Tuesday 16th June 2015 – NOW THAT I’VE FINISHED …

… working on the corner where the beichstuhl is, I can post a couple of photos of it so that you can see what I’ve been doing.

That’s the worktop that I’ve been building just there. The container for the composting toilet is where you might expect it to be, and at the side is the container where the sawdust and wood-ash is kept. There’s a ladle in there for dispensing the sawdust and wood-ash.

The three contents combined (sawdust, wood-ash and the contents of a composting toilet used by someone with a vegan diet) contain all of the elements for making a first-class compost if it’s left to stand for a year or so. That’s why I have two compost bins down at the bottom of the garden. One is “working” and the other one is “standing”.

As for the container, it’s one of these huge stainless steel jam-boilers, about 25 litres of it, and complete with stainless steel lid. It’s lined with a bio-degradable dustbin liner and then a thick layer of shredded paper (I use old telephone directories as the paper is super-absorbent) to soak up any liquids.

As for the upper part, you can see the two shelves that I have fitted in place. One shelf is for what I call the “bathroom books” and the upper shelf is for the supplies of toilet paper and the like.

Storage space is quite important around here, seeing as how there is so much stuff that I seem to have accumulated. I can never have too much of that.

I have to fit the suspended ceiling (which won’t be for quite a while yet) and then it will be ready for tiling.

So having done that, I toot out the worktop for the sink. That had been propped into position merely to give me a kind-of workbench. Once I had done that, I had to reposition the mounting rails.

You may remember that I was planning an inset sink, but the old worktop wouldn’t support the weight of the sink once I had cut the hole in it. Hence I’m going for the type of sink that sits on top of the worktop, and this means that the height of the worktop needs to be lowered by 150mm so that the sink is at the same height.

I’ve also been drilling out the rails in the stud wall between the shower and the sink worktop so that the water pipes will pass down there out of the way.

I would have done much more too, except that I had to spend an hour or so in the barn looking for wood to make the new rails. I need to spend some time tidying up in there, although I’m not sure whenever that might happen.

And what else?

We had another bad weather day today. A hanging cloud everywhere this morning, and this in mid-June too. All miserable, wet and depressing.

I’ve been working on the laptop too, and found another technical forum that looks quite helpful, so I’ve posted on there to ask whether anyone has any ideas about whether it might be possible to extract the data from this failed hard drive.

I doubt it, but it costs nothing to try.

Monday 15th June 2015 – IN THE 20 HOURS …

… between my going out late last night to take the stats and going out this evening for something to drink, we’ve had a mere 48.5mm of rainfall. and it’s been raining ever since as well.

That makes about 120mm in the last four days and that’s an astonishing amount. We’ll all be washed away if it carries on like this.

This morning after breakfast I carried on with the internet stuff that I hadn’t finished yesterday. I’ve made a list of all of the bands that have impressed me at the Fredericton Jazz and Blues Festivals that I’ve attended, traced as many as I could on the internet, and sent them a mail to ask them if there was a live concert recorded that I could use on the radio. This is something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while, and I’ve finally made a start. And already, I’ve had two positive replies.

While I was rooting around with all of that paperwork on Saturday I came across a mirror. I nice bulls-eye mirror with a brass surround rather like a ship’s porthole. Someone gave it to me when I had my first house in Winsford and it’s followed me around Europe ever since. It’s finally found a permanent home on the first floor landing here and good luck to it.

I’ve also extended the light circuit here. On the ground floor where my workshop is, there’s only one light – a 4-watt LED and that’s by the front door. The rear part of the house is quite dark and it’s not so easy to see there when one is working, especially in the gloomy conditions of the last few days.

There was a light with a long lead that I used when I was working in the bedroom before I installed the permanent lights there. So today, I stripped off the plug and wired it into the lighting circuit downstairs. That’s given me much more useful light down there, even if it is just a 1-watt LED.

I’ve found a pine off-cut that’s fine for the upper shelf over the beichstuhl. I cut that to shape and varnished both sides. Tomorrow morning early I’ll put the second coat on the shelf and then that will be ready to fit.

