EPIC HALL

Wednesday 9th June 2010 – Those of you with long memories …

… will recall the 11th of September 2008 when I had a whopping 48mm of rain in one day.

But that was an exceptional case – most of that fell in a brief half-hour period as the result of an incredible storm. Nothing that we have had since has ever come close.

That is, until today. When it rained and rained and rained for the entire day non-stop. This horrible drenching rain that soaks absolutely everything and I don’t think that it’s ever going to stop.

And when I took the stats at 22:00 as usual I recorded 36.5mm of rain in that 24-hour period. And that’s the most rain that’s fallen here (apart from 11th September 2008) by a country mile.

My hardstanding has a river running down it right now as water cascades from just about everywhere in the neighbourhood. The whole of the ground is like a sponge.

Clearly working outside was impossible so after lunch I did some work in the bedroom but knocked off early as it was far too dark to see anything.

The weather really was that depressing.

But I did go down the garden to check up on all the plants, and my attention was drawn to some movement in the field.

We get to see plenty of wildlife here, deer and all that kind of thing. But I never normally have the camera with me. But today I did, quite luckily, and I was able to stand and watch, and reel off a pile of shots as a small fox played “pouncy pussy” with an object in the field.

So absorbed was it with what it was doing that it didn’t notice me there so I watched, getting soaking wet in the process, as it rounded up and then captured its latest meal. I really don’t know who was the more absorbed, me or the fox. But it was interesting all the same.

I think that foxes are beautiful and I just don’t know why it is that people want to hunt and kill them. And in my book, huntsmen who dress up in ridiculous garments and set a pack of dogs on an animal like this and tear it to bits as a public spectacle are on roughly the same social level as paedophiles if you ask me.

I think that they are all thoroughly sick in the head.

Tuesday 8th June 2010 – How about this for bizarre?

As you know, I spend some of the winter cutting down trees for firewood and the first that I cut was the old tree just in front of the house that looked like it had died (and a good move it was to do that too as it immediately revitalised itself and went berserk)

.The wood that I cut down I chopped into lengths and stacked neatly (for once) at the side of the barn to dry out ready to burn.

However, one of the the lengths sprouted a branch or two so I reckoned that there must have been tons of sap still in it. But not at all. In fact when I tried to move it during my tidy-up session I noticed that it had pushed some roots out and grown back into the soil.

Now THAT‘s unusual.

But I’ve not done much in the way of tidying up for the simple reason that the weather has been against me. I did a machine load of washing yesterday and it was such a beautiful evening last night that I left it out to dry. So of course we’ve had nothing but torrential downpours all day and everything is thoroughly soaking. I spent the morning computing and after lunch did some of the moving around but dodging the showers was difficult and in the end I made a coffee and came up here to watch a film.

But there’s been so much rain that my hardstanding is like a squelchy sponge again. I was hoping that it would stay dry to give me a chance to tamp it down. And ironically the puddle that was soaking wet and into which I spent a day embedding rocks into it, that’s currently the driest and most stable part of it now. That’s weird too.

Monday 7th June 2010 – I had another gardening day today.

You can see in the photo that I’ve rediscovered my bean and pea frame, so seeing as I now have three pea plants and four bean plants ( and isn’t that disappointing?) I put it up so that they will have something to cling to. When I saw the lack of beans and peas this year then I needed something to cling to for support, but I hadn’t recovered the frame then.

The radishes I planted a couple of weeks ago are going berserk and the spinach is now coming up. maybe things are putting in a late burst.

I’ve sown another row of carrots in place too, and transplanted the first showing of cauliflower and the second showing of broccoli. The cucumber plants I planted in the small cloche and to do that I had to take out the trays of herbs. They are on the window ledge of the house for now.

You might recall that I brought my herbs back from Brussels and planted them in a trough. I had some more in small pots and so I made up another trough and those herbs have gone into there. I’m putting them in troughs so that in winter I can take them indoors.

The mint I left in a pot and planted the pot in the trough for the simple reason that mint goes berserk and spreads everywhere if you don’t contain it.

The soil in the trough by the way is 50% compost from LIDL, 50% soil from when I dug out the earth beichstuhl and a dusting of wood ashes to give it all some potash.

