One of the benefits of having the ground covered with snow is the picture it gives you of the local wildlife - and not so wild life. Animals leave traces in the snow of their daily, and nightly, activities.

Take the footprints on the right. We think this track was made across our courtyard by a pheasant. The chasse (the local hunt) has established a pheasant enclosure in the woodland near our house. The idea is that it's a safe, protected environment for the pheasants to breed and raise their young, so that they can fly off into the surrounding countryside and get their heads blown off there.

We often get pheasants on our land. The winding, apparently aimless track left by this bird confirms what we've always suspected: pheasants are stupid. The other thing that struck us about this track was how fake the imprints seem. It's as though someone has come along with a pheasant stamp.

There was more evidence of pheasant stupidity over at the enclosure itself. Above is the fence that runs around it. You can just make out the bird's track coming down from the top-right corner, outside the fence.

The bird reached the corner of the enclosure and made a right turn to continue following the fence. In the picture on the right you can see how it continued until, after about 100 metres of walking, it suddenly thought, "Wait a minute! I'm a fucking bird!" and took off.

The beating of its wings made a fascinating pattern. We saw this repeated on numerous occasions - strange little snow angels. Below is another - note the pattern on the right side of the picture. The other disruptions in the snow suggest there may have been some sort of encounter:

Others are not so easy to identify. We think the tracks in the left-hand picture below are those of a rabbit. The pairs of marks are the hind feet, the other two the front feet. In the right-hand picture, there seem to be at least two rabbits running the same path. Meeting this track is that of (we think) yet another pheasant. The line in the snow is caused by the dragging tail. Either this bird met the rabbits or encountered their trail. Either way, it decided flying was the safer bet.

We had a wonderful March. It was so hot I set up a steamer chair under the willow tree, plugged a wifi card into the ancient Mac laptop and worked outdoors for much of the month.

"It's going to be a catastrophe," said the farmers. Of course, it's always a catastrophe for them, the only question is, what kind? "We'll have a long, hot summer," they declared. "Another canicule. Our crops will die in the drought."

They were wrong. They are always wrong. Whatever happened to peasant wisdom?

Since then, it has rained. There must have been days without rain, but it's hard to recall them. And it's cold. We had to close the bedroom window last night — not against the mosquitoes, as would be normal in August, but against the chill gale.

Today, all the lights in the office are blazing in an attempt to dispel the gloom that seeps in through the windows. And Trish has put away her summer clothes without having worn them once.

The garden is a mess. It's on such a slope that I can't mow when the ground is at all wet. So now the grass is thick and tussocky. It looks abandoned. The only consolation is that it has been a fantastic year for growth — the trees have put on such a spurt that they now encroach on many of our pathways.

The leaves are already turning on the cherry trees. We're wearing woollies and thinking of lighting a fire.

We feel cheated. We never take summer holidays because, normalement, Normandy is such a beautiful place to be in summer. Maybe it's time to think of living further south.