Tag Archives: Nerina Hall

Sunday 21st March 2010 – One thing that has been missing from these pages …

… has been “old cars”. I don’t mean the Merc and the Cortina and the old Transit, that have graced these pages just recently – I mean the real stuff.

If Nerina were here right now she would tell you of our holidays in Europe during which I spent most of my time scavenging around in hedgerows for the real old stuff, like this … errrr… Studebaker Champion from about 1950.

This (or rather the first model for this one is a type two) was the car that saved Studebaker from bankruptcy. A big straight-six sidevalve engine that was phenomenally economical for its day and during the petrol rationing in the USA during World War II this car sold like hot cakes.

So what is it doing here in St Pardoux? Especially as it is sporting California licence plates.

Talking of sporting, I was in St Pardoux on my way to somewhere near Maringues to watch Pionsat’s 3rd XI play ES Thuret. Pionsat had 10 players and Thuret were complete but Pionsat still gave them a good run for their money and the game finished, surprisingly, 0-0. It’s the only game so far that I didn’t take any action photos, for the simple reason that there was no action.

Well, there was – in the second half a Pionsat defender whalloped the ball into touch (they’ve been clearly reading my notes) and a girl – and a girly girl at that – who happened to be walking around the ground – she caught it fully and completely in a fashion that any goalkeeper would have been proud of. And the cheers from the crowd were encouraging.

And not to be out-done, a high clearance into touch fell just nicely for me and I headed it back on the volley into play and into the arms of Xavier who was running up to take the throw-in. Again, this was greeted by enormous cheers from the crowd.

But this has got me thinking. This was a basement clash between two of the worst clubs in the entire Puy-de-Dome league. The standard was appalling and I’ve had enough of this so I spoke to Jerome, the organiser of the team, and he’s agreed that I can come and join in the training on Wednesday evenings. And I spoke to Terry when I got home, and he’s coming along to the training too. We probably won’t get to play at all, but at least it’ll get us both up to a decent level of fitness.

You would think that we were both old enough to know better.

-5

Saturday 13th February 2010 – I must have been tired last night.

Crashing out for a couple of hours and then going to bed early and then sleeping through the cacophony that is my series of alarm clocks and not waking up until 10:24. At least I’m feeling better though today. I think it must be all of these bad nights of sleep catching up on me.

This morning that strange gold thing put in a brief appearance up in the sky so I quickly climbed up onto the roof and brushed off the solar panels. I caught a few amp-hours of sun before the heavens clouded over again. But I also dug Caliburn out of his snowdrift and went for a spin up the lane to see if I could get out. Good job I have my new snow tyres because I did manage to make the public highway with a little bit of luck and perseverence. A wise decision to get these tyres, I’ll tell you.

So with a little tidying up I came up here and carried on reading my book. It’s called The 91 before Lindberghand it details all of the successful Transatlantic air crossings before “The Flying Fool”. It’s a fascinating book, especially for me, because as you know I have quite an interest in historic aviation and on one occasion while poking around on an old industrial estate on Long Island I came across a replica of the “Spirit of St Louis” and I had the extreme pleasure of being able to sit at the controls.

Furthermore the book recounts the early airship developments for Transatlantic flight that took place at Atlantic City in New Jersey – another place that I have visited – and then goes on to talk about the legendary near-miss between an airship and a four-masted schooner at Barnegat Lighthouse, yet another one of my haunts.

After that, seeing as there was a gap in the snowfall I went into St Eloy to do some shopping and pick up some gas. I was going to say “nip” into St Eloy but in third gear at 25mph all the way then “nip” it was not. It was an awkward drive but I managed okay and I’m now stocked well up for whatever else this weather can throw at us.

In other news, it’s the 25th anniversary round about now of an event that could have got Nerina and yours truly five years inside without the option. We’d seen a house that we liked and so we put Gainsborough Road on sale and priced it for a quick conclusion. Unfortunately the owners of our dream house wouldn’t reduce the price by very much and the only offers we were getting for Gainsborough Road would have left us with a shortfall.

Now you might think that a mortgage or a bank loan would be the answer but we were both self-employed running my taxi business. And with taxi businesses being what they call “cash businesses” the cash had a tendency to … errr … evaporate long before it made its way into the accounts so the accounts only bore what might be described as “a passing resemblance” to the true state of affairs of our business. We could easily afford the kind of loan that we needed but the accounts didn’t seem to bear it out.