So that was the afternoon. In the morning I was computing and before lunch I did a load of washing – the first for ages down here but you might recall that I did a few loads in Brussels when I was there and Liz kindly did a few loads for me while I was helping Terry.

This evening was the Anglo-French Group. Mark prepared a good game for us and we had some fun. We were somewhat divided into two groups though – some of us working upstairs and the others talking and smoking downstairs.

So tomorrow now that the garden is done for this week I’ll carry on moving stuff from the side of the barn. I want to get all of that stuff moved as soon as possible.

Sunday 6th June 2010 – I went to a barbecue this evening …

… round at Bill’s house and it was nice of him to invite me.

So a barecue – eating outside – yes, you’re right! The weather has changed yet again. Waking up this morning (someone perishing well telephoned me at the unearthly and ungodly hour of 09:51) it was cold, clammy and grey. And as the day continued it got worse and worse.

Luckily Bill had managed to borrow one of these pagoda tent thingies from someone so we weren’t all getting wet otherwise it could have been nasty. The Hound of the Baskervilles made its displeasure felt (or rather heard ecause he was locked up in the house) during the evening but what do you expect?

And that was my day. I haven’t done anything else and I’m not all that concerned. Sunday is a day of rest.

Saturday 5th June 2010 – I was in Marcillat en Combraille this evening …

… for a meeting about tourism. I arrived promptly at 19:30 to find out that the meeting actually started at 17:30. At that time I was in the swimming baths at Neris les Bains.

But nevertheless I was well-entertained by the woman who runs the tourist board and towards the end of our discussion I realised why it was that I had been invited. It seems that the Allier’s equivalent of SMADC also run some kind of programme on local radio – in this case Radio Tartasse – and they are interested in an English-language programme. Of course, before I say anything I need to speak to Liz about it but I did suggest that they talk to Christian at SMADC and see about syndicating what we do for them.

After the meeting I went for a drink with Marianne at the local hotel and in there drinking were Geoffrey and Francois from the Anglo-French group. We had a good chat about things while we were there.

On the way back to Caliburn, just as the sun was setting I couldn’t resist taking a pic of the village square and the donjon. It was just at the right time too – not too light and not too dark either – and it’s come out pretty well. It does help, having a good tripod.

It’s been probably the hottest day of the year today. The temperature reached as high as 35.8°, which is the highest temperature since 7th September last year.

Not much chance of having me working in that. I spent the morning watching the local farmer repair the fence at the back of the house here and then bring his cattle along, and then I spent the rest of the morning doing some work on the website.

This afternoon was shopping and nothing exciting, and then into the pool at Neris.

But I’ll tell you what – I’m noticing more and more tattoos on more and more people over here and I can’t do with tattoos at all. There was one woman in the pool, clearly in her early 50s and with a figure that most women half her age would die for – and she knew how to show it off to the best advantage too – and covered with tattoos. I just don’t know how people can do it and I don’t know what pleasure there is in it either.

There was another woman in there too – and as she went swimming past me on her back I thought of saying to her “for God’s sake don’t breathe in!”.

So here I am in my room tonight – it’s 00:20 and I’m shirtless and it’s still 27° in here, even with all of the windows open. In fact it reached 28.7° degrees in here at one point.

Heaven knows what it’s going to be like in August.

Friday 4th June 2010 – I needn’t have worried …

… about getting up for 09:00. At about 06:15 some kind of rodent on the roof decided to try to scratch away at the tiles to try to get in. And so there I was, lying in bed quietly reading a book until 08:00 when the alarm went off.

Then it was off to Marianne’s and off to pick up the Foreign-language library. The people in whose shed it’s stored are selling up and so the library needed to be moved. Marianne had the key but when we got there, the owners of the shed had put this huge whacking great padlock on the door.

It totally amazes me the people who spend probably tens of quid on these enormous heavy-duty anti-theft anti-everything padlocks, and then use a hasp and staple that is fixed to the door and doorframe with woodscrews rather than coachbolts. So 30 seconds later we were inside the shed and moving the books.

