The cherries on my smaller tree here ripened at the weekend, following which a flock of starlings dived in yesterday, and now the tree is stripped bare. Well, not entirely you understand: it still has leaves with which to preserve its modesty, but the red bits have gone. The larger tree is only intact because it is a slightly different genus that fruits a bit later, but the Starling Regiment is massed on the telephone lines along the chemin between my place and Lauren’s maize field, just waiting for the Verey light to announce another offensive. Tomorrow may be like a scene out of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Yesterday I watched horrified and yet fascinated as a Jay swooped upon a small lizard and pecked it to death. The resistance put up by the victim was a sight to behold: it literally fought until the last gasp, and was still biting the bird as the Jay carried it off. In the evening I went with Dutch friends Leo and Tini to the local restaurant – an emporium that, while it isn’t in line for any Michelin rosettes, nevertheless does a very fine geziers salad and magret de canard wiv chips. The owner (a delightfully rotund lady who works 18 hours a day) has two birds –  one a dove, the other a budgerigar – in a large cage on the back terrace. Throughout our meal, the budgie kept biting the dove’s ankles, and in retaliation the dove kept nutting it with enormous aggression – suggesting to me that doves might not be the peaceable birds they’re cracked up to be.

It is very calm and tranquil here most of the time….until you open your eyes and observe closely what’s happening. Minute by minute, predators hunt and prey hide, the nonstop desire to eat makes locusts look benign, territories are being contested, ants are moving huge objects around, lawnmower blades are slicing through ant-hills and causing chaos, and plumbers are being a f**king gigantic pain in the arse.

The British expat plumber in France sets out, on the whole, not to complete a job to the client’s satisfaction…but rather to tell everyone onsite how everything they’re doing is wrong and thus they are in his way. This represents an extraordinary mental condition known as erectus giganticum gingiber super faciem eius, or ‘fat ginger barbarian who’s got everything arse about face’.

Yesterday this gentleman pitched up onsite, pronounced the work done by others (including me) “useless” and then went home again because – as he mendaciously put it – “there’s nuffin’ fer me to do eeyah”.

So seeking for escape from such behaviour, I have been variously sourcing bits and pieces of tiling, grout, sinks, and taps….but more satisfyingly, hunting out those places that the world forgot in order to find the stylistically unique, the unexpectedly functional, and otherwise unusual surfaces and shapes. There is no greater fun to be had in the world – not least because, along the way, one stumbles across the most extraordinary examples of retail ingenuity.

On the Route Nationale road from Villeneuve-sur-Lot to Bordeaux, there is a small shed-style outlet that displays fragments, seconds, fins de series and bizarre beds. It also sells bottled vegetables, wood at 80% discount, and huge tins of white paint at a fraction of the normal retail price.

Such outlets are sprouting up all over the place across the EU now, as canny buyers (who accept that there are duds in there one has to look out for) catch on to the fact that, for instance, you can buy garden hose and Hozelock bits for a tiny fraction of the price being charged at garden centres and DIY stores. I’ve seen them in Italy, Greece and Spain as well as Yorkshire. However, the one thing they all have in common is that there are items on sale which started out life being badly designed to fulfil one purpose…but which can, with a little imagination, enjoy a second life as something completely different.

In the right context, a piece of industrial metal ceases to be ugly and becomes something joyous to behold. In a designer store it would be priced at €35. In an unsuspecting bricolage, such contraptions will cost you €3.50 a kilo.

At times, we all have to endure the ridicule of those who dare not stray from the beaten path. But increasingly as I get older, I realise that what is old rope to them is a potentially original form of decor to me; and that what they see as a boring barrel is really an objet that can give a sense of age to a kitchen, or be a roadblock to deter the nosey + receptacle of colourful plant life – tout-en-un, as we say in these here parts.