Tag Archives: lie in

Thursday 16th December 2010 – I WONDER IF YOU CAN GUESS …

… whereabouts in the verandah the cooker is situated?

Yes, the weather has warmed up slightly today – it even managed to struggle up above freezing inside the verandah and so the heat that the cooker gave off while heating up my lunchtime coffee managed to thaw away some of the snow on the roof.

But of course, as you know, it isn’t snow at all but just several inches of severe frost.

And this evening we’ve had a dramatic change in the direction – and the speed – of the wind. We are now having a howling westerly gale blowing in that’s keeping the temperature up a little (not like the 11°C that we had the other day) but blowing all the smoke back down my chimney and suffocating the fire (and me as it blows all of the smoke back into my room).

Nevertheless I wonder if this might bring me some sunshine. It’s been ages since I’ve had any.

Things are progressing in the bedroom as well. all of the long wall has been insulated and I could have done even more had I not … errrr … slept through the alarm and had I woken up before … errrr … 10:26.

It’s not quite how it ought to be though because with my wall being 2.65 metres high and the plasterboard being 2.50 metres high, I need to let in another horizontal batten in the appropriate place to support the join between the boards. But that’s tomorrow’s task as I ran out of time today.

I’m not going to have too much time tomorrow either. I had a telephone call from some society asking me if I would like to become an energy producer and sell my excess output to the Electricity Board. By pure coincidence they “just happen” to have a salesman in Virlet tomorrow and he will be delighted to talk to me about how I can become rich, at no obligation, and he will even give me a free estimate for the supply and fitting of some solar panels.

Of course this is a far too good an opportunity to miss and I’m eager to see exactly what he proposes with regard to selling me a solar panel system. He’ll be here at 14:00 so he says, and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

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Sunday 5th December 2010 – I WOKE UP THIS MORNING …

… (and doesn’t that sound like the opening line of a really good blues song, but what with the Prozac and so on, I haven’t had the blues for ages) at about 07:00 to the sound of a fast car coming down the track at the side here and slamming to a halt.

A quick peek out of the window revealed no car at all so, somewhat puzzled, I went back to bed.

A couple of minutes later I heard another car do the same thing. And so another quick peek, and once again no car.

But one thing that I did notice, and which was probably the noise that I had heard, and that was that all of the snow had disappeared off the barn roof and fallen to the floor.

That’s the thing with tin roofs as I am finding out – snow doesn’t stick to them and the slightest raise in temperature is enough to melt the adhesion.

And the temperature did rise too, but brought with it the rain. In fact, it’s rained non-stop all day. A grey miserable depressing day indeed, but at least it was warmer than the last few days. Temperature reached 5°C today.

I finally woke up at about … errr … 12:00 and heaved myself out of bed. For most of the day I’ve been doing a little tidying up and reading a book while warming myself up with this little woodstove. It’s Sunday and it’s my day of rest.

And in other news, I see that one of the wikileaks documents states that Saudi Arabia is the major source of funds for Al-Qaida. This will come as quite a surprise to anyone except the regular readers of my pages, as I have been saying this for years. Bin Laden’s family is the fourth-richest in the whole country and the family-controlled companies have their fingers in so many multi-national projects of all types.

In fact, a brief scan of these pages over the last few years has produced about a dozen things that I have been saying for years that have been subsequently been confirmed by either the USA or the UK. The world ought to be taking much more notice of me than it does, I reckon.

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Sunday 28th November 2010 – WE DIDN’T HAVE SUCH AN EARLY START THIS MORNING …

… that is, if you don’t count having to get up for a gipsy’s at 07:00. In fact it was after 10:00 when I emerged definitively.

And that was strange too. I’d had an exciting dream beforehand, but when I went back to bed at 07:05 and back to sleep I started on another one ( and I can’t remember a thing about the first one now even though it was so exciting). But in this second one, I’d been stranded on a pier and had to swim for shore and after giving the girl at the reception desk a piece of my mind about telling me to go on it, and then walking through the town, I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my camera with me. I was panicking about this, thinking that I had left it in my car which had now been submerged, and so I remember urging myself to wake up so that I could get back my camera.

And wake up I did – right on cue – and to a gorgeous blue alpine winter’s day – the type that I like to have for recharging my batteries after about 10 days of badger all. But that didn’t last and by early afternoon we were back snowing again.

GRRRRRRR.

