Tag Archives: radio anglais

Sunday 8th April 2012 – Well, apart from the fact …

… that I have a splitting headache and I’ll be off to bed in an instant, I had another afternoon out. If I’m not careful I’ll be making a habit of it.

But with it being Easter I had a day off and did absolutely nothing at all. Highlight was watching a DVD of a Nosby Stills and Crash concert that has been hanging around here for years. I’m going to have to find a good program on the internet to rip the sound-track to use on the radio programme.

But before anyone says anything, because it has been mentioned in the past, there are no issues with doing this – ripping sound tracks and the like – because with it being a bona fide radio station (in fact, all of those for whom we contract are) they pay a licence to the Performing Rights Society or whatever the French equivalent of that, and so whatever they broadcast (which includes our programmes and the contents thereof) is covered. Just so that you know.

In fact it rather reminds me of the time back in the 1980s when I was driving a tour bus for Shearings Holidays and showing a copied video-cassette of Carry On Camping to the passengers. This passenger came up to me and said “I’m going to report you”
“Why?” I asked
“Isn’t that a pirated video you are showing?”
“Well, as a matter of fact it is”
“Well I’m going to prosecute you!”
“No you aren’t” I told him
“Why not?”
“Because what you do is that you report me to the copyright holder and the copyright holder sues the owner of the coach – as they have the vicarious liability of the actions of their employees”
“So who owns the copyright of the ‘Carry-on’ films?” asked my passenger
“The Rank Organisation” I replied
“And who owns this coach?”
“The Rank Organisation”
Mr know-it-all then went and sat back down again, suitably deflated.

I hate doing this kind of thing to people, but sometimes, it does have to be said that anyone who sticks his head above the parapet deserves to catch all of the flak.
maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceThis afternoon, Marianne rang me up. If you remember from last year, the town of Pionsat has bought a derelict art-deco maison de maître in the town with the aim of demolishing it and building a new salle de fêtes. We went round to have a good look at it at the time.

It seems that they have now started to dismantle it and Marianne noticed that the rear door had gone so that people could now enter into it without the key to have a good look around. Was I doing anything?

la cellette paris orleans railway viaduct maison ducros maymat rue de la poste pionsat puy de dome franceNeedless to say, I don’t need to be asked twice, so off I shot into town and we went for a prowl around.

I took loads more photos to add to the huge stack that I took the last time I was here, including this splendid one of the village of La Cellette right across the valley with the magnificent La Cellette viaduct on the long-abandoned Montlucon-Gouttieres branch of the Paris-Orleans railway in the background

marianne contet old abandoned mill race pionsat puy de dome franceAfter our little clandestine wandering we then went for a wander around the outskirts of the town looking for the traces of the ditch that brought the water from the river down to the old water-mill as the owners of the mill want to restart the water wheel.

After much protracted searching we managed to trace the entire track all the way back to the river. It’s been fairly well damaged and needs quite some expense to bring it back to a decent state.

As well as that, Marianne also gave me a pile of press cuttings from the local paper – all stuff that I had contributed over the last year or so. I keep a file of that kind of stuff – you never know when it might come in handy.

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Saturday 7th April 2012 – I managed to get out today

Yes – I made it into St Eloy for some shopping – such is the highlight of my life. Mind you, I spent a few bob. Another plant sale, and so I bought three soft fruit bushes – two redcurrants and one blueberry – a tray of 12 cauliflowers and a tray of 12 lettuce.

Another thing was that a few months ago LIDL had on sale a kind or remote speaker that looked like a mushroom. It takes a micro-SD card, but also there’s a small jack that fits into a small headphone socket and there’s also a USB connector for charging up the internal battery and running the sound system off a laptop computer. They were on sale for €12:99 and I was humming and hawing about one, but today they were reduced to €9:99 and so I bought one.

And honestly, I’m impressed with it. The sound is really good, much better than I expected. And I’m looking forward to trying it with a micro-SD card when I’m working somewhere. But the main reason for having it is that the phone that I bought in Canada takes a micro-SD card and so I bought a 16GB card, recorded all of my music onto it, and used the phone as a walkman-type of thing. I wasn’t impressed with the earphones though and so I can plug this speaker into the phone and listen to it like that.