So what we did was that we scratched around for work – any kind of work at any price and it didn’t matter at all if we were never ever going to be paid to do it as long as it looked good on paper – and heaved it into the accounts of the taxi business. It vastly inflated our “recorded” turnover and made everything look so impressive. So much so that the Bank loved our figures and started to heave huge wads of cash at us.

Luckily – and I mean luckily – the chain collapsed. The house we were interested in was taken off the market and so we took mine off and handed the cash back. And why “luckily”? For the simple reason that going to dubious, if not spurious means to inflate your company’s turnover for the purpose of getting an additional loan from a bank or a building society almost inevitably guarantees you a one-way ticket to Shrewsbury nick (or in Nerina’s case, Styal) because sooner or later your little fraud and deception will be uncovered.

Running my taxi business for eight years taught me an awful lot and many of the things that I learnt I would have been better off not knowing. But then again what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I had a few incredibly lucky escapes. When I realised all of the risks that I had been running it completely spoiled my appetite for nefarious activities and I certainly wouldn’t do it again. It’s not something that I would advise anyone else to do. If you need to go to these lengths to support your lifestyle then you need to change your lifestyle to one that you can support and if you can’t do that on your own then you need to find professional help.

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Friday 22nd January 2010 – all the charging circuits shut down today.

What happens is that the solar (or wind) charge during the day gradually increases the charge in the battery from the overnight figure (about 12.4-12.5 volts is a good figure) up to about 14.1 volts if it’s a good day.

Once it’s at that figure it maintains the charge for a short while to give the batteries a chance to warm up inside and to shake loose any oxides that have accumulated, and then it goes into PWM mode, which is where it distributes the charge equally over all of the batteries and balances the incoming charge against the outgoing load.

When it’s happy with all of that it goes into FLOAT mode where the circuits close down until the charge in the battery drops to about 13.4 volts, and then it all starts up again and we repeat the cycle.

So today was the first day since October (I think) that we all went into FLOAT mode, even with the fridge running throughout the day. Three good days of solar charge has done wonders for my system.

This morning I was woken up by Antoine ringing me. Mind you, it was almost 10:00. I’d slept through all of the alarms again. I’ll have to do something about that. Then Antoine phoned me again, Claude came round for a chat, Liz phoned me twice and Francois phoned me once. I’m still in demand as you can see. I’ve never been so popular.

Today I made a start on the garden. I’m resiting my vegetable plot as you know and so I need to clear a place to move the old Ford Transit, the Merc and the British Salt Cortina because it’s under where they are currently that the vegetable garden will be. Back in 2002 all of this was cleared out but all these years of neglect has seen bushes, shrubs, brambles and trees grow right around everything. First job was to cut down a tree that was about 15 feet high and about 2 inches in diameter. That’s grown since 2002!

I could get at the back of the old Transit then and so I took off the towbar. I’m going to let Terry have it to fit on his new van. His is a 2005 model and rear wheel drive so it should fit okay and the tow bar is doing no good at all to anyone, rusting down a field. Older readers of my blog will remember the old Transit. I was on my way to a ferry at Caen to go to the UK for my OU science lab work when I had a puncture. You know that I prefer steel-belted radial tyres to textile belted ones. I’d been travelling at high-speed for hours and so the tyres were quite hot, and the blow-out occurred with such force that it blew the tread and the belting off the tyre. The steel belting spun round like a flail and ripped out the side of the van and the nearside wheel-arch and floor. Mind you, the van was 16 years old and it had seen much better days but it was still a mess and not fit to be driven on the highway after that.

But it’s going to be a lot of work to do this garden. I’ll have to start making the borders for my raised beds.

In other news, the UK is getting weirder and weirder. Some woman has been given a suspended prison sentence for breaching an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. And the Anti-Social Behaviour Order she has breached? Well, her moans and groans during lovemaking are too loud for her neighbours, and they played a tape of it in the courtroom. Personally, I cannot imagine anything so pathetic. I reckon that what it is is that the neighbours are just thoroughly jealous. I remember telling Nerina that it would be nice if she would moan while we were making love. And sure enough, half-way through the next performance she said “when are you going to paint this ceiling? It’s been like this for 5 years. And the walls need papering too …“

Mind you, I did once live next door to a couple whose lovemaking was exceptionally noisy. But never mind the ASBO – I always wanted to give them a round of applause when they finished. But you know how it is – you can’t clap with just one hand.

