Tag Archives: nuit blanche

Tuesday 7th August 2012 – WELL, I’VE FINISHED …

collapsed lean to repairing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome france… the rebuilding of the wall.

Well, to be honest, of course I haven’t. What I do mean to say is that all of the stonework and all of the infill has been done. There’s still the pointing to do of course and that’s not going to be the work of 5 minutes, I can tell you.

And then I’ll need to do the woodwork for the window frames, paint it all and then fit the glass

collapsed lean to repairing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd there’s also the inside of the stonework to attend to, but that’s nothing like as important as the pointing.

But there’s a reason for it all being done today. That is that I didn’t have any sleep at all last night – clearly my guilty conscience or something like that.

Anyway at about 07:45 I was fed up of just lying there and so I got up and about breakfasting. And then, seeing as how I couldn’t concentrate on the web site, I went out and resumed work on the wall

I had a lovely interruption for a couple of hours though, because Liz came round. She was after my blackberries, which I gladly let her take. And we also had a good old chinwag too.

And after lunch, it was back up the wall.

I said that once the wall was finished I would knock off, no matter what the time. And that was what I did – although 18:54 represents only a 6-minute bonus.

And now I’m far too shattered to do anything else and so I’m off to bed

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Friday 30th September 2011 – YOU ARE PROBABLY WONDERING …

… why I didn’t blog last night before I went to bed. The truth is that in fact I didn’t go to bed.

Dunno if it was with crashing out the day before, or all the coffee that I drank, but I was still up at 08:00 and wide awake. So much so that I made myself an early breakfast.

I did crash out on the sofa at about 10:00 but not for long as the phone rang just before midday and it’s been ringing for most of the day on and off ever since.

This afternoon after I was roused by the telephone I did some more transcribing of my holiday notes and then I went outside and dug up my onions.

Well, such as they are because the crop is something of a disappointment. In fact I have more rogue potatoes than I do onions, and that’s sad.

And so I’m off to bed now to catch up on my beauty sleep. It’s shopping tomorrow and I’ve let the stocks run down a little just recently.

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Monday 26th September 2011 – I REMEMBER YESTERDAY …

… saying that I didn’t want to come home.

And had I known what the flight was going to be like, I wouldn’t have done.

I’m not the best air traveller in the world, but I’m much better than some of the people on board who spent almost the entire flight screaming as we were tossed from one patch of turbulence to another all the way across the Atlantic.

The worst part about the flight though was that I didn’t receive my vegan breakfast – and how upset was I about that? That was a huge disappointment, although no complaints about the chick pea curry the night before.

Passing through the Immigration was fairly painless for a change. But the armed soldiers patrolling the airport wasn’t very pleasant to see. We all know about soldiers and their accurate rate of fire. A suicide-bomber pops up his head and 50 civilians are killed in a spray of inaccurate machine-gunning.

And it seems that they can’t spell “AREA” either. We all have to go to the “Baggage AERA” for our luggage.

The airport might have been fairly painless but the journey through Paris to the Gare de Lyon wasn’t. I’m really going to have to find an alternative to this route. Dragging my huge suitcase through the crowds and through the metro and the RER is no pleasure, believe me.

Nothing exciting happened on the train back – which makes quite a change after last year’s adventures and Terry met me at the railway station at Riom.

I fuelled up Terry’s car and then he took me back to his place, where Liz very kindly offered me a bed for the night, for which I was extremely grateful.

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Friday 13th May 2011 – It’s been a long time …

breaking dawn sunrise les guis virlet puy de dome france.. since I’ve had one of these. It was one of those rare nights that they call a nuit blanche around here where I didn’t go to sleep at all. And I’m not quite sure why either, because I had a busy day yesterday too.

And so I sat in the window, reading a book to pass the time and at approximately 04:45 the sun started to come up, so I took a photo of the breaking dawn. I then went back to reading until breakfast time.

It’s been absolutely years since I’ve had one of those.

Today I’ve spent most of the afternoon on the phone. Katherine has sent a parcel back from Canada and it’s gone missing. The Canadian Postal Service’s website is useless and the telephone system is one of those digitalised ones where it is not possible to speak to a human, and it tells you nothing that the website doesn’t tell you.

Of course, I’m not one to take that kind of thing lying down and after many struggles I ended up speaking to the Personal Assistant of Rob Merrifield, who is the Canadian Government Minister for Posts and Telecommunications. We had a lengthy chat and this evening I’ve received a mail from her to say that someone from the Canadian Postal Service will be in touch with me.

We shall see, of course, because I have heard all of this before, but the only way to deal with incompetence and obfuscation is to go to the top. Once a few Government ministers have had their ears bent by a few dissatisfied customers, things might change.

Mind you, I’m not holding my breath. It’s not like the time that the lavatory attendants closed the public conveniences on Crewe Bus Station, to the inconvenience of everyone. But I didn’t take it lying down – I stood up and went over their heads.

home made balloon frame greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceNow that I’ve been to the sawmill at St Gervais d’Auvergne I can crack on with the balloon frame greenhouse and I spent the rest of the day cutting the wood ready for assembling the framework.

It’s coming on quite nicely now, and the net job will be to give it a couple of coats of the LIDL wood treatment, but that’s not for today.

So after finishing off the framework for the greenhouse I came in and started tidying up. I have a caller tomorrow – someone who wants to sell me some solar panels so that I can sell electricity to the EDF. I hate these canvassers.

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Saturday 13th November 2010 – IT’S A GOOD JOB …

… that it’s Saturday 13th rather than Friday 13th, because Heaven alone knows what might have gone wrong then.

The flight was reasonable – nothing remarkable at all – but I’m a very bad traveller and find it very difficult to sleep on board an aeroplane. This journey was no exception at all.

I was wasted by the time that I arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport and I wasn’t very comfortable making my way from the airport across Paris for the train to Riom.

And we waited. And waited. And waited.

First of all there had been the engineering works that were slowing everything down.

Secondly, there had been a locomotive failure down the line. It was all happening today.

All in all, by the time that I reached Riom it was not too far short of midnight. Only three and a half hours late.

Instead of going straight home (which was a silly idea anyway at this time of night) Terry ran me back to their house and Liz put me up in the spare bedroom and that was that.

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