Tag Archives: marianne_contet

Tuesday 14th August 2012 – I’VE HEAVED …

… 6 buckets of lime mortar into this wall today – with the 5 from yesterday that makes 11 and yet it’s hardly making any difference.

You can see near the top of the lean-to wall the light white mortar – that was the 5 buckets from yesterday.

If you look underneath, over the top and down both sides, you’ll just about be able to make out today’s mortar. It’s the sandy coloured stuff because of course it hasn’t dried yet.

The join between the house and the lean-to takes tons of mortar to fill it. I’ve been stuffing into the gap the old bits of cement that I’m pulling off the wall and then going over all of that with a very wet mortar mix, pushed well inside.

I’m hoping that that will help seal the gap and maybe bind it together.

But you can see where I’ll be having the real trouble – just in from the left-hand edge lower down. That’s bursting out a little and the cement binding that someone has put in at one time has long since fallen out.

Some of the stones are loose and others are missing. It’s going to be quite a job to fit that all together.

It’s a good job that the wall is double-skinned and that the inner skin is holding, otherwise that all would have been down long ago.

But it won’t be done tomorrow – it’s a bank holiday here and I’m technicianing for Marianne in the morning;

And then in the afternoon there’s a walk around Pionsat and Durat – where the Dark Age fort used to be – so I’m going off on that.

-2

Friday 10th August 2012 – I DIDN’T DO …

… anything like as much as I wanted to do today, which was something of a disappointment.

We started off on the wrong foot when I telephoned Nikon to see how they were progressing with the repairs to the Nikon D5000. Seems that they didn’t receive the authority to do the work, so they say, despite my having posting it off a month ago.

So I now have to do all of that again.

GRRRRRRRRR!

So after a couple of hours on the computer I went outside to start to cut the wood to make the window frames but although I managed to cut all of the pieces, that was about that for the phone rang.

Marianne was in need of a lift to St Hilaire to plan her walk for 10 days time.

St Hilaire is another village a little like Chateau-sur-Cher in that the church is situated on a mound on a promontory with an excellent view of the surrounding area.

And while the history of Chateau-sur-Cher is quite well-known, almost nothing is known of the history of St Hilaire.

Nevertheless, the mound and the strategic position are very suggestive of a Dark-Age fortress of some kind.

It’s a well-known phenomenon in many similar villages that the church on the mound started off as a tiny chapel somewhere within the fortress and the church expanded as the fortress declined.

Marianne didn’t have much information on the village but we went for a good prowl around.

In the end, we had come up with tons of interesting stuff that we had discovered, as well as having a few interesting chats with the locals.

One of the aforementioned was not in the least pleased to see a couple of people wandering around looking at his house, and he freely gave vent to his displeasure.

However, not all of the locals were so ungracious.

At another house we were invited in for a drink and we had a guided tour of the old lady’s biscuit tin with all the photos, press cuttings and the like, including a newspaper from 1921 with the obituary of her grandfather.

He had a considerable claim to fame, being one of just seven survivors of the legendary Charge de Reichshoffen in 1870.

And so going from knowing very little to knowing quite a lot was the work of just an hour and a half.

Our day wasn’t over yet.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have been talking … "quite considerably" – ed … about the ephemeral Montlucon-Pionsat-Gouttières railway line.

A few weeks ago on one of my ramblings I’d stumbled across the St Fargeol railway station and as Marianne didn’t know where it was, we went the long way round on the way home in order to visit it.

I’m not sure why they called it “St Fargeol” because the station is so far away from the village – a good couple of kilometres if you ask me.

That kind of thing wasn’t important in the 1850s and 1860s because there was no other choice – if you wanted to travel, rail was the only sensible option and so you had no option other than to walk – or catch a hay-ride – to the nearest railway station wherever it might be.

But by the time that this line was opened in the 1930s, road transport was well in the ascendency and the death-knell was already sounding for many rural railway lines.

Not even railway lines and railway stations in built-up urban areas could withstand the pressure from other forms of road-based passenger transport.

These little rural railway lines stood no chance whatever and were soon all swept away. The tacots – the little narrow-gauge railway lines that infested the French rural countryside – disappeared in the blinklng of an eye and the rural branch-lines quickly followed.

All you can see now – if you look long and hard – are the indentations in the soil where the railway used to pass.

So abandoning another good rant … "for the moment " – ed … tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll be off to Commentry shopping, I hope.

But I’m going to have to do better than this for working if I’m going to treat myself to the little autumn break that I promised myself a little later on this year.

-2

Wednesday 8th August 2012 – I HOPE THAT YOU ALL …

… liked the photos of the wall as it stands right now – the ones that I went back and posted for yesterday.

Anyway, here’s another photo for today, especially for Marianne in Brussels who has passed comment to the effect that I seem to spend most of my time in rural France photographing churches.

