Category Archives: Les Guis

Monday 28th September 2009 – WE HAD TECHNICAL ISSUES …

… with tonight’s image otherwise you would have seen that I now have plasterboarding on three quarters of the walls of the attic.

You would also have seen some extra wooden battens in the corner of the room opposite where my desk is going to be. That’s because I’m going to build a cupboard in there. I’m going to miss my target of the end of the month – I’m about two weeks behind – so I may as well do this kind of work while I’m at it as it won’t make much difference to my schedule.

But the insulation is certainly doing its job up there. 2 degrees warmer than in my room and at one stage I had to open all of the windows in there as it was so warm. It’s going to be interesting in there in the winter. Especially as Simon has now returned and he has my woodstove with him. I must go and rescue it this weekend.

It’s just as well I spent the last winter cutting down all of those trees, and this stove will also give me an incentive to do some more woodcutting this winter too.

But talking of timber, I’ve been putting together a project for a Dutch mushroom farmer whom I met at the timber yard when I was there with Liz. He wants 3.5Kw of electricity each day – that’s quite a lot, and so a 12-volt system is quite out of the question. Imagine all of the heat in the cables.

I’ll have to develop the 48-volt system and run on mains power with a really decent inverter. That should be exciting.

Back in the attic, tomorrow I’ll be finishing off the plasterboarding, except for one small corner. That’s where the cables are that run from the solar panels through where the bathroom will be and down to the control panel.

They need to be disconnected and run through some kind of trunking and that requires some careful thought as it’s fraught with all kinds of problems such as short circuits and the like. It’s the kind of thing that needs to be done at night when there is no current in the cables but I don’t think clearly enough after 19:00 at night.

-2

Sunday 27th September 2009 – SO WHERE DID I GO TODAY THEN?

In fact, events resolved themselves, as they usually do if you let them.

Today being Sunday, I didn’t set any alarm and slowly came to in a kind of leisurely fashion putting this weeks’s plans into some kind of shape.

After a while and having the urge to go for a Gipsy’s, I crawled out of bed to notice the time – 12:24 pm. That put paid to any plans I might have had to go out anywhere. It’s been a couple of times that I’ve done this just recently. It gives you an idea of how hard I’ve been working during the week, even if it doesn’t look much like it.

A leisurely breakfast followed by some generally inactive kind of tidying up in the verandah and in my room and that was that, effectively. I haven’t done anything else.

In other news, the Confederation of British Industries, desperately in need of some brownie points and trying hard to ingratiate itself with Gordon Clown’s government, has leapt onto the bandwagon of demanding higher tuition fees and cutting back on student support.

It’s the Leitch Report all over again.

“At a time of economic crisis, when many hard-working families are struggling to support their offspring through university, I am astonished that the CBI should be making such offensive recommendations,” said NUS president, Wes Streeting – the NUS being for the most part a bunch of naive wet-behind-the-ears adolescents.

So, where’s the quote from the OUSA President?

OUSA is (so we are led to believe) a bunch of 200,000 or so distinguished grown-ups actively pursuing academic excellence in their own time at their own pace? Could it be that the BBC forgot all about the existence of OUSA? Or was it that the President had nothing to say on the subject? Or was it that whatever the OUSA President had to say wasn’t worth quoting?

Whichever way you look at it, it just shows how inconsequential OUSA has become under the “leadership” of the last few years. No concept of a sense of history, no sense of grasping the important moment, no sense of pushing themselves and their ideas into the limelight.

When the ideas of the Leitch Report were first sprung onto the unsuspecting masses (I say “unsuspecting masses” because there were a couple of us who had seen the Leitch Report mentioned in a paper of February 2007 and tried our best, but in vain, to urge the remainder to take it seriously) do you know what the clowns did?

They organised a petition.

We did things like that in primary school. I worked for 12 years or so in a major multinational organisation, the largest of its kind in the world, and I can tell you what happens to petitions because we used to get thousands from all over Europe. What happened to the petitions was that the organisations’s budget for toilet paper was zero.

