Tag Archives: tidying up

Wednesday 8th April 2015 – GUESS WHO HAS BEEN A BUSY BOY THEN?

Yes, I’ve accomplished a lot today. It’s really been keeping me out of mischief.

I was up early too for a change. When the alarm went off, I was eating my breakfast. I must have been keen.

varnishing landing floor les guis virlet puy de dome franceFirst job was to varnish the floor and the stairs with the third coat of varnish. I gave it a good wallop and it was all over by 10:30. All it needed to do was to dry and set thoroughly – that’s usually about 48 hours. And then I can fit the skirting.

While that was drying, I went outside and had a look around at what jobs that I can be doing. First job was to start on the compost bin. But I didn’t last long on that as I remembered something else quite important to do.

new wheels summer tyres ford transit caliburn les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd doesn’t Caliburn look nice with his new clean wheels?

Yes, I needed to change his winter tyres and fit the summer tyres. Of course, I have two sets of wheels so I really just change the wheels. And because they have been outside for 4 months, they were pretty grubby and so I gave them a really good clean and polish.

One or two of them have come up really well too, but I’m thinking that I might give all of the wheels a good clean, scrub and coat of paint over the summer. I’ll add that to the thousand other jobs.

Another job that I wanted to do was to fix the guttering on the house. This involved assembling the ladder now that I’ve recovered both the parts, but on my way up to the scaffolding I noticed that I hadn’t painted part of the fascia board where I couldn’t reach off the scaffolding. This meant that I had to reposition the ladder, and then I could deal with that.

While I was waiting for that to dry, I started to cut the lengths of wood that I needed to start to make the compost bin (which was where I started) but in a search for something or other, I started to tidy up the downhill lean-to. And I made some progress too, much to my surprise.

fascia board guttering les guis virlet puy de dome france After lunch, I put the second coat on the fascia board and then started to reassemble the guttering.

I’ve repositioned it slightly because in the past, it drained down to the roof of the verandah and into the water tanks there. Now, I’m having drop onto the roof of the lean-to at the other side, because it’s there that i’ll be digging the hole for the subterranean water tank.

It took a while to do that because I had to work out the levels and cut a few lengths to size. I did as much as I could (I need to check it in the rain and make sure that it works like it should before I glue it together) but when I went to move the ladder round to the side of the house to fix the downpipe, I noticed that it was already 19:20

Doesn’t time fly quickly when you are enjoying yourelf? That was enough for me and I called it a day. I’d earned my rest.

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Tuesday 7th April 2015 – THE WIND FINALLY DROPPED THIS EVENING.

That made quite a change as we’ve had non-stop wind for the last three days or so.

All kinds of records have been broken too with the wind. For example, of all the wind energy created by the big AIR 403 wibd turbine since I reset the meter in December, 40% of it came today. And with the small wind turbine, today has doubled the previous record of wind generated.

It really was impressive but now it’s blown out and we are all quiet.

This morning, I took decisive action and ripped out all of the masking and protection on the stairs and on the landing downstairs. I gave the stairs and landing a thorough clean, sanded all of the imperfections, vacuumed it thoroughly and then gave it all a really good coat of varnish.

That took about an hour and a half in total, and so for the rest of the morning I went outside. First job was to sort out a huge pile of old cardboard that I had put on one side when I tidied the barn out the other day.

cardboard cover raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome franceWith all of that, I went down to the raised beds in the garden where I grow my crops of vegetables. Nothing is going to be done there this year, so I’ve covered over all of the beds with cardboard. I did 6 this morning, and then this afternoon I dismantled the bean frames and did the rest.

I’ve only weeded two of them, the rest can take their chance. BUt it’s not going to be a problem for as soon as it rains and the cardboard becomes waterlogged, it’ll fold down flat onto the soil in the raised beds, suffocate the weeds and then slowly disintegrate into the soil over the period of the coming year.

Immediately after lunch, I put the second coat of varnish on, and I’ll do the third coat first thing in the morning.

For tea tonight I made a mega-mushroom and potato curry. Mushrooms were cheap at the weekend and I had some potatoes left over from winter.

And there was so much surplus energy today that the water in the dump load (the home-made 12-volt immersion heater) went off the scale – ie over 70°C. I had some lovely hot wahing-up water this evening.

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Thursday 2nd April 2015 – I’VE FINISHED …

… work for the next four days. Tomorrow is Good Friday and so I’m having an Easter Break. And I think that I deserve it too after the work that I’ve done so far this year.