This one is the church of La Cellette, for La Cellette is the destination of this week’s Wednesday walk around the communes of the Canton of Pionsat with our friend Marianne.

And didn’t we have a nice day for it too?

This is actually the third church to have been built in La Cellette and dates from 1883.

The previous one was far too small apparently, and because of its constrained situation and site, (and on our travels around, we’ve seen quite a few churches in the Auvergne that have been in constrained situations and sites) it was not possible to enlarge or alter it.

Consequently it was demolished.

The claim to fame of the village lies actually a kilometre or so outside, down a dirt track.

And this is the viaduct of the Paris-Orleans railway on its branch Montlucon-Pionsat-Gouttières.

I’ve talked … "at great length" – ed … about this railway line in the past – how it was designated as “a line of national importance” long before the turn of the 20th Century.

But it was dogged by delay after delay, construction held up by World War I, and when it was finally, after many vicissitudes, opened in 1932 its utility had passed with the collapse of the coal-mining projects in the Gouttieres region.

It was closed “as a war economy measure” in 1939 after just 7 years of operation and the section south of Pionsat was never reopened.

There are still a few traces of the former track if you hunt around long enough to find them though.

At what was once a level crossing for a country lane, there are still the railway sleepers embedded on the roadway. This actually is a good indication of how much maintenance has been undertaken on the lane since the closure of the line.

While you admire yet more railway sleepers, propped up against the viaduct where they have stood for probably 50 years or more ,let me tell you about the biggest irony of all.

And that is the fact that that the Paris-Orleans Railway Company, which built the railway line, was GIVEN the land free of charge by the commune, but under certain conditions.

The stipulation was that the railway company had to build a railway station for the village – it had been dithering about whether it would or not and the gift of the land was meant to sway the decision.

And so the railway company took the land, built the line – and then dropped all plans for the station, which was never built.

But the viaduct still remains, and it’s well-worth the effort to clamber up to the top because the view to the north is stunning

In the foreground we have the village of La Cellette and poking out above the trees to the right of centre is the spire of the church that we have just visited.

Away in centre-left is the spire of the church of the town of Pionsat, and disappearing into ths simmering heat-haze are the rolling hills that lead on up to Marcillat-en-Combraille

There were only a few of us today, which was a pity, but we had a lovely time wandering around the countryside, and then we all repaired to the village café – one of the only two village cafés still surviving in the whole of the Pionsat canton – for a nice cold drink.

And this is where the excitement begins.

A woman who lives in an old house in the village is in charge of the church and we went to thank her for opening it for us. I know her husband – he’s something to do with the FC Pionsat St Hilaire football club – and so we all ended up having quite a lengthy chat.

Now I mentioned earlier that the present church is the third, and I told you a little about the second. And so what about the first one?

We know that it existed because it’s mentioned in a Papal Bull of 1118, being described as a tiny chapel. While its location is the subject of … errr … much debate, one particular theory has been adopted by those who might know a thing or two about it.

Accordingly, Marianne has been trying to visit the cellar of this particular house for half a century.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … the owner of this house, by now in an expansive mood, gave us a guided tour of the cellar on condition that we don’t photograph it and we don’t describe its location.

So there we were – perfect primitive vaulted ceiling, pre-medieval beaten earth floor, a bricked-up external door that wasn’t much more than 5 feet tall.

Marianne was in heaven of course, and I was well-impressed. We had probably at least 1200 years at least underneath our feet.

It really was the climax of an excellent day.

-1

Monday 6th August 2012 – I HAVEN’T POSTED …

… a photo of my wall for quite some time, and so this is where I currently am.

You’ll notice that all of the breeze blocks have gone, except for the ones reinforcing the corner (and I’m not taking those out at any price) and I’ve also put in the base of the second window.

As for the rest, you can see that the outside stonework is proceeding apace, as is the interior stonework.

The infill, which consists of those very lightweight hollow bricks smashed into smaller pieces and mixed with a very lightweight concrete mix (I found some more gravel) is also up to the level that it should be.

Another couple of days on this and the stonework will be done. I’ll then have to turn my attention to fitting the guttering and then doing the pointing.

I’ll be glad when it’s finished because it really is driving me up the wall, but it needs to be done.

And what else? There was the working on the website of course this morning, and this evening down at the pub with Arno, Bill and Marianne.

That was it, really.

-1

Sunday 5th August 2012 – THIS WATER ISSUE …

… that I mentioned yesterday seems to have resolved itself.

When I checked the statistics earlier, we had had 5.5mm of rain up to that point. and it’s still teeming down outside.

All the plants will be having a good watering anyway, and you can’t say that they don’t need it – a few of them were really gasping a bit.

I worked out that the catchment area of the water is about 30m². Therefore 1/30 of a metre of rain – about 34mm – will give me 1 cubic metre, or 1000 litres, of water.

So 5.5 mm of water will give me 5.5/34 x 1000 = about 160 litres of rain. I won’t have any issues about using that lot.

