Category Archives: Les Guis

Saturday 14th December 2013 – WELL, IT DID RAIN …

… during the night, all 2mm of it. First time for ages too as I said. And when I woke up this morrning there was a hanging cloud to greet me. Consequently I stayed in and read a book, and then reorganised the bookshelves a little and did some housework.

It cleared up this afternoon so I had a quick run to St Eloy-les-Mines and the shops, and spent almost nothing there either. I’m back into my old ways again.

After a late lunch I did some work on the laptop and then wznt to Marcillat-en-Combraille for the last match prior to the winter break. AS Marcillat were playing Vallon, top of the table, and to everyone’s surprise they won 1-0. Once again, they could have had a bagful of goals but couldn’t hit the nether regions of a ruminant animal with a stringed musical instrument. Some of the misses were comical to say the least.

Vallon offered nothing up front although they were the better team. And they can consider themselves unlucky, if now downright cheated, of a good goal. An AS Marcillat defender handled a cross just outside his area but the shot fell to a Vallon attacker who volleyed it home. The referee blew his whistle … for the handball, thus disallowing the goal and the Vallon players were furious. The ref said that he had blown prior to the shot but I am totally and utterly convinced, as was everyone else around the ground, that the goal had been scored before he blew. And why blow anyway. Hasn’t he heard of the advantage rule?

And anyone who says that football is a man’s game is clearly unaware of Marcillat’s n°13 this evening. Only been on the pitch two minutes and he’s booked for having a ‘frank exchange of views’ with the referee. And 30 seconds later, as the Vallon keeper goes to clear a ball out of his hands and upfield, the n°13 goes up and impedes the clearance. A second yellow card, and so into the dressing room, and not been on the pitch 5 minutes either. Two of the most stupid bookings that I have ever seen.

Vallon had a player sent off too right near the end. He was rather too vocal about a bizarre refereeing decision and while one never condones that sort of behaviour, I do have to say that some of the decisions made by the referee were totally bewildering to say the least.

Ahhh well.

-4

Friday 13th December 2013 – DO YOU REMEMBER …

… yesterday when I was talking about the stone wall here?

The old woodshed was on those pallets just there and the wood was stacked up against the wall. The wall is honeycombed with all kinds of things growing in it but that part there, where the wood has been for about 3 years or more, nothing at all has been able to grow in that.

Consequently, it’s perfectly clean and weed-free and I want to keep it like that. Hence my decision to mortar the joints, even though it’s supposed to be a dry stone wall.

Not only does it look much prettier like that, then nothing will grow in it either, I hope, and that will be one less thing to have to worry about.

It took me most of the day to do that as I had to clean off all of the moss and the like, and in a few places I had to build parts of it back up again. There were also a few weeds growing in the top and so I had to pull them out. But here we are anyway, one wall about a third done.

This evening I went round to Marianne’s as she was having computer issues. And after I had sorted those out, Marianne cooked some food which was really nice of her.

And it’s rained this evening. First time in well over a week.

-6

Thursday 12th December 2013 – I CRAWLED OUT …

… of bed at such an unearthly hour that it was still dark outside. Not like me of course, but then again, I had things to do today as you know.

But with it being dark outside, I hadn’t realised how difficult it was to go a-riding the porcelain horse without any lighting. The sooner I deal with this issue the better, I think. But I digress.

At 08:30 I was on the Intermarché car park, and so was Terry. He piled into Caliburn and off we went to Limoges and the airport. I’ve never been there before but luckily The Lady Who Lives In The Sat-Nav knew the way and so we didn’t get lost at all.

Leaving the airport, I came home a different way. The way that we went was via Marcillat, Evaux, Guéret and the autoroute, and that is one big curving road. There’s a direct route back via Limoges, Bourganeuf, Aubusson and Auzances and so that was the way I came back. Despite being on more difficult roads, it’s a good way shorter and so it took me exactly (because I times it) the same time to come home, as well as being a much more interesting and beautiful route.

It wasn’t just the ecenery that was exciting either. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were in Piraeus a few weeks ago I was certain that I saw a trolley bus, but I wasn’t quick enough with the camera and in any case I had Trixi with me and who cares about trolley buses when one has a very attractive woman at one’s side?

Anyway, here I am going around the inner ring road at Limoges and what do I encounter but a modern 21st-Century Trolleybus of all things.

And so I wasn’t dreaming in Piraeus the other wekk. Trolley buses are back on the roads, and not before time too. Nice, clean and efficient, it will be interesting to see how well they do over the next decade or so and see how many other towns and cities follow suit.