I put my back into it today too. The living room is now emptied as far as I can reasonably empty it, and it’s now looking like it did last January and February after I had emptied it for the first time. Making a space in the barn to put everything was really a good move, although I’m not quite sure where i’m going to empty all of the rubbish. I’ll be dropping sacks off at each communal bin all the way to St Eloy.

It was all over by lunchtime too – a good couple of hours ahead of schedule. It’s not like me to be so far in advance, is it?

As a result, I had a couple of hours to spare and so I made a start on the lean-to – the one on the downhill side of the house. I’ve thrown out a good pile of stuff from there too, sorted out some space on the shelves for the gardening stuff and rearranged the gardening tools.

You can see floor in there too, and it’s been a long time since that happened.

I’d rounded up quite a pile of stray wood in there too (there’s still a huge mound of course that needs to be sorted) and that was just as well, for today has been horrible, cold and damp. Consequently, for warming up my tea tonight, I lit a wood fire up here. I may as well profit from the heat if I need it.

Now I’m off to bed. I’m going to have an early night to prepare myself for my nice long weekend off.

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Wednesday 1st April 2015 – I HADN’T FINISHED …

… with last night (or, rather, last night hadn’t finished with me). While I was boiling up the water in the gas cylinder in order to do the washing up before I went to bed, the gas ran out.

Considering that i’ve been using it to make coffee throughout the winter and also to cook and to heat the washing-up water when I’ve not had the fire on, that’s not too bad. I’m quite happy with this.

So this morning I had to boil up the coffee on the gas stove in the verandah (I later found the second cylinder of gas) for breakfast.

After breakfast, I emptied the ground floor of the house. As far as I can tell, all of the wood offcuts have been taken out, sorted into type and then stacked onto the bread trays that I had put on the floor of the barn.

The plasterboard offcuts too have been taken out and stacked in the barn now and we finally have some room in there. I’ve swept the floor as far as I could and the bit that I’ve done looks reaonably tidy. Tomorrow I’ll be carrying on the emptying and seeing where I can get to.

Another job that I had to do was to empty the beichstuhl, but that’s enough about that.

Finally, here’s some interesting news.

My friend Terry, who lives on the other side of the Combrailles, is an electrical engineer by trade but because his French isn’t good enough as yet, he works as a self-employed builder. Across the road from him lives a guy who is a maintenance engineer at the big steel mill at Les Ancizes, and he told Terry on Monday that the company had just take on two Portuguese engineers who don’t speak a word of French.

On the basis of “if they can do it, so can I” and he sent in his CV.

And the result?

He starts on Monday. So well done to Terry!

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Tuesday 31st March 2015 – I’M REALLY PLEASED …

… with what I’ve managed to accomplish today.

If you’ve never been in my barn, you simply won’t understand, but it’s a total devastation zone with stuff having been crammed in there without any form of organisation for the last 18 years, and then in 2011 we collapsed the barn roof into it.

Anyway, today I bit the bullet and set to work.

By the time that I had knocked off, I’d filled four more bin bags, moved a pile of stuff around (and which will have to be resorted in due course), sifted through the debris with a heavy magnet (and recovered a pile of misplaced stuff) and I’ve now cleared a space at the side of the Vanden Plas 1300 that is big enough to fit a small family car.

I’m really quite impressed with that, that’s for sure. And this has set me up for tomorrow’s work.

I had a pile of old plastic bread trays and I’ve put them on the floor (the floor is soaking in there) and tomorrow, I’ll be taking out all of the wood from the ground floor of the house and storing it all on top of the bread trays.

That should empty the ground floor of about half of the stuff that’s in there, and leave me plenty of room to move about and prepare myself for starting on the plumbing. I want to finish off the tidying up by Easter so that I can have a nice little break and then get myself going next Tuesday. I deserve a little break after everything that i’ve done just recently.

And for tea I made aother mega-aubergine and kidney-bean whatsit. And I remembered to put everything in it this week as well. That’s a first, isn’t it?

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Monday 30th March 2015 – OUCH!

Yes, I don’t know what it is that I’ve done, but I have a pain in my right wrist and I’ve pulled a muscle in my left shoulder.

The wrist isn’t too much of a problem but the shoulder is – I can’t lift my left arm any higher than my shoulder and I can’t carry any heavy weight with it.

