Hopeful Signs of The Times - Happy Easter Everyone

When we arrived in France - almost six years ago now - Madame Bigot (who then owned the fish shop) told me that it never, ever, snowed in Richelieu.

It snowed that year - an extraordinary event that caused even French drivers to slow to a crawl, and brought the local photographer out on the street taking pictures of this supposedly 'one-off event'.

It's snowed every year since.

We've had five very bad winters here now - and this year the winter was extraordinarily bad. Looking out of the sitting room window at my wife's garden - full of plants that were used to much warmer winters and that have been shrouded in frost or buried in snow for five winters on the trot - I thought that very few of them would survive to see another Spring.

But most of them have. When I walked around the garden today, I found that that nine-tenths of the plants had not only survived, but had grown and spread. With care - and some sunshine - they'll flourish.

Think about it. And Happy Easter!