During the review of the Leitch Report, the British Government set up a committee to look into its effects on part-time Higher Education. The Open University is the largest supplier, by a country mile, of part-time Higher education in the UK, if not the world and has the most students of any educational establishment in the UK. So which University was asked to send a delegate to sit on the committee?

You’ve guessed it. Those well-known suppliers of part-time Higher Education, the … er … Staffordshire University, or North Staffs Poly as it used to be called when I studied Accountancy there in the 1970s.

At an Open University committee meeting, I asked if this appointment was a slap in the face for the Open University. I was told “no – you can’t expect the OU to sit on everything that involves part-time Higher Education”.
So I asked “why not? It’s larger than all the other suppliers combined” and “what other equivalent committees are there in existence currently that the OU sits on?”
And no-one was able to give me a reply.

But that’s where the OU and OUSA sit right now – treated with total contempt by Government and the major British press. And having met personally many representatives of those two organisations, I have to say that I am not in the least surprised.

-3

Saturday 26th September 2009 – YOU MISSED …

… all of the excitement tonight.

Freezing cold autumn weather, a Pionsat win and a draw, debatable referee-ing decisions, a series of mysterious yellow cards flashed at no-one in particular, and for the first time ever, a referee losing his temper in the middle of a match.

And if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, we had a whole raft of hotly-disputed decisions, a couple of fierce arguments, a punch-up, one of the best goals I’ve seen for ages and a couple of errors that schoolboys would be embarrassed to make.

Yes, we have exciting times out here in the wilderness of rural France. It’s much more fun than watching Manure Knighted on the box.

This morning I went into Commentry and didn’t I have a lucky find in one of the crud shops? Remember yesterday when I dropped my tape player down two storeys in the house? well they were selling a portable bicycle accessory tape player with built-in stereo speakers for 5 euros. It works with an external 6v DC socket too. Can’t be bad at that price. I can’t wait to try it out.

Back home later this afternoon, I did another load of washing. I need to get up-do-date before winter. The cold even now is starting to threaten.

And no footy tomorrow. What on earth am I going to do?

-5

Friday 25th September 2009 – AND JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… today’s pic is taken from almost the same spot as the previous two.

You can’t see the battens that I affixed to the wall but you can see the insulation that I attached. That is on the rear wall to the left of the wooden framing, and in the apex above the door. There’s even a shelf up there now – that’s where I’ll be fitting the water tank.

You may be wondering why it is that I haven’t fitted the insulation to the rest of the wall. Two reasons really –

it is outside the limits of my room so I don’t need to do it just now. I’d rather concentrate my efforts inside my room
I ran out of insulation

I’ve also fitted all of the rest of the flooring – one piece of which was not without some considerable effort.

The orange cable that you see is an American 110-volt extension cable, bought in Farmington, New Mexico, in September 2002 and brought back to Europe in my hand luggage. I use American 110-volt fittings for my 12-volt circuit on the farm as it’s capable of handling a much heavier current than European fittings. And I needed the extension cable because with fitting the flooring I’ve had to take out the temporary circuit that I installed the other week.

And of course I clean forgot that I had moved the cassette player across the room. Consequently, in a moment of inattention, I kicked it down through the hole in the stairs all the way down to ground level. I bet that’s done it a world of good.

But cassettes are so depassé these days and CDs are in and as I don’t have a 12-volt CD player I will have to see if I can’t liberate one from a brocante some time and make a more modern 12-volt hi-fi.

Terry and Liz came round again too. They had been to get more sand and came round to see if I had any cement. There were three bags in Caliburn and as they are temporarily in the way I donated them to the cause.

Tomorrow, no Brico Depot. Caliburn is still choc-a-bloc of stuff so I’ve plenty to be going on with. I may well have a run around Commentry tomorrow – it’s quite a while since I’ve been shopping there and there are an Aldi, a Lidl, a good DiY place and a couple of cruddy cheapo shops that are sometimes worth a poke around.

