Cat on a hot tin roof

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on August 13th 2025.

I should preface this blog by saying that we don’t have a tin roof. Neither do we sadly have a cat any longer, but we do have a very hot roof. France is enduring another prolonged heatwave and it has coincided with the time we had set aside to repair our leaky roof. Having taken all the tiles off, stripped out the old insulation (which the mice had taken over as a very cosy winter home) and removed the membrane (full of mice holes) we were relieved to see that most of the joists were still sound. So now it’s time to put it all back together again with new insulation (treated to repel mice), a new membrane and new battens. Then approx 800 tiles have to be pressure washed and put back up again. And this is all being done by just Michael and me in temperatures ranging from 35 – 43 degrees. The heat is killing us! Which is a shame because it does actually feel good to get back to doing some physical work again and Michael and I are very happy working alongside each other. As usual he is bearing the brunt of it, and certainly being the one clambering about on the roof as it makes my legs go wobbly, but I am doing my best as his gofer.

It is too hot to work all day in that sort of heat so we work around it, starting mostly at 7.30 in the morning and finishing at around 11.30, grumbling at such a ridiculously short working day. We have just started our second week of work, the temperatures due to rise to a hard-to-believe 43 degrees and we’re getting to the stage when we don’t have the energy to grumble about anything. We did consider pushing back our start date until the worst of the heat had passed but the old dependable patterns of a few days of heat, followed by a thunderstorm and cooler weather seem not to be happening so much this year.

I have taken many videos for the family during this project but, before you suddenly decide you’ve got better things to do with your time than read this blog, I will share just two short ones of the work in progress. There is no point in showing you a before and after as it was a tiled roof before and remains so afterwards. All the work and effort is below the tiles, completely hidden from view, so nobody will even know what has been done, my least favourite type of home improvement.

Outside of our own niggles with the heat, there are more serious issues. Our trees are beginning to lose their leaves, a self-preservation mechanism against the extreme heat. This isn’t a new phenomenon. The same thing happened three years ago during another hot summer, but I feel uneasy at the thought that this could become a regular occurrence rather than a rare one. I feel the same way about the temperatures, as it seems that 40 degrees is fast becoming a normal temperature, something to be expected each year, rather than abnormal. For me personally, seeing and experiencing 43 degrees is a first, not one I want to repeat. Yesterday at 7pm it was still 37 degrees outside and 36 degrees inside the cabin, but these are just numbers until you experience them for yourself. We’re eating light, quick pasta dishes, but I have decided standing over the hob for even 15 minutes at the end of the day when the heat is at its worst is too much. Tonight we’re eating cold stuff!

There are more ‘firsts’ happening all around us. Our pond has almost dried out, the lowest it has been since we moved here, and I wonder what has happened to all the newts and salamanders that had made it their home. They can hardly move to another pond as waterholes and ponds have dried up everywhere.

Our cabin is in the corner of a field that goes wild when we are not here, a haven for the wildlife and full of wild flowers and grasses. We share it happily with the bees, not quite so happily with the wasps and hornets but we have learned to live and let live. The mosquitoes are in a different category as I can’t find anything good to say about them. But where have they all gone? We have had an unexpected glut of plums, more than we can process ourselves and many have fallen to the ground. To our surprise there are no normal wasps taking advantage of all this bounty. No hornets gorging themselves on the grapes as they have done in every previous summer. And I can count the bees I’ve seen on one hand. It feels eerily quiet. I have become used to the soundtrack of buzzing that seems to be part of this place and the silence is unnerving.

Outside of our own patch the rivers are also drying out, not helped by the farmers pumping out huge amounts to keep their crops alive, primarily the maize as the sunflowers seem to manage quite happily. Our small river at the bottom of the valley is being continually depleted, and at times we hear the pump running all night. We don’t know what rules govern the extraction of water, but we can’t help but wonder what happens when the rivers run so low that the water runs out and the plants die in the fields. There is an assumption that it won’t ever get to that point, but one day it just might.

And then there are the wildfires, not just in France but throughout Europe and further afield. The world is burning.

The natural world has always been my constant, a comfort and a place of refuge in a world that I don’t like very much at the moment. And so it disturbs me when, year after year, there seem to be more signs that things are not as they should be, that there are a growing number of ‘firsts’ which are being slowly and insidiously redefined in our minds as  normal. Beware shifting baseline syndrome.

I’m not quite sure how I moved from talking about a roof to getting all deep and meaningful about the state of the natural world, or my little corner of it anyway. But with each year that passes I feel a stronger sense of disquiet and seeing such a marked difference here this autumn has shocked me.

Not wishing to end on a dark note, I will leave you with a few beautiful pictures and will see you in a couple of weeks, hopefully when it has cooled down again!

MJ