-8

Wednesday 25th November 2009 – Now you see it …

… now you don’t. That could either refer to all of the mess in what will eventually be the bedroom, which has all been swept up and bagged for binning, or the wall between the stairway and the bedroom, half of which has been demolished.

That wall needs to be demolished and moved one roof-beam in towards the camera. And then with my patent narrow stairs I can fit a U-shaped stairway in.

The space that will be saved by having the stairs in a U-shape will be the bit by the window (at the foot of where the stairs are right now) and that’s where the shower room will be. I’m not sure if you can fit all of the OUSA Executive Committee in there, though.

I need to fit two floor beams in and that will be tomorrow afternoon’s job after I’ve demolished the rest of the wall.

Yes, I’ve gone berserk with a sledgehammer. And also a broom too.

And why not tomorrow morning? Well, Terry is coming round. He needs a hand to fetch some sand and as he has no tow-bar as yet on his new van to pull the trailer, we need to bag it up at the quarry.

Rhys and I were earlier talking about brassieres and the subject seemed to veer round to chastity belts. It reminded me of the time just before Nerina and I were married and we had to go to see the priest.
“Are you chaste?” he asked Nerina
“Quite often” I replied. “And she always lets me catch her“.

And in other news, Day 2 of this public enquiry is going down a storm. Apart from the Government’s case having fallen away to nothing already (and there’s another 9 months to go!), we have a plainted “(Iraq) had shown itself willing to use weapons of mass destruction on its own people and its neighbours and was flouting a range of UN disarmament resolutions.”. We know this of course from yesterday. It was our best friends the Septics who sold the weapons of mass destruction to Iraq and provided the intelligence to enable Iraq to use the weapons to the best effect. And it was also a whole series of British and American companies, in some cases aided and abetted by the British Government, who were encouraging Iraq to flout the resolutions.

But if you want to talk about a country that is using weapons of mass destruction on its own people and flouting a whole range of UN resolutions, where is the criticism of the Zionists and the crimes they are committing against the Palestinians, many of whom are Jews and some of whom – shock, horror – are CHRISTIANS?

And while we are on the subject of the Zionists, there’s this huge outcry about the fact than Iran may one day sometime have a nuclear bomb. Well, so what? The Zionists have plenty and no-one says anything about that. So if they have them, why can’t Iran have them to balance out the power? Keen students of british history will know that all through the 18th and 19th Century it was British foreign policy to keep the peace by having a balance of power.

During the period that the Soviet Union was “confronting” (which it wasn’t – it was strictly abiding by the terms of the Yalta Agreement) the west, the wars involving European powers were few and far between. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA and the UK have been dragging the world through the mud.

Vive la Soviet Union! say I.

-8

Saturday 7th November 2009 – I almost did something today …

… that I haven’t done for over 10 years. That is – I went to the swimming baths for a swim. I’d done my monthly shop around Montlucon with plenty of time to spare and on the way back I stopped off at Neris-les-Bains where there is a public swimming baths. I’ve been there before during last winter to take my showers there but I really fancied a swim. And I always carry a holdall in the van with some washing stuff, some clean undies, a towel and a pair of trunks.

And of course, as you might expect, it was closed for the week for pool cleaning.

Neris is an old Roman spa town. It’s quite pretty and genteel – the kind of place that you would take your maiden aunt for afternoon tea. There’s a thermal baths there – something along the lines of Malvern – where you can go for a relaxing cure. It’s pretty good for the stress, so they say. So I wandered along to see if they could fix me up with a shower or something, seeing as I was here.

“Actually, we are closing today” said the receptionist.
“When are you reopening?”
“The 27th of March” she replied. You can see that it was my lucky day.
“Can I come without an appointment for a shower or a bath without signing up for a cure?”
“Certainly“
“So how much would that cost?”
And when she told me the price, I needed to sign up for a cure in order to recover from the shock. Prices start at €53:00. And here I am, complaining about €2:90 for a shower!

She gave me a leaflet with all of the details of the cures that are on offer. One of the things that they propose is a mudbath. Dunno why anyone would expect me to sign up for that – with all of the rain that we have had these last few days I have my own private mudbath just outside the front door. Admittedly it doesn’t have marble walls and floozies handing round the towels, but it doesn’t cost … gulp … €334 either.

