Category Archives: Marianne Contet

Tuesday 12th February 2013 – I was dead right …

… about the weather.

This morning was horribly grey and overcast with a hanging cloud. And it didn’t get any better than that either. Talking to Terry a few hours later, he said that it was snowing round by his place, and sure enough in the late afternoon it started chucking it down here too.

With regard to Bill’s affairs, it was too cold to go round there and so we stayed at Marianne’s and went through a huge pile of paperwork and did the accounts to date. After that I went with Pascal round to Bill’s and we moved some more furniture out.

This afternoon was yet another afternoon without working in the bathroom and this is becoming a tale of lost opportunities. Terry wanted to go to Brico Depot and wanted me to go with him. It was only fair and I’m not complaining as after all, a huge pile of stuff was for me but none of this is getting my bathroom done and for the last few weeks I’ve been continually sidetracked by one thing or another and it’s beginning to get on my nerves. What made it worse was that I was building up a list of things that I needed to buy next time I was there, and it went clean out of my head.

This evening I was at St Maurice. There’s a series of walks around France taking place every weekend and in 2 months time they will be walking around there, so they had a meeting of potential volunteers. I went along to find out what was happening.

Back here, it was oven chips and baked beans for tea, and now I’m off to bed. Tomorrow we’ll have more hanging clouds and snowstorms. And who is going to come along tomorrow to put me off working in the blasted bathroom?

-3

Monday 24th December 2012 – Merry Christmas everyone

I hope that Santa brings you everything that you deserve this morning.

As for me today though, I’ve had the best fire here this evening that I have ever had, and I’m so delighted. After the usual breakfast and bits and pieces I dismantled the stove pipes. I’ve ruined about three brushes and all kinds of things, but it was necessary as the pipes were totally choked with ash and tar and all kinds of stuff. Hardly an air passage in sight, no wonder that the fire wouldn’t draw.

Anyway, the pipes are now thoroughly cleaned, jointed and reinstalled exactly as they should be, and the fire this evening burnt beautifully, even demolishing a large log on the lowest air setting. Even more exciting was the fact that the glass in the window remained mostly clear with hardly a trace of soot. That’s a first.

Apart from that, I wrapped up the presents and toddled off to Marianne’s to deposit hers. We had quite a chat too for a couple of hours, and that was quite pleasant.

So that’s it. Tomorrow I’m supposed to be having a day off but that’s unlikely as, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be having visitors and so I’ll need to cook. That will be exciting.

Anyway, Merry Christmas to you all.

-3

Thursday 13th December 2012 – I wish I could remember …

… who it was who rang me at 17:00 today. I would give them a big round of applause. For at 17:00 I should have been at Marianne’s helping her move a bed, but instead I was totally flat out – crashed out on the sofa. I do remember having the most vague and incomprehensible discussion with someone while I was trying my very best to wake up. I wonder what the other party must have made of it.

This morning I had the usual couple of hours on the radio programme that I’m trying to write, and then I went out to empty Caliburn seeing as I had this bed to move. But tidying up isn’t my strongpoint as you know and it didn’t quite work out how it should have done. I ended up leaving the false floor in the van and putting a pile of stuff underneath it.

Pascal, Marianne’s son, and I dropped off a few things around Pionsat and then went to the Chateau to pick up this bed. We were also treated to some exciting news – while the Water Board was digging in the chateau yard to lay a new water pipe, part of the yard collapsed and some of their equipment fell into a long-lost subterranean crypt of some description. Of course, Marianne is in her element, or she would be if she were feeling better, because she’s been ill too.

While I was there, I told her the news about Bill, and seeing as how she knows her way around French administration and isn’t easily cowed, I set her a task to prove that she is worthy – namely, to make the necessary enquiries.

A brief stop at the Intermarché came next. While I was emptying Caliburn, the black cat came around again. Once more, it let me stroke it and pick it up. Clearly starving, the poor thing, and so I bought a box of Munchies and next time I see it I shall give it a handful. That’s me well and truly hooked, isn’t it?

We had our little social night this evening too, and having made a lucky find in a Charity Shop in Stockton Heath when I was in the UK, I taught a group of French citizens how to play Snakes and Ladders.

Yes French people playing Snakes and Ladders. There’s nothing like a bit of globalisation, is there? Whatever next? Cricket, maybe.

