Category Archives: Les Guis

Sunday 19th August 2012 – THERE WAS SO MUCH …

… that I wanted to do today but I ended up doing nothing at all this afternoon;

And I mean nothing except spending most of my time sitting with a damp tea towel on my head.

The reason for that was that the temperature today reached an astonishing – unheard-of 44.7°C outside, and that must be a world record by anyone’s standards. In my attic it reached almost 36°C and that is unsupportable.

I ended up sitting on a chair downstairs amid the rubble. at least it was a cool, balmy 33°C down there. But this really is ridiculous and it can’t keep on going like this.

Mind you, I understand now why they have four-hour siestas in mid-afternoon in Spain, and why many people from around the equator are said to be indolent.

Well, I certainly was indolent today and if it carries on like this, then tomorrow I’ll be even more indolent. No-one can work in conditions like these.

This morning though Marianne and I were out for the pot d’acceuil at Le Quartier.

It’s the turn today of that village to have the pleasure of our company on this series of rotating exhibitions.

We had the jazz band – the fanfare – from Pionsat playing the music today and Lieneke was there with her flute. They played outside too but their sort of instruments are not the sort that blow away in the wind like poor old Rick’s cello did in Bussières.

There was quite a large crowd there too this morning, sheltering in the shade ‘neath the spreading chestnut tree, or whatever kind of trees they might be, out of the sun.

It was nice to see so many too, and that makes a change from some of the more recent pots d’acceuil.

However, chatting to some of the visitors, it appears that some had turned up by accident – just passing through and seeing the crowds.

it looks as if the mayor of his committee had not let everyone know that the do was on today. None of my friends from Le Quartier (Bill, François, to name just two) had made it to the occasion and I was looking forward to seeing them.

Now, here’s something of note.

I haven’t had a coffee at all today. 29°C in my attic when I woke up and that’s definitely NOT coffee weather.

And that’s quite a change for me, isn’t it?

-5

Saturday 18th August 2012 – THIS IS RIDICULOUS.

Well after midnight and it’s 32°C up here in my attic.

It reached 33.8°C in here at sometime during the day, and outside the temperature reached 40.1°C

There was a pile of radio programmes to do for our next recording session and so I spent this morning up here doing the music ones. And that made me melt, I can tell you.

After lunch I nipped into St Eloy-les-Mines for some shopping and that was painfully hot too. But there’s something going on at LIDL – fewer and fewer articles in the shop, bigger and bigger gaps. I don’t like the look of this one little bit.

Once the shopping was completed I nipped round to Rosemary’s and we spent a couple of hours having a really good chat and a coffee. It made quite a pleasant end to the afternoon

On the way back, I took the short cut through Menat and Teilhet.

And you can tell that despite the boiling weather it will soon be Christmas. Everything at the turkey farm is going berserk.

The noise, the dust and the stench, you could feel all of that from miles away and thee were thousands of the little perishers all running around.

THey won’t be running around for much longer though. Christmas will soon be here, right enough.

Back here, the water in the solar heat exchanger at 20:35 was 34°C and so even at that time, in the dusk, I had a lovely solar shower. That’s the kind of thing that maks me feel so much better.

So now I have to try my best to go to sleep. But how, in 32°C I really do not know. And to think that it was only 3 weeks ago that we were complaining about the cold.

40.1°C – I ask you …

-3

Friday 17th August 2012 – IT WAS A GORGEOUS …

… day for doing the washing. Loads of wind, a bright hot sunny day and plenty of hot water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the excess solar energy.

And if I hadn’t have been so preoccupied I would have done a load too.

However, this afternoon I was back up the wall again.

6 large buckets went into it today, but again it doesn’t look too much like it as it’s all disappearing into the interior.

And I glanced into a hole from where a stone fell out (that’s another problem that I’m having) and the front layer is a good two or three inches away from the rear layer, with a gaping hole between them.

Rhys suggests demolishing the outer layer and rebuilding it, and that’s an idea that I haven’t yet discounted.

