Wednesday 1st July 2015 – NOW, HERE’S A THING

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a solar shower. It’s an old enamel shower base with a wooden frame built around it and infilled with corrugated plastic roofing sheets. On top of it is a black plastic box filled with water and connected to a shower standpipe and covered with an old caravan window.

It all sits outside absorbing the heat from the sun and a couple of times a week I can have a shower. Some times though, I have to put a few litres of hot water into it to bring up the water to a comfortable temperature.

Today, though, this was the first time, so my records tell me, that I have EVER had to put cold water into it in order to cool it down to a comfortable temperature. It’s thoroughly crazy, this temperature. And even with the cold water in there, it was still flamin’ ‘ot.

Mind you, it wasn’t like that this morning. It was all overcast and cloudy. Not good weather at all, even though it was hot. And I’d left the electricity on all night and had the fan going in the bedroom to cool me down while I slept.

I was on my travels too. back at school, school uniform and all. Properly back at school although, strangely enough, I didn’t recognise any of my fellow pupils. One person who was there though was Zero whom I mentioned the other day. What’s she doing at my school?

This morning after breakfast I cracked on with the radio programmes – doing the additional notes for the Radio Arverne sessions. The first lot is half-done and I’ll finish off the rest tomorrow. Then I can start on the second show.

And ironically, by pure and utter coincidence, a major topic has appeared right out of nowhere and landed on my laptop as it were. Something very important and very topical. “A sign from the Gods” I said, and stashed it away ready for use in a week or so.

I was interrupted by the postie who brought me my circular saw. “What happened yesterday?” I asked her, and she gave me a blank look. It seems that although La Poste promises to deliver on a certain date, it receives the parcels at the central tri, in my case at St Eloy, but they don’t come out to the Post Office at Pionsat until the following day. Meantime, to cover their tracks with Amazon, they pretend to have delivered the products the previous day.

Thoroughly dishonest.

After lunch, I attacked the bathroom door. It’s now sanded down so that it fits, a washer stuck in between the top and bottom halves of the hinges so that it doesn’t scrape the floor, and the mortise latch for the door is now fitted and the handles are attached.

Even more so, the closer in the door frame has been chiseled out and the closer frame fitted, so we now have a door that opens and closes properly. This really is progress.

Tomorrow I have to drill out the bottom of the door for the air vent and cut down a floorboard or two to make all of the door jambs. When that’s all done, I can mask everywhere off and varnish all of the wood.

But it is so impressive, this door. I’m well-pleased with that.

Then I had my shower, and went off to Marcillat. It seems that I’ve been co-opted onto the management committee of Radio Tartasse and I’m not sure why. Clearly something’s afoot, and I’m not talking about that thing on the end of my leg either.

-1

Tuesday 30th June 2015 – THAT WAS A WASTED DAY

One of the hottest days that I have ever encountered. 36°C outside, 31°C in the attic (with the fan going full-blast on the maximum position) and even 28.4°C on the landing downstairs with the front door and all of the windows open.

In other words, it’s impossible to work. Instead, I’ve stayed up here sitting right in front of the fan. This morning, I did another radio rock show, just to show that I am still making some kind of progress at something, but this afternoon it was impossible to do anything.

And it was just as well, for my promised circular saw never turned up. Instead, I had an e-mail from Amazon to say that Amazon “…n’a pas été en mesure de vous le livrer en votre absence. Un avis de passage a dû vous être laissé, comprenant les coordonnées de La Poste afin d’organiser une nouvelle livraison”.
In other words, because I wasn’t in, my delivery couldn’t be made and there will be a notice somewhere telling me how to organise a new delivery.

And here I am, never moved from my chair all day, and no-one has been and no-one has left any notice of their visit. I dunno who the couriers are (because there is no notice from them) but whoever they are, it’s quite frankly dishonest.

Anyway, Amazon has had an earful from me this evening and they are going to try to redeliver it tomorrow. I shan’t be holding my breath.

Apart from that, not a lot has happened. I’ve done very little but, seriously, it’s not the day to be doing anuthing at all.

And it’s going to be even worse for the next few days. I’ll have to do something about all of this. A wet towel around the next might be a start.

Monday 29th June 2015 – BLIMEY!

