Tag Archives: composting toilet

Tuesday 26th November 2013 – I’VE RESTARTED WORK TODAY

First time since last Thursday too. But there were a few housekeeping jobs that needed to be performed first, including emptying the composting toilet – a gruesome job.

Once that was out of the way the next stop was Pionsat where I needed to post an important letter. And then off to the sawmill at St Gervais for my wood. 21 laths and 12 demi-chevrons of 4.5 metres. The laths are for putting the insulation on the walls outside here – a job that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and the demi-chevrons are for making the shelves that I want. I have 9 or 10 shuttering planks that I bought in Brico Depot the last time that I was there. They will get me going for the actual shelves but I really need a huge pile more. I won’t be getting them this week as I have a “minder” job to do on Saturday which means only local shopping again.

Back home, I made a start on building my woodshed. For that, I’m using the old chevrons off the house and barn roof. I put them aside specifically for work like this, but some of them are in worse condition than I imagined. Not that that is too much of a worry because what won’t be any good for building will be plenty good enough for burning and you can never have too much firewood, especially if you have somewhere to store it.

Anyway, I’ve selected all of the wood that I need and I’ve almost assembled one side. I’ll finish that tomorrow and then make the seond side, after which I’ll need to dig the holes to plant them into the ground and concrete them in place.

If I can do all of that, this will really be progress with a capital P.

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Monday 11th November 2013 – IT’S REMEMBRANCE DAY TODAY …

… which is a Bank Holiday here in France, and so I remembered to switch off the alarm and have another lie-in. It’s been a while since I’ve had a proper Bank Holiday day off.

It dropped below freezing point last night outside too, the first time at this end of the year, and I’m not surprised because it was a glorious day today – not a cloud in the sky. There was 134 amp-hours of surplus solar energy too and so the home-made electric 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load was in action again.

I had a nice leisurely morning tidying up a load of files on the computer and then carried out what is probably the most disagreeable task that happens round here, and that is to empty the composting toilet. Down at the composting bin, the first time for probably 6 months or something, I was well-impressed. What had been a horrible soggy mass of I don’t quite know what (well I do, but this is a family website) I was greeted by a nice dark brown earthy, crumbly soil mixture. So that is clearly working.

I’m also having charging issues in the barn, and have been for quite some time. The Charge Controller seems to have given up the ghost and no charge has been passing through it for quite some time, and consequently the batteries there are somewhat empty. But it was a shame to miss out on all of this lovely solar energy that we were having and so I made up a cable with a crocodile clip at each end and for a couple of hours I by-passed the charge controller by using this cable, and that put a little life into the batteries and we actually had some light in the barn this evening.

I’ll have to remember to do that more often, in order to give the batteries a chance to build themselves back up again. But that’s the second Charge Controller that’s failed in there. Something isn’t quite right, I reckon. I’ll need to check and see what it is.

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Thursday 18th July 2013 – MYSTERY SOLVED

It wasn’t the old abandoned house that fell down the other night. I managed to have a wander around there to see, and although I walked past it twice without seeing it, because it was so covered in ivy and weeds and so on, it’s still there, or, rather, what’s left of it is,

But I know what it was that made that noise.

I managed to make my way down to the compost bin today (high time I emptied the composting toilet – it certainly needed it) and I’ll tell you what – a cordless Ryobi Plus One hedge trimmer makes a magnificent strimmer for dealing with tall grass and weeds and the like – it’s a long time since I’ve been as impressed as this.

But back to the plot

There are piles of dead wood and twigs and branches covering the bottom end of my garden and there, in the next field where Lieneke had a huge old tree of some description, well she doesn’t have it now.

There’s about two metres of stump and then there’s absolute carnage. I’m not surprised that it heaved me out of bed.

shower room false wall plasterboard les guis virlet puy de dome franceAs for the shower room, well, it’s all finished as far as I can go until I buy the tiles.

And it was finished at lunchtime too (mind you, it was 14:45 when I stopped).

The good news is that the sink is not 50cms at all but just 43cms. That means that I can have a 45cm worktop instead of a 52cm one and that will give me much more room.

I have to admit that, in all honesty, my shower room is not going to be the place to be for anyone suffering from claustrophobia.

But there will be plenty of shelving and even a very small 20cm deep linen cupboard.

But seeing as I had finished by 14:45, how come I didn’t knock off until 19:45 then?

The answer to all of that is that, as I explained just now, I fought my way down to the compost bin, and that wasn’t the work of 5 minutes either as you can imagine.

