Tag Archives: shower

Sunday 2nd August 2015 – PHEW!

I’m glad that it was Sunday today and I could have a lie-in. Because I was thoroughly exhausted after my journeys during the night.

It started off with me looking for a vehicle to convert into a mobile home (obviously what’s going on in North America at the moment is preying on my mind). I ended up with a Leyland Leopard 53-seater with a Plaxton Supreme body – the body from 1979-81. It was blue, the same colour that YNT was when we bought it, with the company name in black block letters down the side. I had it parked in Buchan Grove but, thinking on now, it was on the wrong side of the road. We moved on from there to a newish house on a housing estate and Nerina appeared. We met in a dark and gloomy bar like the Crown Hotel in Nantwich, and she was telling me that she was going to move back. And so she did, but with a proviso that every now and again she would be staying in a hotel somewhere. But whenever she did, she was always back by 21:00. We ended up at my father’s, who was actually Terry, and he’d moved into a new house which had had half of the side wall demolished. It had been rebuilt but the repair and the bricklaying was dreadful – even I could do better. But as I said to Terry, at least it’s done and it’s easy to tidy it up.

So after that, it was 10:00 when I arose and quite right too. I was still not on the same planet as everyone else but a coffee dealt with that.

I’ve been doing more of this updating the blog and with summer having dramatically returned (189.9 amp-hours of surplus electrical energy – a record as far as I can tell) and water in the dump load off the scale, I put 5 litres of hot water into the solar shower and had the nicest shower that I have ever had.

Round to Liz and Terry’s for rehearsals and Liz had had a go at making home-made ice-cream, which wasn’t bad at all. Terry gave me some screwdriver bits that he had bought for me, and Liz had a cardboard box of supplies which I promptly forgot.

On the way back, there was one of the biggest moons that I have ever seen – really impressive, it was. And back here, I had some stuff to do and then off to bed as I have an early start in the morning.

Liz is off to Riom for a hospital appointment, Terry has some work, so I’m chauffeuring.

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Tuesday 21st July 2015 – I PASSED …

… the inspection today. Rosemary came by and gave the place her seal of approval.

And so she should have, too. I was awake long before the alarm went off, having my breakfast by the time it finally did, and then, fortified by a pot of strong coffee, I attacked the house.

The attic is tidier now then it has ever been since I have been living in it and there is no doubt about that. The rubbish has been taken out and the composting bin emptied and cleaned.

The bedroom had a good clean-around too and I even managed to bring a little order into the chaos that is the ground floor where I’ve been working. All the tools have been put away, the floor has been swept with all of the sawdust now in a tidy pile, and there are pathways through the tulips where one can tiptoe without breaking one’s neck falling over something.

I even managed to give some attention to the shower room, and I emptied and cleaned out the beichstuhl, even though it didn’t need it, but one can never be too considerate to one’s guests.

All in all, Rosemary was impressed and awarded me half a melon, which went down a treat for pudding this evening. She arrived at 14:00 and was here until 18:25 – some flying visit! I treated myself to a shower too, although I had to wait until 19:45 and the water had cooled down to a delightful 38.5°C – the temperature at 18:26 was a mere 42.0°C – not far off the highest that it has ever been.

I don’t mind visitors as long as I know that they are coming. It’s a good opportunity and incentive for me to tidy up and clean the place. And it does need it sometimes. I ought to pay much more attention to my accommodation.

But I’m surprised that I had the energy to do all of that this morning, seeing as I had been on my travels again. I was in a Ford Cortina estate (they aren’t half featuring quite regularly in my nocturnal ramblings these days) and testing the handbrake by the simple expedient of rolling backwards down a hill on this new housing estate and pulling on the lever. Of course, in this case the handbrake didn’t work and the car gathered speed. The houses at the bottom loomed up rather too rapidly for my liking and so I did a handbrake turn (with no handbrake, of course!) to pull up parallel to the kerb. A tabby kitten came out of the house right by where I was stopped and so I started to stroke it. Then the cat’s owner came out to see what was happening, and it was none other than a girl who has been previously described in these pages as “the one that got away”. Anyway, she invited me in for a coffee and we had a really good nostalgic chat about old times.

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Friday 17th July 2015 – WE ARE NOT ALONE!