Mind you, I do recall the time that I sent Nerina to have a mudpack applied to her face. They reckoned it would improve her appearance.
“Has it worked?” she asked when she came back
“Absolutely” I replied, “but it’s all worn off now“
Mind you, she enjoyed herself while she was having a weekend at this spa. She phoned me up to say that with all the treatments she had had, she was feeling like a new woman.
“So am I” I replied

This evening I went down to Pionsat to watch the 3rd XI play Thuret, but the ground was totally in darkness. You can see that it was my lucky day today! From the top of the hill just round the corner from me I can see right across the valley and I noticed that the floodlights were on at Marcillat’s ground, about 12 km from here so I drove over there instead. Some of Pionsat’s players were there watching Marcillat play Montvicq and they told me that the match had been rearranged for last week and the team had actually won! And I missed it too!

Marcillat play in Allier’s 2nd Division. That’s the same level as Pionsat’s 2nd XI, but the quality of football was probably lower 3rd Division based on Puy-de-Dome standards. Pretty much agricultural stuff. Marcillat won 5-1 (Montvicq’s goal was a Marcillat “own goal”) without breaking sweat, and I don’t think that Montvicq would score if they were still playing now with Marcillat having been off the pitch for the last two hours.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to watch the 1st XI at Artonne – I’ve never been there for a match. And that reminds me. I was in Brico Depot today and one of the assistants came over and started chatting to me quite socially.
“Who on earth is this?” I asked myself.
Anyway, after a lengthy discussion he asked “are you coming to watch us tomorrow?” Ahh yes. Pionsat footballer. What with Pionsat FC pie hut attendants working at the Auchan and footballers working at Brico Depot, I can see that I’m going to have to be on my best behaviour everywhere that I go. That’ll be quite a change.

+10

-10

Friday 30th October 2009 – I forgot …

… to take a photo of yeasterday’s efforts so I took one first thing this morning.

You can see my paste table – two trestles and a couple of bits of OSB, but saying that it’s a paste table is somewhat of an exaggeration seeing as what I’m doing is actually pasting the walls instead. So you might as well say that it’s a cutting table.

But this fibreglass wallpaper is awful and I hate it. It’s making me itch, which is one thing, and it’s dreadful quality stuff. But at least it’s cheap and easy to hang when you are on your own

But I’m useless at wallpapering and I hate doing it. I remember the time when the long-suffering Nerina asked me to help her to wallpaper and paint the walls in Gainsborough Road back in 1991.
“I hate decorating” I said. “Whoever invented decorating wants f***ing!“
“That’s not what you said on our wedding night” she replied. “You said that whoever invented f***ing wants decorating!”

This is today’s photo and you can see that it’s taken in the evening as it’s dark outside, if you look through the door. The four LED lights give quite a pleasing effect to the room, don’t you think?

If you look closely you can see that all of the walls are now papered and ready for painting, which I may well do tomorrow seeing as there’s no footy this weekend.

And if you look closely you can’t see the scaffolding tower that has been up there since we had no roof on the premises back in July. With the now-redundant woodstove in position you can’t manoeuvre the scaffolding around the walls and in any case the step stool is a little higher and much easier to move around.

In the wooden boz is my bed-settee and I can’t wait to set it up. I’m looking forward to having my first night’s kip on it and that can be any day now.

-5

Tuesday 1st September 2009 – AS I HAVE SAID BEFORE …

… you can always tell how engrossed in a task I am by what time I knock off.

Knocking-off time is usually 18:00 or thereabouts, so no-one was more surprised than me to notice that I was still up here painting at 19:20 and it was only the light that started to disappear that made me sit up and notice.

Mind you, the attic is now painted and it looks quite nice as you can see. Very Tudor-esque – in fact it reminds me of the time Nerina was interested in buying a Morris Minor Traveller and took me along to see it. It needed quite a bit of work, including a new paint job.
“We can paint it white and do the woodwork black, and it will look like a Tudor cottage” I suggested
“The roof has a couple of dents in it” she said.
“Don’t worry about that. No-one will notice when I’ve thatched it”

In fact, if I put a floor down tomorrow, I could quite easily move into there tomorrow night. But I’m not going to – I’m going to do it properly.