Wasn’t it hot today! At one point when we were in Gerzat in mid-afternoon, the temperature on Caliburn’s thermometer was showing 41.3°C outside and off the scale (ie more than 50°C) inside. And it felt like it too.

Yes, we’ve been radioing today, haven’t we?

And I had a dramatic change of plan too. At 08:45 – 20 minutes before I’m due to leave here to head off to Marcillat and Radio Tartasse, I was busy scanning the news – to discover that Chris Squire, the legendary bassist with Yes, had died.

So with just 20 minutes before I had to leave here to record the rock programmes, I was sitting down and totally re-writing the show.

I recorded the rock shows and then Liz came to join me for the normal sessions. That will take us up to the end of July so we could then head back to Liz’s. After lunch (and finishing off the gorgeous dessert that we started yesterday) it was off to the furnace that was Gerzat and Radio Arverne.

We recoded another 5 programmes there, which will take us nicely up to the beginning of September, and another couple of goes should see us well on our way towards the end of the year. But we need to be well in advance with holidays coming up. Liz is off to the UK to see family and then when she comes back, I’ll be off to Canada.

On the way back, I stopped for fuel and a little shopping, and a nice cold drink in view of the heat, and I was back here for 18:20, promptly crashing out for an hour or so as it was far too hot up here to be comfortable.

And talking of being comfortable, I was on my travels again last night, in my nice clean bed. I was with Trixi and a few other people and we were doing a yoga tour of Europe, ending up in the Ukraine and Belarus, before coming back to the Netherlands via Northern Europe. But to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … the group of people who had come with us had become fed up and left the tour to the two of us. They went home via the south of Europe and had become snowed in in Northern Italy while the two of us carried nonchalantly on in the north.

-1

Sunday 28th June 2015 – I’VE FINALLY MANAGED …

… to have a day off work today. And not only that, I had a decent lie-in too.

Mind you, I had to go to visit the beichstuhl and I did think about going off for a coffee but when I checked the time, it was only 05:45 so there was little chance of that happening. I went back to bed and slept until 10:00. And quite right too!

After breakfast, I reviewed the stuff that I had written for Radio Anglais and found, much to my surprise (or maybe not, as the case might be) that I had a totally new slant today on some of the stuff that i had written. Consequently, I had to amend some of it and edit out a pile of it from the notes so that I can review it for another time. I mean, it has to be correct.

I also built up a database of venues so that there’s a list of websites from which I can extract events to broadcast, and simple contact boxes from where I can copy-paste the information en bloc into the notes rather than having to type it out individually every time.

After lunch, I sorted out all of the washing that needed doing, including the bedding. Seeing as it was 38°C in the solar shower, I had a beautiful soak and I’m finally going to have clean bedding. I’d bought some new linen sheets and quilt cover last time I was at the Auchan and I went to use those, but much to my surprise, there were no pillow cases in the set.

Even more surprisingly, I’d had some pillow cases the same colour when I lived in Winsford 35 years ago and I had hardly ever used them. And even more more surprisingly, I managed to lay my hands on them. Isn’t it good having a well laid-out wardrobe and everything stowed away nicely?

I went round to Cécile’s to check on her house and make sure that everything was OK. That gave me an opportunity to borrow her washing machine to do a load of stuff while I went round to Liz and Terry’s to rehearse our radio show.

Liz cooked a gorgeous vegetable pie for tea and the dessert was out of this world – something like a Black Forest Gateau in a wine glass. I’ve never had a dessert as nice as this.

I picked up the washing on the way home and now I’m going to have an early nice – a nice clean me in nice clean bedding. How I’m looking forward to this!

But something interesting has happened on the Social Networking account that I use. I once had a friend – a friendship that ended quite acrimoniously over a posting that he made about me on another site – and he had a daughter who used to confide in me quite a lot about the problems that she was having at home at the time but whom I haven’t seen since then.

All of a sudden, my Social Networking site has put her on my “list of potential friends” whom I should contact. So what’s happening here? How come it is that this site has made some kind of connection between the two of us? Of the couple of billion people who have an account on there, this would be an astonishing coincidence if it’s been a haphazard connection.

Clearly there’s something going on here. I wish that I knew just what it was.