This afternoon I’ve been cutting and fitting plasterboard for the beichstuhl corner. I’ve fitted what I can fit and I’ll do the rest when the shelf is in position. Then, I can take out the worktop where the sink will be, drill it for the sink waste-pipe and the taps and then varnish it. While it’s drying, I’ll fit the mounting rails in the correct place and then install the worktop correctly.

Then, I can start on fitting the door frame.

-1

Sunday 14th June 2015 – THAT WAS AN EXCITING DAY …

… today, wasn’t it?

I’ve set foot out of the house twice, I think. And that’s no surprise because it’s been another thoroughly wet and miserable day today. In fact, had I not had to leave my bed to go for a ride on the porcelain horse at 09:15 I would probably still be in bed now, and I wouldn’t have lost one minute’s sleep worrying about it.

The day started as it meant to go on, with the gas in the little stove up here running out while I was making my coffee. What a way to start the day! And then I caught up a little with some work on the laptop.

From here I went on with the tidying up that I started yesterday and you’ll certainly notice a difference here today. There’s a huge area of empty nothingness now between the door and the back of the bed-settee. everything that was hanging around there has been moved into the bedroom or downstairs to be turned into rubbish.

This led on to another project too. I’ve always had printer issues here as you know, and I inherited an HP 2100-series all-in-one printer. No installation disk so I’ve had to configure it manually but that didn’t enable most of its functions.

Searching for something else on the internet (as you do) I came across a FAQ “I can’t find the installation disk for my HP 2180”. And underneath was the answer – “you can download it from ‘this link’ “. So off I went and sure enough, there it was. And I set to and downloaded it.

218mb, the drivers, which makes a mockery of the old days when I had a 40mb hard drive on my 386, or when I ran my taxi business in the mid-80s with an Apple II that ran everything off a floppy disk of 128kb.

8 hours it took to download, but it seems to work and who knows? I might even have a printer here for a while.

And so with that and the tidying up, you can’t say that the day was wasted.

-2

Saturday 13th June 2015 – I KNOW THAT I SAID …

… something about all of the things that I was going to do today. Well, none of that happened at all. I was sidetracked quite severely today.

A short while ago, while moving some stuff around downstairs, I came across a box marked “LPs”. And having you told you all a while ago about the little program that I have discovered that enables me to download tracks off the internet, I brought the box up here to go though it, see what LPs are in it, see what I already replaced with a CD and then see what is available on the internet for the LPs that I already own and which I dn’t have on CD.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … I lifted out the first dozen or so LPs, and that was all that there were. Underneath was a huge pile of paperwork. probably about half a tonne, I reckon.

It’s all stuff that I brought back from Brussels when I sold the apartment, and another pile of stuff that I had accumulated while I was living downstairs in the lean-to between 2007 and 2009. All of which I had completely forgotten.

So this morning, with a nice stiff mug of coffee I sat down and attacked version 2 of the European Paper Mountain.

By the time that I had finished, I reckon that about three quarters of it will be on its way to the great paper mill in the sky, and probably a lot more will follow it once I’ve closely examined it all. But I have found tons of stuff that is important, including all of the registration details for the Brian James car transporter that I bought a couple of years ago. As well as that, I’ve found a letter that I’ve been looking for for 3 years, a couple of instruction books that I need, and all of the Canada papers for my visit of 2012 and for my land at Mars Hill Road.

So, bingo!

Now, one thing leads to another as you all know, and once you start off, you’ll be surprised at just how many other things there are. Piling the waste paper into an IKEA bag, I decided to add another pile of waste paper – and then another etc etc.

And moving the box away from the wall left a space which was just the right size for the small set of shelves that Hans gave me last month when I was in Eching.

All of the food and cooking gear has now gone onto those shelves and at one swell foop this place looks a lot better than it did before (although there are still a hundred miles to go).

