I'm sure they didn't mention ice in the summer brochure! Montureux-lés-Baulay

We wisely keep a generator for times such as these; for the times when we find ourselves stranded, forbidden to move for days on end, when the contradictory tasks of refrigeration and heating take their inevitable toll on the battery banks.

Not quite so wisely perhaps, not having been able to correctly calculate the probability of such a time actually occurring, one of us may have neglected to take action which would have seen "buy petrol for the generator" crossed off our list of things to do while the other was otherwise productively occupied in the supermarkets a few weeks ago.

If fell therefore on that same person to find a means of doing so now.  To that end I assembled one of the bikes and steadied myself to ride the ten kilometres to the village with the fuel station.   With the outside temperature hovering around five I must confess that I there was not a lot of enthusiasm about the prospect of leaving the warmth of the cabin, and I did manage to stall my departure in the hope of the weather warming just a little, until exactly the time that the ice started to drop from the sky accompanied by a good deal of humidity.

Fortunately, the end of this procrastination coincided with Stanley the elderly black labrador's lunchtime walk time, and even more fortunately he never walks alone.

Anita, his guardian having noticed the little clown bike with the fuel can on it, and it's already near-frozen pilot making final preparations prior to departure while dressed in perhaps not quite sufficient clothing to be outdoors let alone to undertake a lengthy cycle ride, (only twenty kilometres and it will be over, I kept telling myself), stepped in and immediately pressed both of us us into accepting her offer of a lift in her car.

Crisis averted, optional shopping and a bit of sight seeing done to boot, a long night aboard with Anita and Jasper and at the end of the evening, there was still no sign of the flood abating downstream.