I had a visitor this evening, and peering through the gloom I managed to take a photo of it.

A nice deer has come out this evening looking for food, or perhaps looking for Strawberry Moose – after all, it is that time of year and he does need to get back into practice seeing as how he’ll be off to Canada in about three or four weeks time.

I really don’t understand why anyone would want to kill anything as beautiful and graceful as this.

I was awake once more before the alarm clock, mainly due to the heat, and after breakfast I had another really good session on my wen pages. The trouble is though that the more I do, the more there is to do and rather than catching up, I’m falling even further behind.

I was driven out of the attic by the heat too, and I ended up wedged in a corner in the bedroom with the fan blowing full-on at me. Even then, it was almost impossible to keep cool.

After lunch I turned the house upside-down looking for some more tongue-and-grooving but that was completely unsuccessful. There is now no alternative but to go to Montlucon tomorrow and buy some more.

What i did do was to sort out the plasterboarding in the shower room ready for tiling and ready for finishing off the ceiling, and then to attend to some more outstanding bits of wiring. And that was where I reached at knocking-off time.

I finished off today by having a good shower – more to cool me down than to actually clean me off. And that’s me set up for the weekend now.

All ready for Montlucon, in fact.

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Wednesday 15th July 2015 – I’VE FINISHED …

… the flying shelf this afternoon.

It took quite some effort and a pair of arms about 2 metres longer than mine, but nevertheless, after some considerable amount of ado about a great deal, I managed to do it. Strangely enough, the part that I thought would be very difficult was comparatively easy, and the part that I had expected to do quite easily was the part that took the longest.

However, looking for tools, nuts and washers was a considerable part of this too. But then that’s only to be expected.

It’s not as good as I would have liked – I can see several shortcomings in my work, but the design was good anyway. Just the execution was wrong and I’ll have to do better than this if I do it again.

But anyway, it looks OK if you don’t look too closely, and everything works as it is supposed to, so I suppose that that is something.

I was on my travels last night, visiting a football ground at a sports club in Crewe with a cement mixer – the lorry-based cement mixer thing. Someone connected with my family had connections there and they had ordered the cement, and meeting up with this person was the last thing on either of our minds. So I tipped the cement and when I tilted up the mixer into the vertical position, the lorry started to roll back. But someone from the football club grabbed hold of the bumper of the truck and hung onto it to stop it moving.

I was up before the alarm clock and so I spent a very profitable morning on the laptop doing some various assorted computer work, including finishing off a couple of radio programmes. I even managed to telephone the insurance company to have a duplicate label for Caliburn sent to me – which means that I will definitely find it now.

I had to go into Pionsat to buy some bread today for lunch, and also to try out the new bank card that I have received.

And tonight, I had a lovely warm solar shower that has made me fit for anything.

Tomorrow, I’ll be finishing the ceiling in the shower room, or at least, doing as much as I can.

Monday 6th July 2015 – NOW HERE’S AN INTERESTING DISCUSSION.

Our Hero – “is it tomorrow that we are recording at Marcillat?”
Liz – “that’s right – at 09:30”
Our Hero – “ohhh” … pause … “I suppose that I’d better go home then”

Yes, the Bane of Britain has done it again hasn’t he? Gone to Marcillat on the wrong day. Still, it could have been worse. It was a nice drive out and in any case, at least it was a day early and not a day late.

And I’d been on my travels in the night. I was in Glasgow, the funniest city in Europe (everyone who goes there comes back in stitches) organising some kind of football training, and then I’d taken the Metro with Strawberry Moose. The train was stuck in the station for a while and so, knowing that I would awaken as soon as the train set off, I allowed myself to go into a deep sleep. But before I did, I took my trousers off and hung them over the back of the seat in front. Sure enough, I awoke as soon as the train moved, and I prepared to alight at the next station. But I couldn’t find my trousers. There was a pair of shorts there but they were nothing to do with me. Of course I made a fuss and the lady driver told me that seeing as how we hadn’t reached the first stop, no-one could have alighted from the train with my trousers. However, a couple of people had boarded the train and alighted before it had set off. I carried on the argument and a couple of the passengers started to become agitated. But none of this was finding my trousers.
Ironically, I’d been reading a little about the Glasgow Underground yesterday evening and also something comnected with North-West Glasgow and the Underground, which was where all of this was going on.

