Tag Archives: Brussels

Friday 14th January 2011 – Ouch!

It’s been an expensive day today – and I didn’t go shopping either. GRRRR What did happen was that the postie came by today bearing some major bad news.

Firstly, when the solicitor charged with handling the sale of Reyers was asked to settle all of the outstanding Brussels taxation issues, well, indeed he did. But he did that on the 29th of September, the day that the cheque for the sale was cleared, and of course the property taxes on Expo were due on October 1st. And so I had a red reminder today for €1200 that I had not taken into account in my budget.

Secondly, a couple of years ago I went into the taxation office here and asked that the taxes that I am to pay on Les Guis and on Montaigut should be paid by direct debit instead of by demand. I told the tax office that I travel around a great deal and was afraid of missing a payment or two, and the tax office very kindly helped me to complete the forms.

And when I went into the tax office that time, I was brandishing around a tax d’habitation form. And so you can guess what has happened. Just how many brain cells do you need to have, to work out that if someone tells you that he travels around a great deal and is afraid of missing a payment or two, he means ALL HIS TAXES? And so that was another €733 that bit the dust.

While I was out, I reckoned that I may as well go and buy the plank that I need for making my false beam, the one that the electric cables will be running behind. So to St Gervais and the sawmill. And he will cut me a plank of the required width and thickness, but to a maximum of 4.15 metres. That’s no good. The room is 4.47 metres and the plank of course needs to be in one piece – it will look silly as a beam if it is in two pieces.

And so I shot off through the wilds to Montel-de-Gelat and the huge sawmill there. And I arrived about half an hour before closing time. They have planks in stock – 4.50 metres long by 18mm thick. Absolutely ideal for what I want. But the width – 150mm whereas I want 120mm ideally.
“Can you trim one down for me?”
“No”
“No? Why not?”
“Because this is the week when the cutting mill is closed for machine maintenance.We can do it for you next Friday”.

I’m clearly having no luck at all today.

I said the other day that I would take a photo of the lean-to with all of the wood. It looked like this in November last year, and all through the following 12 months the pile increased in size as I flung more and more bits of wood in there.At one stage in the summer I couldn’t even get into the place. But anyway, you can see that it’s emptying out quite nicely.

The wall on the left is the eastern wall of the house and the kitchen will be built against this wall. The dark grey cylinder is the large gas bottle that will power the gas cooker. I’ll anchor it to the wall and drill through the wall in order to pass a gas pipe through. The other cylindrical object is an old immersion heater that Claude gave me to play with.

In the bedroom I did some more of the tongue-and-grooving but that came to a dead stop too as I ran out of 20mm insulation. I’ll have to go to Brico Depot tomorrow and buy a load of that so that I can carry on next week. There’s not much else I can be doing until I buy my plank.

-1

Monday 8th November 2010 – I DID OK …

… with last night’s motel here on the edge of Orangeville. 58 dollars it was, and no-one waking me up in the middle of the night. But I was up early and gone by 08:45.

However, you will have noticed the frost on the roof. Yes, winter is following me around now.

The drive down to Windsor was absolutely uneventful – I can’t think of anything at all to say about it, even if it was a rather circuitous route that I was obliged to follow.

I was back in Windsor by 15:00 and I found yet another cheap motel- 39 dollars a night and with internet too. I worked out that staying for three nights here (which is what I’m doing) is costing me less than one night in Labrador City.

Mind you the paintwork in here could do with a really good clean and there one or two channels on the TV that are what might be described as … errr … interesting but there’s no Monday Night Football which is rather annoying.

I met up with Katherine and we went for a coffee and a chat. And Strawberry Moose is now making up for lost time, recounting all his adventures to his big sister. And now I only have the SatNav to talk to.

Tomorrow I’ll be emptying out Casey and giving him a thoroughly good clean, and that will take a good while. Then I’ll be posting off all my purchases back to France.

I’m shuddering at the thought of the cost of that.

-1

Saturday 25th September 2010 – Well, I’m back home.

And hasn’t this been an exciting few days?

The journey back was just as exciting though – it was raining when I left Brussels, (which was actually at about 21:00 in the evening Friday) and it gradually came down heavier and heavier.