-2

Saturday 27th June 2015 – OOOHHHH!

Yes, this is rather unexpected isn’t it?

It’s not very often that you catch me working on the house on a Saturday, but here you are. We now have a shower room door in place.

It needs sanding down in a couple of places and lifting a little on the hinges but otherwise it’s not too bad a fit. Not the best that I have done, especially after all of the effort that I have put into it, but it will fit, and close too.

I’ll finish it off on Tuesday and then give it first (of three) coats of varnish.

Apart from that, I had a real struggle this morning. I was up early this morning but then crashed out in my armchair until 11:28 when someone phoned me. Had the phone not rung, I’d probably be there now still. I put it down to my voyages during the night. It was a huge forest and someone wandering about there came across the body of a man who had disappeared three years ago. The body was in a dreadful state and it quite upset the person who found it.

Next to disappear was me. I was burnt to ashes but part of my kidney survived and was posted back to me with a label attached (you can forget about all kinds of logic in these voyages)

Finally, a young girl with whom I worked 30-odd years ago -she was the next to disappear and we had to rescue her before she was murdered too.

It’s strange really. The first part of all of this relates to a case in the media yesterday where, in an apartment in caring, sharing Britain, the body of an old man was discovered. He’d been dead in there for three years, and it shows you how much his family, friends and neighbours cared about himthat even in a block of flats, no-one took any notice or interest about him and the seemingly-abandoned apartment.

The second part of course is a reference to Jack the Ripper. He sent to the police part of a kidney believed to come from one of his victims, with a label attached with the aim of taunting the police.

The third part, though – what’s this all about? I haven’t wasted one second thinking about this girl since the day that I moved on from that employment. How come she appeared?

At least, I managed to attend to the door before lunch and that really was my aim.

This afternoon, I attacked the website and began to sort out the images and the text from my Canada 2014 journey. High time I did that, as it seems that whatever I did earlier won’t ever surface off the disk of the old laptop. That looks like it’s irrevocably gone unfortunately.

Apart from that, I’ve had a good chat with Rosemary and Cécile this afternoon. It’s nice to talk to friends.

Friday 26th June 2015 – DUNNO …

… who does the controle techniques around here but I hope it’s not the guy who does the controle techniques on Caliburn.

I’m the first to admit that I used to have cars with sills like this, but that was 25 years ago in another life and things were so much different in those days. I didn’t think that you would go very far with a car like this these days.

I’ve been out and about doing my shopping this evening. I know that I said that I would go to Montlucon tomorrow but I’ve ordered my circular saw by post and I don’t really need the tiles next week as I still haven’t finished the door, and then I have the ceiling to do, and I had forgotten about that.

What with having Monday off to go a-radioing, which means that I’ll have to do about 150 miles with a quarter of a tonnes of tiles in the back of Caliburn and before I go to Montlucon to buy the tiles, to empty Caliburn of all of the stuff that’s still in there.

For all of those reasons, I’ve postponed my trip to Montlucon until next weekend.

This morning, I was up early yet again and after breakfast, carried on with my website for a couple of hours. And it made me realise that I seem to have slipped rather unconsciously back into how I used to be when I lived in Belgium – doing the writing stuff in the morning before getting on with the heavy work in the afternoon. Especially as, these last few days, I’ve had the coffee machine bubbling away through the morning, such has been the amount of solar energy that I’ve received.

I’ve fitted all of the hinges to the door now and had a go at hanging it. It’s certainly the most difficult door that I have ever hung, even though I’ve taken more time over this than I have over any other door that I’ve hung.

The door wasn’t quite right – or to be more accurate, the floor isn’t quite right and the door is fouling.

I’ve had to cut off 4mm from the foot of the door and that’s not easy without a circular saw. I’ve done it by hand with the rough-cut saw and you can see how I’ve done it.

I use a length of aluminium in “L” section as a guide, clamped to the surface and then I saw along the guide. It’s not too bad actually although it takes quite a while to do it.

I’ve not re-tried the door yet. I’ve drilled and chiselled it out for the mortice closer. I had to hunt around for one of those because there were none in the house. In the end I found three in the barn, one of which didn’t have a lock so I’m using that. Instead, I’ll fit a little bolt on the inside of the door. I mean, there’s only me who lives here so it doesn’t really make much difference.