And so back home, in between the phone calls, I planted the cauliflower, the fruit bushes and 6 of the lettuce. I’ll give the other lettuce to Liz on Monday for her to plant.

This morning though, I went through the magazine that I received in the post and made a list of potential radio programmes that I can do. There must be a good half-dozen that I can squeeze out of that. And then I finished the one that I was doing, adding a bit more stuff that I came across that was relevant, and finishing off the additional notes for June. I’m cracking on with this.

Another thing that I needed to do was to transform a few radio programmes from *.wav format to *.mp3 format. And it took ages to find a freeware utility to do it. I had all sorts of difficulties doing that.

Now here’s a thing. You may remember that a few weeks ago I bought a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
and so I went to watch it tonight on my new TV. And what surprised me is that the list of languages for subtitles available on disc is English, French and Dutch, whereas the spoken languages available are English, French and …. errrrr …. Flemish. Now I have never seen that before. The difference in language between Dutch and Flemish is far, far less than, say, French and Québecois, and usually a film company will go with either Dutch or Flemish – confident that those who know one will not notice the difference in the other – but to have them available as a mixed but exclusive option like this is totally bizarre. I’ve a good mind next time to listen to it in Flemish but read the Dutch subtitles and to see if I can spot the difference.

Ja, zeker!

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Friday 6th April 2012- I’ve had another day of being indoors

Yes, I’ve been hard at it today.

And I’ve been working as well. I mentioned briefly last night that I needed to look around for another subject to discuss on the radio for when we finish “speeding convictions” and as chance would have it the Postie brought me one of these little magazines that the bank sends me every so often.

This month there was tons of stuff in it, and there was also another little magazine that comes out every few months as a supplement, entitled “Family Matters”. And by ‘eck wasn’t there some good stuff in there too?

They did one a year ago which was “40 typical situations in France – true or false?” I copied those out and embellished them quite considerably, but I noticed in this magazine today that there were several readers’ questions. I’ve selected a couple of those and added them to the list of qestions – by the looks of things I can keep that going for ever if it keeps on like this.

But there were two subjects in there concerning important matters of everyday life in France that are treated quite differently from in the UK. So what I’ve done today is to dash off a quick 31kb of information about one of them. That took most of the day and there’s more to add as well. We normally do about 3 or 4 kb of information per programme so that’s about 8 programmes, plus whatever else I can haven’t added in yet. That should all keep the ball rolling for while I’m away and also for when I come back too for the first month. I’ve also made a start on the additional information for the recording session when I come back.

Then, of course, there’s the second topic. I won’t do that right now though – I’m going to have a rest for a bit once I’ve finished what’s on hand. I deserve it.

But I tell you what – sitting here with a pile of papers, extracting relevant information, turning it into a play for two actors – we were discussing on a “social network” the other day the benefits that we gained from studying with the Open University. I wouldn’t have been able to do too much of this preparation for the radio without having had the kind of preparation that I was taught at the University, that’s for sure.

And another small matter that is worthy of note – all the paperwork that I receive is in legalese French. I have to translate it all into vernacular English in my head while I’m doing it. I just thought that I would mention that.

And that’s not all I did today either. Liz rang me up and asked me to run an errand round to some clients of Terry’s who live nearby. Then Percy Penguin (who doesn’t feature half as much in these pages as she might) rang up for a chat, and then Dave from Hexham rang up with further information from yesterday and to give me a job of work to do for Sunday.

And to think that I came to live here for a rest! Still, it keeps me out of mischief.   

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Thursday 5th April 2012 – I’ve not been out much …

… today either. It’s another day where I’ve been working on radio stuff – this is fast becoming a full-time job.

With the aim of getting as far ahead as possible, I’ve been concentrating on the Radio Arverne programmes. As you know, these are in four parts – namely the events (organised by Liz), the selected track of the week (just grab the nearest CD and look for something about 3 minutes long), the practical information, and the additional notes – namely useful French phrases, a recipe and gardening hints.

