Tag Archives: radio anglais

Sunday 23rd May 2010 – It was the Garden Fair in St Gervais d’Auvergne today.

This is probably the most important day in the calendar out here in the Combrailles. The weather is, as you know, unpredictable and it can play havoc with your gardening as it has done this year with my plants. I’ve no leeks, no peppers, no chilis and so on.

But this area is the home of many people with a close affinity with the soil and so gardening, especially vegetable gardening, is quite a pastime.

And so at the Garden fair what happens is that everyone brings along their surplus plants and those of us who have been devastated by the late snows and frosts can buy them to replace those that we lost.

And so I duly bought a tray of 50 leeks, some peppers, some chilis, some mint and some decent-sized tomatoes. There was also a stall there manned (“personned” – ed) by a couple of kids full of insipid tomato plants and the like (the stall, not the kids) and they were quite intelligent and interesting (the kids, not the plants). We had quite a chat and some banter and I bought a handful of plants from them for no good reason at all except that I liked the kids. I reckon I get on much better with kids rather than adults. They don’t have any preconceptions and have the same kind of weird sense of humour that I have.

That wasn’t all of the entertainment either. We had some folk-dancing too – a little team of locals giving some kind of demonstration of their art and grabbing hold of passing locals and pulling them onto the stage.

And it’s good to see all of these younger people taking part too. There’s a huge amount of local culture that has been lost due to no-one following on in the footsteps of the older generation and that’s a tragedy.

But that was all in mid-afternoon.

It was Sunday today of course so that meant a lie-in for the morning. And after breakfast I had to write the script for the radio programmes for the month of June.

Yes, we start with the information for the week commencing 4th June and so I am bewildered as to why the person who gives us the stuff to broadcast (which I have to translate into English and work into a script) and who was b*ll*ck*d by me the other week for giving me stuff too late to include in the relevant programmes back then, has sent me all the information (“which we MUST broadcast”) about submitting your income tax returns – final date for submission being … errrr …. 31st May!

All I can say is that it’s no wonder that the French Civil Service is in total chaos.

After St Gervais d’Auvergne I went round to Liz and Terry’s to discuss the programmes and for a chat, and then I came home early to plant my vegetables. After all, tomorrow is yet another Bank Holiday and so it’s a lie-in in the morning and in the afternoon I’m going for a guided walk around some old quarries.

Yes, I really ought to get out more often, don’t I?

-5

Wednesday 28th April 2010 – Today was busy.

This morning first thing I had to go round to Michael’s. He’d just come back from the UK and bought me 10 kilos of oats. And as he was off again this afternoon I needed to rescue them (and pay him) before he went.

Back home I had time to plant some of the seeds that Clare had given me before leaping aboard Caliburn, my trusty steed, and heading off to St Gervais d’Auvergne to meet Liz and go on to Gerzat to record our radio programme. And of course to meet this photographer guy who wanted not just to photograph us but to interview us too. It seems that in the Combrailles we are becoming major news and our publicity is reaching its height. Yes, we are going to be the feature article in … errrr …. a free advert-type newspaper in the Combrailles with a circulation of about 350.

Not quite Le Monde or Paris Match I know, but we remain confident that one day we will be there. I’m eagerly awaiting the day that we will be asked to open our first brocante or be the guests of honour at a concours de belote.

Back at St Gervais d’Auvergne Liz and I went for a coffee or two and discussed our plans for next week. We are going to hit the Chambre de Metiers et de l’Artisanat in Chamailles and get all our business affairs in order. Neither of us has received our formal inscription of our business registrations despite having had an acknowledgement almost a year ago. High time we did something about it.

Back here I planted all of my early potatoes. And I think I’m going to run out of room for the lates and so I’ll have to invent something about that. And I should have gone to football training this evening but today was the hottest day of the year and it’s still 25 degrees up here even with all of the windows open. That’s not a temperature for someone of my age and my level of fitness to be running around. But the weather is supposed to break tomorrow or Friday morning, with rain (the first since April 9th) and a major drop in temperature. If that holds, then training at the Friday night session is a distinct possibility.

