Pierre Noel and les arbres

The Comte evidently thought I was underemployed last week– too much time holed up in my room scribbling (moi?), and not enough time pruning and clearing, no doubt. To remedy this he called in our friend Pierre and asked him to coppice every single tree on the property.

‘There,’ le Comte called over his shoulder as he headed off to his bunker. ‘Now you can have a bonfire.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Right. Thanks.’

Bonfire = Understatement. There was enough wood to create a wood lake. Enough wood to build an entire wooden planet to be launched into orbit with le Comte on it. Enough wood build a lifesize model of the Armada.

I thought seriously about my options. The planet was appealing but I really needed le Comte to finish the bunker before I sent him off into space. And I couldn’t see any use for the Armada since our river is quite shallow. The lake was just silly. 
So I went for Bonfire, but added some sss. I have enough wood to have enormous bonfires every single day for a month.   So that’s good.

Pierre is an acquaintance ancien. We first met him in those early days when we were fresh from dear old Angleterre and didn’t know one end of a goat from the other. He was recommended to us by Robert Mouton as being the only person in the entire department who would climb 50ft up a tree without a harness, brandishing a chainsaw. Pierre claims to be a tree surgeon. This is his metier, possibly even his vocation, he says.  He effects surgical techniques that are postively medieval in scope; no fiddly micro procedures here. However, I have blown his cover. I have discovered that he is also Father Christmas. How do I know? Well, firstly because he said so. He arrived to do some work last autumn just as his annual beard was beginning to sprout and simply announced;

‘Je suis le Père Noel.’

Le Comte claims it was meant to be a joke but it’s obvious to me that he was telling the truth. Where better to escape the paparazzi between January and November than holed up in the Cevennes mountains?  The French don’t even like Christmas much.

‘Rubbish,’ le Comte declared when I propounded my theory. ‘He grows a beard every winter to keep his face warm because that’s what country people do.’

Nonsense. He could knit himself a balaclava if that was the aim. There’s no shortage of sheep. Anyway, this totally explains how come he has no fear of heights. You wouldn’t, would you, if you spent so much time flying around the sky in a sledge? Balancing up a tree waving a chainsaw would be easy-peasy.

He broke our ladder today, however, by dropping a very large bit of branch on it. Maybe he’s losing his surgical touch due to his exceedingly advanced years; he must be several hundred. Le Comte is now muttering from his bunker about the problems of soldering aluminium.

Addendum: The delightful photo of the donkeys is nothing more than pastoral embellishment. They were captured on camera just after their morning swim.