Sunday 25th July 2010 – Coming back …

… from Liz and Terry’s this evening, I was just crossing over the Font Nanaud as the sun was setting. I stopped and took a few photos, as is my wont, and while most of them turned out quite well, this one is in fact quite spectacular.

I had to take it on a very fast shutter so as to avoid any blur or interference and the colours have come out perfectly, which is quite a surprise. I’m impressed with this.

I’d been round there this evening to organise our radio programme for the next few weeks. We will be talking about this auto-entrepreneur system but seeing as we only have enough information for three weeks we will also be doing something about playing football in the region. I reckon that there are loads of expats living in the area dying to integrate and not sure how – and football is a universal language.

So that’s what I was doing this morning and in the early part of the afternoon – preparation. later on I went to the brocante at Youx – quite a big one too as it happens. I bought something that indicated on it that it was 12-volt current in and 230 volt current out at 80 watts – ideal for Caliburn. But it wasn’t half a Stone-Age appliance. We started off at €10 but I got it knocked down to €3 in the end.

At Terry’s we had a play with it. We put 12 volts into it – and got nothing out. And Terry doubts that it is what it says that it is on the label. It’s not like any inverter he has ever seen.

So I dunno. I’ll add it to the stuff to be played with at a later date.

-4

Saturday 24th July 2010 – One thing that is interesting about walking …

… down which you normally drive is that you get to see plenty of things that you would otherwise miss. I mean – I’ve never seen this sign before in St Eloy les Mines and I certainly would have remembered it had I done so.

Most of St Eloy les Mines was closed off this afternoon due to one of these local street market thingies and so after going to LIDL, washing Caliburn (yes, I’ve given Caliburn a good wash today) and going to Carrefour I had a wander round. But there was nothing particularly to catch my attention.

There are two shops recently opened here – Gamme Vert and Cheze, and I took the opportunity to have a good poke around. They both have a pile of things that would come in useful and save me having to drive to Commentry or Montlucon so often. I took quite a note.

Shopping though was boring. I bought nothing out of the ordinary, nothing exciting at all. I suppose that it’s me all stuck in a rut at the moment. I ought to be getting out more often. It would probably do me good.

-3

Friday 23rd July 2010 – I went downstairs this morning …

… and found a mouse dying in the kitchen! My cooking isn’t that bad, you know. Anyway, I heaved it outside to join into the food chain and waited for Terry. He had gone off on a tour of sawmills to find some of the specially-shaped wood for hanging these tiles and so I carried on with some weeding.

When Terry turned up he didn’t have the wood because it’s no longer sold. Apparently it’s a fire risk but having seen last year how quickly ordinary household products catch fire some kind of fire restriction is totally unnecessary.

We started to cut the laths and voltige to cover this roof and made a start on fitting the tiles. With good weather we could have fixed them all on but it was not to be. We were having rainstorms every 10 minutes and they kept on driving us off the roof into shelter.

After Terry went home I sowed some more beans and peas and that really was my day. Tomorrow is shopping, Sunday is rest and then we are back at it on Monday.

-2

Thursday 22nd July 2010 – It was a much better day today.

Only 18.5mm of rain. But this morning was far too wet to go up onto the roof and so instead we went to Montlucon to look at some trailers and so on.

The afternoon was still rather damp so Terry took some wood home to cut and I did some gardening. I’ve sown some more peas, beans, chicory and carrots, as well as doing some weeding in front of the house. And that’s about it, really.

In other news, TNS’s good win has been emulated by Bangor City who beat Honka Espoo of Finland in the Europa (formerly UEFA) Cup to progress to the 3rd round of the tournament where they will meet Maritimo of Portugal. I can’t think that it has ever happened before that two Welsh football clubs have reached the 3rd Round of their respective European tournaments in the same season. In fact I have to think long and hard about the last time that just one Welsh Club did. TNS’s win drew the Welsh Premier League to within a fraction of a seeded place in next year’s series of matches and maybe Bangor’s victory might be sufficient to ensure it. The Welsh Premier League clubs have never yet been seeded at all in the draw for the opening matches so history may well be made next season.

