2009/2010 - such a winter...

December 2009 and the first week of January 2010 have been unremittingly awful, and therefore highly unusual. Not as dramatic and destructive as the Great Tempest of Boxing Day 1999, but long and continuously depressing in different ways. It started with ten days of virtually constant rain, when the daily rainfall was more than the average for the month. Rivers overflowed their banks, and everywhere was sodden. Then the weather went dry, and often sunny, but day after day below zero. The first two photographs show the valley of the river Sée near Tirepied, between Avranches and Villedieu-les-Poeles. This is a flat valley where normally the river gently meanders along, but in times of heavy winter rain can flood. This year it flooded almost completely, and before the flood waters had all gone they froze. Before there was any chance of a thaw, the snow fell. That was on 17 December. and the picture with cattle was the view from our bedroom window the next morning. And the snow is still here, being renewed every four or five days, just as it looks like the last is going from the fields.

We were marooned in our house for four days. On the second day, a farmer used a tractor with a shovel to try and clear a way out, but once we get out of our little rural lane, the road has a sharp incline, and I could not get all the way to the top - 50 metres - even though my foot was to the floor in first or second gears, the car stopped moving. Downhill ended in a T-junction at the bottom of the valley, with sharp climbs in both directions. The last photo is the walk to the village after three days of snow.

New Year's day, and the snow fell continuously, another foot or so. It was gardually reducing until yesterday, 6th January, when another foot fell. It is snowing again as I type, and of course we cannot get the car out and are marooned again. Fortunately, there is a small epicerie (grocery) we can walk to in the village, and a depot de pain as well, though the two mornings a week butcher hasn't been able to get there.

I know there has been a lot of snow in the last few days in the UK, and it seems the bad weather is stretching all the way to the south of France. Must be the climate change - global warming leading to a shift which in the short term is very cold, before overheating. It is also interesting that we in western Europe have had unreasonably good weather, compared with North America, for centuries and longer. Toronto in Canada is on the same latitude as Madrid, and they have snow for six months every year. Snow is really pretty for the first day, but ther magic wears off. I found that in Quebec a few years ago, when the temperature was minus 25 without counting the wind chill, and there was no free running water anywhere. The Saint Lawrence river at Quebec city is about a kilometere wide, and was entirely frozen except for a single little channel kept open by an icebreaker chugging up and down 24/24. We have not got it that bad, yet, but ten years after La Tempete, another bad winter. Is a pattern developing?

Cows and their habits

Butter, cream, cheeses: Normandy is very much dairy country, to the extent that there is a unique breed of cattle – la race normande. They are essentially white splashed with either black or brown, but always with rings round their eyes like spectacles. In general, they look as if a whole pot of paint has been dropped from a height beside a white cow and splashed onto it in a random pattern. The photograph shows a group of young Normandy cattle. They provide very rich, creamy milk, and a reasonable yield; their meat is also good, and they are very successful on the rich grasses of Normandy.

Cows are of course not particularly bright, but they can be curious, and they can be stubborn. They are also very large and heavy. My brother once tried to push a cow out of his way at a fete in southern France, and the cow not only did not move, but casually pushed back. He fell over and was stood on, accidentally, and two of his ribs were broken.

Although in general cattle are not aggressive, they will defend themselves if they think they need to, and particularly if they have young calves with them they should be treated with some respect. Every so often in England there are news reports of someone, usually a middle aged woman, being hurt, or even trampled to death, by cows. Most often it is because they walk through a group with a yappy little dog that runs around barking at the ankles of the cows, which not unreasonably upsets them, and causes them to run about. In the course of this, the person can get knocked over and badly hurt. I read of one such last year, where the woman concerned was planning to sue the farmer because there was no sign warning her that cows could potentially be a danger. Logically, she should never leave the house without a sign on her back warning people that she is an unpredictable idiot.

Some people seem to be able to get on extremely well with cattle. A neighbouring farmer has a grandson of about 11 or 12, who lives in Paris, and is in most respects a very urban child. But he visits the farm for a few weeks in the summer, and collects and returns a dozen or more cows for milking twice a day. He is small for his age, and not even tall enough to look a cow directly in the eye unless it bends its head, but he has no fear of them, and they do whatever he wants.

As a direct opposite, an old friend from England came to see us, and as we went for a walk through our fields said she was terrified of cows, because they all hated her for some reason. We found that rather absurd, and went through the gate into a field which had one cow in it, at the opposite corner. I knew the cow, which was fairly timid, because it had been there for a few weeks, and I had often walked past it. Our friend was very unhappy, but we persuaded her to come with us. The cow looked up and saw us, and her. It immediately roared, and started to gallop across the field at us. The hedge was typical Normandy bocage, too high to get over, even if it didn't have electric wires on either side, and we were already some distance from the gate. The only thing I could do was to run full tilt towards the cow, waving the stick I was carrying to help gather blackberries, and rather pointlessly yell 'Stop!' Within a few seconds we were about 10 metres apart, and the cow did indeed stop. It stared aggressively at me with its head lowered for a few more seconds, by which time the rest of our party were out of the field. It then turned round and ambled off. I have no explanation for that, and the cow never charged at me again.