My morning wasn’t wasted though, as I did two more radio programmes – or, at least, half-done them. These are the rock programmes for Radio Anglais and I’ve done the miscellaneous programmes for two more months. I just need to do the two live concerts and find a radio commentary for one of the programmes.

After lunch, I made the shelf that will fit between the door and the stud wall by the beichstuhl. And the new Bosch circular saw – nice and lightweight, it cut through a pine plank as if there was nothing there. A nice neat cut, no need to sand it down, no whining, no rattling, and the inverter showed no sign of distress. This was the best circular saw that I’ve ever used (and so it ought to be at the price that I paid for it) and if it lasts the pace (because one or two people are a little sceptical about it) it’ll be just the job.

I also cut down a 300mm plank into 2x150mm planks, and the circular saw hardly broke wind doing it. But do you remember ages ago when I told you that the 600mm pine planks were actually 605mm? Well, the 300mm planks are actually 295mm. So much for Brico Depot’s precise measuring.

I had yet another shower to cool me down afterwards (I’m having my money’s worth from the home-made solar shower) and made a mega-red-pepper-and-lentil curry for the next 4 days. I may as well start the week as I mean to go on.

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Friday 3rd July 2015 – THIS MUST BE SOME KIND OF A RECORD

Today’s temperature outside reached a massive 39.4°C and that can’t be far short of a record. No wonder I had a hard time starting work today.

This morning I wasn’t as bright and breezy as yesterday, even though I had the Dawn Chorus again giving me a helping hand. After breakfast I mooched around for a little and then plucked up the courage to attack the radio programmes.The second lot for Radio Arverne are now half-completed and should be done by Sunday, and I have to check over the rock programmes for Radio Tartasse because they are being recorded on Monday.

When I finally managed to attack the bathroom, it was really slow progress. I’ve only done the first three rows of the ceiling, but then again each one had to be cut and shaped by hand so it isn’t surprising. In fact, because of the way that I’ve done everything, there’s going to be a lot of the ceiling that’s going to have to be cut and shaped by hand.

I’ve also had to fit a supporting strut in the ceiling. There’s going to be a flying shelf in the bathroom and the brackets to hang it from the ceiling have to be fitted, and that’s why I needed the supporting strut.

Apart from that, I had to unload Caliburn ready for my trip to Montlucon tomorrow and you’ve no idea how much I didn’t want to do that in the heat that we were having. But at least the water in the solar shower was 39.0°C so that I could have a really good soak.

Now here’s a thing.

Apparently in the UK, there’s been a minute’s silence in memory of those who were killed in Tunisia. Now – can you remember if we ever had a minute’s silence in memory of anyone who was killed by an IRA terrorist?

This is an old Nazi trick and the Nazis used it to perfection. Whenever an “atrocity” was committed by a hated enemy, they would have these ceremonial minutes’ silence, parade funerals, eulogies and all that kind of thing. They whip up the emotions and subsequently the hatred, and then the Government can go ahead and invade another country to “revenge these dreadful deaths” and the public will be so whipped up by hatred that they can’t see what’s going on. And when you see the outpourings of the Tory Government, that echo the comments that the Nazis made about a death in Danzig or the Sudetenland, you realise just how much the Tories have learned from the Nazis and how much of it they have put into practice.

When it came to whipping up hatred against the Irish Republic or the Vatican over the deaths and other atrocities committed by the IRA, the Government was strangely silent. But when it comes to doing it against brown-skinned people, all of the gloves are off. This tells you all that you need to know about the British Government’s racist policies.

And don’t forget that it was the West that declared war on Islam, with the bushbaby’s “crusade” speech. And just who is so naive to believe that when you declare war on someone and start to fight them, they are not going to fight back?

You couldn’t make that up could you? It just shows you the depths to which the intellectual capacity of the Western world has sunk.

Wednesday 1st July 2015 – NOW, HERE’S A THING

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a solar shower. It’s an old enamel shower base with a wooden frame built around it and infilled with corrugated plastic roofing sheets. On top of it is a black plastic box filled with water and connected to a shower standpipe and covered with an old caravan window.