But I’ve sorted out my receipts and paperwork from Canada and done a little more desultory tidying up. And that was that. But then again, it is Sunday and I can have a day off once a week.

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Sunday 21st November 2010 – IT WAS SUNDAY TODAY …

… and that’s traditionally a Day of Rest as you know.

And so we started with a little lie-in. Until about 11:00 or something like that. And that’s the last lie-in now for 7 more days as I’m back at work Monday with alarm clocks and 08:30 starts and so on.

So after breakfast I carried on with the tidying up up here in the attic and it’s looking a little more respectable. So much so in fact that I feel more comfortable in having guests around.

Which is just as well as Terry and Liz called by for a chat on their way past. And I was here too as there was no football this week.

I’ve also steam-cleaned the oven and fridge and they needed it too, having been unattended for almost 8 weeks. You’ve no idea just how quickly the condition of a fridge can deteriorate – or maybe you have, I dunno.

So tomorrow if the weather is okay I’ll be out digging up my vegetables. I need to organise them ready for the winter. If I leave them any longer they will freeze into the ground.

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Sunday 14th November 2010 – IT’S SUNDAY …

… today, and Sunday is a day of rest.

And after all of my exertions of the past couple of days here and there I needed a rest too.

So much so that it wasn’t until about 12:30 that I arose from my (or rather, Liz and Terry’s spare) stinking pit.

It’s hardly surprising that I wasn’t in the mood for all that much. I just loitered around and let the day fritter away aimlessly.

What went a long way towards it all was that

Liz was cooking, and I’ll walk a million miles for that
Liz and Terry said that if I wasn’t in any rush to go home, why didn’t I stay an extra night?

Well, do bears go for picnics in the woods?

So here I am, well-fed, well-watered, well-showered and well-clean-clothed, all nicely tucked up under the covers.

And here I shall stay until my name changes to Rip van Eric.

Saturday 18th September 2010 – Winter is acumen in …

… Lhude sing Rudolph and all of that. The temperature has been slowly dropping for the last few days and last night it reached a low of 5.6 degrees. You might think that that is cold, but on checking my stats I find that apart from last year when we had to wait until mid-October, the other years that I have been here (2007 and 2008) have been the same. So there!

But today was an interesting day, to say the least. It was the mobile phone ringing that woke me up. Who the h*ll was ringing me at that ungodly hour? So the phone stopped – and five minutes later it rang again. And then stopped. And five minutes later …….
“Arrrggghhhhhhh”.
Yes’ I’d slept right through the normal alarm and it was the alarm on the phone going off – at … errrr ….. 10:40 am. What happened there?

So with the morning knackered, first thing that I did was to go outside and check on how the pointing from yesterday was looking now that the cement has dried. There’s definitely some progress, although it’s not as quick as I would like.

Once I’d done that, I had breakfast and then went shopping. They had a few exciting things at LIDL such as a hammer-action stapler which will really come in useful, and then I came back here for lunch

Once I had had my lunch, I went round to Rob and Nicolette’s. They are the people who bought Claude’s old place. Now Nicolette (on the right in the photo) is an artist of no mean repute and they have turned Claude’s barn into a studio for her where she can display her paintings.

It was the official opening of her studio today and the whole village as well as everyone else was invited. We even had the mayor doing the formal unveiling too

>But upstairs in the barn, the transformation is magnificent. You wouldn’t believe how much work that has taken place up there in just 6 months since they bought the place from Claude.

And you can see by the paintings on the wall just how much of an artist that Nicolette is. I have to admit that I’m not a big art fan, especially not of surrealist images, but even I can see the quality in these paintings.

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Saturday 14th August 2010 – A good few weeks ago ….

… I went to a talk about the history and one of the items that was discussed was the local railway network. With this area being situated on a coal seam and the existence of coal mines all over the place there was at one time a railway network around here that was much more comprehensive than you would think at first.

And most people immediately think of railways as being standard-gauge – 4’8.5″ with substantial earthworks and the like, and there is a great deal of evidence for that, especially for our famous railway down the hill here that was opened to traffic in 1932 and did’t even last 25 years.

I drive regularly (or I used to when I used to go to Brussels) along a certain road that runs into Montmarault from the Montaigut direction and I’ve been convinced that I’ve seen traces that correspond to what the Ordnance Survey would call “dismantled railway” along the side of the road, although there is nothing on any map that I have ever seen that would confirm anything.

