latest news ...

home page | latest updates | site map | site index

about this site | audience participation | copyright notice | technical issues | accessibility statement | read this | contact me

VISIT MY ON-LINE MEDIA STORE

LES GUIS - THE PHOTOS FROM 2008

Once the New Year celebrations (such as they were) were out of the way, I set to and started to make the door of my verandah. The plastic sheet was fine, but a door would be so much better.

First of all, you take a large plank ...

Note the mitre saw. It was a good thing to remember that I had one of these tucked away.

Then you need to hollow out the plank in order to fit the cheap door lock that was on sale special offer at the local Auchan. Believe me - it's much easier to measure up for the lock in the door and the slam plate in the frame when you are just dealing with a plank of wood rather than a whole door.

I was really pleased with how this turned out. I'd never done anything like this before and I was learning all the time. But then again, isn't this the whole point of doing something like this?

Here's a door all ready to be assembled. You can see that all it's made out of is two planks. I've simply cut them to length, made a couple of rebates in the verticals, and the horizontals will slot into position quite nicely.

You can see that the camp camp is still standing. At the very least, it's covering the ground and preventing weeds from springing up. The gazebra or whatever it's called makes a useful shelter too when it's raining. But I have a cunning plan for winter 2008-09.

You'll notice another change here - the verandah now has glass in it. Well, mostly. There are still one or two windows to cover, but nevertheless this is a big breakthrough from when there was just a plastic sheeting flapping around.

First thing I noticed was that the temperature in my room went up a degree or two in comparison to what the temperature was doing outside. Secondly, even in the winter I could have 25 degrees in the verandah in sunny weather. In those circumstances, leaving the door to my room open, the temperature would go up a couple of degrees.

The verandah door has now been completed, assembled, and screwed together. It even has all of the hinges attached. It's all now ready to be stained with wood preservative and then hung.

We're looking at the top end of the door here. At the other end, the bottom, you can see the slam plate that will stop the water running down the door and into the verandah. At this end, you can see the 10x10 strips that have been inset into the frame. These are to take the glazing.

And here you are - one door duly stained and hung, and then cladded out with tongue and grooving to match the rest. You might be wondering about the staining. And no, it isn't used engine oil. I didn't reckon that that was o good idea for wood that would come regularly into contact with human beings and where I'm cooking and later going to be growing plants. It's actually some pretty decent stuff from LIDL or ALDI and comes in 5-litre cans. Whenever I see it on offer, I always grab a tin or two.

You can see on the pillar to the left of the doorway the heads of the coachbolts that hold the verandah together. With it being demountable and not fixed permanently, it doesn't count as an extension to the property.

One thing that you don't see is the glass in the verandah door. We had a little problem with that and one day I shall have to get round to buying some more.

By now (we were still in January) I decided to take down the camp camp. It had outlived its usefulness and the gazebra had been damaged in a storm. Mind you, for €19 ($25, £13,) it had done me proud over 6 months as a home and as additional shelter for the tent.

I also set to and dismantled the tree in front of the house. It had gone all straggly and manky and wasn't doing any good there. At least it would make good firewood and you never know - something might grow up from the remains. And if it didn't, I'd pull it down and plant another one.

It's quite usual to have a deciduous tree growing in front of the house in rural parts of Europe. The idea is that in the summer the leaves act as a parasol to keep the sun off the house and so keep it cool. In the winter all the leaves fall off and the sun can then warm up the building.

If you recall the earlier photos from this sort of position you'll remember that there was a pile of soil outside the verandah. This was from when I had dug out to make the base back in 2000 or whenever it was. You can see that I've started to clear it away and level up the slope down the hill. A nice bit of landscaping that I shall be improving every now and again.

You can also see the mud and sludge from a month or two of rain. It's always been a problem around here and by now I'm getting fed up with it. So I've done an imitation of Passendaele (the Third Battle of Flanders) and laid down some duckboards - some old pallets in fact. Eventually I'll be using the old slates off the roof as a pathway, but that's a while away yet.

You can see that I've moved the soil over here. And there's a reason for doing that, which you will see in a minute. But first you'll notice that I've been weeding - pulling up endless brambles thistles and nettles and having a huge bonfire to get rid of them all. All of this waste land here - I'm going to be putting it to some use in the very near future. If I'm going to be staying down here for any length of time I may as well put plan B into operation.

I'll have to put away the framework for the gazebra as I'll be working over there shortly.

The fire is still burning and the framework for the gazebra has been put away. And just as well because I'm digging over it all, as you can see. I've decided that I'm going to have myself a garden on the waste land and see if I can't grow my own vegetables and suchlike. It's a shame to waste all of this land and it'll warn me up, will all this digging, seeing as it's pretty cold outside.

It's the best time to dig, when it's cold, as the frost gets into the soil and breaks it up better than you can ever do with a spade or a fork.

And it's amazing what you uproot when you are digging. There were the obligatory broken bottles, bits of metal, a shotgun cartridge and the front numberplate off a motorbike (but not the bike itself, unfortunately).

But this seems to beat about everything. A nice piece of copper braided cable. It's attached to something at both ends, so it's obviously an earthing cable ("groan" - ed) so I set out to track it down. One end goes to an electricity pylon not too far away from here, but the other end seems to disappear off into the wild blue yonder somewhere between the house and the barn. But what a weird place to put an unarmoured electrical cable like this - just a couple of inches below the surface.

I've been away in England for a meeting, and this is how the farm was when I came back in mid-February. Usually I take a pic of the place before I go away so I can compare the two, but I forgot to do that in January.

Just for a change there have been no plants or weeds running riot. The fact that it is midwinter (although it doesn't look much like it in this photograph) might account for that.

I put this photo up on the web to show Rhys the electrical plugs and sockets for my 12-volt wiring circuit. In the past, I used car cigarette lighter plugs and sockets but they are worse than useless for continual use, and so I wanted something easily distinguishable that won't be confused with British or European plugs and sockets, and is "handed" so you can't confuse positive and negative.

A visit to the USA in 2002 pointed me in the right direction, amd I came back with a shed load of these. But of course you can never have too many of these, so anyone coming back from North America is obliged to make a detour via Home Depot or Lowe's on my behalf. And this is what you have to bring me back. All expenses paid, of course.

You'll notice in this picture that the verandah has grown a guttering. And so it should. One of my aims around here is to be self-sufficient in water and as I don't have a spring or a well here, I need to take positive action to find another likely source. So rainwater it is.

In the long-term I'll be having a sunken tank in between the barn and the house and letting the rainfall drain away off the roofs into there. But that's a while away yet. Meanwhile, from little acorns oak trees grow and I'll be catching the rainwater off the verandah roof and using it for watering the garden, washing and the like.

Yes, the garden. Have a look at this. I'm sure you can remember the plot of land where I had the camp camp, and what it was like prior to that, seen here in the reverse angle. This here today is a world of a difference.

In the distance you can see the Caliburn-coloured wheelbarrow, and the greenhouse frame that Paul's mate John donated to the cause. While I'm on the subject, I've been lucky to have some really wonderful friends, and I would like to publicly thank all of them as well as the many other people interested in my project who have donated all manner of items to me to help me on my way.

A short while ago I talked about the middle of winter and how it didn't look much like it. Well this does, doesn't it? We're in early March now, yet this is the first snowfall of any real significance that I have encountered (there may have been one or two while I was on my travels).

Even so, it wasn't anything major as you can see. Winters up here in the mountains at 700 metres (2250 feet) are usually pretty cruel by West European standards as you can see from 2003, but global warming must be having some effect if this is all that it can do now.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I put the glass in the verandah windows.

I was having a good rummage around in the barn and came across a 12-volt clock that was doing nothing in particular. It didn't used to bother me, not knowing the time, but now that I'm engaged in more social kind of activities, knowing the time every now and again might be an advantage so I've wired it into my control centre.

Just to the right you can see the steady green light on the charge controller on the right of the photo. That means that the batteries are fully charged. Even at 13:10 on a day in mid-March. To the left of the clock you can see the charging bank. All the chargers for the battery-operated tools are plugged in there and whenever I switch on the inverter for mains current the batteries are charged up.

