Tag Archives: eric hall

Monday – 28th October 2013 – MORE OF THE SAME

Yes, back to work today. And to carry on from where I left off on Saturday, and every other day (apart from Sunday) since I’ve been here, I was up long before the alarm went off.

The washing machine is going on Wednesday and so I’ve sent most of the day doing a mega-wash of clothes and the like, making sure that everything is clean. All that hasn’t been washed is the stuff that is going to the clothing bins, and also the curtains, because it’s very hard to do those when you have builders not 6 feet away from where you are trying to work.

I’ve reaired a few pieces of furniture too – stuff that is also being collected by the guy from the Troc on Wednesday. The better it is and the better the condition in which it finds itself, the more money I’ll receive for it.

The notaire has also been on the telephone with a list of things to do, and a eadline by which I need to do them. I’ve totally forgotten that it’s a bank holiday here on Friday, so that’s one less day that I have to do stuff. This is all closing in on me rather rapidly.

-6

Sunday 27th October 2013 – SUNDAY IS A DAY OF REST

Especially when the clocks go back an hour. So it was really nice to get up, go for a gypsy’s, make myself a coffee and go back to bed to watch Carry On Follow That Camel, an excellent film totally ruined by Phil Silvers, and get up to find that it’s still only 10:30.

After breakfast I did rather less than usual, and after lunch went out for a wander. You may remember that a few weeks ago I went to the War Graves part of the local cemetery for a wander around. I went back for another look today and one of the graves there caught my eye.

It relates to a woman by the name of Marina Chaeroff – a Russian name but with a Belgian flag on her tombstone, and she is clearly shown as being decapitated by the Nazis. Like I said before, it’s quite easy to criticise people who were less-than-resilient when it came to dealing with the occupying powers when you don’t yourself run the same kind of risks that you would like them to run.

I went off to pay my respects to Marianne afterwards and, as a huge disappointment, the gravestone that I ordered hasn’t arrived. It’s a big job, I know, but it was promised for the end of the month and they need to get a wiggle on.

The familiar sound of a whistle from down the hill led me to the footy stadium where the Royal Sporting Club of Ixelles were entertaining their neighbours from Auderghem. €4:00 it cost me to get into the stadium so I was hoping to have my money’s worth.

Ixelles started quite brightly and were soon in front. And although they stayed in front for quite some time, we had a few astonishing developments. Ixelles were playing with a young lad on the right wing and he was streets better than anyone else on the field. He scored the opening goal with an excellent solo run and shot, but for some reason his colleagues seemed very reluctant to let him have the ball and he was isolated out on the wing for quite a while.

Ixelles’ tactics, to stand well off the defenders when the defenders were in possession, meant that they were being pushed farther and farther back and it was soon evident that despite being out in front and having the lion’s share of the game, Auderghem were gradually asserting themselves with all the time that they liked on the ball, and in the space of about 20 minutes, interrupted by half-time and one of the most astonishing cloudbursts that I have ever seen, Auderghem scored three goals, totally against the run of play.

The tactics of the Ixelles manager became even more bizarre. Instead of giving his players the old boot in the nether regions and telling them to move the ball out to the right wing, he withdrew the winger from the game, to the utter dismay and disbelief of everyone in the stadium.

The rest of the story you can write yourselves. Despite the heroics of the Ixelles goalkeeper, Auderghem went on the rampage and scored two further goals without too much effort and although Ixelles pulled one back right at the end, if the final scoreline had been 5-2 in favour of Ixelles, no-one would have been all that much surprised.

For Auderghem to have won this game 5-2 is one of those mysteries that will never ever be resolved – something on a par with what on earth was going on with the withdrawal of that right-winger on the hour mark, a decision that surely changed the whole aspect of this game.

+20

-36

Saturday 26th October 2013 – I REMEMBER …

… back to 2004 when I was ill and thinking that I ought to develop a new interest, that the subject of footy first came up. Brussels is ideally situated for being a Northern European footy fan and I do remember thinking that as Belgium and France are rather boring in that respect, I ought to cast my net a little further afield.

