Oh deer indeed.

And to the deer that ran out in front of Caliburn somewhere between St Gervais d’Auvergne and Gouttieres on the way back from our Anglo-French Group meeting, Caliburn and I are really sorry.

But it’s a good job that I’m a vegan otherwise you would be in the pot right now.

Caliburn has a slight mark on the front bumper, which shows that he’s much more solidly built than the Chevy Malibu that I hired in Canada in 2003 (mind you, it was a stag that I hit back then) but I’m very much afraid that the deer went in all directions.

Ahh well 🙁

So apart from that dramatic end to the evening, what else?

After the usual bits and pieces on the computer, I went out and attacked the wall again.

But astonishingly, only 3 buckets of mortar went into the wall. And for a whol assortment of reasons.

1. I had to take down part of the scaffolding. That’s major progress in itself
2. But before I could do that, I had to move a pile of stuff.
3. Once that had gone, I had to hack down a pile of brambles and small trees to make some working space
4. I had to clear away all of the sand and cement  that I’ve raked out of the wall and was piling up against the foot of the wall. That took ages, and I DO mean “ages” too

But I did make two startling discoveries

1. I knew that I had another garden rake somewhere, a big heavy duty proper one with real metal prongs.
   And I would love to know what I was doing with it because it was under the stones that fell when the wall collapsed back all those years ago.
   The handle has long since rotted away but I’ll buy a new one on Saturday at Cheze.
2. I now know the secret of why the lean-to is collapsing.
   There’s a whole network of tree roots from the walnut tree that has infiltrated into the wall below ground level. Much of the day was spent extracting them, and I need to think of a permanent solution to deal with that issue.
   Also, this is the bit where the wall is really bad.
   Rainwater has infiltrated and washed the old mortar away and many of the stones are loose. They need extracting where possible and replacing with larger stones/
   Either that or they need to be well packed in with other stones so that they can’t move and the forces above them are spread out horizontally.

So now you know why that’s why it’s taking me ages.

But anyway, at 18:45 I called it a day and had a quick a solar shower and following that, legged it to St Gervais d’Auvergne where we had the biggest crowd for quite a while.

And that is always pleasant.

+1

-1