Category Archives: Les Guis

Sunday 14th March 2010 – I had coffee in bed this morning!

Those of you with long memories will recall that about 2 years ago I bought a 12-volt coffee machine – the kind that truckers have in their cabs. I discovered it the other day while tidying up (I do that every now and again) and so last night I filled it full of water, put a filter and some coffee in, and left it by my bed. When I woke up I switched it on and stayed lying in bed smelling the aroma for a while.

It wasn’t very satisfactory and it needs some fine tuning. And it doesn’t half sup the juice but nevertheless it was very nice to be lying there having coffee in bed. Last time that happened was when I stayed at Liz and Terry’s in the summer, and I can’t remember when it was before that.

So having drunk coffee and had breakfast, today I did … nothing at all. I’ve been up here all day either reading or working on my website. I noticed that the last time I updated it was in June 2009 and a lot has happened since then! I need to extricate my digit a little bit.

There will be a lot happening tomorrow too. If the weather stays fine I’m going to be burning the leftovers from the garden-tidying and then digging up tree stumps. Luckily the weather has warmed up a bit so the soil might be workable.

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Saturday 13th March 2010 – What a night!

If you remember about a year ago I had a series of nights where I had some really bad attacks of cramp in bed. Last night I had another. I can’t think of anything more painful than that and in stretching my legs out to ease the pain I pulled mycalf muscles -both of them! It took ages for the pain to subside and another age for me to go back to sleep. No wonder I didn’t wake up until after 10:00.

I hope that this isn’t a portent for another series of attacks like last year.

I finally made it off to St Eloy for the shopping and spent quite a few bob there today. LIDL’s gardening sale was ongoing and I bought a 1.5×10-metre roll of black plastic mulching. My new raised beds are to be 1.5×1.5metres so I’ll cut this roll to size, make up a handy framework and use it in winter to keep out the weeds. Carrefour also had a gardening sale so I bought some seeds and a new lopper – €12.99 which is three times the price at LIDL but I hope it lasts 3 times longer. The LIDL ones have a weak spot, the aluminium jaw plate, but these don’t have that – just a simple scissor mechanism.

I popped round to see the European Cardboard Box Mountain that is Claude and Francoise’s apartment to see how they were all doing there, and then the final visit was to the new tyre place. They were advertising Caliburn-sized tyres for €70 each which isn’t too bad a price but by the time they had added on the valves, the balancing, the fitting and the VAT it came to almost €200 for a pair. I’m thinking that I may as well get the Goodyear tyres that were the original fitting seeing as they are only €50 extra for a pair all-in. One thing is certain – I’m not going to waste my snow tyres by running them through the summer. They’ve been invaluable in this weather.

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Friday 12th March 2010 – No wonder …

… it was flaming cold (like 7 degrees) in here when I woke up this morning. Outside it had dropped to minus 9!!! That is just crazy.

So after breakfast in the cold I started to tidy up the wood that I’d cut down. And as you can see I’ve collected quite a pile. That wood is for three years hence and so it’ll stay on the pile for a while until I get round to cutting it up -which won’t be for a while because I’ve broken my loppers. That’s the third pair I’ve broken down here.

On the other side of the patch of land is a huge pile of brambles weeds and the like. And if Monday is a good day all of that will be burnt and I can get on with digging up tree stumps. I’ve washed the inside of the plastic greenhouse ready to move down here and I need to think about uprooting the raised beds.

And this evening I’ve been for a little drive to Clermont Ferrand.

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Thursday 11th March 2010 – One thing that you need to bear in mind …

… when cutting down trees is where they are likely to fall. It’s all very well doing “back-of-an-envelope calculations but if a branch gets caught up somewhere all of your plans can come to naught.

Keen readers of these pages last winter will recall that I had a domino effect – one tree into another and that one into a third. This year I managed to drop two trees across the Cortina and the Merc. Ahhh well!

Luckily there was no serious harm done to anything.

But I remember Liz noticing the look of consternation on my face as Terry used a years supply of wood to get his bonfire going the other day. “Don’t worry” she said. “There will be plenty more”. Well, she wasn’t wrong, was she?

But we had more snow today – piles of it. I was trying to clear up the wood but on two occasions I was driven inside by heavy falls. And by the time 17:00 came round and I was soaked to the skin and all my three pairs of working gloves were saturated, I called it a day, came inside, made myself a coffee and watched Fandango.

Now Fandango is a magnificent, vastly underrated Road Movie that should be part of everyone’s DVD collection. The music is superb. But talking of the music it contains one of the most astonishing out-takes ever. The film is set in 1971 as it quite clearly states, yet the theme music is “Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting” from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road which, as any fule no, wasn’t released until 1973!