At Troyes it was starting to become difficult to see with the rain and my eyelids were becoming heavier and heavier, so I parked up at St Florentin at 01:30 for a few hours for a sleep.

A torrential downpour woke me up at about 08:00 and that set the seal on the whole day. It rained non-stop after that and I brought the whole lot back home with me.

But the exciting events of the last couple of days have worn me out and I crashed out this afternoon. In fact I was hard-pushed to make it to the footy tonight.

And don’t ask me what happened there because I really can’t remember. I came back here and was out like a light.

I’ll be dead for a week, I reckon.

Friday 24th September 2010 – PHEW! I’M EXHAUSTED!

And it’s hardly surprising too after what I’ve been doing today!

In order of appearance –
1) I went in person to the Connections office and I’ve booked my flights and car hire. I leave Paris Charles de Gaulle at 11:00 on Wednesday and fly to Zurich where I pick up another flight to Toronto.

Then I have my car for 6 weeks, and then fly back. Total cost, all included, was €2100 which, all things considered, isn’t too bad at all.

Flying from Paris Charles de Gaulle means that I pay maybe €60 more, but I don’t have to go to Brussels, which would probably cost me that much on the train.

The downside is though that I have to hang around through the night on a railway station somewhere in provincial France.

At the moment, Nevers looks a good bet. I can get a train from Riom at 19:36 that gets me there at about 21:00 and there’s a train from there to Paris at 05:00.

Nevers is a draughty railway station but there are cafes and restaurants just over the road where I can loiter for a while and the train starts from there so it is usually backed into the station by the night shift at about 03:30 so I can curl up in a corner.

It arrives in Paris at about 07:30 so there’s plenty of time to get over to Charles de Gaulle.

I was tempted by flying to Charles de Gaulle from Clermont Ferrand on the 07:00 flight but the price €280 has put me off. I could travel there the night before and stay in the Hilton and still have change from that.

2) I visited the IKEA and had some luck too. As you know, with the composting toilet I’m using an aluminium plant pot but it really needs to be something in stainless steel.

And I found some superb waste-bin cum plant-pots there – 25 litre capacity and in stainless steel, for just €14.95. Exactly what I want and so I bought two of those.

3) But the most important thing concerned my property empire.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I first moved to Brussels in 1993 I bought a little studio apartment about 20 minutes walk from work.

A few years later I met Laurence and as she had a little daughter (Roxanne) my studio was too small for us so I rented it out and we rented a larger apartment. When Laurence and I split up and she moved away, I bought the big apartment at Jette.

The little studio remained rented out – the old couple who rented it moved out and they passed it on to their grandson. When he moved away he passed it on to a girl he knew.

And to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … a few months ago, she sent me a mail to say that she reckoned that she ought to move out and find a place of her own to buy instead of renting.

But as she was happy in my place, she wondered on the off-chance whether I had ever thought of selling it.

The property market isn’t as good as it used to be and finding willing buyers is not all that easy. You need estate agents, plenty of time and patience, a good deal of hassle.

And of course there are all these laws now that you need homeowners files, surveys, thermal inspections and everything else and so on.

So someone ready willing and able to proceed is something that should not be discarded lightly, especially as the price that was offered was – well – I could have got more for it, but then I would have had to pay estate agents, etc etc.

And so I am now 1 property lighter in my portfolio.

But what I have lost in rental income has been more than made up by the fact that I have now reimbursed the outstanding mortgage on the apartment at Jette and the difference between the two figures means that I have more than doubled my disposable income.

There’s also a lump sum left over of an amount not to be sniffed at, and Terry, Simon and I are going to be having a little chat about how this lump sum can be made to work.

I know that if I just leave it lying around it will slowly melt away into nothing.

Thursday 23rd September 2010 – THE JOURNEY …

… to Brussels on Thursday went fine until a few miles north of Moulins when the heavens opened.

And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen rain like that. After a couple of hours it calmed down a little but I still arrived back in Brussels resembling something rather like a drowned rat.

And I must have been in a dismal humour when I left there back last April.

