piste again

on the way back from the forest where we stacked up wood for the winter (or next winter, when the wood will be seasoned) I saw that our field looked like a piste....and that made me think of skiing. That's how crap the weather is!!

However, I'm not piste yet, that's still to come. I am neatly ignoring the fact that I even went to work this morning because now I'm on holiday and, if I think about being at work today, I don't feel like I'm on holiday. So, by some bizarre psychological trick, I am now pretending I am a lady of leisure and always have been.

Leisure being, of course, spending the whole afternoon working my ass off outside. But that's what I like best :-)

I was very happy to see that the forest, which I generally have nothing to do with, is growing nicely. When we bought it, it was a grim place: overgrown pine monoculture, dead undergrowth, couldn't walk through it without having an eye knocked out by broken branches, rubbish dumped everywhere, prostitutes and clients making use of clearings (I'm not joking!!) and to cap it all, an abducted child got buried there. That was, obviously, a fairly major turning point for the forest! Since then we've had it turned into a private road so people can't drive through, we let a tree "fall over" onto the road to make this a bit clearer. There's a memorial to the little girl which seems to put the drunken teenagers and pimps off the place a bit. I spent ages tidying up the rubbish and we all spent ages clearing out dead wood, chopping down trees and clearing clearing clearing. Now we CAN see the wood for the trees, new and diverse undergrowth is springing up and the deer seem to go there more often. There is a lot of evidence of woodpeckers, the buzzards fly over it constantly and today I saw evidence that there might be a badger....it's such a pleasure to restore a piece of nature, it's almost more satisfying than the renovation we're doing on the house.