Now, I have a space next to the desk, so I moved my comfortable chair over there. I can now reach the external drives and the external DVD player simply by reaching out my hand. This led to a session of copying to my laptop the CDs that I bought in Canada and subsequently that have been sitting in a nice orderly pile on the desk. I’ve recorded 15 of them, which leaves just a mere 23 to go, but it’s a start.

This was hard work and so I closed my eyes for a little doze. and just as I was dropping gently into the arms of Morpheus, Rosemary rang for a chat. So there I was, for a good half hour.

I’d checked the clock at one moment and it was 17:57. Next time I looked, it was 20:18. Where did that 2 hours go? I must really have been engrossed in what I was doing.

But honestly, it doesn’t look any better in here. But then, I can’t do this tidying-up lark at all. All of this stuff heaved out or tidied up on shelves and the place just looks worse.

But you can see now why I didn’t do what I had intended to do today, and it wasn’t for lack of effort either.

Remember that yesterday I mentioned the rainstorm?

We had 40.5mm that fell in a three-hour period. And today, despite the good start, we ended up with another downpour in the evening and that gave us another 15mm.

That’s good news for me because my water tanks are full to overflowing. And as there are two tanks together – the rainwater falls into the top of the back tank, sinks to the bottom, passes through the connecting piece (which is at the bottom of the tanks) and into the front tank, with the overflow at the top of the front tank, then there’s a continual circulation of water in there and this is good for aeration. This means that it’s not just a stagnant pool of water.

And as I pull water from the bottom of the front tank, this is where the freshest water will be anyway. So a really heavy downpour like this is really good news for me.

-1

Friday 12th June 2015 – I DUNNO WHAT HAPPENED …

… to my motivation today. After crowing about it for so long yesterday, that was really tempting fate because all of my get-up-and-go had got up and gone.

I struggled to find the motivation to continue with this radio programme that I’ve been writing. I only managed about 500 words today and that took me right up until lunchtime.

And I had an early start this morning too. Up and about for the usual reasons, as anyone of my age will tell you, I reckoned that if it was after 07:00 I wouldn’t go back to bed. So there I was, eating my breakfast and drinking my coffee at all of 07:13.

I’d been on my travels too during the night. I was still at school but somehow had managed to find a pass to allow me to enter into the local University. The date was valid but the bar-code didn’t work so whenever I went there I had to rely on someone else around to open the door for me. However, it did occur to me that with the date being valid I could get the Secretariat to re-validate the bar-code. However that was running a risk that they might ask for identification and then I would lose the card and the “power” of admission. There was such a lot going on there that it was well-worth keeping the card going. Meals in the refectory were good value too and last night I was there at a table with a group of students. I said that I was going up there to fetch some food, and everyone else asked me to bring stuff back with me. By the time that I returned to my table I was loaded up like a Pioneer’s donkey and performing all kinds of balancing acts.

So after lunch and another crash out, I cut another piece of plasterboard. This needed to be shaped because it is the piece that fits around the air vent pipe, so it took quite a while. But once that was in place, I refitted the rails for the false ceiling. With different plasterboard, a different stud wall by the beichsthul and so on, two of the rails needed re-cutting and shaping and that took a while too.

Consequently it doesn’t look as if I’ve done very much today.

I had a good wash and went to St Eloy for the shopping. But there was nothing special to buy and I wasn’t there long.

I’m going for an early night now and tomorrow I might cut the second shelf for above the beichstuhl. Then I can finish the remaining walls around there and then remove the rubbish.

And I’m glad that I sleep in the bedroom now. There’s a terrific rainstorm crashing down on the roof of the house right now.

-2

Thursday 11th June 2015 – I DUNNO …

… what’s happened this last day or two, but today I’ve had another roaring day with the Radio programmes. In the space of two and a half hours, I sat down and dashed off 2000 words on taxation. And that includes having to read a taxation document written in official French and to translate it in my head as I’ve been going along.

So that’s not like me at all just recently given my lengthy spell of lethargy.

