Tag Archives: eric hall

Saturday 14th June 2014 – I WAS UP EARLY AGAIN …

… this morning and after a quick breakfastI was on my way to Montlucon. I wasn’t there long and I was back home by 13:45.

Most of the time I was at Brico Depot, firstly cashing in the pallet that we had loaded with breeze blocks the other day. A lap around inside where I bumped into Christophe and his wife fron FC Pionsat St Hilaire, and I bought all of the fittings for the guttering at the back of the house (for when the cattle have gone from the field behind the house).

as well as that, I bought a submersible water pump. They were on offer at €20:00 and with a 7-metre lift and just 250 watts consumption, it will drain out the pit if it fills with water and also do any amount of pumping of water around here.

Outside, I picked up 8 sacks of cement. I don’t want to run short of that with everything that I have to do around here. As well as that, I bought 45 of these concrete cubes that we use for building pillars. These cubes have no bottom and no top, and you fit them over the metal reinforement that I’ve been buying, and infill with concrete. There you have some ready-made concrete pillars that will support any roof that I want to fit.

I went to Auchan and LIDL afterwards and then came home. Back here, I crashed out for a couple of hours. I had another really late night again last night. I’m still having difficulty sleeping, but I’m off to bed in a moment to see what good an early night will do me.

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Friday 13th June 2014 – WHAT A WAY TO START THE DAY.

Yes, I woke up this morning at 07:30 and peered out of the window at the top of the stairs to see what the weather was like.

Here we have a good example of one of our typical Auvergnat weather phenomena. Here’s a hanging cloud coming drifting up the valley in this direction.

And in mid-June tpp. The weather is completely bizarre right now.

After breakfast I went off to pick up Rob and we set off to Montlucon to rescue his car. It was at the Renault garage near the centre and it was quite tight to negotiate with the trailer and the narrow streets and the tight turning into the yard of the garage.

And when we had the Chrysler on the trailer I noticed that we had a tyre right down but luckily there was an airline handy so I put some air in all of them. And then we set off.

The drive back to Pionsat was uneventful and we reached our destination with no trouble and dropped the car off. But this trailer tows nicely and I’m quite pleased with it. Then I took Rob home where Julie made coffee and gave me some vegetable plants

This afternoon I caught up with some work and then went out for an hour or so in the garden, weeding the cloche planting Julie’s plants and the tomatoes that I bought the other day.

So tomorrw I’m back in Montlucon buying the cement and some more pillar blocks for the concrete.

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Thursday 12th June 2014 – I CAN’T SHOW YOU …

… the photo of how far we got today in the pit. Just after Terry left, we had a thunderstorm and so I covered it up quickly – I don’t want it to turn into a swimming pool quite yet.

But we didn’t get much done today. Terry had things to do this morning and so didn’t come until 11:00. In the meantime I did some tidying up and sorting out of the stuff that we will be using as the work progresses.

We had the cement mixer running for 5 hours, working of the solar panels again and that’s impressive, as I’ve said before. We infilled the first row of breeze blocks and then added another rown on top, and started a third. That was when we ran out of cement.

We then went to the quarry at Montaigut for a trailer load of sand seeing as I’m almost out of that too. Once we had unloaded that, Terry went home seeing as the weather had now turned and there wasn’t much point in carrying on.

After that, I dragged the car transporter out of the undergrowth. Terry has his van Controle Technique tomorrow and I’ve been offered a job of work going to Montlucon to recover a car. The bad weather and thunderstorms didn’t put me off having a shower afterwards.

In the night I had another bad attack of cramp, one of rhe worst that I’ve ever had. And while I was crashed out on the sofa just now, I had another one. They didn’t half hurt.

And my tea tonight was off. I had to open a tin of something instead.

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Wednesday 11th June 2014 – THIS PLACE REALLY IS THE PITS

And it is too. This is the start of the inspection pit just outside here.metal

You can see how it’s being built. There’s the plastic lining and the breeze blocks that will be built up, with the reinforcing metalwork in the corners.

You’ll also notice the sink in the far corner. Anyone who has ever had an inspextion pit will tell you that even in the best circumstances an insection pit will be infiltrated by water and we were forever baling out the pit at Davenport Avenue in Crewe. This way, the water will sink into the sink and I can pump it out with one of those rotary pumps that you fit on an electric drill.