I could have finished the door if I had had another hour or so to work, but I was distracted.

I ended up on the phone to Canada for ages. I need to register Strider (my Ford Ranger) in Canada and for that I need an insurance policy and an address. This meant hassling Service New Brunswick – it’s been four years since I first applied for a street address for my parcel of land at Mars Hill Road. Anyway, after much binding in the marsh, I now have an address and I can progress.

At the insurance company, they were rather bewildered. They haven’t had a request like mine before – a person with a foreign driving licence wishing to insure a Canadian vehicle in Canada. They eventually decided to go away and discuss things with their Head Office and see what happens. I have to phone them back on Tuesday.

And then, with going shopping, I checked the temperature in the solar shower. 37.5°C with no added hot water and that was perfect. At 17:45 then I had a glorious hot shower and it was lovely. And then I could wander off into St Eloy and the shops.

So you see what I mean about being distracted, as well as needing an extra hour to finish off.

I might even have a go at it tomorrow.

Thursday 25th June 2015 – I’VE NOT HAD A VERY GOOD DAY TODAY

My little circular saw has packed up today, which is something of a minor disaster. The bearings on the rotor have gone and so the blade won’t turn even though the motor is going round. And the big old one that I have from years ago, that’s not doing anything at all.

All of this is rather unfortunate as I was in the middle of trimming down the door for the shower room. The Ryobi Plus-One circular saw cut some more but then the lithium batteries went flat (no hope of the old ni-cads powering the saw) so in the end I had to fit a guide and then finish cutting it down with a rough-cut handsaw and tidying up with the belt sander.

That was all rather a shame as I was well on my way to finishing the fitting of the door. I could have had it hanging tonight if everything had gone as planned. As it is, it’s going to take a while to finish off now.

I’m disappointed about the saw. It’s a little 650-watt machine that runs perfectly off my solar power system – most of the other ones are far too powerful and consume too much energy. I’ve had this little one for quite a few years and it’s done me proud. I’m not sure where I’ll be able to find another one like it.

This morning I was up yet again before the alarm and managed a good morning on the internet. I’ve restarted the web site again seeing as how I’ve finished (for now) the radio stuff and I want to catch up, seeing as how I’ve done next-to-nothing on it for ages and there’s a lot to do.

Once I’d organised that, I went off and cut the lets for the hinges into the door frame. That took ages and I had to sharpen the chisels a couple of times. This floorboarding that I’m using to make the door frames is pretty tough stuff.

And then we had the saw issues.

I’ll have to see what I can find on Saturday when I head off to Montlucon for the tiles. If there is one about anywhere, it will be in Montlucon.

UPDATE
Having a look on Amazon, there’s a 600-watt circular saw on special offer at €62:95 – and it’s a Bosch. If I’m going to have low-powered lightweight tools for what I’m doing, I’ll probably be better-off with something high-quality like a Bosch rather than a cheap generic model at half-price, and so I’ve placed my order.

It’ll be here on Tuesday. I hope that I will be too.

Wednesday 24th June 2015 – MANY YEARS AGO …

… I was engaged for a short while to a girl called Liz (you’ve no idea how many people called Liz have featured in my life). It didn’t last too long, mainly for the reason that I wasn’t ready for such a commitment – and I’m probably still not ready even now.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … last night when I was on my nocturnal ramblings, we met up again and resolved to get back together. We arranged to meet up at a park entrance somewhere but we didn’t think about which particular entrance. It was a huge park too, with quite a few entrances so I was constantly driving from one entrance to the next to see if I could find her. Also featuring in this voyage were a very old friend of mine and his wife, a woman with whom I don’t particularly see eye-to-eye. They were constantly interrupting me as I was driving around and I was starting to panic that I would never ever meet up with Liz at this rate (and indeed I didn’t)

What was strange about this is that I was reading a story last night, just before I went to bed, about a couple who had rekindled their relationship after 22 years apart. And it also brought to my mind an occasion in the mid 1990s when I had to meet someone at an Underground station in London, but there were so many exits to this station that we didn’t meet up. However, I’d given no thought at all to this ever since – until I awoke this morning.

