Category Archives: Claude

Sunday 31st January 2010 – Absolutely shocking!

Yes! You may or may not believe this but I have had some electric heating on in the attic this afternoon.

This morning was the day I’ve been waiting since November to have – a real Alpine winter’s day with brilliant blue skies and a hard crispy frost. Despite not going to bed until 03:00 I was up and about at 09:30 with the sunlight streaming in through the windows. First job was to get on the roof and shovel the snow off the solar panels. And that’s a job I won’t be doing much longer as I’ve found a place that does 12-volt trace heating especially for this kind of thing. As you might expect, it’s nowhere near Europe and it isn’t in the USA either but in Canada. They are used to this kind of thing. 5 watts per foot and I need about 35 feet of it so that’s about 175 watts in total. 5 minutes of that will shift as much snow as you like and I’ll get my charge back in no time.

After breakfast it was round to Claude’s to do another van load but he reckoned that the roads are impassable and in any case just a quick glance at him told me that yesterday finished him off for good. He won’t be lifting another box of belongings and so he needs to think again. I’ve made a suggestion to him but it’s up to him if he accepts it. It’s still amazing though, with everything that he has done for everyone else in the past for everyone in Virlet and when he needs help they just totally ignore him.

So back home to find that the batteries in the house and in the barn are fully charged and it’s only lunchtime. Shame to waste the surplus solar energy so I dug up an old oil-filled 400-watt electric radiator and plugged it in – and had the pleasure of watching the temperature in the attic rise by 5 degrees while I caught up with more correspondence.

Yesterday in LIDL I bought one of those plug-in wattmeters for mains current – the type that you plug into a mains plug and you plug the appliance into it and it tells you how many watts and amps the appliance draws. They are of course much more versatile than that and I have lots of plans for it so I took it apart for a nosey. And as I thought, it’s an interated circuit with two wires in and two wires out. So I just cut the wires off the plug and socket bits and then I can hard-wire it into my circuit. It makes data recording much easier.

In other news, the UK is now officially out of recession. At long last – the last “major” western economy to do so. The value of the Pound Sterling is steadily rising in world stockmarkets too. Earlier this afternoon one Pound reached 2.3 Maldive Island Seashells and 1.9 Zimbabwean Bongo Beads.

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Saturday 30th January 2010 – I found today quite moving….

…in more than one sense of the word.

I woke up this morning and the first thing that needed to be done was to shovel snow. The blizzard that was down the south side of the Font Nanaud last night had made it over the crest of the range and had deposited three inches of snow chez nous.

And once I had cleared the snow away from off the solar panels and off Caliburn I went round to Claude’s. And this is where the moving came in. Dunno if you remember a few weeks back when I told you that someone had had some good news and I couldn’t say any more at the time but now I can and it’s that Claude has sold his house and he’s moving. His house is bigger than mine with a nicer plot of land and with a small extra house as well and he’s been slowly renovating it whenever funds have allowed. But last summer he had to have open-heart surgery and that has put paid to his plans for good. So he put his house up for sale and he sold it – and for the asking price too with no reduction. The only downside of that is that the purchasers wanted occupation as quickly as possible and so he hasn’t had time to find anywhere permanent. He’s come across an old empty apartment on top of an industrial premises in St Eloy and that’s where we’ve started to move him into.

Much as I’m pleased for his good fortune in selling his house at top price, I shall nevertheless miss him. He’s been a very good friend and neighbour and he’s helped me out loads of times, especially when I was taken ill down here in October 2003. That’s something I shan’t quickly forget.

We should have been footying tonight – the second half of the season getting under way after the winter break – but there was no chance of that. At about 16:00 it started to snow heavily again and we’ve had about 4 or 5 inches so far. It’s going to be more like ice hockey down the road in Pionsat if anyone bothered to turn up. But you can’t do anything in this weather except stay in. I’m supposed to be moving more stuff for Claude tomorrow but the weather is going to have a big say in the likelihood of that.

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Friday 29th January 2010 – Today was another day …

…when I didn’t do a lot. Sleeping through the alarms and waking up at 10:15 didn’t help for a start!

But then it was bright outside (well, whatever light was passing through the clouds) and nothing registering on the charge meters so first job was to shin up on the roof and clean off the solar panels. I can’t wait to get some trace heating wire up there so I can melt the snow rather than brushing it off.

And while I was up there Claude passed by. He wanted a good chat and he was here for ages so it was gone 12:00 before I could even begin to think about breakfast. But never mind – I started off again by doing some more weeding down the garden where my new vegetable plot will be. I couldn’t keep it up for long though because it was freezing outside – one of those damp biting colds that go right through you no matter what you are wearing.

After lunch I started on tidying out where I’m going to put this cupboard but Claude came back again to borrow the phone and for another chat, so I ended up doing not very much.