It started to rain while I was at the Pionsat brocante this afternoon. And it served me right because I didn’t arrive there until about 14:30.

Mind you, I don’t think that I missed very much because it was mostly awful as you can see.

But I did have the most extraordinary stroke of luck.

I use kee klamps to make the mounting frames for my solar panels and they are expensive. But there was a Dutch guy here with a box-full for sale for all of €5:00 – you can’t even buy one for that – and so I duly knocked him down to €4:00.

I had a very good reason for my somewhat-delayed start to the morning. Brain of Britain here forgot to cancel his early morning alarm and so at 07:45 I had an unexpected cacophony.

Anyway, badger that for a game of soldiers. I tuned off the alarm and went back to bed until 10:45, and that, dear reader, was that.

Marianne was there of course with one of her sons, in her role as active member of the Amis du Chateau de Pionsat and we had quite a lengthy chat.

Marianne was actually in charge of the caleche, the horse and carriage that had ben hired to give sightseeing trips around the town, and I was even invited aboard for a free lap of honour.

It goes without saying that if it’s free, I’ll have ten of those.

That was it really – a really lazy day. But I’m entitled to one every week. A day where you do nothing and don’t feel guilty about it is really important.

-4

Saturday 4th August 2012 – NEVER MIND A PERSONAL BEST …

… this must be something of a new world record.

Believe it or not, I was up and about this morning at the stupid time of 05:50 and I’ve absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if I’d wet the bed or a mouse in the attic had been doing a clog dance or something like that.

Anyway, I had a really leisurely start to the morning and spent a load of time working on the website. I’m currently discussing the Battle of Québec, as it happens.

13:30 I nipped off into St Eloy-les-Mines to do some shopping and also to buy some bricks.

Cheze had them in stock – but at €0:94 a piece which is ridiculous if you ask me. Anyway, I bought just enough to do the surround for the second window that I’ll be fitting in the lean-to. It wasn’t until much, much later that I remembered that I had bought the original lot from Point P.

Just by way of a change, I did some work this afternoon – putting back into position the stones that I knocked off the wall the other day, cementing them into position and then concreting them in place.

But now I’ve run out of gravel, would you believe? It’s clearly not my destiny to finish this wall.

But no gravel means that I can use up the pile of scrunched-up brick that used to be two internal walls in the house until I knocked them down.

They were just lying where they fell all over the floor and so this means that I’m clearing them out of the way, which is A Good Thing. They make nice lightweight concrete too.

Tomorrow is a day off – no village Open Day to attend. I’ll have a lie-in and maybe go to Pionsat for a prowl around the brocante and see how Marianne is doing with her stall for the Amis du Chateau de Pionsat.

-1

Wednesday 1st AUGUST 2012 – I’VE BROKEN …

… through the wall between the house and the lean-to.

It’s not properly through, yet and to be honest I don’t think that it will ever be, because one of the down-sides drilling from both sides of the wall is that the two holes never mate up and mine is about 5mm out.

This morning I was working on the website but for one reason or another I couldn’t concentrate. Add to that the fact that we had so much solar energy this morning, and so I decided to go out and run the huge drill for half an hour or so

That used up some of the surplus electrical energy while I was doing it (only 82 amps made it into the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus energy I capture) and it broke through.

I need to tidy the hole up now, which will take a while, run a tube through the hole, and pass 6 wires through the tube – 230 volt mains, 12 volt DC power and 12-volt DC light, and then the world will be my lobster in the lean-to.

One of the benefits of having power in the lean-to is that I can tile the floor, make a kind-of work area and then install the big washing machine.

I’d love to see how that works and how much current that it uses, bearing in mind that I’ll be running it off the hot-fill from the dump-load with the machine on a low temperature setting and on the economy wash low-water programme.

Talking of the lean-to, I spend a few hours on the wall too and it seems that I’m advancing rapidly.

While I was scavenging around for stones in the house, I came across a pile of smashed-up lightweight brick, plaster and the like from when I knocked a wall down and so I’m shovelling that up and using it as infill.

Apart from the fact that it is of course quite light, it’s slowly emptying the house and that can only be a good thing, killing two birds with one stone.

For our Wednesday walk this afternoon, we went to Roche d’Agoux, a small village right out in the wilderness on the edge of the world.

Roche d’Agoux has a couple of claims to fame, not the least of which is this really impressive outcrop of milky quartzite. There’s a whole seam of this stuff that runs diagonally through the whole of the north-west of the Combrailles, making the odd spectacular appearance here and there, and spectacular is certainly the word.

The photo of the Roche is quite well-known – it’s a typical touristy thing of course – but what isn’t so well-known is the quartz. And so I’ll show you a close-up photo of that, and you can see what I mean by “milky quartz”.