What this couple were doing in this story I really don’t know. But it’s bizarre that these couple of events in real life should become entangled in one of my nocturnal voyages.

With all of this going on, I was up and about at about 06:50, long before the alarm went off. And after breakfast I cracked on with the radio programme. It’s all done now, all 7,000-odd words of it. 41kbs that works out at, or about 13 weeks of text discussion. That should really keep me out of mischief for a while.

As for the door frame, that’s not only started but finished (please excuse the photo – the flash on this phone-cam is not up to all that much). I cut down a couple of floorboards with the table-top saw (which struggled with this -the poor thing couldn’t quite manage properly) and I found an offcut in the barn that I cut down to give me all that I needed.

There’s a batten in there too. That’s for a shelf support as there is going to be a shelf there and that’s where the towels will live. I didn’t have a batten that size but when I installed the flying staircase down to the ground floor, I just used chevrons in a standard length for the columns without regard to what was actually needed. Cutting one down to size gave me more than enough to make the batten.

I just had to sand it down, and the new belt sander that I bought a couple of months ago did that for me.

I was so engrossed by this that I hadn’t noticed the time and it was 19:25 by the time that I knocked off. Really carried away, I was.

So tomorrow, I might have a go at fitting the hinges for the door, and then cutting the door down to fit. I’d love to have that fitted and working by the end of the week.

23rd June 2015 – WE ARE RADIOING …

… next Monday. I had completely forgotten about it and so I need to get a wiggle on. It’s a good job that I had a few days on it earlier in the month in order to get ahead, otherwise I would be starting to struggle right now.

Consequently this mornng, I sat down and dashed off another 2000 words for our next hot topic. That makes about 25kb, which is about 5,000 words and at about 3kb per 5-minute segment, this is enough for 8 weeks. There’s plenty more where this came from too so with a bit of luck, God’s help and a Bobby, this might do until I return from Canada, with what is already in the pipeline. It means that I just have to do the additional notes and the dialogue for the rock music programmes.

At midday I reckoned that I had done enough for today and so I went into the shower room and measured up the inserts of the window frame in order to cut some plasterboarding. That wasn’t as straightforward as it might have been either. I mentioned the other day that with the house being an old fieldstone house, nothing is plumb and the walls are not parallel. It’s all kinds of shapes and so was this plasterboard that I had to cut. And I didn’t have any pieces long enough so I’ve had to join a couple of offcuts on either side;

I fitted a 20mm batten on one wall, a thickness that last night was perfectly correct. Through the night however, the wall has expanded and so the plasterboard is proud of the piece against which it is supposed to abut. I had a dsperate hunt around in the shed and in the end came across a length of 10mm hardboard from when we did the roof here in 2009. That needed drilling, shaping and fixing to the wall instead of the 20mm batten.

After lunch, during which I treated myself to yet another electric coffee, I fitted the plasterboarding to the walls. It’s screwed at one end to the battens and at the other end (ap against the window) it’s been “dot-and-dabbed”. I managed to find my plasterboarding cement after all. The glued ends are wedged up to the walls with counter-battens which will give it an “incentive” to stick. It needs to stick well because it’s going to have tiles fastened to it and “dot-and-dab” isn’t the strongest method of fastening it.

Still plenty of time left and so I’ve been fitting the roof rails for the suspended ceiling. I’ve even put an extra longitudinal support in pace because, even though it’s only lightweight tongue-and-grooving that I’ll be using, a span of 1450mm is too long, especially in humid conditions, and the ceiling might warp.

And tomorrow? I really WILL start on this door frame. I promise.

-1

Monday 22nd June 2015 – BACK TO WORK …

… although I didn’t feel much like it. I didn’t have anything like a late night, but it was still difficult to crawl out of bed.

After breakfast, I did a pile of work on the computer again and that took me though to midday. And then I attacked the shower room.

The worktop is now in position, and all of the plasterboard has been fitted around it (except on the stud wall where the pipes will be running).

And I remembered why I hadn’t fitted the mounting rail on one side too. That was because there isn’t enough room to manoeuvre the worktop into position with both mounting rails in place. I had to take it out, fit the worktop and then refit the rail

But tiling the walls is going to be interesting. According to the plasterboard that I have fitted, the walls are out of plumb bu 25mm over a distance of a metre. So with 18m² of wall to tile, you can imagine what that is going to look like when it’s finished.