The computer was still on, the door onto the balcony was open and generally speaking the place was in something of disarray. I didn’t really fancy that at 02:30 in the morning after having just driven 8.5 hours.

It took me a while to tidy up some space and it was not unti 04:00 that I finally went to bed.

Wednesday 22nd September 2010 – This thing about Canada …

… might be happening, you know.

It seems that Connections, my travel agent in Brussels, might come up with the goods.

They have found me a flight for just €583 for a start, going via Philadelphia but then again you can’t have everything.

The difficulty is that it leaves at 10:40 in the morning on the Wednesday which means that I need to leave here on the 17:30 train at the latest Tuesday, but I can’t guarantee that we will have finished recording by then.

So I’ve asked them to see if there’s a similar deal for a plane on the Thursday, and if there is, then I’m taking it.

As for car hire, I told them about my difficulties. I told them the best quote I had found and the guy with whom I spoke reckons that they can beat it.

But the hire company they use only allow rentals for three-weekly periods. This means that there will need to be a changeover but that’s really out of the question as in the middle of my journey I’ll be nowhere near Toronto.

They are getting back to me tomorrow with the price and if it does beat the best that I have found then I’ll be going for that one too, as long as this changeover thing can be arranged.

But you’ve no idea how difficult it all is, I’ll tell you.

The banks have been organised too. I told the Royal Bank of Scotland that I’m going to Canada – I don’t want a repeat of 2002 when the first time I bought petrol in the USA it flagged up “unusual spending pattern” and blocked the card, leaving me to starve for two weeks.

I’ve paid a lump up front on both my credit cards and I’ll remember to keep them separate this time so as not to have a repeat of 2005.

What with a passport and a driving licence, the only thing that can now go wrong is that if I am arrested at the airport. Yes, 2002 was rather an eventful year for me.

I’ve also emptied all of the microcassette tapes and I’ll be taking the dictaphone with me if I remember it.

There are loads of other things that I need to remember but I’ve forgotten what they are right now.

-3

Monday 20th September 2010 – I’ve had a whale of a time today .

I’ve spent all afternoon trying to book a flight and a car hire. I’ve narrowed my options down to
1) a flight to either Toronto in Canada or Detroit in the USA
2) either the cheapest and smallest car possible, or else a small motorhome.

Now how difficult is that for any travel agent to come up with?

First port of call was Lastminute dot com. Their price for a flight as an unbelievable £1408. Now I can get a deal myself for €650 off the internet so that’s a non-starter.

But what was even more unbelievable was that they couldn’t offer me car hire. Apparently, that company is now owned by a car hire firm and they don’t do car hire in Canada in winter.
“Do you do it in the USA in winter?” I said, after recovering from the shock.
“Ohh yes” said the boy on the phone.
“So can you work out a deal for me from Detroit then?”
So he gave me some figures, which on the face of it were quite reasonable.
“And that’s unlimited mileage?”
“No – 1000 miles”
“Per week?”
“No, per Hire”.

Keen readers of my pages will know that I am capable of doing 1000 miles in a weekend in North America, never mind 6 weeks. Ahh well, that’s another speedo cable I’ll have to pull out, I suppose.
“And you can’t take it to Canada either”
“What?”
“Our hire company doesn’t allow its cars to go abroad”
Well’ as Burt Reynolds once said, “you’ve got to catch me first“. I’ve heard some stupid things in my time, I’ll tell you.

And you have to pay the first $7,000 of any damage too. If you want insurance against that so that you only pay the first €500, that’s an extra £20 per day”

Well, they can p155 off.and no mistake.

And any other internet company? They can do the vehicle hire. Or they can do the air fare. But can they do both? Ohhhhh no. It’s far too difficult.

The only answer is to go to the travel agent who organised me the last time I went to Canada and the last time I went to the USA. The only problem is that they are in Brussels and all their flights go out of Zaventem. So unless anyone reading this blog has any better ideas (and I hope someone does) then on Friday morning when I’m in Brussels I’ll be booking my flight and my car, attending to my business, coming back to here, recording our radio programme, sleeping overnight in Riom, caching the 05:40 train to Paris and then the 10:40 TGV back to Brussels, where I’ll get the airport shuttle.