But at this talk one of the items discussed was the railway line that ran from Marcillat en Combraille to Commentry. Now Commentry was a major ironworking centre and Marcillat has the remains of a few huge limekilns and so a line bringing the lime from the fields to the blast furnaces seems like a likely proposition. But the only line here as far as I am aware is the old standard gauge line that used to pass down here and which doesn’t go directly to Commentry.

But further enquiry revealed the existence of the “lignes economiques” – a whole series of narrow-gauge lines that ran on light railway principles with the minimum of earthworks, and the border area between the Allier and the Puy-de-Dome was littered with these lines. Anyone who has seen the the Father Brown film will recall what a “ligne economique” looks like.

The relics that I have seen not too far from Montmarault are in fact part of this light railway system but my attention for the moment has been seized by a narrow-gauge line that used to run from Marcillat to Commentry – and points beyond, as I have discovered. I’ve tracked down a list of the names of stations along the route but a casual look on an Internet satellite viewing program hasn’t come up with anything. That’s a shame – long-time readers will remember that we tracked down a bridge of James Brunlees by spotting it on a satellite viewer.

One place however has crossed my mind as I have crossed it on many occasions. The railway passed through the village of Durdat Larequille somewhere and not too far from there is what looks like a hollow fold in the ground with what might be a bridge over it. And so on my way back from Neris les Bains I stopped for a look.

I’m right about it being an overbridge but if it’s for a narrow-gauge locomotive and train then it would have to be flaming narrow. I couldn’t stand upright in that tunnel under there

There’s no evidence to suggest that the bridge has been infilled to any extent, suggesting that at one time it might have been of larger size, and I can’t see what might have been a track bed of a railway running to and fro underneath it.

I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that this may well not be a railway bridge after all, and that’s a disappointment – I had high hopes for this.

Yes – I was in Neris today. The weather is becoming colder and colder and there was no chance of a solar shower and so after shopping in Commentry (which was boring, I have to say) I went off there. 29°C in the water and only 20°C in the baths itself – but that’s because some person had for reasons best known to him-or herself decided to open up the side of the pool. It used to be an open-air pool complete with poolside cafe but it’s now covered with a balloon-type of marquee. And who on earth would want to open it up today in this weather?

But now I’m nice and clean so I’m going to change the bedding and have a good night’s sleep. And I need it too. I didn’t have the alarms on this morning and when the phone rang I crawled over to it and answered “ok Terry – see you in a bit” only to hear a French voice on the other end. Yes, I was totally out of it this morning. I’ll have to do better tomorrow.

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Friday 13th August 2010 – When we knocked off this evening ….

… there were still two buckets full of mortar left in the cement mixer.

And so “waste not, want not”, I took it round to my house and built up some of the wall of this lean-to that I have been slowly repairing.

You can see that I’ve built up around the central beam of the roof.

But I had an idea about this. Building with stone uses a lot of cement and you always end up with a filthy mixer full of dried cement and the like so I heaved a bucketful of gravel and a bucketful of water into the mixer to clean it. The gravel will scour the drum and the water will move it round.

I built a very narrow wall on the outside of the wall and a very narrow wall on the inside of the wall, with a large gap in between them. And when I finished and went back to the mixer the drum was quite clean with a load of what looked like very liquid concrete swilling around in it.

I tipped that into a bucket leaving the mixer nice and clean, and took the bucket down to my lean-to and poured the concrete solution into the gap. All nice and runny and you could hear it slurping its way down the fissures in the rocks and soaking into all the dry joints. It’ll take a while to set but when it does it will have done wonders for my stone wall. I shall be cleaning out the mixer like this every night.

As far as the house roof goes, we are making enormous progress and if things hold out we may well be finished on schedule – and won’t that be a first?

You can see in the pic that we have built up all of the walls so that they are of the right height and all of the carpentry is now on. It won’t be long before the roof is finished, and then we will need to build up the outsides of the walls with a stone facing. Once that’s complete we will need to seal the top of the roof into the wall of the house and then just a few more small jobs will finish it off.

Mind you I didn’t want to get up this morning. I had slept through the alarm and was having a very pleasant dream for a change when Terry rang me to make sure I was awake. It’s sad when you have dreams like that – you don’t ever want them to end.