Now where have I put my footy boots????

-3

Tuesday 27th April 2010 – Well, I finished …

… my tract on distance learning. Normally we can get through one page of dialogue in the 5 minutes that we have, and by the purest coincidence the tract that I prepared was exactly 4 pages long and with breaks in the right place at the end of each page. Now how about that?

But a depressing feature of this article was that I sent a whole heap of e-mails out to all kinds of institutions involved in distance learning, making it quite clear that I was offering some kind of free air time to those organisations concerned.

And do you know how many of these organisations took the trouble to reply? JUST ONE

And do you know what their reply actually said? “Thank you for your recent email. I am writing to confirm that it has been passed on to xxxx, Head of Media and Public Relations and she will reply to you in due course”. And seeing as we are in the studio tomorrow recording, it will of course be far too late for her contact to do any good.

But one thing that I am learning, and learning quickly, is that there is no such thing as a recession. There are loads of customers queueing up at places with loads of the folding stuff waving around, but British (and some other) companies just can’t be bothered to get off their collective derrieres to go and get it. Employees far too busy on their Social Networks during working hours to actually do any work. And when the place goes t|ts-up as it inevitably does, then there are all the tears and the weeping and the pleading. And in the meantime the customers are fed up of waiting and have p155ed off elsewhere.

Just trawl through the pages of this blog – especially during the summer of last year when I was in the UK – and see exactly what I mean. I know that if there was the slightest possibility of getting my organisation or business some free air time to a whole host of captive customers I would drop everything to do the necessary. It really is unbelievable.

Next stop was down to Liz and Terry’s to see how the not-very-patient was doing and to plan the remainder of our radio programmes – such as the events for the month. And here was another thing – we have (as you can probably imagine) abandoned our idea of contacting the local government offices for information as they can’t be bothered to reply either and instead we have approached regional Government for their assistance. They very kindly sent us an extremely useful booklet with all kinds of helpful information. But as we were scanning through it, it didn’t look quite right. Colser examination revealed that it was the booklet for …. errrr …. 2008.

I tell you what – I am getting thoroughly sick of this. It must be dreadful trying to do this kind of a job for a living – with 90% of all enquiries going unanswered, 5% replying too late, 5% when they do reply not taking it seriously. Invited guests who promise to attend suddenly disappearing and leaving us holding the baby.

And do you know how much Liz and I get paid for doing all of this? Absolutely nothing at all. And there’s no expenses budget either. We travel at our own expense, pay for our own phone calls and the like. And last month at the studio they didn’t even offer us a cup of coffee, despite the plainest of plainest hints.

Yes, it isn’t easy being famous and my hate goes off to everyone else who has made it to the top like Liz and I are going to. They talk about dogged perseverence, sheer bloody-mindedness and all these other characteristics that are essentials for stardom and having been celebrities for just a couple of weeks, we can understand exactly what they mean.

And that reminds me, said her, abandoning yet another good rant for the moment – we have to wear our best bib and tucker tomorrow because we are going to be photographed by the press.

In other news my 3D modelling has been restarted now that I’m home. And I did manage to find a freeware canoe so that my characters stranded on the beach could paddle off to safety. Had I not managed that they would have been up the creek without a paddle. But as I was preparing their getaway I came across a freeware flying bathtub.

Now isn’t that much more exciting? it can take my characters onto a whole new plane.

-2

Monday 26th April 2010 – It was another good day today

And I didn’t miss any of it really seeing as how I had another early morning phone call. So having dealt with that and having breakfasted I then missed almost all of the decent weather by having to come up here to work. It seems that our guest for this month’s radio programmes has gone AWOL and it’s too late to arrange for anyone else.