There were some bits of blank wall that needed plasterboarding too, and I had forgotten about these. I’ve made a start on them – one part has been done and I’m fitting the studding for the second. The third doesn’t need studding but just a bit of “dot and dab” – I’m sure that I have some stuff for that somewhere, and I’ll look tomorrow.

Water in the home-made immersion heater was really hot – off the scale in fact – and the water in the solar shower was at 32.5°C. 8 litres of water out of the immersion heater into the solar tank took that up to a glorious 38.5°C and I had the best shower that I have had for ages. But the wiring on the immersion heater is heating up again. I’m really going to have to have a good look at this next time we have a grey day.

Later, I made a mega-red pepper and lentil curry, enough for four days. Three says’ worth has gone into the fridge in the vacuum jars and that will keep me going quite happily for the next few days.

But I might not be working here tomorrow. Rob rang up and there’s the possibility of some folding stuff for the next few days.

-1

Sunday 21st June 2015 – HAPPY SOLSTICE

Yes, the longest day of the year today. It’s all downhill from here. Where did the first 6 months of the year go?

And so I celebrated the Solstice by having a lie-in, seeing as it was Sunday today. And in view of the late night that I had had (02:30 when I finally crawled in), it was a good 10:15 when I eventually crawled out and gone 11:00 by the time that I had finished breakfast.

As for the laptop, it had indeed run out of battery so while I was breakfasting, I put it on charge in the barn using the 12-volt power lead that I have.

After breakfast, I spend a pleasant couple of hours going through the hard drive on the 1st Aspire, deleting loads of things that I no longer needed, deleting all kinds of programs and editing the start-up memory. Now, it fires up in seconds rather than the 10 minutes that it used to take and all in all, it’s now quite a stable platform.

But here’s a thing. I remember when I bought it that it had just 2GB of RAM on board, and that’s what it says on the sticker. But when I checked the system, it clearly shows that there is 4GB there. I don’t remember upgrading it, but I suppose that I must have done at some point when I was in the UK. And that might account for how much better it performs when compared to any of its later brothers. Upgrading this one to 8GB might just work because if i can make this perform as well as the 1st Aspire, then I’ll be reasonably satisfied.

This afternoon, I’ve been tidying up in here and for a change just recently, it’s now fit to receive visitors. I’ve even scrubbed the oilcloth that I use as a tablecloth on the table which I use for preparing the food.

I did set out to have a shower too, but the weather was deceiving. Although it looked quite a nice day outside, it wasn’t that warm – and the water in the solar shower was a mere 30°C. The water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load was only 54°C so I couldn’t put enough of that into the solar shower to raise the temperature sufficiently.

Mind you, that was my own fault. Feeling like having a coffee this afternoon, I had the electric coffee percolator going for half an hour. Coffee made in there tastes so much better than instant coffee, but it isn’t half energy-consuming.

So back to work tomorrow – fitting the worktop in the shower room and then starting on the door frame. I really will have a shower tomorrow if it’s warm, and if I can’t have it in the solar shower, I’ll use the corner of the verandah and a bucket of hot water from the home-made 12-volt immersion heater.

-2

Saturday 20th June 2015 – WHAT AN AFTERNOON!

I’ve been sitting here all afternoon waiting for the battery on the laptop to expire. I’ve been extolling the virtues of the impressively long battery life, but it does have a drawback.

I dunno if you remember but I’ve been having memory issues with the new laptop. It simply isn’t powerful enough to run Windows 8.1 and after a while, it slows right down and it is necessary to restart it.

However today, I was distracted by a few things while I was copying a few things from one external drive to another. When I came back, the machine was showing an error message “insufficient memory to run these programs please close …” and then it listed all of the programs. Like Firefox, VLC player and the copying software. That was all that was open.

If that weren’t bad enough, it wouldn’t respond to the ctrl/alt/del escae mechanism to enable me to close the programs, and the cursor had frozen so I couldn’t access the menu.

While I was fiddling around with this, the screen switched off and won’t restart, and this is where I’ve been for the last 7 hours, waiting for the battery running out so it will all go into suspense.

