Should I shut up?

St Augustin
Yesterday's weather: Hot and sunny

I'm sure our French neighbours think that we are mad. After all, we are surely exposing ourselves to risk, I mean, fancy not closing all our shutters as tight as possible at night! Heaven knows what sort of light might escape from the house at night, or into the house in the morning.

We can see less than a handful of other properties from our house and they are all closed tight to the outside world as soon as it gets dark. The only exception is if the household is out for the evening, which is rare. Then they will close all the shutters and leave an outside light on until they return.

We, on the other hand, have windows and shutters open wide all night on the upper floor. Downstairs we do close up the shutters in an attempt to persuade the kitten that until we are up and about, it is still regarded as night. This doesn't work. Just as soon as the sun stretches its arms and gives a yawn thinking that it might consider rousing itself in a while, the kitten gets some sort of uncontrollable urge to scratch on all the doors and yowl until one of us gets up and lets him out. The other two cats, grown up, sophisticated ladies that they are, don't really understand this behaviour at all and would be quite happy for a bit of a lie-in (like us) but as soon as the door is opened, they feel that it would be just rude not to take advantage and pop outside as well.

I love to wake up with the sun, when it is just getting the energy to pop its head over the hillside straight in through the bedroom window, that is when I am ready to wake up and head for the kitchen for my morning cuppa. (By the way, Jim @ Farnham, the UK postal service is obviously worse than we thought because I never did receive that old tea bag you sent me a couple of months ago)'

There is, of course a security aspect of closing the shutters, and we do ensure we are burglar proof when we leave the house for any length of time. Even though crime is a rarity here and a burglary would make the local newspaper it is a requirement of our household insurance that we secure the house when we leave it, so shutters are closed. Somehow though, I feel that this is an invitation to burglers. If someone suddenly decided to take to a life of crime one day, all he would need to do is look for a house where all the shutters are closed all day. Or maybe not, since that is just about every other house around here outside the summer months and all the year-round residents know which houses are closed up for the winter.

Our neighbours are true creatures of habit. We could set our watches (if we wore them, which is one of the great things about being retired) by the sound of their cars leaving and returning every day. We know when to put lunch on by the sound of our neighbour returning every day for his own lunch at 11.45. We know when it is 11.15 on a Thursday and Sunday because the bread van visits the group of houses opposite. We know when it is 7.10 am or pm because the church bells chime for 5 minutes. And lately, I know when it is getting on for 5pm because my young friends come for a walk past the house for young Swanne to play with the kitten. Sadly, they will have to go home soon and probably won't return until next summer, but I'm sure they are now itching to get back home to Swanne's Daddy who is a chef and couldn't take a summer holiday at all.

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I was reading a blog yesterday that I knew I hadn't read in a while. At first I thought I was going mad because one posting looked familiar and then I realised that it was almost a direct lift from another blog that I do read regularly. I can't believe that anyone would want to do that from my daft ramblings, but if you are considering it, please don't or at least ask me first and give me some credit for writing it in the first place. It is just as bad as theft to plagarise someone else's writing, and if that person has been kind enough to link your blog to theirs (I noticed the link had now been deleted) it is also extremely bad manners.