This afternoon, back at the ranch, I wrote the additional notes for our next series of radio programmes. That kept me out of mischief for a good few hours.

The plan of acrion for tomorrow depends upon the weather. If this Indian summer keeps up I’ll be pointing the stone wall. Failing that, I’ll be working in the garden, tidying up the yard or else making shelves for the lean-to. There’s plenty of work on here and, for a change, I have all that I need to do it.

-6

Wednesday 11th December 2013 – THIS HEATWAVE …

… is still continuing. It’s been five days since I’ve seen a cloud and for the last 3 days I’ve had almost 100 amps of surplus electrical energy – unheard-of in December, and I’ve about 63°C of hot water in the dump load.

There was 15°C of water in the solar water tank too – imagine that in December too. I was almost ready for a solar shower this afternoon, although 15°C is not really what I would be comfortable with.

Today I did indeed demolish the old wood sheds and now there’s space to move around in front of the house. But where the wood had been piled up against the stone wall, there’s not a trace of weeds or moss and that has got me thinking, which I know is dangerous. I’m not here tomorrow but if the weather holds out for Friday, I might mix up some lime mortar and point the wall. Strike while the iron is hot, as it were.

I didn’t put up the scaffolding though. Instead, I emptied Caliburn and finally put away everything that I had brought back from Marianne’s old apartment in Brussels. Loads of stuff has made it up here, especially the bits that will improve my standard of living up here in the attic.

There was also a big bag of biscuits and so on that Rosemary broght back from the UK in the Spring and which I had put in Caliburn, dropped off in Brussels and then promptly forgot about.

Tomorrow I’m taxiing, which might come as something of a surprise to long-term readers of this rubbish. I’m taking a passenger to Limoges Airport.hea

-6

Tuesday 10th December 2013 – AFTER THE PREVIOUS NIGHT’S PERAMBULATIONS …

… I didn’t wander very far during the night, which was a shame because it’s far, far better than just sleeping.

But anyway, having left my stinking pit at something like an early hour, and having had breakfast, I set about the woodshed.

And here’s the definitive version of the woodshed, all completed. You can see that I’ve put all of the siding on now, which is just as well because wil all of the cut wood, it’s looking rather full.

Yes, that’s all the cut wood that’s gone in there, but of course that’s not all of the wood. There’s still tons of the stuff lying around here that needs to be cut up and at least, now I have somewhere to put it all, provided that there’s room for it.

Tomorrow I can dismantle the old woodshed and then think about putting up the scaffolding

-2

Monday 9th December 2013 – HERE’S SOMETHING THAT I BET THAT YOU DIDN’T

Yes, not many people know this, but it seems that the mother of singer Neil Young lives in Crewe – on the Badger Avenue council estate in fact. There I was, driving around Crewe in my taxi last night and Neil Young hopped in and asked to be taken down there to see his mother, who lives in one of the small two-bedroomed houses in the crummy part of the estate round by Foulkes Avenue.

Mrs Young was quite pleasant and we had a very good chat, and I ended up going back home to pick up my bass for a jam session with Neil.

Yes, I was having so much fun with all of this that I was really sorry to wake up. If only I could live out even half of whatever goes on in my dreams I really would live the most exciting life, that’s for sure.

It was warm here today too when I woke up – 15.9°C. That is something to do with the fact that I had the room stinking hot last night to cook my pizza. I’ve found the secret of getting this oven to cook – I have to start it up and get it really hot as quickly as possible.

Anyway, after breakfast I carried on in the glorious weather loading up the new woodshed, and I was at it until it went dark. it’s almost all done now – to such an extent that I had to stop and hunt down another pile of pallets to build up the rest of the sides. Half of them are on and the other half will be on first thing tomorrow, which means that I can take the final dozen or so barrow-loads over to the new woodshed.

Once that has been done, I can dismantle to woodsheds that are by the house, and then put up the scaffolding at the front of the house to redo the guttering and fix the wiring under the eves.

-5

Sunday 8th December 2013 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I saw Pionsat’s 2nd XI go a goal down early in a game (that’s not really a change), but come back strongly and score three times in the second half to win 3-1 to get their show back on the road.

But never mind that for a moment – this morning started as I meant to go on, by dropping my breakfast tray and all its contents all over the floor downstairs. I’d had a nice sleep too – an early night, a lie-in until 10:30 without any inerruption through the night, a good dream, and then the bright burning sun shining in through the windows. And then of course the breakfast all over the floor.

