Category Archives: Les Guis

Friday 6th June 2014 – WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME …

… I was awake at 06:00 (and I don’t mean as in not gone to bed yet)? Anyway, so I was this morning, despite having been on my travels during the night.

And it was all to no avail as well because when I pulled into Brico Depot at 06:55, 5 minutes before opening time, there was already a packed car park and a queue of about 40 people at the door. And then at 07:00 they wheeled out the 4-wheel 1.5 tonne 4-wheeled close-coupled trailers for sand and gravel, that were on special offer at just €799. There was a total of 4 trailers and so that was that. I, and another 30-odd people, had had a wasted journey.

Not quite wasted though because I filled up Caliburn with everything that I might need for the next stage of the concreting (because there will be one) except for the 100mm breeze blocks, which I forgot. I also did a round of shopping, to save on going out tomorrow and at the Auchan I bumped into the Megemonts – a couple from Virlet. M Megemont is President of the Virlet Historical Society and mme Megemont is on the local council so I took the opportunity to ask her to send me anything that might be interesting for Radio Anglais.

I was back here for 15:00 for my butty and it’s clearly a case that Rosemary has a spy camera here as she phoned up the moment I set my foot in the door.

It was 20:00 when I went back outside to unload Caliburn. We had the hottest day of the year to daye and it was not possible to work outside. The temperature today reached 34.50C today.

So now I have the fan on here – the first time this year – and I’m off to bed in a minute. I hzve to start on the Radio Anglais programmes tomorrow.

-2

Thursday 5th June 2014 – WHAT A SHOCK!

Yes, there I was in the middle of the night at Dorval ready to pick up mu hire car when the company told me that it no longer had any Dodge Grand Caravans. The last one had been sold in the middle of the week, and there was now no longer ay car to offer me. Consequently they offered me a refund but that was no use whatever to me. I wanted a car and I would never have one over the counter at the ame price that I could book one in advance on the internet.

I was all of a clammy sweat when the alarm went off.

Rob turned up at about 08:45 (I’d alrzady been out working for 20 minutes) and Terry turned up at 09:00. By 09:30 we were sitting there waiting for the cement mixer which, true to form, didn’t turn up until 11:15.

It wasn’t anything like easy to come down here in reverse in his lorry but he managed it and 20 minutes later he had gone, minus 5 cubic metres of concrete.

Terry and Rob had left by 13:00 by which time we had done all we could. We were about half a dozen shovelfuls of concrete short.

Nevertheless we had the first row of breeze blocks of the retaining wall in poqition, the first row of concrete pillars and all of the reinforcing pylons in position.

This was a work and a half though and I’m pleased that I had two good friends to help me do all of this.

Hottest day of the year too (the water in the dump load was boiling) and I had a solar shower – I needed it too, especially after spending a couple of hours in the garden planting my aubergines and weeding the onions.

Now I’m having an early night as I’m having an early start tomorrow.

-3

Wednesday 4th June 2014 – I WENT BACK …

… to Terry’s this morning.

Although I nearly didn’t. When I woke up this morning it was pouring down and wasn’t fit for anything. I had breakfast and wondered whether to carry on with the web pages but by then it had stopped raining so I headed off to Terry’s.

I checked the handbrake mechanism and the nearside seemed to be working fine but the offside not so, so I stripped down the brakes on that side and, as I suspected, the brake operators had seized.

Taking out the operators was not easy at all, but I dismantled them, cleaned them and greased them. A cut-out in the ear halfshaft and this would have been a two-minute job. And if taking them out was difficult, putting them back was even more difficult. And when they were back the pieces wouldn’t hold together and so I had to end up wiring them in.

And as you might have expected, having done all of that and making sure that all of the brake mechanism was working fine, it made not a ha’porth of difference.

We spent the afternoon working on the nearside brake. I made a few adjustments to that side and that did nothing either, which is a total surprise.

These rear brakes on this Jeep Cherokee are totally bewildering me. All that I can think of is that with the brake drums being brand-new, there’s a surface coating that needs to be broken down before the brakes will grip. So we’ll leave it for a week or two in order to see what happens.

If that doesn’t change anything, we’ll have to strip them right down.