-2

Wednesday 21st July 2010 – No solar shower today!

And no automatic hot water either. What we did have was 39mm of rain! And it’s still p155ing down outside and I don’t think that it’s ever going to stop.

Having rerouted the guttering the water was coming down the verandah roof at such a speed that it was shooting over the top of the guttering. Putting a slate up to block the flow caused the guttering to overflow. But the water butts are full so that is something.

We made great progress with this roof today until about 15;30 when the rain started. But it wasn’t the rain that stopped us, it was the lightning. When you are working on a metal scaffolding and climbing up and down an aluminium ladder then lightning is the last thing that you want. And so we tidied up and called it a day.

But that wasn’t all of it. About half an hour later Lieneke came round in a panic. A rock had fallen off the wall and through one of the tiles on her bathroom roof and her bathroom was flooded in the storm. And so there I was in the pouring rain wrestling with the left-over roofing sheets from my barn, getting them up onto her bathroom roof. In the thunder and lightning I might add.

So now I’m soaking wet and I’ve run out of dry clothes.

Tuesday 20th July 2010 – I’m just thoroughly exhausted right now.

Terry rang me at just after 08:00 to make sure that I was awake – he was just setting out. And it was 20:10 when I came back into the house this evening.

This roof that we are fixing is turning out to be a right horror story. We’ve been cutting out the side beams today and fixing extensions to them so that we can make an overhang to stop the water penetrating into the roof. At least we were – until we discovered that the principal beam had rotted away. It’s full of insect holes – and I mean the real galleries rather than plain ordinary and common-or-garden woodworm but at the outside end there was simply nothing at all to inspect.

So we ended up having to take a 4.5 metre beam, cut a load of lets into it for the chevrons to fit into, then drag it up the scaffolding on the ladder, fit it under the roof, turn and pivot it into position, hold it up while we made a few adjustments, whack it in with a hammer and then cut some stud-iron into long bolt-shaped pieces to bolt everything together. And all of that into an attic where the OUTSIDE temperature was 35°C. God knows what the temperature was inside that roof and I have never sweated so much in all my life.

This roof is all thoroughly rotten and the only reason it’s still standing up is because the woodworm are all holding hands in the beams. If they let go then we will all be goosed. Looking under the eaves you can see that the chevrons are just crumbling away. Patching it up is a major mistake because what will then happen is that in the first strong gale or heavy snowfall all of the strains and stresses in the roof will come hard up against the solid wood that has been fitted, the flexing will stop dramatically and all of the old wood will just shear off. The only solution really is to strip the whole lot off – every last piece – and start from scratch but for that you will get no change out of €20,000.

It’s comforting me quite a lot actually because I had always thought of my house as being something of a ruin. Yet compared to a few houses that I’ve seen just recently it’s in comparatively good condition all things being considered.

And another thing too – seeing the conditions in which a few other nouveaux arrivants are living, then my aspirations for my house and the long-term plans I have for it will make it into something quite luxurious. At the moment things aren’t so hot (although my attic is quite a little palace comparatively-speaking, and that’s certainly hot right at the moment) but I’m ripping up and discarding, without any hesitation at all, some situations that others are finding to be quite acceptable. I suppose that I really DO have some expensive tastes after all. What with one thing and another, all of this is cheering me up!

But once that had finished I did some more work on my guttering and water filters and they are all sealed up. Heavy rain is forecast for tomorrow and I need to catch all of the rain that I can.

And in other news, I’ve been severely critical in the past about TNS – or The New Saints – or They’ve No Support – a football team in the Welsh Premier League that is in many respects just one man’s ambition and is hawked around from town to town in North-East Wales. The club qualified for European competition (the Champions’ League in fact) at the end of last season and tonight they thrashed Bohemians of Ireland 4-0 to reach the 3rd Qualifying Round and a match against Anderlecht of Belgium. So good luck to them from a long-time critic.

-1

Monday 19th July 2010 – There was no conversation group today …

… so Clotilde invited a couple of us round for a chat and some snacks, which was very nice of her. Of course Strawberry Moose came along too to meet some of his admirers.