All of this wood looks exciting, doesn't it? It's some cheap shuttering that I bought from Brico Depot and cut down to lengths of 1300mm (about 4'3"). And I bet you are all dying to know exactly what it is that I'm going to be doing with it, aren't you?

If you look way in the background, top right, you can see that we are having some sun. That makes it late afternoon my my reckoning as the sun goes from this part of my land round about 15:30.

And here you are. Some raised beds for my garden, and I bet you knew that all the time anyway.

Everybody has their own idea about gardening and how to get the best from their land. My idea is to make things as easy as possible for me, and by that what I mean is to rotate my crops around and keep some pathways open in between, as well as making digging so much easier. This can best be accomplished by using raised beds, which I can number and keep records of what goes where, as well as being able to walk around the pathways in between.

Another advantage is that each time I dig something, like to make a base for concreting or to sink a drainage pipe, I always seem to end up with soil left over.In raised beds, I can simply chuck it on top of the soil already there and dig it in.

I mentioned earlier that I was planning to capture my rain water for watering the garden and so on. I'm putting the temporary water butts here at the side of the verandah but once they are in they are in and aren't likely to be moved any time soon, so it's a good idea to paint at least this side of the verandah so that it keeps the weather off the wood while the water butts are there.

You'll notice the colour. B&Q in the UK had a colour that looked remarkably like Caliburn-colour, and they were having a clearout with tins at half-price. Visiting half a dozen of their shops in the UK I managed to liberate about 12 tins. It looks quite nice against the brown of the LIDL wood treatment, don't you think?

A couple of weeks ago we had a snowfall and I said that I wasn't particularly impressed with it. Today, with me going to a meeting with Rebecca in Charensat and needing to make an early start, it bucketed down with snow, just like in the olden days.

You can however see the half-painted verandah and how nice it looks. But you can also see the snow on the large solar panel supplying power to the house. That was one thing that I have to bear in mind - during snow falls like this I need to be able to clean the snow away to make sure I receive a decent amount of electricity. Light does penetrate snow and a charge is recorded, but nevertheless there isn't any point in wasting it when I can shin up a ladder or invent a long-handled brush.

Poor Caliburn has received a good dose of snow, as you can see. There isn't likely to be a gritter down my lane so I need to be able to pick myself out along the track towards the public highway. There's not likely to be a gritter along there either, bearing in mind where we are, but never mind.

You can understand now why I choose to reverse down the lane, so that I'm facing forwards to leave. With sudden fogs, low clouds, snow falls, dark nights, it's nice to be able to see where you are going at times like this.

The snow didn't hang around all that long and melted fairly rapidly. But the result of that created quite another problem. The ground churned up into an endless (or rather depthless) morass of mud that looked like something out of the Western Front in 1917. It all looks positively dreadful.

A day or so later it looked even worse and I was in danger of drowning in the morass. At least the raised beds were retaining the snow so that lot wasn't melting across the pathway.

It's a good indication of the conditions in which I live here in the Combrailles, and you can understand now why I put down duckboards by the side of the verandah. Imagine the mud that would be there with me walking up and down that path every 5 minutes.

At the end of March I was obliged to return to the UK for OUSA business and I didn't return until the 30th of April. And this was the sight that greeted me when I finally made it home. Nice bright sunlight, yes, but look at how the grass has grown, and look at all the weeds growing in my raised beds. I need to get on and sort out all of this, and very quickly. Because something was stirring in the woodshed that required my immediate attention.

Before I left for the UK I sowed some seeds for the vegetables that I want to grow, and I gave my key to Claude so that every so often he would come round and water them. And on my return this is what greeted me - a huge pile of baby plants.

Much more came up than I ever imagined, and I'm going to have my work cut out getting all of these into the ground in the reasonably near future. I'm well impressed with this lot.

Nevertheless, I personfully set out and gave the early stuff a really good go, as you can see. Having stuck a water butt temporarily under a downspout while I was away, I had plenty of water to bed them in with. That always helps. The ground is still quite stony, but that's all a question of time and will be resolved in the future.

In the foreground to the right of the stick in the nearest raised bed, that's where I shoved my potatoes.

Another thing is that I'm getting fed up of making notes on pieces of paper and then losing them, or forgetting vital measurements that I've already measured on hundreds of occcasions. What I've done is to start to keep four notebooks in varying sizes.
i.....The biggest, hardback one is for permanent notes such as measurements that will come in useful for whatever I'm going to be doing far and away in the future
ii....The second is for keeping all of the designs in - so I know where they all are and I can follow them as I go along making stuff
iii...This is for making rough notes that I can discard or cross out or amend
iv...This is most important. It's the shopping list - I write down here what I need to buy and next time I'm around at the shops I'll have a list of what I want. But even more important - when several years later I come across some article that I bought years previously for a project and forget which one and what it was for, I can look in the notebook and find it there. I wish I had done this right at the beginning, I'll tell you.

But start as you mean to go on, and being much more organised for a change, this is how it was at the end of day one of building my water butt stand. all the wood was cut to shape and treated with some of the LIDL wood treatment, which you can see in the can in the foreground so that you know what to buy for me if you see any of it about.

But I'm going to have to do something about cutting the grass, aren't I? And look at the plants in the upper left corner.

And here's the finished object, all assembled and treated. You can drive trains over that, I reckon, seeing as how strongly I have built it. But then again it needs to withstand about 700 litres of water, which I reckon is about three-quarters of a tonne.

One thing that I did that the builders of the first Tay Bridge didn't do is to put in some diagonal longitudinal struts, to stop "racking" - the leaning forward of the bridge under an advancing weight. The enquiry reckoned that this would have contributed considerably to the strength of the bridge for very little additional weight or cost, so lets see if it works.

One of the most important things that you need in a water butt is a sieve to catch all of the stones and gravel, leaves and dead animals that fall down the drainpipe. This is a plant basket for an aquarium, and it's just the job for doing what I want it to do as a catcher and strainer.

In the long term I'm going to be doing something different and much more inventive involving a long drop and a sand bed, but this will do for now to be going along with.

And just as well I'm cracking along with this as the rest of the plants are now bursting out. They are going to need planting quite soon and I'll be needing the water I can get for this little lot.

These are the beans. They did nothing for a while and then just unfolded out of the ground like triffids. It was so impressive to watch them emerge, their big leaves already formed underground and pushing the soil out of the way as they climbed up. It's easy to see how the legend of Jack and the beanstalk started.

You might remember my hi-fi adventures from 2006 with a cheap mp3 player. When I was in Belgium in February I found the Creative Zen Micro 6GB player that I had bought a while ago, and brought that down. Wired up to the hi-fi speakers it gave a much better sound with a greater variety of music.

But it wasn't to last. A week or so later we had the dreaded and much talked about "fatal hard disk error" and that was that, unfortunately. Back to the cheap old mp3 player.

There was yet one more refinement to be made to the garden, and this involved making a cloche. I had some tropical veg such as peppers, melons and the like and the greenhouse is a long way from being erected, so it seemed appropriate to knock a cloche together as a temporary measure.

But look at the speed clamps that I'm using. Building the verandah door back in January had shown me just how useful a set of large clamps could be, and when I was down at Brico Depot they had some on special offer. Buying a pair was a good idea and I put them straight to work.

And here is the finished article, all ready and waiting for the plants. Just behind it to the left of the photo is the old black dustbin that I'm using for now as a compost bin until I can come up with something better.

You can see that the window for the cloche is the front window from the old caravan that Liz and I scrappped last summer. I love car and caravan dismantling as there are so many opportunities to recycle whatever it is that you dismantle. Caravans are like a treasure trove in that respect.

The plan was that this year I would put the roof on the house and move into the attic once it was completed. But of course with me having to attend the OUSA Executive Committee meetings and other similar events, I just didn't have the consistent time to spare in doing it.

It looks like another winter in my little room here, so I removed the temporary plastic decorators' door into the living room and replaced it with slightly more permanent wooden structure. And straight away the temperature went up a couple of degrees and it cut down on all of the draughts that used to circulate around here.

There's even a power socket that connects up to the inverter in the living room. How about that?