Tuesday 3rd June 2014 – TERRY RANG ME UP …

… this morning. Apparently his car parts are coming at lunchtime and was I free?

I certainly was and so after the usual couple of hours on the website, I loaded up Caliburn and repaired my big monster trolley jack and then I was off.

I went via Cecile’s and picked up a couple more letters that were in her letter box, and as I arrived at Liz and Terry’s, a white Mercedes van pulled up behind me. It seems that the parts and I had arrived at the same time.

We did the wheel cylinder on the Transit first and then changed the rear shoes and adjusted the handbrake. It took a while to bleed the cylinder and, not being quick enough with my bleed tube, I ended up with a jet of brake fluid up my sleeve when Terry pressed the brake pedal too quickly, but eventually we had the van on the road with all of the brakes working fine.

The Jeep however was another matter.

Changing the shoes wasn’t as easy as it might have been – a cutaway in the face of the halfshaft would have had the job done in 5 minutes and I don’t understand why it is that Jeep has made the job so difficult when it could be so easy because there really isn’t too much to it at all.

We put the new brake drums and discs on and then fitted the new pads (and that wasn’t easy either thanks to Jeep’s overcomplicating what might otherwise be a simple, straightforward job). Terry then took the Jeep for a run and while the footbrake was perfect, the handbrake was useless.

I adjusted it a couple more times and while I could get the shoes to lock up on the inside of the brake drums simply by tightening the adjusters, the handbrake still wasn’t working. It’s a case of of seized cable or seized operating mechanism, so it all needs to be dismantled, cleaned and greased.

By now though it was 21:10 and going dark so I’ll be back here tomorrow. I was covered in oil and so Terry let me have a shower for which I was grateful, and I came back to find that the phone here is down.

It’s not my lucky day, is it?

Monday 2nd June 2014 – WE PRESSED ON …

… with the work today.

While I was waiting for Terry I moved as much as I could of the stone pile that was in the way. There’s certainly enough stones in there now to build a decent wall now. And when Terry arrived, we moved the big ones with the digger.

Once they were out of the way we smoothed off the surface and flattened it down, and then fitted the shuttering, because if you haven’t already guessed, Terry and I are going to be concreting the car park. I need a proper flat surface to work on.

We went off to the quarry after lunch to arrange the concrete delivery, but it won’t be here until Thursday morning so we came back and fitted the reinforcing grillage. That’s necessary with a 150mm thickness of concrete. Terry then went off nd I carried on ripping out the weeds from where the towing dolly is kept.

I had to nip into Pionsat and the Intermarche and I’ll tell you something – for a small-town supermarket in a small town like Pionsat, the place was packed. Three tills were open and there was queueing in all parts. A few people were doing a mega-shop there, a sure sign that the place is certainly having a great success and that it isn’t just people who might have forgotten something at the weekend

I was on my travels last night too. I was in the police force and I’d stopped a Moroccan because of an offence that he had committed with his trailer and i’d discovered that the trailer’s controle technique was out of date by a day. And so I’d gone and given everything else a full inspection and found loads of other faults too.

A few hours later I found him in a telephone box filling in a huge lengthy form about this controle technique issue. He’d been seeking legal advice and filling in this form was something that some solicitor had told him to do. He told me that he was quite confident that he would be let off a penalty and so I helped him fill in the form, all the while thinking to myself “just wait until he receives the summons in respect of everything else that I’d found”.

-1

Sunday 1st June 2014 – TWO EXTRAORDINARY THINGS …

… worthy of note happened through the night.

Firstly, despite there being no footy last night and me not having any coffee since mid-afternoon, it was well after 04:30 this morning when I went to bed. What time I actually went to sleep, I have no idea. It certainly wasn’t quickly.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I was up and preparing breakfast at 07:45. How do you explain that? I can’t even wake up at that time in the week when I’ve had a decent night’s sleep.

So I’ve no idea what has been going on but it’s certainly something extraordinary.

So having crashed out for an hour or so, I’ve been tidying up in here a little and sorted out the fresh food again. High time I did that too. And then I’ve been working on the computer again.

After all, it is Sunday and I’m entitled to have a day off. I’m back to work tomorrow.