Incidentally, it’s from this rocky outcrop where the Roche in the name comes from and it is, incidentally the same root for the word that is used for the area of the Staffordshire Moorlands in the UK the Roaches – that place where the wallabies hang out

When you look around here today at the sleepy little village of … errr … 91 people (a far cry from the heady days of the 1840s when 450 people were living here) it’s hard to remember that at one time, this was quite probably the most important town of the region.

You look at towns like Marcillat en Combraille, for example. A big, bustling village today yet it didn’t receive its charter for a market until 1258 – and that charter was granted by none other than a certain nobleman called Guillaume de la Roche d’Agoux.

He was certainly the most important nobleman in the area at the time and he did have his castle here in Roche d’Agoux.

Many people will tell you that the Roche d’Agoux is actually the ruins of his castle, or chateau-fort, but that isn’t so.

That was something that was mentioned in a guide book of the region of the 1880s and which has lingered on in current folklore.

In fact, that’s the site of his castle over there on that mound. However, it was dismantled in the early 15th Century and that date is interesting.

It’s quite early for this to have happened – long before Cardinal Richelieu’s edicts of the 1620s against the nobility that led to the dismantling of most of the castles in this area – and nothing has come to light which might suggest a reason for this.

However, certainly a few years ago there were some quite substantial remains to be seen, but no-one knows the present position today, because the current owner does not welcome visitors.

I spoke … "at great length" – ed … last time that we were here about the magnificent church.

Like every church almost everywhere in Medieval Europe, the rapid expansion of the population in that period led to the rapid expansion of the church, and having a crafty nose around, I came across some really good evidence of this.

Up there we can see the remains of a window that has long-since been filled it. It’s very reasonable to assume that this wall was thus an outside wall of the building and the light was lost when the annexe was built on behind it

So I dropped Marianne off at Pionsat and went back home to carry on working for a while.

No point in wasting the day.

-2

Sunday 29th July 2012 – SO MUCH …

… for my day off!

It started as usual with my wake-up call from Marianne at 09:45 – although just for a change, I’d been up and about for quite some time by then

In our rolling programme of village open days – a different village each Sunday – today is the turn of Chateau sur Cher. We’d been here before a couple of weeks ago for the village walk, you may remember.

I picked up Marianne and off we went in the glorious sunshine. The weather had improved today so it was a nice day outside. Other people had clearly noticed too because we were favoured with quite a substantial crowd, and that’s always very pleasant.

We had two of the Troubadours de Pingrole providing the music. One on the violin and the other on the vielle à roue. But I was absolutely convinced that they were playing out of tune and I’m not sure why. They certainly didn’t seem to know their music either.

But so what? You can’t pick and choose your musicians around here, as I have said before. And the crowd enjoyed it anyway so I don’t suppose it really matters.

And early on a Sunday morning too, so what do you expect? The bars haven’t been closed long!

There was a concours de petanque organised for the afternoon starting at 14:00 and I somehow found myself roped in to help with the scoring – not that I know anything about petanque.

I always remember many years ago with Nerina driving through rural France and seeing a sign for petanque. No idea what it was so I asked her to look in the dictionary. “Can’t find it” she replied. “But never mind. It’s probably something with a peturret”.

Anyway, back to the plot.

We found that we had been locked out of the village hall. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? And no idea where the guy in charge was either.

So in the end, we all ended up having a picnic on the lawn outside the church while we waited. It was all very convivial.

14:20 he turned up to open the door which, for a competition due to start at 14:00, isn’t very good at all. Dozens of people all hanging about, all of them very disappointed to say the least.

And so it goes without saying that the petanque scoring was a shambles, even though we had the very gracious assistance of Strawberry Moose.

It took me a good few minutes to work out the program, but the organiser decided that he couldn’t wait (I can’t see why – he’d kept us waiting long enough) for me and so did the first round by hand.

All of a sudden, the program clicked into place. And when I discovered the reason why, I could have hit the organiser with a stick. He had entered an odd number of teams into the competition and as soon as one withdrew, it all began to work perfectly fine with no problems at all.

But because of his impatience it fouled everything up as far as the competition was concerned. For a start, it immediately paired up teams that had been competing against each other in the round that he had drawn manually.

The competitors didn’t ‘arf complain, and the organiser had something of a moan as well. But I exacted my revenge. What we did in the end was do three rounds on the computer, let the computer work out the scores and positions for those three, and then handed the result to him to work out the final positions including the other round that he did manually.

But we piddled off and left him to it before the kaka hit the ventilateur.

As an aside to this, later Marianne telephoned me. Apparently it had taken him an age to work out the scoring – far longer to work it out than it would have done if he had given me the time to organise myself at the beginning.

And far longer than my original suggestion which was to scrap the first round scored manually and have an additional, fifth round played, so that we would have had four rounds scored on the computer.

And had he been there at the start, it would have been sorted out much earlier than that too

So serve him right!