But it’s the weekend and I’m having a weekend off. I reckon that tomorrow I’ll go shopping in Commentry and then for a swim at Neris. The warm weather has let me down for the last few days and I haven’t been able to have a solar shower. If I’m not careful I’ll be picked up on radar soon.

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Sunday 8th August 2010 – It was Sunday today.

And there was a vintage vehicle exhibition and brocante at St Maurice pres Pionsat as well.

And so I stayed at home.

Mind you it was … errrr …. 11:30 when I woke up and so I’d missed a good deal of the day. And then with working on my web site until 14:00 I missed a good deal more. But I went into Pionsat to the baker’s – and it was shut! It seems that last Sunday was a one-off seeing as how it ought to have been Pionsat’s brocante last week. But as I was quietly GRRRRRing to myself, out of the door came the boulangere, and so she sold me what I needed. It must have been my lucky day!

Back at the ranch, seeing as I wasn’t going anywhere I lit a huge bonfire and burnt a pile of stuff that has been lingering around here, and I also burnt the dried weeds that I had pulled up when I was working with Lieneke. In fact one of the reasons why I’m still awake now is that the fire is merrily burning away and I can’t go to bed leaving it unattended. But make the most of the sunny day – it won’t last, this weather.

I also installed the compost bin properly in its proper place this afternoon after the temporary installation last night and added the compost from the collapsed plastic composting bin. At the moment it’s four sections high and the three that are currently unused are in shot. I’ll have to think of a place to put them.

You can also see the chassis for the Citroen 2CV that formed the basis of the Lomax kit car I once owned. There’s also a solar garden light and one of the solar cookers for the composting toilet. The others have now been incorporated into the compost and given a liberal dosing of potash.

Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus are the essential ingredients for any fertiliser. There are plenty of nitrogen and phosphorus in the contents of a composting toilet and wood-ash is a good source of potassium. So all the essential ingredients for my garden are right to hand. Now all I need to do is to work out how I can move the methane digester and add the contents of that to the compost. I reckon that I ought to neutralise its contents with plenty of wood ash and sawdust first though but that will just add to the weight.

Nevertheless, things are slowly moving around here. The composting bin was another thing that I’ve been meaning to do for ages and I’m glad it’s in position now.

I was so engrossed that it was 18:30 when I knocked off. And on a Sunday too! A nice hot 41°C shower rounded the day off quite nicely. Tomorrow I imagine that we will be back on that blasted roof.

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Sunday 1st August 2010 – Blimey!

This weather is totally crazy.

When I woke up ( at ….errrr ….. 11:33 this morning, and my excuse was that I was having a really good dream about a new house that I had bought) the weather was beautiful. So I had a leisurely breakfast and messed about a bit on the computer before deciding to go to the brocante at Pionsat.

But a flaming phone call interrupted me and I was there discussing the Palestine question with someone and it was gone 14:00 when I left. Bright sunshine when I left, and in the 5kms it takes to drive to Pionsat the heavens opened with a deluge. In the village square all the stallholders had gone due to the rain and that was that.

By the time I checked the stats at 31:45 we had had 22mm of rain and it’s still bucketing down. Thunder and lightning and all sorts. It had better clear up if we are going to have another go on that roof tomorrow.

In other news, I noticed a little giveaway phrase in a press report about the situation in Afghanistan. Hidden in all of the rhetoric is the little phrase that NATO “hopes to reverse the Taliban’s momentum”. Translated into English that means that the Taliban is advancing in Afghanistan and NATO hopes to push its forces back. Now if the Taliban is advancing, it means that NATO is retreating, so what a giveaway this phrase actually is.

But then again I’ve been saying for a couple of years that the Taliban has had NATO on the run and that Khazi’s writ doesn’t run any wider than the gates of his palace in Kabulseye (and only then with American permission).

To make matters worse, the Dutch pulled out of Afghanistan today. Not that the Dutch forces amount to much – who will ever forget the craven way that the Dutch Army, who had been sent to defend the town of Srebenica and its population, surrendered it to the Serbs and then stood by idly as the Serbs massacred the population – but it’s a sign that the Coalition of the Willing is becoming less and less Willing as the war marches on. What with the Germans also likely to pull out before the end of the year and the Poles and Canadians to be the next to run away, the Septics and the Brits are going to be left with the oeufs all over the visage. And with more and more countries pulling out, the likelihood of persuading more and more countries to take over so that the Septics can secure all of the mineral rights in Afghanistan will be less and less. It will mean that more and more Brits will be dying so that more and more Americans can become richer and richer.