It all sits outside absorbing the heat from the sun and a couple of times a week I can have a shower. Some times though, I have to put a few litres of hot water into it to bring up the water to a comfortable temperature.

Today, though, this was the first time, so my records tell me, that I have EVER had to put cold water into it in order to cool it down to a comfortable temperature. It’s thoroughly crazy, this temperature. And even with the cold water in there, it was still flamin’ ‘ot.

Mind you, it wasn’t like that this morning. It was all overcast and cloudy. Not good weather at all, even though it was hot. And I’d left the electricity on all night and had the fan going in the bedroom to cool me down while I slept.

I was on my travels too. back at school, school uniform and all. Properly back at school although, strangely enough, I didn’t recognise any of my fellow pupils. One person who was there though was Zero whom I mentioned the other day. What’s she doing at my school?

This morning after breakfast I cracked on with the radio programmes – doing the additional notes for the Radio Arverne sessions. The first lot is half-done and I’ll finish off the rest tomorrow. Then I can start on the second show.

And ironically, by pure and utter coincidence, a major topic has appeared right out of nowhere and landed on my laptop as it were. Something very important and very topical. “A sign from the Gods” I said, and stashed it away ready for use in a week or so.

I was interrupted by the postie who brought me my circular saw. “What happened yesterday?” I asked her, and she gave me a blank look. It seems that although La Poste promises to deliver on a certain date, it receives the parcels at the central tri, in my case at St Eloy, but they don’t come out to the Post Office at Pionsat until the following day. Meantime, to cover their tracks with Amazon, they pretend to have delivered the products the previous day.

Thoroughly dishonest.

After lunch, I attacked the bathroom door. It’s now sanded down so that it fits, a washer stuck in between the top and bottom halves of the hinges so that it doesn’t scrape the floor, and the mortise latch for the door is now fitted and the handles are attached.

Even more so, the closer in the door frame has been chiseled out and the closer frame fitted, so we now have a door that opens and closes properly. This really is progress.

Tomorrow I have to drill out the bottom of the door for the air vent and cut down a floorboard or two to make all of the door jambs. When that’s all done, I can mask everywhere off and varnish all of the wood.

But it is so impressive, this door. I’m well-pleased with that.

Then I had my shower, and went off to Marcillat. It seems that I’ve been co-opted onto the management committee of Radio Tartasse and I’m not sure why. Clearly something’s afoot, and I’m not talking about that thing on the end of my leg either.

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Sunday 28th June 2015 – I’VE FINALLY MANAGED …

… to have a day off work today. And not only that, I had a decent lie-in too.

Mind you, I had to go to visit the beichstuhl and I did think about going off for a coffee but when I checked the time, it was only 05:45 so there was little chance of that happening. I went back to bed and slept until 10:00. And quite right too!

After breakfast, I reviewed the stuff that I had written for Radio Anglais and found, much to my surprise (or maybe not, as the case might be) that I had a totally new slant today on some of the stuff that i had written. Consequently, I had to amend some of it and edit out a pile of it from the notes so that I can review it for another time. I mean, it has to be correct.

I also built up a database of venues so that there’s a list of websites from which I can extract events to broadcast, and simple contact boxes from where I can copy-paste the information en bloc into the notes rather than having to type it out individually every time.

After lunch, I sorted out all of the washing that needed doing, including the bedding. Seeing as it was 38°C in the solar shower, I had a beautiful soak and I’m finally going to have clean bedding. I’d bought some new linen sheets and quilt cover last time I was at the Auchan and I went to use those, but much to my surprise, there were no pillow cases in the set.

Even more surprisingly, I’d had some pillow cases the same colour when I lived in Winsford 35 years ago and I had hardly ever used them. And even more more surprisingly, I managed to lay my hands on them. Isn’t it good having a well laid-out wardrobe and everything stowed away nicely?

I went round to Cécile’s to check on her house and make sure that everything was OK. That gave me an opportunity to borrow her washing machine to do a load of stuff while I went round to Liz and Terry’s to rehearse our radio show.

Liz cooked a gorgeous vegetable pie for tea and the dessert was out of this world – something like a Black Forest Gateau in a wine glass. I’ve never had a dessert as nice as this.