-3

Wednesday 25th July 2012 – TODAY STARTED OFF …

… really well. Gorgeous bright blue skies with not a cloud in sight.

I was up … well, not as early as I might have been but still early enough, and while I was breakfasting, I had the fan working, so hot that it was up here.

Terry rang up and so I met him down the lane and we went off to the quarry for some melange and a pile of sand, and I ended up with about half a ton of the stuff – that will keep me out of mischief for a while, rebuilding the lean-to wall.

After computing for a while I attacked the raised bed where the early spuds were hanging about. Now was the time to dig them up.

But I have to say that I was quite disappointed. There’s not even half a bucket full here. I’ve no idea where they all went to. And after all of the effort that I – and Rosemary – had put into everything too!

But I was so engrossed with digging over the bed that I failed to notice the time – 15:24. I had to be in Pionsat meeting Marianne at 15:30 and there I was, all covered in soil and so on

But never mind. Can’t be helped. I flew into Pionsat just as I was.

That’s hardly a good advert for anything,

As well as the Sunday expositions that we have been doing, we’ve also been doing the Wednesday walks around the various communes of the Canton of Pionsat, and you’ve already been on quite a few of them with us.

Today, it’s the turn of St Maigner to receive us. That’s out on the road to Espinasse and must be the commune the furthest south in the Canton. And despite the rush that we had had to get here, we were bang on time to start the walk, which can’t be bad

St Maigner is a very exciting place and proudly announces that the population in the comunne has grown by 17.4% in the last 10 years.

Not sure about how they worked that out, though. The 1999 population was 174 and the 2011 population was 197 – that makes a 13.2% increase in my book. And, regrettably, that’s still a far cry from 1836 and the 990 people who lived here.

This population growth is typical of quite a few small villages in the Auvergne, where most of the population growth is due to all of the foreigners who have come to live here.

Rural France has not been slow in pointing out to the Brits and the Dutch living a stressed-out existence in a tiny box-like villa with a postage-stamp garden and neighbours overlooking your hedge that here are wide-open spaces with room to move about, grow your own crops and be totally stress-free.

And all at a price that you would never even imagine back home.

And the Government is grateful too.

Think about it.

The average foreigner who sells up and comes over here brings with him – say €200,000 – from the sale of his property back home.
He buys a ruin (of which there are many) from a local French farmer for €30,000, saving the French farmer from bankruptcy
He goes to Brico Depot or Point P or the sawmill for all of his renovation material, creating jobs for the locals
His kids go to the local village school, keeping the schools open
He uses the village Post Office and the boulangerie, keeping them open for the locals
Many of the nouvel arrivants are pensioners – they will be having their foreign pensions paid in France and spending the money over here

Just look at all of this money coming flooding into the rural French economy. And it’s all new money too. Not from anywhere else in France, not from the French treasury, but from abroad.

The French must be laughing their heads off.

I was at one meeting many years ago when Brice Hortefeux, a French Government Minister stood up and said to the audience “you should be grateful that we have all of these foreigners here. It’s thanks to them that you still have your schools, your Post Offices, your boulangerie.”

And he’s dead right.

We saw the church in one of the photos above. It was a dependence of the Abbey of Ebreuil and although the first mention of the village isn’t until the mid 13th Century, the church would seem to be considerably older.

You can tell that by looking at the Roman-style doorway here. Despite all of the renovations that the church has undergone (and we all know what that means) this doorway cannot be anything but original.

I’ve seen many a church doorway in this style, and all available records point to them being well before the 13th Century. I would be very surprised if this doorway were much later than 11th-Century.

Having had a good explore around the bourg, we went for a nice long walk out into the countryside, as far as the Fontaine de St Loup.

This is a beautiful, well-restored spring, of which there are many here in the region as you know. But this particular one has a very well-known claim to fame in that during the 7th Century, a very well-attested miracle took place here.

So well-attested and so well known that I can’t remember what it was now. In fact, had I remembered, that would have been a miracle.

Round the back of the Fontaine is the lieu-dit or hamlet of Villeromain.

And this is a very controversial place, if you are a French historian.

Wherever you see a French place-name beginning with ville, it almost certainly (although there are some exceptions in modern times) signifies the site of a Gallo-Roman villa.

I’ve told you before that one is not allowed in France to use the term “Roman” on its own. French history does not accept the principle that the Romans colonised and settled the country.

It insists that the Gauls were already civilised and that the presence of villas and other contemporary buildings were due to the combined efforts of both the Romans and the Gauls.

However, the reason for the controversy about Villeromain is because of the inclusion of the very definite Roman in the name. That would seem to suggest to some people that this settlement was entirely Roman and had no input from the Gauls.

And that opinion does not go down very well with others.

So back home, and the temperature in the solar water heater looked really inviting. This called for a nice, hot shower this evening bearing in mind how dirty I was after today’s gardening session.