And once I had finished attacking the vegetation, I emptied, cleaned and recharged the composting toilet. And it needed it too, as I have said.

After that, changing the habits of a lifetime, I attacked the the room which will be the bedroom and which I’ve been using as a workroom.

A pile of wood went straight out of the window for a start, and then I started to sweep up and tidy up. 3 large bin bags of rubbish and a bin full of sawdust for the toilet, and it’s not finished yet.

But it’s amazing the space that you can make if you put your mind to it.

I’m going to have a serious go tomorrow and see if I can’t make enough space to lie flat all of the sheets of plasterboard instead of having them propped up against a wall bowing away to themselves alarmingly.

They ought to be lain flat but I’ve never really had the space to do it.

Tons of tools recovered, as well as tons of nails and screws, and I bet that there will be others recovered tomorrow. But I’m not going to do too much – I have a pile of correspondence to deal with and some of that is urgent.

I felt like cooking tonight too, and ended up with a gorgeous meal – potatoes, carrots, cauliflower in a cheese sauce and a veggie burger. Absolutely marvellous.

Went down a treat with the ice cream sorbet that I bought for myself as a treat for finishing the shower room.

And we’ve had a storm tonight. First rain since July the … errr … 2nd? And we needed it too as the water situation was getting desperate.

I’m glad that I cleaned out the filters the other day.

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Wednesday 2nd January 2013 – IT WAS BACK …

… to work today.

First time since I’m not sure when.

However, first task was to start on the web page for my visit to Lévis (that’s pronounced “Layvee”, not “Levi’s”) which is across the St Lawrence from the city of Québec. That was a brief excursion on a ferry across the St Lawrence in the middle of the afternoon during my walk around Québec.

It’s usually a bad sign for me to encounter a ferry and I’m never in a good humour, because every time I see a ferry, it always makes me cross.

Once that was out of the way I had a marathon wood-chopping session. I’ve used up a pile of wood over the last couple of weeks and so it needed to be replaced.

That took quite a while and created a nice pile of sawdust for the composting toilet.

It’s also made a nice little space in the lean-to and I’m hoping that I can crack on with that idea. I’d love to have enough space in there for my little workshop by the end of winter

Finally, I carried on with the floor in the shower room, and I’ve worked out why there’s a problem with the floor levels. It seems that with the wisdom that only Brico Depot can conjure up, the grooves are off-centre.

Now that wouldn’t particularly matter if the off-centre was consistent on each plank but in fact, while a pack might be consistent, the batch isn’t.

And that’s just plain ridiculous because there’s a planed side and a rough side, so you can’t even turn the planks over in order to even out the centres.

For tea this evening I tried a little experiment.

As well as starting off the baked potatoes in the oven, I chopped up a few sprouts and carrots, put them in a pyrex dish with some water and put them in the oven too.

Add a veggie burger and onions and garlic in a baking tray and use some of the veg water to make a gravy and I had a magnificent evening meal. Just like a king, in fact.

A wise move indeed, buying this little stove as I have said so many times before.

And setting up a little kitchen in a corner here, that’s working too.

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Tuesday 20th November 2012 – I’VE MADE A START …

shower room floor les guis virlet puy de dome france… on fitting the new floor in where the bathroom, or to be more precise, the shower room is going to be, and there’s one very unhappy bunny here.

The tongue-and-grooving is from Brico Depot and it’s a major mistake to buy anything from there.

5 packs of flooring I’ve bought, all of the same brand, all bought at the same time, and the packets are all of different thicknesses.

Not only that, the tongues of one packet don’t correspond to the grooves of the others either so when you firmly nail one lot down, the subsequent packet won’t slide properly underneath and you have to lever it up a little.

All in all, it’s looking quite a mess – nothing like the neat and tidy little job I was hoping for.

I haven’t finished it yet either because I ran out of light so that’s not going to be done until I come back from the UK, and I’m dismayed about that too.

This morning though, I made a start on the Radio Anglais Christmas Special that we do for Radio Arverne.

This is an hour-long programme, mostly speech but with some music as well and it doesn’t half take some writing. Today though, I’ve been researching and gathering material.

I’m not going to tell you the subject matter though – you can wait until it’s on the air.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to be extremely busy.

In the afternoon Cécile is coming round to work in the garden in exchange for the work that I did for her last Friday.

Of course, I don’t want to frighten her away and so I need to do some tidying up, and that will take me all of the morning, and then some, I suppose.