And how about this? Some of the plants that I planted in the garden have turned up trumps, and I now have some peas. Isn't this marvellous?

Mind you, I clearly spoke too soon for towards the end of June I had to travel to the UK and didn't return until the beginning of August. And by that time, all the peas had long since shrivelled up into the ground. That was really quite a shame, but never mind.

You'll probably remember that back in 2006 I started to fit some flooring in the barn, the raised part on the right as you go in from the lane for those of you who know the place. I did the front ok, but ran aground a bit after that what with having many other things to do.

However, a period of a few days of rain left me having to work inside, so I set to and finished off the back half of the floor. It looks quite nice too. Mind you, I hate this chipboard stuff, but it was cheap and so am I.

One thing I did though was to put a trapdoor in the floor, just over the double doors round the back. Now, if I buy any long lengths of wood I can take them round the back and push them up through the trapdoor. And if I'm working outside, I can drop lengths of timber through the trapdoor and straight outside.

And here you can see the other corner of the floor - and treated too. That stuff from LIDL seems to be excellent quality and the right kind of price, and just the job for here too.

Mind you, I wouldn't say that the beams in the back were level. The Scorpion saw came in useful for cutting out the high spots, and the low spots were packed with offcuts of scrap timber that was lying around. Still, it's far better than it was. And I would never have managed it without the new solar panels, the big batteries and the 600watt inverter

Just to jump out of sequence to early June, and you can see one of the reasons why I cracked on and did the floor. I had loads of timber lying around that I wanted to move to somewhere else out of the way, and up here seemed to be the right kind of place to put it. The trapdoor came in really handy.

You'll find out why I wanted to move all the wood when we get to August.

Don't worry about the chair. That was left behind by the previous owner of the house and is in a pretty bad condition.

One of the reasons why I came to live here was because of the changeable weather. We are on the frontier of three different climatic zones - the Continental, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic so the weather is always changing and there aren't any pronounced dry spells that would kill off all the plants. In fact it's the Atlantic zone that prevails here, with wet westerly winds.

But I was outside with the camera just as a weather front moved in from the south-east - the big grey cloud to the left.

One one occasion there was a magnificent storm over here caused by a south-easter colliding with a westerly and we had a phenomenon known as a Spanish Plume. Not today, though.

We're in June now, and one night I had a visitor who left his or her imprints in the mud. I've no idea who or what it might be, but if you know, please . Whatever it was, it was pretty big.

We had a straw poll on my blog to see if anyone had any suggestions. The winner, by a unanimous vote, was a certain high-ranking employee of the Open University Students Association. We reckoned that these must be cloven hooves.

This was an exciting thing to build - a rotating bird scarer. It's made from two plastic bottles cut in half down their length and nailed to a cruciform made out of two scrap strips of wood, placed on an angle bracket fastened to another scrap piece of wood. It pivots around a central bolt and believe me - when the wind gets behind it, it can push it round at quite some speed.

I saw something like this in a garden in St Julien last year and I was impressed, but I reckoned that the design merited some improvement. So here is my version.

I had to go back to the UK at the end of June and as many of you know, I've started to play the bass guitar again. I've bought an Ibanez acoustic bass.

One of the things that I'll be doing will be to steward the camp site at a friend's music festival so it seemed like a good idea to take the bass along. With that in mind, I built myself a case to keep it in.

You can see in the background the caravan that was my home until the rats trashed it. The first period of sustained bad weather when I have nothing else to do, and that caravan will be a distant memory. Scrap aluminium is reaching record prices in the UK.

I'm also in the middle of doing my thesis for my degree, and I'm spending 2 hours every day working on it. Today, it was so nice that I went and worked outside for a change.

The parasol is nice. It was a cheapie from the sale at the Auchan and it goes quite nicely with the Caliburn-yellow verandah, which I have now finished painting by the way, as you probably will have noticed. But all of this brings a whole new meaning to "Open Office".

It's now close to the time that I need to leave for the UK so some tidying up was in order. It's a long time since you've seen the place looking like this, so it's worth a shot from the back of the house as it's a view you don't very often get to see.

It's hard to imagine that back in 1999 when I first started to take the place seriously, it actually looked like this. There's a lot that has happened in the intervening period but it would have been so much nicer if more had been accomplished and I was living in more ... er ... refined circumstances.

Where the plywood sheeting is over the back of the verandah, that's going to be a doorway into the woodshed that I'll be building onto the back once the roofing is done.

Here's the front view, showing how neat and tidy it is. You can see how all of the vegetables are doing - they are coming along quite nicely, and I've built a pea frame. You can also see the water butt on its stand just to the left of the verandah.

The blade thingy in the middle is part of an old tabletop fan that Claude found down at the tip and stripped it for the electric motor. My interest was to see if the blades would spin round with the wind as I have an old 6-volt bike dynamo that I would like to couple up to some fan blades for the wind to turn it round to charge up a 6-volt battery that would power some 6-volt outside lights.

And now, some 5 weeks later, I'm back home. And just look at what has happened. I reckon that 5 weeks in the height of the growing season was just far too long a time to be away from home, and I've lost quite a few plants, unfortunately. But this is what learning is all about.

The tree in front of the house won't have escaped your notice. Remember back in January when I cut most of it down as it had stopped growing and was looking so sickly. You wouldn't say that now, though. It's thoroughly revigorated itself and is in the peak of condition.

Claude and Francoise had their daughter and her children over for a while in summer and Strawberry Moose, always up for a photo opportunity in the company of beautiful ladies of the opposite sex, took full advantage of the situation.

From left to right we have Camille, Sandrine and His Nibs, Damian, Francoise and Claude. Utica the dog couldn't resist getting on on the act either.

First task now I'm home is to cut the grass so I can walk up to the house without getting lost in the jungle. And that was no mean feat as for some reason or other the tractive lawn mower has ground to a halt. I'll have to have a look at that in due course but in the meantime I relied upon the heavy duty flymo that Robert's father donated to the cause.

But I can't say that I'm impressed with the overgrowing brambles from the plot of land owned by my Dutch neighbours. I remember once that they took issue with me over something back in the dim and distant past and in the spirit of good neighbourliness I attended to it. But the spirit of good neighbourliness around here seems to be all one-way traffic.

And while I was musing on this very subject, I encountered this wonderful piece of parking. This is my other neighbour - or rather his mother, who just parks her car anywhere she feels like.

In order to get to my property I have to turn to the right here and then reverse out and down the hill and round the bend at the bottom. One day I'll be towing a big trailer with a pile of scaffolding or something on it, and I may well have a slight accident due to the constraints on manoeuvring caused by this inconsiderate parking.

Back in April I asked the mayor of the village if he could do something about making sure I get access to the other side of my property. It's now August (and in fact, it's now October).

But every cloud has a silver lining, and here is the very first harvest from out of my garden. A courgette, a handful of potatoes and some beans. And later there were some carrots and mint too. I was impressed with all of this as you can imagine.

And something else that is worthy of note is that it all tasted absolutely beautiful. Nothing at all like shop-bought veg. Anyone who has ever eaten anything straight out of their garden will know exactly what I mean, and anyone who hasn't really doesn't know what he is missing.

But I can't stand here on ceremony - there's work to be done. Such as weeding the raised bds to see what plants are still surviving under the rash of nettles, brambles and dock leaves. Not a lot in these two beds, unfortunately, and I can't find the paper where I wrote down what was where.

In the front bed we have a few mangy cauliflowers and nothing else, and in the rear bed, 5 amazing Indian corn plants with the runner beans behind. And I can tell you that the beans are very tasty. I wish I knew where my broccoli were though.

You remember that I told you that I was needing to move all my wood from dowstairs in the barn? Well once I made some space I shuffled things round a little and emptied the corner of the barn under the little window. And here I'm constructing a three-storey battery box.

You'll notice that I'm double-skinning it and filling the gap in with scrap offcuts of polystyrene - even the door. Batteries lose their efficiency as they go cold so they need to be insulated as much as possible. I'm planning on putting a heatswitch in there too, so that when the temperature drops below 5 degrees Centigrade, a halogen light comes on that will generate heat and hopefully warm everywhere up again. I reckon that running a 10 watt light wll gain more energy than it will lose with 9 batteries in the box.