This evening I went round to Liz and Terry’s to take Liz to this meeting in St Priest. It was organised by the SMADC and the CREFAD, and there was someone from the BIRC (pronounced “BERK”) there, but no-one from the SPANC or the SMUT. It was to talk about tourist ideas and to discuss them with several practicioners and a few experts but like most of these meetings, everyone is there to promote his or her own venue. And of course, I’m no different than most of them. Networking is a vital part of community interaction.

But I’ll tell you something – if you were to program into a computer a list of all of the physical characteristics of my ideal woman and the girl (Katrine) who organised the meeting were to drop out of the slot at the bottom, I would not be disappointed in the least. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been struck in such a way. I probably won’t be able to sleep tonight now! I’m now wondering when CREFAD’s next meeting is!

On the way home there was a blinding blizzard of a snowstorm and I inched my way back at 25mph (40kph) – that is, until I crossed the Font Nanaud, the pass through the mountains about 5km south of Pionsat. Once I was over there the snow dramatically stopped and there wasn’t a drop to be seen. It was astonishing.

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Friday 22nd January 2010 – all the charging circuits shut down today.

batteries fully charged charging circuit shut down les guis virlet puy de dome franceWhat happens is that the solar (or wind) charge during the day gradually increases the charge in the battery from the overnight figure (about 12.4-12.5 volts is a good figure) up to about 14.1 volts if it’s a good day.

Once it’s at that figure it maintains the charge for a short while to give the batteries a chance to warm up inside and to shake loose any oxides that have accumulated, and then it goes into PWM mode, which is where it distributes the charge equally over all of the batteries and balances the incoming charge against the outgoing load.

When it’s happy with all of that it goes into FLOAT mode where the circuits close down until the charge in the battery drops to about 13.4 volts, and then it all starts up again and we repeat the cycle.

So today was the first day since October (I think) that we all went into FLOAT mode, even with the fridge running throughout the day. Three good days of solar charge has done wonders for my system.

This morning I was woken up by Antoine ringing me. Mind you, it was almost 10:00. I’d slept through all of the alarms again. I’ll have to do something about that. Then Antoine phoned me again, Claude came round for a chat, Liz phoned me twice and Francois phoned me once. I’m still in demand as you can see. I’ve never been so popular.

old ford transit hedge tree jungle garden les guis virlet puy de dome franceToday I made a start on the garden. I’m resiting my vegetable plot as you know and so I need to clear a place to move the old Ford Transit, the Merc and the British Salt Cortina because it’s under where they are currently that the vegetable garden will be. Back in 2002 all of this was cleared out but all these years of neglect has seen bushes, shrubs, brambles and trees grow right around everything. First job was to cut down a tree that was about 15 feet high and about 2 inches in diameter. That’s grown since 2002!

I could get at the back of the old Transit then and so I took off the towbar. I’m going to let Terry have it to fit on his new van. His is a 2005 model and rear wheel drive so it should fit okay and the tow bar is doing no good at all to anyone, rusting down a field. Older readers of my blog will remember the old Transit. I was on my way to a ferry at Caen to go to the UK for my OU science lab work when I had a puncture. You know that I prefer steel-belted radial tyres to textile belted ones. I’d been travelling at high-speed for hours and so the tyres were quite hot, and the blow-out occurred with such force that it blew the tread and the belting off the tyre. The steel belting spun round like a flail and ripped out the side of the van and the nearside wheel-arch and floor. Mind you, the van was 16 years old and it had seen much better days but it was still a mess and not fit to be driven on the highway after that.

But it’s going to be a lot of work to do this garden. I’ll have to start making the borders for my raised beds.

In other news, the UK is getting weirder and weirder. Some woman has been given a suspended prison sentence for breaching an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. And the Anti-Social Behaviour Order she has breached? Well, her moans and groans during lovemaking are too loud for her neighbours, and they played a tape of it in the courtroom. Personally, I cannot imagine anything so pathetic. I reckon that what it is is that the neighbours are just thoroughly jealous. I remember telling Nerina that it would be nice if she would moan while we were making love. And sure enough, half-way through the next performance she said “when are you going to paint this ceiling? It’s been like this for 5 years. And the walls need papering too …“

Mind you, I did once live next door to a couple whose lovemaking was exceptionally noisy. But never mind the ASBO – I always wanted to give them a round of applause when they finished. But you know how it is – you can’t clap with just one hand.

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Thursday 31st December 2009 – Fiat even more Lux!

12 volt LED light electrical circuit les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, the lighting is slowly progressing around the house now. Even with having light up and down the stairwell, it still meant that I needed a torch to move around the house as the living room was in darkness. But I remedied that this morning by using the other half of the light switch at the foot of the stairs and an old redundant light switch by the door into the kitchen, and I now have a light by the front door over the control panel and I can now happily move around torchless.