What I did today until about 16:30 was 6 weeks worth of the additional notes. Get those out of the way.

After that I went outside for a few hours in the garden. I made up some tubs for the lavender, cleaned a few of the herb beds and planted the thyme and rosemary that I bought the other week. There was some rosemary in there that looked like it had died so I pulled it up – but the root system still looked good and healthy so I planted it in the cloche – let’s see what it does there.

As well as that, I cleared out some of the space where I’ll be planting the rose bushes, and I did some more weeding. With all of the rainfall after the weeks of beautiful sunny weather the weeds are going berserk.

I had a couple of phone calls this evening too. One from this guy in Canada and another one from Dave from Hexham, who contributes every so often to the comments on this blog. He is working right now on a new business idea and so we had a long chat about that – that is, until his phone card expired.

Tomorrow will be another morning in. I need to choose a new topic for the practical information for the radio programme and then write a pile of stuff about it. I’ll have to go through a pile of magazines and journals that I have here and see what I can find.

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Wednesday 4th April 2012 – I’ve hardly been out …

… of the house all day. I’ve been busy writing radio programmes.

We’re launching a new series of programmes on Radio Tartasse on Thursday and Sunday evenings at 20:00 – what is known under the generic term of AOR, or album-orientated rock music. Two programmes every month – one which will feature just album tracks with some kind of chat in between the tracks, and the other which features a 5-minute introduction and then 55 minutes of one particular group doing a selection of live tracks that I edit and cobble together to make it a kind of live show.

It was the kind of thing that I reckoned would be pretty straightforward and easy seeing the size of my record collection and the amount of useless information that has collected inside my head, but it’s far from it. It’s taking much more time than I imagined. I’ve been at it all day from about 11:00 and I’ve managed to do 4 programmes.

We’ve already recorded four of them – for the months of April and May, but I want to get well ahead while the getting is good and so I wrote another four – two months’ worth – and we’ll be recording them in due course.

And that’s it, really. Nothing else. Doesn’t time fly quickly when you are enjoying yourself?

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Saturday 31st March 2012 – WELL, I’VE SEEN SOME …

… bad football matches in my time, but I was totally taken aback by the one that I saw this evening.

Phone call at 19:00 to tell me that the floodlights at Pionsat hadn’t been fixed and so FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s game planned for this evening is to be played tomorrow afternoon instead.

That had me at a loose end this evening and with no footy at Marcillat-en-Combraille, a quick glance at the scheduling told me that there was a Regional Elite game at St Gervais d’Auvergne where the home team was to play Orcines.

I’d never seen a Regional Elite game and so I went for a wander down there, and to be quite honest I’m not sure that it was worth the effort.

St Gervais were pretty dire and Orcines weren’t much better, even though they had a couple of veterans playing up front who had clearly done this kind of thing at a much higher level a few years ago, although these days their zimmer frames were something of a danger to the other players on the field.

Add to that the fact that the St Gervais keeper was having a real off-day (he surely can’t play like that at this level each week, can he?) and a 3-0 victory for the visitors was almost a foregone conclusion.

After that I popped round to Liz and Terry’s where some ginger cake needed eating, and then back here.

This morning though, I had to write the text for two radio shows. It’s getting all exciting with a new series of programmes, but it’s much more work than I ever imagined it to be.

I popped into St Eloy-les-Mines for shopping, and excelled myself here.

6 small shrubs that will (I hope) grow into a hedge at the back of the raised beds, 6 rose bushes to make a hedge just outside here, some rosemary and thyme plants and a couple of lavender bushes. I can’t believe that I’m buying things like this.

It isn’t like me at all to buy flowers – I suppose that it is symbolic of how much I am becoming settled here.

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Friday 30th March 2012 – WE WERE RADIOING TODAY …

… and so that involved a trip to Gerzat.

In the gorgeous glorious sunshine as well, even though it was less hot today.

This morning was therefore printing stuff off, and then going off to Sauret Besserve to pick up Liz.

We recorded 5 programmes, ao as to get ourselves well ahead of the game seeing as I’m having serious thoughts about going for a holiday again. I have the wanderlust, don’t I?

