We are under siege from the hoards of grasshoppers and have taken to sleeping in our downstairs back bedroom.  One particular type of brown hopper are crawling up our house walls and disappearing into the roof.  They are then crawling through cracks in between the wooden logs upstairs and appearing all over our mezzanine floor where we usually sleep, heading for the warmth during the evenings when it turns colder.  There is no way I can sleep there at the moment, especially after Friday night when I heard one thud onto my pillow!  There are actually less hoppers this year due to the torrential rail we experienced during June, last year’s plague being due to the drought but we never had such a problem last year with them coming into the roof.  I told Chris that if we had not been fortunate enough to have our extra bedrooms, I would have made him rent a small apartment somewhere in the valley for me to sleep in!  I’m not normally of a nervous disposition but even I draw the line at having hoppers crawling over my face in the middle of the night.  I spent the weekend strimming the slope in front of the patio and this caused a whole army of hoppers to converge on the chalet.

Today we went on a murdering spree.  We don’t like killing them but enough is enough.  Our terrace ended up looking like the killing fields after I swept them out of the eaves and Chris splattered them with a flip-flop on their arrival onto the patio. The ones caught in the house go to a watery grave down the toilet.  We discovered their route up and have covered parts of the wood with double sided tape which they walk on and then get stuck.  We think, however, that this grasshopper invasion must be an unusual phenomenon as when we moved in here this time 2 years ago, there was absolutely no evidence of their having been any in the house at all.  Plenty of dead flies but not a grasshopper in sight.  I suppose this is one disadvantage to living in the middle of an Alpine meadow!

After having caught at least 20 hoppers upstairs last night we finally went to bed after midnight.  I expected to get up this morning and find the whole of our upstairs covered but there wasn’t one in sight – how weird was that.  I suppose they crawled back when it turned colder in the middle of the night.  I was also surprised I didn’t suffer from nightmares too.

Kevin and Antoinette are here on holiday with Antoinette’s son Colin and his friend.  The youngsters are enjoying mountain biking down the mountain, white water rafting and climbing in the adventure park and costing Antoinette a small fortune.  I was invited to go climbing with them today but as they couldn’t get out of town till 6 this evening due to the [tag-tec]Tour de France[/tag-tec] bike ride coming through tomorrow, I postponed it until next week after the boys have returned home, leaving Antoinette and Kevin a week to themselves.  We spent some of the weekend following the Tour live on the television and it’s getting quite exciting as it nears the Serre Chevalier.