Category Archives: radio anglais

Sunday 28th March 2010 – Blimey, that was quick!

Yes, summer has been and gone and taken autumn with it, and we are back in the middle of winter.

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire giat puy de dome franceI was at Giat today to watch Pionsat’s 2nd XI play them (they lost 2-0). 790 metres up on an exposed plateau and I froze to death in the biting wind. And the locals are expecting snow this evening, so they said.

13.9 degrees in here when I set out and 12.8 degrees when I came back so I lit the fire for a while to warm up the place. So much for the 20.2 degrees we had early last week.

After the footy I went round to Liz and Terry’s to insoect the work in progress in the new kitchen (very impressive) and to plan our radio programmes for the next month. We are highlighting medical insurance and the like to go with Julie’s account of her hospital encounters.

And much to our surprise our radio programme from last week is being streamed. You can listen to it at
http://lemagazine.canalblog.com
Send us your feedback, please.

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Tuesday 9th March 2010 – We were back in the studio today.

And not only that, we were actually told what we had to do! Now isn’t THAT a welcome departure from the usual? and we also know when we will be being broadcast.

Basically we have to do a 5-minute spot, and didn’t that cause some consternation? Have you any idea how quickly 5 minutes goes when you are busy? After recording the first programme we were there hacking away at the material we had in a (vain) effort to cut it all right down. But we managed just the same – it was a case of having to, but it’s depressing when all of your hard work falls onto the cutting-room floor.

And we are going onto the airwaves next Tuesday at 18:50, repeated on Wednesday morning at 08:50.

I spent the morning arranging things and as it was a nice day again I had the heater on up here. That’s getting to be a habit just recently, isn’t it?

And after we came back from the studio I went round to see Marianne – I haven’t seen her for a while. I enlisted her help for our radio show -she’s the local journalist so she gets to know everything that’s been going on and she owes me a favour- I let her use one of my photographs for an article that she wrote. She’s also keen to involve herself in this English-language newspaper that died a death and so I offered her my support. I hope she will wear it in comfort.

And the weather has deteriorated some more. Howling gales, devastating winds, and temperature in the heat exchanger of minus 11. It’s flaming March, for God’s sake.

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Sunday 7th March 2010 – I think that the Pentax has finally died

I went out this afternoon to see FC Pionsat St Hilaire play Montel-Villosanges at Villosanges. I took three sets of fully-charged batteries, one of which was brand-new, and all charged up on different chargers, and I couldn’t get a shot. The batteries “depleted” while I was poised for action. I know that it was bad before but the voyage to Trappes and back seems to have made it worse.

So that’s that!

Mind you, it was perishing cold – minus 5 out there. With a howling wind and driving snow it was uncomfortable even watching the match. Heaven knows what it was like on the pitch playing. The game was difficult which was no surprise given the conditions, and ended up 1-1. The Chimps are a naggy, aggravating side as I have said elsewhere and the ref had his work cut out what with the players and a crowd (for it was a crowd, to be sure) whose passion quite often went beyond the bounds of what might be called “reasonable”. We had a “fight” between two players – and I use the word with inverted commas because had the two players have come up against a couple of British Brownies en route for a Sunday School outing my money would have been on the Brownies.

After that it was round to see Liz and Terry to discuss our radio programme next week. It’s keeping me busy, all of this.

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Tuesday 16th February 2010 – Radio Stars!

eric hall liz messenger radio anglais arverne gerzat puy de dome france
Well, we made it onto tape, and next week we’ll be on the airwaves! After all of the hard work that Liz and I have put into our efforts we went down to Radio Arverne’s offices in Gerzat along with Julie, our special guest for the month of March.

No-one had told us how it was to be presented so we worked out our own system of presentation and production which would have done the trick – to record the five weekly “what’s on” sessions and then do firstly the chat with Julie about her experiences in the French hospital system followed by the chat about building permits and then chop the chats up into chunks to fit around the “what’s on” bits in order to make five programmes of equal lengths.

So having worked that out, as we were all grouped around the mikes ready to go they then decided that what they wanted was for the programmes to be recorded in their sequence of events. Now how on earth can you do that when you don’t know what people are going to say in advance and you have to watch your papers, watch your guests and watch a clock at the same time?

We managed to record three programmes and we have to go back on March 9th to do the other two (March is a 5-week month). And after our recording efforts we still had to do some editing so it really defeated the purpose of what we were trying to do and they could just as well have edited it from our proposal which would have been quicker to record. Ahhh well!

We listened to some of it afterwards and it sounds terribly amateurish but in actual fact we ought to be proud of what we did. We were three people effectively just off the street with no formal training and with very little “previous” in this kind of thing and we were given no guidance at all yet between the three of us we managed to get something like three half-decent radio shows on the very first take. You can’t ask for more than that.

And I was wrong about the temperature last night. We had a mere minus 9.7 degrees. Round at Liz’s she saw minus 17. This morning in the verandah it was 1.2 when I went down for breakfast but in the 20 minutes that I took to eat it the temperature rose to 5.2. The sun was such that I even ran the electric heater up here this morning.

I’t’s 1.2 degrees outside now and everything is melting. I don’t reckon the winter is over yet though.

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Monday 18th January 2010 – You can tell what today’s weather has been like …

… simply by looking at a few stats.

Firstly, outside the temperature made it up to 7 degrees, but in the verandah it was as much as 16. Secondly, while bank 2 of the solar panels on the house registered 29 amp-hours, bank 1 registered 89!!!

We’ve finally had the day I’ve been waiting for, with brilliant sunshine all day, the highest solar energy since 18th November and now the batteries are fully-charged. So much so in fact that I ran the fridge for an hour or so.

This morning I had an “office”day. I managed to get the printer to work so I sat down and wrote a few letters. I did the CV for this taxi company and then I had to write a letter to Pentax as I need to send my camera away for repair. For the past few months it seems like the battery life has been getting less and less but when I put the “empty” batteries into something else they work fine. Fiddling around with the batteries in the battery holder sometimes gets the camera to work again so its clearly a bad contact somewhere.

And that got me thinking. There’s a few things that I’ve bought that don’t work and are just hanging around here doing nothing much. I’m going to pack them up and send them back to the vendors with a letter of dismay and see what happens. Someone might decide to do something.

This afternoon was the drive down to Gerzat. The guy from SMADC and his sidekick sat in the front of the car and totally ignored me in the back all the way there and all the way back. At the radio station I worked out a format for the programme with the presenter. Basically it will be a cafe scenario with people popping in for a chat, talking about forthcomng events, new legislation and problems with French administration. We’ll record an hour’s worth of programme one day per month and they will edit it into four 5-minute slots. Blast-off is said to be the 1st of March and so we go into studio in mid-February.

If this isn’t going to get my name in lights, shameful self-publicist that I am, then nothing will!

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