But it involves spending much more time on the neighbour’s land, fixing a scaffolding on his property, and also loads of time and loads of skill, neither of which I have

But I tell you one thing.

When I carried out the emergency repair on the long side after it collapsed I infilled the top of the wall with ferro-cement and then with concrete and when I rebuilt the top of the back wall (the one where I’m working now) I infilled the top of that with concrete too.

And I’m glad that I did because that ought to hold together even if part of the underneath should happen to fall down

But I’m glad that I’m doing it now. It wouldn’t have lasted for too much longer.

-2

Thursday 16th August 2012 – ONE THING …

.. that can be said about the weather that we had on Sunday is that the garden has really come to life.

The courgettes have finally started to flower, which is quite a relief as I was starting to worry about them, and then also the corn has started to push its tassels out which means that they should be starting to develop their cobs pretty soon.

I was worried about them for a while too.

But I do have to say that my potager has never ever looked so good and a huge thank-you to Rosemary who has motivated me, kept me going, and come to lend a hand on occasions too numerous to mention

But never mind the garden for the moment. I had the usual few hours on the internet this morning working on the website as usual.

I’ve also had to spend some time sorting out all of my photos from yesterday. Marianne wants a couple of the walk for her newspaper, and Rick the trailer guy wanted the ones that featured him on his poor ‘cello to pass on to the insurance company.

But after all that, another 6 buckets of mortar went into the wall.

And this is the difficult bit because firstly I’m working on the bit that’s bulging and dropping stones, and secondly I’m uncomfortably perched on the ladder.

it’s too high for where I need to be and any smaller ladder isn’t tall enough.

Not only that, I have to carefully chip out the flaking cement that someone has tried to use as weathering over the old mortar, and do that without disturbing too much the weak stones.

Those 6 buckets don’t seem to have done much – but then again these cracks are way deep and forcing in the liquid cement isn’t quite as easy as it might

But I’m making slow progress all the same and in another 10 days it will be finished.

I hope.

-1

Wednesday 15th August 2012 – I WITNESSED A CALAMITY TODAY!

I mentioned yesterday that I was technicianing for Marianne this morning.

And so I was. We were doing the pot d’acceuil at Bussieres for the tourists this morning.

The weather was fine and so they decided to hold it outside, even though there was a fair wind blowing.

Music was provided by Rick the Belgian trailer guy on the ‘cello and a girl friend of his on accordion. I really enjoy listening to those two playing and indeed they did not disappoint this morning – that is, until the tragedy occurred.

Halfway through the proceedings they stopped for a breather. Rick stood his ‘cello on the tripod and went over to chat to someone he knew.

Just at that very moment a violent gust of wind picked up his ‘cello, hurled it down the street and smashed it into a stone wall.

And “smashed” was the appropriate word too.

35 years he’s had that ‘cello. He was devastated, and so were all of us. It’s an awful thing to happen to someone.

I’ve had my bass guitar for that length of time and I know how I would feel if something were to happen to it.

I felt really sorry for Rick.

All of that put rather a damper on the proceedings.

It’s really hard to focus and have a good time when you’ve been the witness to a personal tragedy such as this.

What made matters worse was that the event was very poorly attended. I’m not sure what had happened to all of the publicity but it certainly didn’t reach the hands of the people whom it was intended to reach

So after that tragedy we went into Pionsat for the kermesse – or more to the point, for the midday meal at the kermesse. Marianne had reserved a table for her and some friends and I took along my butties because of course you won’t find anything there that I might be able to eat.

It comes as a huge surprise to most people when you tell them that the site that they know today as Pionsat is not in fact the original site of the town.

I’m standing roughly where the original site of the town might have been, looking back at the present site of Pionsat with the zoom lens on my camera

We are about one kilometre south of the present site, at a lieu-dit or hamlet known as Durat,

There was said to be an early medieval fortress here at Durat, but no-one is quite sure where.

they say that the fortress has been completely dismantled and that nothing whatever remains – and that they are surprised by this.

This mound here is my best guess, although there is nothing that has ever been found to prove it.