Clotilde’s house is gorgeous but it’s really discouraging to hear her say that it took 46 years to get it into the condition that it’s in today. And she showed us a photo of how it was when she bought it – and it really was a right tip too.

On the way down to Clotilde’s, I went the long way round with my new camera via the birdwatching centre at the back of St Gervais d’Auvergne seeing as how it was a beautiful early evening. This as you know is my favourite photography spot.

Here’s a beautiful view of the Gorge de la Sioule just down there in the centre of the photograph and over away to the left is the church at Sauret Besserve

I wanted to take a couple of photos of the view from there – a view which you all know is one of the best in the whole of France – and see how the new camera performs in the excellent weather conditions.

This is a close-up of the radio antenna on the Puy-de-Dome – a little bit of crop-and-enlarge from a full-size image. We have a new high-quality lens and I was keen to see how that performed too.

But that wasn’t all that was exciting about my little visit to the centre ornithologique this evening. As I was there this evening, the moon rose. Quite early for once, I know, and so I gave it a little go with the new lens too.

Quite honestly, this photo couldn’t have come out much better, could it?

All in all, I’m well-impressed with my new camera and lens. And quite rightly so, considering the money that I’ve spent on it.

Back at Pooh Corner this morning, Terry has started on Lieneke’s roof and I’ve been roped in to help. That’s going to be the plan for the next few weeks I suppose. And her roof is a right mess – far worse than mine was – and only patching a part of it is not going to be a long-term solution, for the more that you rip off the more damage that you find.

The chimney is leaning quite ominously too and I don’t like the look of it.

But it was hot up there on that roof today and my being stung by a wasp didn’t help matters much. 30-odd years since I was last stung by a wasp and now it’s twice in as many weeks.

And we’ve set a couple of records today. A total of 317 amp-hours on the two banks in the house will take some matching. And 44 degrees in the solar heat exchanger and 42.5 in the electric heater – those figures are impressive too. I’ve been thinking about the electric water heater – a 25-litre oil drum would do the job but an old milk churn with lid would be even better. I need to search the brocantes.

But at Clotilde’s this evening I did hear a story about a man who ran some cold water slowly onto his tin roof and took a shower underneath the downspout – and burnt himself, the water was so hot. And here I am, just having fitted about 150 sq m of metal roof on my barn. I’d love to try that out!

Sunday 18th July 2010 – I have been severely critical …

…“What, you, Eric? Shurely shome mishtake” – ed … about the way that people in North America treat their heritage. And not just on the odd occasion either. And not just in one country, as a matter of fact. However I do recognise that there are some people who are making a valiant effort.

I am ashamed to say that in my own neck of the woods the lack of interest in culture and heritage and all of this is just as apparent as it is in North America. And that is just what is on public view. There is much more that is going on behind closed (and locked doors) that the public never has the opportunity to see.

I’ve been on my travels today and one of the places I visited was the Fete des Myrtilles at St Julien-la-Geneste.

There was an art exhibition taking place in the church and Marianne the local journalist was there to photograph it. She blagged her way into the church tower to take a photo of the exhibition and asked me whether I would like to go – she knows that I have an interest in boldly going where the hand of man has never set foot.

And so up in the tower it was – and this was the sight that greeted me. I know that Medieval religious art is two-a-penny and not usually particularly good but that is no reason in my opinion to just chuck it in a corner out of the way where no-one is ever likely to go and just leave it there to fester, to let rats and mice make a nest for it and when in 100 years time everyone has forgotten all about it, quietly burn it somewhere in a lonely field.

According to Marianne it is something to do with the Chemin de la Croix which is something that means nothing to me but seems to be of some kind of significance. Marianne was pretty busy so I didn’t have time to ask her but I’m seeing her at a meeting tomorrow night and so I will interrogate her.

But it appals me how people can treat significant objects in this despicable fashion . Yes, I’m having another “Lancaster Bomber” moment, aren’t I?

Things weren’t any better up in the top of the tower either. I took the opportunity to shin up the rickety wooden ladder and force the trapdoor so that I could go into the bell housing. And I bet no-one had been up there for fifty years either.