Saturday 17th November 2012 – AFTER AN EARLY …

… early start this morning, I dashed off a complete Radio Anglais programme – the rock music programme for January.

I can do things like that at one sitting when I’m in the mood and I wish I were in the mood more often. When I’m feeling like that I can move the world and that’s a phenomenon that I would like to maintain.

I had a quick whizz around the shops at St Eloy-les-Mines where I bought nothing of any importance, and then round to Marianne’s for a chat and a coffee. She gave me a couple of prezzies too, which was nice.

This evening it was out to Marcillat-en Combraille for the football.

This match tonight could best be described as a “warming” match – very entertaining, and all for the wrong reasons too, with AS Marcillat winning 2-1 in the end.

Tomorrow I’m having a lie-in, I hope and then I have more work to do. I can’t even arrange to have a day off these days.

Ohh how times have changed 🙁

-4

Sunday 23rd September 2013 – AFTER THE DEBACLE …

… that was yesterday, and being still awake at 05:30, it’s no surprise whatever that I had something of a late start this morning.

And the … errr …. 11:30 start meant that the day was over before it had really begun.

I had to be at Marianne’s at 13:00 to set up the stage for this show that started at 16:00. so there was no time to do anything else.

Setting up of the equipment didn’t take all that long and after the sound check we settled back to listen the music.

We were being treated to a concert of Haydn’s Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze – “The_Seven_Last_Words_of_Christ” – with three violins and a ‘cello.

As you know, it’s not my type of music but even I can recognise quality when I hear it.

I would rather have a different kind of music as you know, but as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … around here, you have to take whatever entertainment that is offered, wherever, and whenever you can find it.

The musicians were extremely professional and very well-rehearsed. They certainly gave the music a good haydn. The packed crowd in the church certainly appreciated the performance too.

It all made for an extremely enjoyable afternoon, I have to say

With having set up the sound quite quickly, it gave me a god opportunity to have a look around the church.

Of course I’ve been here before, but I’ve never had much of an opportunity to go for a good prowl around.

And I’m glad that I did, because for a modern church (built in 1888 which is new for around here), it is surprisingly interesting and there’s a lot to see.

The thing that you’ll notice about this church is that it is not aligned in the more-traditional east-west direction. And there’s a reason for this.

This isn’t the original site of the church – that can be found across the square near where the steps down to the old market place are.

The church that was there was disaffected, like all churches were, during the French Revolution. It was used as a store for saltpetre.

Saltpetre is however extremely corrosive and during a survey of the structural stability of the church some years later, they discovered that the saltpetre had eaten away all of the structure of the church and it was totally unsafe.

Not only had the church to be demolished immediately, they couldn’t rebuilt on the same site. The site where the church might be found today was the only empty plot of land in the centre of the town, and so they had to build the church around the plot, not the other way around.

Even more interesting was the fact that it was the feast of St Bravy

He was an abbott on the 8th Century and is the patron saint of the church. And with it being his feast day, his skull, one of the relics of the church, was actually on display for all to see.

This led to one of these fascinating conversations that only ever happen once in a lifetime
Marianne – “it’s a very small skull, don’t you think?”
Our hero – “it’s probably the skull of St Bravy when he was a small child”.

Radio rehearsing came next with Liz, and a lovely stuffed courgette meal later, back here to carry on working.

Printing out the notes for tomorrow produced nothing at all and as I’m too tired right now to do anything about it, I changed the font colour to blue and now I have blue notes. I’ll have to look at this black ink cartridge when I feel more like it.

Right now I need to sort out some music for our radio programmes tomorrow if I can manage to stay awake, and then I’ll be off to bed.

I just hope that I remember to wake up.

-4

Wednesday 29th August 2012 – WE HAD OUR FIRST …

… no-show today.

Marianne and I went all the way out to Vergheas this afternoon for our Wednesday walk. Unfortunately no punters showed up, which was rather sad.

Mind you, it was only to be expected, I suppose. There had been the walk here a few weeks ago – the good one that I had been on, and then there was the pélerinage to the statue of the Black Virgin 10 days ago.

I suppose that everyone is simply Vergheased out.

Mind you it was just as well that no-one came because the sky was clouding over rapidly. We didn’t want to hang around too long. But long enough for one thing that I had wanted to do.