Remember that building that we saw just now on what might have been the castle mound?

I went for a little probe around and I noticed this. Of course, there is nothing whatever to suggest that this is any part of the original fortress, even if the fortress had been built of stone, but it is certainly significant.

People have this strange idea about castles being made out of stone – like in the film The Vikings starring Kirk Douglas.

That is clearly an anachronism.

Stone-built castles wouldn’t come onto the scene for another 100 years. Wood would have been the more usual building material round about this time. A wood castle “completely disappearing” wouldn’t be too much of a surprise

On our way out to Durat we passed another significant Pionsat landmark.

This concerns a citizen of Pionsat, one Désiré Chaffraix, who left the town to go to seek his fortune in the USA.

And having made his pile (some say in the brothels of New Orleans but no-one has ever dared put that in writing), he returned home round about the turn of the 20th Century.

He fancied himself as a “man of the people” and as there was an agricultural recession in the area at the time, he used his fortune to employ the locals to build three huge mansions.

This was one of the earliest make-work projects for the unemployed, but there seems to be little doubt that he was doing it for a rather sinister purpose.

He had the idea that he would lead some kind of new political movement in the region, and used these projects as a means of “encouraging” the locals to vote for him

Of course the locals took his money and started to work on his project, but at the next round of elections, the perfidious locals voted for his opponent.

In an evident fit of pique, Chaffraix stopped the construction, cut off the funds and moved away. And left behind three magnificent but only half-finished stately mansions.

And here they stand, even today, like the Maison Durat which is one of these three unfinished tributes to the ambitions of Désiré Chaffraix.

On our way back into town we were treated by Marianne to a guided tour of the Chateau de Pionsat.

It’s not been possible to visit the chateau for a number of years now because it’s been undergoing a programme of major renovation, so we wre quite lucky.

And Marianne was quite pleased too. The chateau is her chou-chou and she delights in having the opportunity to show people around her celebrated pile.

Not that there’s as much to see of it as there would have been 300 years ago, that’s for sure.

You only have to look at the dressed stone used in some of the most banal buildings in Pionsat dating from the 19th Century to know where much of it has gone.

It’s actually in two parts – a Medieval part that dates from the time of the 100 Years War and was built on the instructions of Charles V as a barrier to marauding English troops from the Aquitaine, and the second part is from a couple of centuries later.

After the Revolution it fell into disrepair but was later listed as a Historic Monument and is now slowly being pieced together.

We finished everything by about 19:30 and I came home.

Completely worn out and it’s supposed to be a bank holiday – a day of rest – too.

But at least we had a pile of rain this evening, and the garden didn’t half need it;.

And I really do feel sorry for Rick the Trailer Guy and his cello.

-1

Tuesday 14th August 2012 – I’VE HEAVED …

… 6 buckets of lime mortar into this wall today – with the 5 from yesterday that makes 11 and yet it’s hardly making any difference.

You can see near the top of the lean-to wall the light white mortar – that was the 5 buckets from yesterday.

If you look underneath, over the top and down both sides, you’ll just about be able to make out today’s mortar. It’s the sandy coloured stuff because of course it hasn’t dried yet.

The join between the house and the lean-to takes tons of mortar to fill it. I’ve been stuffing into the gap the old bits of cement that I’m pulling off the wall and then going over all of that with a very wet mortar mix, pushed well inside.

I’m hoping that that will help seal the gap and maybe bind it together.

But you can see where I’ll be having the real trouble – just in from the left-hand edge lower down. That’s bursting out a little and the cement binding that someone has put in at one time has long since fallen out.

Some of the stones are loose and others are missing. It’s going to be quite a job to fit that all together.

It’s a good job that the wall is double-skinned and that the inner skin is holding, otherwise that all would have been down long ago.

But it won’t be done tomorrow – it’s a bank holiday here and I’m technicianing for Marianne in the morning;

And then in the afternoon there’s a walk around Pionsat and Durat – where the Dark Age fort used to be – so I’m going off on that.