And then back home, via Liz’s to drop her off and for some coffee and vegan ginger cake.

birdwatching site ornithologique st gervais d'auvergne gouttieres puy de dome franceOn the way back I stopped off at the birdwatching site at the back of St Gervais d’Auvergne to take a few pics with the new zoom lens that I bought a while ago.

Again, it’s manual focus and that is causing a few difficulties.

And I’m beginning to realise that this was not the best of my decisions. Only one of the photos was worth keeping, and this was a shot of the church at Gouttières, about 10 miles away.

And you can see, running from to centre to mid-right the road that I take when I go home.

So, like the 50mm lens, it will work eventually and do the business once I can work out how to get it to do what I want.

Back here, I had the TV on again and watched a DVD of Steppenwolf Live at Louisville, Kentucky.

I bought this ages ago but the little DVD player didn’t go it justice. The new AKAI though is magnificent and the sound, turned right up as befits any rock concert, is the best CD-type of stereo player that I have around here.

I just hope that this TV lasts the pace. If I can get 5 years out of it, it will be excellent

But one thing about this Steppenwolf concert – there are only four musicians on stage. John Kay on vocals and guitar, another guitarist, a drummer and a keyboard player. No bassist.

But never mind how you can possibly play “Born To Be Wild” and “Pusher” (to name but two tracks) without a bassist, there is nevertheless a bass being played somewhere out there, and it’s not being done on the foot pedals of the organ, as I once saw the famous bass line of Darkness (11/11) played on stage by Van Der Graaf Generator when they didn’t have Nic Potter with them. It’s definitely a bass guitar

Overdubbing at a later date for the DVD? Perish the thought.

-5

Tuesday 27th March 2012 – I DIDN’T DO …

… anything like as much as I wanted to in the garden today. And there is a variety of reasons for this.

  1. it took longer than I was expecting to dig over the first raised bed that I needed to clear.
  2. the framework of the bed needed some repair – and so I had to sort that out
  3. I found some crops growing in there – leeks I think from some seed that I might have planted last year. Only baby leeks but leeks none-the-less, and so they needed careful handling.

And if that’s not enough to be going on with, I’ve been “revisiting” the sites that I have already cleared of nettles and brambles. Each time that I see something new growing, I pull it up.

I also am slowly advancing around the garden area as I clear it from generic weeds such as the aforementioned nettles ad brambles. I’m making huge progress with that and it’s all looking very good, but it’s taking my time to do and distracting me from clearing the raised beds.

Anyway, one of the raised beds is clear and it has garlic growing in it. Only another three to do this week – shallots, onions and leeks are destined for those.

But in something of a record for recent times, I knocked off work at … errrr …. 19:42. It’s been a long time since I’ve been out working that late, and enjoying what I’m doing as well.

Talking of records though, this morning though Liz and I were recording the Radio Anglais sessions at Marcillat-en-Combraille for Radio Tartasse. We’ve finished talking rubbish … "sez you" – ed … and so we’ll have to think of a new subject for May’s programmes.

I had a bad night’s sleep last night though.

There’s evidently a mouse or two that have been hibernating in the wall of the house – finding their way in by means of the place where there was no plasterboarding in the bedroom. Of course I fixed that a few months ago and now that the mice have awoken, they can’t get out of the wall and so go running around inside trying to find a way out.

So at 04:00 I was rudely awakened and had to listen to them clog-dancing around the ceiling for hours.

I wish that they would hurry up and starve to death or something.

-2

Monday 26th March 2012 – AND SO AFTER MY JOHNNY …

… Cash impression yesterday – you know, “I walk the line” – which is so much better than my impersonation of Glen “I am a linesman for Notts County” Campbell, I had a quiet day today and I hardly went out.

Seeing as I was in the mood – which doesn’t happen all that often – I wrote a huge raft of stuff for the radio programmes. As well as a few more of the 20 questions I did an article about how to appeal against a speeding ticket and also some more useful phrases in French for our non-French-speaking listeners.

That was really about it, I suppose.

But I did have a heated shower.