So I had to have a rummage around in the darkened corners of my mind and I’ve come up with a lively topic – FURTHER EDUCATION. Liz and I can talk about that for hours as we both have experience of it. And with people desperate to fill in their spare time it seemed to be a good option.

There are four categories too, which will fit in nicely with the four weeks –

GCSEs and A Levels
Higher Education
Vocational training
Learning for Pleasure

and so I have been researching.

I had a break for a few hours and did some more unloading of Caliburn. You can’t move up here for stuff now. I had a rummage through the tools that were in the LDV and remade the toolbox contents in Caliburn with the best of the stuff. When I had my taxis 25 years ago I used my tools an awful lot – hardly surprising given the cars that I had, and many of those tools from those days had found their way into the mobile toolbox. And strange as it is to say it, just feeling those tools and feeling just how comfortably they fitted into my hands again – it was just like meeting up with good old friends.

Normally I don’t go in for the pretentious prose and garbage and that kind of thing, but it really was something extraordinary.

But on the subject of vocational training I met Elodie at the football. She’s quite cute and I have a soft spot for her. I hadn’t seen her on the tills at Auchan for a while, and she told me she had left and was now back in full-time education. One of the courses she is taking is in shorthand-typing and having learnt of Terry’s injury, she suggested that it might be a career opportunity for him.

-3

Saturday 10th April 2010 – It’s Saturday again.

Where did the week go? I’m organising Monday night’s meeting of the Anglo French Group and it seems like only yesterday that it was last Monday night.

And so why do I need to organise the meeting? Well, we are all going to be famous. French TV has heard about our radio show and is coming to interview us on Monday early evening. They also want to have a nosey at the Anglo-French Group and have a chat with them.

Well well well!

So today seeing as there was only one footy match this evening – at 20:00 – it was “shopping in Commentry”, and I had quite a good day. Apart from the usual stuff they had good quality spades on sale in ALDI (I have a garden fork and a shovel of this brand) so I bought one to replace the spade that was broken. I’ve been using the Deputy Spade for the last few days but it’s nothing like as good.

I was also doorstepped on the carpark of the ALDI by someone who wanted to talk about solar panels. A man who has lived 20 years in France and can’t speak French! I asked him if he was planning to learn and he said that he couldn’t be bothered. It really beggars belief – all these Brits that moan like hell about foreigners who come to the UK and won’t speak English and insist on native-language help in British Government offices. They ought to come over here and look at some of the Brits – they won’t moan about them, I bet. Yes, there are even plans to have English-language assistance in some of the French town halls.

Not that I’m all that bothered about it but it’s the people who need the English language help over here that are the ones that moan about the foreigners needing native language assistance back in the UK. The irony goes totally over their head.

While I’m in “rant mode” – remember the other day that I was talking about dealing with some people by the employment of a pickaxe handle? Well, it just so happened that at the Bricomarche they had some pickaxe handles on sale and seeing as I didn’t have one in Caliburn I treated myself. Now let someone argue with me. Never mind the baseball bat – I’m not into globalisation and a good old pickaxe handle as used by generations of British tea leaves will be just fine.

Glorious hot day too, and nice and warm in the swimming baths at Neris but no swimming races or swimming galas. I was quite disappointed. But I wasn’t feeling down – there wasn’t any need to seeing as we didn’t have the pleasure of their company.

-1

Wednesday 7th April 2010 – Think of a phrase that contains …

… the words “booze-up” and “brewery” – and we aren’t talking about the Open University Students’ Association either!

Yes, I thought that incompetence at its most stunning inefficiency could only be reached in the hands of that august body but I am fast changing my opinion. I have been reliably informed by one of my “moles on various committees” that this week’s radio programme was the one for the 1st week of March – the radio station appears to have thrown the wrong version onto the cutting room floor and gone with the one we discarded which is now 5 weeks out of date.

