Category Archives: Les Guis

Sunday 5th December 2010 – I WOKE UP THIS MORNING …

… (and doesn’t that sound like the opening line of a really good blues song, but what with the Prozac and so on, I haven’t had the blues for ages) at about 07:00 to the sound of a fast car coming down the track at the side here and slamming to a halt.

A quick peek out of the window revealed no car at all so, somewhat puzzled, I went back to bed.

A couple of minutes later I heard another car do the same thing. And so another quick peek, and once again no car.

But one thing that I did notice, and which was probably the noise that I had heard, and that was that all of the snow had disappeared off the barn roof and fallen to the floor.

That’s the thing with tin roofs as I am finding out – snow doesn’t stick to them and the slightest raise in temperature is enough to melt the adhesion.

And the temperature did rise too, but brought with it the rain. In fact, it’s rained non-stop all day. A grey miserable depressing day indeed, but at least it was warmer than the last few days. Temperature reached 5°C today.

I finally woke up at about … errr … 12:00 and heaved myself out of bed. For most of the day I’ve been doing a little tidying up and reading a book while warming myself up with this little woodstove. It’s Sunday and it’s my day of rest.

And in other news, I see that one of the wikileaks documents states that Saudi Arabia is the major source of funds for Al-Qaida. This will come as quite a surprise to anyone except the regular readers of my pages, as I have been saying this for years. Bin Laden’s family is the fourth-richest in the whole country and the family-controlled companies have their fingers in so many multi-national projects of all types.

In fact, a brief scan of these pages over the last few years has produced about a dozen things that I have been saying for years that have been subsequently been confirmed by either the USA or the UK. The world ought to be taking much more notice of me than it does, I reckon.

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Saturday 4th December 2010 – IT TOOK ME WELL OVER AN HOUR …

… to dig Caliburn out of a snowdrift this morning. The weather broke and we had a glorious Alpine winter’s day for a change (at least until early afternoon) and seeing as supplies are getting low I decided to go into St Eloy and do some shopping.

But that useless whatever in the snowplough – he’s been down the lane and instead of coming down to me and clearing out, he drove past down the other lane to where there is absolutely no-one at all and left me with a big snowbank across the top of the hill.

So after chopping more wood and so on, clearing snow from the cloches, the heat exchanger, the solar water, the solar lights and the compost heater, I dug Caliburn out and he’s now mobile.

After a wash I limped gingerly into St Eloy (you have no idea how bad the roads are) and not only did I do my shopping I did a pile of washing too in the laundry. Quite a big stack had built up around here and there’s no possibility of doing it myself here in these conditions.

What with one thing and another, though, I was late getting to the shops and so I didn’t have much time to use the dryer there as I wanted to be back before dark and it starting to freeze again. So I have a huge pile of damp washing hanging up in the verandah and I don’t know when it will ever dry.

But back to this Alpine morning. I’ve noticed quite often that once a cloudy day ends and night falls, the weather front shifts by about 50 miles and we have a marvellous Alpine night with millions of stars. And as soon as it dawns the weather front shifts back down again and we are plunged back into doom and gloom.

This morning though the sky stayed clear enough for me to have a decent charge on the batteries for the first time since I don’t know when and tonight is clear again so who knows? We may even have a decent day tomorrow but I am not holding my breath.

In other news, I’ve had another letter from the car hire people. Having given up on the idea of trying to stick me for excess mileage they are now trying to charge me $110 for cleaning Casey, saying that I returned it in a dirty conditions.

I think that this is outrageous and I have a good mind to write and tell them so. Of course I would never ever hire a car and get in into an appalling state of (lack of) cleanliness. regular readers of these pages will of course be well aware that in matters of tidiness and cleanliness I am second to none.

Of course I’m several thousand miles away from being in a position to dispute the charge so I don’t know what I can do about it. It’s certainly not fair – as if I would ever get a hire car into such a condition.

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Friday 3rd December 2014 – IT’S STILL SNOWING.