And in other exciting news I’ve had an e-mail from Simon. He wasn’t able to pick up a cheap woodstove for me from Machine Mart as he was leaving last night and delivery wasn’t until today. But a change of plan means that he isn’t leaving until Monday so he’s picking up a stove for me. Many thanks to Krys and Terry for teaming up to work that out for me, and for Simon for putting it into operation.

-4

Thursday 24th September 2009 – TODAY’S PIC…

… is taken from almost the same place as yesterday’s. That means that it is much easier to compare the progress for today.

what you will notice is that the framework around the head of the stairs (or where the head of the stairs will be) is now in position. And I have to say that I’m quite impressed with it, even if it means that I have to enter the room now via a ladder. You can almost picture it being clad in plasterboard (except for where the water tank will be, which will be a wooden door).

The horizontals are not permanently fastened yet, which means that I can still bring bulky objects into the room, but I’m not sure what objects I’ll be having that will be so bulky.

I was about to start on the insulation but then I noticed the time – 18:15. As the late, great Arthur Naylor once said -“it’s not worth starting another case” and I resolved on an early night. well, late by normal standards but early these recent days.

It doesn’t look a lot of work, but each one of those joints has been filed by hand to make a millimetre-perfect fit and that takes time. And then I had to go with Terry to the quarry to help him with his order for sand. And a good job I did, as the digger was out of action and we had to handball 800kgs of sand onto the Sankey trailer.

Tomorrow I’ll be insulating, and then finishing off the flooring. Once that is in I’ll be plasterboarding the outside wall. The plasterboarding for the partition walls won’t have polystyrene on them , so that will be done at a later date.

-4

Wednesday 23rd September 2009 – NO VEGAN CHOCOLATE CAKE! SHOCK! HORROR!

But there was vegan ginger cake instead so that was ok.

And I reckoned I earned it too. Caliburn certainly did, hauling almost 2 tons of gravel over the Font Nanaud in the Sankey trailer. And then we had to unload it and bag it afterwards.

Terry offered me a shovel – a standard size one but I had my LIDL special – a long handled variety.
“It saves my back – I can shovel up while I’m stading upright”
“But the long-handle means you bash people with it when you turn round”
“Anyone who has worked with me for any length of time ought to know not to get too close to me no matter what tool it is that I’m wielding”.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ve started to erect the other pillars and cross beams for the partition around the head of the stairs. This is the part where the door will go.

I’ll be fitting the water tank in the space over the top of the door but it’s looking smaller than I expected it to be. I have a 200-litre tank that someone gave me but I don’t think that it’s going to fit and so I’ll have to actually go out and buy … “you do know that word then” – ed … a smaller one.

Talking of buying, I’ll be having a weekend of not going to Brico Depot. Caliburn is still chock-full of stuff from last weekend and I’ve nowhere to store it, so I’m going to have to work on using all of the material that’s hanging around in order to make some space.

-6

Tuesday 22nd September 2009 – I SPENT MOST OF THE MORNING …

… putting these two crossbeams in. This is where the door into the room will be.

You can see that the old beam in centre-pic is pretty well eaten. I can’t rely on that supporting the weight of people continually coming and going, especially when I knock down the wall underneath it in the very near future, and so it needs plenty of reinforcement to spread the load.

But these beams have to go in exactly right if they are to do any good. Millimetre-perfect is almost essential so you have to cut the lets undersize and the beams oversize and file them down until they fit. That’s what takes the time.

This afternoon I was interrupted by a couple of visitors. Firstly, Terry and Liz turned up, to borrow back their cement mixer. Terry, keen reader of my blog that he is, has suggested that I go with him tomorrow late afternoon to collect a ton of gravel and take it to his house.
“You have to say the magic words” I said.
“Liz is baking” he replied.

After Terry and Liz left I carried on and fitted some more flooring and tried out Rhys’ idea of screwing the plasterboard. Lucky I bought a pile of 4×60 screws. And with the drill on the lowest speed setting and with a low torque setting it drove the screws up nicely. I’ll try some more of this.