I managed an hour or two catching up on some recording that I needed to do, and then in the glorious sunshine off to Charensat to see the footy at 13:00.

Pionsat had 11 players, but no more, and it was a fair team too, and as I said, they ran out winners 3-1 after being down 1-0 for a long period in the game.

It was particularly important for young Vincent. He came up from the juniors last year and he’s finding it something of a big step up, but he’s doing what he can and he showed that if you have a genuine striker’s instinct, then nothing much else really matters all that much.

Here, a high ball into the area had the keeper stretching and … he dropped it. It’s not easy hanging on to a ball in this cold weather with the sun streaming into your eyes.

And there was Vincent, following the ball in like every good striker should, whether he thinks he’s going to get it or not, and when the keeper fumbles the ball, it lands right at Vincent’s feet and that was 3-1 to Pionsat.

Back here, I finished off the recording and then watched the Packers against the Falcons. The Packers came back to scrape a dour win, having fallen behind to the most bizarre touchdown that I have ever seen. The Pachers’ quarterback overthrows, a Falcons defender sticks out a hopeful foot, and kicks it right into the hands of a colleague wide open on the left wing, who, totally unmarked, runs it back 72 yards for a touchdown. The Falcons won’t ever do that again, that’s for sure.

-4

Saturday 7th December 2013 – I FINALLY MADE IT …

… to the shops in Montlucon today – first time in ages. And I spent a pile of money too, which is not at all like me, of course.

Mind you, it was an effort to get out of bed which was hardly surprising seeing as it was absolutely taters outside. And scraping the ice off Caliburn’s windscreen didn’t improve things either. But in Montlucon I did the usual round of the usual shops.

Just for a change, LIDL turned up nothing exciting apart from a big box of clementines (yes, it’s nearly Christmas) but everywhere else did me proud. At Noz, the cheapo shop, I bought a full set of the Piorot Series I DVDs and also some of the home-made fizzy lemonade that they have. Three bottles of that, for me over the Christmas / New Year festivity period, and not only that, the bottles with the drink inside are those with the wired stoppers and cost less than just the bottle alone at IKEA.

In Brico Depot, I bought 24 planks of shuttering board – €3:95 a plank and three joined together widthways makes a decent 50cm shelf 3 metres long. I can crack on and build my shelving now, once the rain restarts. But it didn’t restart today – we had another one of these glorious Alpine winter days.

Before leaving Montlucon I went to the Centre Aqualudique, which is the posh way of saying “swimming baths”. It was cold in there, but not as cold as it would have been at Neris les Bains, and I made history by not only forgetting to take my clean undies with me but also my soap and shampoo. Something of a wash-out, if you pardon the expression.

This evening I froze to death on the terraces (well, terrace) at Marcillat as the home side’s 1st XI took on Varennes in a squalid bottom-of-the-table match.

Two worse attacks I have never ever seen in my life. Varennes never even tested the Marcillat keeper once during the entire match and while Marcillat had plenty of opportunities, they couldn’t hit the nether regions of a bovine animal with a stringed musical instrument. They could still be playing when the winter break is over in February and the score would still be 0-0.

That is – except for a very dubious penalty and a woeful calamity of a mix-up between the Varennes n°3 and his goalkeeper. And tule n°1 of any defence is and always has been “when making a backpass to the keeper, always send it wide of the posts”.

Are you reading this, Varennes n°3?

But it was a niggly, argumentative match – a typical foot-of-the-table affair, and when the referee finally did have enough and brandished the first yellow cards, I would have had half the teams in the dressing room a long while previous to that.

-3

Friday 6th December 2013 – I REALLY DIDN’t WANT …

… to leave my bed this morning. We’ve had dry weather for the last couple of days but this morning it was absolutely teeming down, just for a change.

So after breakfast I attacked the upstairs of the “downhill” lean-to, the one on which I fixed the roof two years ago. It was still like a building site up there and so I set about cleaning it out. After all, I have some demi-chevrons now and if things go according to plan I’ll have some shuttering planks tomorrow and they make really good shelves.

But I didn’t stay long up there as I had a phone call. A damsel in distress needed rescuing in Montlucon, and you know how Strawberry Moose is when it comes to damsels in distress.

However, as I said a couple of years ago, being a superhero today isn’t easy. The rise of mobile phones has meant the decline in telephone boxes, so where now does a superhero go when he needs to put his underpants on over the top of his trousers?

