A Start

I don't know how this is going to work out, but here goes.

This is a beautiful landscape - and very French. This morning is frosty and crisply shining. Vivaldi is playing on the CD and I look out across the glowingly wooded country which, when I woke this morning was clothed in grey. The woods floated darkly on the sea of mist like galleons at anchor. If this is retirement, then I am all for it.

I have bought a house in a small mediaeval town that stands on a precipitous thrust of rock. There is a ruined Norman castle first built by William the Conqueror and later used by Henry II and his remarkable wife Aelinor of Aquitaine.Below it is a ravine carved out by a river which does not look powerful enough to have achieved such a chasm.

Behind the castle, the here are two or three cobbled streets and squares which trickle down towards the modern town. They are lined with timber and stone houses from various centuries.On the southern side of the ridge there are the remains of the old ramparts, lichen covered and to these walls the houses cling.Mine was built in the early seventeenth century with heavy square stone. It is not on the street but hides behind an even older house which certainly looks mediaeval with bulging small-paned windows and a tiny front door. Next to it is a white door which one assumes at first is a garage; but when it is opened it leads, on the right, to the back door of the street house and, on the left, the front door of a house which is now empty. Straight ahead, a pair of rather rickety, wooden doors lead to a narrow passage that passes my front door and comes to the yard and the back door which is situated in an extension that runs as far as the city wall at the end of the yard.