But one good thing that will come out of it is that I’ll be so exhausted by all of this that once I’m on the aeroplane I’ll crash out all the way to North America. Which, seeing as I am something of a nervous traveller on aeroplanes, isn’t such a bad idea. But seriously, here I am trying to arrange for myself a less-stressful life and all of the events are conspiring against me.

-3

Friday 20th August 2010 – I’ve had a TV …

… on in here this evening.

Even though I keep on telling people that I don’t have one, there actually is one here in the corner. And even though I keep on telling people that I don’t watch it, I did today.

But it’s not an ordinary TV. Dave who follows this blog (are you over there or over here, mate?) will remember it because I was with him at Hexham market when I bought it.

It’s a little portable TV that works off 12-volts and what is so important about it is that it has a built-in VHS player. It cost me all of, would you believe, £15.

Now I have tons of VHS videos stretching back for almost 30 years and for the last heaven-knows how long I’ve been looking for a 12-volt player to watch them on, so this TV thingy was the answer. And when I was in Brussels back in April I brought some of my cassettes back here. Tonight I sat back and watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Mind you, the reason why I spent the evening doing just that was because once again I’m completely worn out. We have now formally finished the roof and it doesn’t half look impressive as you can see in this photo.

The part from the right of the roof light on the main roof, where the moss has been cleared off, has been stripped, extended and refitted – and the chimney has been re-pointed and sealed at the base.

And then the lean-to, which formerly had a flat roof, now has a pent roof – we raised that up at the back and fitted new tiles. It’s been finished off today with the edging tiles that protect the woodwork from the elements.

All in all we can be well-pleased with all of the work that we have done. I have to say that I think that our stonework is magnificent, especially when you consider that we’ve never done anything like this before!

There is some pointing that needs doing on the side wall of the house. Some of the stones are quite loose and it might be that one might fall out and drop on the roof that we have done and we don’t want that to happen. There’s some pointing that needs doing round about where the flashing is too – just above the top row of roofing tiles.

I’m not sure how we are going to do the pointing though – I’m not standing on a ladder that’s canting right over the lean’to onto the side wall of the house, so there!

As usual there was some mix left and so I added wome water and a huge bucket-full of gravel and then tipped it into my wall. You can see how much the wall has grown by just looking at this pic and comparing it with the earlier ones.

There’s still quite a bit to do yet and it’s going to need pointing when the levels have been built back up, but it’s still impressive.

And after a shower (summer is back again) I came up here and watched a video. And why not? It’s the weekend. Shopping tomorrow, relaxing on Sunday and then what may well be the final week at Lieneke’s as we get cracking on the bathroom. That shouldn’t take long and then I will be back working properly on here again.

And about time too. I have tons of work that needs doing.

-1

Saturday 14th August 2010 – A good few weeks ago ….

… I went to a talk about the history and one of the items that was discussed was the local railway network. With this area being situated on a coal seam and the existence of coal mines all over the place there was at one time a railway network around here that was much more comprehensive than you would think at first.

And most people immediately think of railways as being standard-gauge – 4’8.5″ with substantial earthworks and the like, and there is a great deal of evidence for that, especially for our famous railway down the hill here that was opened to traffic in 1932 and did’t even last 25 years.

I drive regularly (or I used to when I used to go to Brussels) along a certain road that runs into Montmarault from the Montaigut direction and I’ve been convinced that I’ve seen traces that correspond to what the Ordnance Survey would call “dismantled railway” along the side of the road, although there is nothing on any map that I have ever seen that would confirm anything.

But at this talk one of the items discussed was the railway line that ran from Marcillat en Combraille to Commentry. Now Commentry was a major ironworking centre and Marcillat has the remains of a few huge limekilns and so a line bringing the lime from the fields to the blast furnaces seems like a likely proposition. But the only line here as far as I am aware is the old standard gauge line that used to pass down here and which doesn’t go directly to Commentry.

But further enquiry revealed the existence of the “lignes economiques” – a whole series of narrow-gauge lines that ran on light railway principles with the minimum of earthworks, and the border area between the Allier and the Puy-de-Dome was littered with these lines. Anyone who has seen the the Father Brown film will recall what a “ligne economique” looks like.