-2

Saturday 31st May 2014 – I WENT TO MONTLUCON TODAY

And I wasn’t alone either for Rosemary came with me. We met up at the Total garage at Montaigut, but first port of call was back here. Rosemary needed a new worktop for the two cupboards that she had bought and although Brico Depot no longer stocked it, it was exactly the same as what I had bought for my house and I have tons of it around here. I could certainly spare a sheet of it.

After that we blitzed the shops – I did my usual round and Rosemary did hers. As well as that, we went around a few furniture shops as Rosemary needs some things for her cottage.

I loaded up Caliburn at Brico Depot with a pile of breeze blocks and some metal pylons for next week’s work around here, and I bought a two hook from Espace Emeraude. The Kubota came with just a stalk for ring-coupling trailers whereas my trailers are ball couplings so I needed a stalk with the ball on the end.

Rosemary bought lunch and on the way home we stopped at Neris-les-Bains for a cold drink. it was the start of the theatre season there and so we were serenaded by an Opera singer, just by way of a change.

+53

-2

Friday 30th May 2014 – I’VE BEEN DIGGING AGAIN

Yes, and here’s a new development – I was actually outside working at 08:30 and I can’t remember if that has ever happened before.

Terry had a day off – he had another job to do and of course, paying jobs with folding stuff always take priority over anything else, and so I was on my own.

I started off by picking out all of the large stones from the pile of earth that I had excavated on Wednesday evening, And then I started to shovel up all of the earth into the trailer to empty at the precipice.

I’d dug out the soil a little too deep so it seemed, and so I ended up by having to backfill it and then driving up and down everywhere to flatten it all down.

Considering that it’s my first job with the digger, it’s not come out too badly but Terry says that he’ll smooth it off on Monday. Yes, we’re a long way from being finished.

There was still plenty of time left and so I started to clear out all of the weeds from where I had parked the Sankey trailer.

By the time that I had finished , I’d cleared out quite an area and it looks quite good there now – quite an improvement. I’m going to park the Kubota there for now as I’ll be using the Sankey trailer for a while as long as the digger is here.

But with my early night last night, I had a good night’s sleep without any interruptions. Nerina wandered along too. I was in Crewe again at the Bus Station in the good old days when Crosville did the bus services there prior to the apocalypse of the mid-80s.

Each of the buses carried a notice of some kind and the notice had a glaring spelling mistake. I spoke to Nerina, who was working for Crosville, and it turned out that it was she who had written the notice. I told her that she should take more care about what she writes, but she had the air of not caring less about it.

-2

Thursday 29th May 2014 – I HAVEN’T DONE A TAP …

… today. Nothing at all. Just spent my day off working on the website and sorting out a few images, and that was that.

But I had an interesting night. I was up 9 times during the night with attacks of cramp. It’s been a long time since I’ve suffered an attack, and I seem to have caught up with it in spades. It was a dreadful night.

I also had a busy night. I was in a hotel room in a dingy room and I noticed that the bed was full of maggots. There was also a mouse’s nest in the skirting board too and all in all it was a most disreputable place. It made me realise just how comfortable I am here.

So tomorrow, it’s back on the digger if the weather holds up.

Wednesday 28th May 2014 – I’VE BEEN DIGGING …

… today. But not, as you might be thinking, with a shovel or a spade.

Just for a change today we had a nice day and I was up with the cock (but enough of my personal habits). And a little later, Terry came round. With his van. And the big trailer. And with our mini-digger, because if you remember, we own a mini-digger between us.

While Terry was sorting himself out I was rescuing the very sad Sankey Trailer from out of the undergrowth and coupling ut up to Caliburn, and then we set to work.

A few years ago I had someone from the football club pay me w avisit with his digger and he dug out a couple of ruined houses so that I could make a car park. He hadn’t done it exactly as I had wanted but he had been and gone while I was at the shops and so I wasn’t going to stand in the way of anyone who can work at that speed.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that Terry brought the digger around and we carried on where the prevuous guy had left off.

It took much longer than I anticipated as firstly I wanted to save all of the big stones to build a nice stone wall, and secondly, we had to keep on taking Caliburn and the trailer up to the precipice and shovel the soil out by hand.

Terry left at about 16:30 and hopefully he’ll be back to help me carry on on Friday, and I had a play around with the digger as I had never used one before. And I had an enormous amount of fun and I can certainly see a pile of uses for this.