In other news, keen readers of these pages will recall an incident from a few years ago concerning a Welsh Premier League match at Porthmadog. A supporter shouted out at a linesman “Who’s the Paki with the flag?”. He was apprehended by a couple of supporters, marched down to the club’s offices, made to apologise to the club and the linesman, and then booted out of the ground and banned for life. However the Welsh Football Association charged Porthmadog with “failing to control its supporters”, fined £13,200 and docked 3 points. And so earlier in the week at Llanelli a group of supporters made monkey chants at Port Talbot Town’s Drew Fahiya, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent. The supporters were unidentified.

Now this sounds something like 10 times more serious that whatever happened at Porthmadog, but there are one or two subtle differences. Porthmadog is a small rural club run by a group of volunteers and continually bounces along the bottom of the league. Not the kind of club that will put up a great fight especially when money is tight and three points here or there is pretty meaningless. But Llanelli is a big city club – a leading light in the Welsh Premier League and run by high-profile businessmen. The club is challenging for the Championship and a place in the European Champions League, and the fortune that goes with it – is at stake. There are many eyes, including mine and several hundred others in Porthmadog, who are following this case with interest and awaiting the Welsh FA’s next move with bated breath.

And in other other news, I have a candle lit in my room sending a message to a dear friend who departed from this plane of existence a year ago and who I am desperately missing.

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Wednesday 10th March 2010 – If you look very closely …

… at this image you will notice three things.

Firstly there’s a big empty space where the two halves of the old Transit used to be. Thats right – I’ve winched them over to the other side of the meadow (I only bent a chain hook today!) where they are safely installed and this has left me with all of this room to use as my vegetable plot.

Secondly, you’ll notice that the hedge has been cleared out, piles of brambles have been uprooted, overhanging branches removed and tall saplings cut right down. There’s a good view now over neighbouring fields for the moment (until I block it off with the greenhouse) and the sun will get over there a treat.

Thirdly, you’ll notice the snow! It’s snowed all day and all night and it’s really beginning to get on my wick, this weather. It’s almost the middle of March and we had sub-zero temperatures all day and this flaming white stuff.

The first serious snowfall of the year was almost exactly 3 months ago to the day. Any more of this and I’ll be off to Canada for good. At least over there you expect to have it for all that time and you can prepare accordingly. This is just getting ridiculous.

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Tuesday 9th March 2010 – We were back in the studio today.

And not only that, we were actually told what we had to do! Now isn’t THAT a welcome departure from the usual? and we also know when we will be being broadcast.

Basically we have to do a 5-minute spot, and didn’t that cause some consternation? Have you any idea how quickly 5 minutes goes when you are busy? After recording the first programme we were there hacking away at the material we had in a (vain) effort to cut it all right down. But we managed just the same – it was a case of having to, but it’s depressing when all of your hard work falls onto the cutting-room floor.

And we are going onto the airwaves next Tuesday at 18:50, repeated on Wednesday morning at 08:50.

I spent the morning arranging things and as it was a nice day again I had the heater on up here. That’s getting to be a habit just recently, isn’t it?

And after we came back from the studio I went round to see Marianne – I haven’t seen her for a while. I enlisted her help for our radio show -she’s the local journalist so she gets to know everything that’s been going on and she owes me a favour- I let her use one of my photographs for an article that she wrote. She’s also keen to involve herself in this English-language newspaper that died a death and so I offered her my support. I hope she will wear it in comfort.

And the weather has deteriorated some more. Howling gales, devastating winds, and temperature in the heat exchanger of minus 11. It’s flaming March, for God’s sake.

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Monday 8th March 2010 – I’ve started to move the old Transit …

… as you can see. I’ve managed to get it about 6 feet out from the hedge and it took quite a while for that.
Firstly the front wheels have sunk in quite a depth and accumulated humus from rotting vegetation meant that I had to spend a while digging it out.
Secondly I’ve lent out my good electric winch and the not-so-good electric winch had a few issues about it which mean that it’s not up to all that much – hence I had to resort to the old hand-powered chain winch. But what the heck? hand-powered chain winches have been around for centuries and they worked well enough in those days.
Mind you the first thing that I did was to bend two S-hooks that I was using to make a loop in one of the chains – so I had to go and hunt down a couple of bow shackles. And then I snapped a chain! – Yes, snapped a chain using a hand-powered chain winch! And if that wasn’t enough, I actually stretched the other galvanised steel chain! Yes, stretching a steel chain! It’s a flaming good chain winch this – the power I can get on the lever must be phenomenal!