And here's the box, more-or-less completed. When the barn roof is done, it will be at this end where I'll be mounting the solar panels and wind turbine and as the voltage drop is proportionally more with a lower voltage, I need to put the batteries as close as possible to the charging equipment. There's space in my box for 9 batteries in three tiers of 3. Four batteries that I currently have isn't really enough. The charge fluctuates too much with the current that I can draw and recharge.

And I've learnt from the last battery box. This one is a front-loader so I can put stuff on the top without inconveniencing myself.

We mustn't forget the socialising part of life down here. Normally I try to steer clear of other immigrants round here. There are too many of them and, like most Brits or the Dutch they have the wrong attitude towards the inhabitants of the area.

Not all of them though. In June there was an English-French conversation group started out here, where British people could practise their French and where French people could practise their English. At last - a group of people with the right idea about integration so I duly signed up. Here we all are, one summer evening, having a barbecue round at Bill's barn.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the battery box appears to have grown. And how! You can see that it's now expanded along the wall into an absolutely fantastic workbench, all made by my own fair hands. With winter not too far away I won't be able to work outside as I normally like to do and now that I've roofed over here with the flooring upstairs, it makes a nice corner to install everything and to have things close at hand.

You'll notice that parts of the top lift up like a kiddies' school desk. It's in these cubby holes that I'm keeping all my tools so that they are easily found. I have to say that I didn't expect it to come out as well as it did and it's already proving quite useful.

we're now in the beginning of September and I'm continuing the improvements to my living area. Back in the verandah I've installed a sink. It's the one that we salvaged from the caravan that we scrapped in 2007 and that I had in the wet room for a while. But seeing as I'm living in my room and the verandah permanently, then the sink may as well come to join us.

There is no plumbing for "water in" at the moment but I'm going to be working on that in the near future, but plumbing out is via an old washing machine drainage pipe that I had lying around.

And back in the barn I've carried on with the work bench. On this photo you can see the lights that I've installed to illuminate the work surface when I'm working there.

They are in fact two of my famous "pesto jar" lights and if you look on this page you can see how I make them. There has however been a refinement. Instead of the chocolate block connectors, I've finally managed to track down some proper sockets for the bulbs.

Everything is in a mess right now but things can only get better. It's a big advantage having a workbench like this, and makes things so much easier.

You may remember back in June I built a rotating bird scarer out of two plastic bottles and some scrap wood. I was so impressed that I went and built another.

There's a slight refinement too in the design. I've dangled a couple of old CDs from the arms of the bird scarers - on a short wire so that they don't catch up in the woodwork as they rotate around. This is really quite effective. The CDs catch the sun and send flashes of sunlight across the garden, which must be disconcerting to visiting birds and other animals. And when they spin around, the reflected sunlight goes around too giving quite a hypnotic effect.

Talking about visiting birds, I had one come to visit me some time in September. The poor thing was clearly injured, with a broken wing I reckon.

It's difficult to know what to do in circumstances like this. I offered it some sunflower seeds but it clearly wasn't interested and after walking around for a short while, it settled down.

I went to have a look at it half an hour later, but it had died, so I moved it into a peaceful corner of my garden. The next morning it had gone so either it had made a miraculous recovery or it had contributed to the food chain of a higher species. Such is the life of the animal kingdom.

My garden is coming along in leaps and bounds - I'm quite impressed with what I managed to produce seeing as it was my first attempt and I was away for so long. But I clearly didn't dig the beds over enough, because some of my root vegetables have taken on some decidedly peculiar shapes as they wound their way down through the rocks.

Baldrick would have been well-pleased with this vegetable that "has grown into a rude and amusing shape". I'm clearly going to have to improve on my digging techniques over the winter.

And then we had the rainfall. The heavens just opened and threw at us everything that there was to throw. And it went on for about three hours. I can safely say that I have never seen rain quite like this.

You may have noticed that with the house being built on a slope, I had to cut into part of the bank to make the base of the verandah level, and I had carefully cut a small trench around the base to channel the water away. But no channel was ever going to compete with the amount of rain that was falling outside and pretty soon the water started to seep in. Time I began bailing out.

Suddenly outside there was a large thud and next minute a whole stream of water flowed into the verandah covering everything in 3 inches of mud and water. Part of the bank had collapsed and filled in the grid outside, and the water falling off the barn and down the drain had risen up over the obstacle and into the verandah.

I reckoned that
 i.... it was a good job there was nothing valuable on the floor
 ii... I'd put the cupboards in the verandah on plinths or on strips of wood to keep them off the floor
 iii.. I'd built my living room floor on 40mm of polystyrene slab laid on a sheet of plastic that had been turned up at the side to allow water to pass right underneath.

48mm (just under 2 inches) of rain fell in that three hours, and all of it seemed to come into the verandah. But by the time I had shovelled and brushed it out, the floor was looking cleaner than at any time in the recent past. But I was so impressed with the verandah door. The reason why the water was building up so quickly inside the verandah was that the door is such a good fit that it was keeping the water in. So every cloud has a silver lining somewhere.

It was round about now that I started to harvest my potatoes. I didn't think that there was much to be gained in keeping them in the ground for any longer. The stems had withered and died, and with all of the rainfall they were likely to rot.

I've already dug up plenty, so I suppose half a bucket remaining isn't to be sniffed at. I planted about 25 seeds because I thought that 100 would be far too many. But I'm not sure about that. If these can keep throughout the winter in a black bucket (to absorb any warmth and to keep out the light) filled with soil, then I may well have a good go at a large number of potatoes next year.

If you have a close look at the corner of the barn, you'll see that the scaffolding pole appears to have shrunk and the old Rutland WG 910 wind turbine is missing.

I bought that turbine second-hand in April 1999 and it did me fine until mid-2006 when it started to slow down. Soon it came to a dead stop. I reckoned it was the bearings but for one reason or another I never got round to taking it down. That is - up until now. No time like the present.

And blow me up if an hour or so later George and Liz didn't pass by. And here I was with an empty pole and the other Air AH 403 wind turbine that I bought in Flagstaff in 2002 looking for a pole to go up.

Now I know that this wind turbine works, because it's been photographed spinning round like the clappers on the banks of the Firth of Forth on top of a two-metre scaffolding pole that I was holding. So in no time at all (geologically-speaking) we put it up.

It's in wind shade for about 85% and the pole is nowhere near high enough, but it does go round when there is enough wind coming in the right direction. On a 6-metre (20-foot) pole on the other end of the barn, we might actually see it do some good.

Inside the Rutland, you can see what a state it is in. A good clean was the first thing to do. And indeed the bearings had gone, so I dismantled the flywheel to get at them. And that was my first surprise. I was told when I bought it that the bearings had been replaced, but that was only half the story. The rear bearing (the easy one to change) had been replaced, but the front one (difficult) had not. And it was an old type of open frame ball bearing that had totally seized up. And hardly surprising seeing as the turbine dated from 1984. That's what I call shameful workmanship. I'd love to see what the previous owner was charged for.

The bearings are a common type - 6202 - so don't be tempted to order them from the turbine manufacturer, buy them off eBay at $2.85, £1.50, €2.00 the pair, or ask your friendly neighbourhood electrical engineer if he has a couple in his toolbox (thanks, Terry. I'll buy you a pint or two in due course.) and that was that.

Well not quite, for the thing still wouldn't go round. It seems that the spindle is slightly bent (no wonder the bearings kept on failing) so I balanced and shimmed the flywheel by trial and error and after several hours on this, it now spins round perfectly in the slightest breeze.

I wish the Air wind turbines would do that.

Meanwhile, the roofing sheets for the barn turned up at last. They are quite nifty, being made of corrugated iron but having the profile of roofing tiles. From a distance you would be hard-put to tell the difference, as you would see by looking at the roof of your neighbourhood fast food restaurant - the one that was found by a High Court judge to be culpable in the cruel treatment of animals and unethically preying on young children's "pester power" and whose name shall never be mentioned in anything I ever write - and you'll see what I mean.