It’s probably due to my exertions during the night. I don’t remember too much about it except that at one moment the hero of the plot (whoever he was) rounded up a baddie and his girlfriend and held them at gunpoint. Having calmed the situation, he turned his back on the baddie in order to give the girl some instructions. A silly thing to do, turning your back on someone, as events subsequently were to prove as the baddie bent down, picked up a length of 4×2 and whacked the hero across the back of the head.

Despite the hour that we lost on Sunday, I managed to be up and about at a reasonable hour for a working day. And after breakfast I made a prompt start on the tidying up. Half an hour saw tons of stuff gone out of the attic and it’s a long time since I’ve seen it look so empty. I can see plenty of clear floor. Tomorrow, I’ll do a little more and see what that brings me.

Cleaning the dust off everything was quite easy. I just threw the stuff downstairs and that dealt with that issue.

Having dealt with the attic, I turned my attention to the ground floor. I moved 12 sacks of rubbish out of the ground floor – 2 of household rubbish, 7 of builders’ rubbish and three of plastic bottles, tin cans and papers.

Once all of that had been thrown out, I could turn my attention to the rest of the ground floor. A few more bits and pieces, notably the cable sheathes, found their way into the lean-to and I was able to bring in the floorboards out of Caliburn, swapping them for the rubbis.

With a little bit of space downstairs, I could start to stack things better in the ground floor and I can even see some floorspace there too now. So feeling pleased with myself, I knocked off at 18:15.

Tomorrow, I’m going to clear out the bit of the barn that I cleared out before, and then I can see what I can move out over there. If I can move out the wood and the portable gas heater, that will make tons of empty space and I’ll feel much happier about all of that.

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Sunday 29th March 2015 – SUNDAY IS A DAY OF REST

But not for me it isn’t – at least, not today.

Mind you, it was the day of a lie-in and it was 11:00 (or 10:00 in real money because we put the clocks forward today) that I crawled out of my stinking pit.

After breakfast, I carried on with the tidying up. And it looks a little more respectable in here (only a little, though) and another pile of stuff was taken out. I’ll crack this place yet, even if it will take me a century to do it.

At the footy this afternoon, FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 2nd XI were playing Sauret-Besserve. With a full side out, and even a substitute, the team was nevertheless rather imbalanced. Felix, the goalkeeper, was playing in attack and Vincent was in goal. That filled me full of foreboding as his only other match in goal had … well, not been a success.

I was proved right in the first 5 minutes. With a howling gale roaring down the pitch towards Pionsat’s goal, Sauret took the lead with a spectacular 40-yard punt that was picked up by the wind and sailed over the despairing Vincent’s hand into the top corner of the net. And in the first 40 minutes, I don’t think that Pionsat had managed to put the ball in the Sauret half.

Things changed as soon as the wind dropped slightly. FC Pionsat St Hilaire found a lull in the wind and soared upfield into the Sauret penalty area where a rather hopeful cross hit the arm of a Sauret defender. A cruel occurrence, but no-one can really complain about the award of a penalty. It may not have been intentional but it did deprive the attack of an advantage. Anyway, old Eric stepped up and calmly slotted home.

30 seconds later, Anthony did well on the right wing to hold up the play and then he hit another hopeful cross into the area. The Sauret keeper and the central defender both hesitated for a second as each one expected the other to come for the ball, and that gave Christophe just enough of a moment to slide his foot in and push it past the keeper into the net for the lead.

In the second half with the gale at their backs, Vincent (who has a huge kick for such a thin boy) was punting his clearances downfield well in front of his attackers. Nevetheless, Pionsat had three or four golden opportunities to bury the game, including one where Christophe sold a marvellous dummy to the Sauret defence, letting the ball go through his legs for Bertrand, running wide, to shoot across goal when surely it had to be easier to score.

And they might well have regretted that too, had it not been for Vincent in goal who made a couple of excellent saves that his big brother Matthieu would have been proud to make.

But with the game in its dying seconds, Felix (who had a good game up front for a goalkeeper) held up play on the edge of the penalty area, drew the entire defence onto him, and then just at the last minute slid the ball across the empty penalty area for Christophe to sidefoot into the empty net.

Yes, a good game, and a good result too. Pionsat’s team can be very proud of that.

Back here, I had a little fire tonight. Not that I really needed it, but it’s Sunday and pizza night. I may as well be comfortable while I’m cooking.