But I wasn’t at all in the mood for carrying on working as my second group of visitors brought me some news that has left me numb. Followers of my blog from its previous home will recall that back in early spring I had an “interaction” with a local farmer that got rather out of hand and attracted the attention and involvement of the local gendarmes.

Criminal charges were preferred and a summons was issued, and when the gendarmes went to serve it on the aforementioned farmer, I very much regret to say that they discovered him no longer in a position to receive it.

I’m totally devastated by this as I’m sure everyone else in the locality is. I don’t hate anyone at all so much that I wish them dead. This guy, much as he was a thoroughly obnoxious character, was quite simply a guy living a traditional French peasant lifestyle and caught up in a changing world with which he was in no condition to cope.

I just hope that wherever he has ended up, he is happier there than he clearly was round here.

-3

Monday 21st September 2009 – I WAS QUITE HAPPILY …

… working away upstairs when I happened to glance it the time.

Blimmin’ ‘eck – 18:40. And I have to be in St Eloy all dressed up and looking pretty by 19;30.

Of course, as you know already if you have been following my blog, the days when superheroes such as myself could whizz into a telephone box in our day clothes, do a quick twirl and whizz out again dressed as our alter egoes have long gone thanks to the technological revolution that has seen the rise of the portable telephone and the consequent fall of the public telephone box.

Hence we have to get washed, shaved and dressed like you mere mortals and that takes time. Better get my skates on.

So what had I been doing that had taken all of the time?

First thing was to bring a whole pile of battens upstairs into the attic. The way I’m progressing I won’t any longer be able to bring 4-metre lengths of wood upstairs via the stairs. That took a while too.

Then I put battens on the wall where my desk is going to be, and xylophened them. I’m making it a kind of policy to xylophene any wood that is coming into contact with any of the wood that is already up there.

That took me to lunchtime.

After lunch I fitted the insulation and then fitted the three floor panels in that corner. I’ll be needing an offcut too to fill a small width.

From here it starts to get exciting – I brought the door upstairs.

A cheap British B&Q glass door that I bought in a sale ages ago. You can see where it’s going to fit when it’s installed (it’s just leaning against the post right now). The stairs are going to turn away from the door at 90 degrees, go halfway down and then do a U turn. To the right of the door is where my desk and office stuff will be, and underneath the office space is where the shower room will be.

Once I had put the door into the position where I want it, I measured up the floor so that I know where the left-hand upright will go, and then measured the floor so I know where to fit the two traverse beams that will support the floor that people will walk on as they enter the room via the door.

And it was doing that when I happened to notice the time.

At St Eloy we were 8, if I remember correctly, and our task for this evening was to look at faces and write down what we imagined were the lifestyles of the people depicted. And then we had a very congenial session in the bar afterwards.

Participating in the Anglo-French group is as much about socialising with congenial people as it is practising and improving our “second” language.

-5

Sunday 20th September 2009 – IT WAS A LOVELY DRIVE …

… out to Briffons this afternoon. It took me about an hour or so to get there – Espinasse – Biollet – Pontaumur and then up into the foothills of the Mont Dore and the Puy de Sancy. Had the weather been any good it would probably have been fair to say that parts of the drive might have been spectacular, but in fact there was an almost constant drizzle and restricted visibility once I’d passed Pontaumur.

There are some delightful settings for football grounds around here but I reckon that Briffons probably beats them all to date.

Even with the low rainclouds ( and I bet we are pretty well high up here) the view can be said to be spectacular, as I’m sure you must agree.

It was Pionsat’s 2nd XI playing today, and Briffons are in Division 1 (one step higher up) of their pool so I was filled with some trepidation following the mauling last week at Pontaumur, and once more Matthieu in goal had to work hard to earn his corn, as you can see in the photo.

But I needn’t have worried. Jan, the first-choice centre-half, was back in the defence and Sebastien was playing in his habitual centre-forward role

It was amazing how much more solid the team looked with just those two changes (although there were a couple of other team changes too).