And that isn’t all either. I’ve been given a task to undertake by the footy club which requires them to send in a form. So I’ve been waiting 3 weeks and it’s not made it there yet. I obtained a duplicate and I rang up the President of the club about completing it – the deadline is Friday – but I got the answerphone so I left a message.

No callback by the time I went to training, so never mind – I’ll see the President’s son down at the ground. But down at the ground there were just 4 of us, and we were locked out of the stadium. It appears that the trainer has given the players the night off so that they can watch the footy on the box.

Unbelievable, isn’t it? Last Wednesday they were rained off; last Friday was someone’s birthday; today there’s something better on the box. And all the teams are struggling right now and need a change of fortune. Fitness is a big issue with the teams – watch them drop off the pace in the last 15 minutes – but the trainer cancels the training session. Stand by for a right spannering on Saturday and Sunday.

I did a couple of laps around the field and then came home. The President eventually rang me back at 21:00 and I explained the situation. “I’ll ring up the secretary right now and call you straight back”. It’s now 02:30 and guess what?

But it’s not all doom and gloom. You remember my action photo from the footy 10 days ago? Well the local rag has published it. It might only be La Montagne but it’s still nice to see my name in lights and it’s another addition to the portfolio. And Claude came back from his holiday in the Midi so we had coffee on the terrasse. We could do that because there was a moment when the rain stopped. After me crowing about the good weather yesterday it p155ed down for most of the day. But in between the showers I dug out a few more treestumps.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be starting to build the new megacloche. The afternoon will be spent at a talk on the history of the area of La Cellette. Marianne wants me to meet the organiser.

And 02:30 in the morning? This 3D program has taken hold of me. My two characters have now made it to the beach with a herd of wild rhinocerous hot on their heels. I shall be scanning the world-wide web tomorrow evening to see if I can find a freeware boat otherwise my little animation will come to a premature end.

-2

Sunday 4th April 2010 – Easter.

Yes, it’s a Bank Holiday and that can only mean one thing – a day off.

So coffee in bed once more and a lie-in until 10:15. After that I read a book and did some work on the computer and that is the sum total of my day.

In fact I’ve been having a bit of fun on the computer. There’s a 3D animation program that’s been doing the rounds – pretty old technology and ages out of date, and it’s just been released on freeware with a few specimen characters. Anyway I downloaded it (it took almost all afternoon because it’s huge) and had a play.

Actually it’s something of a misleading offer because although it’s true that it’s all free, you get characters that are for all intents and purposes featureless and although you can animate them as they are, you have to buy the accessories like hair, eyes, clothes and the like. The program is tremendously complicated and there is also no instruction manual or help facility – what there is is an on-line forum where the contributors, in typical internet on-line forum manner, just hurl all kinds of abuse at each other. Total waste of time.

But after about 3 or 4 hours at it and with a shed-load of perseverence I managed to create my first animation – not very exciting but it’s a start. It’s the kind of thing you can have hours of endless fun doing if you have the time to spare. But it’s not something I’m going to be chucking any money at.

In other exciting news it seems that our radio programme has attracted the attention of French television who want to be put in touch with the presenters (Liz and Yours Truly). It’s something to do with a television programme about the Combrailles. It all sounds thoroughly exciting.

And in other other news, I see that the Zionists have allowed a delivery of clothes into Gaza – the first since 2007 in case you were wondering. For a race that complains about the inhuman treatment that they received 70 years ago they should know better about treating others with even more inhuman treatment. And the fact that they claim so bitterly about “terrorism” when the territory they occupy was captured through terrorism is so ironic as to be insulting and indecent.

I have no sympathy with them at all – if they treat the Palestinians (many of whom are Christians) like dogs, then they deserve to be bitten.

-2

Tuesday 30th March 2010 – Think of a well-known expression …

… involving booze-ups and breweries.

We were in the studio this afternoon recording our radio programmes for the month of April and I must admit that I am impressed by the hi-tec equipment available here. Have a close look at the bracing support on this microphone stand. It’s terrific.