And then up here to the furnace. It’s roasting up here and the fan is doing almost nothing.

Summer seems to have arrived – but for how long?

-7

Monday 23rd July 2012 -171.4 AND 160.1 AMP-HOURS …

… of solar energy in bank 1 and bank 2 respectively might not be a new record (although it isn’t far off), but 154 amp-hours of that being surplus and hence being diverted into the dump load (the hot water tank) – now, that definitely is.

And having emptied out the hot water from the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load, which was still at an indecent temperature and filled up the tank this morning with cold water, that brought the water temperature down to just a mere 39°C.

And by the time that this 154 amp-hours of solar energy had finished, it was enough to push the temperature of the water off the scale – ie over 70°C.

Now that is impressive.

The temperature of the water in the solar shower tank may well only have been 30°C, but 5 litres of water out of the dump load took it right up to 38.5°C and I had yet another lovely shower.

And I’m all clean now, just for a change.

Mind you, I wasn’t half dirty earlier on.

This morning, after my 07:00 start (despite only going to bed at 02:30), a leisurely breakfast and an hour or so on the laptop, I went round to Marianne’s to move the International Library from her friend’s garage to an empty room at François’ at Barrot.

That was enough to make anyone filthy

From there it was off to LIz and Terry’s to pick up Liz and then off to Gerzat to record the Radio Anglais programmes for Radio Arverne.

And as well as the 5 that we had planned, we needed to do a 6th as Bernard had somehow managed to lose the one for this week. And it’s not very pleasant in the heat up there in their attic.

That’s it, really. Quite busy but nothing much to show for it.

I’m off to bed now, another ridiculously early night as it’s another early start tomorrow.

I’m changing the cylinder head gasket on Liz’s car.

-3

Sunday 22nd July 2012 – IT’S NOT EVERY …

… day that I’m up and about at 08:30 and having breakfast.

For it to happen on a Sunday, when I don’t have an alarm clock set, is really quite extraordinary.

Mind you, it’s just as well because between then and 10:00 I had three telephone calls

Radio Tartasse telling me that the Monday morning session is cancelled
Marianne reminding me about our morning at St Hilaire
Rosemary who wanted to talk about cheese

Just imagine me being polite on the telephone early on a Sunday morning! But then they were all important, especially the one about cheese!

Marianne is doing this Sunday “tour of the communes” of the Canton of Pionsat thing this summer, and I’ve been tagging along as technician and general labourer. Marianne isn’t as young as she used to be – which goes for all of us.

Today was the turn of the commune of St Hilaire to be honoured by our presence.

But we weren’t actually “in” the commune (although we were, if you understand what I mean”. We were out in one of the Lieux Dits – the hamlets associated with the Bourg – the Lieu Dits of Baudry

Here at Baudry is the “Domain de Baudry”. It’s a pisciculture or fish farm where they rear trout and carp for sale or for release into the river system.

It’s very popular with fishermen of course, and everyone can try his hand at it, whether you are an experienced fisherman or a rank beginner. Even the equipment is available to hire.

And it’s not as if you are going to have much difficulty in finding a fish, is it?

The place was absolutely heaving today, and I hoped that they had all come for our exposition and not just for the fishing.

There were loads of people whom I knew too, including Anne and Mike and daughter Misha from up the road in St Fargeol. Misha had tried her hand at fishing and I had spent much of the morning watching her on her maiden fishing expedition.

And to everyone’s surprise and delight, she actually caught five fish! Well, well done Misha! I hope that mum prepared the chips for tea.

Musical entertainment was provided by the fanfare de Pionsat – the Pionsat jazz band.

We have encountered them before and I remember saying at the time that they are more noted for their enthusiasm than their technical abiity. And that still holds true today.

However, as I said when watching the rock band at St Gervais d’Auvergne last month, the comments of Samuel Johnson are relevant – “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”.

This isn’t a big city where you can choose from 200 musicians. You have to take people as you find them. They do their best, we are all grateful for the effort that they make and we all have fun.

What more can anyone expect?

After dropping off Marianne back at Pionsat I had a couple of hours off in the afternoon (well, it IS Sunday) and then went round to Liz and Terry’s to go over our radio programmes.

Mushroom risotto was on the menu too – a huge improvement on the last mushroom risotto that I had, the famous one at Hardon House in Newport Pagnell, that looked as if someone had eaten it before I had.

Ginger cake for pudding too! That really made for an excellent Sunday.

-6

Saturday 21st July 2012 – I’VE BEEN A BUSY LITTLE B…..

… all day today, although you might not think so.

Not quite managing an early start, I still managed an early breakfast and then started to work. We needed a series of 5 radio programmes for Monday and so no time like the present.

All morning (and some of the early afternoon) was spent drawing up five minutes of a gardening programme, and then 15 minutes-worth of useful French phrases. It’s all becoming rather complicated.

