It seems like a strange thing when it is still summer to be thinking about winter, but it's part and parcel of life in rural France that you have to think ahead. This year, we began our winter planning in July.

Most of us here, for instance, heat our houses with woodburning stoves, so there is no 'turning the heat up' when you need it and just expecting the mains supply to be there. You have to make sure you have stock in, and wood ordered in summer comes at a lower price than winter wood, for obvious reasons. It's also better delivered in summer so that you can get it under cover and make sure it dries out good and proper before winter arrives. 

This year, we haven't had a summer wood delivery because we're waiting for a friend to come and cut up the remainder of last year's overstock, which was too long to fit in the stove. Our chainsaw is broken, so this is labour we'll have to hire for this year. 

Instead, I ordered densified wood, which at 257 euros a half-tonne and 335 euros a tonne, works out a lot cheaper if you buy it in bulk. That arrived on Monday, just as the heavens opened (in the driest summer since 1914...), and the DH and I had to barrow it into the barn in the pouring-down rain. Just as we finished, so did the rain, of course.

We also ordered the oil for our central heating back in June. Those of you who don't heat with oil will not have noticed the price drop, as it hasn't translated into petrol prices at the pump, but the lower price for heating fuel is a massive bonus this year - around half the price it was two years ago. So now we have a nice full tank, which always makes me feel happy - it was so empty it was nearly running on vapour. 

Meanwhile, on Monday, the 'window guy' came to measure up the windows properly and get his deposit. Three medium-size windows (replacing leaky single-glazing) are setting us back nearly 3,000 euros. Argon-filled, with a stove-enamelled finish, they are the world's whizziest windows, and for the price, they'd better be. But we trust the installer, whom we've used before, and the windows will be started on 20 September, just before the weather gets really cold. 

On Friday it's the turn of the bedroom, which is being insulated with 20cm-thick polystyrene-backed plasterboard. Hopefully it will make a big difference, as below our beams, which are dado-rail height, we are only protected from the outside world by a centimetre-thick layer of plasterboard. 

Things should be better this year, though our cathedral ceiling means the room will never be warm. But I don't ask much, really. Just that I don't have to sleep in a hat all this winter, as I did last year...

So, Tiger Woods and his wife are to divorce.

Well, no surprise there, then. There's only so much humiliation a woman can take, and given that she's still young and pretty, and the settlement will be huge, she'll probably have a pretty good future in front of her, unlike the average sad, jaded, shat-on politician's wife. If he does indeed pay her $100 million, that's an awful lot of money for each illicit shag. They part on good terms, apparently, and will share the parenting.

Personally, I wouldn't want the man near my kids either, but that's her affair. Woods' texts were frankly unpleasant and show a violent personality - one can only be glad that the man is successful, as if he wasn't, he strikes me as possibly dangerous. But certainly I can't look at him the same way again. 

It is always a shame when your idols turn out to have feet of clay. I was quite a fan of Woods, who is a great golfer, and who always seemed polite and articulate. But his dark secrets are a tad too dark for me, I must admit. Infidelity is one thing, violence against women is quite another.

Having had personal experience of marital violence in my own family, I find that my reaction when he appears on television these days is to simply switch over, or at least to mute or leave the room until he's gone away.

It was something of a shock to find that - in one way, at least - I'm suddenly fashionable. All this summer I've been wearing an updo.

A late-50s, early-60s-look updo is apparently the coming thing, according to the Guardian. The popularity of Mad Men's Christina Hendricks, of the hourglass figure, is (as usual) cited as one reason for the trend. 

All balls, of course. Personally I've been wearing my hair up because it's been BLOODY HOT all summer, in case no-one's noticed. Also, because I've largely eschewed western clothing in favour of kimono, an updo is easier to wear without looking like the Madwoman of Montcocher. 

I must admit, though, to being pleased that my new hairdresser persuaded me to the little wispy bits around my face when I had my hair done a while back. She spent ages on my natural-looking streaks, and how they matched the cut and no matter what I do with it - up, down, ponytail, bun - it always looks like I'm having a Really Good Hair Day. 