I cant switch off using the crash button because this will stall all of the hard drives in mid-operation and that can have fatal results as we know. So thank heavens for the ancient Aspire 722 with its smashed screen and broken keyboard. I’m giving serious thought to refurbishing it and pressing it back into service.

Last night I was playing football for Pionsat, up front with Anthony. I passed the ball to him and the keeper dashed off his line to clear the ball from Anthony’s feet, but missed his kick and stubbed his toe, injuring himself. Everyone stood around waiting for the ref’s whistle but it never came so I shouted to Anthony to play on So he kicked the ball towards the goal but, incredibly, it was going wide from such an easy position. So he had to run after it and pop it into the net. At which point the referee disallowed the goal as he said that the game had stopped, although he had never blown the whistle. This led to a huge and heated argument.

It was all rather reminiscent of an incident in gridiron a few years ago when a thrown ball was intercepted but not caught or deflected out out of play. It was therefore still a live ball (classed as a fumble) but everyone stood around for a good 30 seconds looking at it before a player suddenly realised what had happened, picked it up and ran for home.

From here, I went on to Australia and went into an office which was an old brick-built circular building with, exceptionally, the (male) receptionist sitting in the centre of the room with his back to the door looking inwards. I had a small office on the ground floor and I was doing all kinds of personal things there, without realising until much later that there was a CCTV camera looking right at me.

Outside, it was hot and dusty and bright sunlight, and I had to walk acrosss the road to the trafic light and take up my position to run home amid all of the traffic, reckoning that even over a very long run I could keep up with rush-hour traffic on foot. I remembered an overhead railway with all kinds of brightly-coloured locomotives passing by.

This brought a feeling of déjà vu, with something that I had done in a particular nightly ramble several years (during one of the previous incarnations of this rubbish) ago when I used to go running from our old house in Davenport Avenue Crewe via Shavington and Stapeley into Nantwich and then back home via Wistaston. That of course relates to the “incident” in 1994 when I was caught up in a certain event in the middle of the night in Brussels and then had difficulty sleeping for years afterwards, so I started running around the city late at night in order to tire me out. But that didn’t work because I found my second wind pretty quickly and ended up doing half-marathons every night.

This morning, I had to make some more muesli for breakfast and then I started on thie mega-back-up that has led to all of these problems.

I hope that thgis problem is all going to clear itself up soon because I can’t go on like this.

Friday 19th JUne 2015 – I’VE HAD AN INTERESTING DAY

I was actually working this morning when the alarm went off at 08:00. That’s not something that happens every day, so you need to make a note of it. I did!

I was putting the coat of varnish on the underside of the shower-room worktop. The top coat was dry from yesterday evening so I could run it over and begin. I wanted to do that as early as possible so that it would be dry by the end of the afternoon.

Back up here after breakfast, and seeing as I was on a roll, I did another live concert for Radio Anglais, editing and engineering it to make a continuous stream. Now I don’t know why it is but sometimes I’m there for days and I can’t ever set the joins correctly. At other times, it’s as if the joints go together automatically with only the most minimal effort, and today was one of those days.

The only real problem that I did have was with the original engineering and I found myself at times editing out the faults in the original mixing. One was particularly troublesome but I managed to overdub the following track and fade out the previous track where I’d overdubbed it, so that the annoying click is inaudible. Studying the waveforms of the two tracks, you can usually find a length in each tracks that is pretty much identical, and you can superimpose them at that position.

I’ve also restarted a radio project that I had begun in 2013 but with all of the issues that I was having in that year, I had set aside. I’ll tell you more about it at a later date when it’s complete (whenever that might be) but I need some info from Radio Tartasse that won’t be available until the end of the month.

After lunch, I found to my delight that the worktop was dry. So I could turn it back over and put the second coat on the top. This is bang on plan as the second coat always takes ages to dry and it can stay like that until Monday now.

I tidied up the shower room, brushed everything up and removed the debris. It’s looking quite tidy in there now, for a change. I’ve also fitted the missing mounting rail for the worktop (I should have done that yesterday but I forgot) and then I measured up the doorway so that I can make a start in making the door frame on Monday.

This evening it was shopping in St Eloy-les-Mines and if there was a big queue at the checkouts, I was in it. One of those days.