We’ve put the books in the garage of a neighbour for now – a little old lady in her 80s. This lady was telling us how her garden had gone to pot and she had had some professionals in to sort it out for her but there was lots that needed doing. I mentioned that I had a friend in the business and described what he did.
“Petit bricolage? Isn’t that the kind of person that goes around doing little odd jobs for single elderly ladies?” she enquired.
I can see that I’m going to have to start charging Terry 10% commission! But seriously the best way to develop the kind of business that Terry is doing is to talk, talk and talk.

Marianne made lunch and then I came back here and ran Caliburn a few times up and down the lane at the back to tamp down the track. But it was far too hot to work – it’s been a gorgeous day – and so I stayed up here until 17:00.

I’ve now started to move stuff from around the outside of the barn and put it on the hardstanding. I need to make the space to put the scaffolding for when we do the roof. That’s going to be pretty imminent.

Thursday 3rd June 2010 – I went outside this morning …

… and had another look at that damp patch. I went to have a dance in it and sure enough a whole pile of water welled up in my footprints.

I have mixed emotions about this. I’d like the new hardstanding to dry out as quickly as possible so that I can use it, but on the other hand I can see the advantages of digging out my own well.

So I dunno. Bernard reckons that it might be 8 days before it’s safe to drive onto the hardstanding – to give it time to settle and to tamp down, but this damp patch he reckons will take much longer. I’ll be interested to see what it’s like in a fortnight.

But I was right about this morning. I had a nice leisurely breakfast, did some work on the computer and spent most of the afternoon in the garden planting. I’ve more veg coming through but it’s still weeks behind down there. Mind you we had a good hot windy day with the wind now blowing from the east. I’ve done some tidying up as well and I can now get into the barn for a change.

And talking of the barn it won’t be long before we start on that roof. At least all of the stuff that’s lying around in the way can be put on the new hardstanding.

Tomorrow I have an early start. I need to be in Pionsat at …errrr…. 09:00. No idea how I’m going to manage that.

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 – The quarry opens …

… at 13:30 after the lunch break and at 13:40 the lorry turned up. It took him a good 15 minutes to negotiate the tight angles and corners around here, but once he was in position, he promptly deposited 15 tonnes of gravel.

The lorry then went away and half an hour later it was back with another 15 tonnes which was likewise promptly unloaded.

There is a downside of all of this, and that was that he left with a cheque for €628. Hasn’t that torn a huge hole in my budget for this year?

And if that wasn’t enough, at 16:30 Sebastien and Bernard turned up despite their bereavement and immediately set to work.

They were only here for an hour or so before they were all finished, so it didn’t take too long. Mind you, they did tell me that they were here all Saturday afternoon digging out and moving about 30 trailers worth of rubbish and so on, depositing it in the waste land up the lane, and they did an hour of spreading and tamping down with the digger.

It’s cost me another €200 for the labour and machinery for everything that they did, which might sound like a lot to some people (but certainly not to me) but when you think about it, at a minimum wage of €8:50 per hour, €200 represents about 24 or 25 man hours of labour alone. And would this ever have been done by a man working 25 hours with just a shovel?

Anyway, they’ve left behind them about 80 square metres of hardstanding. And you have to admit that this looks pretty good too. This was much better than I was ever expecting.

But we’ve hit a problem in that we might have uncovered a hidden spring. Water is bubbling up and of you look closely in the middle of the image there’s a large damp patch. After they went I spent about an hour sinking rocks into it to bind together the sand and gravel and also to allow the water to bubble to the surface if that’s what is happening. It’s best to get it to come out in one place rather than undermining the hardstanding, and then I can simply lay a trench and pipe it away.

However I reckon that the weather might have something to do with it. You know about all the rain we’ve had recently and we had another 24mm today. There’s water everywhere.

Jean and Elizabeth and their friends popped round today as well to see how I’m getting on. Elizabeth is impressed with the garden and Jean is impressed with the work inside. It’s been a long time since they came here.

Tomorrow I’m going to take it easy. It was hard work shovelling that stuff today.

Tuesday 1st June 2010 – You may remember …

… that the other day I posted a photo of this tree that was slowly lowering itself down onto the vegetable plots in my garden under the weight of all of the foliage that it was producing.

I’ve had a good look around on the internet to see if I can identify the tree and its fruit, but I’ve not had very much luck at all. I would be grateful if anyone could identify it for me.

I reckon that this might well be your department, Krys.