Steam-cleaning the verandah is priority number one, and then emptying the composting toilet – that’s always a good plan too.

need to empty the verandah as much as possible, because for this winter I want to bring inside the pots of herbs and they are too heavy for me to lift on my own.

I suppose that I’d better go and have an early night then – I need to be fighting fit for tomorrow.

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Tuesday 13th November 2012 – I’VE JUST WOKEN …

… up 🙁

Yes, I went out like a light again in the middle of the evening and it’s hardly as if I’ve been working too hard either.

This morning after coffee I wrote some more stuff for one of the Radio Anglais programmes that we do – a delightful couple of pages on composting toilets, would you believe?

And then I went out to cut another pile of wood ready for the bad weather.

After lunch I carried on emptying the first floor and finally, at 18:00, I was in a position where tomorrow, if nothing else crops up, I can rip up the floor in what will shortly be the shower room.

It’s quite nice tongue-and-grooving but it has about 200 years of ingrained dirt from when it was the upstairs hallway – that is, until I turned the stairs around in November 2009.

It’s impossible to clean it – believe me, I’ve tried, and so it’s coming up and being replaced with new. Once that’s in and given a couple of coats of varnish, I can start on insulating the walls and then fit the plasterboard.

Yes, and I don’t know why, but I also seem to have been very popular today.

I’ve had four phone calls, from Cécile, Rosemary, Percy Penguin and Liz, although not necessarily in that order. Maybe its those that are wearing me out.

-1

Friday 9th November 2012 – I DIDN’T QUITE …

… manage to do as much as I would have liked on the tidying up in the bedroom where I’m working.

I had a phone call from Cécile this morning inviting me round for a chat. She’s renovating a house all on her own and reading between the lines, she had run out of ideas and inspiration.

That, of course is something to which I can easily relate, having been here myself on many occasions and needing a push along the path (thanks, Terry).

Anyway, we had quite a long chat about things in her house and so she’s going out shopping tomorrow for some bits and pieces to help her along the way.

It really does help to have someone to chat to every now and again in circumstances like this.

This morning though, I had a good stint on the website and I’ve now finished my visit to Québec and I’m back in my motel in the Street of 100 Motels.

I can now start indexing the Québec photos and splitting the pages up into bite-sized morsels so as not to overwhelm the MTV generation with its truncated attention span.

That might take some time too.

After that, I cut a pile of firewood, emptied the composting toilet (there aren’t half some lovely jobs around here) and then attacked the tidying up for an hour or so.

The pile of stuff on the shelves is diminishing rapidly. I can’t imagine what half of the stuff is doing in here anyway. It should be in the barn.

Tonight I lit the fire, even though there wasn’t really a need. It’s just that I fancied jacket potatoes and baked beans for tea and for that I need the oven.

It was well-worth the effort too, really enjoyable.

And so I’ve decided to have an early night tonight. That will do me good too.

But before I go, a huge “well done” to Rhys who has at last, after all kinds of vicissitudes, some of which have been mentioned in these pages and others which haven’t, been finally awarded his citizenship of the USA.

Yes, I’m really happy for you and I’m sure that the rest of the readership is too.

You deserve it.

-1

Tuesday 4th September 2012 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I was up before the alarm went off.

And just as well because with having visitors today, it gave me chance to tidy up a little in here and then go downstairs and steam-clean the kitchen.

As an aside, by the way, this unit that I bought the other week and assembled on Sunday, it’s really doing the business and I’m quite impressed with it. I think that this was a really good purchase.

So Rosemary came round for her lesson in pointing and to be frank I think that we spent more time gossiping than working. Nevertheless, she made a reasonable mix and managed two bucketfuls into the wall with a finish that wasn’t too bad at all.

However, I think that she understands that it takes longer than one might think, until you’ve been doing it for a while anyway.

One thing though for which I’m glad that she was here was that I had to change the wires over on the wind turbine.

That involved lying a ladder on the roof (at an angle of course) and then slotting another ladder into the space between the rungs and up the wall so that I could climb up on it.

Not for the faint-hearted, that but I couldn’t think of another way to do it. I needed an assistant for that as who knows what might happen when I’m on my own.

And bravo too, for her being only ever the third person to be brave enough to use the composting toilet.

Anyway, that’s that. I’ll have an early night and then attack the wall in earnest tomorrow. The quicker I start, the quicker I’ll finish.