We had a pasting through the night again so the first job this morning was to stick my head out of the skylights and brush it off the solar panels.

Mind you, I needn’t have bothered – I had just over 1 amp-hour of solar energy today. Thick grey clouds and the odd heavy snowfall was the order of the day, and I’m still snowed in.

Freezing cold as well – it stayed negative all day, even in the verandah and that’s no surprise – the huge layer of snow on the roof is keeping any kind of heat away from the inside.

So I’ve tidied up a little more in the bedroom and fitted some temporary shelves in the wardrobe for putting the tools and so on. And then I fitted some more studding to one of the walls ready for some more insulation. I need to get a move on.

I’ve also started to take out the old slate. It’s going to take ages but it will take even longer if I don’t do it. I’ve decided to take two bucket loads with me each time I go downstairs – that’ll be a good plan.

When it was dark I went into the barn and did some more stuff in there until 18:00 and then I came in. I wasn’t going to hang around in that cold weather. 5.1°C it was up here but an hour of the little stove going full pelt soon put that right.

But when will it ever end?

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Thursday 2nd December 2010 – WELL THERE’S COLD …

… and there’s very cold, and then there’s .. errrr … -8.9°C. That’s what the temperature dropped to last night. No wonder it went cold in here all of a sudden at about 00:30, and why it was only 9.1°C in here this morning when I woke up.

First job this morning before I could cut my wood was to look at the batteries. Last night I noticed that the charge had suddenly dropped to about 11.8 volts and there was a smell of gas lingering around.

So this morning a quick touch test showed that one of them was overheating and on a closer examination you can see that this battery has burst. I don’t know why either. Since I’ve had my water heater wired in as a dump load, there shouldn’t be any possibility of any overcharge, and this battery isn’t one of those that handle the input.

But changing the battery for another restored the current and then I went and chopped another huge load of wood – I had a feeling that I’ll be going to need it.

The postie came by this morning with a registered letter. Not very unusual, you might think, but she walked down from the end of the lane as I’m snowed in right now. I was impressed with her devotion to duty anyway.

Later I carried on with the wardrobe and it’s finished as far as I can do it. I’ve none of the wood for the sides and the shelves and so on. That’ll have to wait until I can get in to Montlucon, whenever that might be. But I also did a little clearing up in the bedroom too, so that I can make some more space for working.

I also managed to do some more in the barn as well.

Up here after knocking off work it was a mere 5.6°C. Not surprising because with all of the snow on the windows in the roof, no heat is getting in from outside. But this little heater is doing a very valiant job and I’m impressed that it can cope with these temperatures with just burning old scrap offcuts of wood.

Tea though is difficult right now. I cook in the verandah right now and the temperatures are impossible. I can’t cook myself a decent meal when I’m having to work in temperatures like -3°C. So it’s a handful or two of pasta, a tin of beans and some veg out of a tin. That’s the best I can do.

I just can’t believe this weather.

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Wednesday 1st December 2010 – THIS WEATHER DIDN’T IMPROVE ANY TODAY.

I woke up to find snow everywhere – a good 6 inches must have fallen through the night and the temperature stayed below zero all day.

I was getting low on water in the verandah so I had to hammer my way through the ice in the water butts – the tap was frozen solid. Definitely a good idea it was to fasten the top onto the butts with wing nuts rather than screws.

After the customary chopping of a bucket load of wood to replenish the stocks up here I carried on with the wardrobe.

And I’m definitely sick of Brico Depot wood. The horizontals I made out of the left-over demi-chevrons from the roof – those that I bought from the sawmill – but the Brico Depot demi-chevrons I was using for the uprights – they just split and collapsed. It’s the sawmill in future for me for my wood.

Much of the wardrobe is done but I ran out of light and so I went into the barn and carried on tidying up the wood that used to be the laths off the barn roof. The long bits or those with decent ends I’m saving at the moment but there are also tons of short bits or broken-off bits. I moved a few bucket-loads of those down to the lean-to where I’m keeping the wood that I’m burning. I’ll cut those up tomorrow morning and add them to the pile.