So tomorrow, back to work. And back to emptying the house.

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Saturday 28th March 2015 – I’VE BEEN CARRYING ON …

… the moving round of everything today, despite it being a Saturday.

I’m annoyed though that it’s taking me 10 times longer than I anticipated. I’m nowhere near anything like finished and that’s depressing. Mind you, I did find €2:12 in loose change mixed up in the pile of dust so I can’t say that it wasn’t rewarding. It works out at about €0.25 per hour and you can’t say fairer than that.

Anyway, the two wardrobes up here are emptied and dismantled, and all of the spare bedding has gone downstairs into the wardrobe in the bedroom along with the clothes that were hanging up.

I’ve swept up all of the dust where the wardrobes used to be and moved the desk into that space. That means that the alcove is almost empty and the water tanks can go in there whenever I’m ready to start the plumbing.

There’s tons more stuff to be moved out to the bedroom, and not only that, rearranging things has created piles more rubbish all of its own and all of this will need to be sorted out too.

This is going to take forever.

In between times I went to St Eloy for some shopping. Not to the Intermarche at Pionsat, you’ll notice. And there’s a reason for this. That is that I’ve been noticing a gradual increase in prices there. The fruit and veg are no longer affordable and the quality is going downhill rapidly. I don’t mind cutting down on quality if I’m cutting down on price, or paying more out for better quality, but this is starting not to work. I reckon that ocompared with the prices at the Pionsat Intermarche, I’ve saved about €4:00 on the weekly shopping bill.

At the footy tonight, Pionsat lost 2-0 to Montel Villosanges. No complaints about the result – the Chimps were easily the better side and Pionsat offered very little. The defence was quite rocky, with Matthieu in goal performing heroics to keep the score down, and the midfield and the attack were pretty ineffective. It’s all looking quite depressing.

I was on my travels again during the night. I was with the two guys with whom I played bass in a rock group in the 1970s. We were going somewhere in Bill Badger, the A60 van that I had in those days, and we had a pile of scaffolding to move so we were loading it up on the roof of the van. Ohh happy days!

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Tuesday 24th March 2015 – SO WHAT …

… have I done today then?

First thing was to trim off a corner of the door that is catching on the floor. And having done that, it was then catching somewhere else. It seems that I have a warped floorboard and that is what is causing the door to catch.

The solution was therefore obvious – out came the big new belt sander and that soon dealt with that issue. There was a lot of vacuuming to do with the new vacuum cleaner, but that’s impressive too. There is however a design fault – a 90° bend in the pipe inside the machine that leads into the dust bag. That could easily be eliminated and so it should be, because it blocks up quite easily.

Next job was to fit the beading around the window and the framework for the sheet of glass that will be fitted above the door.

I had to sort out the issue of the flooring in the far corner. The walls are of course nothing like straight and there’s a gap that varies from about 15mm to 3mm. I tried to carve a piece to fit but gave up after half an hour. Instead I went into the barn and found a 4.5m length of 20mm x100mm left over from when we did the barn roof. I trimmed that down to 70mm using the desktop saw, and that will do to pad out the skirting board so that the gap is covered.

I then spent the rest of the morning vacuuming and cleaning up.

After lunch I masked off by the window and then started to varnish. I’ve done the window sill and insets and also the interior of the wardrobe and that took until all of 19:00. And I’ve had a bit of a shock in that I’m not going to have anything like enough varnish to do it all. A trip to Montlucon is therefore on the cards, well before my planned trip on Saturday.

I had a fire in here tonight. It wasn’t that it was that cold, but it was cold enough and it meant that I could cook my meal in comfort. It was left-over hot-pot from Sunday night – Liz gave me a doggy-bag. Not enough for a meal but with a handful or two of pasta thrown in, it made a lovely meal.

And now I’m off to bed – a nice early night.

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Sunday 22nd March 2015 – A STRANGE ROUND GOLDEN THING …

… appeared in the sky today. Only for a minute or so, but it was there nevertheless. I have a vague recollection of seeing some thing similar before, but it was so long ago now that I can’t be sure. but we did have rain and hailstones and probably the odd plague of locusts somewhere in the vicinity. I certainly didn’t want to leave my nice warm bed so it was no surprise that I didn’t crawl out until 10:30.