The relics that I have seen not too far from Montmarault are in fact part of this light railway system but my attention for the moment has been seized by a narrow-gauge line that used to run from Marcillat to Commentry – and points beyond, as I have discovered. I’ve tracked down a list of the names of stations along the route but a casual look on an Internet satellite viewing program hasn’t come up with anything. That’s a shame – long-time readers will remember that we tracked down a bridge of James Brunlees by spotting it on a satellite viewer.

One place however has crossed my mind as I have crossed it on many occasions. The railway passed through the village of Durdat Larequille somewhere and not too far from there is what looks like a hollow fold in the ground with what might be a bridge over it. And so on my way back from Neris les Bains I stopped for a look.

I’m right about it being an overbridge but if it’s for a narrow-gauge locomotive and train then it would have to be flaming narrow. I couldn’t stand upright in that tunnel under there

There’s no evidence to suggest that the bridge has been infilled to any extent, suggesting that at one time it might have been of larger size, and I can’t see what might have been a track bed of a railway running to and fro underneath it.

I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that this may well not be a railway bridge after all, and that’s a disappointment – I had high hopes for this.

Yes – I was in Neris today. The weather is becoming colder and colder and there was no chance of a solar shower and so after shopping in Commentry (which was boring, I have to say) I went off there. 29°C in the water and only 20°C in the baths itself – but that’s because some person had for reasons best known to him-or herself decided to open up the side of the pool. It used to be an open-air pool complete with poolside cafe but it’s now covered with a balloon-type of marquee. And who on earth would want to open it up today in this weather?

But now I’m nice and clean so I’m going to change the bedding and have a good night’s sleep. And I need it too. I didn’t have the alarms on this morning and when the phone rang I crawled over to it and answered “ok Terry – see you in a bit” only to hear a French voice on the other end. Yes, I was totally out of it this morning. I’ll have to do better tomorrow.

-2

Saturday 10th July 2010 – There was no mistake this morning …

… about the weather. I awoke quite early to the sound of what was without question a driving rainstorm. And when I went out a little later we had had about 4.5mm of rainfall through the night.

That may not sound like a lot and over a surface area of 6.5 square metres (the verandah) where about 155mm of rainfall would make 1000 litres, then the 30 litres of rain from today is pretty small beer.

But off just one side of the barn roof, which has a footprint of about 16m x 3.5m, or 56 square metres, then almost ten times that is quite a lot.

You’ll see the impromptu drainage system that I’ve rigged up (don’t worry that it is neither straight nor square – this is just a temporary lash-up) and if you look closely at the 203-litre water butt, you’ll see that it’s overflowing. And quite right too!

So much so in fact that I’m going to change some of the drainage around on the house so that the drainage on the lean-to (all 8 square metres of it plus the part of the house roof that falls onto there) will drain into the water butts at the verandah.

Terry has found me some puzzolane and I’ve also thought of yet another amelioration to the water supply and so I reckon that next week I’ll have a good go at this.

Lieneke woke me up this morning. She needed to talk to Terry and so I gave her all of his contact details. It involves The Folding Stuff so it’s pretty important. And after computing for a while I did a couple of odd jobs. I now have a bracket for holding the ramps onto the towing dolly and I’ve also done something with the guttering on the far side of the barn.

I haven’t shown you anything of the solar shower yet. I spent some time this afternoon working on it and now that it is sort-of finished for the moment, all can be revealed.

We’ve started off with a black IKEA storage box, of which I have more than a few lying around here. I’ve drilled a hole in the bottom and fitted a connection with a tap. And then we have a simple shower pipe and head from my old place in Brussels.

But that’s not the most exciting part of it. I’ve erected a metal framework using an old set of shelving units and put the storage box onto the top, covering it with an old caravan window. It’s nothing exciting, but it all seems to work.

I’ve an idea about filling it too but that calls for yet more engineering, but seeing as it was 19:15 when I knocked off (and I still managed to find the time to fit in a solar shower from the old system) I called it a day instead.