Yes, tomorrow. I can’t see me going anywhere tomorrow. I’m properly snowed in here and there’s no sign of a snow plough.

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Tuesday 30th November 2010 – WELL, I WAS RIGHT …

… about the weather last night. We touched rock bottom at -6.2°C – the lowest November temperature that I have ever recorded, and that by a country mile as well.

And as if to rub salt into the wounds, the temperature struggled up today to the dizzy heights of an astonishing November temperature of -1.2°C, the first negative maximum temperature that I have ever recorded in November.

And that wasn’t all either – at about 12:00 or thereabouts the heavens opened and cascaded down a ton of snow and that stuff kept on coming for the whole afternoon.

The high winds that came with it, blowing in from the east, whipped the stuff about in a mini-blizzard and as a by-product had both of the wind turbines going round.

As for me, I spent the day working in the bedroom downstairs building my fitted wardrobe. It was impossible to work outside. I’ve done the three main cross bars for the front and the two central uprights. All the joints are cut and shaped.

Tomorrow, if the weather is still nasty I’ll be screwing it all into position. I need then to run some electric cable for a light over where the drawers and the mirror will be and then I can fit the last side wall inside the wardrobe. Once that’s all done I can carry on with the plasterboarding around the walls.

I knocked off at 18:00 as usual and made a coffee for bringing up here. And up here we had a balmy 6.7°C. But despite its faults, such as needing filling every 15 minutes, this little pot-bellied stove is doing the business up here. It’s really tiny as you might remember but it burns the offcuts of wood from joinery projects, old flooring, scrap wood that I scavenged, the old broken laths off the roofs that we did, old paper, cardboard and everything and brought the room up to a pleasant 18°C at a total cost of nothing for the fuel.

The stove itself of course cost just £85 new so that’s probably one of the best investments that I’ve made around the farm and I certainly appreciate it in this weather.

The long-term aim for the stove is to buy one of those Gobain stoves – wood-burners that also have a built-in oven and a back-boiler that heats the water. With the back-boiler I can heat an indirect hot water tank and run a little central-heating system with a radiator in the bedroom, another small one in the bathroom and a small one in the lean-to where I used to live.

With there being an indirect cylinder I can also use solar heat to heat the indirect water circuit in the summer so that’s the best of both worlds, and the surplus electrical energy can be used to power a small electric oven for cooking.

But summer is a long way off and the way things are around here just now I don’t think that we are ever going to have another summer. It’s permanent winter from now on.

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Monday 29th November 2010 – I’VE BEEN GARDENING THIS AFTERNOON

With the weather having warmed up today, I’ve covered over the beds of spuds and carrots with some of the black plastic sheeting that I used to cover them just after I dug the beds out. This will hopefully trap the “heat” (after all, 6 degrees is “heat” after what we have been having just now and help them to thaw out, as well as protecting them from the frost until I can get to dig them up.

I also wanted to put my herb beds under cover too so firstly I grubbed out everything in the mega-cloche and then moved the strawberry plants from the smaller cloche and planted them into the mega-cloche.

6 plants went into that cloche last spring, and 21 came out. I was impressed with that. They should do well in the mega-cloche and I might even have a decent crop this coming year.

The smaller cloche wasn’t big enough to take all of the herb beds so I had to tidy up the greenhouse and put the other herb bed in there. All of the stuff that didn’t grow was consigned to the new compost heap and now for once there is plenty of room in it.

But the plastic covering of the greenhouse has decayed and so I need to turn my attention to building the new greenhouse out of the windows that Simon gave me. Last year I made a space to put that, and the space where the plastic greenhouse is, I’ll build a garden shed there.

I’ve also given the inside of the back of Caliburn a bit of a clean-out too, and then I spent a pleasant hour or so crushing tin cans – I had a load of them lying around and so I’ve flattened some of them ready to take to the recycling. Plenty more to go, too, and I’ll spend some more time on that.