I was all hot and smelly afterwards and even though the water was only 32.4°C in the solar shower I had a shower as I certainly needed it.

I crashed out for a while afterwards and then had a long chat with Rosemary on the phone. She needed a little cheering up.

So tomorrow is a Bank Holiday and I’m having a Day of Rest.

But it was sad to see the state in which the Sankey Trailer finds itself. The floor is dropping out of it and the chassis is rotten. It’s not got long for this world.

-4

Tuesday 27th May 2014 – 43.5 MILLIMETRES …

… of rain – that’s what we had yesterday. It’s totally unbelievable and must be a new record for here. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Anyway, this morning it stopped for a while and we even had some blue sky. And so Terry rang me up. His Jeep needs to go for a Controle Technique sometime soon but the rear brakes weren’t up to much – could I go for a look at it.

That reminded me. Caliburn’s Controle Technique is up too and so I passed by the place at St Gervais to book an appointment. As it happened, he was in the middle of two retests and so that gave him 5 minutes free and as Caliburn’s check was the “odd year” emissions only check, he did it then and there. Of course, Cailburn passed and so he is all nice and legal again.

Round at Terry’s, I stripped down the rear of the Jeep and it didn’t take long to find the problem. The handbrake shoes were worn down to the rivets and a disc pad had disintegrated. All of that meant that the rear drums and discs were totally shot and so we needed to order all of it.

It was interesting to note that the brake shoe retaining clips were missing in the rear offside drum, and that the brake pads on the front were almost new. What I reckoned is that the previous owner had noticed the brake issues, fixed the front and then taken one look at the rear and given up in disgust, thrown it back together any old how and then sold it quickly.

Jeep spare parts are shockingly expensive if you don’t know where to go for the parts. To give you some idea (and I can’t remember the exact prices but it’ll give you a clue) we needed left-hand headlights for it. In the UK a set was £300. In France, they were about €350. In the USA they were 70 – not Pounds or Euros, but dollars, plus £30 postage.

Terry was also having problems with the handbrake of his van. I had a look at that too and that didn’t take 30 seconds to see the problem either. A weeping rear cylinder has soaked the nearside brake shoes. We ordered a pair of new cylinders and a pair of brake shoes for that.

That means that in another week or 10 days I’ll be round there again dealing with all of that.

So let’s see what tomorrow’s weather brings. Because if it clears up any and stays fine, Terry will be round here repaying the favour. I have a cunning plan.

-3

Monday 26th May 2014 – THIS IS ASTONISHING …

… but here I am at 22:15 on a Monday evening and in a minute I’ll be off to bed.

Clearly something’s up, although I’m not quite sure what, and I did have a little something of a late night last night but nevertheless …

And the weather doesn’t help at all. It’s been raining for almost all of the day and this afternoon we’ve had some terrific rainstorms – coming back between Gouttieres and Pionsat I could hardly see the road.

So this morning I was up early and in Marcillat-en-Combraille for the Radio Tartasse version of Radio Anglais. And we had the usual shambolic performance that is becoming something of a trademark these days and it’s a good job that I’m engineering my own rock music programmes, for Heaven alone knows what they might be like.

Terry’s big Ifor Williams trailer was in Pionsat at Simon’s so I had to pick that up on the way back and drop it off on Terry, and then Liz and I made our way down to Gerzat for the Radio Arverne sessions.

Bernard for some reason wasn’t there and Philippe, the young apprentice, was there waiting for someone else (it seems that they had forgotten about us). But the someone else didn’t turn up so Philippe did the engineering for us. It took ages as he didn’t really know how our shows work but eventually it finished, only for Philippe to find out that the studio calendar was on the wrong page and we were indeed expected after all.

So what happened there I really don’t know.

So braving the rainstorms, I’m back home and I’m off to bed. I’ve had enough for today.

-1

Sunday 25th May 2014 – THIS BLASTED WEATHER!

When I finally awoke this morning (at … errr … 12:37 this afternoon – I must have been tired) it was absolutely beautiful. But I didn’t have much chance to enjoy it as I had a lot to do (much of which didn’t get done).