Dutch football fans are well-known for their passion and ardour and as the town of Breda is easy to get to from here on public transport (change trains at Antwerpen), then NAC came onto the radar. However, times changed, and things changed, and I changed, and that was that. Nevertheless, it was always something that turned around in the back of my mind.

Dutch football has some very interestingly-named teams such as Willem III, Heracles and Top Oss, but pride of place has to go to the enigmatically-named Go Ahead Eagles. Any team with a name like that deserves to be supported. And so imagine my surprise this morning when, over a cup of coffee, I glanced at the footy fixtures and found that the Eagles were playing away this evening – at NAC Breda!

So early this afternoon after lunch I leapt into Caliburn and shot off up the motorway as far as Weerde (I really ought to live in a town with a name like that – second only to the town of Silly of course) when I realised that I didn’t have my passport (I seem to be making a habit of this).

Back on my way to Antwerpen I encountered a Carrefour at Mechelen so I was even able to do a pile of shopping, and after that, with Golden Earring playing on Caliburn’s music centre in honour of my Going Dutch, I eventually arrived at the ground.

Nice and modern, which many purists (including Yours Truly) will think is a pity, but with plenty of space around it and plenty of parking too which makes a pleasant change.

Buying a ticket for an Eredivisie match is not easy. You need to have a Dutch FA clubcard to but a ticket for the match. if you don’t have one, which of course I don’t, you need to produce a national identity card, which I don’t have either, or else produce a passport, which I did have, so it was a good job that I remembered to go back and fetch it. But just €15 (that’s £12) for a ticket is an absolute bargain to watch a 1st-tier match in a keenly-fought domestic league.

Next stop was to buy some food. I left Caliburn (who has never been to the Netherlands before, by the way, so there’s a first) at the Stadion Rat Verlegh (a delightful name) and went on foot to the centre, and I’m glad that I did because I stumbled once more upon something quite exciting that I would otherwise have missed.

This is a Fokker 100 of the late 1980s or early 1990s and what it is doing here as an advert for a scrapyard I really have no idea. This isn’t the first one that we have seen either, for those of you with very long memories will recall the Andover that sat on top of a scrapyard at Ettiley Heath, at the back of Sandbach, for a while. But anyway, here it is and here it sits, and here it will probably stay until the price of scrap aluminium rises again.

It did rather remind me of that delightful story about the old World War I pilot reliving one of his battles during a live television interview.
“There I was, at 8,000 feet, all on my own, and suddenly these five German Fokkers appeared out of a cloud, right in front of me”
“I should mention, for the benefit of our younger viewers” said the interviewer “that a Fokker is a type of German aeroplane”
“Thats right!” ejaculated our hero. “These Fokkers were Albatroses”

So I eventually made it into town, following my nose which was quite interested in the smell of chips that it was detecting.

This brought me to a little square just on the edge of the old medieval centre and here was a beautiful historic building. I’ve absolutely no idea what it might be although it looks like an ersatz town hall or school building of the late 19th Century when the Dutch ran out of inspiration. However, I could be completely wrong about this and nothing would surprise me.

Here I was distracted as two pizza delivery motorcyclists burst out of an alleyway and headed off in different directions. That gave me a clue and so I headed into the alleyway and found myself at the back of a takeaway pizza lace. My takeaway Vegetarian with my own vegan cheese (I always come prepared) was one of the best I’ve ever eaten.

On the way back to the stadium in the dark, wishing that I had come here much earlier to properly explore the town, I encountered this object, right outside the football ground as you,might expect one such object to be. Whatever its proper name might be, I was told that the locals refer to it as the p155 house, and for very good reason too as you can see.

In fact I made very good use of it. I must stop drinking all of this flavoured water while I’m driving. It’s doing me no good at all, I tell you that. I’m not sure how I would have coped had I not found this artefact. It’s certainly a novel way to spend 1.2 centimes.

Mind you, it’s a bit disconcerting having to resort to something like this in front of a crowd of about 17,000 people trying to get into the Stadion Rat Verlegh. I mean, I didn’t want to give them all an inferiority complex.

But that’s enough of me talking rubbish. Let’s concentrate on the football.

