well behind schedule. Most years I do my Christmas Eve end-to-end, death-defying walk on the big lake, but not in 2011.

The duck pond, recently refilled by November’s rain after drying out in the summer, was completely frozen …

… until Ruadhri got to work on it!

Rors seems to have been programmed since birth to break any ice he comes into contact with.

And the water butts were iced up, this one able to withstand Roly Poly’s considerable weight!

There was a heavy frost this morning. These crazy daffodils came up far too early. I hope they’ll survive the cold OK.

Our wood supply is holding up well, thank goodness.

The llamas, alpacas and sheep don’t even notice the cold. In fact, it’s their favourite kind of weather. The chickens aren’t so happy with it, but are coping. And we’ve tucked the guinea pigs up nice and warmly in their cages with bubble wrap round the sides and old coats over the top to keep the draughts out. Bunny, who roams free, seems to have hunkered down in the hay barn for the moment.

I don’t mind the cold. I prefer it to the wet, dismal (i.e. Irish) weather that we’ve had to now. Of course, if it stays like this for another six weeks and the pipes start freezing I may change my tune! At the moment it’s possible to break the ice on the animals’ water buckets and butts, but give it a few more subzero days and they’ll be solid. It’ll be in and out with a kettleful of boiling water than.

But for the time being, I like winter.

publicdomainpictures.net

It’s official. 2011 was the hottest year in France since 1900, beating previous record holder 2003. The average temperature of 13.6 degrees C was 1.5 degrees higher than ‘usual’. This resulted from a warm spring and a warm autumn. Summer was actually quite disappointing with July being colder than normal.

The warm weather has continued into winter. This is the first in the six winters we’ve spent here when the lakes haven’t frozen over before Christmas. We’ve had practically no snow and that’s very unusual too. A couple of daffodils have even poked their heads out of the ground, three months earlier than in previous years.

Is this a sign of climate change, or just a natural variation? It’s too early to tell yet, but two hottest ever years within eight years of each other could be indicative of generally climbing temperatures. We’ll have to see what happens over the next decade.

The warm year meant that crops ripened early and many plants produced another flush of flowers. A lot of wild birds and animals managed to squeeze in an extra brood of babies. Our swallows had three sets of youngsters this year. That’s amazing, considering that in May 2009 ago most of them were killed by the blizzard in May. Maybe it’s Nature’s way of redressing the balance.

The hottest ever recorded temperature in France was 44 degrees C in Toulouse in 1923, while the coldest is -31 degrees in Chamonix in 1905. (Worldwide records are 58 degrees in Libya in 1922 and -89 degrees in the Antarctic in 1938.)

There are generally reckoned to be seven climate zones in France and they’re shown nice and clearly on this map.  The zones are:

1. Climat Océanique
2. Climat Semi-Océanique
3. Climat Méditerranéen
4. Climat Semi-Méditerranéen
5. Climat Continental
6. Climat Semi-Continental
7. Climat Montagnard.

Generally, the océanique and semi-océanique zones are wet and fairly mild, the continental and semi-continental have hot summers and cold winters, the méditerranéen and semi-méditerranéen have hot summers and warm winters, and the mountain zone, well, that’s techncially imprévisible i.e. it will do what it wants! However, you tend to get a lot snow in winter.

Here in Creuse we fall into the Climat Semi-Continental zone, but this year so far haven’t had the usual brutally cold hiver that we’d expect. But there’s still three months of winter to come and that could all change …

Haven't had the helicoptor by yet ...

We had a pre-Christmas shock a short while ago. A vanload of gendarmes pulled up outside the house and a significant amount of firepower clambered out. It was gone four o’clock, three days before Christmas. Surely they weren’t here to check Chris’s gun licences or my paperwork for the business. Everything’s in order but it’s still hassle having to dig it all out.

But no, fortunately. Apparently some horses had escaped onto the ‘main’ road and they wondered if they were ours. We only have well behaved llamas and alpacas, cats and a dog who never wander far away from the house, slightly naughty sheep and goats but they’ve never made it off our premises, and completely harmless poultry and guinea pigs here. The horses almost certainly belonged to our neighbour Yann. He has a field-full of heavy horses, Percherons and Bretons. They’re beautiful, gentle creatures. When they’re in the field adjacent to our llama field, the opposing sets of animals spend ages simply looking at each other. After a chat the gendarmes set off to see Yann and probably spend an hour or so helping to catch the horses. It was a good job we’d dealt with the turkeys in the morning. I always dread having someone call round, especially armed law enforcement officers, when either I’m busy plucking or Chris is removing various turkey body parts in the slightly gruesome preparation for the eating procedure.

We’re well known to the local police, but for non-criminal reasons. Since Chris has guns we have to get various permits approved by them every year. So we make several calls to the local station in Boussac or the one further away in Chatelus (depending on where the rural Creuse force, which seems to only consist of a couple of cops, is based at the time) to get that sorted out. They’re always very interested in the llamas. We didn’t recognise any of the gendarmes who called today. I guess they must be the holiday-cover crew, shipped in from somewhere out of the area. I hope they’re used to handing several tons of horse at a time.

An unexpected visit from the fuzz is in keeping with this Christmas holiday so far. It isn’t going according to plan. The weather’s rotten and we’re all full of colds so the crafty activities and long, healthy walks I’d mapped out for us to do aren’t happening. I still have to boil the puddings and make crackers, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve got presents for everyone either! And as well as feeling fluey, Benj is moping. He’s turned soft after three months in an overheated flat in the city. He reckons he’s cold and has borrowed clothes off practically everyone to keep warm. He also has sore teeth after the visit to the dentist on Tuesday and he’s missing his woman/women (more than one name has been mentioned!).

Things are very soggy round the farm at the moment. It’s at its most dismal.

We’ve gone from dry, concrete hard ground to waterlogged muddy mess in the space of a week. We’re on heavy clay here so it goes to crazy extremes. But on the bright side, I don’t have to fill any water buckets up for the outdoor animals. They’re collecting more than enough water from the barn roof.

Gigi refused to come out of the barn till the rain stopped

So, not a great run up to the big day. But there are still a couple of days left to get into the spirit of things. We’re not quite at the ‘bah humbug’ stage yet!

Normally this is a white alpaca in a green field! Poor muddy Mellie!