I had a very late night as well and struggled to leave my bed this morning. For the first half hour or so I was all ready to go back to bed, and that’s what makes this morning’s efforts all that more remarkable.

I’m glad that I chose light oak for the preparation of the surfaces of the oak worktops that I bought in Eching. I shudder to think how it might have turned out had I bought mid-oak or dark oak.

For the kitchen, I’m going to try to find a transparent surface treatment if I can. The stuff that I have is nothing like as good as this stuff that I bought.

But it has turned out rather well – you can’t deny the quality of the stuff. And here’s the worktop for the beichstuhl all in position with the fitted hinge on the lid covering the sawdust container and also with the bracket and peg to hold the lunette in position.

It’s all worked out rather well.

This afternoon I’ve been plasterboarding, spending much of the time trying to extract the plasterboard sheets from the back of the pile. But anyway, they are out and I’ve now plasterboarded the back wall and half of the wall to the left on the stud wall.

I’ve also fitted the shelf for the “bathroom books”

Tomorrow I’ll hopefully finish the plasterboarding in that corner and then I can start to empty more of the rubbish out of the shower room.

That will give me much more room to work.

-1

Wednesday 10th June 2015 – 08:45 …

… and there I was, downstairs working. And that’s not like me at all these days is it?

But I want to have this perishing beichstuhl finished sometime soon, like tomorrow for example, and it needs a coat of varnish on the underside and another coat on the top. And this varnish isn’t like the stuff that I normally buy that is ready for a second coat in 2 hours – this needs 24 hours.

So what I did first thing this morning was to put a coat of varnish on the underside of the worktop, and the second coat on the upper side last thing before knocking off. That should be dry enough tomorrow to install. Then I can crack on with the plasterboarding. And I mustn’t forget the locating peg on the lunette either.

In between times I finished off the additional notes for the next radio programmes and caught up with a couple of outstanding things that needed to be done.

We also had a most astonishing thunderstorm – 25mm of rain fell in about an hour and we had the most impressive thunder and lightning – an enormous one going off with an enormous crack right overhead here.

I didn’t get any of that (well I did – about a ton of it all over me) because the water filter had become blocked. So there I was in the middle of this rainstorm dismantling the entire system, removing the home-made filters and cleaning and renewing them. They were blocked too, and that’s happened since the last rainstorm. Probably all of the dust that had settled during the last week when we have had no rain at all.

I said that I had about a ton of water all over me. I had to dissemble the pipe between the two filters and the water that was stuck in the pipe came out with such a force, right over me and I got the lot.

Of course, by the time that I had rebuilt all of the filters the rain had stopped. That’s about normal, isn’t it? But I keep on meaning to build a spare filter system so that I can just swap them over and clean them off at my leisure. They always need cleaning or replacing at the most inopportune moments.

And we’ve had high winds all day too and the wind turbine has been going round like the clappers. I wish that it would do that every day.

Tuesday 9th June 2015 – I HAD QUITE A STRUGGLE …

… to leave the bed this morning. I had something of a late night and a restless sleep – I dunno what I’ve done but someone was clearly talking about me.

During breakfast I started to doze off again and for half an hour or so it was a real effort to stay awake, and at times I didn’t quite manage it.

However it must have done something because in the space of a couple of hours I dashed off the additional notes for the next batch of Radio Anglais programmes – 14kb of text without a pause. I’ll check it over tomorrow and make sure that it makes sense.

After lunch, during which I fell asleep again for 10 minutes, I cracked on with the beichstuhl.

I’ve now finished the worktop for the composting toilet as you can see. The hinges over where the sawdust container will be aren’t fixed yet but it gives you an idea as to how it will look.

The lunette over where the toilet drop will be isn’t going to be hinged. There will be a peg to locate it in position and it will slide out on rails to provide easy access for the drop container which can be lifted out quite easiiy for emptying into the compost bins.

It’s now been varnished too, and I do have to say that I don’t really like the colour. It’s called “light oak” but it isn’t all that light – at least not as light as I want. I should have gone for clear varnish but they didn’t have any.