The teams were pretty evenly matched for most of the game and Pionsat ran out as winners thanks to a typical 2nd XI goal – hoof over the top of the defence and a quick forward running on, beating the offside trap. But they had to work hard for it and fully deserved the victory.

Tomorrow I’ll be back in the attic fitting the battens and insulation on part of the last wall. Then I have to work out the layout of the stairs and the door into the room. Poncing will have to wait for a couple of days.

Which reminds me – the French verb for “to wax skis” is FARTER. So when I’ve finished the attic I can go down to the ski slopes at Superbesse not too far from here, get a job as a ski repairer and spend the winter poncing and farting to my heart’s content.

-4

Saturday 19th September 2009 – WELL, THAT’S ME SPENT UP!

540 euros in Brico Depot and not an awful lot to show for it.

Running through the list there’s

a pile of insulation – 20mm stuff because they had run out of 40mm and so I’ll just double up the thickness
some filler for the cracks in the plasterboard
some plasterboard tape
some fibreglass wallpaper
some fibreglass wallpaper glue
some blue wall paint (I forgot the gloss for the woodwork)
piles of tools for puttying and wallpapering
some floor tiles to build a plinth for the woodstove
all of the cement and grouting
some light switches
a telephone socket (and, yes, I forgot the telephone cable)

That was the first load. The second load was

38 metres of tongue-and grooving – not the rubbishy stuff at 3.37 euros that I use for building or the better stuff at 4.95 euros (they had run out of that too – GRRRRR) but some other stuff at 6.17 euros
some wood battens for the tongue-and-grooving
some varnish
some nails
some underfelt for the laminate floor

And no woodstove either.

The cheapest on offer is 190 euros but I don’t much like it. As Krys suggests, Machine Mart is the place to be and Terry sent me a link to their site. And Simon is still in the UK. How can I contact him?

It’s a lot of money but realistically all that I now need for the attic is a couple of sheets of bare plasterboard for around the head of the stairs, and a supply of skirting board. And two panes of glass but I’ll explain that in due course (and no, I haven’t broken a window). I have everything else.

Outside in the car park I was doorstepped by a couple of Dutch people who wanted to talk to me about solar energy. It takes Dutch folk completely by surprise when I talk to them in Dutch (well, Flemish but it’s near enough).

But it’s a sign of the times that the Dutch want to become involved in solar energy. There is no word in Dutch for “cheap”. The word that they use is “goedkoep” which literally means “a good buy” – implying that if you do see something cheap you immediately have to purchase it.

The Dutch were the original settlers of New York, which is why I’m absolutely astonished that the USA is known as “The Land of The Free”. The problem with the Dutch is that they have no word for “gratis”.

Having said that, however, I sympathise with Michael Caine, who famously said in Goldmember “There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures – and the Dutch”.

Only one footy match tomorrow – in the Cup and at Briffon, a village in the foothills of the Mont Dore about 100 years away from here. I’ll need a native guide and a pile of native bearers to get there I expect.

By the way, for those of you who have been following the discussion and debate in the “comments” to some of the entries on my blog (and you can always join in), you will be delighted to know that the verb “to sand” in French is “poncer”.

I will be doing a lot of poncing next week.

-2

Friday 18th September 2009 – MORE HEAVY ENGINEERING.

If you look at the pic you’ll notice firstly that I’ve added the second floor beam. The gap in between the two new ones is just over 65cms and that’s going to be the width of the stairs.

There’s also a cross-beam added to the floor. This is embedded in the two new beams and the two older beams to the left. The third beam (the first of the old ones) is rather thin, having been devoured by some kind of obnoxious animal And as this beam will be taking the weight of people entering into the room in the attic and the wall that’s holding it up going to be knocked out, there will be a few more cross beams to spread the load.

The second upright is in, and all the cross pieces have been added. It looks rather like Richard Hauptman’s Ladder except that it’s much stronger. It will be to the right of here that I’ll be installing my desk and office (such as it is) and the bathroom will be underneath.