The temperature in the 12-volt home-made immersion heater that I use as a dump load went off the scale again and so I tipped 10 litres of the hot water into the solar-heated shower tank (which raised that up to a glorious 42.5°C) and put 10 litres of cold water into the dump load, which cooled that down to 62°C.

Tomorrow we are radioing in the morning and in the afternoon I’ll have a bash in the garden. I have garlic, onions and shallots to plant, as well as the shrubs that I bought the other week.

And not forgetting the raspberry plants that Liz gave me either.

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Sunday 25th March 2012 – THERE ARE NO PHOTOS …

… of FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 3rd XI’s match against Blot l’Eglise this afternoon.

I was busy doing other things.

Like running the line.

Well, walking the line actually, if it comes to that. It was a hot day and I’m not as young as I used to be.

“But surely the linesmen have to keep up with play” said Steve. Indeed they do, but that’s never an issue with FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 3rd XI. They aren’t as young as they used to be either.

But I did feel so sorry for them. Again, playing without anyone with any pretensions to goalkeeping, the first goal that they conceded was from a corner with the keeper stranded in no-man’s-land (or “no-person’s-land” as was once famously said by the legendary Turdi de Hatred on one memorable occasion quite some tiime ago).

Either come for the ball or stay on your line – don’t dither, otherwise you will be beaten by the looping header over the top.

Apart from that, the match was finely-balanced and although Pionsat didn’t offer much up front, the Blot l’Eglise team never ever gave the keeper anything serious to worry about, despite all of their possession.

The second half saw a different goalkeeper (said he, using the term loosely) and once again in this half there was nothing to differentiate either team. That is, until tragedy struck late in the game.

And not once, but twice.

On both occasions the Blot l’Eglise attackers had a decent fiery shot on goal. On both occasions the Pionsat keeper dived full length qnd got both hands to it. On both occasions he couldn’t hang on to the ball. On both occasions he dropped it – right at the feet of one of the Blot forwards. And that, I’m afraid to say, was that.

The big difference was, that I have said at great length on many occasions, that the Pionsat hierarchy is not doing enough to find a real goalkeeper for the 3rd XI.

And the fact that they went off to Blot this afternoon without anyone being asked to accompany them to run the line is something else about which I can rant for ever.

After that I shot off down to Menetrol to watch FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s Ist XI.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire us menetrol puy de dome franceMenetrol have a decent side – not as good as Clermont Fontaine du Bac the other week but decent all the same, and they scored just as I arrived – some 20 minutes late. And they scored another later in the game.

Pionsat pulled one back late in the match but the referee then, inexplicably, blew for the end of the game with, according to Franck, 3 minutes of normal time remaining – never mind stoppage time.

And there were a couple of bizarre refereeing decisions made in this game, as well as a completely one-sided issue of yellow cards, to the detriment of Pionsat.

Apart from that. I had an early start this morning due to an urgent need to ride the porcelain horse,

And so with the hour’s difference today as well, I’m not feeling myself, which is just as well as it’s a disgusting habit anyway. But I did some more work on the radio programme before the early start to Blot.

After the football it was round to Liz and Terry’s to discuss the radio programmes and Liz cooked a gorgeous meal. Penne al arrabiata.

The recipe calls for two chilis but Liz only had small ones so she put in 4, forgetting that the smaller the chili the more concentrated the spicy effect is. But then again who’s complaining? Especially as there was ginger cake for pudding.

I also picked up a hitcher, a prisoner on the white lins of the freeway coming back from Menetrol.

I do that every now and again, really out of thanks to the thousands of people who have picked me up while hitch-hiking in the days of my youth.

But it’s a windy road from Chatel-guyon to St Georges de Mons and I bet he was glad when I stopped to drop him off. It’s doubtful if he knew how quickly a Transit Van can move when the driver has his foot down, and how well the aforementioned handles with decent tyres on it.

Caliburn is running quite well just now. 

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Saturday 24th March 2012 – JUST FOR ONCE …

FCPSH FC PIONSAT ST HILAIRE football club de foot lapeyrouse puy de dome france… The 2nd XI of FC Pionsat St Hilaire had a little bit or two of luck in a football match.