Of course this is only a temporary measure to protect the woodwork and the contents of the barn, and is not meant to be permanent. I will replace it with proper roofing tiles as soon as I have the money.

Of course.

No, I'm not going away, but I'm shortly going to be having people round and in any case I need to start to tidy up ready to do the roof. Mowing the lawn and tidying the graden is such a rare event with me that it needs to be fully recorded, because it doesn't stay neat and tidy for long with me.

You can see that one of my sweet corn plants has been blown down. It was the torrential rain of the other day that did that. Luckily, that was the only real damage that happened around here. Things could have been much worse.

Last year when I planned to do the roof I cut down all the saplings that were growning in the sand heap at the front of the barn. What with all of the delay, they had all grown back again. The only permanent solution is to pull up the roots so they don't grow back. There were enough of them and they put up quite a fight. But at least there will be plenty of firewood. I'm going to have to go into the coppicing business.

There was an unfortunate side effect to the delivery of the roofing sheets, as the only place to put them was in front of the barn. Now though, the postie can't put the post in the letter box there. I'd bought a new one ready for when I move the entrance to my property, so I reckoned I may as well install it here.

It seems that all French post boxes have a master key that post office employees hold. I've received several big parcels, far too big to go into the slot, yet they have found their way into the inside of the box.

Once I'd cleared out around the side of the barn I had a play with the scaffolding tower to make sure I knew how to put it up. I don't want to be messing around with it when I have a couple of friends and a couple of roofing sheets up on the roof.

This effort wasn't so successful, so I'm going to have to reposition the bracing to hold it in the rectangular. I don't fancy working on it if it's going to be looking like this while I'm up there on top.

Not the least of the problems is the fact that the ground at the side of the barn slopes away alarmingly, and being on a scaffolding tower at that height on that slope is likely to be harmful to someone's health - probably mine.

Mind you, I had a few assorted lengths of scaffolding lying around and a few bags of scaffolding fittings. I managed the poles but could I elephants find the fittings, so I improvised with a few kee klamps and some other assorted fastenings. I'll wedge some wood supports under there too to help it along.

The base is now perfectly level, but the tower looks even more out of true. I really must reposition the bracing.

One of the things that came my way was an invitation to power up an event in the neighbourhood, using solar panels and a wind turbine. It was just not feasible to do it, given the amount of current that they needed to draw and the amount of lights and wire that was needed.

Nevertheless, they offered me some space to have a little display so I decided to make myself a little travelling kit and a Tower of Power.

First thing that I needed to do was to make a control panel. Here you can see the finished article, with a battery being charged up by a couple of 5-watt panels.

It's all very well having a place to play, but you need something to play with. And as it's getting on for winter and it will soon be dark out here, a light board seemed to be the obvious solution.

From the top down, we have
 i.... one of my patent pesto jar lights
 ii... a Brico Depot bulkhead light, with the 230 volt innards removed and a 12 volt halogen socket placed in it
 iii.. a B&Q 12-volt flourescent strip light with auxillary AA battery back-up.
 iv.. a recessed halogen light, one of a bundle that I bought in the UK some time ago and I wished that I'd bought hundreds more.

To mount a wind turbine and a solar panel, you need a long pole - in fact, a Tower of Power. Here's mine, all four metres of it with a kee klamp fitting and guy ropes. The idea is to attach it to the back of Caliburn and use the guy ropes to hold it to the roof rack.

It's a lightweight 45mm pipe, not a full-weight scaffolding pole. That means that none of the 48mm fittings that I have actually fit anything, but on the other hand, it's light enough for me to handle on my own without any risk of breaking anything.

Here's the finished object - a Tower of Power firmly attached to the back of Caliburn. "Incredible", I hear you say.

You can see that the tower is attached to the back of Caliburn, and firmly seated in an old axle stand base. Each guy rope is attached by a chain and tensioner to the front corner of the roof rack. And that way, it helps to take the strain of the pole.

You can also see the roofing for the barn.

Attached to the back of Caliburn, I said. For that, we needed to invent some kind of bracket.

A while ago when I was in Stoke on Trent I bought some lengths of aluminium of different profiles, on the grounds that they might come in handy fir something. And sure enough, it's just the kind of thing you can make brackets out of, using a couple of pipe clamps and so on. The two thin clamps clamp over the bar at the back of the roof rack, and the tower is clamped inside the large clamp.

All we need now is a working wind turbine, and if you look closely at this photo (click on the thumbnail to see an enlarged view) you can see the wind turbine happily spinning around in the wind, even here on a work bench.

The new bearings seemed to work wonders, even though the shaft seems to be bent. But a few shims in the right places have taken care of that.

One last thing before I go, and that's my market stall. We all know what the Auvergne weather can be like and if you think that I am standing outside in the pouring rain getting wet then you are mistaken.

If I'm going to set my stall out I may as well do it properly and make one that protects me from the weather. And protects the customers too. If you ever notice market stalls on a market when it rains, whatever custom there is always seems to be loitering in the shelter of a market stall with an overhanging roof. There's a lesson to be learnt in that.

And here we are at the reseau rural meeting at Barrot, near Le Quartier. About 50 people turned up, which was something of a disappointment, but I suppose it's quality that counts, not quantity.

The wind turbine is spinning around quite happily at the top of the Tower of Power and the solar panel that I bought for Rebecca is charging nicely halfway up. You can also see the solar briefcase that I bought last year.

And if you look closely at the side of Caliburn, you can just about make out a pair of antlers. I was not alone at this do.

Once all of that was over, I had to make myself ready for my series of open days that I would be having. Most important thing to do is to make room for people to park. This involved a good deal of hacking down the undergrowth down the old abandoned lane.

Once that was done I could park the Ford Escort van down at the side of the Passat with plenty of room for people to pass in between, and move the old equipment (ride-on lawnmower, cement mixer, rotavator) in front. Then, there was suddenly all of this space down there to park Caliburn.

What with all of these people coming and the need to impress everyone with the range of equipment available, a huge bank of batteries was appropriate. And seeing as how I had all of these batteries lying around and how they needed a good charge anyway, then I may as well connect them up to the charging circuit.

With winter coming on and how I was going to be staying here and not gadding about for a change, I reckoned that a big bank of batteries would also come in useful for my own purposes. Nothing would be lost by coupling them up.

With people coming to visit me for my open days there needed to be something in the way of "facilities". This gave me the impetus to get on and finish the beichstuhl that I started to build last year.

It's all in position and the pit has been dug, but as you can imagine, it's only a temporary structure as I have something much more impressive in the pipeline, relating to my visit to Guidestone Farm, Loveland, Colorado in 2002.

And with the weather being what it is here in the Auvergne, it is always a good idea to prevoir some kind of shelter for your guests if you want them to be comfortable.

With not very much else on offer for my visitors and little else available, a tarpaulin was the answer, pinned up between the house and the barn. The reason why it's hanging down at the back is so that the rainwater that rolls down the roofs onto the tarpaulin can then roll away down the back rather than loiter on the tarpaulin and collapse it with the weight.

When George was here for the open day he kindly helped me move the old wood stove that was in the way of the path down to the field behind the gates.

This opened a whole new vista and a whole new approach for me, so I decided to carry on the work and try to make things so much tidier outside. There were all kinds of stuff dumped outside from when I emptied the kitchen so that I could fit it out as my winter quarters last year. It's high time that I got on and sorted it out.

Once I had cleared a path down to the gate, I could then get into the field and make some kind of start on clearing down there.

The first task was to fight my way into the old lean-to, the one that fell down in 2002 and I had to rebuild. I hadn't quite finished it when I was taken ill, and since I've been back, I haven't been able to get down there due to the weeds and brambles. That is, of course, until today.

And I was happy that I found my way down there, for I rediscovered my Flynn's Bar. Named after a British prisoner's escaping tool from a Prisoner-of-War camp in World War II, it's a piece of heavy metal hexagonal bar about 1m long, with a chisel end at one end and a point at the other end. There is no tool better than this for bringing rock up from the soil - launched into a pit or trench with some force you will be astonished at the penetrating power that it has.