There were three bells in the belfry and the original pulling gear was all there, although it looked as if it had been disconnected for a hundred years.

And so we had one bell which was electrically connected to chime the hours and half-hours, although Terry did ask me how they managed in view of the frequent power cuts that they have around here.

The second, which was slightly smaller, was still hanging but disconnected and the third, the smallest of the trio, had been taken down and just flung in a corner where it sat.

Of course, just as I stuck my head into the bell housing, the clock chimed half-past three.
“I bet Marianne did that on purpose” said Terry.
“I don’t know why you are complaining” said Marianne. “You should be grateful that it wasn’t twelve o’clock”.

It’s nice to have friends.

You may remember that we were here a few years ago and were entertained by a guy from Canada who played the bagpipes and his friend who played the drums. They were back here again today, bringing their bagpipes and drums with them and they entertained the crowd for a short while.

Hardly a traditional French entertainment, you might think, but this is part of the beauty of living here. There are all kinds of people from all over the place living here and they have brought their cultures with them.

That wasn’t all of the excitement either. This car was parked up around the back of the church and so I went for a closer look, and it took me quite by surprise because it’s a comparatively rare car and I didn’t expect to see one here.

It’s a Renault Novaquatre, a model that was built for just a couple of years. Launched in the Autumn of 1937, it was never a popular car. Few were made and production ground to a halt in the summer of 1940 when the Renault factory was taken over by the Germans, and never restarted after the war.

Back home, I helped Lieneke with her gardening for a while and then Terry and Liz came round for the scaffolding. They invited me back for tea which was nice of them and as Liz had baked vegan ginger cake I gratefully accepted. I was even given a doggy bag!

But earlier in the day I’d been to the brocante at Le Quartier. I had had a good day there, spending a whole €10:50 on a map of the French railway system in 1962, a hold-down switch for my doorbell, a kind-of lance for weed control, a ladle for the composting toilet and – biggest prize of all – a heavy-duty electric paint sprayer. Jerome from Pionsat’s 3rd XI was there too and we had a good chat.

But I’m on the warpath again about these paintings.

-3

Saturday 17th July 2010 – I’ve not done much today

After having had to work on a Bank Holiday and on the odd Sunday just recently I’ve been taking it easy.

A leisurely morning entering the stats into the computer and then at lunchtime going to Commentry for shopping. Aldi produced s few tins of metal paint to replace the one we used on the caravan chassis a few weeks ago and Centrakor – one of the cheapo shops produced a shower curtain. But as usual the other cheap shop – Les Bonnes Affaires – produced the goods – a huge pile of plastic storage containers at 10 for €1 so I bought 30 of them. And then I can sort out all my nails and screws properly.

Most of the day was miserable and it didn’t lighten up until late afternoon. The water didn’t get hot enough for a solar shower and the electric water heater didn’t click in. But never mind.

But while doing the statistics it was interesting to see the figures of solar energy received for the first day that the automatic heater ran. Bank 1 gave an impressive 153.3 amp-hours and bank 2 gave a record 130.7. So now that I have somewhere to dump all of the electricity then you can see that my system is capable of generating almost 285 amp-hours of electricity – that’s over 3KwH – in a good day. And I’m quite pleased with that. Next task is to put up the remaining wind turbine. That should be even more impressive.

Friday 16th July 2010 – I’ve made a couple of changes …

… to the automatic water heater. First thing was to fit the top of the element (where all of the wires are) into a watertight box so that the risk of them being splashed with water is minimised.

There’s also a little LED warning light fitted to tell me when the diverter is working and current is reaching the element.

I’ve added a double-keel to the pontoon as well. The element protrudes 19cms below the pontoon so I fitted a keel of 20cms, 1 each side of the element, so that if the water level drops the element won’t ground out and cause a short circuit.

Finally, I’ve fitted a 50-amp fuse on the control board, just in case anything extraordinary happens.