But anyway, the Transit together with its load of one-and-a-half Passats is on its way across the field, and that’s certainly something to celebrate.

This morning was another bright sunny alpine day with quite a wind – just the job for a washday and so while I was doing the washing I was also unloading all of Saturday’s shopping from Caliburn. The solar energy was such that I ran the upstairs heater for 5 hours – another day with 240 amp-hours (almost 3KwH) of sun and I’m thinking seriously about the idea of resurrecting my mains automatic washing machine. I’ve also had some sales material about some fridges that use about 0.5kWH (about 43amp-hours) of energy per day. Energy consumption for electrical appliances is plummeting and it won’t be long before I can have a real fridge here too.

This afternoon I put all of the plasterboard (all 16 sheets of it) upstairs. You’ve no idea how heavy that stuff can be when you are mauling it up by hand. And then I tackled the Transit.

Tomorrow we are recording the second instalment of our radio programme. I hope they don’t lose this tape!

And in other news, you may remember that the other day I spent an hour in the torrential rain moving a car for Bill. Tonight at the Anglo-French group he very kindly gave me a box of vegan biscuits for my trouble. “I felt embarrassed when I saw the state you were in” he said. But as I said at the time, I was quite happy doing it – it brought back many happy memories of when I had my taxi business and the state I was in the other day was the state in which I lived for eight years, so it was no trouble at all. But it was still very kind of Bill to give me the biscuits and I am very grateful. After all, one might say that the efforts that I went through for him – they really took the biscuit!

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Sunday 7th March 2010 – I think that the Pentax has finally died

I went out this afternoon to see FC Pionsat St Hilaire play Montel-Villosanges at Villosanges. I took three sets of fully-charged batteries, one of which was brand-new, and all charged up on different chargers, and I couldn’t get a shot. The batteries “depleted” while I was poised for action. I know that it was bad before but the voyage to Trappes and back seems to have made it worse.

So that’s that!

Mind you, it was perishing cold – minus 5 out there. With a howling wind and driving snow it was uncomfortable even watching the match. Heaven knows what it was like on the pitch playing. The game was difficult which was no surprise given the conditions, and ended up 1-1. The Chimps are a naggy, aggravating side as I have said elsewhere and the ref had his work cut out what with the players and a crowd (for it was a crowd, to be sure) whose passion quite often went beyond the bounds of what might be called “reasonable”. We had a “fight” between two players – and I use the word with inverted commas because had the two players have come up against a couple of British Brownies en route for a Sunday School outing my money would have been on the Brownies.

After that it was round to see Liz and Terry to discuss our radio programme next week. It’s keeping me busy, all of this.

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Saturday 6th March 2010 – Well, we’re back.

We had a football match tonight – the first since early February, and only the second since mid- December. Pionsat’s 3rd XI played Beauregard Vendon and were one man short, yet they scored five goals – and still finished on the losing side.

But back in December you remember that Gregory Richen turned out for the 3rd XI as he was unavailable for his habitual 1st XI game and scored 2 of their goals – well that seems to have started a fashion for Christophe Larue who also plays for the 1st XI in attack is unavailable tomorrow so he turned out for the 3rd XI this evening and scored all five goals.

All of this in thoroughly freezing conditions that are threatening snow. As if we haven’t had enough!

Also back is the Pentax – unrepaired and still struggling along. I’ll be happy though when someone round here pays me a pile of cash they owe me and I can think about a replacement.

I went shopping around Montlucon today and did the usual rounds. Some 12 volt LED bulbs at €3 each at Noz and a max-min thermometer at €4.99 from Vima were the highlights. Piles of gardening stuff including my seed potatoes (earlies and normals) and two blazing rows at Brico Depot – firstly when the girl in the building material section tried to sell me the wrong (and more expensive) plasterboard despite being told, and secondly when they refused to open the bulk purchases till so I had to struggle with an enormously-loaded trolley up a shopping aisle. Someone in the car park helped me get the wood on Caliburn’s roof rack to which I replied “it’s a good thing that the customers are more helpful than the staff!”

And then a freezing cold ( and I mean COLD) hour in the swimming baths only to find that the private shower was out of order. That put the tin hat on the day.

But I’m clearly moving in the wrong circles, much to my regret. As you know, at Noz I browse through the CDs and DVDs that they have on sale (I bought two twin-packs of Bela Lugosi films for 69 cents each pack today) and saw a CD entitled “Handel’s Organ Works”. Well, so does mine but no-one ever wrote a song about it!

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Friday 5th March 2010 – I had another good day today.

I’ve now finished clearing out the space where I’m going to put the two halves of the old Transit. I’ll move the drainpipe, drag them across there and then put the drainpipe back and extend it further down the hill..