We had a little break for shopping. St Eloy-les-Mines unfortunately. I was hoping to go to Montlucon as I’m running out of everything, but the radio was more important.

I just managed the basics, as well as some A4 pouches for the laminator, seeing as LIDL had some on offer, and also a pile of bags of hazel nuts for the muesli – it’s been a while since LIDL had any of them in stock.

Back at the ranch I cooked some more rice in the steamer while I had lunch and then continued wih Part II – a load of notes on the system of points for traffic offences here in France.

It’s quite complicated, and having to navigate around the French Government’s own website is not so easy either.

Anyway, there’s enough to keep us going for a good few weeks.

This evening, with piping hot water in the dump load and only 24°C in the solar shower tank and me feeling rather dirty, I dumped 6 litres of water from the former to the latter, which pushed that up to 35°C.

I stripped off and just as I was about to plunge underneath, the ‘phone rang.

And it’s a good job it was a telephone and not a television as it was Marianne reminding me about tomorrow. She would have had a giggle if she had known how I was answering the phone.

So a nice clean me, and I’m off for an early night. And a little lie-in tomorrow.

-3

Sunday 15th July 2012 – WE WERE IN …

… Vergheas today.

That’s the farthest extremity of the Canton of Pionsat and so we had an early start.

Not as early as my start though. Having had two consecutive early nights (and a third one in a moment) I was up and about before 08:00 – on a Sunday – with no alarm – and for no particular reason either.

When was the last time that that happened?

The Open Day at Vergheas was by far the best-attended so far, and there were the local musicians in attendance.

You can see the two old women there turning away on their vielles à roue for all they were worth while the men were having a good old go at the accordion. Everything in 3/4 time of course – nothing complicated here.

The Bourrées de Vergheas – the local folk-dance troupe – were in attendance too. And after giving a demonstration of a few dances (all in 3/4 time of course) they grabbed hold of all of the foreigners present and had them up on the floor dancing.

Even Marianne was invited to dance and I’ll publish the photo sometime unless I receive a well-filled brown envelope in the meantime. It was certainly an exciting way to spend a morning – much better than staying in bed.

The dance troupe, by the way, caters for all ages as you can see in the photo.

There was even a little girl of about two or three dressed up in traditional Auvergnat costume having an immense amount of fun there with all of the grown-ups.

As you know, I’m all in favour of involving the youth of the community in these events. It is they who are the future and if you don’t engage with them then the traditions of the area will all die out.

But Marianne is not well – she has her bronchitis again. Hardly surprising – I reckon that we will all be developing gills sooner or later if this awful weather continues.

But Marianne became worse and worse as the morning wore on and in the end I had to drive her car home to Pionsat.

All events are now cancelled for this week while she recovers.

This afternoon I finished the rock music radio programmes and not much else. I’m thoroughly worn out too and at all of 23:19 I’m off to bed too. I can’t last the pace these days and I dunno what’s the matter with me.

-3

Saturday 14th July 2012 – IT’S ONLY 23:15 …

… and I’m thoroughly whacked.

I’m also extremely tired, but that’s another story. Anyone would think that I’ve had a really hard day, but in fact I’ve done probably not much more than nothing.

I didn’t even have an early start either – it was 09:30 when I crawled out of Quatermass’s Pit.

And on that subject, I wish that the weather would improve so that I could do some washing. We’ve had more torrential rain again to day and if it carries on I’ll be uprooting my vegetables and planting rice instead.

After a leisurely morning’s breakfast I started on the radio programmes but it wasn’t long before I was sidetracked.

The Music folders on my external hard drive are in a mess and having sorted out the photos last weekend, I decided to organise the music. Strangely enough, that freed off a couple of gigabytes of space on my hard drive and there’s room to move about now.

And that wasn’t all either.

In 2002 I was in Utah and spent a very pleasant half a day prowling around the Escalante (or Escalente) Desert in Utah. Today though, it’s in the news.

All over the American newspapers today though was an article about someone else who had been prowling around the Escalante (or Escalente) Desert for three weeks totally lost and being found in the nick of time by some searchers.

I had a look at my web page, and realised that it was one that had only received the briefest of updating when I did a major update of my website in February 2007.

Sensing that the page would receive a few hits today (and I wasn’t wrong either) I spent the afternoon rewriting it and bringing it right up to date.

So much for the radio.

Anyway, I’m off to bed. I’m out with Marianne tomorrow and I need to be on form. I’ve no idea why I’m so tired right now.

-2

Wednesday 11th July 2012 – I WAS OUT …

… this afternoon.

You may remember a few days ago that Marianne and I went to do a recce of Bussieres to see what was going on there.

In this series of walks that she is doing around the villages that make up the canton of Pionsat, today was the day that she was doing the public walk around the village and so, as usual, I went along to hold her coat and keep her out of mischief.

As I’ve said on numerous occasions … “and you’ll say again” – ed … the church is the focal point of every village, and this is where we all met up.