After that I cleared off some weeds and brambles from the side of the lean-to that faces down the garden. Once they had been cleared I laid down a few pallets and started bringing the cut wood out of the lean-to and stacking it on the pallets. I need to move this wood as I want to put the composting toilet there – I need the space where that currently is for other purposes.

But I didn’t do that for long as Lieneke arrived and started to clear out her field that is next to mine. It’s been a bit of a mess for years but now she’s started on it and so I felt obliged to join in on my side of the fence.

I’ve moved much of the wood from here and stacked it around the back of the barn. And then I pulled up the weeds nettles and brambles that were stuck in the wall. Lieneke needed a hand to move a huge load of barbed wire that she had found in her meadow and there was so much of that that it took quite a while.

But you’ll also notice that I’ve put the left-hand gate back on its hinges, and doing that was important. One of the side effects of clearing the weeds and brambles is that there is now a clear shot from the lane down to where I have my shower. And of course I don’t want to give any of the locals an inferiority complex

So for that reason, until I can get a shower curtain I’ll be taking my solar showers behind the gate.

But I need to move the composting toilet tomorrow. I can’t now use it where it is at the moment.

-1

Thursday 15th July 2010 – After about almost a year …

… of waiting to fix that downpipe on the side of the house and it being in position for just a couple of weeks, I took it down today.

There were two reasons for that –
firstly – all of the rainwater from the house and the lean-to are just running off down the lane and turning the place into a quagmire
secondly – the water situation is starting to become a little tight- I reckon I have about 150 litres or so left.
And when it rains, the 6.5 sq.m of verandah roof doesn’t catch all that much – 100 litres of water is about 15mm of rain. But add to that the footprint of the lean-to – 5m x 1.8m, or 9 sq.m, then the 100 litres of water becomes 6mm of rain. And then add that to the side of the house roof – with its footprint of 5.3m x 3.5m or just over 18.5 sq m then the 100 litres of water becomes just under 3mm of rain.

Sitting here the other day watching the rain filling up that water butt by the barn with all of the water off the barn roof has given me some new ideas which I put into action.

What I did was to rip off all of the guttering on the lean-to and to replace it so that it slopes to the right rather than the left. The guttering now captures all of the water off the lean-to and now I can replenish my water supply more quickly – always of course assuming that it’s ever going to rain again.

This morning though I removed all of the wood from off the old vegetable patch at the side of the barn – all that we ripped off the one side of the roof. 3 of the beams are useless and will have to be cut up for firewood but of the others some of the wood can be salvaged and I might start shortly on the greenhouse, using the old beams as a frame.

While I was at it, and with the old vegetable patch now being clear of wood, I set to work on that with a vengeance.

I spent a pleasant hour or two pulling out all of the weeds that were growing over the stone wall and now you can actually see it, for the first time since I don’t know when. This place is starting to tidy itself up a bit and that’s a pleasant change.

The automatic electric water heater is working too. It ran for almost three hours today and I put a thermometer in to see what the temperature was doing. 37°C the water reached in that time so not much danger of the sytem melting down, although if I make a sealed circuit with a smaller tank I shall either fit a thermal cut-out of have an expansion tank of some description. But it’s still impressive all the same.

Ironically the water in the solar water heater reached a lovely 44°C this evening and so I had a nice steamy shower.

What with one thing and another things are starting to get quite luxurious around here!

Wednesday 14th July 2010 – Today will go down in history!

I’ve finally fitted the most important piece in the jigsaw of my electrical system here (the wind turbine notwithstanding) and that it the electric water-heating mechanism.

How my system works at the moment is that there are two banks each of three solar panels and each bank is connected to the batteries via a charge controller. The two controllers are set up differently so that one cuts of when the batteries reach 14.1 volts and the other one cuts out when the batteries reach 14.15 volts. They both cut back in when the battery level drops to 13.4 volts or so. This avoids any overcharging of the batteries.

You can tell when the batteries are fully charged by the difference in solar charge received by each of the banks. If there’s a substantial difference then that will be because the one set at a lower charge will have cut out, just leaving the second one running. And if I have the fridge working then sometimes the difference can be substantial. On the 8th July for example one bank recorded 37.7 amp-hours whereas the other recorded 157.3 amp-hours, almost 2 kilowatt-hours of charge.