That will free off a space of about 8 metres by 5 metres and that will be where the new vegetable garden will be.

You can tell how long I was working out there though as when I took the picture the light was going so that would make it about 18:45. That’s quite a departure from the norm – usually on Fridays I knock off early and have a good wash but I was on a roll so I kept on going. And I bet I’ll pay for that tomorrow, but at least it’s done now. A couple of days to dry everything out and I can start moving stuff around.

The weather has gone colder now. Last night it went down to minus 5.4 but today was a glorious perfect blue sunny day. I generated about 240 amp-hours of electricity, that’s just under 3KwH and a new record. I had the heater on up here for five hours.

And that’s got me thinking – a modern automatic washing machine uses about 0.9KwH for a full load on maximum wash. If I could rig up a way of having hot water to feed into the machine and running it on a standard wash I reckon I could do a load in about half of that. I’ll bring my washing machine back from Brussels and have a play with it. In the meantime I might ask someone to check the consumption of a washing machine on that kind of load.

Tomorrow is Saturday and as it’s the first of the month that means Montlucon, Brico Depot and a megashop. I’m going for all my gardening materials too. I’m going to have my work cut out for the next month or two.

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Thursday 4th March 2010 – I had quite a surprise this morning …

… despite the torrential rain all yesterday afternoon, evening and through the night, the garden fire was still smoking this morning. It wouldn’t restart though, but nevertheless it was quite something to see.

I’ve finally reached the hedge at the back of the vehicles – you’ve no idea how many brambles I’ve had to scythe my way through – and I’ve made a start on cutting down the overhanging branches (and there are plenty to go at).

I’ve also cut around the far side of the old Transit so that is now totally clear of undergrowth so once I’ve burnt all of the weeds and brambles and the like (that’s another fire for tomorrow) I can drag that out of the way.

So this afternoon I emptied the greenhouse and got ot ready for cleaning. I’ll be buying some seeding soil on Saturday to get ready for the sowing but I need to clean the plastic sheeting of the greenhouse and get it ready to move it to its new home. It’s all getting quite exciting.

I also had a play with the Ford Escort but I couldn’t get it started – I think that the fuel cut-off valve is stuck. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have mattered very much – I would have just pulled it out with Caliburn, dragged it down the lane and then rolled it backwards down the hill into its new position. I might have managed it on my own but it’s one of those things that’s unequivocal – once you have started you really need to finish it because you can’t leave it blocking the lane and at the point where it’s likely to become stuck there isn’t anything like a handy tree to attach the chain winch to help me along. It’s the kind of project that I’m going to leave until I have visitors.

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Wednesday 3rd March 2010 – I didn’t get as much done today …

… as I was planning to. First thing I did was to put the battery on charge for the Escort and while that was brewing away I carried on down in the field where my garden will be.

It was quite a reasonable day this morning and so I cracked on, and I managed to uncover the scrap Cortina and the W123 Merc. Of course, the Cortina will never go anywhere much under its own steam. It was built in 1980 and spent its entire working life on a salt mine and by the time it was scrapped in 1994 it was rotten in places that Cortinas don’t even have places. It was driven through the night from Middlewich to Brussels in 1995 and since then it’s been moved around Europe on a towing dolly or an A frame, finally coming to rest down my field in 2000.

Its purpose is the provide spare parts for XCL – the Cortina Mark V estate that was my pride and joy for many years and which is languishing in a lockup garage in Montaigut. XCL has many happy memories for me – that was the car in which I came over to Belgium from the UK in 1993 with all my worldy goods in the back and for a few years we drove for tens of thousands of trouble-free miles all over Europe.

The Merc on the other hand has another significant memory for me. I was stuck without a reliable car after the Senator and I parted company in 1997 and I had to go to the UK to pick up a caravan for down here (the one that I lived in and was trashed by rats). A lovely girl called Annette from Guyana or Trinidad or somewhere like that and worked in the Guyanan or Trinidad embassy in Brussels wanted to go to visit the UK for a while too on a kind-of conducted tour so a decent car was essential if I were to take her. So I mentioned to a friend that I was looking for something respectable and he produced the Merc. And I had a lovely week in the company of Annette all around the UK. She really was a lovely girl and I was quite upset when she was transferred back home to the Caribbean.

We had a torrential rainstorm this afternoon so I decided to take the towing dolly (which you can see in this photo with the Subaru that Ric and Julie gave me being towed by the old LDV back in 2001) round to Bill’s. He has an old car he needs to remove from off the public highway. I got round there and asked him when he planned to move the car, to which his response was “well we could do it now if you’re free“. No straps, no chains, no anything, but so what?

