Tag Archives: les guis

Saturday 20th March 2010 – One thing about the warm weather that we are having…

… is that the footy can recommence. And in the balmy spring weather we had two matches tonight. The 2nd XI played Neuf-Eglise and ground out a 0-0 draw. The second half particularly seemed to go on on for ever and I think that most of the supporters had fallen asleep by the final whistle – I know that I had

The second match was against Artonne and keen followers of my blog may recall the away match back in November which was controversial in the extreme, to say the least. It was refereed by the ref who had the attack of the hysterics against the Miners back in October so fireworks would be guaranteed, one would have thought.

But instead we had a lamb-like performance from everyone(except the Pionsat no14 who was sent off for two yellow cards) and Pionsat ran out 2-0 winners. I don’t think anyone was expecting that.

For the rest of today, nothing much happened. I did my shopping in St Eloy and didn’t get anything out of the ordinary, except for the seeds I was missing. I went round to see Claude and Francoise but they weren’t there. According to the neighbour they’d gone down to the South of France for a week to see Sandrine, their daughter. Hmmmm.

I did encounter Bob from Montaigut. He’s a Brit and managed to get a job with a French company as an employee. I managed to persuade him to come onto our radio programme some time and talk to us about the French working environment.

And that was that, really.

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Friday 19th March 2010 – It’s raining now and blowing a gale.

In fact the rain is the first we’ve had since a week last Thursday -over a week ago. And hasn’t a lot happened in that time? A week ago we were still in the grip of the icy weather with the temperature as low as minus 9. Last night it was as low as … er …. PLUS 9.2

And look at everything I’ve done too – finished off weeding the hedge and the area around the vegetable garden, burnt all of the rubbish in a mega-bonfire, moved the greenhouse, moved the cloche, dug two raised beds, planted tons of seeds. Today I finished all of the sowing for February and March and I’ve started to repot the Liz Ayers Memorial Orchard, as the trees are having to stay in their pots for another year.

One thing I noticed in a gardening book is that they reckon that the soil I’m planting things in should be friable. One of my plots has onion and garlic in it. Now how friable is that?

But I’m going to have to do something about the manure water distiller. Since its installation back in February it’s given me about half a litre, most of which was yesterday.Today it gave me three litres and there is more beckoning. I’m going to have to move it no matter what otherwise they will be changing my address from “Les Guis” to “The House at Pooh Corner” and like Christopher Robin, I’ll go down with Alice or some other infectious disease. Which of course reminds me – the new AA Milne Travel Company is now organising trips to London where you can visit Buckingham Palace to see The Changing of the Guard, followed by a trip to the Bank of England to see “The Guarding of the Change”.

And I’ve not long been back from Clermont Ferrand, I’m thoroughly exhausted after this hard week, and so I’m going to have an early night.

Goodnight All!

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Thursday 18th March 2010 – My progress knows no bounds

We now have, from right to left, a greenhouse, a cloche with 5 strawberry plants, a home-made bird scarer, a raised bed with garlic and onions, and a raised bed that is empty but covered with a sheet of black plastic.

First thing though was to scrape up all of the wood ash from the big fire. That’s my source of potash and it’s threatening rain – I don’t want to lose that. And I noticed something curious, namely that I’d set the fire over some tree stumps in the hope that I could burn them out but despite the raging fire all day Monday they are but scorched and it took me ages to pull them up today.

When I finished the raised bed I started on the organising of the seeds and I’ve now sown in seed trays some lettuce, peppers, aubergines, chili peppers and turnips. There’s loads more stuff to do. And I’m down on seeds too – there’s about 6 missing so I’ll be doing a megashop on Saturday.

I had a surprise visitor this morning – Liz came round with some of this compressed hardwood that a friend of hers sells. I invited her onto my terrace and we had coffee. It’s getting mighty civilised here these days – not like me at all. But it’s a major sign of progress all the same.

But there’s a couple of things that aren’t quite right. This compost bin is …errr … not much good and when I heaved a load of stuff into it, it all came apart. I had to empty it so that I could reassemble it and now it’s held together with a load strap. I dunno how long it will last – not very, I suspect.

The second thing is not quite so good. It concerns the composting toilet and a manure-water distiller that I’ve invented. This isn’t the place to discuss it – you’re probably eating your tea right now – but basically I wish I had put it somewhere else as it’s in the wrong place and it’s now too heavy to lift. The hot weather we have had is accelerating the distillation process and it’s making its mark on my close environment.

