As you drive past all the wonderful stone buildings the lush green fields and the 40 degrees sun thinking wouldn't it be nice to live here such an idyllic place, well before you do let me share a few secrets.
Winters are a survival game of the highest proportions. Yes you can dress it up saying that you have a wonderful wood burner and an electric blanket but that's just the facade, a covering for the world to think how lovely. The reality is rooms where you can see you breath, water running down the walls, ice on the inside of the windows, duvets nailed to the doors, plastic duct taped to the windows and towels to stop the rain coming in.
Having a wood burner is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but the romance of the naked flame vanishes when you realise you have to chop the wood and drag it around the farm to the shed, bring it in every night. To keep warm you have to clear out the fire ever day and relight it before one room gets warm enough to sit in.
Taking a shower is an excruciating experience. The bath itself is like a block of ice and standing anywhere other than under the thin shower of hot water is a painful experience. The shower gel has to be coaxed out of the bottle due to the near frozen constituency and the blob that finally lands of your scrubby rolls straight off unless you are quick to capture it and hold it in your hands until it is pliant enough to froth up and clean you body. Towels are always damp and do a sad job of drying. The dash from bathroom to bedroom is like diving down the piste on your stomach naked and the dressing experience is now perfected to half a minute.
The wonderful tiled floors are blocks of ice and chilblains appear before you even slip your left slipper on. the shutters are wonderful and do help to draft proof to some extent, but it mean the whole house is plunged into a darkness where you need to lights on just to see to open them. In the morning you stumble around in the dark trying to find enough coverings to be able to function without bits freezing and dropping off, just to you can fling open the windows, letting out the tiny heat you may have built up in the night, just to open the shutters so light can flood in. There have been occasions when the damp has swollen the windows and after flinging them open and folding the shutter back the window then refused to shut leaving you with the dilemma of whether to force the window and risk breaking the already rotting wood or leaving it ajar and letting in the sub zero temperatures.
The only saving grace is summer, a few wonderful months when the pains of winter fade and we bask in the sun and visitors arrive and say what a wonderful place you live in you are so lucky its magnificent!!! .
Too true. Along with the duct tape, bits of rug and blankets, sheets of cardboard, buckets, towels, plastic bags, triple duvets the other essential is a sense of humour, and fortunately you have that in abundance. :)
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