You can see therefore from this that there can be times when an enormous amount of solar energy is totally wasted. So what you can do is to rig up a system whereby once the batteries are fully-charged then instead of the system shutting down, all of the unwanted power is diverted into some kind of “dump load”.

I’ve had plans for this for ages and a while ago I bought some 12-volt water heater elements. And today, even though it’s been a Bank Holiday and I don’t normally work, I’ve rigged up an old galvanised 50-litre ash can as a kind of ad-hoc immersion heater.

It’s going to have to be developed further of course. Electric elements floating around on wooden pontoons in open-topped galvanised ash cans full of water right close to the main access in the house is a recipe for some kind of disaster sooner or later and one of the reasons why I’ve been holding off from fitting this dump load is because I’ve been looking for some kind of more substantial and correct recipient but in the absence of anything more positive I can’t be waiting for ever. The piazzo buzzer on there by the way is to let me know when the circuit opens up

The proof of the pudding is of course in the eating and now that this system is wired in I can put a 12-volt clock in line to tell me how long the circuit is open.

And so while the clock on the right (from a Renault Clio by the way) keeps the time, the one on the left (from a Vauxhall Cavalier) tells me how long I’ve been heating the water.

1h20 (it was about 1h35 by the time it finished) may not seem a lot to anybody and the water didn’t get all that hot but on day one with 50 litres of water in what is effectively a large open bucket – that has to be progress. Just imagine that in a 50-litre sealed tank with loads of insulation around it.

And I had a visitor this afternoon – a guy who I met the other day and wanted to discuss solar panels and wind turbines. He was here for about three hours and we had quite a lengthy chat.

And that’s not the only visitor I had today either. The windows up here are wide open and there’s this lovely gale blowing right through here, and it’s just blown this huge, enormous green thing that looks like a cricket right into the attic. We had quite a chase around the place and eventually I caught him in a plastic box and threw him back outside.

Tuesday 13th July 2010 – Some people have all the luck

Terry had a job to do this morning and he needed a hand, so seeing as I owe him God knows how many days’ work I went along to help.

And where we ended up was at a house right on the edge of the Gorges de la Sioule – the cleft in the Combrailles that runs from South-West to North-East.

The view is certainly spectacular from here, that’s for sure and I wouldn’t mind a little field right up there at the back to build my log cabin.

And back home I started work on part one of the patent water filter system (and I would have done part two too but Terry forgot the puzzolane). Part one consists of a length of 40mm downspout, a reduction plate from 40mm to 100mm, a length of 100mm pipe, another reduction plate back to 40mm, a section from an old stainless steel mesh kitchen strainer and another length of 40mm pipe into the water butts. This first filter takes the place of the sump (the stones and the like sink to the bottom of the 100mm pipe) and the mesh filter inside the water butt.

You can see what I mean in the photo just here. Filter n°1 is the one on the right-hand side. The mesh is to the left of the filter so anything that I don’t want to drop into the tank will stay in the section of 100mm pipe – the grey stuff.

To the left of filter n°1 is another grey section of 100mm pipe. That will be filter n°2. It’s constructed in the same way as filter n°1 except that it will be filled with puzzolane and there will be stainless steel mesh at either end. The purpose of that will be to to keep the puzzolane in the section of 100mm pipe and that will be the water filter.

I’m eventually going to make up two sections of these so that I can change them and clean them. Cleaning by the way will be quite easy – you just put a pressure hose to blow backwards and that will move all of the debris out.

Of course the idea of using puzzolane is not new. The Romans were the first recorded users of puzzolane for filtration purposes (they also used it as a base for Roman concrete) but nature makes quite good use of it too – Volvic water from just down the road from here uses natural puzzolane seams to naturally filter the water that rises up from the water table. That’s ground water of course – and I’m using rain water so I bet mine will be cleaner than theirs.