You might think that this light isn’t all that bright. But firstly, it’s plenty bright enough to move around with and secondly, it’s only 1.2 watts, believe it or not. Yes, these 12-volt LED lights from LIDL, at €4.49 a shot, they are definitely the way to go.

Don’t look too closely at the wiring by the way. Terry takes the mickey out of it even when I do what I consider to be a good job. But here, I ran out of wire and had to cobble together whatever I could find .

I also ran out of time. I did in fact allow myself plenty of time but Claude came round. He’s got a puncture on his old Clio and was wondering if I had a spare 155×13 tyre. I have a couple but they are for the diesel Escort and I’m not going to part with them so I offered to run him into town or to a scrapyard to pick something up. But no, did I have anything? In the end I found 2 165×13 tyres on Volkswagen wheels that belonged to the Passat before I had a lucky find with those 175/70×14 Golf wheels and tyres. So they are the wrong size and on different wheels and they have been hanging around outside for 7 years in all kinds of weather. But they are free so he’s taken them and will change them himself onto the Renault wheels with a crowbar.

Now I did some crazy things with cars and the like in my youth but I drew the line with tyres long before this particular point was ever reached. Second-hand tyres of good quality from a scrapyard is fair game but perishing (in both senses of the word) Uniroyal and Courier remould tyres – well, it’s a problem in the making, this is. And I’m not quite sure how a crowbar will affect the rims of the wheels, especially when you need to rely on the integrity of the rims to keep an airtight seal with tubeless tyres.

This afternoon I fitted one of the offcuts from the verandah roof over where the plant-pot beichstuhl is. There’s no roof over where I’ve fitted it although the scaffolding planks on the scaffolding overhead so protect it somewhat. But with a driving wind causing everything to swirl about, I had a good soaking while I was riding the porcelain (or in this case, aluminium) horse this afternoon. Time for action!

In between all of this, I did a load of washing. After last night’s brilliant and clear skies the sky forgot to cloud over this morning and for a couple of hours we had a brilliantly clear sky. I seized the opportunity to do a load of washing but the clouds caught up before I had finished and now everything is receiving a final rinse from Mother Nature out on the washing line. And more rain is forecast.

I nipped round to Claude’s this evening to give him and Francoise a bottle of champagne for New Year, seeing as I forgot to give it to them on Christmas Eve. Beethoven is ill and they are going to have to take him to the vet’s. He’s 16 and in reasonable health and has bags of character. I’m not into dogs but in his case I could make an exception. I hope he’s going to be ok.

And that was that. I had a nice tea with some roast potatoes, and now I’m going to do nothing except listen to the torrential rain beating down on the roof.

Happy New Year to you all. And I wish for you for 2010 everything that you wished on everyone else for 2009.

-6

Tuesday 29th December 2009 – Errr … yes …. quite!

12 volt LED light circuit hall les guis virlet puy de dome franceSo I finished the lighting in the stairwell this morning as you can see. There’s a 12-volt LED light now illuminating where the entrance hall is going to be.

. Once that was done I looked at the list of other small jobs to do. One of them was to fit a piece of insulation over the top of the battery box and seeing as that golden thingy was up in the sky I reckoned that this was a good time to do it.

So I removed all of the rubbish from off the top of the wooden lid, cleaned everything out, and while I was about it I checked the batteries – I haven’t done that for a while.

melted battery les guis virlet puy de dome franceThere are 10 batteries in the box – they are all Hawker 92-amphour sealed gel batteries. 9 of them were all nice and cool and simmering away nicely. The tenth was boiling hot and it you look closely you will see where the case has swollen up. This is pretty serious stuff. It’s the first battery in the bank and it’s quite clear from looking at this that the business of handling 250 amps of current per day during the summer has proved to be too much. It’s boiled, the plates have swollen and made a short circuit inside. The short circuit has created resistance to the charge and that resistance is being dissipated into heat and hence the battery is warm and why the charge in the rest of the batteries is down.

Just at that moment a friendly grey cloud blew over the sun and cut off the solar energy so I did a swift disconnection, removed the battery and subsituted another one. And straight away the battery voltage went up 0.4 of a volt.

I’ve rerouted the cables so the positive lead goes into one battery and the negative lead goes into another and that will help to circulate the current a little better but I think that I’m going to have to reconsider my configuration. I can generate a theoretical maximum of about 75 amps but a more practical expectation is about 50 amps. 50 amps seems to be too much for one battery so I’m planning on reverting to the original idea of having two banks of batteries with each of the two banks of solar panels charging up its own bank of batteries. The bus bar, that connects everything together, instead of being between the control panel and the batteries, will have to be sited after the batteries. That will involve more cable, with a greater potential for voltage drop, but unless I can think of another way then that will have to do.

