Eye spy

It was such a beautiful morning, sunny and not too cool. Apart from our hostess, we were the first up, then the others emerged by degrees. We were all due to meet for breakfast at another house nearby, at around 10:30, but were given a generous ‘first’ breakfast in the meantime.  By the time we had been shown round the garden and the impressive vegetable patch and picked bags full of lemons from our hostess’s trees, we didn’t arrive at the other house till around 11 am, and even then, it was a while before we all sat down to eat. The table was positively groaning with good things – fresh bread, croissants, sausages and a salmon galantine, all made by our French chef friend, as well as fruit, Buck’s Fizz and all the other trimmings. Simply wonderful.
 
After brunch, there was a bitter-sweet ceremony. Our two hostesses arrived home yesterday to find one of their twelve dogs literally at his last gasp, as if he had just waited for them to get back to say goodbye. So a large hole had been dug in the garden, a sapling was fetched from the local nursery and we all gathered to see him laid to rest and the tree planted over his grave. There are already three trees nearby, planted over the graves of other dogs that have gone before (and the girls have only just finished building the house).
 
We eventually came back home in the early afternoon and lit the fire double quick. The sun disappears behind the hill not long after noon in winter and the house gets very cold – a reminder of how difficult we would find it to adjust to the climate, if we were to return to Britain. Now I’m going to try to catch up with blips – but suspect I may not get very far.