A couple of days away.....

Went down to Sarah and Angus's place near Montauban to collect Choccy from her holiday with them. Think she'd have been quite happy to stay there though, she's had a fine old time with her mates....

Managed to get out on a hack on Monday, bit windy and wet but fun all the same. Rode Squaw for the first time, she's a lot like Gandalf in shape and like him, she certainly isn't a plod! Very forward going, a bit spooky, quite opinionated......and she can ski down muddy slopes!!!

Rode her in a bosal just like G's, no problems with the brakes.....

Did about 9kms in the end, map here

Then it was back to the ranch for a fun evening involving curry and wine and, erm, chickens......

As we've had a bit of a Silky population explosion recently, we took three of them down to Sarah's. They spent the day in her luxury henhouse and when it started getting dark, Sarah's chickens joined them.......all except for one who wasn't at all sure about these strange interlopers in her house. So we were then treated to the spectacle of first Felix then Angus trying to get her to go in. Felix tried the stalking technique

Angus went for the net approach (getting himself a belt from the electric fence in the progress which didn't make us laugh at all.......)

The chicken was totally unimpressed with all of this and refused to be coralled..........After nearly an hour of hilarity (we'd seen some wine by then) the chook eventually tired of giving them the runaround and just hopped up into bed.

The next day we awoke (quite late) to a bit of sunshine for the first time in weeks so we took the reluctant Maverick for a walk whilst Mike and Angus went for a run.

The Terrible Two were on form, the SNO had to be extracted from the bottom of a muddy ditch and Tally was away with the fairies picking flowers a lot of the time.....

Then after another fab lunch we had to head home. Weather still good, might actually get my horse out tomorrow!!

Good things come to those who wait......

My little Silky hen has been brooding eggs for several weeks and finally her patience has been rewarded, sadly only one egg has hatched, the others were from the bigger chickens and as our cockerel is a dwarf breed, he can't get up on top of them to do the deed!!

Now she has left the other eggs and gone to sit on a bunch of duck eggs in the corner of the stable. Maybe she'll have more luck with those as our drake, Confit, has been rogering the ducks enthusiastically for weeks!

That must have hurt!!

The chickens like to make a lot of noise when they've laid an egg. I found one today that really must have made one of them squawk!!! It's bigger than a duck egg, here it is next to a duck egg and a normal size chicken egg........Aliénor, who is wise in the ways of chickens, says it'll be a double yolker. I shall save it for a breakfast fry up........

More white stuff.....

I get the impression that the animals are less than impressed with the return of the snow, most of them had decided to hide from it this morning!! That's more than one day of snow here this winter which is practically unheard of.....still, the sun's out now so most of it has already melted.

All cosy for the night.....

Just been out to check on the menagerie, I love the way the chooks all line up on the gate to sleep!

Even though it's the coldest weather of the winter so far, the chooks and ducks are still laying well. My restauranteur friends will be pleased!

Chickens.....

The chickens like to roost on the gate that keeps the hay in......and also in the hole they've made in the second round bale!

The little Silky hen, Snow White, always lays her eggs right in the middle of the round bale. The horses don't seem to mind........

Murder most fowl and runaway mares......

My neighbour came round yesterday to show me how to kill, pluck and gut our 2 Guineafowl. What has this to do with horses? Well, my neighbour Josette is in her eighties, the house we live in used to be a bakery which was built by her grandparents and she has loads of lovely stories from her childhood when her parents ran the bakery.

Whilst she was sorting out my fowl (glad to see the back of them actually, they made a dreadful noise and kept attacking the chickens and even Aliénor!! But they do taste good......) she was telling me about delivering the bread for her father.

It was shortly after the war, and they kept a cob mare to pull the cart to make the bread deliveries. When Josette was about fourteen, her father entrusted to her and her cousin the job of delivering bread to various farms and houses dotted about the region. He harnessed up the mare, loaded the bread, and told Josette on no account to get the whip anywhere near the horse, as she walked along smartly enough without any encouragement. Josette duly set off conservatively down the road at a walk. Once out of sight of her father, however, she gave the mare a flick of the whip. The horse objected to this and set off at a gallop. This was OK on the straight main road, but they needed to turn off down a side road, Josette tugged on the reins to make the turn but the mare didn't slow and went round the corner at such a speed the whole lot went over, horse, cart, bread, and two girls ended up on the floor......!!! The mare skinned her knees, the shafts snapped off the cart and the bread was spread round the countryside. Luckily no serious damage was done but she was in serious trouble with her father!

"But I never admitted to him that I'd whipped the horse", she told me, he never found out til the day he died!