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Wedesday 17th March 2010 – I now have a little terrace …

… as you can see – and it’s less than 60 cms high too.But it’s amazing the things that you can do with old pallets and continually give them new leases of life. These were formerly part of the attic floor and before that they carried loads of paper into the European Commission.

And it was nice to have a terrace to sit out on to have my breakfast – at 09:30 it was already 17 degrees outside. And today has been the warmest day since October sometime – a max of 22.6 degrees outside and another 270 amp-hours (over 3KwH) of solar energy.

If you look carefully you’ll see that the cloche has gone. That’s now taken up residence in front of the greenhouse. And furthermore when moving the cloche I uncovered 2 strawberry plants from last year. So a ferret around where the outdoor strawberry plants were last year salvaged another 3 so I now have a cloche with strawberry plants in it.

I pulled up a raised bed from out here too and moved that down to the area in front of the cloche. I gave that a thorough digging and that’s in place, with onions and some left-over garlic from last year. I haven’t half been busy!

Tomorrow I’ll be digging some more and moving another raised bed. This will be for the spuds at the end of the month. When that’s done I’llbe taking an inventory of the seeds that I have, finding out which ones I need (to be bought on Saturday) and then starting to sow them in trays. The garden needs to get under way.

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Tuesday 16th March 2010 – Well, I moved the greenhouse!

This is where it will be staying for the foreseeable future, gale-force winds permitting.

I had to dig out six tree stumps and that tookabsolutely ages. I broke the handle on my pickaxe but luckily Claude (Laurence’s father that is) many years ago gave me a kind of digging axe and I put a shaft into it, and that came in really handy. There was a whole warren of tree roots under there and they took some moving.

This afternoon I had to dig over the patch a few times ( and that wore me out) and then dig out the greenhouse from where it used to be, in front of the verandah. In fact the empty space there makes a nice place to put my outdoor table and chairs. I rounded off the day by chopping wood but I really didn’t need it as it was an absolutely beautiful day today. The warmest so far this year an I had 270amp-hours (over 3KwH) of electricity – enough to run the electric heater in here for 5 hours and the temperature up here reached 18.6 degrees.

Tomorrow if the weather keeps on going I’ll be moving the cloche and making the first of the raised beds – you can see one of the shuttering planks leaning up against the Cortina.

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Monday 15th March 2010 – For tea tonight…

…I had ratatouille and baked potatoes. The ratatouille was out of a tin (I’ve not evolved beyond that stage as yet) but the baked potatoes were out of my own fire.

Yes, I had a raging fire going since about 10:30 this morning and I burnt all of the rubbish that I had pulled up from where the vegetable patch is going to be. It was burning like stink too, and I must smell like a forest fire.

This afternoon I covered up the vegetable plot-to-be. I could only find one opened tarpaulin so I’ve used the lean-to roof to cover the rest. With a couple of bits of vehicle having been parked on there for 8 years or so there’s nothing growing there, so it seems silly to leave it uncovered and attracting the weeds. I’ll keep it covered until I’m ready to do something with it.

I was going to dig up the tree roots and transplant the greenhouse too, but the fire was still roaring away so I carried un pulling up brambles and nettles from elsewhere. I’ve now cleared out down the side of the Merc (well, some way anyway) and all of the weeds have been consigned to the fire.

That’s left a nice little space at the side of the lean-to and so I set up the compost bin that I bought for 10 Euros in the Brico Depot sales. It goes quite nicely there. There’s some hardstanding just there and I’m going to put the dustbin there in early course.

All in all I’ve had a pretty good day, even though someone spoilt it right at the beginning by telephoning me at, would you believe, 08:02 this morning. I caught up with the person responsible and gave him the sharp end of my tongue. It’s not the first time that he’s dragged me out of bed like this but it will certainly be the last, I can tell you.

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Sunday 14th March 2010 – I had coffee in bed this morning!

Those of you with long memories will recall that about 2 years ago I bought a 12-volt coffee machine – the kind that truckers have in their cabs. I discovered it the other day while tidying up (I do that every now and again) and so last night I filled it full of water, put a filter and some coffee in, and left it by my bed. When I woke up I switched it on and stayed lying in bed smelling the aroma for a while.

It wasn’t very satisfactory and it needs some fine tuning. And it doesn’t half sup the juice but nevertheless it was very nice to be lying there having coffee in bed. Last time that happened was when I stayed at Liz and Terry’s in the summer, and I can’t remember when it was before that.