I picked up the washing on the way home and now I’m going to have an early nice – a nice clean me in nice clean bedding. How I’m looking forward to this!

But something interesting has happened on the Social Networking account that I use. I once had a friend – a friendship that ended quite acrimoniously over a posting that he made about me on another site – and he had a daughter who used to confide in me quite a lot about the problems that she was having at home at the time but whom I haven’t seen since then.

All of a sudden, my Social Networking site has put her on my “list of potential friends” whom I should contact. So what’s happening here? How come it is that this site has made some kind of connection between the two of us? Of the couple of billion people who have an account on there, this would be an astonishing coincidence if it’s been a haphazard connection.

Clearly there’s something going on here. I wish that I knew just what it was.

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Friday 26th June 2015 – DUNNO …

… who does the controle techniques around here but I hope it’s not the guy who does the controle techniques on Caliburn.

I’m the first to admit that I used to have cars with sills like this, but that was 25 years ago in another life and things were so much different in those days. I didn’t think that you would go very far with a car like this these days.

I’ve been out and about doing my shopping this evening. I know that I said that I would go to Montlucon tomorrow but I’ve ordered my circular saw by post and I don’t really need the tiles next week as I still haven’t finished the door, and then I have the ceiling to do, and I had forgotten about that.

What with having Monday off to go a-radioing, which means that I’ll have to do about 150 miles with a quarter of a tonnes of tiles in the back of Caliburn and before I go to Montlucon to buy the tiles, to empty Caliburn of all of the stuff that’s still in there.

For all of those reasons, I’ve postponed my trip to Montlucon until next weekend.

This morning, I was up early yet again and after breakfast, carried on with my website for a couple of hours. And it made me realise that I seem to have slipped rather unconsciously back into how I used to be when I lived in Belgium – doing the writing stuff in the morning before getting on with the heavy work in the afternoon. Especially as, these last few days, I’ve had the coffee machine bubbling away through the morning, such has been the amount of solar energy that I’ve received.

I’ve fitted all of the hinges to the door now and had a go at hanging it. It’s certainly the most difficult door that I have ever hung, even though I’ve taken more time over this than I have over any other door that I’ve hung.

The door wasn’t quite right – or to be more accurate, the floor isn’t quite right and the door is fouling.

I’ve had to cut off 4mm from the foot of the door and that’s not easy without a circular saw. I’ve done it by hand with the rough-cut saw and you can see how I’ve done it.

I use a length of aluminium in “L” section as a guide, clamped to the surface and then I saw along the guide. It’s not too bad actually although it takes quite a while to do it.

I’ve not re-tried the door yet. I’ve drilled and chiselled it out for the mortice closer. I had to hunt around for one of those because there were none in the house. In the end I found three in the barn, one of which didn’t have a lock so I’m using that. Instead, I’ll fit a little bolt on the inside of the door. I mean, there’s only me who lives here so it doesn’t really make much difference.

I could have finished the door if I had had another hour or so to work, but I was distracted.

I ended up on the phone to Canada for ages. I need to register Strider (my Ford Ranger) in Canada and for that I need an insurance policy and an address. This meant hassling Service New Brunswick – it’s been four years since I first applied for a street address for my parcel of land at Mars Hill Road. Anyway, after much binding in the marsh, I now have an address and I can progress.

At the insurance company, they were rather bewildered. They haven’t had a request like mine before – a person with a foreign driving licence wishing to insure a Canadian vehicle in Canada. They eventually decided to go away and discuss things with their Head Office and see what happens. I have to phone them back on Tuesday.

And then, with going shopping, I checked the temperature in the solar shower. 37.5°C with no added hot water and that was perfect. At 17:45 then I had a glorious hot shower and it was lovely. And then I could wander off into St Eloy and the shops.

So you see what I mean about being distracted, as well as needing an extra hour to finish off.

I might even have a go at it tomorrow.

Monday 22nd June 2015 – BACK TO WORK …

… although I didn’t feel much like it. I didn’t have anything like a late night, but it was still difficult to crawl out of bed.

After breakfast, I did a pile of work on the computer again and that took me though to midday. And then I attacked the shower room.