Vergheas is an old (and I DO mean old) fortified site – the mound upon which the church is built looks artificial to me, and that’s a good-enough indication.

What I had wanted to do was to see if there might be any trace of the old walls still remaining. When we had been here before, I’d had a good prowl around and had made a mental note of a couple of places that might be likely.

There was another flattened terrace on a lower level than that upon which the church is situated. This looked artificial to me.

The edges of this terrace were quite steep and in one or two places sloped down considerably towards the stream at the bottom. And sure enough, the side of that was lined with dressed stonework.

On the way back to Pionsat the heavens opened and we had 6mm of rain that fell in minutes. I can’t say that I’m sad about that, because we needed a good torrential downpour.

I was going to carry on working when I arrived home but I went upstairs and crashed out instead. I’d had a long, hard day.

This morning I was up early and met Rosemary at Montaigut en Combraille. She hopped into Caliburn and we went in to Montlucon. She ordered her new window at Lapeyre and I bought a load of stuff from Brico Depot.

I was back home for 13:15 – plenty of time to put the final coat of paint on the new woodwork ready to fit it tomorrow.

And in other news, and a bit of malicious gossip, if the conversation that was reported to me today means what a couple of people think that it might mean, no-one will be surprised if there’s a tiny addition to our little expat community’s population round about the start of the New Year.

-3

Sunday 26th August 2012 – TODAY DIDN’T WORK …

… out like it was supposed to.

The morning bit went OK, though.

The first port of call was to La Cellette down the road, because today is the Pélerinage de St Avit – the Pilgrimage.

St Avit was the Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand in 570-something and his claim to fame was that at the time when th village suffering from one of these mysterious infantile epidemics, he summoned up a Spring, the water of which apparently cured the children.

This was something that was classed as a miracle and so every 2nd Sunday after 15th August the well is blessed and a statue of St Avit is paraded around the village.

Hordes of children come to the pilgrimage, especially those whose medical condition isn’t so good. They are presumably hoping for a similar miracle as that which happened 1450 years ago.

But something that Liz and Terry said later on in the day made me think, which is a rare event, I know.

With the current state of the National Health Service and other medical services in the United Kingdom, praying for a miracle is probably just as effective as a means of cure that any kind of treatment dished out in a British hospital by the NHS might be.

From La Cellette, Marianne and I went on down the road to St Maigner.

This is our final pot d’acceuil of the tourist season and I can’t say that I’m sad about it. These persistent early starts have been wearing me out.

The attraction here was not a musical turn but a rope-maker, who spent the session teaching people to use his rope-making machine.

My attention however was distracted by the vehicle in which the cordier arrived. And isn’t it beautiful?

It’s a 1949 Renault Juvaquatre, and what’s interesting about this is that it’s not the more usual saloon but an estate car.

The Juvaquatres were inspired by the Opel Olympia that had been released in 1935, and Renault quickly set down to work on a similar car. So quickly that it made its appearance at the Paris Motor Show in 1937.

Serious production had hardly begun before the Second World War intervened and it was not until 1946 that serious production began.

They filled the streets from then on for many years and you can still see them about on the roads very occasionally even today.

You aren’t likely to see an estate car – a break – version though. They are as rare as hen’s teeth and it’s been ages since I’ve seen one like that.

Paradoxically, when the Juvaquatre was replaced by the much more modern and legendary 4CV – the quatre chevaux – in 1951, they realised that they couldn’t make a van – camionette – or a break out of it because of the rear engine configuration.

Consequently, they reintroduced the Juvaquatre break and production kept on going until the quatrelle was launched in 1960

We did actually have some music though – it wasn’t all quiet.

Someone from the village produced an old wind-up gramophone and a collection of 78s and spent a happy morning there winding up the music.

It was all good stuff too – the traditional type of French accordion music that you would hear almost everywhere in the 1940s and 1950s and which has sadly long-departed from the scene

I was back home for lunch and then I waited for a phone call – and waited, and waited. I had arranged to meet up with someone so that we could go together to the Virlet brocante but i didn’t get the call.

And to tell you the truth I fell into the Arms of Morpheus at about 16:00 – I really don’t know what’s up with me these days.

At Liz and Terry’s, Liz and I rehearsed our radio shows and after tea we discussed a few plans and projects that we might undertake whenever we have some free time – whenever that might be.

Tomorrow we have our recording sessions, and after that it’s back to work.