So having drunk coffee and had breakfast, today I did … nothing at all. I’ve been up here all day either reading or working on my website. I noticed that the last time I updated it was in June 2009 and a lot has happened since then! I need to extricate my digit a little bit.

There will be a lot happening tomorrow too. If the weather stays fine I’m going to be burning the leftovers from the garden-tidying and then digging up tree stumps. Luckily the weather has warmed up a bit so the soil might be workable.

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Saturday 13th March 2010 – What a night!

If you remember about a year ago I had a series of nights where I had some really bad attacks of cramp in bed. Last night I had another. I can’t think of anything more painful than that and in stretching my legs out to ease the pain I pulled mycalf muscles -both of them! It took ages for the pain to subside and another age for me to go back to sleep. No wonder I didn’t wake up until after 10:00.

I hope that this isn’t a portent for another series of attacks like last year.

I finally made it off to St Eloy for the shopping and spent quite a few bob there today. LIDL’s gardening sale was ongoing and I bought a 1.5×10-metre roll of black plastic mulching. My new raised beds are to be 1.5×1.5metres so I’ll cut this roll to size, make up a handy framework and use it in winter to keep out the weeds. Carrefour also had a gardening sale so I bought some seeds and a new lopper – €12.99 which is three times the price at LIDL but I hope it lasts 3 times longer. The LIDL ones have a weak spot, the aluminium jaw plate, but these don’t have that – just a simple scissor mechanism.

I popped round to see the European Cardboard Box Mountain that is Claude and Francoise’s apartment to see how they were all doing there, and then the final visit was to the new tyre place. They were advertising Caliburn-sized tyres for €70 each which isn’t too bad a price but by the time they had added on the valves, the balancing, the fitting and the VAT it came to almost €200 for a pair. I’m thinking that I may as well get the Goodyear tyres that were the original fitting seeing as they are only €50 extra for a pair all-in. One thing is certain – I’m not going to waste my snow tyres by running them through the summer. They’ve been invaluable in this weather.

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Friday 12th March 2010 – No wonder …

… it was flaming cold (like 7 degrees) in here when I woke up this morning. Outside it had dropped to minus 9!!! That is just crazy.

So after breakfast in the cold I started to tidy up the wood that I’d cut down. And as you can see I’ve collected quite a pile. That wood is for three years hence and so it’ll stay on the pile for a while until I get round to cutting it up -which won’t be for a while because I’ve broken my loppers. That’s the third pair I’ve broken down here.

On the other side of the patch of land is a huge pile of brambles weeds and the like. And if Monday is a good day all of that will be burnt and I can get on with digging up tree stumps. I’ve washed the inside of the plastic greenhouse ready to move down here and I need to think about uprooting the raised beds.

And this evening I’ve been for a little drive to Clermont Ferrand.

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Thursday 11th March 2010 – One thing that you need to bear in mind …

… when cutting down trees is where they are likely to fall. It’s all very well doing “back-of-an-envelope calculations but if a branch gets caught up somewhere all of your plans can come to naught.

Keen readers of these pages last winter will recall that I had a domino effect – one tree into another and that one into a third. This year I managed to drop two trees across the Cortina and the Merc. Ahhh well!

Luckily there was no serious harm done to anything.

But I remember Liz noticing the look of consternation on my face as Terry used a years supply of wood to get his bonfire going the other day. “Don’t worry” she said. “There will be plenty more”. Well, she wasn’t wrong, was she?

But we had more snow today – piles of it. I was trying to clear up the wood but on two occasions I was driven inside by heavy falls. And by the time 17:00 came round and I was soaked to the skin and all my three pairs of working gloves were saturated, I called it a day, came inside, made myself a coffee and watched Fandango.

Now Fandango is a magnificent, vastly underrated Road Movie that should be part of everyone’s DVD collection. The music is superb. But talking of the music it contains one of the most astonishing out-takes ever. The film is set in 1971 as it quite clearly states, yet the theme music is “Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting” from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road which, as any fule no, wasn’t released until 1973!

