Blue Skies and White Smoke

The rain and snow have stopped, there’s blue sky about and most of the oak leaves have been blown from the trees and are now clogging up everything in sight. They gather in every little corner and this, I am delighted to say is a job for the kids. I’m sure they will be sitting at school (well Guy will be – Kitty has yet another day off!) dreading the leaf-sucker being pulled out from the garage and handed to them. Very gradually they are beginning to understand that there are numerous jobs which need to be done and that they have to do their fair share. I suppose I’ll have to bribe them or maybe I’ll just threaten not to feed them again – that seems to work a treat. They are now at the stage where the fridge and larder are opened more frequently than their school books and so any ban on snacking might have the desired effect.

But as the blue skies appear, so does the smoke. The thick, smelly, white smoke from countless leaf fires which just hangs in the air and shrouds much of the hills. I stopped this practice quite a few years ago as I’m sure it cannot be good for the environment. Now I either take the leaves and other garden waste to the council tip or I use it to fill in the many holes in the ‘garden’ which remain from the 4 years of building work which finished in May.  

My neighbour usually has several of these fires throughout the winter, but being a ‘man of the earth’ and a reasonably responsible Frenchman (albeit a bit mad on occasions when we cross swords), he waits until the smoke is blowing away from my house before he lights up. The problem is that if it’s blowing up the hill, it blows right into his wife’s washing line, but hey, that’s his problem. I never get close enough to him to smell his smokey shirt – thank god!

Given that everything is soaking, I don’t know how they start these fires. Wet leaves are not the easiest thing to light. My method was to throw a good dose of petrol on them, light a bit of paper, throw and run. But I suspect, these old Frenchies do something less risky (or should that be less stupid?). Whatever they do, it seems to be successful as witnessed by the numerous columns of smoke. Why don’t they let the blue skies hang around for a few days before covering it up or is more rain coming? Maybe they know something about the weather forecast which the ‘Weather Channel’ does not! C’est la vie as they say in Glasgow.