After lunch I made a start on the jungle but I wasn’t there for long. Claude came round for my assistance with his trailer wiring that he coulsn’t get to work. So the rest of the afternoon was spent rewiring his trailer.

And in other news, here is the reason for the latest attempt at airline piracy. One western country wants to remove another civil liberty from its citizens so it needs to create a panic in order to scare them sufficiently so that they will fall for it hook line and sinker. I’m not quite sure what kind of pervert it is that wants to spend all day looking at naked bodies but if this is going to become law I’m going to insist that the people operating the scanners are completely starkers so we can get our own back by looking at them in the buff.

Of course the way to respond, if this ever happens, is to whip up a scandal of our own by accusing all of the airport staff of being pedophiles anxious to have a sneaky look and the naked body of some unsuspecting minor. That should whip up quite a storm, and quite right too.

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Friday 18th December 2009 – I wondered why it was dark this morning …

snow december 2009 les guis virlet puy de dome france… when the alarm woke me up. The skylights in the roof had about 3cms of snow all over them.

And so after breakfast I went for a wander around and a bit of a photography session. You can see how much snow fell during the night, and it was still chucking it down as I was a-wandering.

After my little perambulation I rang up Liz and spoke to her about the proposed group meal. We had a good chat for half an hour or so. They had had the snowplough down their lane at 10:00 and by 11:00 it had all snowed over again.

heavy snow 2009 les guis virlet puy de domeI was having charging issues in this weather so I shinned out of the side window with the yard brush up onto the roof and brushed the snow off the solar panels where I could reach. That generated something and I had to do it a couple of times during the day. I’m going to have to work out a remote way of doing that in due course. Heated trace wire seems to be one possibility.

I went to brush the snow off the panels that are on the roof of the Luton Transit and which power the barn but I couldn’t find the ladder – half of the old wooden green one. it was there last winter and I do remember lying it down but it seems to have disappeared. I wonder if I lent it to someone. I had to improvise a ladder to get up there and brush things down.

caliburn heavy snow 2009 les guis virlet puy de dome franceI started to fit the turn-round step in the Stairway to Heaven but I’ve hit upon a major design fault. Not that this is any surprise – I was wondering how it was that I have managed to avoid that fate so far. I haven’t allowed for the height of the extra beam that I fitted. It’s not a major issue and I can work round it by having several angled turn-round steps in the corner that will drop me nicely underneath it. It just means that I could have better-managed my staircase. Ahh well.

And at 14:00 precisely that strange golden thing appeared again – and loitered around for about 10 minutes before it started snowing again.

This afternoon Bill rang me up and invited me to his house for Boxing Day. He’ll be having some friends round. That was nice of him. He was telling me about the over-60s dinner that his village organised and to which he was invited. He said that never mind the hairdos, most of the women had had a good shave. It wasn’t the “blue-rinse brigade” that I used to deal with when I worked at Shearings but the “blue chin brigade”. I blame it on all of the hormones that they pump into the cattle round here.

Claude came round for a chat too and he was here a while. We heard the snow-plough arrive and dashed out just in time to see it disappearing back up the lane. It had managed to get within 50 yards of me before it pliddled off, leaving me still snowed-in. But then again it’s much closer than he got last year when I was left snowed-in for four days.

But all of that explains why I haven’t done too much today. I cut another vertical and cut a couple of lets into the beams to take it. And much to my surprise it fitted absolutely perfectly and went into tension without even being screwed in. Now I call that an achievement! If it goes light tomorrow I’ll screw it in. It will be nice to see what I am doing.

Meanwhile, it’s now 28 days since we had a day without any kind of precipitation at all. Today was enough snow for the equivalent of 5cms of rain. And apart from that one morning last week it’s now been 22 days since I’ve had a decent amount of solar energy and 6 days since we had any temperature above freezing point. It’s starting to get on my nerves.

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Thursday 17th December 2009 – "In the bleak midwinter frosty winds made moan ….

severe winter 2009 les guis virlet puy de dome france…. earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone”
You know, I had no idea that Christina Rossetti lived here in the Combrailles. Last night the temperature outside dropped to -7.1 and in the heat exchanger it plummeted to -10. Consequently in order to get through the ice in my water butts so that I could have some water, I went in search of the pickaxe.

Now that a wind has sprung up blowing the snow everywhere the temperature has warmed up to a balmy -1.5. It might even struggle up above freezing point tomorrow if we are lucky – the first time since Sunday afternoon.

This morning I actually managed to hear the alarm and so I was up and about comparatively early. I went straight into St Eloy to purchase my Christmas present at LIDL and luckily they still had some in stock. Of course I can’t tell you what it is as I don’t open my presents until Christmas morning. On my way to St Eloy that weird golden thing put in an appearance for 10 or 15 minutes and then it was back to the snow again.