In other news, keen readers of these pages will recall an incident from a few years ago concerning a Welsh Premier League match at Porthmadog. A supporter shouted out at a linesman “Who’s the Paki with the flag?”. He was apprehended by a couple of supporters, marched down to the club’s offices, made to apologise to the club and the linesman, and then booted out of the ground and banned for life. However the Welsh Football Association charged Porthmadog with “failing to control its supporters”, fined £13,200 and docked 3 points. And so earlier in the week at Llanelli a group of supporters made monkey chants at Port Talbot Town’s Drew Fahiya, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent. The supporters were unidentified.

Now this sounds something like 10 times more serious that whatever happened at Porthmadog, but there are one or two subtle differences. Porthmadog is a small rural club run by a group of volunteers and continually bounces along the bottom of the league. Not the kind of club that will put up a great fight especially when money is tight and three points here or there is pretty meaningless. But Llanelli is a big city club – a leading light in the Welsh Premier League and run by high-profile businessmen. The club is challenging for the Championship and a place in the European Champions League, and the fortune that goes with it – is at stake. There are many eyes, including mine and several hundred others in Porthmadog, who are following this case with interest and awaiting the Welsh FA’s next move with bated breath.

And in other other news, I have a candle lit in my room sending a message to a dear friend who departed from this plane of existence a year ago and who I am desperately missing.

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Wednesday 10th March 2010 – If you look very closely …

… at this image you will notice three things.

Firstly there’s a big empty space where the two halves of the old Transit used to be. Thats right – I’ve winched them over to the other side of the meadow (I only bent a chain hook today!) where they are safely installed and this has left me with all of this room to use as my vegetable plot.

Secondly, you’ll notice that the hedge has been cleared out, piles of brambles have been uprooted, overhanging branches removed and tall saplings cut right down. There’s a good view now over neighbouring fields for the moment (until I block it off with the greenhouse) and the sun will get over there a treat.

Thirdly, you’ll notice the snow! It’s snowed all day and all night and it’s really beginning to get on my wick, this weather. It’s almost the middle of March and we had sub-zero temperatures all day and this flaming white stuff.

The first serious snowfall of the year was almost exactly 3 months ago to the day. Any more of this and I’ll be off to Canada for good. At least over there you expect to have it for all that time and you can prepare accordingly. This is just getting ridiculous.

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Tuesday 9th March 2010 – We were back in the studio today.

And not only that, we were actually told what we had to do! Now isn’t THAT a welcome departure from the usual? and we also know when we will be being broadcast.

Basically we have to do a 5-minute spot, and didn’t that cause some consternation? Have you any idea how quickly 5 minutes goes when you are busy? After recording the first programme we were there hacking away at the material we had in a (vain) effort to cut it all right down. But we managed just the same – it was a case of having to, but it’s depressing when all of your hard work falls onto the cutting-room floor.

And we are going onto the airwaves next Tuesday at 18:50, repeated on Wednesday morning at 08:50.

I spent the morning arranging things and as it was a nice day again I had the heater on up here. That’s getting to be a habit just recently, isn’t it?

And after we came back from the studio I went round to see Marianne – I haven’t seen her for a while. I enlisted her help for our radio show -she’s the local journalist so she gets to know everything that’s been going on and she owes me a favour- I let her use one of my photographs for an article that she wrote. She’s also keen to involve herself in this English-language newspaper that died a death and so I offered her my support. I hope she will wear it in comfort.

And the weather has deteriorated some more. Howling gales, devastating winds, and temperature in the heat exchanger of minus 11. It’s flaming March, for God’s sake.

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Monday 8th March 2010 – I’ve started to move the old Transit …

… as you can see. I’ve managed to get it about 6 feet out from the hedge and it took quite a while for that.
Firstly the front wheels have sunk in quite a depth and accumulated humus from rotting vegetation meant that I had to spend a while digging it out.
Secondly I’ve lent out my good electric winch and the not-so-good electric winch had a few issues about it which mean that it’s not up to all that much – hence I had to resort to the old hand-powered chain winch. But what the heck? hand-powered chain winches have been around for centuries and they worked well enough in those days.
Mind you the first thing that I did was to bend two S-hooks that I was using to make a loop in one of the chains – so I had to go and hunt down a couple of bow shackles. And then I snapped a chain! – Yes, snapped a chain using a hand-powered chain winch! And if that wasn’t enough, I actually stretched the other galvanised steel chain! Yes, stretching a steel chain! It’s a flaming good chain winch this – the power I can get on the lever must be phenomenal!

But anyway, the Transit together with its load of one-and-a-half Passats is on its way across the field, and that’s certainly something to celebrate.