On several occasions Loubeyrat’s forwards broke clean through the centre of the Pionsat defence with only François to beat – a rather regular occurrence unfortunately – and twice they hit the woodwork and on a couple of other occasions they either put it wide or over the top.

They did actually score two goals, but so did FC Pionsat St Hilaire, and the match ended 2-2. It’s the first point that they have won in an age, and considering that Loubeyrat are second in the table this is a good result for Pionsat.

This morning though I was working up here – preparing for a radio programme or four. Doing the gardening bit and also the French expressions.

Tomorrow I have to do the main part of the programme – the information.

We’re running out of stuff to present but I collared Max at the football tonight. He’s the part-time secretary at a couple of mairies and he did promise me to let me have copies of the arretes prefectorials – the local by-laws.

But he keeps forgetting.

And so I have to keep on reminding him.

And seeing as it was so nice today not only did I have a solar shower (35.5°C and with a saucepan of hot water from the dump load thrown in to warm it up even more) I did a load of washing.

“Up-to-date” I hear you say, and it’s true that everything that was hanging around, as well as what needed washing from this last week has now been attended to, but of course I found some more stuff lying around that I had overlooked and so the pile hasn’t diminished any.

What was nice about the wash was that the temperature of the water was well over 70°C. What I did was to run part of the clothes through the wash at 70°C and then left them to soak while I went off to do a quick bit of shopping at St Eloy les Mines.

When I came back the water had of course cooled down and so I put the woolly jumpers in from winter and gave them a run round in the machine. That will have sorted them out.

But what with one thing or another there seems to be plenty of surplus energy around. I think that I’m going to have to switch the fridge on for 24 hours every day so that the batteries can run down a little overnight.

If it’s a miserable grey day I can always unplug it in the morning.

-3

Friday 23rd March 2012 – WE HAD A …

… change of plan today as well

I got to Liz and Terry’s at lunchtime and after a quick butty Terry and I hit the road to Ambert to see this dumper.

But we didn’t go any further than Les Ancizes.

We started to talk about the pros and cons of having a dumper as opposed to a large powered barrow. While a dumper can carry much more soil around, when you consider what a mini-digger can excavate, then rapidly filling a dumper to capacity isn’t going to be much of an issue.

There are several other things that might be an issue, namely

  • trying to manoeuvre a dumper around the kind of tight spaces that you might expect to encounter on building projects around here – the very reason why we went for a mini-digger and not a JCB in the first place
  • if you are going out to a site you will need to make two trips, namely one to move the digger and a second to fetch the dumper. With a powered barrow, the barrow will go into the back of the van and so you only make one trip

With a few other discussions along these lines, we decided that maybe a dumper wasn’t quite what we wanted and so we did a U turn and went back.

Browsing around the internet for powered barrows we became distracted and it seems that I have spent some more money that I can’t really afford.

The old in-car DVD player that I use to watch DVDs in here is slowly giving up the ghost. The battery failed ages ago and now it’s being very selective about what DVDs it plays.

But there on the internet on sale was an AKAI 12-volt TV with build-in DVD player (the new generation DVDs as well), Freeview TV box, 15-inch screen and loads of other bells and whistles and all for … gulp … £214.

And with all of that, it draws less that 20 watts.

i spend a lot of time watching DVDs and I reckon that I ought to have something decent to watch them on without straining my eyes on a tiny 7-inch screen.

Not only that, I didn’t buy myself a birthday present last month.

Once we’d done the internet bit we went outside (it was a gorgeous day) and did bits and pieces in Liz’s garden, and I swapped the tyres over on her car from winter tyres to summer tyres (just you watch the snowstorm now).

Well, it was better than me singing for my supper, and the tea was beautiful as usual.

This morning though, I did some work on my web pages for the journey to Canada last autumn. First time since 6th of January.

I’ve loads of other things to do as you know, but I wanted to do something on these pages as a gesture of recommencement.

Tomorrow I have to write four or five radio programmes. That will keep me out of mischief.