But I’m intrigued to see how this new siting of the solar water will fit in with the temperature readings that I have been keeping. It’ll attract the sun much earlier in the day for a start, that’s for sure.

And in other news, my brassica have now been attacked by the Cabbage White Butterfly and four times a day I’m engaged with stripping the caterpillars off the plants before they strip the plants. So far it’s a draw but it’s hard work.

And in other other news, it seems that I was rather careless when potting up some seeds. I now have a huge tomato plant growing in the middle of the greenhouse.

-2

Friday 9th July 2010 – As I have said before ….

… if you are the kind of person who is always in a hurry or rushing around for appointments and the like then you don’t want to be living around here.

Not with leviathans like this roaming around the lanes round here anyway.

I encountered these two beasts on my way back from Commentry. The other side of Ronnet it was, and it wasn’t until we reached the Abbey of Bellaigues that they took the high road and I took the low road. About 6 miles of 25kph with nowhere to pass them. Ahhh well!

This morning I was awoken at 06:04 by a storm – howling winds and all that kind of thing. I was half-expecting torrential rain but when I finally crawled out of my stinking pit (09:40 – I was having a lie-in after my efforts on the roof) there wan’t a trace of anything.I surely can’t have dreamt it all?

So a couple of hours catching up on the computer and then off to Commentry for shopping. And nothing really interesting at all. But even more interesting – I’m trying to set up my water filters and can I elephants find any puzzolane. I asked inter alia at the local builders’ merchants and he had to look up in his catalogue before telling me that he didn’t have any. In case you are wondering what puzzolane is, it’s a certain type of volcanic lava – lightweight, porous and made of carbon and it’s a superb natural water filter.

In the Puy de Dome there are over 80 dormant volcanoes all of which have produced puzzolane, and not for nothing is this region littered with commercialised natural springs – Volvic being the prime example but there are many others. All the ground water is filtered through the natural puzzolane layers. So why can’t I get hold of any?

Back at Pooh Corner, having unloaded Caliburn, I made a desultory start on tidying up. But the weather clouded over and it looked like rain so grabbing hold of a few offcuts and odds-and-ends I’ve rigged up a kind of downspout system for one of my spare 203-litre water butts to catch the rain that might fall on the barn roof.

And badger me if, when I came in and read my messages, that Krys hadn’t written to me to suggest that I think about a way of collecting the rainwater that falls on the roof. Great Minds or Fools, Ms Stephenson?

And now it’s 00:30 – 7 hours after I fixed this downspout – and it’s rumbling away with thunder and flashing away with lightning and not a drop of rain has fallen. All my plants and I could do with a heavy downpour, especially through the night. I can’t wait to see the water cascade off the barn roof and into the water butt.

And another solar shower this evening. That’s 6 consecutive days. I was never this clean when I lived in my apartment in Brussels!

-3

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 – It was 19:04 when I knocked off this evening.

But I’ve been having a temendous amount of fun.

This afternoon I’ve been painting the woodwork for the barn roof with some xylophene – the stuff that kills all the beasties and so on that try to infest it. I’ve done about half so far – enough to do one side of the roof. That’ll do to get me started once we have the scaffolding.

It’s quite easy to spread the stuff on the wood too. It’s quite thin so it goes on really easily and quickly with a paint roller.

But this morning was even better. The starter had gone on Bill’s car and he has a similar car for spares so I went round there, took the starter off the scrap car and swapped it with the duff one. It took a while to do it as you have to move all kinds of hoses and filters and so on and I ended up covered to my armpits in old and dirty oil but it was just like old times when I had my taxis. Hardly a week went by without me having to change a starter or an alternator and strangely enough I used to enjoy it.

But the enthusiasm has started to fire up my imagination. When the roof is on the barn and I’ve disposed of the body off the caravan I’m going to set up a decent workshop in the barn. I’ll resurrect my old gas-welding gear, get some oxygen and acetylene bottles, buy an engine crane and rescue all my decent tools from Brussels.

And then I’m going to have some fun.

-11

Monday 7th June 2010 – I had another gardening day today.

