Winter

So now we know. Spring has not yet arrived. I have put my giant hedge-trimming project on hold because it's just too darn cold and miserable outside for that sort of thing.

Lowri has gone to England for a week's intensive work, so I am temporarily the sole chauffeur/ cook / homework assistant etc. Still I'm managing to get some work done during the day. I have just completed three arrangements for cello and guitar of some favourite pieces by Albeniz (n.b. safely out of copyright), which Lowri and I will be playing in a concert in Castres this summer.

Philomena has been studying Emile Zola at school and now wants to read La Bête Humaine. It's one of the master's shorter works at only 435 pages. It's a story of homicidal folly and blind violence on nineteenth-century steam trains. Good luck to her. Meanwhile Herne is rapidly devouring the collected Blake and Mortimer, Lucky Luke, and Asterix, while Fearnley is working through the Lord of the Rings. I'm reading La Dame aux Camélias and can't decide whether it's genuinely sympathetic to the tragedy of the femme entretenue or just prurient. Probably both. Lowri is being kept up to the mark with a pile of fat French novels from her book club. Too heavy for a hand-luggage-only trip, though, so she's taken some Sudokus instead.