We winched the Rover on board and with nothing to hold it on I set off to turn round. First bump in the road the Rover bounced out of the wheel traps and the car’s towing eye wedged up against the dolly’s mounting bracket. So when we finally got everything into position where Bill wanted the Rover to be, I had to jack the car out of its position with a trolley jack, two axle stands and a huge pile of blocks of wood. And all the time it was teeming down with rain.

It was just like old times when I had my taxi business back in the 1980s, doing crazy things with old cars in torrential downpours. I was soaked to the skin and I took ages to dry out afterwards. I’m trying my best to get warm now before I go down with pleurisy or something.

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Tuesday 2nd March 2010 – Well, the Passat has a new home.

In fact I’ve moved it to where we cleared out yesterday. It’s not actually where it’s going to stay but we had a little operational difficulty about that – namely it will be parked right over where we had the fire yesterday – and that it still burning – or it was at 17:30 this afternoon.

Well done to the Passat though as it went everywhere under is own steam, the first time it’s seriously moved since 2003 as keen readers of these pages in one of its many former reincarnations will remember that it was when I was down here from Brussels with the Passat in 2003 that I was taken seriously ill, and Lieneke drove me back which meant that the Passat had to stay here.

So I charged up the battery on the solar panels in the barn but the battery wouldn’t hold its charge (no surprise there) so I had to jump it off Caliburn. None of the electrics were working either so I had to hotwire the heater plugs and after three rotations the engine fired up. Smoke everywhere, especially from the damp that was everywhere and having to dry out) but then again so would you if you had stood around for 7 years and someone put 13.4 volts through you.

The handbrake had seized so a simple rolling backwards and forwards freed that off, and then I set off down the lane, negotiating the elageur who had miraculously appeared in order to mow the banks. At this point the throttle cable snapped, so I wedged the throttle stop open with a piece of wood (to go faster, you just stick a thicker piece of wood in – all hi-tech this, you know) and I eventually got it into position.

Tomorrow I’ll be moving the Escort van and the Sankey trailer, and taking my towing dolly round to Bill’s. Once that is done I can sit back a little.

I’ve also been hacking my way through the undergrowth in the garden and as well as that I’ve been moving he rubble out of what will be the bedroom. I’m not short of work round here at the moment.

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Monday 1st March 2010 – Dydd Gwyl Dewi!

We celebrated St David’s Day by having a work-in here. Just Terry, Liz and Yours Truly but of course it’s quality that counts, not quantity.

As you know, I’m looking for a place to park the Escort and the Passat (and also the Sankey trailer) so that they can get access down to the fallen tree and the collapsed house. I have a patch of waste ground that has old trees, stones, rocks, brambles, thistles as well as rusty beer cans and hibernating lizards and so we set to clear it out so I can move everything down here.

This led to one of the biggest fires I’ve see down here (in fact it’s still burning even now) and the space is totally clear of rubbish and I can start moving the cars down there tomorrow. I was a little disappointed in Liz who refused to play the starring role in my production of “Joan of Arc” but there you are.

I’m ever so impressed with what we accomplished today.

I needed the heating on again tonight as the temperature has fallen again. But it’s the wood-burning stove doing the business right now. Liz has found someone who does the compressed blocks of wood and he’s given me a couple to try. I need to saw them in half though – they are too big to go through the hole in the stove.

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Sunday 28th February 2010 – Phew!

I didn’t wake up until past 11:00 this morning But that’s no surprise as I didn’t get to sleep until God knows what time. What kept me awake for most of the night was the hurricane we had. It started to blow round about 19:30 but by the time 01:00 came round it was howling away like a good’un. The crescendo was at probably 04:00 when there was everything howling around. You could hear the wood that I had neatly stacked up come crashing down and it was round about this time that the bathroom window was blown in.

What was surprising though was how warm it was. it was 12 degrees outside during all of this – a good 10 degrees warmer than usual. In fact when I woke up it was almost 14 degrees in here and it rose steadily during the day.

So first job after breakfast was to fix everything. But in reality there wasn’t all that much. The barn has lost a pile of slates but it will be going to lose all of them in early course – the same with the bathroom window which is going to be replaced. So the permanent damage is about nil. Mind you it wasn’t half impressive.

And most of today has been spent cleaning and tidying. It’s about time I did something like this. Nietzsche said something like “out of chaos comes order” but he clearly hasn’t ever been around anywhere that I have been.

I’ve had no heating today either – the first day of the year. And it’s still 13.4 degrees. Sumer is definitely acumen in. Lude sing cucu, what?

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EPIC HALL

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