As you know, last Sunday evening Liz and I prepared our programmes for today so I sent to everyone concerned a notice telling them that I wanted their submissions by 28th March at the latest.

So having had our discussion and made our plans then of course on the 29th March we had a mail from the SMADC (Societe Mixte pour l’Animation et Developpement des Combrailles), one of these local QUANGOs, telling us about stuff we must absolutely advertise without fail!

So imagine my pleasure in writing back in saying that “these meetings are for the week 2/6 April and we recorded the programme for this week back in February so you are too late!” Some of these events also concerned communes to whom we had written requesting information and who couldn’t be bothered to reply and that got my goat too. So this afternoon I buttonholed the author of this famous mail to
1) remind him of our deadlines
2) tell him that if the communes of St Gervais and Manzat want their events published then they need to reply to MY e-mails first.
As you know, my normal method of impressing the importance of something into someone’s consciousness is to beat it into their skull in morse code with a pickaxe handle and I can see me adopting that method here if things don’t improve.

This evening it was the CREFAD meeting at St Gervais about these “cheques-service” so Liz and I turned up at the venue to encounter
1) Bill, who had been attracted to the venue by our publicity
2) a totally darkened and locked room.
The lady at the library opposite tried the door and confirmed that it was locked so we had a wander around the town to see where else it might be.

Answer = nowhere at all, but the door of the Mairie was open so we went in, and there was the Mayor. He looked at the agenda and comfirmed that the meeting room had indeed been booked by CREFAD for the evening.
“Ahhh – you must have gone to the wrong room” he insisted, and very kindly led us across the road.

But no – we had indeed gone to the correct room and yes, it was indeed locked and in darkness. That even surprised him. We even tracked down a leaflet advertising the meeting and he confirmed that we did indeed have the date, time and venue perfectly correct.

And to think that we had even advertised this meeting on our radio programme!

Anyway I’ve just written a stinking e-mail to CREFAD about this. I included the phrase “since our involvement in this radio programme and having sampled a few of the examples of the organisation of these kinds of Organisation I’m beginning to wonder if this ‘lack of seriousness’ is engrained in the region”. If they want us to advertise their meetings then they have to persuade us that they are serious. We don’t want our own credibility undermined by these sort of happenings.

And I can write mails like this now. I’m a Prima Donna … “you mean a pre-Madonna” – ed … now so I can throw teddy out of the pram. I don’t know how they expect us to run a radio show if the kind of organisation that we have encountered today is typical of what we are likely to receive.

Honestly, you thought OUSA was bad, didn’t you?

And in other news, I have the fire on in here. It’s freezing outside.

+13

-12

Sunday 28th March 2010 – Blimey, that was quick!

Yes, summer has been and gone and taken autumn with it, and we are back in the middle of winter.

I was at Giat today to watch Pionsat’s 2nd XI play them (they lost 2-0). 790 metres up on an exposed plateau and I froze to death in the biting wind. And the locals are expecting snow this evening, so they said.

13.9 degrees in here when I set out and 12.8 degrees when I came back so I lit the fire for a while to warm up the place. So much for the 20.2 degrees we had early last week.

After the footy I went round to Liz and Terry’s to insoect the work in progress in the new kitchen (very impressive) and to plan our radio programmes for the next month. We are highlighting medical insurance and the like to go with Julie’s account of her hospital encounters.

And much to our surprise our radio programme from last week is being streamed. You can listen to it at
http://lemagazine.canalblog.com
Send us your feedback, please.

-7

Friday 26th March 2010 – On my way …

… to Clermont Ferrand this evening I passed under the autoroute, went round the bend … “no surprise there” – ed … above Beauregard Vendon and noticed this absolutely magnificent rainbow dangling underneath the clouds.

You need to enlarge the photo to see it and it’s not really all that clear even then, but it wasn’t half impressive. I wish I had taken the Pentax, poorly though it is, with me.