Tyhe quality was rather … errr … less than I was expecting for an Eredivisie match. NAC were, well, about average I suppose but Go Ahead Eagles were thoroughly awful and how they were in one place higher than the home side before the kick-off I really do not know. They had a central defence pairing of Lord Lucan and Martin Bormann and for the second quarter of the game they were quite simply torn to shreds. Its no exaggeration to say that 4-0 at half-time, all the goals coming in that 20-odd minute spell, was something of an understatement.

It will also come as no surprise to anyone reading this that the second half was a totally different game. Naive followers of the sport would expect the second half to begin with the Eagles having their heads buried in their boots and a bouyant bunch of Breda boyos bouncing out to run up a cricket score (mind you, 4-0 IS a cricket score when England are batting).

But no, Breda had gone right off the boil and were content to play exhibition football for a while, passing the ball around amongst themselves instead of going for the jugular.

This of course gave the Eagles some kind of respite and a couple of times they snatched the ball away and went racing off down the ptch to give the Breda defence some VERY ANXIOUS moments indeed. I remember thinking that if the Eagles scored twice (which they could so easily have done), there would have been an almighty panic in the Breda side and anything could happen.

However the Breda defence stood firm and with just two or three minutes to go, they managed to pot a fifth goal to calm what was clearly becoming a jittery Breda performance. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a side winning 4-0 look so nervous.

But I really don’t know why teams like this do this kind of thing. 4-0 up and looking good, and then going on the defensive for 45 minutes. They should have carried on with the allout attack, been 6-0 up after the hour, and then gone on to bury this team, instead of giving them a few easy chances to get back into the game. Really bad planning, this, and I would have kicked the players all around the stadium. A tight mid-table finish means that goal difference is all important when it comes to doling out the prize money at the end of the season and whenever you are given the opportunity, which doesn’t arrive very often for clubs like this, you should be going for the throat;

And on that note, I went home. Another one of my … errr … goals in life accomplished.

+14

-10

Friday 25th October 2013 – I’VE FINALLY FOUND …

… the Acte de Base, or title deeds, to the apartment here. And a few people are going to be in for something of a surprise because, if you remember from a while back when I had a run-in with the Syndic of the building about one or two matters, I find that I am completely correct in my assumptions and it seems, to my legally-untutored eye, that the Syndic has been ripping off poor Marianne for years. I shall have to look further into this, itemise where I think that there are problems, and invite an explanation.

It might be, of course, that I have simply misunderstood things. On the other hand, there might be five fingers. But it does prove the value of tidying up. Maybe I should do it more often.

Apart from that, I’ve binned another pile of papers that I was keepig on Marianne’s behalf. All that remains is some stuff that relates to an incident in her life that dates from 1996 and which I shall have to look into in due course, and some insurance details which I am 99.9% sure are of no value whatever but nevertheless need to be followed up.

So, what else? Not much. I’ve been fairly busy but I’ve not really accomplished all that much. I need to get a move on.

+19

-5

Thursday 24th October 2013 – THE MAN FROM THE TROC …

… came around this morning as promised and went through the furniture. He doesn’t want all of it and for what he does want, his terms are hardly generous, but then I’ve been trying to sell this stuff for a couple of months and only some of the stuff has gone, and I’ve really no idea what to do with the rest and it has to be gone by next weekend and so I have to cut my losses and move it on. I’m playing for much bigger stakes than a couple of hundred Euros.

I also had a phone call from the church of St Vincent de Paul. They could well be interested in what is left over, and they have a van slot free for 10:30 next Tuesday. Consequently, that will be the rest of the stuff gone, and what is left over after all of that will be out on the street on Wednesday evening, either for the dustbin men or for whoever it is that goes a-wandering past.

And apart from that, I’ve been tidying up again. I need to keep on top of all of this.

+28

-6

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 – I MENTIONED A CHANGE …

… about the property just now, didn’t I? This is what greeted me when I arrived – the building is shrouded in a cover and the facade is under repair. But what a repair! There are two men up on the scaffolding filling in the holes in the wall. There are two men down at the foot mixing the cement. There are another two men fastening the buckets of cement to ropes, using open hooks, and, standing in the roadway, pulling down on the ropes to raise the buckets.