The worktop is now in position, and all of the plasterboard has been fitted around it (except on the stud wall where the pipes will be running).

And I remembered why I hadn’t fitted the mounting rail on one side too. That was because there isn’t enough room to manoeuvre the worktop into position with both mounting rails in place. I had to take it out, fit the worktop and then refit the rail

But tiling the walls is going to be interesting. According to the plasterboard that I have fitted, the walls are out of plumb bu 25mm over a distance of a metre. So with 18m² of wall to tile, you can imagine what that is going to look like when it’s finished.

There were some bits of blank wall that needed plasterboarding too, and I had forgotten about these. I’ve made a start on them – one part has been done and I’m fitting the studding for the second. The third doesn’t need studding but just a bit of “dot and dab” – I’m sure that I have some stuff for that somewhere, and I’ll look tomorrow.

Water in the home-made immersion heater was really hot – off the scale in fact – and the water in the solar shower was at 32.5°C. 8 litres of water out of the immersion heater into the solar tank took that up to a glorious 38.5°C and I had the best shower that I have had for ages. But the wiring on the immersion heater is heating up again. I’m really going to have to have a good look at this next time we have a grey day.

Later, I made a mega-red pepper and lentil curry, enough for four days. Three says’ worth has gone into the fridge in the vacuum jars and that will keep me going quite happily for the next few days.

But I might not be working here tomorrow. Rob rang up and there’s the possibility of some folding stuff for the next few days.

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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 – THOSE OAK WORKTOPS …

… that I bought in Eching the other week and which I doubted were oak due to their astonishingly good price, they are indeed certainly oak, or something very much like it. You just ask my Ryobi circular saw. The poor thing has gone to lie down in a darkened room to recover, and I had to fetch out the 650-wattmains-powered circular saw.

Even that struggled, but eventually it cut the worktop as required and we could all breathe a sigh of relief.

As for trimming off the corners, I didn’t even think about the Ryobi – I just grabbed the 400-watt mains jigsaw and after much binding in the marsh, it managed to do the job.

Yes, I’ve discovered a little bit of motivation today and I’ve been out working. Cutting the worktop for the bathroom and, as an aside, using the off-cut as the top of the beichstuhl to replace the pine plank that’s there. I may as well go for co-ordination while I’m at it.

This is how the bathroom will look when it’s finished, whenever that might be.

I’m not going for an inset sink, following my catastrophe a while back. This type of sink, a mounted sink, will be just as good and will keep the strength and rigidity of the worktop, something that was sadly lacking with the previous one.

I will however need to lower the mounting rails by 15 cms so that the top of the sink is at a consistent height.

In other news, I’ve found (at long last) a decent ripper for downloading streams from popular video and music channels on the internet. It’s offered as an add-on for my web browser and came on line on 15th April.

My plan with this is simple. I have about a thousand LPs from the good old days and it has been my intention to copy them to *.mp3. I’ve even bought a USB turntable for just that purpose. However, it takes far too long to do that and all of the setting up that you need to do and the editing afterwards, it’s a never-ending task.

What I’m planning to do is to download the albums corresponding to those that I already own and have paid for. That way, there won’t be a royalty or copyright issue and that way I can bring myself up to date. I’m currently listening to one album that I’ve downloaded – Neil Young’s Ragged Glory – probably the best rock album that Neil Young has ever made – a real powerhouse album and one that I haven’t played for … ooohhh … it’s 15 years since I last had my real hi-fi set up.

As well as that, I had a lovely solar shower today. And a sign of the times is that it wasn’t a heated shower either. Just the sun – that’s all it took to bring the water up to 37°C and it was glorious. We had that much sun that the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater went off the temperature scale (over 70°C) in mid afternoon and it’s still there even now.

Now I’m all clean and ready for bed. But not before I tell you about my travels last night. I was back playing in groups again (we had this the other night, remember?) and the guy with whom I mostly played and I were trying to get a band together. We were however woefully short of equipment and people kept telling us to ‘go and see so-and-so – he has piles of stuff that he will lend you that he has spare”. And everyone that people mentioned were people with whom we had played all those years ago but we had “moved them on” for various reasons. The irony was that we were the ones struggling and they had all gone on to make it big.