-1

Tuesday 3rd April 2012 – Remember the other day …

spring trees in bloom blossom puy de dome france… when I told you about all of the trees in the garden bursting into life in that couple of hours? Anyway, I thought that you might like a photo of the blooming things.

It was taken out of the little window at the top of the stairs in the attic – a favourite point of view of mine for the garden. Just compare it with any of the other photos taken from the same spot just recently and you will see the difference.

Another thing that you might notice in the photo is the change in colour of the soil. There’s a reason for that – it was positively precipitating down outside – the first time for 13 days that we have had any kind of precipitation. Just as well too, because I was getting pretty low with the old water, but the 8mm of rain that we had – that filled up the water butts considerably.

Mind you, at one stage it was touch and go. A huge pile of accumulated dust and dirt just have been washed straight down the pipe and it blocked the filter. No water was getting through to the puzzolane filter, and the water was backing up in the system. I had to disconnect the pipe – emptying about 30 litres of water all over me, clean the filter and then reassemble it. It did the trick and allowed the water to circulate through the filters and into the water butts.

So apart from that, what else did I do? Well, emptied the composting toilet, such is the highlight of the exciting life that I live around here. And have I described the composting toilet? Basically, it’s a stainless steel 20-litre casserole pot with lid. I pad it out with shredded cardboard packaging and then line it with a biodegradable bin liner. At the bottom of the bin liner I put a pile of shredded telephone directory pages (nice and absorbent). You take off the lid, do what you need to do (the casserole is in a nice wooden housing that I built, cover it with a ladleful of mixed sawdust and wood ash, and then put the lid back on. When it’s full, the contents are emptied into the compost heap and we start all over again.I can do that because, as regular readers of this rubbish will know, I’m a vegan. You can’t do this if you are a carnivore

As well as that, I tidied up in here. With being so busy over the last few weeks I hadn’t tidied up at all and the place was looking totally depressing. I’m useless at tidying up, so it’s always quite an effort, but now at least it looks a little more civilised. And I found a few important things that I had mislaid so at the end of the day it’s always worthwhile tidying up.

But I wish that I knew the secret of how to be tidy.

-3

Friday 2nd March 2012 – WELL, I DIDN’T …

… quite have my early night last night.

I started talking to someone on the internet just after I posted last night’s blog and it was 02:00 when I finally went to bed.

But here’s something that doesn’t happen every day – not only was I awake when the alarm went off, and not only was I breakfasting, but I was actually outside weeding the garden when the alarm clock went off this morning.

Wide awake at 07:30, I was, and I’ve no idea why. I must have wet the bed or something.

But it was a good day to be wide awake so early. By the time that I came in for a coffee – at about 11:50 – it was 24.6°C outside with gorgeous blue skies and everything. It really was marvellous.

Terry came round a little later. He had a job of work to do in the vicinity and so he popped by to sey hello. And I swapped a few 4mm bolts for a few sacks of sawdust – the composting toilet depends on sawdust, and plenty of it, and I was starting to run low, although you might not think so with all of the wood that I have cut up just recently

With it being so nice, I quickly coupled up the solar water heater -cum – shower unit. I was not really wanting to do that as there are a few improvements that I want to do, but it was a shame to miss out on the solar heat and the possibility of a shower some time in the near future.

I could certainly do with a shower anyway, and I’ll be heading to the swimming baths at Neris-les-Bains if it stays nice tomorrow.

With so much solar energy (we had 243 amp-hours today – that’s about 3KwH) the water in the dump load reached 48°C. That was the cue for the first load of washing for the year.

And there was plenty of that to do as well.

tabletop washing machine les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd it was nice to sit outside this afternoon with a butty or two, a coffee from the electric coffee machine, and watch the washing machine do the business using water heated by the surplus energy off my system. It really is a sense of acccomplishment for all of this to happen.

But as for the washing itself, most of it is going to have to be done again. I tried to do it using these washing nut things but they turned out to be a dismal failure and haven’t made mush impression at all on the dirty stuff.

I’ll have to buy some “proper” washing powder stuff and do it again.

After all of that, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden again.

I didn’t have the fire going because I had the washing hanging out, but there’s now a huge mountain of weeds and so on ready to be burnt and I might do that tomorrow morning.

The area to where I’m going to move one of the compost bins is now clear. All I need to do is to dig up a few small tree stumps there, and compact some hardcore down to stop the weeds from penetrating from underneath, and then I can put the first of the bins there.

And when the pile of weeds has been burnt, I can start to put the greenhouse there where it ought to be.