This is just as well as, I am not, it must be admitted, a high-maintenance kind of gal when it comes to hair.  I loathe using products and drying it upside down is about as far as I'll go in terms of faffing about with it. I wash it twice a week, and on a daily basis, all it gets is a brush (if it's lucky) before being scragged into a scrunchie and left until bedtime. I doubt that my bollocks-to-it approach is quite what the 'artistic director' at Trevor Sorbie had in mind with his doughnuts and hairspray.

At the moment, come to think of it, I don't even have a hairdryer, as my old one began emitting sparks and has been pensioned off as bellows for the kitchen woodburner. 

Oh la. It is time for a trim, though, and the DH, who hasn't had a haircut in over a year, is beginning to look increasingly like Beethoven, so maybe it's time I booked us a double appointment. 

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has once more come out as the surprising voice of reason, in banning a police advertisement that suggested people might be terrorists for indulging in perfectly normal behaviours. In the ad, a man says: "The man at the end of the street doesn't talk to his neighbours much, because he likes to keep himself to himself. He pays with cash because he doesn't have a bank card, and he keeps his curtains closed because his house is on a bus route." The listener (this is a radio ad) is then told: "If you suspect it, report it."

Fortunately, there were swiftly 18 complaints from listeners to the ASA, suggesting that not only could the ad be offensive to ordinary law-abiding citizens, it might also encourage people to harass or victimise their neighbours and was appealing to people's fear. 

Perhaps ACPO believes every French citizen to be a terrorist. We all use cash here, not cards, and frankly, whether or not you keep your curtains closed is regarded as your own business. Shame on the UK police for coming up with such cobblers.

Anyone who thinks such an ad is not potentially harmful, I would suggest watches the series The Nazis - A Warning From History, particularly the interview with the lovely little old lady who had shopped her 'lesbian-looking' neighbour to the Gestapo for having 'Jewish-looking friends'. That neighbour died - like thousands of others who had committed no crime - in a concentration camp, simply because of a neighbour's nosy-parkering.

As the summer wears on, I become increasingly thankful that I no longer live in the UK.

It it hideous, watching aghast from afar as the Tories rip off their smug, complacent human masks to reveal that they are indeed the same shape-shifting lizards that they always were. 

Kiddies' playgrounds and a TB-detection service for the homeless are the latest funded schemes to go, this morning, following on from the ending of school repairs, changes to pensions that will affect the poorest in society, the cutting of legal aid for people in need, the withdrawing (then quick back-pedalling) of free milk for children, and yesterday that twat David Willetts (whose job title mometarily escapes me) suggesting that unemployed graduates should 'start businesses' on leaving college if they can't find work. 

Exactly what fucking planet do these people live on? A cosy, furry little world where mummy and daddy can't just buy Quentin a housey-wousy to live in, and then fund him in a business start-up before he goes on to a job in the Thity doesn't even occur to these people. They don't even know it exists. They don't know the rest of us even exist. 

Twenty years of this shite under Thatcher and her lickspittling cronies was what made me emigrate in the first place. The Tories of that era made me ashamed to be British and they destroyed everything that I had loved about my country. 

But this new lot appear to be no better and the way things currently look, they are, all of them, utterly unfit for government. I know - and everybody knows - that New Labour spent money like it was going out of fashion, and left the country in debt up to its eyeballs. But as for this 'big shit sandwich and we're all going to have to take a bite', when are they themselves going to tuck in?

Every measure they have so far introduced impacts on only the poorest, most vulnerable, most disenfranchised people in society.  I don't see Tories themselves suffering, or the upper classes or the middle classes. It's working class families who will be hit by every measure so far implemented. It is not City-banker public schools that are falling down, it's the schools that produce Britain's engineers and nurses and firemen. 

Let them just once manage on Jobseeker's allowance for a year, or live on a council estate plagued by drugs or gangs for six months, or be denied live-extending cancer drugs under the postcode lottery that is NICE, and then tell the rest of us how to live.