So Terry came round this morning and we went stright off to Montlucon and Brico Depot. A pallet of 70 breeze blocks went into the trailer, along with another 18 breeze blocks with the round corner-holes for fitting the reinforcing metalwork. 88 breeze blocks – cost €105. And isn’t that an improvement on €2.14 plus VAT of 20% per block?

Back here we unloaded the trailer. And I’ll tell you this – the Kubota is a marvellous tool for this. No messing about – we left the van and trailer at the top of the hill and ran a shuttle with the Kubota and Sankey trailer. Three trips and we had everything exactly where we wanted it. That’s better than carrying the blocks one at a time down the hill. It’s a superb little thing.

We lined the pit with the plastic and fitted the sink, and then Terry mixed the concrete while I was down in the pit tamping down the concrete and fitting the breeze blocks. And once more, the solar panels powered the little concrete mixer to perfection. It’s amazing what I can do here with my solar panels.

That took us up to 18:00 and so Terry went home and I tidied up, and emptied the beihstuhl. We’ll put some more concrete in tomorrow and then build up the walls.

However, that depends on the weather. We’re having a thunderstorm right now.

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Tuesday 10th June 2014 – I MIGHT HAVE GUESSED …

… and indeed, to such an extent, that I told Terry that it was bound to happen.

And I was right too!

It’s been a year or so since the farmer who rents the next-door field has been here to bring his cattle to graze in here. And so today, for the first time that we have deposited a pile of objects in the lane in front of his gate, guess what happens?

Yes – the aforementioned farmer brings his cattle. It’s absolutely typical.

So this morning I was up early and went to St Eloy to buy the breeze blocks, but I came back empty-handed. In Brico Depot they are €1:15 each and I was prepared to pay a little extra for the convenience, but when Cheze wanted over €800 for 300, then they can forget that. Terry and I will be off to Brico Depot tomorrow to buy a van-load.

So this is what we have been doing today. And while it’s a little short of the Empire Pool, it took about 6 hours of digging out with the digger, a pick and a shovel.

It’s not actually a swimming pool, but an inspection pit. All of my life I’ve been working on cars by lying on my back in the mud underneath cars on jacks, on axle stands or even propped up on bricks. But now that I’m settled here and can’t see myself moving on from here, I am going to treat myself to better working conditions.

I’ve always promised myself a pit, and I’m going to have one.

And this is it.

We had the power barrow here today as the floor is about finished in the Sankey trailer but i had to nip into Pionsat to buy some petrol. And while I was there I had to help a couple of young Dutch girls who were confounded by the petrol pump. Any excuse to practise my Flemish.

After Terry left, I had another shower and called it a day. Until the farmer came round.

But here’s a thing. And who says it never pays to complain?

You remember the Brico Depot incident the other day involving the trailer? Well, I left a polite but firm not telling them what I thought about my experience. And today, I had a phone call from the manager, something that I never expected. He gave me the usual platitudes, even telling me that he had rung round a few other branches to see if anyone else had a trailer left over.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that he’ll put my name on a trailer whenever the next batch is issued, and you can’t say fairer than that.

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Monday 9th June 2014 – I HAD TEA TONIGHT …

… sitting outside on a garden chair. Yes, at lunchtime, Tery and I moved the chairs and table onto the concrete, and doesn’t that make a nice little terrace? It’s very nice and comfortable.

I had a very disturbed night last night. It was far too hot in here so I left the inverter running all night so that I could have the fan going, but I had to turn it off after a while as I couldn’t get off to sleep.

And during the night I was in prison. And I was too, even down to being in a cell and choosing my bunk. That was frightening to such an extent that I was glad to wake up.

After breakfast I was out straight away and attacked the waste land next to the Subaru. I cleared as much as I could with the long-handled secateurs and then when Terry turned up we attacked it with the digger. The little Kubota did really well pullind the Sankey trailer with the soil and rubble in, up to where we tip it.

By the time lunchtime came around we had dug out and flattened a parking space at the side of the Subaru and so we pulled the Minerva across the way into what will be its new home for a while.