While the varnish was drying, I found the pine offcut from the previous worktop. I’d varnished that because I intend to use it as a shelf over the beichstuhl.

I dunno about you, but in my bathroom I have a dozen or so of what I call “bathroom books” – books with little easy-to-read sections such as dictionaries of quotations, unusual facts, jokes, that kind of thing.

I like to have them handy as it gives me something to read. And being all in little segments, they are easy to pick up and put down.

I made a huge green-pepper-and-lentil curry this evening, enough for four nights. I’ve not been eating regularly and i need to do something about that. At least there are three more meals that only need heating up.

Monday 8th June 2015 – I THINK …

… that I am going to have to find a new top for my old Black and Decker workmate. I thought that the circular saw was making hard work of that final cut on the top of the beichstuhl this evening.

It’s a fine old workmate too – getting on for 30 years old. Nerina bought it for me in the days when Black and Decker stuff was good, when I was planning on making some fitted wardrobes at Gainsborough Road. She reckoned that it might motivate me to do them, and I did too!

It’s been around Europe with me on all kinds of construction sites and it’s outlived a couple of more modern reincarnations which have failed to last the pace.

Yes, I’ve been working again. Cutting out and smoothing out the lunette in the top of the beichstuhl, and then cutting out the lid for the sawdust container.

It”s all been sanded down and fitted with reinforcing struts – not that it needs them but I’d look pretty silly if it were to. I can finish it off tomorrow and give it the first coat of wood treatment

Apart from that, I spent the morning on the laptop talking to Acer. seeing as I’ve been having some success about various matters on various forums, I attacked Acer today about my new laptop which is painfully slow with Windows 8.1.

The official helpdesk guy was no help at all but the self-help forum came up trumps. I was given a whole list of things to switch off and to delete, and told where and how I can reduce screen graphics to a minimum. That has certainly bumped up the speed and it’s roaring along now like it ought to do.

Even more interestingly, upgrading the RAM from 2GB to 8GB is staightforward. It’s standard DRAM 3 stocked everywhere and someone is going to find a plan of how to fit it. This one is not like the other ACER Aspire laptops with the service hatch underneath – you need to take the case right apart to get into it.

Rosemary rang up for a chat, and I had an interesting chat with a cold caller. He didn’t understand my lifestyle at all – it made no sense to him whatsoever

So tomorrow I’ll continue in the shower room? We’re are advancing quite slowly, but advancing all the same.

And with today’s water temperature in the solar shower at 33°C and the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater where all of the excess solar energy goes being over 70°C when I knocked off, 5 litres out of the latter into the former gave me a glorious solar shower to finish off the day.

Sunday 7th June 2015 – IT’S SUNDAY …

… and that’s a Day of Rest of course.

I’ve had a day in doing quite a lot of nothing at all. I had a play around with that 3D program that I mess about with sometimes, and I’ve made an astounding discovery today. The animation manoeuvres are somewhat limited due to the restricted movements of the limbs, but I’ve discovered that there is a way of overriding the stops and now the world really is my oyster.

While the cloud was busy unloading itself I did the next lot of rock music programmes for Radio Anglais. The live programme isn’t as good as I would like it to be, but I can’t remember where I am at the moment and I won’t get my notes back from the radio station until the end of the month. Consequently I’ve had to invent another live concert from some stuff that I had lying around. The joins in the programme are fairly evident despite my attempts to hide them by overdubbing some extra applause, but then you can’t have everything, I suppose.

And so it’s back to work tomorrow. I’ll go for an early night in that case.

Friday 5th June 2015 – CALIBURN IS BACK

I told you the other day that I had had a phone call to say that Caliburn was ready. And so today, Liz came to pick me up and we cleared off down to St Gervais to rescue him.

I had set the alarm for 07:30 as usual but I was wide awake, up and about at 07:00 without any prompting. I had an early breakfast, I remembered to put the money out for the boulangère and I was good and ready well before 09:00 when Liz was due. I walked down to the end of the lane to meet her.

