Ouf. Off to bed in a minute after a fun Bank Holiday. Some people, doubtless, went to the coast, given that it was 27 degrees and blazing sunshine, but here the DH was working, so I felt morally obliged to do something useful about the place. 

We have been decluttering recently - something we always seem to feel the need to do in spring. The DH has been clearing out his studio (aka: junk room full of computer bits and whatnot), while I have been chucking out clothes. I bunged over 100 items in the latest bourse, and at the end of the bourse, took three binliners of clothing round to a friend's, whose daughter is knocking off work after having her baby and could do with a new wardrobe for free.  

Meanwhile, the DH has been screaming for more space in the living room, as he is sick of manoeuvring around furniture all the time (why, for heaven's sake, do we have a dining table that seats six, and four dining chairs, when we eat on our laps?), and I too am getting tired of what we own - furniture that is too heavy and cumbersome. I fancy, for instance, replacing our Queen Anne high-back dining chairs with indoor-outdoor stackable bistro-style chairs, so we can also use them in the garden.

Anyway, here's what I got done today:

* After chi kung (about which, the DH is being good as gold) and breakfast (an apple, as today is a fast day), I did some work, then had a bath.  

* We had a nice hour-long walk before lunch and then I had a rubbish stock-cube-soup and another apple.  

* I did three loads of washing and got it all dried outside in the sunshine.   

* Then I did the plastics recycling - two bin bags full. This is just a couple of weeks-worth, given that we don't have potable water so we drink 24 bottles of mineral water a week.  

* I took five bin bags of rubbish to the poubelles.  

* Then I started emptying our disgusting, full, white trash trailer and took another five bin bags to the poubelles. No more, because I ran out of bin liners. 

* Then I valeted the car, because the rubbish had leaked ick all over the boot and because we also need to take it to the garage to ask about a part-exchange. We have a lovely Citroen C5 estate, but it is way too big for our needs and I fancy downsizing to something like a C3 or a Clio. It's got to be a French car, in order to get parts and servicing, so sadly a Nissan Micra, a Kia or a VW are all out. 

* Then I cleaned out the Dust Buster, because it was full of car crap, mostly sand from Brittany.  

* Then I had a rest and a cup of rooibos, especially as I fell a couple of weeks ago and have a twisted ankle, bruised ribs and a bruised sternum, so am feeling a bit dire generally.

* Then I did some gardening - mostly just tidying up as I did a ton of dead-heading, pruning and planting at the weekend.  

* Then I did some work for an hour or two, and then went down to the ponds to read for a bit in the sun, but I couldn't concentrate, so I raked out algae instead.

* Then we came back up and had dinner (salad with bresaola and another fucking apple).

* Then I swept up the living room, packed up a bin liner of clothes for Emmaus, filled the car with boxes of books/old computer etc for charity, cleared the dining table of all the accumulated junk it's acquired while we've been decluttering, covered my wing chairs in freshly dyed clean sheets (I've gone for turquoise...) and moved all the furniture we're getting rid of into the dining-room half of the living room. Presto, tons more space. 

And now it appears to be night.  Oh la, another day bites the dust. But I did at least get to spend a lot of it outside today, and even inside, the doors and windows were wide open, with that amazing summer feel - birds singing, willows blowing. My ministrations mean that the car is beautifully clean (next stop, the car wash) and we now have uninterrupted space from the front French doors right across the room to the window opposite, which overlooks the hillside. This, I think, is the crucial view in the room and keeping it clear makes the place feel huge. 

A good day's work, then, so I can feel virtuous, and back to my desk tomorrow. And, thankfully, eating again...

So, here we are again then: 3.53am. 

I'm often up at this time these days - another delightful effect of menopause. It's probably five or six years at least since I got more than five hours a night, but when it gets down to two or three, then it really begins to bite.

From long experience, however, I now know better than to lie in bed hoping that I'll finally get comfortable, or stop sweating like a pig, or that the cats will magically move over and give me some room. Instead, the best thing to do is get up, make a cup of camomile tea and do something quiet for an hour or so.

One reason I'm awake tonight is that the new Velux blind still hasn't arrived, and the bedroom is flooded with moonlight, although there is only a half-moon. We switched the bedroom around this winter in order to be against the south wall rather than the north one, in the hopes of it being marginally warmer. Indeed it is, but we're now lying in bed staring directly at the Velux.

But of course, ordering the blind was the usual comedy of errors. I first went onto Velux's UK site, so that I could search in English, and quickly found the blind I wanted - the red and pink floral number shown above, which diffuses light, but should be dark enough to block out enough light so's I don't wake up at night, now the nights are getting shorter. Cost? £93. 

Then I went onto the Velux French site to actually order. But roller blinds on the French site are available only in plain white, cream, taupe and navy. That's it. No other colours, and no patterns. Contrast this with the 37 different colours and patterns on the UK site. Also contrast the price: 130 euros - not exactly a fair exchange rate. 

This, sadly, seems par for the course in France - in many instances, there is massively less choice and things cost far more for no apparent reason (it's cheaper, for instance, to order French fabric from the US and pay for delivery than it is to buy it in France). On the French Velux site, one is pushed towards a two-layer blind, half blackout, half pleated, which costs a packet and isn't what I want anyway.