I’d been on my travels too during the night. I’d been talking with someone about a journey I was planning to take into Canada’s high Arctic and the map that I was showing to them was marked with various different routes. I then boarded a train that took me right up into the wilderness and there I was, clutching the giant pizza that I had brought with me as food supplies for the journey. However halfway along, we werre shuned into a spur line to let a freight train pass by heading south. I alighted to take a few photos of the freight train. My train suddenly took off without warning and I had to chase after it, scrambling aboard as best as I could. It took me ages to find my seat and when I did, I found that someone had eaten my pizza.

Back in the Land of the Living, I did some tidying up after breakfast. Not very much but some, and you can actually see the floor in one or two places now, which is astonishing around here, and then I did some editing of the radio programmes that we are going to record tomorrow. I had the fire on for an hour or so too – it was rather cold up here.

After a rather late lunch I went round to Liz and Terry’s to rehearse the programmes, and Liz cooked a lovely tea.

Back here, I’ve finally edited the Christmas Special that we recorded in December 2014 and you can hear it HERE.

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Thursday 19th March 2015 – YOU MAY NOT BELIEVE THIS, BUT ….

empty tidy bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome france… the bedroom is empty of everything apart from a set of steps and the tools that I need to lay the flooring.

Everything that I don’t need for the foreseeable future is now downstairs on the ground floor, as are all of the plasterboard offcuts. The things that I don’t need right now but which I’ll be requiring in early course are now stacked up on the stairs so I’m bound to trip up over them and break my neck before I’m much older.

That left three sheets of plasterboard and that was something that I was not looking forward too. They were too big to go down the stairs, my idea of a trapdoor didn’t work, and there was a scaffolding outside the window that I would have to dismantle.

One sheet was easy to deal with. This was the waterproof plasterboard for the shower room. I needed two full-lenght strips to finish off in there so by the time I’d cut them off, that left me with a full-length strip about 35cms wide and I could pass that down the stairs with no difficulty.

The second sheet was one of those that I bought years ago, one with the 40mm of insulation backing. That however was cracked across its width roughly halfway down so I reckoned that I may as well complete the damage. The tow halves of that went down the stairs with some degree of difficulty, but much less difficulty than dismantling the scaffolding.

This left just one sheet. And I thought to myself “sod this for a game of soldiers. I’m not dismantling the scaffolding for this” and I cut that in half too.

That resolved all of the issues at a stroke (of the plasterboard knife).

This gave me just enough time to sweep out the bedroom prior to lunch. And it does look nice in there.

After lunch I went round to Cecile’s. She and her mum are leaving tomorrow and she needed help to load up her car and to do a few other things too. It gave me an opportunity to rescue the floorboards that I had left there when I needed to unload Caliburn in a hurry a couple of years ago.

On the way back, I went to see Simon. He has a machine for fitting floorboards and he had offered to lend it to me. So I went to pick it up. It’s similar to a stapler, with an automatic magazine for the nails. You have to hit the piston with a heavy mallet to get it to work, and if you have the machine in the correct place, it punches lost-head 3-inch nails right through.

I forget how many times I’ve clouted myself with a hammer fitting floorboards, and if this maching works as well as it looks, I’ll have this floor done in no time.

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Wednesday 18th March 2015 – WE NOW HAVE …

bedroom door lock handles keys les guis virlet puy de dome france… door handles, a door latch and even locks and kets on our door now.

And not only that, the bottom has been trimmed so that it opens and closes correcclty, and the battens have been fitted to the door frame to prevent the door from going through the frame.

Fitting the lock took longer than I thought that it would, but then again, if you want anything doing, you may as well do it correctly. And it was done so “correctly” too that the 5mm pilot drill that I used to drill through the door to site the hole in the latch where the handle will fit, that went right through without touching the sides and for the keyholes, I was about 2mm out of position.

Even the through-bolts for the door plates, the upper one was spot-on and the lower one was 2mm out too.

You can’t get much better than all of that.

The question of battens was not so simple though. The distance between the doorplate and the frame is only 20mm so using a 27mm lath was clearly out of the question. One alternative was to trim off a length from an 18mm pine plank, but rummaging around in the barn I found a 4m length of 18×40 lath left over from when I built the verandah, and that did the business perfecrly. A run-over with the belt sander cleaned that up really nicely.

And while I was rummaging around in the barn, I found something that I knew that I had and which I didn’t have a clue where I had put them – half a dozen 60cm pine planks. Propped up against the central beam in the barn, hidden behing two chipboard and one OSB boards about which I had also forgotten.