It took me ages to make all of the joints and to cut the wood to size, but you have to do it properly – not like my first attempt – the verandah – where you can walk in through the gaps in the joints.

In this case I cut the wood slightly over-long and the joints slightly under-size and then filed everything down to fit. And it isn’t half impressive – all millimetre-perfect.

After that I mixed some cement and went round and filled in some of the holes in the wall that I missed.

As I have said, you can tell when I’m enjoying myself by the time it is that I knock off. 19:20 today, and I knew it too, but there was no way I was going to stop until I’d finished what I set out to do.

For the music today, I had just one double album on continuous loop – another album that has been on my playlist almost from the day it came out. It’s surprising how many live albums are on my playlist but this is one that beats almost every one – Dire Straits’ best album by a million miles, Alchemy Live.

Besides having the very best Dire Straits track ever, the vastly underrated “Telegraph Road”, it contains in my opinion the definitive versions of “Sultans of Swing” and “Tunnel of Love” – the latter with the line
From Cullercoats to Whitley Bay
reminding me of a trip I made from Cullercoats to Whitley Bay a couple of years ago in the company of someone who is no longer with us.

What I don’t like about the album though is Mel Collins. There is no place in a good rock band for a saxophone as indeed Mark Knopfler admits in “Sultans of Swing”
Don’t give a damn about any trumpet-playing bands
It ain’t what they call “Rock and Roll!
and furthermore I absolutely detest with a fury those bands that bring on “special guest stars” to augment their numbers.

If I go to a concert I expect to see the band performing on its own and to hear the music that they can play. If I wanted to hear Mel Collins and his blasted saxophone (not that I do) I’d go and find a King Crimson concert somewhere.

Tomorrow is shopping day again. Insulation, tongue-and-grooving, varnish, wallpaper, paste, filler and tape (GRRRR at Krys and Rhys) paint tiles, refractory tile cement and a woodstove.

-1

Thursday 17th September 2009 – I STARTED ON THE HEAVY ENGINEERING TODAY

I’ve fitted the first of the new floor beams, and also one of the uprights that will enclose the head of the stairs.

And I’ll tell you now – that Hitachi battery-powered SDS drill that Terry ordered for me from Screwfix is phenomenal. It went right into the stonework of the house – with a bit of effort it has to be said – but nevertheless it drilled the holes for 4 big anchor bolts and it’s held them firmly.

So, what’s the plan?

Well, it all revolves around windows of which there aren’t all that many. The stairs up to the attic rise from bottom-right to top left as you can see and there’s a window at the bottom of the flight.

What I’m doing is to make a U-pattern staircase that will go from the centre of the attic (just where the window is in fact) down to the left and then round back on itself. This will be enclosed by a wall around the upright and a couple more of its friends.

To the right of the upright will be covered over with flooring and that’s the bit that I will be using as my office. It’s 2.1 metres from there to the front wall of the house.

The stairs are going to be narrower – 65cms instead of 1m so with an allowance for the woodwork the double width of the U shape will be 1.50m.

And where the stairs will stop at the floor below will give me a an empty space of 2.1 m by 1.5m which will have a window in it (the window that is currently at the foot of the existing staircase) and that empty space will eventually become the bathroom (but not any time soon).

Do you understand that?
If so, would you mind explaining it to me?

Mind you, it wasn’t straightforward. I had to open the window-that-will-be-the-bathroom-window to heave a few old chevrons out – but the blasted thing fell to pieces in my hands. I know that it needs to be replaced and indeed it will be but I hoped it would last for another year or two.

So there I was having to patch and screw it back together before I’d even got started. And mauling huge beams up into the attic isn’t my idea of fun either. In the end I ended up cutting that one down to size outside.

After I’d finished and had my well-earned cup of coffee I had to nip into Pionsat and empty the chemical beichstuhl.I hate doing that when there are people around so finding the village square overrun with the fairground attractions rather put me off my stride.