-2

Monday 13th August 2012 – AND SO …

… after my lazy day yesterday, today it’s back to work.

And with a vengeance too.

This is the next stage of Project Collapsed Lean-to.

You can see the lean-to wall just there and how it’s leaning away from the house wall and also bulging out at the far end.

All of that needs to be pointed, and it isn’t easy because some of those stones are just hanging in there thanks to a wing and a prayer, and a few have already gone.

It’s not the easiest job that I’ve ever done, and I have to be careful because teasing out some of the rotten cement infill also tends to tease out some of the stones.

Anyway, I’ve cleared away some of the brambles and so on, and then painted the woodwork with the first coat. I’ve also pointed a few square metres of wall – starting from the top and working down so that I can make sure that it’s all properly sealed in before I pull the cement away from underneath.

Like I said – it isn’t easy and I reckon that it’s going to take me longer than anticipated – always provided that the wall doesn’t fall down on my head while I’m doing it or anything else stupid like that.

-1

Sunday 12th August 2012 – I DIDN’T BLOG …

… last night, did I?

Sunday is a Day of Rest as we all know, and I celebrated by truly having a day of rest. I didn’t do anything at all – not even write up my blog for the day. No Commune visit with Marianne so I intended to make the most of it.

Of course, I took the statistics though. We always have to do that – in fact that was really the only time that I set my foot outside the door. 22:00 that was, too!

And Rosemary rang me up today and we had a really good chat for over an hour. It’s nice to talk to friends.

Apart from that, it was just a case of making some food and putting a couple of DVDS in the DVD player so I could watch the films. I can’t even begin to remember what it was that I watched either.

How decadent is this?

But there is an underlying reason for all of this.

I want to get away for an autumn break – and I need to too. I’ve left my winter clothes in Canada when I was there in May and I need to fetch them back

And so I need to get a wiggle on with this blasted lean-to. I want that done before the winter.

So I’m recharging my batteries ready for the onslaught.

Saturday 11th August 2012 – Damn Damn Damn Damn!!!!

I went into Commentry this afternoon to do my shopping. I didn’t buy anything too exciting but I spent up at the Bricomarché.

And it was there that I had a disaster.

No glass there – all sold out. But the guy there did have a rummage around and managed to find some offcuts of glass that would do to make the windows for the lean-to.

So he cut them to size and I put them carefully on the floor in the back of Caliburn.

I then took the ladder off the roof of Caliburn so that I could put all the guttering up there. No room on the roof rack to put the ladder back and so without thinking, I simply threw the ladder into the back of Caliburn as I would normally do.

The crash and tinkle told its own story. Nick Lowe might love the sound of breaking glass, but I didn’t.

This morning I was going to work and I managed to select the music for one of the four rock programmes that I need to do, but then I was sidetracked and didn’t do very much after that.

And back home after the shopping I crashed out until 19:30 and if someone hadn’t ‘phoned me up I would still be asleep now.

Dunno what’s the matter with me just now. I’m going to have to put more effort into concentrating on what I ought to be doing.

-2

Friday 10th August 2012 – I DIDN’T DO …

… anything like as much as I wanted to do today, which was something of a disappointment.

We started off on the wrong foot when I telephoned Nikon to see how they were progressing with the repairs to the Nikon D5000. Seems that they didn’t receive the authority to do the work, so they say, despite my having posting it off a month ago.

So I now have to do all of that again.

GRRRRRRRRR!

So after a couple of hours on the computer I went outside to start to cut the wood to make the window frames but although I managed to cut all of the pieces, that was about that for the phone rang.

Marianne was in need of a lift to St Hilaire to plan her walk for 10 days time.

St Hilaire is another village a little like Chateau-sur-Cher in that the church is situated on a mound on a promontory with an excellent view of the surrounding area.

And while the history of Chateau-sur-Cher is quite well-known, almost nothing is known of the history of St Hilaire.

Nevertheless, the mound and the strategic position are very suggestive of a Dark-Age fortress of some kind.