That is necessary because where the Minerva was parked, that is where we will be laying the next load of concreting, so it had to be cleared.

Once we had done that, we moved the rest of the stuff and then dug out the rest of the earthern bank so that it’s now level with where we dug out the other day.

Terry went off home after that and I tidied up. And then I took advantage of the solar hot water. It was 38°C which is no surprise seeing as we had the hottest day of the year today – 38.4°C. I must have drunk 3 litres of liquid during the day.

While I was emptying the trailer on one of my trips, I met Nicolette who was taking the dog for a walk, and we had quite a chat. It’s been ages since I’ve had a good chat to her.

Up here in my room it was 31.8°C, and so it was no surprise that I ended up eating outside tonight.

Tomorrow I’m going early into St Eloy so that I can order all of the breeze blocks that I need to build the retaining wall and line the inspection pit, as there will be one of those here too, and I’ll also order the concrete cubes that I need to build up the columns that will support the roof

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8th June 2014 – HAVE YOU EVER FELT …

… a fool?

I spent most of the morning trying to make this cassette recorder thing work. It’s like an old-style walkman but connects to the PC via a USB cable and it is supposed to be able to convert cassette tapes (of which I have thousands) into *.mp3 files.

It cost me all of about €17:00 from an ALDI when I was on my travels the other week.

I could plug the machine in, with no problems, and the bleep that my PC gave me told me that it had accepted the connection, but the machine didn’t show up on Windows Exploder. An automatic-peripheral search failed to pick it up, and neither did a manual-peripheral search. I ended up reading every help file that I could find but to no avail.

I even left the tape player running to see if the Audacity program would register anything, but nothing there seemed to do anything.

Searching deepinto the bowels of the PC I did notice that I seemed to have acquired an “external USB microphone” that I had never had before. And when I unplugged the tape player the microphone disappeared, and when I plugged it back in, it came back again.

It was then that the penny dropped. I set the tape player to play, reopened “Audacity”, and in a brilliant flash of inspiration, I clicked on the red “record” button. And sure enough, off it jolly well went.

D’ohhhhh!!!

So having wasted all of the morning (and I did too, for it was 10:10 when I woke up), this afternoon I turned my attention to the radio programmes. But I didn’t make much headway as once more it was far too hot in here to do anything. 29°C in fact and even as I type, it’s 27.3°C

Not that i’m complaining because we can do with the warmth, but it’s still not conducive to work and I can understand why it is that these people go in for siestas.

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Saturday 7th June 2014 – I DIDN’T GO ANYWHERE …

… today. And that’s just as well because although I did manage to crawl out of bed at 07:50, I didn’t go to bed until about 04:30 and I’ve no idea why.

Nothing happened during the night (just for a change) and after breakfast I started on the Radio Anglais stuff. I have to do two months of everything this next fortnight as Liz is going to be away for a while. I’ve done two live concert programmes for the rock music stuff and it’s not so easy, especially as I’m now doing the engineering myself. And I do have a great deal to learn.

I’ve had the fan running all day as temperature in hzere touched 30°C briefly, and I’ve also had a shower – the first one of the year that has not been heated. It was 37.6°C and beautifully warm, and now I smell of coconut.

I’m off to bed now for an early night, and I’ll see what tomorrow will bring.

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Friday 6th June 2014 – WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME …

… I was awake at 06:00 (and I don’t mean as in not gone to bed yet)? Anyway, so I was this morning, despite having been on my travels during the night.

And it was all to no avail as well because when I pulled into Brico Depot at 06:55, 5 minutes before opening time, there was already a packed car park and a queue of about 40 people at the door. And then at 07:00 they wheeled out the 4-wheel 1.5 tonne 4-wheeled close-coupled trailers for sand and gravel, that were on special offer at just €799. There was a total of 4 trailers and so that was that. I, and another 30-odd people, had had a wasted journey.

Not quite wasted though because I filled up Caliburn with everything that I might need for the next stage of the concreting (because there will be one) except for the 100mm breeze blocks, which I forgot. I also did a round of shopping, to save on going out tomorrow and at the Auchan I bumped into the Megemonts – a couple from Virlet. M Megemont is President of the Virlet Historical Society and mme Megemont is on the local council so I took the opportunity to ask her to send me anything that might be interesting for Radio Anglais.

