Yes, the lighting is slowly progressing around the house now. Even with having light up and down the stairwell, it still meant that I needed a torch to move around the house as the living room was in darkness. But I remedied that this morning by using the other half of the light switch at the foot of the stairs and an old redundant light switch by the door into the kitchen, and I now have a light by the front door over the control panel and I can now happily move around torchless.

You might think that this light isn’t all that bright. But firstly, it’s plenty bright enough to move around with and secondly, it’s only 1.2 watts, believe it or not. Yes, these 12-volt LED lights from LIDL, at €4.49 a shot, they are definitely the way to go.

Don’t look too closely at the wiring by the way. Terry takes the mickey out of it even when I do what I consider to be a good job. But here, I ran out of wire and had to cobble together whatever I could find .

I also ran out of time. I did in fact allow myself plenty of time but Claude came round. He’s got a puncture on his old Clio and was wondering if I had a spare 155×13 tyre. I have a couple but they are for the diesel Escort and I’m not going to part with them so I offered to run him into town or to a scrapyard to pick something up. But no, did I have anything? In the end I found 2 165×13 tyres on Volkswagen wheels that belonged to the Passat before I had a lucky find with those 175/70×14 Golf wheels and tyres. So they are the wrong size and on different wheels and they have been hanging around outside for 7 years in all kinds of weather. But they are free so he’s taken them and will change them himself onto the Renault wheels with a crowbar.

Now I did some crazy things with cars and the like in my youth but I drew the line with tyres long before this particular point was ever reached. Second-hand tyres of good quality from a scrapyard is fair game but perishing (in both senses of the word) Uniroyal and Courier remould tyres – well, it’s a problem in the making, this is. And I’m not quite sure how a crowbar will affect the rims of the wheels, especially when you need to rely on the integrity of the rims to keep an airtight seal with tubeless tyres.

This afternoon I fitted one of the offcuts from the verandah roof over where the plant-pot beichstuhl is. There’s no roof over where I’ve fitted it although the scaffolding planks on the scaffolding overhead so protect it somewhat. But with a driving wind causing everything to swirl about, I had a good soaking while I was riding the porcelain (or in this case, aluminium) horse this afternoon. Time for action!

In between all of this, I did a load of washing. After last night’s brilliant and clear skies the sky forgot to cloud over this morning and for a couple of hours we had a brilliantly clear sky. I seized the opportunity to do a load of washing but the clouds caught up before I had finished and now everything is receiving a final rinse from Mother Nature out on the washing line. And more rain is forecast.

I nipped round to Claude’s this evening to give him and Francoise a bottle of champagne for New Year, seeing as I forgot to give it to them on Christmas Eve. Beethoven is ill and they are going to have to take him to the vet’s. He’s 16 and in reasonable health and has bags of character. I’m not into dogs but in his case I could make an exception. I hope he’s going to be ok.

And that was that. I had a nice tea with some roast potatoes, and now I’m going to do nothing except listen to the torrential rain beating down on the roof.

Happy New Year to you all. And I wish for you for 2010 everything that you wished on everyone else for 2009.

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