From there I went round to Pionsat to speak to the new owners of the “Queue de Milan” where our group meets on the first Monday of every month. It turns out that the previous owners had forgotten to mention us to him.
“Do you eat here then?” he asked
so I explained to him about our group and how, as it happens, he might be able to do something for us for our Christmas meal.
The conversation then turned to other matters and one of the subjects we discussed was the football and how they were discouraged by the previous owners. With the ground being right next to the hotel I reckoned he should do his best to talk to them.
“Will they eat here after the match then?”
Ahhhhh – right. Not a hotelier, not a bar keeper, just a restauranteur.
Pionsat is a typical small Auvergnat town of maybe 1200 people if it’s lucky. It’s true that there’s no other restaurant for a good few miles but then again the place is hardly heaving with people. A place like the “Queue de Milan” should be the focal point of the area with its hotel, its bar, its little salle de fetes and, yes, its restaurant. It should be all of those things. The previous owners tried to run it as just a restaurant, closing down the bar as the football ground turfed out and things like that, but that of course went tits-up. So if the new owners are trying to follow the pattern then it will end in its own logical conclusion.

Which of course reminds me – the “Queue de Milan” being the hotel-restaurant for the area. Many people are now getting into the detailed planning for Christmas and looking for places to eat out over the festive season. Many ex-pats such as myself live in deplorable circumstances in the middle of house renovations and the like. This is the time that family and friends like to be together and if you don’t have the facilities to lodge your guests you stick ’em up in the local hotel.

So it’s no surprise to anyone for me to tell you that the “Queue de Milan” is closing down tomorrow and reopening on the 4th January once the festive season has ended. And they complain that the business isn’t paying. It beggars belief.

After that I went round to Claude’s. He’s finished with my acrows (he’s only had them for 8 years) and he’s also found the rotavator attachment for my brushcutter, the three-wheeled lawnmower and a few other things. So Caliburn and I went round to pick them up. And what a surprise! He’s been tidying up and found in the pigsty his reserve stock of metal window shutters. They are now surplus to requirements and so he heaved them into the back of Caliburn. That was really nice of him!

So having got the morning out of the way this afternoon I fitted the vertical that I was trying to fit in the dark yesterday – it’s amazing just how easy everything is in the daylight when you can see what you are doing. I followed that by cutting and shaping another vertical which I then installed. And that then split up the vertical length by a good foot. Luckily it’s split outward from the joint so that the weight is still being taken by the unsplit part. I drilled and screwed it to keep it together but I’m fed up of this awful crappy wood from Brico Depot. This is the second one that’s split on me. Someone ought to take the quality control manager outside and shoot him.

Tomorrow I’ll be cutting and fitting the three last beams and once they are in position I can do the remainder of the stairs. I also have some floor to fix as well – I narrowed the stairwells as you might remember so the part between the old beam and the new beam needs to be floored over. That has to be done before I fit the second half of the stairs.

And I also have to go to Glastonbury in the very near future. Someone had seriously annoyed me and they and their entourage are going to be on the receiving end of a really good kicking.

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Monday 14th December – It’s gone flaming cold now

Yes, outside it is minus 4 and I shudder to think what it might have been if we didn’t have this thick cloud cover. Yes, another thick cloudy day which means that I’ve had no solar charge yet again. I wonder when the sun is going to come out. According to the weather forecast banner on my website we are promised a clear sunny day tomorrow but knowing the weather and the weather forecasting around here I’ll believe that when I see it. It also promises me minus 9 as well tomorrow and I’ll believe that – one day last January we had minus 15.

This morning I wasn’t in a hurry to wake up but once I was up and about I discovered that all of my water has frozen up. That’s the trouble with storing the rainwater above ground. It was a bit icy yesterday and I was going to defrost it after the football and fill all of the kettles but with the match being delayed it was too late when I got home. Luckily I have a couple of litres that I’ve filtered and that will keep me going.

And so I started cutting the lets on two more pillars but Claude came round for a natter instead. And then it was round to Liz and Terry’s to give them a hand followed by the Anglo French group in St Gervais. When I got back home, it was just 4.5 degrees up here in my room. But it’s amazing just how quickly the place warms up with a bit of heat.

And I’ll be going to bed soon. Terry is on his travels tomorrow morning and I have an old stone sink to give him. While he’s here he’s going to help me lift some plasterboard upstairs to the first floor and carry my gas bottle round to the side of the house. He reckons it’s going to be an early start. I don’t much like the sound of that.