Even better, once I'd cleared out that sector of the field I could now go about and fight my way further down the field, boldly going where no man had gone before for the last 5 years or so.

The overhanging trees of my Dutch neighbours are a positive nuisance though, and as they are showing no signs of attending to their responsibilities in this respect, I'm going to attend to this in a manner that shall represent the lack of time and lack of patience that I have.

To dispose of the weeds that I pulled up was another matter. If you compost them, there's still a danger that their seeds will propagate in the compost so that when you add the compost to the soil you are adding weeds as well. Added to that, the methane given off is 30 times more harmful to the environment than the CO₂ given off.

That's the reason why I prefer to burn the weeds if possible, but I'm not being very clever here. I should have added some potatoes wrapped in tinfoil and pierced on a metal skewer. That way, I could have had baked potato for tea. I could have brewed up too, had I been organised.

Talking of tea, (well, one of us was) just look at the size of this carrot that I dug up out of my vegetable patch. It's enormous. When Rebecca was round here the other day she commented on the size of my carrots but I don't think that even she expected one to be this big.

But you can see the shortfall in my digging technique. I need to go much deeper and dig many more rocks out of the soil, so as to give my carrots more room to grow downwards. That will stop them becoming all twisted like this.

Meanwhile, back in the barn, I've been wanting to find some handles for my workbench tops, under which I keep my tools. I really wanted some sunken flush-fitting handles for them so that they don't interfere with the worktop but can I find any? Can I elephants.

The answer in circumstances such as this is to make your own. A holesaw bored out into the worktop, a piece of hardboard sealed it at the bottom, and a jointing strip across the top let into the work surface made a handle. It was quite easy, really.

One of the things that I can do now I have a huge bank of batteries and a washing machine is to run the washing machine when the weather is nice.

It tool me a while to figure out the machine but now that I've sorted out how it works, it's pretty efficient and does a reasonable job. Especially if I soak the difficult stuff in soda crystals overnight. That makes quite a difference.

But never mind the washing for now - look at all of this wood. I'm having issues with my Dutch neighbours about their trees - they don't maintain their garden next to mine and their trees are being damaged in the storms we have. I've had two substantial branches drop on my land, and several of their branches have broken and hanging dangerously over my property.

In the absence of any positive response from them, I'm cutting down the branches and keeping them for myself. Once I set up a wood burning stove I'll be burning them for firewood. Meantime, I hope that they galvanise themselves into action and do the work that they are supposed to do.

One of the things that I'll be doing this winter is to have another look at my drainage system. When I installed it, I wasn't clear about what I was planning to do, and I didn't have much time to do it either so I did the best I could.

At least all of the difficult work was done, and now it's simply a matter of repositioning the drains and laying a few new pipes down the hill towards where I'm going to install my lagoons.

First thing that needs to be done is to move the drain from the middle of the path and put it at the side of the verandah. We had a problem with water flowing underneath the sides of the verandah and flooding me out, so with the drain just here, all the water should drain away. I can also run something down from the water butt to catch the overflow water

Another thing I can do is once the drain has been moved, I can level out the soil in front of the verandah ready to cover it in the broken slates that I'll be taking off the barn roof. It'll get rid of those for me, and also stop the path being so muddy.

We can't leave the month of October without reporting the winter's first snow fall. The 30th of October, in fact.

It wasn't much, and it didn't stay around for long, but it was here all the same. Now I need to go and prepare myself for the onslaught of the bad weather. Winter draws on, and I shall need them in this weather.

You may remember from a couple of photos ago my carrot that had grown into a rude and amusing shape. Most people suggested that it was because I hadn't dug my raised beds deep enough and that there were stones in them.

That of course is not unlikely. There are rocks, never mind stones, almost everywhere around here and the throughness of the digging was not something that occupied my mind too much. I resolved that I would have a good go at that this winter, and I made a start on the last bed that I made - and made quickly too when time was running out in the planting season.

This raised bed was in fact only resting on the soil rather than being dug into it, and it was shallowly dug. It was also very damp. And I'm not surprised. And neither should you be when you see the stones that I took out of it.

There was a solid layer of stones about 20cm or so below the surface, and that had me thinking that this whole garden that I dug last winter is just a layer of humus on the remains of the floor of some building that had been here in the past. A layer of well-worked clay had been pressed into the depressions of what may well have been a primitive stone floor, and dead and decying plant matter had accumulated on the top over the years.

From this bed I took out about 7 or 8 wheelbarrowloads of stones and added them to the rockpile for future use. And from this barrowload you can get some idea of the size of some of them. It was a nightmare having to haul them out of the garden - in some cases I had to dig about a metre down to pull them out. I was glad I had found my Flynn's Bar again.

At least with these stones, though, I'm getting plenty of raw material for this house extension that I want. And I'm also making plenty of room to dispose of the excess soil from my other earthmoving projects.

I mentioned that I was going to overhaul the drainage system and reposition a couple of the drains. That was easier said than done. Digging out the concrete drainage chambers was a nightmare, and cutting them to fit their new locations proved to be impossible.

Not to worry, though. Brico Depot has a range of plastic fittings that look quite interesting and are reasonably-priced too. They were sold out of some of the stuff I wanted, but there was enough to enable me to make a decent start.

I dug out starting at the water butt, and used that nifty-looking syphon thing as a grid to collect the water that dribbles out of the water tap. Then, I put the plastic drainage chambers in line with the waste pipe that runs underneath the concrete floor of the verandah, and connected them up with a pipe.

And that wasn't as easy as it might be either, for the whole area was infested with stones and it was doing my head in trying to get out as many as possible.

Some of the stones were really impressive too. This one, underneath the pathway to the house, appears to be dressed. Now that is what I call peculiar. I wonder where it came from.

I have a little theory about this. On the old maps of the area there is a large building shown, just a couple of hundred metres away. There's only one wall standing now. It is described as an old barn, but there's a communal land around it on 3 sides, and a road that bifurcates to pass either side of it. I don't think that it's a barn at all. I'm wondering if it's an old church (Les Guis used to be a pretty big village in the past) and that it has been quarried for the stone. That might account for the dressed stone here - used in the building of whatever was on the site before my house was built.

I've laid the first two lengths of drain now, and you can see the snaky course that it's taking. That can't be helped, as the rocks in here too were enormous and one or two of them were beyond my capacity to move.

But this has got me thinking. I'm wondering if, as in the garden, there's a layer of rocks under here that form a path, and the mud is simply a layer of rotting humus that is waterlogged due to the rainwater being unable to pass through the rock bed. When I get time, I'm going to have a good scrape and see what I can reveal.

I've now dug the drain out as far as I can go, for I have run out of pipe. And when I was at Brico Depot I was wondering whether I ought to buy more pipe. I'm about 2 methers short from where I'm going to be building the junction box, and once that is in, I need to strike off downhill and to the right. I reckon that altogether I'm going to need another 16 metres of pipe to get right down to where I want to start the lagoons.

Ahh well, I can finish it off later. I have plenty of other things to be going on with.

I suppose that I have mentioned that I live on the extreme north-west edge of the Monts de la Combraille - the plateau that is at the extreme north-west edge of the Massif Central.

This plateau, which undulates quite severely due to the number of streams in the area, is overlooked by a low scarp ridge about 2km away. In the summer it isn't possible to see it very clearly due to the trees being in full leaf, so they say

The view from a little farther round is also just as impressive. The other side of the slope is the road between Pionsat and St Eloy, so I drive over there quite often.

But me on a roof, you might be wondering. It's not every day that you can get me up a ladder.There's obviously something afoot, and we aren't talking about the thing on the end of my leg.

Yes, there is definitely something afoot. You can see from the pic that the Rutland wind turbine is missing once more from its pole at the end of the barn.

An even closer inspection of the pic will also reveal that it isn't the same pole that was there before. In fact, the original pole was a mere 3 metres or so tall. And when I was rooting around in the barn, I came across a pole that was more than 4 metres long, galvanised, and much stronger.

Height is might in the world of wind turbines, and so I did a crafty exchange of poles.