I mentioned previously that the original building of the church has been expanded on several occasions, but as it is on a very constrained, the expansion has taken place in all kinds of directions and so its shape does not conform to what one would expect to see of a more traditional church layout.

Although the church might not be as interesting as the one that we saw last week at St Maurice près Pionsat, it does have a feature that is quite unusual – a sundial.

We’ve seen a sundial on a religious building before – but on a monastery in Trois Rivières in Quebec, Canada. And I do recall telling you the story about the two Québécois discussing it
“what’s the time?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a watch”
“Well go outside and look at the sundial”
“Don’t be silly. It’s dark outside”
“Well take a blasted torch with you!”

The claim to fame of Bussières does not lie in its church, but rather unusually in its village school, and you saw a good photo of that last time.

In the 1920s there was a controversial system of education introduced in France by someone by the name of Célestin Freinet. He didn’t believe in a structured, rigid system of teaching but more in a form of “learning by doing” in a kind of anarchic way.

His system was highlighted in a film called L’École Buissonnière – a title that is a pun on the French way of saying “playing truant” and in several novels such as Le Voleur d’Innocence by René Frégni.

One of the disciples of Célestin Freinet was the teacher at the village school here, Marcel Mercier. And he was apparently quite well-known throughout Europe for his efforts in the Freinet method of education.

While you admire the view across the valley with the zoom lens over to St Maurice près Pionsat, I’ll tell you that during the period 1938-1941 Mercier sent out all of the children to interview all of the elderly people in Bussières.

He encouraged the children to write down everything that they heard. The result was a book entitled Notre Petite Commune – “Our Little Home Town” – and it’s something of a classic of French social study for the first half of the 20th Century – although it’s been long out of print.

The biggest surprise however was that one of the people on the walk had actually been a schoolboy under Marcel Mercier, had participated in the project and, furthermore, whipped out from his rucksack a copy of the book!

Of course, Marianne was in her element and it promptly disappeared into her own rucksack. A promise to return it in very early course was made, once a hastily-arranged appointment at the photocopiers had been met.

Our former schoolboy friend still thought very highly of Mercier and told us that he had also written at least one novel that had become quite famous, but the name of which he had completely forgotten.

Bussières is another one of these isolated villages that has been decimated by a desertion of its population. In the 1840s it could rustle up almost 800 inhabitants but today, it’s a nice, round 100 people.

This building here formerly played an important role in the history of the village, but when I came to write up my notes I found that its former purpose had completely gone out of my head – just like everything else has.

Something to do with taxation – maybe the hated gabelle, or salt tax. I dunno now. I shall have to check with Marianne

Mind you, there is a reason that things have gone out of my mind. And that is that today I’ve given so many people a piece of it that I don’t think that I have any left.

Mindless, you might say.

Firstly, the courier company to whom I entrusted 6 parcels over 4 weeks ago still has three of them in its warehouse. They didn’t know where the other 3 were, but nothing has been forwarded on.

So I’m surprised that I still have a phone connection this evening, seeing the amount of heat that was generated while I was … errr … discussing the issue with them.

Secondly, the phone that I purchased four weeks ago has still not arrived despite the “24-hour guaranteed delivery”.

It seems that the courier company won’t deliver it here as “the address is inadequate” – which translated into English, means that the driver is too lazy to step out of the van and look for the name on one of the five mailboxes here.

I had them on the phone today too and once more I was surprised that the wire didn’t melt. But then again they had just seen the review that I had posted on their Amazon page – trust Amazon to remind me to review my “purchase” this morning.

At the Intermarche I went in for a loaf of bread. That took seconds but going through the checkout took half an hour as a stagiare – a summer student who had been left on her own at the tills tried her best to deal with a queue of 20 people.

At the petrol station I bought a bottle of gas – my first for 15 months seeing as I have a decent woodstove that I cooked on all through the winter. Last year the gas cost €25 – this year it’s €36, and I had a few things to say about that too.

All in all, I was glad to go out and about.

Better news at the Post Office, though. I’ve sent back the Nikon D5000
camera for repair – downloaded all of the instructions and the address label and so on.

When I sent the old Pentax K100D back last year it cost me an arm and a leg to post it, but when I handed over the parcel and label and enquired about the price, I was told that it was “carriage-paid”.

Well, good old Nikon, hey? Let’s see what happens about that.

But returning to our gas bottle for just a moment. 15 months or so that I’ve had my new woodstove – costing €270. The wood burnt in it has cost me nothing.

With the gas bottles, I was getting through one every three weeks when I was running the heating – and probably a darn sight more when the temperature dropped minus 16°C.

By my reckoning, running the heat from November until mid-March is about 20 weeks. Say, 7 gas bottles at €36 a time – €252. One more period with the fire on and it’s paid for itself already.

-1

EPIC HALL

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