It’s a well-known phenomenon in many similar villages that the church on the mound started off as a tiny chapel somewhere within the fortress and the church expanded as the fortress declined.

Marianne didn’t have much information on the village but we went for a good prowl around.

In the end, we had come up with tons of interesting stuff that we had discovered, as well as having a few interesting chats with the locals.

One of the aforementioned was not in the least pleased to see a couple of people wandering around looking at his house, and he freely gave vent to his displeasure.

However, not all of the locals were so ungracious.

At another house we were invited in for a drink and we had a guided tour of the old lady’s biscuit tin with all the photos, press cuttings and the like, including a newspaper from 1921 with the obituary of her grandfather.

He had a considerable claim to fame, being one of just seven survivors of the legendary Charge de Reichshoffen in 1870.

And so going from knowing very little to knowing quite a lot was the work of just an hour and a half.

Our day wasn’t over yet.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have been talking … "quite considerably" – ed … about the ephemeral Montlucon-Pionsat-Gouttières railway line.

A few weeks ago on one of my ramblings I’d stumbled across the St Fargeol railway station and as Marianne didn’t know where it was, we went the long way round on the way home in order to visit it.

I’m not sure why they called it “St Fargeol” because the station is so far away from the village – a good couple of kilometres if you ask me.

That kind of thing wasn’t important in the 1850s and 1860s because there was no other choice – if you wanted to travel, rail was the only sensible option and so you had no option other than to walk – or catch a hay-ride – to the nearest railway station wherever it might be.

But by the time that this line was opened in the 1930s, road transport was well in the ascendency and the death-knell was already sounding for many rural railway lines.

Not even railway lines and railway stations in built-up urban areas could withstand the pressure from other forms of road-based passenger transport.

These little rural railway lines stood no chance whatever and were soon all swept away. The tacots – the little narrow-gauge railway lines that infested the French rural countryside – disappeared in the blinklng of an eye and the rural branch-lines quickly followed.

All you can see now – if you look long and hard – are the indentations in the soil where the railway used to pass.

So abandoning another good rant … "for the moment " – ed … tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll be off to Commentry shopping, I hope.

But I’m going to have to do better than this for working if I’m going to treat myself to the little autumn break that I promised myself a little later on this year.

-2

Thursday 9th August 2012 – WHAT A GLORIOUS DAY!

And I’m not just talking about the weather either, although that was certainly superb.

This morning was an early start and that found me in Montaigut-en-Combraille with Terry and Rob where we spent a pleasant 90 minutes visiting a semi-derelict building in the town.

We have big plans for this – well, actually we don’t, but the whole purpose of being there this morning was to measure it up and then draw up big plans for it.
Never mind a cunning plan, we will have several cunning plans for this place.

While Terry and Rob went off to chat amongst themselves I went off to the mairie to have a chat with the mayor of Montaigut-en-Combraille about what our intentions are.

Surprisingly (or maybe not, because times are changing in France when there is a question of foreign money being invested in these small semi-abandoned rural towns) she was quite co-operative and gave me loads of help, even introducing me to her deputy who was the kind of person who would really take an interest in this kind of project.

Back home, I started to turf out of the lean-to all of the accumulated breeze blocks, large stones and so on that I won’t be using again up there so that there would be plenty of space for me to move around.

But then the weather intervened – in the sense that by 13:00 the batteries were fully-charged and the water was heating up.

With all of this surplus energy around, out came the big drill and YESSSSSSSSSSS I finally pushed the core drill right through the wall and into the house.

I’ve even managed to feed the plastic pipe through the wall and so now, next time that it’s too wet to work, I’ll be running three sets of cables through the tube – a 230-volt power line, a 12-volt power line and a 12-volt light line, and then starting to wire everything up

This afternoon I was round at Liz and Terry’s doing the rear brakes on her car. Pretty straightforward of course but I was having issues with fitting the springs what with a lime burn on my thumb – how I managed that on Monday after all this time without one is another one of those total mysteries.