Hence I nipped round to the other publics across the way from the village hall and of course it’s Thursday – dancing lessons night – and half the Anglo-French group were there with Mark standing outside. It was just not my lucky day.

And talking of it not being my lucky day I’ve now run out of vegan chocolate cake. I wonder if Terry needs any more wood moving.

-2

Wednesday 16th September 2009 – WE ARE GOING TO …

… have a major change of plan.

This morning despite the torrential downpour and Novemberish weather I finished off the plasterboarding as far as I could on the walls. I’ve done exactly one half of it – one complete end (save for 2 places around the window that just require small offcuts from somewhere else) and half of each of the side walls.

I can’t do the rest of the side walls until I lay the flooring there and I can’t do that until I reposition the floor beams.

But you will notice that the ceiling has grown some battens and some of the chevrons have now been covered in white stuff.

What on earth is going on?<

After doing the walls, I cut the first piece of plasterboard to do the ceiling. Not too big – not too heavy. But it was too heavy to hold with one hand while nailing it to the chevrons.

And when I finally managed to attach it (after much manoeuvering and bad language) the weight of the plasterboard pulled it out through the nails. I even invented a kind-of tracking to run it along so that I could glue it in place and then nail it and I was struggling along with that.

90 minutes passed and I still hadn’t done it and then I have another 30 or so to do afterwards. I could clearly see that I would have a major sense of humour failure long before I finished. So it was time for a coffee and a pause for thought

This has led to a major change in direction which will be greeted with hoots of derision from many lurkers to this blog but ask me if I care.

I have a theory in life that I learnt from a very early age due to the family that I had at the time, and that is that if you can’t do a job on your own then you do something else that you can do on your own.

And that is why the idea of plasterboarding the ceiling has now been consigned to the dustbin of history (good job I only bought half the load) and the ceiling is going to be tongue-and-grooved whether I like it or not.

So I spent the remainder of the afternoon fitting battens on the ceiling and putting up between the chevrons the rest of the polystyrene that I didn’t use.

On Saturday I’ll be buying another 35 square metres of insulation and 40 square metres of tongue-and-groove. I can fit that quite easily on my own … “famous last words” – ed.

I also had a very bad attack of nostalgia too. Playing all of these ancient cassette tapes at random, suddenly Camel appeared on the scene with Rain Dances and Mirage.

I was immediately transported back to 1975, the lagoon-blue Ford Cortina PMB270D and Jackie Marshall.

She was still at school but worked on Saturdays in Nantwich library and each weekshe would surf through the new records that they obtained. “Eric would like that” – and smuggle it out for me to tape and then smuggle back in afterwards.

And it looks like I’ve now hit 1975 and so there will be heaps of Caravan, Hawkwind and all other exciting stuff from Nantwich library hitting the airwaves in the attic in the next few days – all groups that she and I used to go and see back in those days.

I wonder whatever happened to her? She was quite cute and sweet but her parents hated me with a vengeance and our relationship was destined not to last.

One day while I was driving for Shearings I stopped off in Whitchurch (Shropshire) to get some cash out of Barclay’s Bank and who should be working behind the counter? We had a brief chat but you can’t spend too much time with a queue of people behind you and I never saw her again after that.

I dunno. What with piles of Marillion and the ghost of Jackie Marshall up there in the attic, it’s a good job there isn’t any Leonard Cohen. If I don’t blog any more after this entry, it’s because I will have found a copy of Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London” and strung myself up in the beichstuhl.

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Tuesday 15th September 2009 – IF YOU COMPARE THIS PIC …

… to the pic of yesterday you will notice a change. In fact I’ve started to add the plasterboard to the walls.

First thing in the morning I finished off the battens and then set up a workstation outside with everything I need to measure and cut the plasterboard. I’ve been cutting it into manageable sizes and so although it looks like a patchwork quilt I can’t see any other way of getting it into the attic by way of the ladder that I’m using.