One of the problems with the wind turbine, apart from the lack of height, was the fact that there was a tree in the way. It hadn't been there when I put the Rutland up - or rather, it had, but it was much smaller and it had grown rapidly over the years. So, one of the plans was to cut it down. In any case, it was where I'm planning to put my garage.

When you are cutting down trees, you need to calculate your angles precisely because a degree or two out on the ground can make quite a difference at 40 feet up, and you don't want your tree to become tangled up in a neighbour if you can avoid it.

And if you look closely at this pic, you will see that it isn't the Rutland that has returned to its position on the end of the barn. I've put up the AIR 403 that I've had lying around here since 2002 and my visit to the USA

I've not had much luck with it trying it out on the farm, although I know it works because when I was up at Lorna's on the Firth of Forth it went round like the clappers just mounted on the end of an old pole and held in the hand. The key has to be perseverence.

Meanwhile, we fixed the bearings in the Rutland (there was a nib on a casting mark, so we ground that off) and I stuck it on its pole in a convenient position as a wind test.

And you can't say fairer than this, can you? I had to wait until the end of the month but it was well worth it. We had the most terrific gale one Sunday morning, and all of a sudden the bearings bedded themselves in, and it was off. Just like it did at Lorna's that time.

Even though it was only sporadic (it'll take a few weeks for the bearings to bed themselves in properly - they'll be tight for a while yet), it was still belting around and you have no idea how pleased I was to see it turn like this. When it's in its proper place and another 3 or 4 metres higher up, it'll do much better than this.

But that brings me to the question of the other wind turbine, and what is wrong with that that it isn't turning. Especially as it's much better-placed. I'll take that down soon and check over the wiring. It's probably something as simple as that.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'd made a good start on clearing the offending tree, but then I had another idea. As I said, it was growing where I'm planning to put my garage, whenever the commune get round to gravelling the track and whenever I can have use of the commune's JCB. But no time like the present. There are several other trees in the vicinity that need to go too.

So having eaten my lunch and gone to the lavatory, I took up the bow saw and large axe.

When I've finished, I'll put on women's clothing, and hang around in bars.

Winter creeps slowly onwards too. We had another snowfall towards the end of November and it looks like the weather is going to persist for a few days like this.

I try to keep a note of the weather as much as I can, and record the basic details on my blog. I keep records too of temperatures, rainfall and solar energy on a daily basis. It's a useful way of comparing things year on year.

Well, it all looks pretty picturesque in this photo, taken down the field. In fact, if I move some of the rubbish, fill in the pipeline and shift the scrap cars, it'll look quite good. Good enough for a calendar pic.

Mind you, it's freezing cold right now and I have a tee-shirt, a jumper, a fleece, a thermal overall, a jacket, two pairs of socks, après-ski boots, gloves and a woolly hat. And I'm still feeling the cold.

Just as I was tidying up to go on, I noticed a couple of vapour trails of aircraft quite close together. And if you have a good look, you can make out a couple of big passenger jets flying south.

I live more-or-less due south of the big Paris airports (about 350km to the north) and so there is an endless stream of big jets flying south to Africa. They don't fly north over here though - probably afraid of a head-on collision in the low cloud so they route them somewhere else for coming back.

I had a disaster in mid-November. The big inverter went open-circuit while I was away for the day and sucked up 0.5 of a volt before I got back to check. That played havoc with my plans - especially as during the winter it's unlikely I can build my battery bank back up by that much.

Every little helps, though, and when I noticed a drop in charge at a certain time of the day, I went to investigate. The sun is now so low that another tree is in the way producing some shading. It might only be 25 watts that I lost, but 25 watts is 25 watts and I'm in lumberjack mode right now anyway.

And lumberjack mode isn't the word right now. You can see that I've made really good progress on the area where I'm intending to park my cars. You can see the Finnish lumberjack axe embedded in a tree stump just there. That was a present from a Finnish Army General who I drove around for a few weeks in my diplomatic chauffeur days.

Claude has inspected the area and he is confident that he can pull up the stumps with the digger, so that has saved me a lot of work.

But one thing that December brought was snow. And plenty of it. All throughout the month work outside was continually interrupted by heavy falls of snow.

But never mind. There was plenty of other work to be going on with and one of the jobs waiting was to finish off inside the verandah. Lots of cheap tongue and grooving followed by liberal amounts of cheap white paint in the damp and freezing cold made for a ghastly job but I didn't care as long as the job was finished.

Good weather was few and far between and at one time I was despairing of ever having any sun. Even a few days of Alpine weather, stinking cold but bright sunshine, would have gone down a storm with me.

But why is it that whenever there is a clear sky with just a small amount of thick cloud in the sky, the cloud is ALWAYS obscuring the sun? It happened every time and I really was getting quite fed up of it.

Like I said, we were being constantly interrupted by snowfalls and some of them were quite heavy, just like this one that came down on the 14th of December.

It's quite simply not possible to even contemplate working outside in this weather, so I contented myself with going round for a walk and then getting on with checking the wiring in the house. There's quite a bit to do there as my early attempts at wiring were hopeless.

If you look down the field where the orchard is, you can see that I'm slowly disappearing into a sea of white, as the snow comes down heavier and heavier.

I was out there with a depth gauge later on when the weather settled down and I measured 16cms - about 6 inches. In some places the snow was 24 cms - almost 10 inches. Not a lot,you might think, but I'm quite sheltered here. It was much worse out in the open.

The general effect here was one of a Christmas calendar, with the trees in the background pretty much covered in a heavy layer of snow.

The old Rutland wind turbine did well though. Every time there was a stiff breeze pushing thesnow around, it sprang into life. It doesn't produce a lot of electricty, but it keeps on going round even when the wind speed is little more than "draught". It's a good site just here.

Although the snow doesn't look very deep, it was too deep for the idle burger who drives the village snowplough. A little higher up the lane, the weight of snow had brought down a tree across the lane and the snowplough driver, instead of leaving his comfortable cabin to move the tree, turned round and drove away.

Four days I was stuck here, and the mayor's assistant felt the weight of my tongue when I finally caught up with her.

But despite all of that we did have some nice scenery. It was well-worth going for a walk around with the Pentax to see what was what.

Those of you who received a Christmas card from me this year will recognise this image. It was the bottom right corner of this image that was cropped out to give the background to Strawberry's message.

If you scroll up a bit from here, you'll see image 0811092 of the back of the house and the soon-to-be car park shrouded in a low cloud. Here's a pic from more-or-less the same spot showing everywhere covered in snow.

There's a good view of the three wind turbines too. But the one on the house hasn't turned a blade since it was installed, and I noticed when I had a good look that the negative cable is browned as if there is an electrical short-circuit. What I reckon has happened is that one of the cables is damaged and has shorted out against an earth and so I'm going to take it down to have a good look at it.

Here's a view of the front of the house, with the 2x12-watt solar panels under the eaves, the big 123-watt panel on its pole, the negligent wind turbine, and a pile of snow. And it's seeing this photo that has made me have a dramatic change of plan.

Keen followers of this website will know that I have been planning to have solar roof tiles on the house. They won't be at the optimum angle to catch the maximum solar energy but what I save on slates and on mounting, I can buy more solar tiles to make up for it.

But not any more. Look how the snow is lying on the roof, and how the solar panels, inclined at the correct angle, are clear of snow. No - copulatum expensium - I'm going to be going for panels inclined to the optimum angle on a framework. You aren't going to get me up on a roof shovelling snow off the tiles.

I'm in rewiring mode right now as you probably know, and I've been giving things some thought. I use American 3-pin plugs and sockets for my 12-volt circuit as they are easy to work with and have a high amperage rating, but I need something even more heavy-duty for the really big stuff. I'm currently using some two-pin push connectors that I bought from Wilkinson's in the UK but they no longer stock them, and in any case they aren't really suitable.

So rooting around in a box of bits and pieces I came across a hibernating dormouse (which is now doing the best it can outside) and these that I've had for a while.

If you look at the plug you will see that it is slightly different than a standard American 3-pin plug. The standard plug has two vertical pins but this plug has one pin vertical and the other pin horizontal.

If you look at the socket, you can see that it has one slot vertical, and the other slot is a tee-shape. So it will accept the heavy-duty plug and also a standard plug. This is just what I want. If I put one of these plugs on my powerful appliances, then I won't be able to fit them into the standard socket on the standard wiring so there is no rick of burning out that circuit. They will only be able to fit onto the heavy duty socket, which will go nicely on the heavy-duty circuit. However, you can also plug the standard appliances into them.

These plugs and sockets are officially rated at 20 amps, which is 250 watts round here, but they are of solid construction so I reckon they can take much more than that with a decent cable. And I have some decent thin-walled 6mm cable rated at 60 amps.

A few days after the snowstorm, we had a sudden thaw. And I was back in my usual position - namely up to my knees in the morass. You can see how dreadful it gets here when the thaw comes around.

As you know, if you are a keen reader of these pages, this is actually a communal path that leads to my house. And the mayor of the village, in his electoral speech, said that he was going to tarmac down to all of the inhabitants. Forked tongue or what?

One night during late December I had yet another unexpected and unknown visitor. I'm not sure who - or what - it was because I couldn't see the spoor, but it's pushed its way right through the brambles and over through the overgrown field of my Dutch neighbours.

Talking of spoor and the like - someone went into Waterstone's Bookshop and asked "Do you have a copy of Lord Baden Powell's autobiography?"
. The shop assistant replied "I'm terribly sorry but he only ever wrote one book. It's called Scouting For Boys"
The customer replied "yes, that's the one".

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've made a start on filling in around the drains I've been laying. And I've been sorting out all of the fairly flat stones that I've been digging up and I'm making myself a patio in a crazy paving style. Not that I've got very far for the ground is too hard right now to do it properly.

But this is where I need someone like Liz Ayers to help me out. She reckons that she's an ace at jigsaws, and so this would be right up her street.

And just to prove that the weather can be really weird when it puts its mind to it, here was a most unexpected bit of weather. And just before Christmas too. How timeous!

There was a break in the dreadful weather we had been having and at solar midday (13:11) on this particular day I had received 40.8 amp-hours - more than I had received in the previous 10 days. It didn't last, unfortunately, and by the time the clouds had closed back in, I'd had 55.6. It was totally unexpected, and also very welcome.

And a couple of days later, we had three similar days and it built the battery bank back up again.

And almost true to form, the end of the year came along and brought us yet another snowfall. Not as important as that of the 14th of December and no danger of us being snowed in, but significant nevertheless

You can see that the solar panels are pretty clear of snow. I've had the foresight to keep a ladder up against the Transit and I can shin up there in seconds with the yard brush and clean it off. Sunlight will in fact penetrate snow to a certain depth, but there's no harm done in giving it a hand.

So what did I do to keep myself occupied while it was snowing like this? I stayed inside the barn and dismantled the caravan. This cost me £400 and was my home for 6 or 7 years until the rats trashed it while I was ill. Best thing they ever did, for this motivated me to move into the house.

But the caravan was in a shocking state as you can see. The front corner had rotted right through and was cunningly disguised with a piece of white contiboard (which will make a nice shelf). I think it's not before time that I've dealt with this.

The rear of the caravan isn't much better. That's also rotted away and there was just a strip of wallpaper hiding that.

To dismantle a caravan first you take off the corner beading with a crowbar and the you take the windows out. Either unscrew them, drill the screws out, or gently lever them out. Next step is to take off the aluminium panelling from the outside and the roof, for which you will get £1400 per tonne at a good scrap dealer and that makes it all worthwhile.

When you have salvaged the insulation for reuse with other projects and disconnected the wiring and gas pipes, you undo (or drill out) every screw head you can find on the sides and in the roof and all of the panels come off and the interior comes out. The kitchens fetch a good price on eBay from people building log cabins, and the chassis will make a useful trailer.

You can reassemble the panels outside with coachbolts and cover the frame with cheap tongue-and-grooving to make a garden shed or with cheap plastic to make a greenhouse. If you have an old truck chassis-cab lying around, you can reassemble the framework on the back, cover it with weatherproof plastic sheet and make a mobile home. I'm taking the "garden shed" route with this one.

USEFUL PURCHASES

There aren't all that many interesting purchases to talk about this year. I seem to have reached the point where I have most of the things that I need. One thing that I picked up was a low-wattage mains electric stapler-cum-nail-gun and glue gun. The glue gun I could live without and the stapler - well, I could think of other things upon which to spend my money, but the nailer was exciting.

I'm forever building odds and ends out of offcuts of plywood or putting up tongue and grooving and I lose count of the number of times I've clouted my thumb, or missed the wood with the nailer. When I saw one of these at a fiver $9, €7, I wasn't going to pass it by. Especially as there is tons of nailing to be done in the near future.

Brocantes are a way of life round here - every village has one at least once a year and I always totter along as much as possible because sometimes I turn up trumps. No sooner had I written the above when I found myself in the middle of rather an exciting brocante, or car boot sale, in Virlet.

On the left we have a table top saw - the type to which you attach an electric drill to make it work. But I have a cunning plan, and intend to wire a 12-volt motor to it so that I can run it off my electrical system here. That'll make short work of a lot of jobs around the place.

But never mind that, just look at the other item! That's a table top washing machine and runs off a 100-watt motor. That'll work magnificently off my system here, what with my 600-watt inverter. It doesn't heat the water, but in the summer I can use solar water and in the winter I can boil a stockpot up on a wood fire. And do you know - it only cost €10, $15, £8. That has to be the bargain of the century.

The washing machine worked fine in practice but when I went to use it in anger the motor just wouldn't turn over no matter what I tried.

A quick dismantle revealed that with the weight of the clothes and the water the case was distorting and the contact switch wasn't connecting with its operating lever. I have to work that manually when I'm doing my washing but that isn't any big deal. It's much better than going down to the river with the other women.

In a section for useful purchases, it has to be said there are few places more likely to have useful items to purchase than LIDL or ALDI. And since there has been a LIDL opened in St Eloy, then it's always a useful port of call. So much so that quite often I'm tempted to abandon my Saturday shopping trips in favour of Monday shopping trips, Monday being when the best of the special offers come out.

One Monday back in October there was a magnificent sale of artefacts. From right to left, and back to front, we have
 i.... a set of two AA-powered LED lights. We had a couple of those, ideal for in Caliburn, in dark cupboards, places like that.
 ii... some button-cell batteries - simple cheap ones of no particular provenance but a good assortment for €2:99, $4, £2:50. I can never find these batteries when I want them so I treated myself to a stock.
 iii.. some rechargeable PP3 (or are they PP9? I always confuse them) batteries. Most of my meters run on these batteries and I never seem to have enough.
 iv... some rechargeable D-cell batteries. Huge ones, these - 4000 mAh. I can never get enough of rechargeable batteries. It's all I use these days and I charge them up with 12-volt chargers either wired in to my 12-volt circuit on the farm or wired into Caliburn. It makes sense if I'm driving anywhere involving any kind of distance to take advantage of the battery - charging capabilities that Caliburn offers.
 v.... some handy max-min thermometers with external sensors. I can always use these for recording temperature. I don't know if the external sensors are waterproof - if so that will be quite useful too. At the moment, my submersible temperature probe is only instantaneous and it doesn't record the max/min temperatures. One big disadvantage I've found with these - rather than being able to reset them whenever I like, they set themselves automatically at midnight and sometimes I'm too late to take the reading. And it was only while typing this that it dawned on me that if I set the time to 3 hours earlier, then I'll be able to take the reading when I do the rounds before I go to bed, the thermometer will reset itself at 03:00 instead of at 00:00, and will still register the coldest part of the night for the next day's reading. d'oh!
 vi... some lithium button cells. I have quite a few appliances that use these more expensive and more powerful button cells, so a few packets at €2:99, $4, £2:50 is a good deal.

LIDL excelled itself today.

You can keep up-to-date with my antics on a more-or-less daily basis by reading my blog

photos for 2009

photos for 2007

Return to the photo gallery.

back to top

home page | latest updates | site map | site index

about this site | audience participation | copyright notice | technical issues | accessibility statement | read this | contact me

page last modified 20:46 2nd January 2009
site last modified

©