So tomorrow I’ll be fitting the woodwork for the windows and painting it all (I still have tons of this excellent LIDL wood treatment stuff), and then sorting out some wood to make a fascia panel across the exposed ends of the roof chevrons to keep the weather out of the ends of the chevrons.

That wood will be painted too.

I’ll measure up for the glass fit what guttering that I have lying around, and then on Saturday I’ll go into Commentry to buy the glass and the rest of the guttering.

Coming on in leaps and bounds now!

-2

Wednesday 8th August 2012 – I HOPE THAT YOU ALL …

… liked the photos of the wall as it stands right now – the ones that I went back and posted for yesterday.

Anyway, here’s another photo for today, especially for Marianne in Brussels who has passed comment to the effect that I seem to spend most of my time in rural France photographing churches.

This one is the church of La Cellette, for La Cellette is the destination of this week’s Wednesday walk around the communes of the Canton of Pionsat with our friend Marianne.

And didn’t we have a nice day for it too?

This is actually the third church to have been built in La Cellette and dates from 1883.

The previous one was far too small apparently, and because of its constrained situation and site, (and on our travels around, we’ve seen quite a few churches in the Auvergne that have been in constrained situations and sites) it was not possible to enlarge or alter it.

Consequently it was demolished.

The claim to fame of the village lies actually a kilometre or so outside, down a dirt track.

And this is the viaduct of the Paris-Orleans railway on its branch Montlucon-Pionsat-Gouttières.

I’ve talked … "at great length" – ed … about this railway line in the past – how it was designated as “a line of national importance” long before the turn of the 20th Century.

But it was dogged by delay after delay, construction held up by World War I, and when it was finally, after many vicissitudes, opened in 1932 its utility had passed with the collapse of the coal-mining projects in the Gouttieres region.

It was closed “as a war economy measure” in 1939 after just 7 years of operation and the section south of Pionsat was never reopened.

There are still a few traces of the former track if you hunt around long enough to find them though.

At what was once a level crossing for a country lane, there are still the railway sleepers embedded on the roadway. This actually is a good indication of how much maintenance has been undertaken on the lane since the closure of the line.

While you admire yet more railway sleepers, propped up against the viaduct where they have stood for probably 50 years or more ,let me tell you about the biggest irony of all.

And that is the fact that that the Paris-Orleans Railway Company, which built the railway line, was GIVEN the land free of charge by the commune, but under certain conditions.

The stipulation was that the railway company had to build a railway station for the village – it had been dithering about whether it would or not and the gift of the land was meant to sway the decision.

And so the railway company took the land, built the line – and then dropped all plans for the station, which was never built.

But the viaduct still remains, and it’s well-worth the effort to clamber up to the top because the view to the north is stunning

In the foreground we have the village of La Cellette and poking out above the trees to the right of centre is the spire of the church that we have just visited.

Away in centre-left is the spire of the church of the town of Pionsat, and disappearing into ths simmering heat-haze are the rolling hills that lead on up to Marcillat-en-Combraille

There were only a few of us today, which was a pity, but we had a lovely time wandering around the countryside, and then we all repaired to the village café – one of the only two village cafés still surviving in the whole of the Pionsat canton – for a nice cold drink.

And this is where the excitement begins.

A woman who lives in an old house in the village is in charge of the church and we went to thank her for opening it for us. I know her husband – he’s something to do with the FC Pionsat St Hilaire football club – and so we all ended up having quite a lengthy chat.

Now I mentioned earlier that the present church is the third, and I told you a little about the second. And so what about the first one?

We know that it existed because it’s mentioned in a Papal Bull of 1118, being described as a tiny chapel. While its location is the subject of … errr … much debate, one particular theory has been adopted by those who might know a thing or two about it.

Accordingly, Marianne has been trying to visit the cellar of this particular house for half a century.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … the owner of this house, by now in an expansive mood, gave us a guided tour of the cellar on condition that we don’t photograph it and we don’t describe its location.

So there we were – perfect primitive vaulted ceiling, pre-medieval beaten earth floor, a bricked-up external door that wasn’t much more than 5 feet tall.