It seems to me that everyone is starting to come out of hibernation now.

-2

Monday 16th January 2012 – THE FIRST THING …

… that I did today was to empty the composting toilet.

I’ve been neglecting it for a few days, what with one thing or another.

And of course, once you get started you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are too. But the composting toilet did need to be emptied, such is the exciting life that I lead these days.

Second job was to cut a mound of wood.

I’ve been running the pile down this last week or two while I’ve been waming myself and cooking with the new woodstove and so I set about sawing up a big load of wood which should keep me going for the next few weeks.

All done by hand with this new saw, and I’m almost as impressed with that as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin, which hasn’t featured anything as much as it deserves in these pages of late.

anemometer ls guis virlet puy de dome franceThird job was to rescue the old anemometer that was formerly mounted on the side of the house and which I had taken down when I had put the wind turbine up there.

This was sitting in the lean-to not doing very much at all but it’s now screwed to the fence by the front door.

The main reason why I put it back up is that its temperature gauge is much more accurate than the one that I’m currently using to measure the air temperature.

This afternoon, with the sun blazing down and the heater upstairs working flat-out, I reckoned that this is a bit silly. There is so much more that I ought to be doing with the surplus electricity that I have.

And so remembering the heady days of spring and summer 2011 with the 12-volt immersion heater that I had made out of an old xylophene drum and a 12-volt heater element and which corroded through while I was in Canada just now, I set to and dismantled it.

I gave the important bits – like the heater element – the once-over to make sure that they still worked (and you would be amazed at how quickly it boils 1.5 litres of water) and then built another heater using a 4-gallon plastic water header tank.

I’m not sure how long the plastic will remain viable, but it should be good for a while anyway. It will hopefully give me hot water in weather like this and I can do my washing.

But all of this got me thinking – and that kind of thing is dangerous.

When I was setting out on the road of doing all of this, I remembered mentioning to someone who I thought was a friend of mine my plans for maybe having a microwave oven here.

A short while later I stumbled across a thread in a newsgroup somewhere where this “friend” and his mates were openly ridiculing my thoughts about this. Of course, such a friendship had to peter out after that.

Nevertheless, I do wonder what this guy and his mates would be saying now when here, in the middle of winter, for the last three days I’ve been running an electric heater up in the attic.

Serve them right. 

And what happened to this day off that I was going to have?

-2

Tuesday 16th August 2011 – It’s quite useful …

… being up early in the morning because you can get so much more work done.

And up early I was as well for last night I had an early night. It wasn’t planned, but the internet crashed here quite early on as I told you and so I profited by going to bed early. And that surprised everyone, I bet.

This morning I was up, breakfasted, washed and dressed long before 10:00. And after working on the website again I was finished by 12:30. It was time then to attack the pointing again and I managed to do quite a lot.

thunder box beichstuhl composting toilet les guis virlet puy de dome franceI finished one load of mortar by 13:45 and ir wasn’t worth starting another load prior to lunch so I fitted the toilet seat to the composting beichstuhl. It’s cut like that for a special purpose and that’s why I needed a wooden one.

You can see how the beichstuhl works. There’s a huge 20-litre casserole saucepan in there, complete with lid. Inside there is a compostable bin liner. So you lift the white top of the box (you can see the hinges), take off the casserole lid, put in some sawdust (you can see the blue sawdust container behind the beichstuhl) close the white lid, do what you need to do, put in some more sawdust, lift up the white top and refit the casserole lid. When the bin liner is getting full, you dump it in the compost heap and fit another. It’s as simple as that.

Recycling, self-sufficiency and closed-cycle environments is what it’s all about. The water consumption is zero and I shall have tomatoes as big as your head next year.

This evening the temperature in the solar shower was at 39°:C and so I had a gorgeous shower. That was quite enjoyable too. And to round off the day I was down the garden getting a huge courgette, a pile of beans and a pile of new potatoes and made a huge curried stew that will keep me going for the next couple of days as well.

All in all it was quite a good day today.

0

Tuesday 17th May 2011 – I now have a new beichstuhl

beichstuhl home made composting toilet les guis virlet puy de dome franceand here’s a photo of it in ill its glory – minus the tongue-and-grooved cladding of course.

Did I mention that when I was at Les Bonnes Affaires the other day they had a couple of 20-litre aluminium casseroles? And just €9:99 too. I thought that I would try one because being a casserole it would be watertight, it has a tight-fitting lid and it shouldn’t be prone to rusting.

