Come to South West France and FREEZE! It's been minus 7 degrees for nearly a week now and it's not going down too well. I guess we're just not used to it! I thought you might like to see this piccie of the frozen fountain in our fish pond. I think the fish are all in hibernation. They've got more sense than us. We had to buy the plastic heron to frighten the real heron that was after the fish. 37 euros, and it falls over in the slightest breeze. Think they saw us coming! The real heron was fooled for a bit, but now it's so cold, he's taking his chances again and getting ever closer.

Have you ever wished the ground would open up and swallow you? I'm sure you have. I had the most embarrassing incident for a long time on Wednesday lunchtime (and let's face it, I have embarrassing incidents on a daily basis with such things as getting the language all mixed up but I've got used to that). Let me tell you more...

We have had a group of six 20-odd year old girls staying together in a gite. They were on a course were staying originally every Monday night and every Thursday night, with an occasional Wednesday night thrown in for some of them. Got it so far?

Wednesday morning, DH was perturbed (to say the least) that there was a car parked outside the gite. He chuntered to himself constantly about "people taking liberties" and how we were being taken for fools as they clearly expected to stay free of charge, whenever it suited them, and the cost of the heating, not to mention the fact that he wanted to turn the water off to try and avoid burst pipes (I've already mentioned how cold it's gone). I, for my part, was convinced that all they'd done was shared one car, and left one parked outside the gite. Finally, after one too many interruptions, I lost my cool.

"Right", I said, "let's go up there and sort this out!" I marched him up there, gone midday and hammered on every door and window of the gite, yelling at the top of my voice, in French, "is there anybody in there?" . So utterly convinced was I that there was nobody in the gite, that I even kicked the door. Silence. We waited. I then began screeching at DH that he was just causing trouble, and didn't he have anything better to do? when the upstairs bedroom window opened just a crack and this white faced, heavy eyed, beauty of about 23 years old, with just got out of bed hair muttered something to me. I think I frightened her to death!

I was speechless. But only for about half a second. I told her that there was a problem, and could she come down and speak to us. She asked if it was OK for her to get dressed first. You betcha! Five minutes in a gale force wind later, she appeared, terrified, and I left DH to explain the reason for the disturbance, partly because I was frozen through by then, but mainly because of embarrassment and mortification. She went out in her car not long after! DH and I weren't speaking for all of five minutes, and I haven't been able to think about the incident without blushing to the roots of my hair ever since! That'll teach me! Customer relations - pah!