But this evening the temperature has plunged dramatically. When I went downstairs it was -3.3 and there was a really heavy frost. Seems like the temperature is in freefall tonight and we could well be on our way to the coldest night of the winter. And winter hasn’t started yet – it’s still November around here.

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Sunday 28th November 2010 – WE DIDN’T HAVE SUCH AN EARLY START THIS MORNING …

… that is, if you don’t count having to get up for a gipsy’s at 07:00. In fact it was after 10:00 when I emerged definitively.

And that was strange too. I’d had an exciting dream beforehand, but when I went back to bed at 07:05 and back to sleep I started on another one ( and I can’t remember a thing about the first one now even though it was so exciting). But in this second one, I’d been stranded on a pier and had to swim for shore and after giving the girl at the reception desk a piece of my mind about telling me to go on it, and then walking through the town, I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my camera with me. I was panicking about this, thinking that I had left it in my car which had now been submerged, and so I remember urging myself to wake up so that I could get back my camera.

And wake up I did – right on cue – and to a gorgeous blue alpine winter’s day – the type that I like to have for recharging my batteries after about 10 days of badger all. But that didn’t last and by early afternoon we were back snowing again.

GRRRRRRR.

But I’ve sorted out my receipts and paperwork from Canada and done a little more desultory tidying up. And that was that. But then again, it is Sunday and I can have a day off once a week.

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Saturday 27th November 2010 – THIS MORNING, I WAS UP …

… dressed, in St Eloy, done all my shopping and back home before I’ve usually crawled out of bed on a Saturday.

LIDL was having a special offer today – car radio CD players with SD card fittings, similar to the one I bought ages ago and which I fitted to Caliburn, but also with Bluetooth mobile phone connection.

Using a mobile phone in the van is almost impossible so a Bluetooth connection has to be really good. The oyster that I use isn’t up to it, unfortunately, so I’m keen to see how this works. And in any case I’ve been after a 12-volt CD player for the house for ages and I’ve not seen a good one, so ‘ll simply use the one out of Caliburn and fit it in a box.

So that was the reason I was up and out of bed at 07:50. These radios sell out quickly and I wanted to be there at opening time and luckily there were still a couple left. So what with this and the Ryobi stuff I bought in the States that’s my Christmas presents to myself all sorted out.

But the drive down to St Eloy was … errrr … difficult in -4.4 degrees and a heavy snowfall. we are having an impossible November, aren’t we?

And although the day improved a little and we even had a little sun, it’s still flaming cold and not likely to improve. I spent almost all of the day up here with the fire on, watching a couple of films and sorting some papers. And it seems that I spent much less than I thought in North America – what with the Canadian dollar being at about $1:39 to €1. That’s a nice surprise.

And I had the final bill from Avis Car Rentals about the excess mileage – I have to pay them the sum of $0:00 within the next 14 days.

And laugh as you might, I did know someone in Crewe in the UK who received a bill from the Electricity Board for £0:00 in the 1970s. He ignored it, and then 14 days later he had a reminder. He ignored that too, and a couple of weeks later he received one of the famous “red letters” saying that if he didn’t pay the sum of £0:00 within the next 7 days they would disconnect his supply.

He sent them a cheque for £0:00 and heard no more about it.

Perhaps I ought to do the same.

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Friday 26th November 2010 – THIS WAS THE SIGHT …

… that greeted me this morning.

Yes, we had a real pasting through the night. So first job was to brush the snow off the solar panels by reaching out through the roof windows with a large brush, seeing as I no longer have the scaffolding up.

It was something of a contortion to do it but I managed all the same. In fact it reminded me of a film that I saw when I was a small child and which left quite an impression on me.

There were some pioneers living in a log cabin with straw thatch, somewhere along the edge of the settled USA in the late 18th Century and to drive them out the native Americans set fire to the cabins (with the occupants inside) by firing the thatch with flaming arrows.

