High Alpine botanising

It’s very, very early here on the mountain top. I have coffee, I have the window open in my office. Birds are madly singing, there is a sniff of rain in the air. And I think a deer just walked past the mulberry tree on the lower terrace.

I can’t see of course as the grass is so high. (Cue reminder to text Nicolas in an hour and ask what day of the ‘I’ll get round to it next week’ slot I am assigned.)

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Here, let me lean out and show you.

I heard rustling and a bit of activity, and hope it’s deer rather than wild boar. One of them is adorable, the other makes an almighty mess.

A bit like my office. And my brain.

Not adorable.

Back from London and I haven’t even packed away and sorted the files I brought. I just dumped them on my desk and went frolicking in the garden with the cat.

So you might assume that after a week I will get round to showing you round.

But that delight awaits.

Have some holiday snaps instead.

And these ones are particularly apt because my friend Alice took most of these shots. And she is the one who diligently logs on to my site and is rather disappointed most days to find I still haven’t written a post.

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So I bring you ‘what we did on the weekend’. We went botanising. At altitude. In the Alps.

We hiked up to three peaks – Le Grand Arc, Le Petit Arc and le Char de la Turche. In the Lauzière mountains, in the Savoie region of France, in the commune of Montsapey. (I looked that up. I sat dreamily in the car while Paul and Alice told us of this amazing hike we were going to do. I didn’t even consult a map.)

I plodded, Alice took amazing flower photos, we caught up on news. We got hilariously drenched on the way back.

Oh, and I had the most high altitude dizzy spell and almost fainted on the way up to the first peak. Side effect of vaccine dose number two?

Not to worry, my friends just stopped for an earlier lunch than planned, and I lay facing uphill, legs on a rock, eating a baguette, twenty minutes, good to go.

What lovely friends.

And no, that’s not our dog. He photobombed the shot. Mind you, who wouldn’t want a cross between a Savoie sheepdog and an Australian collie who would happily bound up to 2500 metres of altitude and play on the summit?

Okay, this post has shamed me, time to rummage in the photo folder and show you this smaller mountain top.