I’ve was out all morning. Nada, the Croat sculptress who lives in Biollet near the Buddhist temple was at the chantier on Saturday and she said she needed to see me. And so I went today. She’s had some work done on her house but there’s a lot more to be done during the months of July and August and she was looking for advice, help, and the name and address of a decent craftsman. This kind of thing is right up Terry’s alley so I duly gave her his phone number and made her well-aware of his hourly rate.

We also had a lengthy chat about downsizing and composting toilets. I’m amazed at the thing in which people consider me to be an expert these days. But not composting toilets of course. After all, people have been saying that I have been talking crap for years.

Nada cooked lunch for us and then I came back here. But not to work outside or to take photos because it was absolutely p155ing down outside. Instead I started to design my publicity leaflet for my business. I need to get a move on with that and earn some dosh – especially as my gravel is coming tomorrow.

The gravel is coming, but the guy with the tractopelle isn’t, so I understand. There’s been a death in their family and that has kyboshed that!

And in other news, this latest Zionist atrocity has reverberated around the world. Krys quite rightly said that what would Notonyournelli have said if the Zionists had been on the receiving end of this. But more to the point, what would the western world have said if the Iranians or the North Koreans had done a similar thing?

Monday 31st May 2010 – First of the year

Lunch today consisted of the usual salad butty only today it featured home-grown lettuce and home-grown radish as well as all of the other ingredients.

I’ve been using home-grown garlic and home-grown herbs for a while but today was the first time that I had pulled something important out of my new vegetable patches for food purposes. I’m well-impressed by how well they seem to have grown and while the taste at the moment is a little insipid it will improve over time.

In fact the lettuce would have definitely done with another fortnight in the ground but things are getting rather tight in the lettuce bed and it needs some thinning out, so pulling up a usable lettuce to eat was probably as good a way as any of making a space for everything else.

But in the greenhouse the tomato plants that have been dormant for ages have now started to go berserk. Rather too late now to expect anything profitable but never mind. It also seems like there might be some pepper plants coming up now that I have bought some, and another pea plant is now emerging from underneath the soil. That makes a grand total of two.

I went round and had another look at the digger today. This is what it looks like, in case you have forgotten, and it’s huge!

I bet it made short work of the rubbish.

I’m eager to see it back in action shovelling the stones into place but there seems to be some kind of difficulty about that and I don’t understand why.

I have to have the stones delivered by a lorry as I need over 30 tonnes of the stuff and 15 trips with the Sankey down to the quarry at Montaigut is a little too much. I have the number of someone with a tipper but they can’t give me a precise date for coming to deliver the stuff. And I need to know a precise date as I need to have the digger driver here to shovel the stuff and spread it out.

I can’t believe that it’s so complicated. Arranging a one-hour spec for a lorry to deliver two loads of stones seems the simplest thing in the world to me. But at least it gave me time to pull up all of the roots and brambles and thistles that were lying around in the way. And I also met the farmer who has taken over the field next door from the late Farmer Parrett. We had a nice friendly chat too.

In other news, the Zionists intercepted this aid convoy and stopped it delivering the supplies to the Palestinians by the simple expedient of murdering the aid workers. It’s high time someone put a stop to this behaviour and if the west is refusing to intervene then you can’t blame Hamas and the rest of the Arab world for having a go.

Sunday 30th May – Sunday is a day of rest …

… as you know. There are no alarm clocks, no nothing. And I lie in bed until whatever time I like and I don’t care.

So what the heck was going on that I was wide awake and sitting up in bed reading a book at … errr … 06:52 this morning? And by the time 08:00 had come I had eaten my breakfast, drunk my coffee and watched an episode of Up Pompeii.

First thing I did though was to stick my head out of the window and take a photo of the work that was done yesterday. And it’s even more impressive from up here. They did a really good job and I can’t wait for it to be finished.

Once I had taken the pic I made a start on a big mega-tidy-up here in the attic. It looks completely different now up here with everything where it ought to be (more or less) and it’s much more like a living room.

And do you know – that was that. I crashed out for an hour after lunch (no surprise there) and did nothing else of any importance. Apart from talking to Helena that is. She was the girlfriend of a mate of mine at school and we kept in a little bit of touch after that and then we disappeared. I briefly encountered her on a schoolmates website and we have now met up on a social networking site.