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Friday 4th December 2009 – If you look closely at this pic …

bedroom stud wall les guis virlet puy de dome france…you will see not only the wall painted white (that I did last night) but a new vertical that I’ve fitted – where I’ve uprooted some of the floor.

Well, it isn’t exactly fitted but merely stuck in position for now.

This morning I did some tidying up and so on and had a look at the batteries in the barn. One of them is going a bit duff and although I haven’t identified which one it is yet, I’ve identified the bank that it’s in and isolated that.

I’ve also been playing “hunt the tools” and collected up a few that were hanging around.

Claude came for a chat too and was here for about an hour. As you know, he had his open heart surgery back in the summer and since then he’s been told that he needs to walk 4 miles each day. For the last couple of days he’s been in hospital having a check-up so I asked him if that was his 5000 mile service.

This afternoon I cut the lets into the new beam and then had a look at where I’ll be putting the bedroom wall. That’s important as the lower half of the “U” shape of the stairs to the attic will be fastened to the verticals that will support the new bedroom wall. So I measured up where the central pillar will be – the one that the bedroom and bathroom doors will pivot around, and that’s the one that you can see in the image. The bathroom door will be between the two new verticals and the bedroom door will be to the left of the newest vertical.

In other news, I wanted to mention something about catchy soundbites and cliches. They are quite good when used in unexpected and novel ways but quite often they become hackneyed and banal. In other cases they are used totally out of place and when they do, they become ridiculous. Just like the one used yesterday by Baroness Ashton, the EU’s new Foreign Affairs spokesman (that’s all she is – a spokesman. She won’t have any influence at all on policy).

There was a kamikaze attack on a gathering of students in Somalia and she described it as “a cowardly attack against civilians“. Now I don’t know about anyone else reading this blog, but I wouldn’t call a kamikaze attack “cowardly”. I certainly haven’t the courage to do it, and I doubt if Baroness Ashton has either. If she would volunteer to undertake one I would gladly withdraw my accusation, but in the absence of such an announcement, the only word that I can use to describe her statement is “pathetic”. If this is the best spokesman that the EU can come up with and if this is the finest example of her speeches, then I cringe for the future of the EU. How can anyone take seriously an organisation that employs someone to make such stupid statements?

I suppose she thinks that it’s really brave of someone to sit in a bunker 5000 miles away from the action and presses a button to launch a rocket that kills civilians, or flies at an altitude of 50,000 feet and presses a button that drops a bomb that kills civilians?

But on this subject I want to draw your attention to a paragraph from a book that I have recently been reading. It concerns a man who undertook to wear a greatcoat loaded with explosives and detonate it – and himself – in the middle of a meeting. The author describes him as a man of “high courage and self sacrifice”. Definitely not cowardly at all.

So who was the author and what was the book? Well, the author was, would you believe, a westerner. Now isn’t that a surprise? He is Anthony Cave Brown, a journalist and historian. And in his book Bodyguard of Lies he is actually describing an attempted suicide attack on Hitler.

So there you have it – a westerner attempting to kill someone we don’t like – “high courage and self-sacrifice” but someone with a brown skin killing people about whom we neither know nor care – “cowardly”

I don’t know if you remember the episode “General Hospital” in Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett talks about the leak of information from the hospital
“One of our spies (brave heroic fellow!) says that one of their spies (filthy rotten bounder!) ….“
and we all laughed at that because it was funny. But here we are 20 years later and it’s all becoming true to life. As I have said before and I’ll probably say again, the blatant hypocrisy of the western world is totally staggering. No wonder no-one in the vast majority of the world (the 80-odd percent who aren’t westerners) can’t take seriously anything that we do and doesn’t believe a word that we say.

And for Baroness Ashton as EU Foreign Affairs spokesman opening her account by saying something so stupid and ridiculous, and also so hypocritical, I really do despair for the future of the west. We don’t stand a chance.

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Tuesday 24th November 2009 – I lit a fire in my brassiere this evening.

home made brazier fireI started off by putting samples of all of the construction material that I had been using in the attic. And I’ll tell you – the effect is frightening. The plasterboard took the longest to burn but eventually it did. Everything else was gone in minutes.

No wonder there are so many conflagrations in domestic property. There won’t be much left of my place if it sets alight.

But the tidying up is progressing, and it’s looking quite impressive downstairs. Another day or so and it’ll be done. The pallets that formed the old floor in the attic, they will have to be chucked out of the window but I can’t move the broken slates yet. They are destined to be used for the footpaths between the raised beds in the new vegetable garden once make a start on that later this winter.

And once the tidying up is completed it will immediately become untidy again as I demolish the wall between the bedroom and the stairway. All the rubble will be used for making the steps outside up into the house.

Claude came round today for a chat and bought me some news. Someone has had a really good stroke of luck – an exceptional one in fact. It’s bad news for me as it happens but I suppose that if I stopped being selfish and looked at it from other people’s points of view I should really be pleased at their exceptional fortune.

