Sticky fingers at the piano lesson!

France has far more space than the UK, so abandoned farm buildings and yards are quite common - I think in England they would be built on/over/refurbished, but here there's much less pressure on the land so they just stay there, along with their old pieces of machinery and trees.And the trees are a thing of joy! From our first, rented house, we could walk as a family to a wonderfully complete abandoned farm which still had furniture inside, and had fig, plum, pear and walnut trees waiting to be harvested all around. Many people went and helped themselves - in fact my French teacher had a huge bunch of lilac this year from the same farmyard!

The boys' wonderful piano teacher and his fiancee moved to another part of the same village last year. As one boy had a piano lesson, the other would come for a short walk with me to discover the area.We found a shed at the bottom of their lotissement (estate), with an extremely fruitful cherry tree!Today it was Son 2's turn to go first (scales, solfege, and We all Live in a Yellow Submarine), so Son 1 and I headed back to the cherry tree for the first time in a year, baskets in hand.We were richly rewarded for our good memories!The cherries are much smaller than the ones from our friends' garden - probably an older variety, but they are sweet and extremely juicy. On the other side of the trackway from the shed and the tree is a field of wheat.

Behind the tree are these wonderful, rolling hills, typical of le Gers. Where we live now is more flat, sadly. We sometimes call the plateau-lands near us the 'Sto Plains', if anyone recognises the reference! But David and Marlene get to see this every daySo, Son 1, fortuitously wearing red, started picking. He soon got tired and sat on the trackway, scratching calculations into the baked soil to try to work out the surface area of the earth. BTW, I cut his hair on Sunday - not bad, I think!

He then headed off for his lesson (scales, solfege, Yesterday and the Imperial March from Star Wars), and Son 2 came racing down clutching his book of music. Having picked a few cherries, he got fed up too, and settled down in the trackway to work out and sing all the lyrics of Yellow Submarine in a high, clear voice.Thus, surrounded by this surreal combination of maths and music, I picked most of the cherries!

The first result was: The second result was much more pleasing:Here are a few other photos Son 2 and I snapped in the area, while I tell you a few other good things that happened today.My tiny pupil started writing of her own accord today! Teachers and possibly mothers will appreciate the excitement of seeing a child who has learnt her letters and her phonics and started reading, spontaneously starting to write down her own ideas. She wrote her name (beautifully), my name (astonishingly well) and then added 'rucs', which she told me said 'works'. There we were, working together, and she had written down what we were doing. I was very proud of her. Next year I have twins to teach from the start! That's gonna be fun!

My other pupils were fine too, and I have been given some plants by our next door neighbour which will be a lovely addition to the garden and the house. More on those later. I watered all Ben's plants (he's in Switzerland today, and spent time in an antiques market, although when he phoned me to check prices we agreed they were too high). The boys did homework and spent time in the pool.And of course, we had cherries and ice cream for tea!