I didn’t buy anything extra, except for the strawberries. A huge punnet for €1:99 and the ones that I ate tonight (there’s enough for three or four days) were delicious. Well, i did have some soya cream that needed using up.

And seeing as how there were no yellow paper collecting bags out on the streets in Montaigut last week, I imagined that tonight would be collection night so I took all of mine down there. But there were none about so it can’t be every fortnight like it is in most places. But the two slugs and a snail enjoyed the run out anyway.

And now, just for a change, I’m going to have a very early night. My efforts this morning have caught me up.

Thursday 18th June 2015 – I’M FED UP …

… with this weather.

It started off okay this morning but it clouded over slowly as the day progressed and by the time it was going dark it was teeming down with rain again. It’s really getting on my nerves. I recon that during the last week we’ve had more than 150mm (6 inches) of rain.

I had another morning spent on the computer dealing with these hardware issues that I’ve been having. I’m still nowhere near fixing them but I’m not ‘arf learning a lot on my way around.

As far as working on the house went, I’ve finished drilling and enlarging all of the holes for the pipework in the stud wall. There were a couple more holes that I had forgotten and so I drilled those too.

I then turned my attention to the worktop.

That has now been completely drilled out for the pipes. Then I measured all up for fitting the sink and the tap. All of the holes have been drilled for them now (and I spent some time trying to take off the holecutter from the spindle – that wasn’t easy either) and the top surface has now had the first coat of wood treatment. It looks quite nice, but it’s still too dark if you ask me.

Tomorrow first thing I’ll do the underside of the worktop and then towards the end of the day I’ll put the second coat on the top surface. In between times, I’ll have a go at attacking the door frame and see where that takes me.

Wednesday 17th June 2015 – I’VE BEEN DRILLING ….

… for most of the afternoon.

I need to route all of the water pies – the cold water in, the hot water in, the hot and cold out and the hot and cold central heating – around the house, and where the water tanks will be going is in the attic right above the shower. The shower room and the kitchen where the sink will be are right in a vertical row one under the other, and so I’m planning to route all of the pipework down the inside of the stud wall.

The central heating is a later addition to the plan, and as well as that, I’d only made provision for the other water pipes in the top rails of the stud wall. Hence, there were 22 holes to cut and I’ve done 18 of them this afternoon.

As we’ve actually had some good weather today, I’ve resurrected the little 330-watt mains drill and that has made rather short and effortless work of the drilling.

Or it would have done, but I soon discovered why I hadn’t used it for years. The on-off switch is broken and so the drill is permanently “on”. That makes for some interesting moments when I’m starting off with the drilling.

I’ll finish all of this tomorrow and then I can finish off with the plan to fit the worktop. I might even have finished it off today but I crashed out for an hour – and I mean crashed out too. I was well-done.

This morning I started on my website, trying to resurrect all of the notes that I have lost, and that’s not easy. It’s going to be a lot of work and I’m not looking forward to doing it all again.

After that, I’ve been working in the garden. Yes, even though I said I wouldn’t this year.

But this was urgent as I had a load of stuff, including the beichstuhl, to take down to the compost heap. But I couldn’t get down there, seeing as the weeds, brambles and everything else have totally overwhelmed it. And so for a good hour and a half I was hacking my way down there.

But in a change, I’ve put the smaller container, the 15-litre one – in the beichstuhl. This will mean that it will have to be emptied more often, as it will fill up quicker, and that suits me fine. It’ll keep the compost bin turning over and keep the shower room healthier.

As it’s sitting low in the box, I’ve propped it up by taking the telephone directories upstairs and put them underneath the container. That raises it up and that’s much better. I’ve also put the bin bags and the shredder upstairs too so it’s all to hand.

And so I’ve had an easy night tonight. Day 2 of the aubergine and kidney bean casserole that I made yesterday and forgot to mention.

I was on my travels during the night – or, rather I wasn’t for I was here. Someone with whom I used to be very friendly back a few years ago was here too and we were watching my ocean-going yacht arriving down the little lane here. It took hours for them to unload it – in fact they still hadn’t finished by the time that I woke up, even though this guy had gone downstairs earlier to chivvy them up.

EPIC HALL

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