-1

Sunday 19th August 2012 – THERE WAS SO MUCH …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, here’s something of note.

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

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

-5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And “smashed” was the appropriate word too.

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

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

I felt really sorry for Rick.

All of that put rather a damper on the proceedings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is clearly an anachronism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-1

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

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

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

So I now have to do all of that again.

GRRRRRRRRR!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, not all of the locals were so ungracious.

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

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

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

Our day wasn’t over yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consequently it was demolished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is where the excitement begins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It really was the climax of an excellent day.

-1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was it, really.

-1

Sunday 5th August 2012 – THIS WATER ISSUE …

… that I mentioned yesterday seems to have resolved itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I did have the most extraordinary stroke of luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-4

Wednesday 1st AUGUST 2012 – I’VE BROKEN …

… through the wall between the house and the lean-to.

It’s not properly through, yet and to be honest I don’t think that it will ever be, because one of the down-sides drilling from both sides of the wall is that the two holes never mate up and mine is about 5mm out.

This morning I was working on the website but for one reason or another I couldn’t concentrate. Add to that the fact that we had so much solar energy this morning, and so I decided to go out and run the huge drill for half an hour or so

That used up some of the surplus electrical energy while I was doing it (only 82 amps made it into the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus energy I capture) and it broke through.

I need to tidy the hole up now, which will take a while, run a tube through the hole, and pass 6 wires through the tube – 230 volt mains, 12 volt DC power and 12-volt DC light, and then the world will be my lobster in the lean-to.

One of the benefits of having power in the lean-to is that I can tile the floor, make a kind-of work area and then install the big washing machine.

I’d love to see how that works and how much current that it uses, bearing in mind that I’ll be running it off the hot-fill from the dump-load with the machine on a low temperature setting and on the economy wash low-water programme.

Talking of the lean-to, I spend a few hours on the wall too and it seems that I’m advancing rapidly.

While I was scavenging around for stones in the house, I came across a pile of smashed-up lightweight brick, plaster and the like from when I knocked a wall down and so I’m shovelling that up and using it as infill.

Apart from the fact that it is of course quite light, it’s slowly emptying the house and that can only be a good thing, killing two birds with one stone.

For our Wednesday walk this afternoon, we went to Roche d’Agoux, a small village right out in the wilderness on the edge of the world.

Roche d’Agoux has a couple of claims to fame, not the least of which is this really impressive outcrop of milky quartzite. There’s a whole seam of this stuff that runs diagonally through the whole of the north-west of the Combrailles, making the odd spectacular appearance here and there, and spectacular is certainly the word.

The photo of the Roche is quite well-known – it’s a typical touristy thing of course – but what isn’t so well-known is the quartz. And so I’ll show you a close-up photo of that, and you can see what I mean by “milky quartz”.

Incidentally, it’s from this rocky outcrop where the Roche in the name comes from and it is, incidentally the same root for the word that is used for the area of the Staffordshire Moorlands in the UK the Roaches – that place where the wallabies hang out

When you look around here today at the sleepy little village of … errr … 91 people (a far cry from the heady days of the 1840s when 450 people were living here) it’s hard to remember that at one time, this was quite probably the most important town of the region.

You look at towns like Marcillat en Combraille, for example. A big, bustling village today yet it didn’t receive its charter for a market until 1258 – and that charter was granted by none other than a certain nobleman called Guillaume de la Roche d’Agoux.

He was certainly the most important nobleman in the area at the time and he did have his castle here in Roche d’Agoux.

Many people will tell you that the Roche d’Agoux is actually the ruins of his castle, or chateau-fort, but that isn’t so.

That was something that was mentioned in a guide book of the region of the 1880s and which has lingered on in current folklore.

In fact, that’s the site of his castle over there on that mound. However, it was dismantled in the early 15th Century and that date is interesting.

It’s quite early for this to have happened – long before Cardinal Richelieu’s edicts of the 1620s against the nobility that led to the dismantling of most of the castles in this area – and nothing has come to light which might suggest a reason for this.

However, certainly a few years ago there were some quite substantial remains to be seen, but no-one knows the present position today, because the current owner does not welcome visitors.

I spoke … "at great length" – ed … last time that we were here about the magnificent church.

Like every church almost everywhere in Medieval Europe, the rapid expansion of the population in that period led to the rapid expansion of the church, and having a crafty nose around, I came across some really good evidence of this.