I can’t say any more about it right now as there needs to be something of a proper announcement at the right time by the right people in the right places.

In other news, the public enquiry into the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil has got under way. Many people wonder why I call it that, but don’t take my word for it – take that of Australia’s Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

But back to the plot. I was particularly impressed with the phrase “that Saddam had a “continuing intention” to acquire weapons of mass destruction, having used them in the past”. We all know by now that Saddam Hussein had Bacillus Anthracis, Clostridium Botulinum, Clostridium Perfringens, E coli, Histoplasma Capsulatum and Brucella Melitensis, and that he used them on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war. And how do we know this? Because the USA sold them to him and then gave him the satellite photos of Iranian troop movements so that he knew where to aim the chemical weapons.

The other bit that drew my specific attention was that “the sanctions policy in place against Iraq since 1991 …was steadily breaking down”. Here’s one reason why it was breaking down. And here’s another one. And there are plenty more where those came from. No wonder the wheels fell off the sanctions policy when Western companies put greed before ethics and legality.

Another Western company implicated in the breach of sanctions was Matrix-Churchill. They were one of the companies, by the way, that were named and shamed by Michael Moore as having supplied chemical weapons to Iraq. And would their “breach of sanctions” have anything to do with Saddam’s “continuing intention to acquire weapons of mass destruction”? During the company’s trial in a British court for its alleged breach of sanctions, the directors of the company claimed that their breaches of sanctions had been guided by the British Intelligence (there’s an oxymoron) Services and the British Ministry of Defence.

This startling revelation so clearly shocked the Court that the British Minister for Trade, Alan Clark was summoned to give evidence and under oath he was obliged to admit that he had been “economical with the truth” in an earlier statement denying all knowledge of the affair. Of course, the trial collapsed and the directors were awarded compensation.

This entire Iraq affair stinks to high heaven.

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Thursday 29th October 2009 – I’ve been poncing today…

.. and I’ve got most of the walls pretty smooth but there’s still a little bit to do where I had to do some patching.

Once I’d done the patching though I started to sweep out the room and almost dropped a ton of rubbish and dust onto the top of Claude’s head – he’d popped round to inspect the work. We had a long natter about this and that – he’s got to go back to hospital in a few weeks time for a check-up. What with all of the walking that he does these days I told him it was his 6000-mile service.

This afternoon I had a really weird phone call. It was from some woman – I forget her name, not that it meant anything to me as I don’t know her anyway – who lives in Les Coursieres, a hamlet about 2km away from here. Apparently she is buying some furniture from Germany mail-order and they have asked her for her e-mail address. She doesn’t have one so she wants to know if she can have mine to give them!!!! I dunno why it is but my fame seems to be spreading around here just now.

Once I disposed of that I started on the wallpapering. I’ve done about a third of it and tomorrow morning, after finishing the poncing, I’ll do the rest. But it’s looking much more like a home now.

In other news, on Tuesday Terry and I were discussing football and how all of the fun seems to have gone out of it. We said that even the hurling of abuse at opposition footballers seems to have gone out of the window and that there would soon be nothing left to go to the matches for. Of course, what with truth being stranger than fiction, no sooner do we discuss it than there is a news article about it. Football as an interactive spectator sport is dying, more’s the pity. All I can say is that I will stand in the centre of any football stadium you care to name for 90 minutes every Saturday and let 50,000 football fans say whatever they like about me and my family, for just a quarter of the money that Craig Bellamy gets, the big wimp.

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Tuesday 15th September 2009 – IF YOU COMPARE THIS PIC …

attic wall plasterboard les guis virlet puy de dome france… to the pic of yesterday you will notice a change. In fact I’ve started to add the plasterboard to the walls.

First thing in the morning I finished off the battens and then set up a workstation outside with everything I need to measure and cut the plasterboard. I’ve been cutting it into manageable sizes and so although it looks like a patchwork quilt I can’t see any other way of getting it into the attic by way of the ladder that I’m using.

plasterboard attic wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceTerry recommended glueing the plasterboard to the battens but it was a hell of a job getting the polystyrene to stick. It wasn’t possible to put the pressure on at the right places and it kept on springing off. I held it on with some speed clamps but that didn’t work and so I tacked them on with nails – and then I thought “badger this for a game of soldiers. If I’m using nails I may as well nail the boards to the battens and forget about the glue”.

It’s not very pretty but I’m going to have to use filler anyway in the joints so mixing more filler to fill the nail heads is neither here nor there. It’s still going to be quicker than waiting for the glue to dry on each individual panel.