You can see in the photo that I’ve rediscovered my bean and pea frame, so seeing as I now have three pea plants and four bean plants ( and isn’t that disappointing?) I put it up so that they will have something to cling to. When I saw the lack of beans and peas this year then I needed something to cling to for support, but I hadn’t recovered the frame then.

The radishes I planted a couple of weeks ago are going berserk and the spinach is now coming up. maybe things are putting in a late burst.

I’ve sown another row of carrots in place too, and transplanted the first showing of cauliflower and the second showing of broccoli. The cucumber plants I planted in the small cloche and to do that I had to take out the trays of herbs. They are on the window ledge of the house for now.

You might recall that I brought my herbs back from Brussels and planted them in a trough. I had some more in small pots and so I made up another trough and those herbs have gone into there. I’m putting them in troughs so that in winter I can take them indoors.

The mint I left in a pot and planted the pot in the trough for the simple reason that mint goes berserk and spreads everywhere if you don’t contain it.

The soil in the trough by the way is 50% compost from LIDL, 50% soil from when I dug out the earth beichstuhl and a dusting of wood ashes to give it all some potash.

So that was the afternoon. In the morning I was computing and before lunch I did a load of washing – the first for ages down here but you might recall that I did a few loads in Brussels when I was there and Liz kindly did a few loads for me while I was helping Terry.

This evening was the Anglo-French Group. Mark prepared a good game for us and we had some fun. We were somewhat divided into two groups though – some of us working upstairs and the others talking and smoking downstairs.

So tomorrow now that the garden is done for this week I’ll carry on moving stuff from the side of the barn. I want to get all of that stuff moved as soon as possible.

-1

Monday 10th May 2010 – I was working this afternoon …

… in the bedroom. I’ve put the first layer of battens on the left-hand wall, added another strip of insulation (the last I have as it happens so I need to buy some more) and put all of the counter-battens on the back wall.

Tomorrow I’ll be putting some on the side wall and then starting to put the polystyrene insulation on top.

You’re probably thinking that it’s due to the weather that I was working inside, but ohhhh no. It’s true that when I first woke up it was raining heavily but by the time I had woken up definitively there was a beautiful blue sky and for much of the day it stayed like that.

This morning after working on the computer I planted out the first sprout plants, put the beetroot out to harden off and did some more sowing. I also noticed that the cauliflower are now starting to show themselves. And with the damp conditions in the greenhouse for the last few days followed by the heat today I’m hoping that a few more might take off.

After lunch it was working in the bedroom. I might have to go back to Brussels in a couple of months or so and I’ll be bringing a pile of domestic stuff back with me. I’ve nowhere to keep it as yet so getting the bedroom ready might come in handy so that I can use it as a storage space for now.

This evening we had just a couple of little showers and a thunderstorm as a weather front moved across from the East. But I hope this weather keeps up for a while – we need it.

-1

Saturday 24th April 2010 – I’ve just watched …

… this ...errr....interesting football match this evening.


We had all kinds of blood, guts and thunder for 90 minutes, and played almost entirely between the two penalty areas. Matthieu in the Pionsat goal had to be at his best to claw away a free header from the corner and the Cebazat keeper had to save two weak shots, but that was the sum total of the attempts on goal.



Yes, I'm back at home after all the excitement of Friday evening in Brussels. And what with the late finish getting everything ready last night, I didn't make it home all in one go. I ended up having an overnight stop at Clamecy where I froze to death in a layby (yes, it's still perishing cold at night)
Still, the one thing about that was that it made me have an early start, and I didn't lose very much as I stopped for the weekly shopping at the Carrefour in Moulins.
I was back here by the early afternoon and  promptly crashed out for two hours on my sofa. That set me up nicely for the trip down to Pionsat and the football tonight.
As Golden Earring once famously said, "it's good to be back home".
+1
-3


		
		
			This entry was posted in Carrefour, clamecy, Eric Hall, fc pionsat st hilaire, fcpsh, football, France, Les Guis, moulins, Pionsat and tagged Brussels, caliburn, Carrefour, cebazat, clamecy, crash out, eric hall, fc pionsat st hilaire, fcpsh, football, France, golden earring, Matthieu_M, moulins on 25/04/2010 by Epichall.


			
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EPIC HALL

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