If you look at the bottom corner – in centre-pic, you’ll notice that the paint looks pretty thin. In fact, the “plaster” in that corner was just running sand and every time I put a brush of paint up against it, a pile of sand fell off. After an hour or so of messing about, I came up with the solution (in more ways than one). I mixed up a couple of litres of water with a small amount of cement so that it was just grey water, and I painted it liberally over the sand until it had well soaked in.

Then I made a thicker mixture and painted that over. And then a third, thicker one. And then when it had dried, I painted over it with the acrylic paint. That seems to have done the job.

What helps when you are working is some decent music, and I had a lucky dip into the cassette box all day, picking cassettes at random. Lucky find from a long-forgotten past was Runrig’s Cutter and the Clan. A long time since I’ve heard that.

A fine folk-rock band, Runrig, and living proof, as the rest of the non-English-speaking world will already be able to tell you, that good rock music is good rock music even though you might not be able to understand the lyrics. “Alba”, the track that opens the album, is a good thumping rocker, even if the lyrics translated from the Gaelic into English read
“We hate all English-speaking b@$t@rd$ and when we catch one alive we will pull off his testicles and shove them up his @r$e”

Keyboard player with Runrig is Pete Wishart, Scottish MP and former keyboard player with Big Country. I met him at a European Parliament session in Strasbourg a few years ago before he joined Runrig.
“I’m a Big Country member” he told me.
“That’s right” I replied. “I remember”.

It’s rained more-or-less non-stop all day and we have had 9mm of rain. It looked for a while like this magnificent summer might have finally come to an end, but I’ve just been outside and it’s clear blue (yes, blue – there’s a bright moon outside) sky. So it might pick up again and summer might carry on. But you’ve no idea how satisfying it is to be working in the attic and hear the torrential rain and be grateful for the magnificent job that we did on this roof.

-2

Monday 31st August 2009 – WA-HEY!

I now have all the windows fitted in the attic.

What I spent today doing was installing the two windows that I bought on Saturday. But don’t worry – Auvergnat window-fitters can rest in peace as I shan’t be challenging them with my technical abilities.

The smaller of the two windows was a little too big for its hole and they didn’t have a smaller one, so yours truly got out the cheap electric plane that he had bought ages ago and never used, and put it to work.

That soon sorted out the vertical height adjustment. There was the opposite problem in the horizontal plane (not the one I’d been using to shorten the height) so I attached the window into place by using some small right-angled brackets (I bought a job lot of 100 for a quid ages ago and they are worth their weight in gold) screwed to the side of the frame and screwed to the face of the window opening.

And then I used a couple of pieces of wood as vertical shuttering and filled in the big gaps with a pile of cement. And an impressive job it turned out to be.

The big window was just about the right size horizontally (with judicious use of a sledgehammer and large chisel around the brickwork) and slightly too short in the vertical. So I screwed it to the lintel and fastened it into the sides with half a dozen of those “knock-through” screws and rawlplugs.

I then put some wood on the sill to use as a form of ad-hoc shuttering on the outside of the window and then filled it with cement underneath from the inside.

And that turned out to be a neat job too. It hardly required any facing on the outside.I then pointed it up out and in. And you can tell how much I was enjoying what I was doing by the fact that it was 18:45 when I noticed the time and called it a day.

Tomorrow I’ll be painting the rest of the walls with the white paint I bought on Saturday. I want to get all of the insulation in by Friday.

I came across a cassette by “Men At Work” … "you mean ‘persons exercising traditional labour practices’" – ed … a fine old Australian band better known for “A Land Down Under” but they did much better stuff than that.

Two Hearts is a more ballady-type of album and not a particular favourite of mine, although Nerina liked it. On the other hand, Cargo rocks along quite nicely and is probably the best of their albums.

The best track on Cargo, and the best that Men At Work ever recorded, is a song called “No Restrictions”. It begins with the lyrics “There are no restrictions on what I do or say”, so you can tell that it was written a very long time ago. I wonder what on earth they would sing today.

It totally appalls me to see how many freedoms that westerners had 10 years ago have all been eroded away to nothing by fascist governments labouring under the guise of “Socialists”.

And what is even more appalling is that it only seems to be me and a handful of others who care about it.

But of course, during the decline of the Roman Empire, those in power gave the masses “bread and circuses” to keep them occupied so that they didn’t notice. With the decline of the British Empire, those in power have given the masses 24-hour drinking and 500 channels on the TV to keep them quiet.

And instead of Rollerball to distract them, there’s always West Ham v Millwall.

-4

EPIC HALL

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