I was back here for 15:00 for my butty and it’s clearly a case that Rosemary has a spy camera here as she phoned up the moment I set my foot in the door.

It was 20:00 when I went back outside to unload Caliburn. We had the hottest day of the year to daye and it was not possible to work outside. The temperature today reached 34.50C today.

So now I have the fan on here – the first time this year – and I’m off to bed in a minute. I hzve to start on the Radio Anglais programmes tomorrow.

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Thursday 5th June 2014 – WHAT A SHOCK!

Yes, there I was in the middle of the night at Dorval ready to pick up mu hire car when the company told me that it no longer had any Dodge Grand Caravans. The last one had been sold in the middle of the week, and there was now no longer ay car to offer me. Consequently they offered me a refund but that was no use whatever to me. I wanted a car and I would never have one over the counter at the ame price that I could book one in advance on the internet.

I was all of a clammy sweat when the alarm went off.

Rob turned up at about 08:45 (I’d alrzady been out working for 20 minutes) and Terry turned up at 09:00. By 09:30 we were sitting there waiting for the cement mixer which, true to form, didn’t turn up until 11:15.

It wasn’t anything like easy to come down here in reverse in his lorry but he managed it and 20 minutes later he had gone, minus 5 cubic metres of concrete.

Terry and Rob had left by 13:00 by which time we had done all we could. We were about half a dozen shovelfuls of concrete short.

Nevertheless we had the first row of breeze blocks of the retaining wall in poqition, the first row of concrete pillars and all of the reinforcing pylons in position.

This was a work and a half though and I’m pleased that I had two good friends to help me do all of this.

Hottest day of the year too (the water in the dump load was boiling) and I had a solar shower – I needed it too, especially after spending a couple of hours in the garden planting my aubergines and weeding the onions.

Now I’m having an early night as I’m having an early start tomorrow.

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Wednesday 4th June 2014 – I WENT BACK …

… to Terry’s this morning.

Although I nearly didn’t. When I woke up this morning it was pouring down and wasn’t fit for anything. I had breakfast and wondered whether to carry on with the web pages but by then it had stopped raining so I headed off to Terry’s.

I checked the handbrake mechanism and the nearside seemed to be working fine but the offside not so, so I stripped down the brakes on that side and, as I suspected, the brake operators had seized.

Taking out the operators was not easy at all, but I dismantled them, cleaned them and greased them. A cut-out in the ear halfshaft and this would have been a two-minute job. And if taking them out was difficult, putting them back was even more difficult. And when they were back the pieces wouldn’t hold together and so I had to end up wiring them in.

And as you might have expected, having done all of that and making sure that all of the brake mechanism was working fine, it made not a ha’porth of difference.

We spent the afternoon working on the nearside brake. I made a few adjustments to that side and that did nothing either, which is a total surprise.

These rear brakes on this Jeep Cherokee are totally bewildering me. All that I can think of is that with the brake drums being brand-new, there’s a surface coating that needs to be broken down before the brakes will grip. So we’ll leave it for a week or two in order to see what happens.

If that doesn’t change anything, we’ll have to strip them right down.

Tuesday 3rd June 2014 – TERRY RANG ME UP …

… this morning. Apparently his car parts are coming at lunchtime and was I free?

I certainly was and so after the usual couple of hours on the website, I loaded up Caliburn and repaired my big monster trolley jack and then I was off.

I went via Cecile’s and picked up a couple more letters that were in her letter box, and as I arrived at Liz and Terry’s, a white Mercedes van pulled up behind me. It seems that the parts and I had arrived at the same time.

We did the wheel cylinder on the Transit first and then changed the rear shoes and adjusted the handbrake. It took a while to bleed the cylinder and, not being quick enough with my bleed tube, I ended up with a jet of brake fluid up my sleeve when Terry pressed the brake pedal too quickly, but eventually we had the van on the road with all of the brakes working fine.

The Jeep however was another matter.

Changing the shoes wasn’t as easy as it might have been – a cutaway in the face of the halfshaft would have had the job done in 5 minutes and I don’t understand why it is that Jeep has made the job so difficult when it could be so easy because there really isn’t too much to it at all.