The bill for Caliburn came to €370, most of which was for a new caliper. And I will say that I have never had brakes as good as this, not even when Caliburn was brand new. This was money well spent, and it makes a total mockery of the €2500 estimate that I had from Barrat Ford of Montlucon.

Liz and I went for a coffee afterwards, where we bumped into someone whom I knew from Sauret football club. We had a lengthy chat about football, as you might expected, but one thing that I did notice was that there were 10 or so people in the bar there and they were all totally pickled – at 10:15 in the morning. It was all quite amusing, not at all aggressive as you might find in the UK, and sitting out on the terrace in the glorious sunshine watching the world go by, you couldn’t be anywhere else except in France. It’s a feeling that you can’t explain to anyone who has never spent any length of time here.

I went round to Rosemary’s afterwards to see how she was getting on. Instead of going by the main road, I went by the old road round the back of St Gervais down the Gorge de la Sioule to Chateauneuf les Bains and then along the road through the gorge to the Pont de Menat. That’s one of the most beautiful roads in the whole of France, I reckon.

We had a good chat and Rosemary even made lunch which was very nice of her. I went off later to do my shopping and was back here by the end of the afternoon.

I’ve spent the evening making a database of all of the music that I’ve played on the rock programmes. This had been getting out of hand so with the new laptop I’ve downloaded an SQL program and I’ve been busy trying to remember everything that I learned when I did my Diploma in Computing at University. You’ve no idea how much I’ve forgotten – or maybe you have. After all, I’m not getting any younger.

As well as that, I’ve been extracting soundbytes from the old time radio programmes that I’ve been downloading. I need to build up my library to use in the rock programme for my “studio guests”

I’ve had the fan on all evening too. The temperature up here reached 33°C this afternoon and outside, it was 36°C at one time. This means that it’s either going to snow tomorrow or else we are going to have a terrific thunderstorm.

Thursday 4th June 2015 – IF THERE WERE ANY DOUBTS …

… about those worktops being made of oak, you just ask the jigsaw.

The thing gave up after about 6 inches – a broken blade being the issue here. Terry had given me a little cheap low-powered one that I tried, but that was a thankless task. There wasn’t enough power to work the blade properly and we ended up with a scorched surface where the heat from the blade had singed the wood. In the end, the ancient Scorpion electric saw was put to use and although that struggled a little, it did the job.

So after I don’t know how long, the other worktop for the top of the beichstuhl was cut to shape, and it’s a much better fit than the first effort, and looks so much nicer too.

To cut out the trap for the container of the beichstuhl I resorted to the circular saw, trimming off with the Scorpion, and that’s also a much better job than the previous one

To cut out the hole, I had to trace a line around the lunette of the toilet seat, drill out the angles and then go and find my box of jigsaw blades – no easy task. However I did eventually find them and I’ve cut out the hole (3 blades later). It needs trimming off but that’s a job for tomorrow as it was quite late when I knocked off.

I had a late start – that’s why nothing was finished. I’ve been working on the radio programmes – in particular the rock programmes – for Radio Anglais this morning. I need to push on and try my best to get ahead while I am still here. I’ll be off to Canada before too long. Time is closing in.

And what a gorgeous day today. Not a cloud in the sky, 33.3°C temperature, water in the solar shower at 38.5°C and the temperature in the dump load going off the scale at 14:00. In the end I had to drain out 10 litres of hot water and put in 10 litres of cold in an effort to keep the temperature manageable.

It’s going to be like this for the weekend too apparently. That will be nice.

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 – THOSE OAK WORKTOPS …

… that I bought in Eching the other week and which I doubted were oak due to their astonishingly good price, they are indeed certainly oak, or something very much like it. You just ask my Ryobi circular saw. The poor thing has gone to lie down in a darkened room to recover, and I had to fetch out the 650-wattmains-powered circular saw.

Even that struggled, but eventually it cut the worktop as required and we could all breathe a sigh of relief.