A couple of miles further on at St Bonnet there was a Citroen U23 lorry from 1951 parked at a garage at the side of the road so I stopped and took some pics of that too. No old vehicles for months and months and then two good ones – the Studebaker of Sunday and now this one – in a couple of days.

This morning I was much more mobile – most of the aches seem to have worn off. But after breakfast I came up here for three hours and did some more stuff for the radio programme. I can now tell you all about registering with French Social Security.

After lunch I went into the garden and braved the wind and rain (we had ONLY 22mm of rain today and it’s p155ing down now). I didn’t install any more raised beds today but I’ve started doing the paths in between them. People keep asking me what I ontend to do with the rubble and old slate still in the first floor bedroom- well now you know. The rubble from the dividing wall is the base of the path and the slates are the top covering. They say that slates discourage slugs from crossing but I don’t care – it makes a good path and there’s plenty of it. Slug-repellant capacities will be a bonus.

-7

Tuesday 23rd March 2010 – If you look in this photo …

… you’ll notice a few changes. From right to left we have the outline of the greenhouse. It’s far from being erected as I said previously as I don;t have the bolts for it and there’s no glass. But at least it’s in position.

Next to it is a water butt. It’s one that has been hanging around here for quite a while so I reckoned that I would put it to use. There are loads of receptacles full of old rainwater so I filled it with that. Bucket by bucket as there is no way of connecting it to my water system. Not yet anyway, but I have a cunning plan.

Thirdly you will notice a third raised bed. I installed that this afternoon too. I need to get a move on with these as I noticed to my astonishment that the radishes seem to have germinated (since Thursday!) – there’s definitely signs of movement in that seed tray.

So that was this afternoon’s work. What about this morning? Well there wasn’t all that much of that. I had to get up in the middle of the night to go for a gipsy’s but the next thing I remember was that it was 09:54. A leisurely breakfast on the terrace was followed by the realisation that –

it was a gorgeous bright sunny day
all of the batteries were fully charged (and it was only just 10:30)
there was a decent wind blowing

That can only mean one thing – WASHING! So I scouted around and found a machine-load of stuff

While the washing was a-doing I did a bit of housekeeping and general arranging so as to keep on top of what there is to do around here.

And did you all hear us on the radio this evening? Yes, Liz and I were on the air!

-7

Saturday 20th March 2010 – One thing about the warm weather that we are having…

… is that the footy can recommence. And in the balmy spring weather we had two matches tonight. The 2nd XI played Neuf-Eglise and ground out a 0-0 draw. The second half particularly seemed to go on on for ever and I think that most of the supporters had fallen asleep by the final whistle – I know that I had

The second match was against Artonne and keen followers of my blog may recall the away match back in November which was controversial in the extreme, to say the least. It was refereed by the ref who had the attack of the hysterics against the Miners back in October so fireworks would be guaranteed, one would have thought.

But instead we had a lamb-like performance from everyone(except the Pionsat no14 who was sent off for two yellow cards) and Pionsat ran out 2-0 winners. I don’t think anyone was expecting that.

For the rest of today, nothing much happened. I did my shopping in St Eloy and didn’t get anything out of the ordinary, except for the seeds I was missing. I went round to see Claude and Francoise but they weren’t there. According to the neighbour they’d gone down to the South of France for a week to see Sandrine, their daughter. Hmmmm.

I did encounter Bob from Montaigut. He’s a Brit and managed to get a job with a French company as an employee. I managed to persuade him to come onto our radio programme some time and talk to us about the French working environment.

And that was that, really.

+11

-6

Tuesday 9th March 2010 – We were back in the studio today.

And not only that, we were actually told what we had to do! Now isn’t THAT a welcome departure from the usual? and we also know when we will be being broadcast.

Basically we have to do a 5-minute spot, and didn’t that cause some consternation? Have you any idea how quickly 5 minutes goes when you are busy? After recording the first programme we were there hacking away at the material we had in a (vain) effort to cut it all right down. But we managed just the same – it was a case of having to, but it’s depressing when all of your hard work falls onto the cutting-room floor.