That was a few hours lost today anyway, and another 30 minutes soon followed that as Rosemary rang up for a chat. Not that I resent rescuing damsels in distress or talking to my friends, not in the least, but I have so much to do here. Anyway, I didn’t do much more cleaning, even if inbewteen the rainshowers I moved a little bit more wood.

Anyway, let’s see what tomorrow might bring.

-8

Thursday 5th December 2013 – WHY WOULD ANYONE …

… want to sit down and read all 383 or so pages of my travel website? I know that it’s all good stuff but nevertheless that is rather extreme.

However thank you anyway.

Apart from that, this morning I found one more pallet and stripped it down, and now it’s screwed to the side of the woodshed. And so that’s finished – at least, all I’m going to do of it.

It’s somewhat Heath – Robinson, but as I said before, everything except the screws and a metal bracket is from salvaged materials. There are even some second-hand nails in there holding a few things together.

This afternoon I started to fill it, and I have to say that I didn’t realise just how much wood I have, because I was at it for a couple of hours and I’ve hardly made any impression at all in there. It’s going to be a much longer job than I anticipated moving the wood about.

This evening, I crashed out at about 23:00. I can’t think why. It’s not as if I’ve been working flat out.

-3

Wednesday 4th December 2013 – I’VE ALMOST FINISHED …

… this woodshed. In fact I might have actually completed it had it not been for a “supply” issue.

This morning, anyway, I finished putting the roof on – that is, all for a small piece for which I need to find the offcuts from when we roofed the barn in 2011. They are about somewhere but heaven alone knows where right now. The roof is not on as I would like, because I really wanted to pass at least one screw through where all of the four sheets of corrugated iron meet up. However, I broke two metalworking drill bits in quick succession and so I had to give up that idea.

I’ve put some diagonal bracing in the back wall too. I noticed when I was up on the roof that the shed had a tendency to “rack” while I was moving about. The bracing has stiffened that up considerably now.

The shed is to be clad with old pallets, of which I have a large supply. but here’s the rub, they were amongst the first things to go into the barn after I fixed the suspended flooring, and so they have had ever so many years of stuff piled on top of them. It took most of the afternoon to pull out a dozen, and then most of those were not the ones that I wanted.

To cut a long story short, I now have 6 pallets stripped down and fixed to the framework and tomorrow I’ll need to fix another 8 to complete that. Then, there needs to be the pallets that I’ll be using for the shelving. Once all of that is organised, I can start to load it with all of the wood that is in the temporary woodshed.

It goes dark at about 17:30 in the evening and I don’t finish work until 18:00 so I usually look for things to do where there is artificial light. This evening I stripped out the food cupboard and sorted out all of the tins and jars.Before I started, the food was rather overflowing, but now it’s all stacked neatly and there’s room for half as much again.

Anyway, tomorrow hopefully I’ll be able to finish this woodshed. I’ve plenty of other things to be doing.

-7

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 – THIS WOODSHED …

… is coming along in leaps and bounds, and might even be finished tomorrow.

All of the horizontals had their joints cut and then they were screwed to the uprights. That involved a little bit of acrobatics and also a really good search for the LIDL portable work platform-ladder which was lost in the undergrowth.

And once more, I’m impressed with this Ryobi Plus One Impact Bit driver – almost as much as I am impressed with my galvanised steel dustbin.

This afternoon I found some old bits of floorboard and cut them to a length of 1m40. These were screwed aross the top of the uppermost horizontals, and once they were in the correct position I went in search of four decent sheets of corrugated iron that were formerly on the roof of the lean-to.

So having located them, I managed to screw (using the metal-cutting screws that we had for the barn roof) two of them to the bits of floorboard across the top, and there’s half the roof. And had I not lost the light, the roof would have been on today. That will have to wait for tomorrow morning now.

What’s exciting about this woodshed is that apart from the screws, absolutely everything else is “recup” – he French name for “salvaged materials”. There’s not a piece of wood or metal or plastic that hasn’t been used previously in a construction.

And what a day too. Another alpine arctic day, clear blue skies and not a cloud in the sky until the evening. 61 amp-hours in the electricity dump load and water at 40°C. Temperature outside reached 13.5°C too – the highest for a month.

This can’t last though. We’ll be back in the rain by the weekend, just you wait and see.

-4

Monday 2nd December 2013 – SO FOLLOWING MY DAY OF REST …

… yesterday, it was on with the motley.