That so-called stainless steel bin that I bought from IKEA is rusty already and leaking, after less that a year and so it needed to be changed. At least this gives me an opportunity to redesign it.

It isn’t finished because I can’t find the hinges for the top part, and I can’t find the clips to hold the seat on, but they’ll turn up somewhere sometime.

Such delightful things that I talk about on my blog.

I started that after I’d been working on my voyage around Cape Breton Island, but I didn’t get a head start on it like I wanted. Another succession of cold canvassers, and the guy from Pionsat Patrimoine who doesn’t understand the meaning of the sentence “I’m busy and I don’t have time to deal with these photos right now” – mind you, the time it took him on the phone, I could have done it.

Tomorrow I’m going to strip out Caliburn, including removing the seats, and see what’s in there, and see if I can’t find that SatNav (although I’m not optimistic about that). I need to get ready to go to the UK.

-2

Saturday 14th May 2011 – Wonders will never cease

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire biollet st maurice puy de dome ligue football league franceAt the football tonight, Biollet St Maurice put two past Pionsat’s 3rd XI tonight as you might expect, but rather astonishingly, Pionsat replied with FIVE (or was it 6? I lost count). That doesn’t happen very often, does it?

Mind you, Pionsat were bolstered by Cedric and Sebastien from the 1st XI, playing their first competitive matches for many, many months following long injuries.

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire biollet st maurice puy de dome ligue football league france Rusty and short of match fitness they may well have been, but they made something of a small difference to the team. The others on the pitch somehow picked up their game and were doing things that they don’t usually do.

But that’s the difference between “being beaten before they start” and “having loads of encouragement and support from the other two teams”. The first and second XIs ought to help out the 3rd XI whenever they can – something that I’ve been saying for years.

And there’s no football anywhere tomorrow – not even in the Allier. It’s cup final day, so it seems. What am I going to do?

This morning that solar panel guy came to see me, and he stayed for about 5 minutes. That suits me. I have no sympathy for canvassers and cold callers.

This afternoon I went to Commentry for the shopping and apart from the usual stuff I made some puchases for the water filters. Chatting to the guys in Bricomarche they had some fibreglass flyscreen stuff at €7:50 per square metre – much better for making a sand filter than a nylon stocking. The Centrakor came up with a pair of those anti-spatter frying pan covers that will be ideal for cutting down and also some stainess steel conical tea strainers, fine for conical puzzolane-filter housings that I’m building.

The Bonnes Affaires came up with some aluminium mesh gutter covers that they use for keeping leaves out. I can make good use of them too, especially at the reduced rate of €1 for a packet ot 0.8 square metres (I bought three). They also had some big casserole saucepans – 12-litre or thereabouts in aluminium for €9.99. I bought one of them to see if it’s any good for making an enclosed composting toilet.

And remember my posting of a few weeks ago about some interesting or exciting news that might be happening? Well, can tell you something but instead I’ll leave you to stew for a few more days.

-1

Thursday 28th April 2011 – Well, today didn’t get off to a very good start.

No indeed. I heard all of the alarms go off at 08:00, but then the next thing that I remembered was looking at the time on the clock and it was 10:35. Ahh well.

But I didn’t miss anything though. We are back in the hanging clouds again and it’s just like winter with low clouds and damp and so on everywhere. It’s perked up the rainwater but that’s about all. I even had to turn the fridge off.

And due to the miserable wet weather I was back in the barn again after lunch. I’ve almost finished tidying up the parking place in there and I reckon that with about another hour’s work I could drag the caravan body out. But it won’t be moving soon as I need to move the Ford Cortina 2000E estate and to do that I need to move the trailer. But it’s nice to think that I can now see the wood rather than the trees.

It’s also nice to be able to get at my huge toolbox and find all my mechanics’ tools. Just like old friends they are. I’m looking forward to getting the Cortina into the barn so that I can make a start on it.

What was surprising though was the things that I found – loads of things I’d forgotten about, including the drawers with all the important Cortina bits – and I’ve not seen that since I dismantled my workshop in Crewe in April 1989. There was also an electric screwdriver from that era or maybe a little later – and it was still holding a charge, which astonished me.

I’m slowly making progress, slowly being the operative word. But I’ll get there in the end. Tomorrow it’s the Royal Wedding and so in keeping with the general contents of the event I’ve set aside the day to deal with the contents of the composting toilet. I think that it’s quite appropriate.

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