In other news, the nuclear talks in New York broke up with the contributors agreeing to a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. One group of people has objected and decided to oppose the idea. let me ask you to guess which group?

Hamas? The Iranians?

No – the Zionists! Now of course the Zionists refuse to admit that they have nuclear weapons (although it’s an open secret that they do and that they were built in conjuction with white racist South Africa) but ask yourself this – if they didn’t have any nuclear weapons, why would they be objecting to a nuclear-free zone? And while Iran agrees to suspend any question of nuclear activity there if everyone else does the same, then now tell me who it is that is the REAL obstacle to peace in the Middle East?

Yes, it’s high time that the west stops this absurd and illogical defence of the Zionists at any costs and starts to concentrate its activities on the Muslems, Jews and Christians that the Zionists are massacring. If the west pulled its support of the Zionists there would be peace in the Middle East inside a month as they would be forced to negotiate with their neighbours.

And in other Middle East news, there’s an aid convoy sailing from Cyprus to Gaza bringing in urgent supplies. The UN reckons that the Palestinians (many of whom are women and children and many of whom are Christians) need about 60,000 tonnes of supplies per week to survive and the Zionists permit only 15,000 tonnes – and no building materials so that the Palestinians cannot rebuild the houses that the Zionists demolish with bulldozers. So an aid convoy is setting off with supplies. And the Zionists have vowed to stop it.

This of course raises two important questions.
Firstly – have the Zionists forgotten already about the ships that brought them and their supplies to Palestine in 1947 and 1948 and which led to start of all the trouble in Palestine? Surely not, the hypocrites.
And secondly, how does the treatment that the Zionists are handing out to the Palestinians differ from how the Nazis treated the Jews back in the 1930s and 1940s. We haven’t got as far as ;ass murder yet, but we have the economic blockade and if you have been keeping up with the news just recently we are having the ethnic cleansing and the deportations. The Zionist treatment of the Palestinians has been described as a “pogrom” – and by a Zionist politician too!

When is the west going to put a stop to it?

-3

Saturday 29th May 2010 – Errrr….

… quite!

Returning home this evening after the chantier I had a tremendous surprise

Those of you with long memories will recall that back in the winter 2008-9 I cleared a plot of land of old trees, weeds, brmables and the like ready to make a parking place for Caliburn and the trailer etc etc. But there were all kinds of rubbish stones and the like to move. And endless searches for diggers was fruitless. Eventually Bernard from the footy club told me of one and we made contact but since the guy’s visit here last week I’ve been waiting for him to get back to me.

Anyway, when I returned home I found that he had been and gone, having dug out absolutely everything and a few more things besides.

It’s not exactly how I wanted it but habitual readers of this blog will have noticed that I have a tendency to vacillate. So, recognising my own failings more than anything else, I’m glad that he came to do it while I wasn’t here because it avoided me getting myself all confused and mixed up and he could get on with the job without me bothering him.

Better still, he’s left the digger here and he’s told me to go ahead and get the stones delivered as soon as possible – and then he’ll come back and do the laying. He’s also brought the football club’s heavy roller for compacting the stones and that has saved a whole pile of work.

So this time next week at the latest I’ll have a proper hardstanding to park some of my vehicles and I’m so impressed. I shudder to think of the cost of it all but it’s one of those things that I need to do, and the sooner the better if you ask me.

This is the most exciting thing that has happened to me since I’ve been here.

At the chantier there weren’t so many of us as in the past. It seems that the numbers of participants are falling off. But of course it isn’t quantity that counts, it’s quality and those who were here know each other very well and are quite good friends so that all helps considerably.

Some of the participants were involved in gardening and others such as Nan, Francois and myself, carried on with making this wooden toilet and shower block that we started last year. we had quite a production line going with Francois measuring and cutting and Nan and I fixing and nailing.

We had the work done in no time, including a pause for lunch and chat.