-2

Monday 27th February 2012 – IT WASN’T QUITE …

… as warm up herethis morning.

A mere 13.4°C up here in fact.

But considering that the temperature had dropped to -2.2°C outside last night and that I had no heating on in here last night either, I was quite impressed by that.

I’m wondering in fact whether or not it’s staying warmer up here since I finished the ceiling in the room below. It does seem like it.

This morning I went off to Sauret-Besserve and picked up Liz, and then we made our way down to Gerzat to record the Radio Arverne programmes. And wasn’t that a farce? They have had new computers and new programs installed and Bernard didn’t know how to work it all.

It took quite a bit of telephone assistance together with a little first-hand aid from Yours Truly to organise everything.

At one stage it looked like we might have to come back and do it all over again – an idea that didn’t impress me too much.

Instead of being a quick hour or so it ended up more like two and a half hours. Both Liz and I had things to do this afternoon so that meant hurrying back up here to get ready, and then off to Radio Tartasse in Marcillat en Combraille to carry out another little task, more of which anon.

Today we had well over 11 hours of solar energy – a huge improvement on winter’s previous best of 10:49. It seems that the weather has suddenly opened up.

So much so that when I came back from Radio Tartasse I did a little gardening – not on my garden but in the lane there are several small trees starting to grow and their branches have been scratching the side of Caliburn. I spent a pleasant half hour or so cutting them down.

I had a fire up here tonight although it wasn’t strictly necessary. And the temperature went to over 25°C while I cooked my baked potatoes and ratatouille.

It won’t be much longer before I have to abandon the idea of cooking up here on the stove. It’s warming up far too much.

-2

Sunday 26th February 2012 – ONE THING …

… that I can never understand is how it is that it can be 4:30 in the morning and I’m wide awake and I only go to bed because it’s force of habit – and yet next morning I wake up, don’t move for ages, slowly come round, eventually make sure that I’m wide awake and then get up because there’s no point in lying in any longer, and it’s only 09:20.

I don’t understand that at all.

And so despite it being yet another day of rest, I did the script for the new radio show, more of which anon, and then went off toi watch the football at Pionsat as the season has restarted.

I was spoilt for choice – FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 1st XI were at home to Chanat or the 2nd XI were away at Lapeyrouse?

Now I’ve never been to Lapeyrouse for a match, believe it or not, but the 1st XI match sounded much more interesting and so I waited until 14:50 and went down to the ground, only to find the game postponed.

GRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

If only someone had let me know!

Mind you, it’s probably as well that I didn’t go, because the 2nd XI were soundly spanked by the opposition.

But what was remarkable today is that I had to cook my tea downstairs in the verandah on the gas stove. Reason – I’ve not had the fire lit all day. When I woke up it was 17°C and it’s currently 15.5°C.

Isn’t this all a big change from two weeks ago?

-3

Monday 20th February 2012 – I’VE HAD SOMETHING …

… of a busy day today.

And it started, believe it or not, with me being up and about before the alarm clock went off – something that doesn’t happen every day.

So after an early breakfast I stayed in and spent much of the time on the computer working on another project for the radio, more of which anon.

But this involved making a few downloads from the internet. And as I watched these downloads unfold I noticed the internet speed dropping slowly but surely. Clearly something is up, and it’s high time I fixed it.

That meant disabling and then deleting the MacAfee anti-virus suite, which is something pretty appalling and I can’t think whyever it is that computer manufacturers bundle it in.

Once that was out of the way I went back to prehistoric computer protection, and installed the latest free AVG anti-virus software, and then Ad-Aware, Spybot and C-Cleaner, the same as I have been using for years.

Sure enough, 2 viruses, 140-odd adware links and the odd bit of spyware, and half a gb of bunged-up old temporary files all littering the computer and after quite a bit of patience and persuasion, they have all gone.

Now I seem to have a leaner, fitter computer.

Mind you, trying to download AVG at 9.3kbs took absolutely hours, but it was worth it and I’m hoping that I can win back the time in due course.

It’s all very well having virus protection, but not just any old virus protection though. You need one that works quietly, quickly and effectively without pinching all of your resources.

-3