This morning was another bright sunny alpine day with quite a wind – just the job for a washday and so while I was doing the washing I was also unloading all of Saturday’s shopping from Caliburn. The solar energy was such that I ran the upstairs heater for 5 hours – another day with 240 amp-hours (almost 3KwH) of sun and I’m thinking seriously about the idea of resurrecting my mains automatic washing machine. I’ve also had some sales material about some fridges that use about 0.5kWH (about 43amp-hours) of energy per day. Energy consumption for electrical appliances is plummeting and it won’t be long before I can have a real fridge here too.

This afternoon I put all of the plasterboard (all 16 sheets of it) upstairs. You’ve no idea how heavy that stuff can be when you are mauling it up by hand. And then I tackled the Transit.

Tomorrow we are recording the second instalment of our radio programme. I hope they don’t lose this tape!

And in other news, you may remember that the other day I spent an hour in the torrential rain moving a car for Bill. Tonight at the Anglo-French group he very kindly gave me a box of vegan biscuits for my trouble. “I felt embarrassed when I saw the state you were in” he said. But as I said at the time, I was quite happy doing it – it brought back many happy memories of when I had my taxi business and the state I was in the other day was the state in which I lived for eight years, so it was no trouble at all. But it was still very kind of Bill to give me the biscuits and I am very grateful. After all, one might say that the efforts that I went through for him – they really took the biscuit!

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Sunday 7th March 2010 – I think that the Pentax has finally died

I went out this afternoon to see FC Pionsat St Hilaire play Montel-Villosanges at Villosanges. I took three sets of fully-charged batteries, one of which was brand-new, and all charged up on different chargers, and I couldn’t get a shot. The batteries “depleted” while I was poised for action. I know that it was bad before but the voyage to Trappes and back seems to have made it worse.

So that’s that!

Mind you, it was perishing cold – minus 5 out there. With a howling wind and driving snow it was uncomfortable even watching the match. Heaven knows what it was like on the pitch playing. The game was difficult which was no surprise given the conditions, and ended up 1-1. The Chimps are a naggy, aggravating side as I have said elsewhere and the ref had his work cut out what with the players and a crowd (for it was a crowd, to be sure) whose passion quite often went beyond the bounds of what might be called “reasonable”. We had a “fight” between two players – and I use the word with inverted commas because had the two players have come up against a couple of British Brownies en route for a Sunday School outing my money would have been on the Brownies.

After that it was round to see Liz and Terry to discuss our radio programme next week. It’s keeping me busy, all of this.

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Saturday 6th March 2010 – Well, we’re back.

We had a football match tonight – the first since early February, and only the second since mid- December. Pionsat’s 3rd XI played Beauregard Vendon and were one man short, yet they scored five goals – and still finished on the losing side.

But back in December you remember that Gregory Richen turned out for the 3rd XI as he was unavailable for his habitual 1st XI game and scored 2 of their goals – well that seems to have started a fashion for Christophe Larue who also plays for the 1st XI in attack is unavailable tomorrow so he turned out for the 3rd XI this evening and scored all five goals.

All of this in thoroughly freezing conditions that are threatening snow. As if we haven’t had enough!

Also back is the Pentax – unrepaired and still struggling along. I’ll be happy though when someone round here pays me a pile of cash they owe me and I can think about a replacement.

I went shopping around Montlucon today and did the usual rounds. Some 12 volt LED bulbs at €3 each at Noz and a max-min thermometer at €4.99 from Vima were the highlights. Piles of gardening stuff including my seed potatoes (earlies and normals) and two blazing rows at Brico Depot – firstly when the girl in the building material section tried to sell me the wrong (and more expensive) plasterboard despite being told, and secondly when they refused to open the bulk purchases till so I had to struggle with an enormously-loaded trolley up a shopping aisle. Someone in the car park helped me get the wood on Caliburn’s roof rack to which I replied “it’s a good thing that the customers are more helpful than the staff!”

And then a freezing cold ( and I mean COLD) hour in the swimming baths only to find that the private shower was out of order. That put the tin hat on the day.

But I’m clearly moving in the wrong circles, much to my regret. As you know, at Noz I browse through the CDs and DVDs that they have on sale (I bought two twin-packs of Bela Lugosi films for 69 cents each pack today) and saw a CD entitled “Handel’s Organ Works”. Well, so does mine but no-one ever wrote a song about it!

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EPIC HALL

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