It's beginning to look ....oh, shut up!

Progress of sorts: the Christmas trees are up in the bay window and in the sitooterie, Swedish candlesticks at a couple of windows and a nice winter wreath in place of the tired hanging basket by the front door.  A couple of homespun Christmas presents are wrapped and ready to go, and we’re making progress with the  rest.  We’ve had to print a few extra cards as unexpected ones arrive, but think we’ve got most of them covered now.

We went to collect some meat, including Christmas dinner, from our friends in Sussex yesterday.  They finally got their Dexter steer Tom into a trailer and off to be transformed into freezer contents (Dick and Harry had already gone that way, and delicious they were too).  Jonathan is finding small-scale stock rearing far from profitable, so is scaling it down still further.  What he does do he does well: the pigs roam free in some woodland on his property, and the cattle are strictly grass-fed.  We couldn’t do it: on that scale, you can’t avoid getting to know the beasts as individuals, and we’d be far too soft to send them to slaughter. 

Quite a good day at the hobby on Monday.  Although it was a full traffic list of over eighty matters with an unusually high number of attenders, we left at 16:50 with a clean sheet.  This was a comfort: of my previous three scheduled days, one was cancelled, the next petered out before lunchtime and the third was finished in 35 minutes flat, so a full day and a completed list was a bonus.  One more to go (as it may well, of course) before the festive hostilities. 

As I write, France is going to the polls for the second round of the regional elections.  It looks as if the youngest (and most toxic to date) of the Le Pen dynasty will take Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, and her auntie is hoping for a few more regions.  Our new mega-region, Midi-Pyrénées-Languedoc-Roussillon may stay with the left, but I wouldn’t predict anything at this point.  If Marine Le Pen wins the presidential in 18 months’ time, I think that will mark the end of my relationship with the land of freedom, equality and brotherliness, if not, indeed, the end of those values themselves.  Or maybe they’ll just add a rider: ‘so long as you’re French, white and catholic’.  I am no less anxious for the future political face of my nation, and as for the Untied States of America, I quake in my size nines.