One scene that always sticks in my mind was a pioneer opening up a hatch in the roof and sticking a broom or something out to try to dislodge the flaming arrows. I just wish I knew what film it was.

Anyway, returning to my moutons, I made a lid for the compost bin, took off the segment with the opening lid and then closed it with the new bit, and used the leftover segments to make a second bin.

I’ve lined the base of it with brushwood for drainage and I’ll be starting on using that.

I’ve also been tidying up in the barn, sorting out the wood and identifying which bits to cut up, and I’ve also started making the wardrobe in my bedroom.

A couple of little repair jobs in the barn took me up to knocking-off time at 18:00 and then up here to find a temperature of just 7.2 degrees. But a huge blazing fire in my little stove has brought the temperature up to 20 degrees quickly enough and it’s nice and comfortable in here.

But outside, when I went down to make my tea, it was MINUS 4.4 degrees and that’s just ridiculous for November. And of course it’s only nigh on 6 and a half months since it stopped snowing – 5th May in fact. This year is crazy.

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Thursday 25th November 2010 – WINTER HAS FINALLY ARRIVED

There was no snow when I woke up this morning, but it wasn’t half flaming cold.

So after breakfast I piddled off outside and dug up all my onions. There’s maybe about 50 of them and that’s not really enough for a year’s worth of cooking. I should have planted many more than that.

But with the temperature continuing to drop and with the heavy torrential rain that started to fall I called it a day in the garden and started to unpack the supplies that had come from the States and the supplies that Terry and Liz had bought me from the UK.

And while I was doing that, the heavy rain turned to heavy snow and that was that. It snowed and snowed and snowed and now we have had quite a pasting. It’s sub-zero outside and this snow is going to stick.

I went round to Rob and Nicolette’s too to thank them for keeping an eye on the premises. Nicolette said that she had had some of my beans and courgettes – one of which weighed 4.5 kilos! Courgettes grow well round here.

She had made a huge courgette and bean soup and had frozen some of it for my return which I thought was really nice of her. And in exchange I gave them a little something that I had bought in Canada and which was in the box of goodies.

Funnily enough, I went there at 18:00 for a quick chat and it was 20:45 when I left yet it only seemed like 5 minutes that I was there.

And now I’m holed up here in my room with a raging blaze from the little fire. The temperature was 7.4 degrees when I came up here but a good blaze for an hour or so brought the temperature up to 18 degrees, which is much more like it.

And I have no intention whatever of moving from here.

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Wednesday 24th November 2010 – WE HAD THE SECOND …

… snows of winter today.

A bit more than yesterday as well. And although it melted fairly rapidly we had quite a pasting early in the afternoon while I was on my way to Liz and Terry’s. That didn’t stay long either though but the temperature has now plummeted and I slid Caliburn on a patch of ice on the way home.

Winter is definitely here.

I’ve finished off fitting the wind turbine to the fence and it’s now wired in. And of course we are never ever going to have a breath of wind ever again.

It’s a weird place to put the wind turbine that’s for sure but it’s destined to go on the end of the house once the pointing is finished. And in any case that alley between the house and the trees is something of a wind trap and it’s going to be interesting to see what we can produce from it.

Meanwhile, of course, the wind turbine is being “run-in” so it’s a good idea to mount it, especially seeing as how we haven’t had a drop of sun for about three days now.

Round at Terry and Liz’s Liz showed me how to pickle my beetroot and I now have 5 jars of it simmering away. I also took along a few of my chilis to dry out but I seem to have forgotten them. I also gave Terry a hand to put up the scaffolding – he’s fitting windows into his barn roof and I have to sing for my supper.

Not that I’m complaining of course . We had an absolutely excellent stew with dumplings, complete with home-made bread.

Tomorrow if it’s fine I’ll pull up my onions and start to dry them. But if the weather is bad (and what are the odds on that?) I’ll work inside the house.