July 2010 was the second-most-deadly month for NATO forces in Afghanistan. And when was the most deadly month for them? Why, June 2010 of course. But of course nothing of this is surprising. For every innocent child that NATO kills you have half a dozen people shouting for revenge. And Afghans and other tribesmen (“tribespersons please” – ed) are much more likely to pick up a gun and go to war that your average North American or British Couch Potato.

And how long has this war been going on? 8 and a half years? And instead of things getting better and better they are getting worse and worse. The Brits and Septics have been dragged into the very bloodbath that they promised that they would avoid. But then again, the way of dealing with a group of freedom fighters, most of whom were Saudi Arabians, led by a Saudi and financed by a Saudi company, leading to an invasion of … errrr …. Afghanistan was something that mystified almost everyone on the planet.

The funniest thing about all of this is that when the Russians invaded Afghanistan the Afghans fought the Russians off – armed by weapons supplied by the west. The Russians had the right to feel aggrieved by that. And 20 years or so later here are the Afghans fighting off the might of the west with no help from anybody at all. No wonder the Russians are p155ing themselves laughing.

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Wednesday 28th July 2010 – I had another day off today …

… because Terry was elsewhere, and I celebrated it with something of a lie-in.

After breakfast I did some more work on my website, which has fallen way behind schedule, and then I finally managed to do a big load of washing, what with the wind and the weather being all right for that sort of thing. It’s amazing how much washing there was but then again I haven’t done any for a while.

After a late lunch I emptied Caliburn out. I’ve lost my SatNav and I’ve no idea where it might be. It’s nowhere in Caliburn as far as I can see and it’s annoying me, this.

Terry suggests that I look elsewhere for it in case I may have taken it out of Caliburn at some time, but around here, where on earth do you start? You can be here for a week and only just scratch the surface. I reckon it’s well and truly gone.

But at least Caliburn is now fully empty, and he needs to be. We have a scaffolding to pick up in a week or so and the other trailer has now apparently gone tits-up. This is annoying me! We are going to have to collect it in the two vans.

When I knocked off I had a shower – the solar shower was showing 36 degrees and that’s warm enough. The automatic heater fired itself up as well today and reached 33 degrees, 11 degrees above the ambient. Add on another 11 degrees for a closed lid and another 11 degrees for insulation and you can see how this is all going to work when I install a tank instead. I noticed by the way that even with the fridge running and the water heater working there was still an excess of solar power. I might have to fit two elements instead of just one.

But talking of the fridge, there’s no thermostat on mine and so it runs 24 hours per day 7 days per week. And at 5 amps that’s a total of 120 amp-hours, or about 1.45Kw. But Conforama where I bought my bed settee from, they are offering a table top fridge – twice as big as mine – that uses just 0.37Kw per day – or about 32 amp-hours. And it’s an A+ so there’s bound to be a ton of insulation stuffed into it, so I’m currently thinking about abandoning my 12-volt fridge, buying a small inverter that will power the fridge and then having the inverter switched into the dump load. When the batteries are fully charged the inverter will fire up and run the fridge as well as the water heater and when the battery charge drops the inverter (and the fridge) switch off.

The big advantage of this is that on a good day it takes until about 12:30 for the batteries to be fully charged. with no fridge running through the night the batteries will be fully-charged in an hour or so and that’ll give me more time for the water heater and the fridge will be running away in the background on its minimal power requirement.

I shall have to look into this.

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Monday 12th July 2010 – No solar shower tonight!

And so the run stops at 8 consecutive evenings. But then again I’m not complaining because today it rained. The first time for what seems like ever and we had 8.5mm of the stuff. My plants needed that, and so did my water butts. Things are getting a little low here.

So this morning after a lie-in I was catching up on my websites until lunchtime. And then Terry came round to see Lieneke about this work that needed doing and so I took the opportunity of him moving his tractor to another place on the hardstanding, dragging out the trailer and loading all of the kwikstage scaffolding onto it.

And that really was my day. Nothing exciting at all. But tomorrow I have to help Terry with a barn door which means a start at … gulp … 08:00. Does that time actually exist anywhere?

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Friday 9th July 2010 – As I have said before ….

… if you are the kind of person who is always in a hurry or rushing around for appointments and the like then you don’t want to be living around here.

Not with leviathans like this roaming around the lanes round here anyway.