I’ve made a start on emptying out the bedroom now. That’s not going to be quite so easy as I have nowhere to put anything. I think that maybe half a day in the barn emptying out a space where I can put the wood offcuts, the electrical conduit and the insulation – that will make a huge amount of space.

But my door does look nice and I’m really happy with that.

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Tuesday 10th March 2015 – I’VE MADE A START …

… on the wallpapering today.

This morning, I spent a great deal of time tidying up in the bedroom, sweeping up all of the sawdust and plaster dust and moving a pile of stuff around. I’ve filled four bin liners of rubbish and there’s probably one or two more as well to go. Unfortunately the place doesn’t look much emptier, it just looks different and I’m still worrying where I’m going to put everything. The aim was to make a pathway all around the three walls that need wallpapering, so that I can move the scaffolding around.

And I’m glad that I’ve decided to put a new layer of flooring in, because some of the existing flooring is looking very creaky indeed.

wallpaper bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome franceOnce that had been done, I made a start on the wallpapering. I’m using this fibreglass wallpaper that covers all known imperfections (except mine of course) and I’ve put 5 drops onto the wall, meaning that one wall of the three is finished completely. Tomorrow I can finish off and then on Thursday, depending upon how I’m fixed for time, I can put the first coat of paint on.

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Monday 9th March 2015 – I’VE FINISHED …

finished wardrobe bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome france… the wardrobe.

Well, I haven’t actually. It still needs varnishing, the hardware finishing off and a couple of the doors sanding down so that they can close properly. However, all of the woodwork is finished at long last.

The upper fascia panel isn’t particularly pretty, but with all irregular heights and having to carve around the ceiling beams, I’m not sure how else I could have done it. I suppose that I could have fitted a false ceiling as I’m planning to do with the ground floor, but I hadn’t thought of that when I started on the bedroom.

This has now taken me on to cleaning up and tidying ready to start the wallpapering. And I hate tidying up as you all kno. I can’t remember which Harry Potter film it was where Dumbledore had the magic wand that cleaned up that house where the timid teacher was living, but I would give all that I own and more to to have one of those.

But as I expected anyway, there isn’t enough room on the ground floor to put everything that I’ll be taking downstairs. This is going to become quite complicated before I go much further.

I was late starting because, as you know, I had to go with Terry to the quarry to fetch some sand. It was a nice morning out anyway because the sun was shining. However it clouded over in the afternoon and I think that the summer might have gone.

And for tea? Cooking in the verandah again I made one of my huge aubergine and kidney bean whatsist – enough to keep me going for four days. The next three days, I can warm up the food in here.

And tomorrow? I’ll be finishing off the tidying up and then hopefully starting on the wallpapering.

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Saturday 7th March 2015 – THE EXPERIMENT …

… of leaving the fridge running through the night worked just fine. The voltage in the batteries dropped to a minimum of 12.47 volts, which is quite acceptable and so it will have another run-out tonight.

As I said yesterday, leaving it running for 24 hours per day is something that I do from about mid-May to mid-October. I’ve never had it running 24 hours so early in the year.

It was nice to have freezing cold orange juice, soya milk and soya yoghurt for breakfast. That was well-worth waiting for. And after breakfast I cracked on with the scripts for Radio Anglais. I’ve ended up doing 5 weeks for our recording session at the end of the month because, believe it or not, my services as a long-term live-in carer for the sick might once more be in demand, if an e-mail that I’ve received recently is anything to go by.

I also found time to tidy up in here and on the ground floor a little, and to empty and clean out the beichstuhl. Such exciting jobs that I have to do these days.

Cecile rang up too. Apparently she’s coming back on Thursday for a couple of days, so on Thursday I’ll be spending the afternoon away from here warming up her house for her.

And the football season has restarted after the winter break. Pionsat’s 2nd XI were playing Charensat and ran out 4-1 winners. And that despite playing with just 10 men. Yann, who has been out injured for about three years and has just made two or three 10-minute cameo appearances during that time, played a full match. Clearly not yet match-fit, still nevertheless it was good to see him play the full 90 minutes.

There was a new player too. Almost as old as I am and … errr … somewhat larger than I am. I was told that he had played for the club years ago but had come out of retirement to have another run-round. And despite his lack of match-fitness, it was quite evident from some of his touches that he had played at a much higher level than the Puy-de-Dome league Division 4. He’ll be an asset to the club when he finds his feet again.

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