Claude poked his head in and had a look – and he’s quite impressed. The last time he was here we hadn’t finished the roof tiling. That was a month ago and doesn’t that seem like a long time ago? We had sun in those days – not like today. I had to put a jumper on as the temperature has now plummeted. In a valiant attempt not to light the heating, I now have a fleece jacket on as well. The first frost of the autumn can’t be far away.

In other news, at the Anglo-French group yesterday I was working with Antoine Ged. He’s the former postmaster (now retired) and his English is surprisingly good. He lent me a book to read – entitled Managing in Turbulent Times. This is another one of the Alvin Tofler – The Third Wave kind of books that were written 30 years ago forecasting how the world would look at the turn of the 21st Century. And while many predictions were totally wide of the mark, many others were surprisingly, if not astonishingly accurate.

In one chapter on the subversion of democracies, Drucker (the author of “Turbulent Times”) writes
“such a process (of subverting democracy) is doubly important …in which small, single-minded, often paranoid groups have attained a power out of all proportion to their actual size”
Now I bet you any money that many people are waiting for me to make a nasty and cheap crack about an organisation that many of us know and love. But not a bit of it. May I draw your attention to the key word in the quote from Drucker – a word that has as its middle two letters “NG” and not “MP” and so it can’t possibly apply.

But of course the Open University Students’ Association Executive Committee does in fact speak with a single mind (except when the OUSA President crawls out of her sick bed at the Annual Conference to oppose a motion in respect of which the rest of the Executive Committee is speaking in favour – but more of this anon) but that single (“do you mean “simple?” – ed) mind does not belong to any of the elected members of the committee.

No more graphic example of this that the one that was reported to me by one of my moles on various committees – taking a well-earned break from all kinds of activities at the last Annual Conference – who happened to be present when the much-maligned Turdi de Hatred very generously invited the members of the retiring Executive Committee to dinner at the University canteen.
The waitress approached the table at which Turdi and the members of the committee were sitting and asked
“is madam ready to order?”
“I’ll have the steak!” announced Turdi
“And the vegetables?”
“They’ll have the steak too!”

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Monday 14th September 2009 – I’VE DONE MOST …

attic space blanket wall insulation counter battens les guis virlet puy de dome france… of the counter-battens today.

That is, the end wall, two thirds of a side wall and half of the other side wall. I just have to finish up that wall to two-thirds of its length, which will take me about half an hour tomorrow, and then I’m going to have a go with the plaster board.

The reason why I’m only doing two thirds of the sides and one end wall is that that is all the flooring that I’ve laid so far. I can’t do the rest until I build up the roof of the bathroom and the wall around the staircase and while it makes good sense to do it all at once, the fact is that I have 13 sheets of plasterboard (about two-thirds of what I need) outside at the mercy of the weather (fancy it not being able to fit inside Caliburn) so it needs to be utilised pretty quickly.

I’m starting with the easy bits – the vertical part of the side walls – to give me confidence in handling it. I’ll do the complicated bits when I develop a technique.

As I was driving down the lane on my way to St Gervais for the Anglo-French group, I bumped (not literally) into Claude. He’s been in hospital having open heart surgery and he wasn’t discharged, he was expelled. He’s leaner and fitter than he ever was and looks so much better. I was quite relieved when I heard that the surgery had been a success.

And in other news, autumn has arrived. It’s currently 17 degrees in my little room and that’s with the light and the computer on and with me in the room. That’s the lowest it’s been for ages. I’ll be having the heating on in here before much longer.

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Tuesday 28th July 2009 – AT FIRST GLANCE ….

aspire recycled plastic roofing slates les guis virlet puy de dome france … this photo doesn’t look any different from that of yesterday. However, if you look closely you can see that we have put some slates on the roof.

10 rows in fact.

As soon as Terry came round we cracked on with it but as the day wore on we came across a problem of a different and most unexpected kind.


It was a blinding hot summer’s day and the heat was intense. And here we were, handling black slates made from recycled plastic whilst leaning on a black rubberised sheet of damp-proof membrane. By early afternoon Terry had resorted to gloves to handle the slates and I, leaning on top of the damp-proof membrane, had resorted to building a ladder-bridge to keep my body off the roasting surface. You can see the ladder on the left of the roof.

Clearly we couldn’t continue like that and by 16:00 we were obliged to call it a day.Terry plans to be round earlier tomorrow and we can bash on with the slating before it gets too hot and hopefully we can fit the base of the framework for the solar panels. It will be nice to have electricity in here again. But first I have to invent some kind of gauge to measure angles from the horizontal.

After Terry left I had resolved to paint the underside of the plywood but as it was so hot and promises to be so tomorrow I did a load of washing instead. And with constant interruptions for an endless series of phone calls and visits from Claude and Tijas I didn’t manage to get anything else done.

It just leaves me more to do tomorrow, I suppose.

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