I managed something of an early start too, which took me by surprise, and I’d finished digging the holes for the remaining side of the woodshed before I’d even woken up.

It took ages (so it was just as well that I started early) to position the uprights where I wanted them to be and for them to be perfectly vertical on all four aspects, but now they are in place and properly cemented in. It looks rather weird, my woodshed, but then it’s supposed to practical, not aesthetic.

This afternoon, I cut all of the horizontals. The top two overhang by about 1.250 metres, reaching the wall of the barn. The reason for this is that I need to park the cement mixer somewhere out of the weather as the tarpaulin that is covering it keeps on blowing off. This little overhang will be just perfect for that, and keep the cement mixer out of mischief until the summer.

We had the reappearance of that strange golden object in the sky later in the evening, but that wasn’t the most astonishing part about the weather today. I suspect (and I’ll check later) that records might have tumbled as far as wind energy goes today. It’s gusted quite strongly and the three wind turbines here have been turning around constantly. It was nice to see that, that’s for sure, even if the wind situation here is rather less than I was hoping.

-3

Sunday 1st December 2013 – SUNDAY IS A DAY OF REST …

… and so I rested. In fact I didn’t even get out of bed until 10:30, and that was only because I needed to visit the beichstuhl.

I didn’t do any housework either. I had a nice relaxing morning reading a book. As you know, I’m fully of the opinion that everyone should have the right to have one day per week where they can sit and do nothing at all if they so choose, and not feel guilty about it.

I didn’t even set foot outside my house until 14:30 – not because there was nothing to set foot outside for, but merely because it was so perishing cold.

However at 14:30 I set out, for Terjat as it happens. No footy again in the Puy-de-Dome today but Terjat’s 2nd XI had a rearranged match against Quinssaines and so I reckoned that I would toddle off over there to see whether we were going to have a repeat of the humiliation of a couple of weeks ago when, even playing with 11 men against the 10 of Premilhat, they still managed to be well-and-truly stuffed 7-0.

Well, Quinssaines were pretty poor, although quite well-organised, and Terjat were even worse. But somehow Terjat managed to win. And not by just one goal, but by an astonishing 5-2 scoreline.

The big difference was that while both goalkeepers were, shall we say, guardiens de fortune and so couldn’t really be expected to do too much, Terjat actually put the Quinssaines keeper under quite a lot of pressure, shooting from just about everywhere there was a sight of goal. And of course, it paid off in spades.

On the other hand, even though the Terjat keeper never made a clean catch during the entire 90 minutes, no-one followed up the balls into the area to pounce upon the dropped balls, or even had a serious attempt at trying to beat him. In fact, when finally Quinssaines did have a go at really testing him, a free kick blasted over the wall into the goalmouth from about 25 yards out, it went clean through the keeper’s hands into the net.

Ohhh what might have been!

No gridiron tonight either. The internet connection isplaying up and I was seeing nothing but a stop-start freeze-frame slideshow. That was a shame as we were to be treated to a bottom-of-the-table grudge match between the Falcons and the Bills. It doesn’t get more desperate than that.

-5

Wednesday 27th November 2013 – I’VE FINISHED …

… building the framework for the woodshed, and the two sides are assembled. It doesn’t half look serious too, as indeed it should – 2 metres high and 1.5 metres deep and it will be 4 metres wide when it’s properly assembled.

Next stage of course is to dig the holes in order to plant the legs of the sides, but I’m not sure that I’ll be doing that tomorrow. Right now, it’s -7°C outside and dropping rapidly, and with one of the clearest starry skies that I have seen for a while, there’s no limit as to how low it might go.

Mind you, we had a gorgeous day today as well. Hardly a cloud in the sky all day and 78 amp-hours in the electric water-heater. It was quite enjoyable working outside.

And I’ll tell you something else. If you remember back to September, I bought a Ryobi Plus One Impact bit driver, and I used it today. It gets through the batteries but it drove the 6×60 screws right into the wood without very much effort at all, without any pilot holes – and we are talking real wood too, not this resinous pine stuff. I was well-impressed with that.

I finished that about 15 minutes before it went dark so I had a wood-cutting session – some of the rotten beams that I’d pulled out. And then I had to go to Marianne’s – she’s upgraded her computer but half of the programs that she has wouldn’t install. Hardly surprising, as some were for W98, but others just needed a little tweak. And back home, I had Rosemary on the phone for 15 minutes.

Now I have the fire banked up and I’m going nowhere.

-5

EPIC HALL

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