And we are going onto the airwaves next Tuesday at 18:50, repeated on Wednesday morning at 08:50.

I spent the morning arranging things and as it was a nice day again I had the heater on up here. That’s getting to be a habit just recently, isn’t it?

And after we came back from the studio I went round to see Marianne – I haven’t seen her for a while. I enlisted her help for our radio show -she’s the local journalist so she gets to know everything that’s been going on and she owes me a favour- I let her use one of my photographs for an article that she wrote. She’s also keen to involve herself in this English-language newspaper that died a death and so I offered her my support. I hope she will wear it in comfort.

And the weather has deteriorated some more. Howling gales, devastating winds, and temperature in the heat exchanger of minus 11. It’s flaming March, for God’s sake.

+10

-11

Sunday 7th March 2010 – I think that the Pentax has finally died

I went out this afternoon to see FC Pionsat St Hilaire play Montel-Villosanges at Villosanges. I took three sets of fully-charged batteries, one of which was brand-new, and all charged up on different chargers, and I couldn’t get a shot. The batteries “depleted” while I was poised for action. I know that it was bad before but the voyage to Trappes and back seems to have made it worse.

So that’s that!

Mind you, it was perishing cold – minus 5 out there. With a howling wind and driving snow it was uncomfortable even watching the match. Heaven knows what it was like on the pitch playing. The game was difficult which was no surprise given the conditions, and ended up 1-1. The Chimps are a naggy, aggravating side as I have said elsewhere and the ref had his work cut out what with the players and a crowd (for it was a crowd, to be sure) whose passion quite often went beyond the bounds of what might be called “reasonable”. We had a “fight” between two players – and I use the word with inverted commas because had the two players have come up against a couple of British Brownies en route for a Sunday School outing my money would have been on the Brownies.

After that it was round to see Liz and Terry to discuss our radio programme next week. It’s keeping me busy, all of this.

-8

Tuesday 16th February 2010 – Radio Stars!

Well, we made it onto tape, and next week we’ll be on the airwaves! After all of the hard work that Liz and I have put into our efforts we went down to Radio Arverne’s offices in Gerzat along with Julie, our special guest for the month of March.

No-one had told us how it was to be presented so we worked out our own system of presentation and production which would have done the trick – to record the five weekly “what’s on” sessions and then do firstly the chat with Julie about her experiences in the French hospital system followed by the chat about building permits and then chop the chats up into chunks to fit around the “what’s on” bits in order to make five programmes of equal lengths.

So having worked that out, as we were all grouped around the mikes ready to go they then decided that what they wanted was for the programmes to be recorded in their sequence of events. Now how on earth can you do that when you don’t know what people are going to say in advance and you have to watch your papers, watch your guests and watch a clock at the same time?

We managed to record three programmes and we have to go back on March 9th to do the other two (March is a 5-week month). And after our recording efforts we still had to do some editing so it really defeated the purpose of what we were trying to do and they could just as well have edited it from our proposal which would have been quicker to record. Ahhh well!

We listened to some of it afterwards and it sounds terribly amateurish but in actual fact we ought to be proud of what we did. We were three people effectively just off the street with no formal training and with very little “previous” in this kind of thing and we were given no guidance at all yet between the three of us we managed to get something like three half-decent radio shows on the very first take. You can’t ask for more than that.

And I was wrong about the temperature last night. We had a mere minus 9.7 degrees. Round at Liz’s she saw minus 17. This morning in the verandah it was 1.2 when I went down for breakfast but in the 20 minutes that I took to eat it the temperature rose to 5.2. The sun was such that I even ran the electric heater up here this morning.

I’t’s 1.2 degrees outside now and everything is melting. I don’t reckon the winter is over yet though.

-4

EPIC HALL

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