Oh la. So, I emailed Velux.co.uk and asked if they could deliver to France, and the answer was, of course, no. Very helpful. By this time infuriated, I therefore went onto a totally different blinds site, Blinds2Go, found what I wanted and ordered it from there for a cost of £61. So Velux, you've lost the sale, you silly arses. Even with the cost of courier-ing it to France, it still works out cheaper than buying from Velux direct, and they despatched it the same day.

And hopefully, when it arrives, I might have a bit more chance of making it through the night. For now, I console myself with Sara Sant'Ambrogio's masterly renditions of Bach's cello suites, and Bembo's paws on my computer, feeling for the music. 

So, she's finally gone. 

"Ding-dong, the witch is dead!" my husband sang, bouncing into the living room. It's the reaction of almost everyone I know. Among my acquaintances are those that hated Thatcher, those that REALLY hated Thatcher, and those that REALLY REALLY FUCKING HATED Thatcher.

One shirks from rejoicing at anyone's death, but this woman was a figure so divisive, so nasty, who did so much damage - the consequences of which we are still living with - that any other reaction seems impossible.

Let's remember 10 things about Thatcher, just in case we get sentimental.

1 She called Nelson Mandela a 'grubby little terrorist', refused to support sanctions against South Africa and continued to trade arms to an Apartheid government that tortured and murdered its own citizens. 

2 In order to get herself re-elected, she ensured that a peaceful solution to the Falklands issue failed, thus leading directly to a war in which over 900 people died and 2,000 more were injured, some of them horrendously. 

3 She closed 150 coal mines, many of which were profitable, leading to the loss of thousands of jobs and devastating entire communities, including the one I came from. Those mines that remained, she privatised, and they still run today, making profits for private individuals and recklessly disregarding issues of safety and welfare for their non-unionised workers. 

4 She introduced Clause 28 (Section 28), which forbade local authorities from 'promoting homosexuality', thus causing many organisations that counselled young gay people to close.   

5 She supported the retention of capital punishment - the right of the state to kill its own citizens. 

6 She forced councils to sell their housing stocks and forbade them from using the profits to build new housing, hoping to boost the private-let market (ie: properties owned by the rich), leading directly to the terrible social housing shortfall currently afflicting the UK. 

7 She introduced the financial deregulation of the City that led directly to the current banking crisis and contributed to the bitter, double, near-treble-dip recession in the UK, not to mention the Black Wednesday of the 90s that wiped £3.5bn off Britain's wealth.  

8 She privatised Britain's national industries such as telecoms, power and rail, promising a brave new world of share-owning democracy. In truth, working-class people could never afford shares, and most of those institutions are now owned by either foreign governments or finance houses, thus leaving any profits in the hands of a rich elite. Scottish Power is owned by the Spanish firm Iberdrola, Thames Water is owned by Germany's RWE, London Electricity was bought by France's EDF. All of these companies have a record of hiking prices to British consumers, who are powerless to affect the running of firms headquartered overseas.  

9 She opposed the indictment of General Pinochet - another man who tortured and murdered his own people. 

10 She banned members of trades unions from working for GCHQ, thus equating union membership with treason in the public mind.

I could go on and on: the poll tax (and subsequent riots); her support of the Khmer Rouge; the doubling of the VAT rate, which came to encompass almost every item rather than just luxury goods, thus disproportionately affecting the poor; her creation of a social divide in the British population wider than at any time since the Victorian era; 3.6 million unemployed (actually 5 million once you account for those shovelled onto incapacity benefit in order to massage the figures); the wiping out of Britain's manufacturing base, leaving us the one of the few countries in Europe that doesn't even have an auto-industry.

But I'll stop here. Suffice it to say that Thatcher and her cronies changed Britain forever - the current dismantling of the NHS and the welfare state (the two things that Britain ever had to be proud of), and the demonising of the poor by the current bunch of arseholes in government could never have taken place without her influence on the present generation of Tory politicians, schooled and tutored under her leadership.

Thatcher made me ashamed to be British. And in the end, she and her legacy made me emigrate from a country that I feel has had the heart and soul ripped out of it and can never recover. 

My mate K and I have been feeling antsy lately. Something to do with the long winter, I think, and being so shuttered up. Everyone's so sick of it now, the endless lugging-in of wood, refilling paraffin stoves, exchanging gas bottles, donning thermals first thing, not being able to go out for the fog or the cold or the snow. 

We're now into the first week of April and the frost is still thick on the ground every morning, with daytime temperatures around 9 degrees. So K and I decided to take a quick shopping trip to Mayenne. Nothing spectacular, you understand, just the sort of thing that normal people, who don't live in the arse-end of nowhere, probably do every day. But here in the boonies, where even posting a letter means a 5km round trip, a trip to the discount store means a 50km journey and some logistical planning, especially the soothing of husbands who might have to - horrors - get their own lunch.