As for trimming off the corners, I didn’t even think about the Ryobi – I just grabbed the 400-watt mains jigsaw and after much binding in the marsh, it managed to do the job.

Yes, I’ve discovered a little bit of motivation today and I’ve been out working. Cutting the worktop for the bathroom and, as an aside, using the off-cut as the top of the beichstuhl to replace the pine plank that’s there. I may as well go for co-ordination while I’m at it.

This is how the bathroom will look when it’s finished, whenever that might be.

I’m not going for an inset sink, following my catastrophe a while back. This type of sink, a mounted sink, will be just as good and will keep the strength and rigidity of the worktop, something that was sadly lacking with the previous one.

I will however need to lower the mounting rails by 15 cms so that the top of the sink is at a consistent height.

In other news, I’ve found (at long last) a decent ripper for downloading streams from popular video and music channels on the internet. It’s offered as an add-on for my web browser and came on line on 15th April.

My plan with this is simple. I have about a thousand LPs from the good old days and it has been my intention to copy them to *.mp3. I’ve even bought a USB turntable for just that purpose. However, it takes far too long to do that and all of the setting up that you need to do and the editing afterwards, it’s a never-ending task.

What I’m planning to do is to download the albums corresponding to those that I already own and have paid for. That way, there won’t be a royalty or copyright issue and that way I can bring myself up to date. I’m currently listening to one album that I’ve downloaded – Neil Young’s Ragged Glory – probably the best rock album that Neil Young has ever made – a real powerhouse album and one that I haven’t played for … ooohhh … it’s 15 years since I last had my real hi-fi set up.

As well as that, I had a lovely solar shower today. And a sign of the times is that it wasn’t a heated shower either. Just the sun – that’s all it took to bring the water up to 37°C and it was glorious. We had that much sun that the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater went off the temperature scale (over 70°C) in mid afternoon and it’s still there even now.

Now I’m all clean and ready for bed. But not before I tell you about my travels last night. I was back playing in groups again (we had this the other night, remember?) and the guy with whom I mostly played and I were trying to get a band together. We were however woefully short of equipment and people kept telling us to ‘go and see so-and-so – he has piles of stuff that he will lend you that he has spare”. And everyone that people mentioned were people with whom we had played all those years ago but we had “moved them on” for various reasons. The irony was that we were the ones struggling and they had all gone on to make it big.

And we had a few young groupies too. They all lived in a big heap under a continental quilt and there was a pile of loose underwear floating around. I kept asking them wbout each piece – to whom it belonged, all that kind of thing. But no-one owned up to anything so I threatened to have them all out of bed and do an identity parade.

I know that I’ve said it before … "and you will say it again" – ed … but I wish that my real life was even half as exciting as what goes on when I am deep in the arms of Morpheus.

-1

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 – IT WAS HARD …

… to get out of bed this morning. The early start yesterday plus a very late night last night didn’t do much good for my rest, and I was as lethargic as the guy yesterday in the garage.

I was in the middle of doing something last night when I finally went to bed and so after a leisurely start to the day I had to carry on. It took far, far longer that I intended to do it – in fact it took me almost to lunchtime and that was rather a waste of a morning.

And Terry rang up. Did I fancy a trip to Brico Depot? I can’t go anywhere right now as I’m awaiting a phone call from the garage to tell me that Caliburn is ready. But Brico Depot does have something special in the arrivages this week. I only have one decent ladder, and it’s not very long. But this week Brico Depot is selling three-plan 8-metre aluminium ladders at just €99 and so I asked Terry if he wouldn’t mind picking one up.

And now, I have a nice new big ladder (or I will do the next time I go round to Sauret-Besserve).

After lunch, seeing how beautiful it was and there was water at 64°C in the home-made 12 volt immersion heater, so I did a huge load of washing. It needs to be done, of course, and it gave me an opportunity to have another little relax this afternoon.

But I really ought to be working – I can’t keep wasting time like this. And so I’m going to have an early night and a decent sleep and I’ll hopefully get a good start in the morning.

EPIC HALL

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