No means of security – it just wants a moment’s distraction for a bucket to crash down on the head of a passer-by, someone leaving the building, or a car on the road. Or even on what is laughingly described as a workman, because not one of them is wearing any safety gear like a helmet or steel toecapped shoes. I asked one of them what he thought about the conditions of work but he just smiled at me. Closer inspection of the scaffolding revealed that it’s from a company called Delta in Warsaw. Clearly City Facade consider workers from Eastern Europe to be by and large expendible on their chantiers.

Internet was the next issue. The sum that Marianne owes is enormous and I’ve rather had my fill of paying for Marianne’s debts just now. The good news is that being right next to the University there’s a wifi hotspot that bleeds over here. It’s payable, like anything else in this Godforsaken country, but if I go for a minimum service (which is really all that I need) it’s quite good value for a fortnight’s subscrition – much better than any other deal I’ve been offered. However, while I was at Proximus, they were selling open-network wifi dongles for just €40 and, as you know, I have the right to wifi access on my French, my British and my Canadian sim card. Canadian access is not so important now that there is free wifi at Tim Horton’s, but the rest will come in handy.

I’ve also spent most of the afternoon on the phone. There’s a guy from a troc coming round to see the furniture that is available, but as far as charities go, theres no-one interested in the rest. It’s astonishing. Most of them want me to photograph the stuff and give a full description before they come to collect it. Obviously, as my friend Erika says, beggars CAN be choosers. But one thing about this is that it all beggars belief. No wonder people don’t donate stuff any more if they have to jump through hoops like this.

-55

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 – I’M SUPPOSED TO BE TAKING IT EASY …

… today, but you wouldn’t have thought so. First on the ‘phone was Rosemary. Her roofer is staying on for a day or two and so he’s going to have a quick go at her barn. Of course, we took the scaffolding down on Sunday, so could he borrow my roof ladder?

So at 08:30 they were here at Pooh Corner to take it away, and from there it all went downhill. Marianne called me to remind me of an errand that needed doing in Brussels and about which I had clean forgotten. Then I had two other calls in quick succession and I can’t now remember who they were and what they wanted – such is advancing age.

Then I had another task to perform. Seeing as how I’m not leaving until this afternoon now, I went to put another plan into operation and that involved meeting an estate agent in Pionsat. We had a pleasant morning out, but this idea that I have will not come to fruition, which is a shame, as there is a major stumbling block with my idea.

Back at Pooh Corner I fell in with Lieneke and Guus who are here for a week, and we had quite a lengthy chat. It’s always nice to see friendly people – they are in quite short supply here. And Raoul the cat put in his first appearance of the autumn. Checking up on his sources of food supply for the winter, methinks.

I loaded up the van and after a brief repos I set off for Brussels. And I got well on my way before I realised that I had forgotten my passport, and so I had to come all the way back again. I made it as far as Melun where I stopped for fuel and also for a bag of chips and a vegetarian pitta. I’m going for a little luxury in my old age. Another sign of old age is that I only made it as far as Valenciennes, a good 90 minutes short of Brussels, before I pulled off for a kip. I’m clearly not as young as I was. Consequently I didn’t make it here until about 02:30 – to find a major change about the property and also the fact that the internet is disconnected – more of which anon.

+25

-6

Monday 21st October 2013 – HERE’S SOMEONE WITH A SORE HEAD

This was what greeted me this morning on my way round to Cécile’s house. Someone clearly not paying enough attention last night.

Its not the first time that Ive encountered a car in a ditch of course. Keen readers of this rubbish will recall that on my way to the footy at Combronde a few years ago I encountered another one in a ditch near Menat. On that occasion the driver would indeed have had a headache as there was a head-shaped dent in the windscreen just above the steering wheel, but in the case of this car there was no such evidence (I did look).

But just for a change I was up early, as I needed to be. First stop was fuel at the Intermarche at Piosat, and second was at Marianne’s to pick up Cécile’s keys. Then, passing by the car in the ditch I went on to her house.

At the top of the Font Nanaud there was this spectacular site waiting to greet me. Usually, quite early in the morning, there’s a hanging cloud that sits in the Gorges de la Sioule and when you pass by the Birdwatching Centre beyond St Gervais, you can see it.