Tonight I went into Pionsat for the annual fireworks display. And that was nothing much to write home about although it is nice to go out. But it did remind me of Guy Fawkes’ Night 1980 when I was a taxi driver in Crewe. There was a company in Crewe at that time called “Dial A Car” and they had two vehicles, a Vauxhall Victor Transcontinental Estate that was driven by one driver, and he had only one speed and that was “flat out everywhere”. The other car was an absolutely ancient and derelict Ford Zephyr. That night around Crewe these two cars became affectionately known as “Dial A Rocket” and “Dial A Banger”.

-9

Monday 12th July 2010 – No solar shower tonight!

And so the run stops at 8 consecutive evenings. But then again I’m not complaining because today it rained. The first time for what seems like ever and we had 8.5mm of the stuff. My plants needed that, and so did my water butts. Things are getting a little low here.

So this morning after a lie-in I was catching up on my websites until lunchtime. And then Terry came round to see Lieneke about this work that needed doing and so I took the opportunity of him moving his tractor to another place on the hardstanding, dragging out the trailer and loading all of the kwikstage scaffolding onto it.

And that really was my day. Nothing exciting at all. But tomorrow I have to help Terry with a barn door which means a start at … gulp … 08:00. Does that time actually exist anywhere?

-1

Sunday 11th July 2010 – Now how weird is this?

I’ve had one of those days today that just became more and more weird as it drew on.

I went to Espinasse this afternoon for the local fete and as far as I was concerned it was a fete worse than death.

it got off to a bad start in my opinion before the day even started. We had the typical defilé as you might expect, but whoever heard of a village fete here in the Combrailles where there wasn’t even a hint of a brocante? The Combrailles is the brocante capital of the world and the locals will vider their greniers at the drop of a hat. All we had today was a brocan’t, and that’s not on at all.

Highlight was the Irish musicians who came on stage at 18:00.

Now I bet you that you can go into any Irish pub anywhere in the whole wide world, or any folk night anywhere in any English-speaking area of the world, or anywhere wherever any Celtic musicians might be grouped and the first two songs that you will always hear will be “Dirty Old Town” and “The Wild Rover”.

And here in the backwoods, miles from civilisation and 200 years behind the times, what did these Irish musicians play as his first two songs? YEEEEUUUUCCCCCHHHHHHH. I had a word with him about it afterwards, and his response was “ohh well”. Yes – ohh well indeed.

But that was not the most weird part of all of this. They stopped the music mid set …. to draw the lottery numbers and shout out the prizewinners. It was just like being in any Workingmen’s Club anywhere in the United Kingdom where they would stop the … entertainment … (and I use the term loosely) so that they could play bingo.

It was absolutely unbelievable.

Another thing that we had today that was astonishing was a politically-correct May Queen. Normally the May Queen of any village is a young teenage or preteen girl and there are good reasons for this, especially for the pagans amongst us, those of us who are more than 2,000 years old and with long memories and those of us happen to know a little about early medieval village life.

But of course the way the world is these days in the UK and other such cases it’s becoming less and less politically correct to have a real May Queen just in case someone might photograph her – but who would ever have thought that such a taboo (because that’s what it is in the strictest and literal sense of the word) would have reached down here?

Mind you, I know that it’s not a politically-correct thing to say, but it could just maybe be because they couldn’t find a virgin in the village?

Another thing that caught my eye was an American from Colorado Springs wandering around and wearing a T-shirt reading
“Land of the Free
Home of the Brave”.
Anyone who has ever read anything that I have ever written will know all about my opinion about the USA being “The Land of the Free“. Everywhere I’ve ever been in the USA it’s always been “please prepare your admission money”.

As for “Home of the Brave” – well Manifest Destiny, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee as well as hundreds if not thousands of other similar “incidents” saw to it that there are no longer any braves in the USA.

In fact the more I thought about it, the more offended I was about that blasted T-shirt and in the end I went and had an “frank exchange of views” with the wearer.

There was clearly something up with me today – I don’t normally let things like this get to me. It must have been the heat. In the end I came home and had a shower (and we aren’t talking about Open University Students Association’s Executive Committee either). 19:45 and still 43 degrees in the container. I’ve picked a good site for that.

-2

EPIC HALL

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