We put the new brake drums and discs on and then fitted the new pads (and that wasn’t easy either thanks to Jeep’s overcomplicating what might otherwise be a simple, straightforward job). Terry then took the Jeep for a run and while the footbrake was perfect, the handbrake was useless.

I adjusted it a couple more times and while I could get the shoes to lock up on the inside of the brake drums simply by tightening the adjusters, the handbrake still wasn’t working. It’s a case of of seized cable or seized operating mechanism, so it all needs to be dismantled, cleaned and greased.

By now though it was 21:10 and going dark so I’ll be back here tomorrow. I was covered in oil and so Terry let me have a shower for which I was grateful, and I came back to find that the phone here is down.

It’s not my lucky day, is it?

Monday 2nd June 2014 – WE PRESSED ON …

… with the work today.

While I was waiting for Terry I moved as much as I could of the stone pile that was in the way. There’s certainly enough stones in there now to build a decent wall now. And when Terry arrived, we moved the big ones with the digger.

Once they were out of the way we smoothed off the surface and flattened it down, and then fitted the shuttering, because if you haven’t already guessed, Terry and I are going to be concreting the car park. I need a proper flat surface to work on.

We went off to the quarry after lunch to arrange the concrete delivery, but it won’t be here until Thursday morning so we came back and fitted the reinforcing grillage. That’s necessary with a 150mm thickness of concrete. Terry then went off nd I carried on ripping out the weeds from where the towing dolly is kept.

I had to nip into Pionsat and the Intermarche and I’ll tell you something – for a small-town supermarket in a small town like Pionsat, the place was packed. Three tills were open and there was queueing in all parts. A few people were doing a mega-shop there, a sure sign that the place is certainly having a great success and that it isn’t just people who might have forgotten something at the weekend

I was on my travels last night too. I was in the police force and I’d stopped a Moroccan because of an offence that he had committed with his trailer and i’d discovered that the trailer’s controle technique was out of date by a day. And so I’d gone and given everything else a full inspection and found loads of other faults too.

A few hours later I found him in a telephone box filling in a huge lengthy form about this controle technique issue. He’d been seeking legal advice and filling in this form was something that some solicitor had told him to do. He told me that he was quite confident that he would be let off a penalty and so I helped him fill in the form, all the while thinking to myself “just wait until he receives the summons in respect of everything else that I’d found”.

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Sunday 1st June 2014 – TWO EXTRAORDINARY THINGS …

… worthy of note happened through the night.

Firstly, despite there being no footy last night and me not having any coffee since mid-afternoon, it was well after 04:30 this morning when I went to bed. What time I actually went to sleep, I have no idea. It certainly wasn’t quickly.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I was up and preparing breakfast at 07:45. How do you explain that? I can’t even wake up at that time in the week when I’ve had a decent night’s sleep.

So I’ve no idea what has been going on but it’s certainly something extraordinary.

So having crashed out for an hour or so, I’ve been tidying up in here a little and sorted out the fresh food again. High time I did that too. And then I’ve been working on the computer again.

After all, it is Sunday and I’m entitled to have a day off. I’m back to work tomorrow.

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Saturday 31st May 2014 – I WENT TO MONTLUCON TODAY

And I wasn’t alone either for Rosemary came with me. We met up at the Total garage at Montaigut, but first port of call was back here. Rosemary needed a new worktop for the two cupboards that she had bought and although Brico Depot no longer stocked it, it was exactly the same as what I had bought for my house and I have tons of it around here. I could certainly spare a sheet of it.

After that we blitzed the shops – I did my usual round and Rosemary did hers. As well as that, we went around a few furniture shops as Rosemary needs some things for her cottage.

I loaded up Caliburn at Brico Depot with a pile of breeze blocks and some metal pylons for next week’s work around here, and I bought a two hook from Espace Emeraude. The Kubota came with just a stalk for ring-coupling trailers whereas my trailers are ball couplings so I needed a stalk with the ball on the end.

Rosemary bought lunch and on the way home we stopped at Neris-les-Bains for a cold drink. it was the start of the theatre season there and so we were serenaded by an Opera singer, just by way of a change.

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EPIC HALL

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