Some of you might be thinking that this is a reference to the goings on with the tax dodgers from Portsea Island, but no, it is actually about the weather.
This had been a mild winter over here, an up until the end of January, we had only had to use one line of our wood supply, to supplement the central heating. We had one snowy night at the start of February but the next morning it all melted. That was that for the winter we thought, but we were wrong. Very wrong.
A few days later, the temperature dropped to about -10 and stayed there for the best part of two weeks. Six inches of snow came two days later.
The French don't grit roads, unless you are in the mountains, so the roads soon became very tricky.
On the Sunday, Mr Bernard's car got stuck half way up the hill, and I had to get out and help the mayor pull him out of a ditch with his tractor. Amazingly, he only had a few tiny scratches on his paintwork. I put a warning triangle by our gate, and that seemed to get the message out, so the mayor and I were spared any more heroics.
On Tuesday we went out to do our usual weeks shopping, but we had to put the snow chains on to get to Roumaziers safely. If you think it is quiet around here normally, you should see it in the snow. You could count the cars going past each day on the fingers of one hand.
We kept both fires on all day to keep the house warm, and got through as much wood in two weeks as we had in the previous three months. Even though the barn was very warm, we stopped work because, after we had got the wood in, started the fires and thawed out the overflow, half the day was gone.
One morning we woke up and found we had no running water. I checked the meter. to make sure that we had no leaks, and then rang the water company. They said that they had no reported problems in Suris, so it was a fault at our end.
Following the water boards instructions, I opened up one of the valves on the back of the meter and got a jet of near freezing water in the face, very nice at -13 C. This meant that the problem was down to us, as it was their supply that hit me in the face at 3 bar pressure. Next up I opened the other valve, just to see if it was frozen, forgetting that I had switched the supply on again, and promptly got hit in the face with another jet of cold water. Oh how I laughed !
Tina tried melting snow, to get some water to flush the toilets, but it took loads of gas and time, and it turns out you don't get much water out of a bucket full of snow. We gave up on that and opened the well instead, as the winch still works well.
I did some Internet research about frozen underground pipes, and found one that said that the problem was likely to be where the pipes are nearest the surface. I looked around the pump house, and found a loop of pipe with a little bit of insulation on it, were the mains joined into the old supply from the well. We heated this up with Tina's hairdryer, and after 10 minutes or so, the taps started running again. Phew !
The pipes are now covered in 2 foot of rock-wool, just in case.
The swimming pool cover got a massive dip in it, from the weight of the snow and ice on it. I brushed of us much as I could, and chipped the ice off as far as I could reach every day, but it was two weeks before it thawed enough to clear it completely. Luckily the steel poles remembered that they used to be straight and went back to their normal shape.
Even after the temperatures returned to normal, it was still weeks before the lakes thawed out.
We were think of going down to the mountains before all this, but we have now decided that we have had enough snow for one year.