Today though, it had well-overflowed the Gorges and St Gervais, just down there in that valley, was totally overwhelmed. I hadn’t seen it that dramatically before.

Once I’d sorted out Cécile’s affairs I went off chaud-pied to St Gervais to pick up Liz who had taken the Punto for its controle technique, and we shot off to Gerzat to record the Arverne sessions of Radio Anglais.

That wasn’t as easy as it might have been eiter as Bernard had forgotten that we were coming, and then everything that could possibly go pear-shaped did go pear-shaped and if we had had the time I would have done it all over again.

I took Liz for lunch afterwards as she deserved it, and then I came home. I should have gone to Brussels this evening too but what with a very late night last night (I can’t believe how stressful it is these days dealing with other people’s problems when they don’t really want them dealt with) and I wasn’t up for a 750km drive through the night.

I went to bed instead.

-5

Sunday 20th October 2013 – WHOSE SILLY IDEA WAS IT …

…to set an alarm clock for 08:00 and ON A SUNDAY MORNING too?

Well, actually, it was my idea. When I was at Liz and Terry’s the other day, Terry mentioned that he had a scaffolding to take down on Sunday morning and no-one to help him. Right at that moment, Liz was poised over me with a plate of vegetable curry in one hand and a slice of ginger cake in the other, and so my spirit consequently wavered, and here I was at 09:15 heading across the countryside to Rosemary’s.

At that time of the morning, with the rain that we had had throughout the night, there was a gorgeous mist rising serpent-like from the Gorge de la Sioule and I would have taken an photograph or two of it in order to regale you all, but that was when I discovered that I had forgotten my camera.

After a coffee (thank you, Rosemary), we attacked the scaffolding and we soon had it down and in Terry’s trailer. Terry then asked me, rather disingenuously, if I wanted to come for lunch. I said that that would be very nice, to which Terry replied “good. You can help me unload the trailer”. Drat! Foiled again!

So after unloading the trailer we had soup and bread. And I was supposed to go to the football at Montel but I didn’t have the camera and in any case I wasn’t in such an energetic mood, so we chilled out for a while.

Back here, it’s Sunday and pizza night. And then I had Cécile on the ‘phone for over two hours. It seems like she has forgotten something important at her house, and would I mind …

-5

Saturday 19th October 2013 – THERE HAVE BEEN A LOT …

… of changes around here – it’s amazing what cam happen when you’ve been away for as long as I have.

Steaming down the hill past the quarry at Montaigut on my way to the shops at St Eloy this afternoon and I came shuddering to a halt. That’s because a new road, and of course, a new road junction seem, to have miraculously appeared.

I’ve heard a great deal about this proposed new road – it’s something that’s been proposed for quite a while. For years, heavy lorries from the quarry have struggled through the medieval streets of Montaigut, snarling up the traffic and rattling the houses, and all of the local inhabitants are thoroughly fed up of it.

But not any more. While I was away, a new road has been consrtructed that by-passes the village and goes off to the N144 on the outskirts.

There, the traffic is not obliged to enter into the village at all and that will please everyone.

It will please me greatly too. I often need to take the N144 and then turn off for Montmarault and in order to do that I have to go down some quite narrow windy roads with, more often than not, the sun full in my face at the most inopportune of moments. Now I can just steam on down to here and then hang a left on the new road, and I’m there in no time.

There’s another part of the road that is in the throes of being built. That part will take you onto the road that leads to Pionsat, and that’s another piece of road that should have been built centuries ago to by-pass the village.

All the traffic on there, if it isn’t going to the village itself (which is highly unlikely as there is nothing in Montaigut tha Pionsat doesn’t have) is going to the motorway at Montmarault and so is being channelled through the village and as anyone will tell you, traffic in Montaigut can sometimes be impossible.

No, when they finish this, it should be a good thing.

However I am getting ahead of myself. This morning I was intending to go to Montlucon but I’d seen some interesting stuff that would do for the radio programme, so I wrote a couple of thousand words on the tax changes that took place in July.

After shopping, I went round to Marianne’s to catch up on all of the latest news, and then to Cecile’s to unload Caliburn of the stuff that Cecile had chosen from the other Marianne.

We had footy this evening too. Pionsat’s 2nd XI were relegated to the fourth Division at the end of last season and are doing fairly well here. Tonight they were playing the Miners of St Eloy but they would only muster a team of 10 and which was not a particularly strong team either, with several faces missing from the squad.

They started off brightly, with the Pionsat n°9 ( a guy called Fred, a new signing) playing a total blinder up front and looking as if he could take on the entire Nord Combraille side on his own.

It didn’t however work out like that as Pionsat couldn’t keep going, being short-handed like that.

The Miners gradually came back into the game and eventually the goal that they had been threatening to score for quite some time went into the back of the net, despite the best efforts of Christophe who seems to have taken over the goalkeeping jersey on a permanent basis, given the illness, injury and retirement of everyone else around the club. There have been quite a few changes over the last two seasons.

Nord Combrailles scored a second goal late in the game to put the issue beyond doubt.
But that wasn’t quite the end of the story, because this guy Fred, who had quite impressed me throughout all of the match, was still going at the final whistle.

Here he is bursting through the Miners’ defence right on the final whistle, shrugging off a few strong tackles, and putting a shot across the face of the goal beating the keeper easily. But it hits the post and bounces to safety – about the third or fourth time that he had hit the woodwork. He would have been my man-of-the-match on any day of the week in any team, that’s for sure.

Even more astonishing was the weather. We were all standing on the terraces in shirt sleeves. This was one of the nicest October nights that I can remember.

-9

Friday 18th October 2013 – IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG …

… for the battery issue to resolve itself. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve brought all the good weather back with me from Greece, but there’s no doubt that once the weather eye cottoned on to the fact that I was back, the weather has improved no end.

Yesterday I had 200 amp-hours of solar energy and today the batteries topped out to such an extent that I had almost 40 amp-hours of excess charge. Thats good news in itself. but it’s clear from the performance and the statistics that I’ve been keeping is that one of the batteries is on the point of handing in its hat. I have all of the new batteries that I bought – they are still there waiting and so when I finally return from Brussels (I’m heading off there early nrxt week) I’ll change them all over.

This morning though I was off to Marcillat and Radio Tartasse for today’s recordings of “Radio Anglais”. I did the rock programmes and then Liz joined me for the information stuff. We went for a coffee and chat afterwards and then I came home.

First job was to fix the letter box. You may remember from ages back that strange things have been happening to it, and when I came back from Greece it had been propped up against one of the cars in the car park. I spent a pleasant 10 minutes anchoring it back in the ground where it can stay until I have more time to deal with it.

After lunch I started work on another series of radio programmes. We’re recording the “Radio Anglais” programmes for Radio Arverne on Monday and the text needs to be written for that, but I also need more topics for discussion as the pipeline is running low. There were a variety of taxation changes in July this year so I’ve started to do a programme about that lot.

Apart from that, not an awful lot has happened. But I’m not in a rush to start anything because if I’m heading up to Brussels on Monday or Tuesday, it will be just something else that I’ve failed to finish and I have enough projects like that already on the go.

-6

Thursday 17th October 2013 – I’VE BEEN BACK AT WORK TODAY

Not much though – just gradually easing myself in.

I had a couple of radio programmes to write for Radio Anglais – for the rock music shows that we broadcast onn Radio Tartasse. It took me a while to find the hard drive with the music on before I could start anything, but that’s all finished and up and running. I’m using a few songs from the enormous pile of CDs that I bought earlier. Did I mention that I bought no less than 20 CDs from various second-hand stores in Canada and the USA?

For the live concert, I’m treating my listeners to a surprise in December. Together with Neil Young and Warren Zevon, I’ve been taking an enormous amount of mickey out of one particular group. Due to tragic circumstances that unfolded, maybe it’s not a very clever thing to continue it these days and so as a kind of homage, I’ll be playing a concert, the tape of which I discovered in a Salvation Army charity shop in Presque Isle, Maine. Rare is not the word unfortunately, but nevertheless there’s quite a twist in the tail of this concert.

Anyway, that took me the best part of the mornng, particularly as it took me an age to make the external CD Drive function properly.

This afternoon I’ve tidied up in here and reconfigured things a little. Tidying up was exciting of course, but I’ve not yet managed to make my new laptop work with the wifi on the Livebox here. However, as I discovered, it does work of an ADSL cable, so I’ve had to move my office around a little so the cable can reach the laptop.

I’ve also been doing another web page. A musician called Thom Swift has seen my sample pics of his performance at the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival and wants to see more of them. The easiest way is to do a web page with them all on, and so I’ve been working on that. It’s not finished yet but hopefully I shall have it done tomorrow.

I need to get my pages up on line asap.

-8

Wednesday 16th October 2013 – MEANWHILE, BACK AT POOH CORNER …

… I did a very silly thing. Or rather, I forgot to undo something rather silly, and that was despite my best intentions too.

Before I set out for North America I had every intention of disconnecting the fridge and wiring it into the overload circuit. That way, if we were to have a long spell of heavily overcast weather, it wouldn’t run down the batteries.

But guess what? I totally forgot to do it and we have indeed had a long spell of heavily overcast weather. Consequently, I’m struggling for electricity.

That was what I found this morning when I returned home. I had the best night’s sleep for absolutely ages round at Liz and Terry’s, and after a breakfast of coffee and toast I hit the road for Pooh Corner, stopping at the Intermarché at Pionsat along the way.

Back here though, having seen what I forgot to do, I’ve gone into emergency mode. Everything is disconnected except, as I write, a 1-watt LED light and if that fades out I have a Ryobi lantern standing by. There’s one battery that is fully-charged (I keep that on a separate circuit) and that I put for a top-up via the solar panels in the barn and later in the night I’ll drag it across here. I can wire that into the circuit and disconnect the main battery bank quite easily so there will be some power, and then in the morning it can go back into the barn to be charged up while the battery bank in here is reconnected.

Apart from that, I’ve spent most of the day on the sofa crashed out. The after-effects of my marathon voyage. I’ll have a good rest and then tomorrow I have a radio programme to write.

That is, of course, if I have any electricity. What a silly thing to do.

-5

Tuesday 15th October 2013 – I changed my plans a little this morning.

I didn’t have too much to eat last night as there wasn’t all that much in the vicinity of my hotel. I had to walk for almost ever until I found a “Quick” that sold me some chips. Consequently I paid €5:95 and had the breakfast here.

A wise decision, that, because I would have paid much more than that for a couple of coffees along the route, so when you add the orange juice, the toast and the half-baguette with strawberry jam into the equation (and when did you ever see strawberry jam in little squeezy tubes?) I more-than-had my money’s worth and that will keep me going for quite a while.

I had a good night’s sleep too. Not a single mosquito bit me and not a single fly entered into the room to buzz around my head at 04:00 in the morning. In fact I went out like a light and that was that.

Traffic was incredibly heavy on the road back to the airport and the RER train was packed too. And what with struggling up inclines and steps and dragging my suitcase along all of these corridors, I can see why I abandoned this route in favour of the TGV. However a direct train to Montlucon for just €46:00 makes up for most things, even if I do have to wait for over 2 hours for Liz to finish work. Still, there’s plenty of coffee in Montlucon and I have a book or two to finish. I hope that the coffee at Montlucon is better than that at Paris Austerlitz which was quite frankly disgusting and if I hadn’t had to pay all of €1:10 for it, would have found its way into the plant pot. It as however just as well that I drank it, because, would you believe – shock! Horror! That I have a Three-and-a-half-hour journey on my train and there is not even a hint of a buffet car. How is this possible?

Anyway, my luck was destined to change. There I was, in the station at Bourges in the middle of “Apache Blood” when I happened to remark to myself that we weretaking an inordinate amount of time to restart. It turne out that there was a bottleneck down the line and, true to form on this voyage, my travel was to be retarded by at least 20 minutes. Still, that gave me the chance to dive over the station buildings and buy a coffee. Every cloud has a silver lining of course, and it’s really an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good.

We end up only 5 minutes late at Montlucon and so I have plenty of time to photograph the locomotive, a diesel number 567348, that pulled us all this way. Plenty of time indeed, because Liz isn’t due here for another two and a half hours.

So why this train then? The answer is as I said earlier. It’s a direct train. All the other trains involve a considerable amount of changes, and one or two of them even involve coach journeys. I didn’t fancy any of that for a moment.