I encountered these two beasts on my way back from Commentry. The other side of Ronnet it was, and it wasn’t until we reached the Abbey of Bellaigues that they took the high road and I took the low road. About 6 miles of 25kph with nowhere to pass them. Ahhh well!

This morning I was awoken at 06:04 by a storm – howling winds and all that kind of thing. I was half-expecting torrential rain but when I finally crawled out of my stinking pit (09:40 – I was having a lie-in after my efforts on the roof) there wan’t a trace of anything.I surely can’t have dreamt it all?

So a couple of hours catching up on the computer and then off to Commentry for shopping. And nothing really interesting at all. But even more interesting – I’m trying to set up my water filters and can I elephants find any puzzolane. I asked inter alia at the local builders’ merchants and he had to look up in his catalogue before telling me that he didn’t have any. In case you are wondering what puzzolane is, it’s a certain type of volcanic lava – lightweight, porous and made of carbon and it’s a superb natural water filter.

In the Puy de Dome there are over 80 dormant volcanoes all of which have produced puzzolane, and not for nothing is this region littered with commercialised natural springs – Volvic being the prime example but there are many others. All the ground water is filtered through the natural puzzolane layers. So why can’t I get hold of any?

Back at Pooh Corner, having unloaded Caliburn, I made a desultory start on tidying up. But the weather clouded over and it looked like rain so grabbing hold of a few offcuts and odds-and-ends I’ve rigged up a kind of downspout system for one of my spare 203-litre water butts to catch the rain that might fall on the barn roof.

And badger me if, when I came in and read my messages, that Krys hadn’t written to me to suggest that I think about a way of collecting the rainwater that falls on the roof. Great Minds or Fools, Ms Stephenson?

And now it’s 00:30 – 7 hours after I fixed this downspout – and it’s rumbling away with thunder and flashing away with lightning and not a drop of rain has fallen. All my plants and I could do with a heavy downpour, especially through the night. I can’t wait to see the water cascade off the barn roof and into the water butt.

And another solar shower this evening. That’s 6 consecutive days. I was never this clean when I lived in my apartment in Brussels!

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Saturday 22nd May 2010 – I took the plunge this afternoon …

… and went swimming in Neris les Bains. For the first time ever it was warm in there – an air temperature of 26 degrees – so of course they left all of the doors open so a draught of air was blowing around. That won’t half cool down a wet body.

Just the usual suspects of course – no swimming galas or races or anything so it was something of a let-down but at least I’m now clean (in body, anyway).

So this morning I heard all of the alarms go off but badger that – I went back to sleep. I woke up … errr … some time later. So after breakfast and doing some work up here until 13:30 I went off to Commentry. Nothing exciting in LIDL or ALDI or the Intermarche either. Centrakor turned up trumps with a pair of plastic flip-flops for 2 Euros. Just the thing for wandering around swimming baths and muddy football dressing rooms. In Les Bonnes Affaires, the cheap shop, I spent 10 Euros, much of which went on interesting items of food but they did have a plastic stopwatch in there – good value for 2 Euros. I don’t wear a watch but I’ll need something for when I’m refereeing. That’s something useful.

On the weather side the Heat Exchanger recorded 63.9 degrees, the highest total this year and the highest since August 29 last year. In my room the temperature is currently 24.6 degrees – and at 01:30 too! It touched 26.4 degrees during the course of the day and that’s the highest since 9th September. The weather is certainly looking a lot more like it.

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Friday 21st May 2010 – I was at a meeting tonight …

… at Ayat sur Sioule with Marianne as part of our tourist information work for Radio Anglais when this bird decided to join in by flying into the room. It’s a hirondelle, so I’m told – whatever that might be. Keen followers of my outpourings will know that I have more than a passing interest in local birds, but none of … errr … this type of bird.

The meeting itself was a washout. It was to discuss tourist initiatives in the Combrailles and it was very similar to the one a few months ago. The same stories with the same old audience shamelessly networking away.

This morning I had something of a lie-in to catch up my strength and then until midday I was working up here. Later I did some gardening, planting outside another load of stuff and also some emptying out of Caliburn. And many of my “dormant” seeds have suddenly sprung to life. I’d given them up ages ago.

Tomorrow is shopping and I may well go to Commentry, followed by a swim. It’s a while since I took the plunge at the local baths. I wonder if there’s another swimming tournament. .

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EPIC HALL

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