K dropped her car at our house to save me going out of my way, and off we set into a glacially cold but beautifully sunny day. The return of the sun made us feel more optimistic as we headed first for lunch at a routiers restaurant (all-you-can-eat buffet) and then for Noz, where consumer goods go to die.

Noz, which I assume from the name is a Breton company (it means 'night'), is a chain of gigantic warehouses filled to the brim with crap. My DH can't stand the smell of plastic and despair and usually sits in the car playing Angry Birds, while K's husband runs out of patience in about five minutes and starts plucking her sleeve, so it was nice for both of us for once to womble about at our own pace, picking up tablemats, ceramic gew-gaws, hairbands, end-of-line yarn and God knows what else like blackbirds searching under leaves for a tasty morsel.

Admittedly, especially in mid-winter, the clientele are of the poorer sort - people who can't afford things at full price, so wander around looking for out-of-date chocolates for Christmas presents, etc, all of which is pretty depressing. But most people are like us, just out to see what bargains they can pick out of the assorted tat.

I was really in search of the herbal extracts I'd found last time, which in France still come in those glass vials that you break at either end and add to water. But sadly they were all sold out. I did, however, load up on chocolates and caramel-au-beurre-salé biscuits to take to my monthly book club meeting, incense sticks, whisper-thin Indian silk scarves like the kind we all wore in the 70s, and things for the kitchen such as ginger juice (invaluable, this), pickled root ginger, dandelion tea and masses of tins of sardines, as I'm now trying to eat two a week against osteoporosis. 

I'm not sure what K got, but it definitely included herb teas and a washing-up bowl, along with the Nidra hydrating bath stuff I'd recommended on Cosmetopica. Oh, and a ladybird house made of bamboo, because everyone needs one of those...

You never know what you'll find at Noz: garden furniture, coffee makers, mirrors, shoes, tee-shirts, rag rugs and children's toys. Last time I picked up tinned cherry apples, which the DH thought were disgusting and I ended up putting out for the birds to eat. But I do pretty well with scarves, and even sometimes with clothes - my favourite cotton hoodies with double-lined hoods are from Noz, along with the dress I wear to go swimming in summer - heavy cotton jersey with spandex. 

Just a simple change of scenery, rather than staring at four walls, was most welcome. Only slightly marred by a lorry flicking a pebble onto my windscreen on the way home, which entailed a quick trip to the garage for a resin fill (60-odd euros, which made the trip a tad expensive). Still, the repair is near-enough invisible and it gave K and I a chance to go and have a coffee in a local caff, surrounded by cooing black-collared doves, before finishing up with the supermarket shop and then home to our loving spouses.  

Oh well, back to work... 

Well, that's my last Lidl shop for a while. Our local outlet has just closed, a victim of this seemingly endless recession. 

I'm gutted, as this is where I've done my 'big' shop ever since it opened. The local SuperU has much much higher prices, and even the top-up shop of a few items costs as much or more than the food at Lidl. But Lidl is also better quality.

I know the firm is a joke in the UK, but here in France where quality control is high, its fish, meat, fruit and veg are superb. I love the German chocolates and brands of tomatoes, chilli, biscuits and part-baked breads available. Not to mention the fact that they stock wine from Chile, South Africa and Italy (what joy in France, where EVERYTHING is French), great chorizos, cheese at two-thirds the price it is in SuperU.

Shopping will now mean trekking 25km or so to the next-nearest Lidl in Mayenne, not something we can really do every week, so it will now become a fortnightly event and we'll just have to stock up.

It was a shame today, too, to see all these girls out of a job. They've worked really hard and always been pleasant and now, through no fault of their own, they're on the scrapheap. There are few jobs locally. Next to the Lidl, the huge DIY store that has been B3, Mr Bricolage and Gedimat in the past 17 years, still stands empty a year after it closed. The place used to be thriving, with Brits doing up their properties packing the carpark, buying plasterboard and plants. All disappeared. The summer swallows can no longer afford to renovate their homes, and many Brits have had to go back because no work is available here. You can forget running a gite now - the market is completely saturated and this area offers neither tourist attractions nor the weather that attracts people to the south. 

Yesterday, after swimming, I headed into town to the Sunday Cochinelle minimart, which is open until lunchtime. I haven't been down that end of town in a while and I was shocked to see quite so many businesses closed down. My local town, Gorron, is just a wide spot on the road really, with the main road running right through it and no real centre, and at this end of things, the shops were always a bit lost and forlorn. But now they're mostly gone altogether: the butchers and bakers who were here when we first came (back when our own village still had a bakery and a tabac, and a general store and a school, all of which have died), the little clothes shops, victims of the fashion hypermarkets that have started up everywhere.

With the drizzle coming down, the roads up for repair and the general greyness, it all seemed rather bleak. Even Bagnoles, which we visited on Sunday, is affected - this once-thriving spa resort was once carpeted with mink-wearing Parisians coming to take the waters, but there are now hotels shuttered up and shops empty - something I never thought I'd see. The town used to be brimming with money. 

France has been hit less hard by recession than the UK in that there is still greater social cohesion and unemployment benefits are much higher. But it's still hurting, and I wonder how much longer it can all go on.