Terry recommended glueing the plasterboard to the battens but it was a hell of a job getting the polystyrene to stick. It wasn’t possible to put the pressure on at the right places and it kept on springing off. I held it on with some speed clamps but that didn’t work and so I tacked them on with nails – and then I thought “badger this for a game of soldiers. If I’m using nails I may as well nail the boards to the battens and forget about the glue”.

It’s not very pretty but I’m going to have to use filler anyway in the joints so mixing more filler to fill the nail heads is neither here nor there. It’s still going to be quicker than waiting for the glue to dry on each individual panel.

Claude poked his head in and had a look – and he’s quite impressed. The last time he was here we hadn’t finished the roof tiling. That was a month ago and doesn’t that seem like a long time ago? We had sun in those days – not like today. I had to put a jumper on as the temperature has now plummeted. In a valiant attempt not to light the heating, I now have a fleece jacket on as well. The first frost of the autumn can’t be far away.

In other news, at the Anglo-French group yesterday I was working with Antoine Ged. He’s the former postmaster (now retired) and his English is surprisingly good. He lent me a book to read – entitled Managing in Turbulent Times. This is another one of the Alvin Tofler – The Third Wave kind of books that were written 30 years ago forecasting how the world would look at the turn of the 21st Century. And while many predictions were totally wide of the mark, many others were surprisingly, if not astonishingly accurate.

In one chapter on the subversion of democracies, Drucker (the author of “Turbulent Times”) writes
“such a process (of subverting democracy) is doubly important …in which small, single-minded, often paranoid groups have attained a power out of all proportion to their actual size”
Now I bet you any money that many people are waiting for me to make a nasty and cheap crack about an organisation that many of us know and love. But not a bit of it. May I draw your attention to the key word in the quote from Drucker – a word that has as its middle two letters “NG” and not “MP” and so it can’t possibly apply.

But of course the Open University Students’ Association Executive Committee does in fact speak with a single mind (except when the OUSA President crawls out of her sick bed at the Annual Conference to oppose a motion in respect of which the rest of the Executive Committee is speaking in favour – but more of this anon) but that single (“do you mean “simple?” – ed) mind does not belong to any of the elected members of the committee.

No more graphic example of this that the one that was reported to me by one of my moles on various committees – taking a well-earned break from all kinds of activities at the last Annual Conference – who happened to be present when the much-maligned Turdi de Hatred very generously invited the members of the retiring Executive Committee to dinner at the University canteen.
The waitress approached the table at which Turdi and the members of the committee were sitting and asked
“is madam ready to order?”
“I’ll have the steak!” announced Turdi
“And the vegetables?”
“They’ll have the steak too!”

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Monday 14th September 2009 – I’VE DONE MOST …

… of the counter-battens today.

That is, the end wall, two thirds of a side wall and half of the other side wall. I just have to finish up that wall to two-thirds of its length, which will take me about half an hour tomorrow, and then I’m going to have a go with the plaster board.

The reason why I’m only doing two thirds of the sides and one end wall is that that is all the flooring that I’ve laid so far. I can’t do the rest until I build up the roof of the bathroom and the wall around the staircase and while it makes good sense to do it all at once, the fact is that I have 13 sheets of plasterboard (about two-thirds of what I need) outside at the mercy of the weather (fancy it not being able to fit inside Caliburn) so it needs to be utilised pretty quickly.

I’m starting with the easy bits – the vertical part of the side walls – to give me confidence in handling it. I’ll do the complicated bits when I develop a technique.

As I was driving down the lane on my way to St Gervais for the Anglo-French group, I bumped (not literally) into Claude. He’s been in hospital having open heart surgery and he wasn’t discharged, he was expelled. He’s leaner and fitter than he ever was and looks so much better. I was quite relieved when I heard that the surgery had been a success.

And in other news, autumn has arrived. It’s currently 17 degrees in my little room and that’s with the light and the computer on and with me in the room. That’s the lowest it’s been for ages. I’ll be having the heating on in here before much longer.

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality