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Tuesday 20th January 2015 – I’VE HAD ONE OF THOSE DAYS …

… today. And it all went wrong as early as breakfast time. I was thinking to myself that my breakfast coffee tasted pretty awful, and closer inspection revealed that I was in fact drinking merely hot water in a coffee-flavoured mug. That depressed me for a start.

And then going downstairs I fell through the trap that I had made yesterday, and only quick thinking by grabbing the beam as I fell through it prevented me from plummetting down to the concrete floor about 3 metres below.

I’ve done myself quite a mischief, but while I was hanging there from the beam working out the best way to haul myself back up, I came to the conclusion that maybe the hatch was not such a good idea after all.

I mean, it is an excellent idea but it won’t work here, because there’s not sufficient support around the edges to carry the weight of whatever is going to be walking across it, as I had just demonstrated. Consequently, once I had ccrawled back up onto terra firma, I ripped out the hatch and the surround and spen the rest of the morning refitting both layers of the floor. I’d nearly finished by lunchtime but I carried on regardless until it was finished.

I know that I said that I was going to vacuum out the bathroom and put the first coat of varnigh on the floor, but as you might expect after I’ve talked about such things, we were having a slight snowstorm and there was a hanging cloud here for most of the morning. That put the kybosh on the vacuuming.

After lunch I fetched a pile of wood into the house for the fire, but all of a sudden, the sun put in a bried appearance. Out came the vacuum cleaner and I cleaned out the bathrrom and then did the first coat of varnish.

As for the vacuum cleaner, there will be some who would complain about the lack of efficiency, but these people would have seen the price tag (€29:99 reduced to €14:99) and not seen the power of the machine – 600 watts instead of the more usual 1500 watts. I knew exactly what I was buying and I knew exactly how it was going to work, and so I was not disappointed at all. It did exactly what it said it would and did it quite efficiently too, and I was delighted.

I spent the rest of the working day cutting a board that I need for the head of the stairs – I’d forgotten about that. I’ll fit that next time I’m working here as I’m out all day tomorrow.

I’ve also fitted the handrail for the stairs. Two huge screwed eyes and a length of 14mm hemp rope, and that’s made quite an effective handrail.

It’s not 100% my own idea though. I knew that I had seen something like this before, and the other night, watching the absolutely outstanding Green For Danger, there it was, on the stairs of the Nurses’ Home. It looks as if I’m going back in time.

I was working long after 18:00 but I had a phone call that interrupted me for 10 minutes. Terry had the census people round there and they didn’t speak English, so I was required to interpret.

So tomorrow, I won’t be here as I have things to do. But I’m going to put the second coat of varnish on the bathroom floor before I go, and if I remember, I’ll put the third coat on when I come back and that’s the flooring all done down there.

Saturday 10th January 2015 – I’M A FIRM BELIEVER …

… that if a thing is destined to happen, it will happen. Regardless of however much input one puts (or doesn’t put) into the whole procedure. It seems to happen time and time again and the only secret of this is, as Jacqueline De Bellefort said in Death on The Nile – “You have to follow your star wherever it leads, even to death itself”.
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And with this in mind, I went off to Commentry this afternoon.

Mind you, I nearly didn’t.

I had made a stunning breakthrough with this 3D program that I’ve been playing with. I had totally given up on the modern version of it ages ago and had gone back to an ancient version, and there I was last night trying to make a 4th Generation character work properly when, all of a sudden, it all clicked into place and I was so engrossed in what I was doing that it was 06:00 this morning before I realised it, and I hadn’t had any tea either.

Consequently, it was 11:20 when I crawled out of my stinking pit and seeing the bright sunlight and clear sky I resolved to go to Commentry and the swimming baths. Pausing only to add a little more filler to the wall where there was a hole or two, at 13:30 I was off on the road.

The pool was a little (just a little) warmer than last time, practically empty and the shower was just as delicious, even though the private showers were closed for maintenance. And seeing that I was only half a mile from Bricomarché, I went off in search of some sunken hinges – I’ll need these for the trapdoor that I’ll be making in a week or so.

While I was there, not only did I find siome hinges that will do the job, I solved the problem of the handrail for the stairs. Some huge screwed eyes, with 16mm holes, and a 2-metre length of some very nice 14mm hemp rope – that will make a lovely handrail.

But here’s the exciting bit, that relates to what I was talking about earlier. I was thinking again about these wooden ends for the plasterboarding. Cutting up pine boards was my original idea but at Montlucon the other week the stuff on offer was rubbish. At Bricomarché the stuff is so much better, the staff is so much more friendly and they have cutting facilities too.

So while I was wandering around turning things over in my mind, I came across the tool sale, and there on offer at just €44:00, was a cheap 600-watt table saw. It was the last one in stock too.

It’s not the ideal thing, but it’s the nearest that I can find and i’ll need to build a table for it if I’m going to cut doors down doors and things like this, but for what I want to do at the moment it’s ideal. I can soon trim down half a dozen floorboards with this.

I went to the new NOZ at Commentry too. I didn’t buy anything exciting but nevertheless it was a good opportunity to have a look round.

Back here, nice and clean for once, I crashed out for an hour or two. And I’m not surprised either. And I’m off to bed in a minute with nice, clean bedding too. And as it’s Sunday tomorrow, I ccan have a nice lie-in.

But I’m glad I followed my star all the way to Bricomarché at Commentry today.

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Friday 2nd January 2015 – I WAS IN CREWE …

… last night, back at Gainsborough Road. The four members of Golden Earring were in bed, which was a mattress on the floor in a smallish room rather like back at La Batisse, and they were giving a concert to about four people while they were in bed. It was all rather weird.

What was even more weird was that someone was writing up a schedule of the “concert” and I noticed that, even deep in the arms of Morpheus as I was, that I could tell that the address that they had written was incorrect.

For some reason that I don’t quite understand, Golden Earring feature quite often in my nocturnal ramblings.

I was awake at 07:00 this morning but there was no possibility of hauling myself out of my stinking pit. I stayed there until about 10:00 instead and then had breakfast. I watched More Than Murder, the second part of this Mike Hammer spectacular. Its French title is “Il pleut des Cadavres” – which crudely translated by Yours Truly means “It’s Raining Corpses” and that sums up the film quite well.

These films are about 90 minutes long and more people die in them than died in the 90 minutes that it took to sink the Bismark. I don’t suppose that the films are too bad but they are full of plot holes and non-sequiturs and the action moves on at such a speed that there’s no time for a substantial plot to build up. They are clearly aimed at the truncated attention span of the American MTV generation.

It does make me wonder that if the Director hadn’t had the time constraint of 90 minutes and all that had to be crammed into it, what would these films have turned out like? Marlon Brando, when he directed One Eyed Jacks ended up with a “Director’s Cut” of about 9 hours or something like that, and the savage editing clearly showed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Director’s Cut of More Than Murder would double that with plenty to spare.

The Boulangere was late today but the time wasn’t wasted. When I built the woodshed Iused a pile of old pallets and there was tons of wood left over – the feet of the pallets and the like. So I separated all of the feet from the planks – some of them were quite substantial – and brought them up here. They didn’t half get the fire going.

And apart from that, nothing else happened today.

Now apart from FC Pionsat St Hilaire, I don’t usually talk about football very much on here. But I follow the antics of Bangor City Football Club. This is the largest and best-supported club in Wales, and I started to follow them when I used to go to Bangor to see a girlfriend who was at Uni there. They are having a dismal season this year, languishing at the foot of the Welsh Premier League and running around like a bunch of headless chickens directed by a manager who seems to have lost the plot completely in my opinion and a spineless Board of Directors who, it seems to me, have totally abandoned their responisbilities.

Had they won today, they would have risen off the bottom of the table because the team above them lost, but instead, they gave another clueless and inept performance and lost 3-0. It’s already looking like an odds-on relegation certainty, and this is a fine end to the biggest club in Wales.

It’s high time that the Board of Directors accepted its responsibilities, dismissed the manager, released some of the underperforming players and brought in a manager and some players who know how to fight..

What’s going on at Bangor City is a total shambles and the Board of Directors must accept total responsibility for the disaster that is staring them in the face before it’s too late.

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Thursday 1st January 2015 – HOWEVER DID THIS HAPPEN?

Yes, at 07:30 this morning, the alarm in here went off. I’ve had it switched off for over a week, so I’ve no idea what’s caused that to go off. And after an 04:00 finish last night, that was the last thing that I needed.

Never mind, I turned over and went back to sleep and that was how I stayed until just before 11:00.

After breakfast, I watched Stacy Keach as Mike Hammer in MURDER ME, MURDER YOU, one of Mickey Spillane’s detective films. It’s not the best of the hard-bitten private eye films – for that you are going to have to go a long way to find anything that will beat The Maltese Falcon or the Tony Rome films, but it was on sale with another Mike hammer film at a throwaway price in NOZ and I can say that I haven’t wasted my money.

Apart from that, I’ve had a day of rest today. I haven’t even cooked a meal. We have however had a beautiful Alpine day which had thawed out the taps so that I can at last isolate the front water butt and when I’ve emptied that I can change thr fractured tap.

I’ve had fire issues too. I tried several times to get the fire to light but to no avail. In the end I sorted out a pile of new wood offcuts and that managed to stimulate a reasonably healthy blaze.It seems that the wood that I brought in the other day is saturated and that’s not helping matters, to while I had a good blaze going with the new wood, I put some of the other wood in the oven to dry out. We’ll see what that is like tomorrow.

So Happy New Year to everyone. I wish you all for 2015 exactly the same that you all wished for everyone else in 2014.

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Friday 26th December 2014 – HAPPY BOXING DAY

And I finally had something for which i’ve been waiting for quite a while – namely, a decent lie in. In fact, it was well after 10:00 when I woke up this morning – and quite right too.

I’d been on my travels during the night too. Part of my adventures were concerned with dealing with a load of scrap machinery and buying old cars at a car auction. And from here we moved on to Canada and dealing with a General Election where the votes were measured in feet and inches around a pillar and the candidate whose candidature were were overseeing was a homeless vicar who received 14 votes.

This morning though, I watched the third Fantômas film, and then followed this up with Adventurer: The Curse of The Midas Box

I found the latter film in a bargain bucket in NOZ for just €1:99 (about £1:50) and that surprised me as although I didn’t know the film, the cast was certainly impressive and it’s a modern film. I have to admit that it wasn’t a particularly good film despite the cast, but I don’t regret the purchase and the film certainly didn’t receive the panning that the critics gave it. In my opinion, it’s something along the lines of “Harry Potter and Hermione Grainger meet Jack The Ripper” – there seems to me to be a clear influence in this film from the Harry Potter films.

I’ve also had my Christmas dinner today. Potatoes, roast potatoes, carrots, broccoli, sprouts (perfectly cooked) and seitan slices, followed by Christmas Pudding and custard. And delicious it was too.

Now we are having a howling gale outside – the weather is going to change I reckon, and I’m sure that the bad weather is just a whisker away.

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Thursday 25th December 2014 – MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all my readers. And I shan’t make any wisecracks about the walls of the public conveniences on Crewe Bus Station because I say the same thing each year and you must be sick to death of it by now.

During the night I was in Rome being fleeced by an Italian shopkeeper, and having to sort out a few kids, some of whom were mine and the rest of whom were kids that I was looking after, and they were having a fight in a hotel room and the police had been called.

I was awake early this morning but managed to stay in bed until about 08:30 – I wasn’t in anything of a rush to leave my stinking pit as I’m sure that you can imagine. And after breakfast, I did precisely zilch.

I’ve watched a few films though. First up was The Mask of Dimitrios starring Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet. Lorre is one of my favourite actors and this film continues the joint roles that the two of them played in The Maltese Falcon. That’s a film that I can watch time after time after time, and having seen the Mask of Dimitrios, that will be the same.

I’ve also watched the first couple of Fantômas films. Louis de Funès is my favourite actor but occasionally he has a tendency to over-act and these films are not amongst his best. But still, I found a box set of the Tantomas films going cheap

I’ve not eaten much today either. I have plenty to nibble on so I’ve been attacking all of that. I even found a bag of Bombay mix from I don’t know when and that tasted wonderful.

And do you know what? It’s more of the same tomorrow. I’ve absolutely no intention of going anywhere or doing anything at all. Which is probably just as well as when I went out just now to take the stats, there was the start of a heavy frost. Everywhere is cooling down again and there’s snow forecast for Sunday.

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Tuesday 14th October 2014 – THIS JET LAG THING …

… is still affecting me and I’ve no idea why. Last night, it was 05:00 when I finally went to bed. And had Terry not telephoned me at about 10:30 to come round and pick up some things from here, I would probably still be in bed even now.

But anyway, seeing as I was up, I was up and I had a leisurely breakfast and watched a film on the DVD – Rio Bravo, one of my favourite Westerns and another one in which the actors are more intent on having a good time than they are on focusing on the script and the stage direction. Of course, it’s the kind of thing that only good actors can get away with.

This afternoon, the clearing up started and by the time that it went dark, I had no fewer than 10 bin-bags of clothes prepared for recycilng. And that’s not all either as there are three dustbins full of clothes in the barn plus a few items of clothes elsewhere. I can’t believe how much rubbish that I’ve actually managed to accumulate here – there’s even stuff that I remember buying in the UK before I met Nerina, and that’s 30-odd years ago. Still, it’s all ready now to be transported to the local clothes recycling bin.

Something else that I can’t believe is that despite all of this, there still doesn’t seem to be very much difference in the amount of space taken up in here. It’s as if nothing whatever has been moved or emptied. But then my tidying up is always like that. If it looks any different from before, it’s usually that it’s more untidy, with having to move all kinds of stuff around in order to get at what i’m looking for.

I rang up Rosemary as well in the evening. On Saturday I’m going to be taking all of these unwanted clothes to Montlucon and to do some shopping too, as it seems that I’ve run out of oats and things like that. Rosemary is always game for a wander around the shops so I invited her to accompany me, which makes a nice change.

And then I finished off the vegan lasagne that Liz had given me in a doggie-bag the other day. That was tea, and then I settled down to see what was happening in the big wild world.

Friday 15th August 2014 – YEEUUCCHHH

Yes, it had been another one of those evenings last night. Late last night it started to pour down in spades and at about 06:00 it was so loud that it woke me up. It was unbelievable. Every day I seem to be saying that I’ve never seen anything like it, and every day I’m right because it’s just getting worse and worse.
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It poured down for most of the morning and I did the usual work on the web site. I ended up building a shop as well – I’m slowly changing all of the links on my Canada pages from Amazon.co.uk to Amazon.ca and there’s a shop facility on there.

I need to maximise the income potential on my web pages.

After lunch, I waited until the rain subsided and then went up on the scaffolding to carry on working on the electrics. And I would make much more progress if I could find all of the stuff that I needed without having to spend hours hunting it down, and I knew where all of my tools were. It seems that this tidying up that I did throughout the winter isn’t working out as planned.

I didn’t do much while I as up there either. Despite having planned it all the other day, I’ve changed it a couple of times already this afternoon while I was up there, and it will be changed again before I’ve finished.

Not only that, I was suffering from a bad attack of dropsy. I was dropping everything while I was up on the scaffolding and I had to keep on going down to fetch it – I’ve forgotten how many times I was up and down the ladder. In the end, all that remained to fall off the scaffolding was me and so I called it a day. It’s not the place to be, the scaffolding, when you are having concentration issues.

It was however 19:50 when I knocked off – it shows you haw engrossed I was in what I was doing. And it’s a good job I stopped when I did as about 15 minutes later the heavens opened again.

So let’s see how I can get on on Monday.

– in that I was

Friday 25th July 2014 – WELL TODAY DIDN’T GO ACCORDING TO PLAN

With the late finish last night it was something of a later-than-usual start.And this was interrupted by the boulangère with today’s bread. She’s going to be spending the weekend making jam and so seeing as how she seems to know what she is talking about, I took her to show her a tree and some fruit growing thereupon. She considers that it’s small plums and there’s no reason why I can’t make jam with them – but not for a while yet until they are ripe.

Back here I was sidetracked again with some research and so it was quite late by the time I made it outside. First job was to pick up all of the scaffolding that I’d dismantled yesterday and stick it over the fence into my garden.

Once I’d done that, I went up on the scaffolding and attacked the woodwork, putting the second coat of preservative on where I’d done the first coat yesterday.

I also attacked the bolts on the Sankey trailer with the angle grinder but this was where things went wrong and I ended up spending the rest of the day dismantling the angle grinder to find out why it keeps on stopping. It’s not been right for a while.

The brushes were worn and there’s a wire with a bad connection, as I discovered after I dismantled it. And I hadn’t finished it (and not by a long way either) at knocking-off time.

Up here later, I fell asleep watching The Naked Gun. I’ll see it again tomorrow and fall asleep in a different bit.

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Thursday 24th July 2014 – SO DESPITE THE LATE NIGHT …

… last night, I was still up at something like the correct time. And we had the usual procedure this morning of breakfast and then work on my website until midday. It was interrupted by a phone call from Rosemary – it’s nice to have phone calls from friends.

When I went outside, I went up onto the scaffolding in the beautiful weather and sloshed a pile of wood preservative onto the wood in the roof – the bits where I did the first coat yesterday.

While I was up on the scaffolding I untangled the mooring wires for the wind turbine. There’s only one attached to the wall at the moment and over the passage of time the other three have become tangled. It was a complicated manoeuvre involving a 4-metre lath of wood and a garden rake.

This afternoon I started checking over the rear wall of the house, slowly making my way down the scaffolding, dismantling it as I descended. I’ve arrived at the level of the roof of the lean-to and so I sloshed a pile of wood preservative on that too and I’ll do the second coat tomorrow.

I’m at the stage where I need a couple of buckets of mortar for the wall of the lean-to – some of the mortar that i did in the summer of 2012 needs some attention.

That’s tomorrow’s job and I finished off my working on the Sankey trailer. Of course, with it being ex-British-Army from the 1950S and 60s it’s a mixture of AF and Whitworth nuts and bolts. I have all my AF spanners but I’ve no idea where my Whitworth stuff is and so it wasn’t easy. I’ll have to use the angle grinder tomorrow on that. But the chassis isn’t as bad as I thought and even a manual wire brush cleaned it off quite well. I’ll still get the wire brush on the angle grinder to do it properly.

After knocking off, I watched The Spy Who Shagged Me, the same film that I tried to watch last night. And tonight I fell asleep in a different place and woke up in a different place too.

One day I might get to see all of it.

Monday 14th July 2014 – HAPPY BASTILLE DAY

And it started as it meant to go on with my being wide awake at 08:00. And on a Bank Holiday too. And even worse, I didn’t go to bed until 02:30 and so I was expecting to have a long relaxing sleep today. No idea why I awoke so early.

What was evn worse was that I was on my travels again during the night, working at a home for Eastern European boys, and I do remember a boy from Romania coming to the home, and he had a centipede embedded just underneath the skin of his stomach. From there, I went off with Caliburn. We were on the A556 – the major road that runs between Chester and Manchester and connects the M6 and the M63. Coming from the Chester end, I came to the big roundabout on the M6 and so initially I started to descend the slip road for the southbound carriageway, suddenly realised that I really wanted to go northbound but there was a police barrage across the slip road and so my doing a U-turn would attract suspicion. Nevertheless I turned round and slipped around the roundabout to the northbound entrance, and there was another police barrage there. I was, of course, flagged down and the policeman stopped me spoke to me in a mysterious Eastern European language which I understood but couldn’t reply to.

And it hadn’t escaped my notice that I’d gone widdershins around the roundabout, not clockwise as I would do in the UK where, of course, they drive on the left-hand side of the road.

After breakfast I watched part Two of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows and this was much more like it. Even with the same director as Part 1, this film spent much more time exploring the dark side of the whole affair and the tension slowly built up consistently all the way to a climax. In my opinion, it was certainly the best film of the series.

Having said that, the film is full of non-sequitors and inconsistencies and a mature audience will notice the considerable holes in the story, as well as the dozens and dozens of situations and scenarios that anyone who has seen The Lord of the Rings Trilogy will immediately recognise.

And I still say that Ginny is totally the wrong partner for Harry Potter. He would have been much-better suited to Luna and I remain totally convinced of that.

So as the sun came out today, I opened the windows here for the first time for three weeks, and that was the hardest work that I did today.

Tomorrow, I’m back at work.

Sunday 13th July 2014 – WHO WAS IT …

… who said that the weather would improve this weekend? We’ve had another desperate day just like the other day when we had a minimal amount of solar energy. 17.5mm of rain fell during the dy and by the looks of things there in plenty more to come.

Mind you it was very nice where I was during the night. I was back in Crewe driving a coach down Middlewich Street for G&B Travel. At the bottom of the hill I turned right into Badger Avenue and on my left by the petrol station … "WHAT petrol station?" – ed … were a few vehicles belonging to a band of travelling gypsies. All the way along Badger Avenue and as far as the Merlin pub were more gyspy vehicles and a few of them were erecting aerials. I went up to one caravan and asked if there was anywhere where I could have internet accent. The woman there told me that there wasn’t anything there, but in her next breath she said to her neighbour – in Romany – that there was excellent internet connection.

So this morning I was up at, would you believe, 08:15 and after breakfast I watched Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1

This is another disappointing Harry Potter film. It didn’t miss out by much, but what it did miss made a great deal of difference. It was much more of a mystical, introverted film rather than an action film like the earlier ones. It was all dark and broody and could have been an excellent psychological thriller if a real director had been in charge of it. With someone like Hitchcock in charge it would have been one of the best films ever but I had the feeling that the director was afraid of the subject and afraid of losing his audience. As a result, he chickened out of the film and … errr … lost the plot completely.

This afternoon I had a mega-tidy-up, and you won’t believe the difference that it’s made here. I’m quite impressed and I did it.

So tomorrow, more of the same. It’s a Bank Holiday so another day off for me.

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Saturday 12th July 2014 – I HAD A QUIET …

… day today. I was on my wanderings during the night although when I woke up, I couldn’t remember where I had been. And then after breakfast, I sat down and started on the next lot of radio programmes for Radio Anglais. However, my heart wasn’t in it and I didn’t stick it for long. I need to be much more resolute.

This afternoon I went to St Eloy to do the shopping and who should I bump into but Lieneke and Guus. They have apparently returned for the summer. We ended up having a good chat for quite a while.

Back here I crashed out for a while, then carried on reading Clay Blair and watched Austin Powers – International Man of Mystery

And that was that. And with Monday being a Bank Holiday, it’ll be like this for another two days as well.

Wednesday 9th July 2014 – TODAY, I HAVE DONE …

… absolutely nothing at all.

I’ve been outside just three times, twice for filling the kettle to make coffee and the third time to record the statistics. I didn’t even go outside to pick some lettuce for my butties. And I didn’t even have my lunch until 18:30.

And this is the reason why. This is how things looked here at 07:30 and it didn’t change throughout the day.

The rainstorm woke me up at about 07:00 and interrupted a really interesting journey, the details of which disappeared the moment I woke up despite me saying to myself that I’ll have to remember this one.

So after breakfast I cracked on with the website for the usual couple of hours with the intention of going out to clear away the rest of the weeds at the back of the house. But with the torrential rain still pouring down (we had 13mm up to 22:00 and it’s still raining hard) I abandoned that idea.

Instead, I carried on exploring the possibilities of this new upgrade of the 3D computer program that I installed the other week and then spent the rest of the day reading the first volume of submarine warfare in World War II

This and the second volume are two thoroughly absorbing books, but totally spoiled (which is a deep tragedy) by the (American) author’s total Anglophobia. I don’t think that I’ve seen even a German author write with such distaste and disdain about the British war effort in World War II

I’ve not had any tea tonight either as I’m not in the mood for it, even though I have stuff prepared downstairs. I just hope that it will be a better day tomorrow.

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Saturday 10th May 2014 – ANOTHER GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP …

… here at Blanc Mont and I woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

I wasn’t alone here either despite what it looks like in the photo. Discreetly hidden in the bushes is a French Army radio post and they were most surprised when I stumbled upon them last night when I went for a walk. I had a feeling that they wanted me to clear off but not much chance of that.

Of all of the villages around here, there’s not much to see. Not for me anyway as there is nothing much of historical importance. Well, not for me anyway as everything was obliterated during the fighting of 1914-18. You can see in the odd church some kind of vestige of original stonework, badly damaged by the shelling, but rebuilt with modern techniques and modern materials.

Still, the emphasis here in 1919 was on time, not on aesthetics, and you can’t blame them for that.

This is Navarin Farm on another high point of a Marne ridge. This is a monument raised by public subscription to remember the dead of the Battles of the Marne and is an ossuary where the bones of unknown soldiers recovered from the battlefield in modern times are laid to rest. Even 100 years on, they are still recovering soldiers from the fields.

It’s possible to go in for a visit, but not for me because, with my usual luck, it’s closed.

Outside the ossuary, the ground, in public ownership, has been left exactly as it was at the end of the war. You can see a couple of trench systems here, a concrete pillbox, and thousands of shell holes littering the site.

Just add to this a few feet of water – not hard to do as it was pouring down on an off all through the day, and you can imagine what a nightmare it must have been to have lived in these trenches for 4 years.

Suippes has not much to celebrate as it’s another largely-reconstructed town. Its claim to fame is that during World War II it suffered something of a massacre of its civilian population as you can see from this commemmorative plaque.

It’s quite easy for many people to criticise the French civilians in respect of what some see as a lack of resolution towards the German occupying forces but as I have said before, the critics have never had to run the risk of four years of bombing and four years of Gestapo activity, and never had to stare arbitrary death in the face.

Another dark claim to fame, or maybe infamy, is an event that took place here in 1915. A Division of French soldiers was ordered “over the top” to attack the enemy but having been shelled all through the night by their own artillery which had incorrectly calculated the range, the survivors were reluctant to leave their trenches once the barrage had moved on.

The French military authorities were not impressed and picked at random 25 soldiers and tried them for cowardice. All were found guilty in a summary drum-head court martial and the 4 NCOs were stood up against a wall and shot. It was the inspiration for the Kirk Douglas film Paths Of Glory.

There’s also a museum here and I had a little argument with them about their notices and descriptions – everywhere they talk about Angleterre and the Anglais. I had to remind them, most insistently, that the country is called Royaume-Uni and its inhabitants are called Britanniques.

In the driving rainstorm I paid a brief – but only a brief – visit to a French military cemetery – the Suippes Farm cemetery.

It’s interesting here to notice that many of the headstones are not crosses but a more traditional design with Arabic writing. It’s quite often forgotten that the Arabic colonies of France supplied a huge proportion of soldiers to the French Army and they died for France in the same way that the soldiers of Metropolitan France did. And as soldiers from West Africa did too.

A short drive down the road at La Cheppe, there’s the Camp d’Attila. That’s a Gaulish oppidum of, would you believe, 22 hectares surrounded by twin earthen banks and this is surprisingly complete too. It’s very impressive to go for a wander around the ramparts in the rain – I was certainly having no luck at all with the weather. There’s even a Roman road that passes right by the camp. It’s the kind of place that has everything.

So now I’m off to spend the night on the edge of Chalons. I don’t care what they call it today, or what they will call it in the future. To me, it always has been and always will be Chalons-sur-Marne.

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EPIC HALL

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