Towards the end of the afternoon we covered up the garden that the others had dug over. A length of breathable bio-membrane covered in woodchips Jean and I fetched the chips with the car and trailer and shovelled them onto the membrane and the others spread them out And just as we finished we had a downpour

It’s nice to work in the company of convivial and pleasant people, and it appears that I might have visitors on Wednesday afternoon

In other news, Dennis Hopper has died. This is desperate news for me and for many of my friends as he and Peter Fonda were our role models as teenagers and they inspired a whole generation of people such as ourselves. I’m going to watch Easy Rider again just now but it won’t ever be the same again.

Friday 28th May 2010 – It further occurs to me …

… that you haven’t seen inside the greenhouse at all so far this year and so that was worthy of a photo.

It’s a cheap greenhouse from LIDL that I bought last year and it came complete with detachable staging. €49.99 if I remember correctly and that was a good purchase as well.

Most of the seeds have been planted in soya dessert containers. I learnt that from last year and the year before that – planting in seed trays just swamped me out all at once and having 24 lettuce all ready at the same time with none following on was bad news. Doing things like this – a few at a time – ensure a decent succession of crop.

You’ll notice plastic spoons and plastic knives in the pots. I write in pencil on them the name of whatever is in the pot so I don’t forget. Real plastic tags are quite expensive whereas plastic spoons and knives cost me 50 cents for 20 at the local cheapo shop.

In fact this isn’t everything – not by any means. It’s pretty crowded in the greenhouse as you can see and so a pile of stuff has been moved into the new mega-cloche where they can be hardened off ready for planting.

Some stuff, such as the borlotti beans (they are the only ones that have taken) and some more sprouts were even further-advanced than that and so they have already been planted in the appropriate raised bed.

I can see that I’m going to have to work hard to keep up with all of this succession planting. And I’m having to start weeding too. That’s a novelty, isn’t it?

Once I’d done the garden I did some more work in the bedroom and then at 18:00 I nipped into St Eloy les Mines for some shopping seeing as I’m out tomorrow at a chantier communal at Jean and Elizabeth’s. I met Julie and Rob in LIDL which was a surprise as normally I meet them at Brico Depot.

And I still didn’t get to the two new shops either. They both close at 18:30 and I had the privilege of having a door shut in my face on two occasions.

At the chantiers we have to bring along some food to share and so I cooked a huge aubergine and kidney bean chili, some of which I had for tea and the rest I’ll take tomorrow.

But it’ll upset the locals – it’s …errr… rather spicy.

Thursday 27th May 2010 – One of the things I did today …

… was a job that I had been putting off for a while.

well, not exactly putting off but one that I keep on meaning to do but always forget about – until today, that is.

When I did the lean-to roof back in August I did the guttering but due to the lack of stock in Brico Depot I couldn’t do the downspout so I just had a length of pipe shoved in there. After several months of this I suddenly remembered about the downspout when I was in Brico Depot once not so long ago and as they had the stuff I stocked up.

I prmoptly forgot about it and the occasional flashes I had always seemed to occur when I was too busy to do it. Even the tempest blowing it down coincided with something else of urgence that I had to do.

But not today! I was wandering somewhat aimlessly around the place this morning after my customary 2 hours on the computer and so I searched out all of the stuff and did it.

I’ve not finished off the bottom as I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I have it simply draining onto another piece of guttering and that runs away down the field as a temporary measure.

I’ll now have to think of more permanent arrangement to complete it because I can’t leave it like this. It’s a waste of water for a start.

I’ve also done some more gardening. I’ve put out some of the aubergines and planted some spinach and more radishes. I’ve also sown a few lettuce seeds in a pot to create some kind of succession. The radishes that I planted 6 weeks ago are looking good and I reckon that on Monday it will be lettuce and radishes from my own garden.

To finish off, I’ve started boarding the back wall in the bedroom where the wardrobe is going to be, and as you might expect, I don’t think that I have enough OSB boards left over from when I did the barn floor. That’s a disappointment.

Still, it’s almost the weekend and I can nip off into town and buy some more to finish the job. But it is depressing that I always seem to run aground just when I’m in the right kind of mood to press on regardless.

In other news, we were in the studio on Tuesday recording our programme for June. We didn’t have a guest because the guy I was trying to contact didn’t call me back. So of course, he called me back yesterday. Our programmes that we recorded are for the month of June so today I received an e-mail from a Tourist body telling me about events in the Puy-de-Dome in … errrrr … June.

You can’t make up this kind of nonsense, can you?