Up there we can see the remains of a window that has long-since been filled it. It’s very reasonable to assume that this wall was thus an outside wall of the building and the light was lost when the annexe was built on behind it

So I dropped Marianne off at Pionsat and went back home to carry on working for a while.

No point in wasting the day.

-2

Monday 30th JUly 2012 – YOU CAN TELL …

… what kind of day I was having today. When I looked at the clock after heaving a bucket-load of concrete into the lean-to wall, I noticed that it was 19:24 – 24 minutes after knocking-off time.

But at least, the one part of the wall, outer shell, inner shell and infill, is now complete. That’s the part from the field-end up to the window aperture. I can now turn my attention to the next bit.

But not tomorrow – I’m fixing Liz’s car. and not Wednesday either – I’m walking with Marianne on another one of our Wednesday walks.

In fact, Marianne and I were out walking this afternoon for a couple of hours. In a few weeks time she’ll be doing a walk around the village of Vergheas and she needs to plan for it.

It just so happened that this afternoon someone from the regional tourist office was giving a talk in the church to another group of people about the history of the village. Marianne accordingly blagged a couple of invitations, I went down to Pionsat to pick her up and off we went.

It was quite interesting too, for Vergheas is a very important place for such a small village, with something of a history.

It’s right on the border between the Limousin and the Auvergne and during the 17th Century many of the locals made their living by smuggling salt. The salt tax, or gabelle – was at a different rate in different areas and while Vergheas was a cheap area, the Limousin just down the road was one of the most expensive areas.

Buying salt outside your home area was not allowed, but the inhabitants of the Limousin came to Vergheas by their hundreds, with just 6 tax collectors to stop them.

But if Vergheas is famous for anything, it’s famous for its statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. This was brought back here by some Crusaders after the 4th Crusade and may well have been loot gained in the Sack of Zara (modern-day Zadar) in 1202 or even the Sack of Constantinople in 1204.

The Crusaders donated it to the Church and here it sits, attracting pilgrims from all over the place and it is said that various miracles have been performed here.

The biggest miracle of all, though, is what happened to the statue in 2001. Nothing can surpass this.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have mentioned on several occasions that the Religious Authorities every now and again take an inventory of the relics and possessions of the churches.

In 1973 there was an inventory taken of the treasures of the church here, and as soon as this was published, the church was raided by burglars and the statue was amongst the items stolen.

And that was the last that anyone heard of the statue until the astonishing events of 2001.

In 1997 an antique collector from Le Mans died and his executors spent the next few years hawking his collection around the antique shops of Paris in order to obtain the best price.

They called at one antique shop in 2001 to offer the articles for sale, just as the owner was reading a 1943 book that showed a photo of the statue.

And, by pure coincidence, at the same time on his desk was a newspaper article with a photo of the statue. It was the anniversary of the theft of the statue and the local residents using the medium of the Press to plead that someone might have a pang of conscience and return it.

Truth being stranger than fiction, the shop owner recognised the statue straight away, bought the collection and promptly returned the statue to the village.

From the church we then went for a tramp in the woods. Unfortunately he got away and so we went for a ramble to the edge of the village and the fontaine – the spring from where the locals formerly obtained their water.

Pretty similar to the one that we visited last week in St Maigner but, as far as I am aware, no miracle has ever been acclaimed for this fontaine

I suppose that one miraculous event is enough

And I was told that I am apparently persona non grata with a couple of English people in Chateau sur Cher.

At the petanque yesterday, one of them went to pay his entrance money with a €50 note. Me being me, I turned to Marianne and said “I know these people. Make sure that that note is dry!”.

Apparently my comment was not appreciated.

Ahh well – ask me if I care. I hate people who don’t have a sense of humour.

And while we are on the subject of the petanque, I forgot to mention yesterday that I saw the doppelganger of a very dear departed friend. That quite knocked me back a little.

Apart from all of that, I’ve had the usual few hours on the website this morning.

This afternoon though, I managed to find an hour or so and I’ve planted some more carrots, spinach, radishes and some lettuce that I had setting in a few pots.

I’ve also noticed that a few of the lettuce seed that was out-of-date and so which I threw away on the garden a few weeks ago, some of that is sprouting.

Fancy that!

EPIC HALL

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