Marianne was in heaven of course, and I was well-impressed. We had probably at least 1200 years at least underneath our feet.

It really was the climax of an excellent day.

-1

Tuesday 7th August 2012 – WELL, I’VE FINISHED …

… the rebuilding of the wall.

Well, to be honest, of course I haven’t. What I do mean to say is that all of the stonework and all of the infill has been done. There’s still the pointing to do of course and that’s not going to be the work of 5 minutes, I can tell you.

And then I’ll need to do the woodwork for the window frames, paint it all and then fit the glass

And there’s also the inside of the stonework to attend to, but that’s nothing like as important as the pointing.

But there’s a reason for it all being done today. That is that I didn’t have any sleep at all last night – clearly my guilty conscience or something like that.

Anyway at about 07:45 I was fed up of just lying there and so I got up and about breakfasting. And then, seeing as how I couldn’t concentrate on the web site, I went out and resumed work on the wall

I had a lovely interruption for a couple of hours though, because Liz came round. She was after my blackberries, which I gladly let her take. And we also had a good old chinwag too.

And after lunch, it was back up the wall.

I said that once the wall was finished I would knock off, no matter what the time. And that was what I did – although 18:54 represents only a 6-minute bonus.

And now I’m far too shattered to do anything else and so I’m off to bed

-1

Monday 6th August 2012 – I HAVEN’T POSTED …

… a photo of my wall for quite some time, and so this is where I currently am.

You’ll notice that all of the breeze blocks have gone, except for the ones reinforcing the corner (and I’m not taking those out at any price) and I’ve also put in the base of the second window.

As for the rest, you can see that the outside stonework is proceeding apace, as is the interior stonework.

The infill, which consists of those very lightweight hollow bricks smashed into smaller pieces and mixed with a very lightweight concrete mix (I found some more gravel) is also up to the level that it should be.

Another couple of days on this and the stonework will be done. I’ll then have to turn my attention to fitting the guttering and then doing the pointing.

I’ll be glad when it’s finished because it really is driving me up the wall, but it needs to be done.

And what else? There was the working on the website of course this morning, and this evening down at the pub with Arno, Bill and Marianne.

That was it, really.

-1

Sunday 5th August 2012 – THIS WATER ISSUE …

… that I mentioned yesterday seems to have resolved itself.

When I checked the statistics earlier, we had had 5.5mm of rain up to that point. and it’s still teeming down outside.

All the plants will be having a good watering anyway, and you can’t say that they don’t need it – a few of them were really gasping a bit.

I worked out that the catchment area of the water is about 30m². Therefore 1/30 of a metre of rain – about 34mm – will give me 1 cubic metre, or 1000 litres, of water.

So 5.5 mm of water will give me 5.5/34 x 1000 = about 160 litres of rain. I won’t have any issues about using that lot.

It started to rain while I was at the Pionsat brocante this afternoon. And it served me right because I didn’t arrive there until about 14:30.

Mind you, I don’t think that I missed very much because it was mostly awful as you can see.

But I did have the most extraordinary stroke of luck.

I use kee klamps to make the mounting frames for my solar panels and they are expensive. But there was a Dutch guy here with a box-full for sale for all of €5:00 – you can’t even buy one for that – and so I duly knocked him down to €4:00.

I had a very good reason for my somewhat-delayed start to the morning. Brain of Britain here forgot to cancel his early morning alarm and so at 07:45 I had an unexpected cacophony.

Anyway, badger that for a game of soldiers. I tuned off the alarm and went back to bed until 10:45, and that, dear reader, was that.

Marianne was there of course with one of her sons, in her role as active member of the Amis du Chateau de Pionsat and we had quite a lengthy chat.

Marianne was actually in charge of the caleche, the horse and carriage that had ben hired to give sightseeing trips around the town, and I was even invited aboard for a free lap of honour.

It goes without saying that if it’s free, I’ll have ten of those.

That was it really – a really lazy day. But I’m entitled to one every week. A day where you do nothing and don’t feel guilty about it is really important.

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EPIC HALL

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