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Tuesday 23rd November 2010 – WE HAD THE FIRST …

… snows of winter today.

I woke up to find a light scattering all over the place. Not much, and it didn’t last long either but the first snows nevertheless.

It’s rather ominous.

So after breakfast I chopped a couple of bucketloads of wood. In the lean-to that I have been slowly repairing there’s all kinds of bits of wood in there so I’m slowly hacking it into manageable pieces for the little stove. I get through about half a bucket each day and there’s plenty to go at.

In fact this little woodstove heats up the place quite quickly burning all of the offcuts and I haven’t had the gas fire on at all yet.

I also noticed that the heavy chipboard lid that I was using to cover up my breadbin outside – that’s given up the ghost too. So I made a new lid to measure out of an offcut of waterproof plywood covered in a couple of plastic binliners.

This afternoon I fitted the wind turbine onto the pole and I’ve attached that to the fence. I’ve not yet wired it in as the light went, but that’s a job to do tomorrow hopefully. And I need it too. We’ve had no sun for a couple of days.

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Monday 22nd November 2010 – BACK AT WORK TODAY

And you have no idea how difficult it is, crawling out of bed at something like 08:30 in the morning when you haven’t had to do it for a while.

What made it worse was the weather – really a case of groping my way outside because we had a typical Auvergnat hanging cloud again and you couldn’t see a thing.

First thing that I did was to pull up my beetroot. That didn’t take too long and some of the roots are enormous. Liz is going to show me how to pickle them later this week and I’ll be looking forward to that.

Next was the turn of the potatoes and I seem to have rather a lot of them. I’ve had a cursory skim over about a quarter of the potato patch and I’ve pulled up a huge bucket full. But a few of them were damaged by the lifting so I reckon I’m going to have to make a huge potato curry.

I didn’t stay down there long because the heavens opened after about half an hour and it wasn’t very pleasant at all. And having to run up the field to answer the phone at about 11:30 or so, only for it to stop ringing as I put my hand on it – that didn’t help matters either.

But after that I fought my way into the barn, tidying up a load of wood as I passed, and sorted out a scaffolding pole to mount the wind turbine. That’ll be fixed to the fence for a while until I finish pointing the house wall, whenever that might be. And mounting it to the fence won’t be any time soon either as the weather is just impossible right now.

After lunch I tidied up a little in the bedroom downstairs to get ready to start work in there again, and I’ve used some of the old planks from the stairs to make a temporary floor in what will be the bathroom.

Now I have an inside toilet – a dry toilet of course, that’s made from a stainless steel waste bin (I bought two of those from IKEA) lined with a biodegradable bin liner and part-filled with sawdust. It’s only merely placed in the bathroom – it’s a long way from being fitted – but it’s a major advance as I don’t fancy trekking to the outside in the snow that we are likely to be having any time soon

I’ve also had a phone call from a potential customer interested in a wind turbine – that old guy who I met on an ALDI car park in Commentry a while back. He wants to power his house heating with it, which is rather optimistic, so we had a chat and if he wants to go any further he’ll call me back.

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Sunday 21st November 2010 – IT WAS SUNDAY TODAY …

… and that’s traditionally a Day of Rest as you know.

And so we started with a little lie-in. Until about 11:00 or something like that. And that’s the last lie-in now for 7 more days as I’m back at work Monday with alarm clocks and 08:30 starts and so on.

So after breakfast I carried on with the tidying up up here in the attic and it’s looking a little more respectable. So much so in fact that I feel more comfortable in having guests around.

Which is just as well as Terry and Liz called by for a chat on their way past. And I was here too as there was no football this week.

I’ve also steam-cleaned the oven and fridge and they needed it too, having been unattended for almost 8 weeks. You’ve no idea just how quickly the condition of a fridge can deteriorate – or maybe you have, I dunno.

So tomorrow if the weather is okay I’ll be out digging up my vegetables. I need to organise them ready for the winter. If I leave them any longer they will freeze into the ground.

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EPIC HALL

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