I left early for the football (as Pionsat were playing the Goatslayers at Teilhet) as I went via Cecile’s to check her mail, check on the house and do a load of waxhing. and the lawn is completely overgrown – I’ll have to cut that again pretty soon.

Pionsat lost 2-1 at the Goatslayers which is hardly a suprise as they only had 9 players out. Christophe, Julien and Jerome are injured and Kevin was unavailable, and after the maximum effort last night no-one was available from the 1st XI. But the weather broke. We had a thunderstorm and torrential, driving rain enought to chill anyone’s ardour.

I was round at Liz and Terry’s later to rehearse our radio shows, and Liz cooked a vegan lasagne which was excellent as usual. And then I made my way home, picking up the washing on the way back.

-2

Saturday 24th May 2014 – PHEW! THAT WAS CLOSE!

Pionsat are not totally safe from relegation but this evening’s result means that St Priest must win tomorrow by 13 clear goals if they are going to escape.

A desperate struggle on the field against the runaway champions this evening. In the opening 20 minutes, Lempdes missed two absolute sitters in from of goal and immediately afterwards, Pionsat stormed up the field and took the lead. A long clearance by Matthieu was misheaded across the defence by one of the central defenders. It fell on the feet of a fellow defender but Nico was by far the quickest, whippingit off the defender’s feet and smashing it in past the unprepared goalkeeper.

Lemdes pulled one back near to the end when Pionsat were caught stranded upfield when they lost possession, and in the closing seconds, had two goals disallowed for offside much to their dismay. Pionsat were dug in on the edge of their own penalty area for the last 10 minutes or so, and when the final whistle was blown, an audible sigh of relief could be heard all around the ground.

This all looked most unlikely three matches ago. Pionsat’s final 3 games were – team 2nd, away; team 3rd in the table, away; champions at home. You couldn’t have a final three games much tougher than this and yet we had a draw, a very unlikely win and then a draw – 5 points out of 9.

All of Pionsat’s goals in those matches have been goals of sheer opportunism and we have had some desperate last-ditch defending with balls being kicked upfield or out of play without any ceremony at all, with the team captain bellowing out orders to his team-mates.

This is just how football at this level should be played and the irony of it all is that if Pionsat had played like this for the rest of the season, they would have been challenging for promotion, never mind battling desperately against relegation.

Apart from that, I’ve spent the morning and some of the afternoon writing stuff for Radio Anglais, been to the shops in St Eloy where I bought a vine to plant at the front of the house, and then crashed out for an hour this afternoon.

And Thursday, so I’ve found out, is a Bank Holiday. I’m going to have an unexpected day off work.

-4

Friday 23rd May 2014 – IT’S BEEN GETTING ON FOR 25 YEARS …

… since I cooked any sausages, but guess what I was frying tonight for tea?

And not just any ordinary sausages either but some vegan ones too.

I completely forgot that last year when Rosemary went to the UK she came back with about 20 packets of dehydrated vegan food from a British mainstream supermarket. Some I gave to Cecile but I completely forgot about the rest until I was talking to Rosemary once more this afternoon.

That got me thinking and I had to scratch round in the house until I found them. It wasn’t easy and it took a while but here we are. First packet that I put my hand on was the dried sausage mix (add 250ml of water and roll into shape) and there we were.

Surprisingly, they weren’t too bad either – much better than I was expecting, and there’s more for tomorrow night too. And I now know where that packet of dehydrated falafel mix that I had last weekend came from – I’m just curious as to why it wasn’t with the rest.

So after the usual morning’s performance I was outside doing a few odd jobs and so forth before starting on the bean frames. And I made one before lunch , sowed a pile of seeds into two rows and screwed the bean frame into position.

During lunch, the heavens opened and that was effextively that. In four hours we had 13mm of rain. I went out and did some tidying up in the barn and in the lean-to, sorting out some space and also finding some more wood for my bean frames. I did manage to make another frame and sow some more rows of beans during the odd break in the weather.

But this weather is getting me down. Every day this week it’s started off nicely and then degenerated into this depressing, miseerable weather that we’ve been having. It’s almost the end of May too and the weather forecast for all next week is the same – risque de pluie – a very good probability of rain.

It’s high time we had some summer.

-2

EPIC HALL

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