But Liz picks me up, and she has made a beautiful curry for tea and there is even a bed for the night. I’m grateful for that – with the torrential downpour I really wasn’t looking forward to going back home in all of this.

-6

Monday 14th October 2013 – I’M IN PARIS NOW …

although I rather wish that I wasn’t. It’s wet, depressing and miserable, just like I am.

And compare that to the photo here that I took of my plane at Athens Airport – bright gorgeous sunshine enough to put a smile on the face of anyone. I can understand why people who live in countries like Greece and Italy are so happy. Who couldn’t be, with weather like this?

Our ‘plane was an Airbus 319 which was quite comfortable even if there were 150 – 25 rows of 6 – of us aboard. What was rather funny (or not, though) was that there were two toilets on the plane, one for First-Class passengers (of which there were about 30) and one for the huddled masses such as Yours Truly, who were kept well-and-truly curtained off from our elders and betters.

On the ‘plane though, dressed in the traditional habit of an Orthodox Monk, was a dead-ringer for one of my childhood heroes, the Cypriot champion of Enosis and clandestine leader of the EOKA, Archbishop Prekarios.

The morning was totally beautiful, though. I was up quite early and went out to take a few photos of the sunrise and that didn’t disappoint me at all.

And what was so funny about that though was that the Transcendental Meditationists were already up and about, encamped upon their little terrace, presumably to stop Trixi and Yours Truly invading it for our morning session on the mats (followed, of course, by a little yoga). Clearly even Western Transcendental Meditationists are allowed to have issues over possessions and territory here on the real earth. Perhaps they are just beginners.

I found that almost as funny as the leader of another group storming up, rather aggressively, to another bunch of people, adopting a menacing pose and shouting in a voice loud enough for those on the island of Angina to hear clearly “would you mind being quiet – I’m trying to give a seminar down here and you are disrupting me”. That was the leader of those engaged in the “Non-Violent Communication” sessions.

We went around afterwards and photographed the complex where we were staying. This is part of one of the blocks of accommodation – my room is down there in the bottom right-hand corner and even though it looks right out of the way, it’s quite deceptive because there’s a substantial slope down to the cliffs and I had a small terrace with a view over the sea and that suited me.

All in all, we had a very good time here. I was certainly glad that I came and wouldn’t hesitate about coming a second time, even if it was just for a holiday and not for a course of something.

Our ferry back to Piraeus sails from the port of Megalokhoros – “Big Village” and, true to form with everything else that has happened so far this holiday, it was late and so we had to loiter on the quayside for quite some time.

The bus ride back to the airport was quite uneventful – no-one killed or injured and no luggage sailing up and down the bus. Somehow it was quite a disappointment, even though I did quite clearly see an old white Wolseley 6/80 in a scrapyard at the side of the road. I can see myself needing a much bigger suitcase next time I come here because what with the Wolseley and the Zundapp pick-up, I’m going to be rather overloaded.

The plane was late too, just for a change, and so we had a final coffee together. She then went for the train to Athens and I headed for my plane. Greek security was thorough, but cheerful. They were smiling, saying “please” and “thank you” and generally relaxing the passengers rather than stressing them out in the British, French, Canadian and American style.

There was some real excitement though. A couple with a baby were trying to take all of their worldly possessions onto the aeroplane as cabin luggage, even though it would clearly not fit into the measuring gauge. When the girls at the ticket desk tried to explain this, the woman became quite hysterical, and, shame as it is to say it, rather nasty and offensive. I’m not quite sure how the situation developed but when I passed them by on my way to board, a senior Greek airport official backed up by a quitedetermined-looking policeman, was saying patiently to them ‘but Madam, this is Greece. What they do in the USA has no relevance to what we do here”.

On arrival at Paris, I had to go to another hotel, as my Comfort Hotel at Le Mesnil was fully-booked. And in an irony that only ever happens in books and never in real life except to me, I had to wait hours for the bus to the “Ibis Budget” to arrive, whereas the bus for the “Comfort Hotel – Le Mesnil” was the first to arrive, and by a country mile as well.

-3

EPIC HALL

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