And we had a few young groupies too. They all lived in a big heap under a continental quilt and there was a pile of loose underwear floating around. I kept asking them wbout each piece – to whom it belonged, all that kind of thing. But no-one owned up to anything so I threatened to have them all out of bed and do an identity parade.

I know that I’ve said it before … "and you will say it again" – ed … but I wish that my real life was even half as exciting as what goes on when I am deep in the arms of Morpheus.

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Friday 8th May 2015 – HERE …

.. is where I spent last night – at a motorway service area at Heverlee, near Leuven. And I slept the sleep of the dead too – totally painless it was. Didn’t feel a thing.

And even better, there was a nice hot shower available too. And didn’t I enjoy that? I haven’t felt so good in ages.

Mind you, I forgot to buy a bottle of water and so my morning coffee, in a roadside rest area while they cleared away an accident down the road, and coffee made with sparkling water is certainly different, that’s for sure.

I wasted the morning not doing very much at all, and then met up with Alison for lunch. Alison and I worked together for an American company for almost a year, and we both walked out at more-or-less the same time. And for the same reasons – basically that American companies have no idea of the notion of cultivating staff loyalty, and rule their employees by fear. There’s no place in my environment, nor in Alison’s environment either, for an attitude such as that, and we can’t understand why it is that other people allow themselves to be pushed around.

Afterwards, I went to check up on Marianne and to have a chat. It’s hard to believe that it’s two years since she passed away, but then at this sort of age time passes quickly.

It seems that I wasn’t the only person to go to visit her either, for there were a couple of other pots of flowers that had been left on her grave. I’m glad that she hasn’t been forgotten and that she is being looked after by people locally. It’s not feasible for me to come to Brussels to tend to her as often as I like.

It’s also VE day today – the end of the War in Europe, so it’s only right to go to pay a visit to the interred in another part of the cemetery here at Ixelles. There are some military graves here, but there are also some graves of civilian victims of the Gestapo.

There are many people, one or two of my acquaintances amongst them unfortunately, who criticise the French and the Belgians, and a few other people too, for what they see as a lack of resolution by the population of those countries when it came to resisting the German invaders.

But if you have a look at these gravestones, you’ll see fusillé – “shot”, or executé – executed, or decapité – decapitated. These were the risks that people were running every day for four and a half years of the Occupation, so it’s hard to be as resolute as some might like when you are risking all of this.

And, of course, it’s very easy to beat the drum when there’s an ocean between you and the invader. I’d be interested to see just how brave these critics would have been had they been over here amongst the Gestapo during the Occupation.

I braved the rush-hour traffic and set out for Germany. I’d forgotten just how busy the roads could be on a Friday afternoon and I’m glad that I’m no longer involved in any of this.
And here I am crossing the border into Germany not too far from Aachen at the back of Liege.

The camera on my new phone has quite a high resolution and isn’t far off what the Nikon D5000 can come up with on a good day. It’s also easy to use on the move so moving pictures are back with us again.

However, I needed to be careful. Can you make out the blue flashing lights just down the road? I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been waiting for me.

It seems that I have entered my destinations into the Satnav in the wrong order and it’s doing the route backwards. That’s clearly no good so I need to change it all. At a rest area at the side of the Autobahn I pulled up to reprogramme it, but then I thought “what they heck” and it’s here where I’m going to be bedding down, German police permitting.

And talking of the Police, I’ve managed this year to avoid having a run-in with the Belgian police this year. Either my luck was in or else they must have been all asleep.

-3

29th April 2015 – TODAY IS ANOTHER DAY …

… when I smell all coconutty.It was a much better day today and the temperature in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the excess solar energy reached 64°C. Consequently, when I knocked off at 18:30 this evening, I put some hot water in a bucket, cooled it down with some cold water, and then had one of my patent “jug showers” in the corner of the verandah. And wasn’t that lovely?

So today, I’ve varnished all of the woodwork that I cut yesterday. So far it’s had two coats on either side but tomorrow morning it will have the third coat on the outer side.

That is, apart from the pine board that will be the front of the beichstuhl. That’s had three coats ion the other side, and nothing on the inside, and for the simple reason that I’m going to tile all of the inside of the beichstuhl. If I’m having the fittings for the composting toilet in there, it needs to have a wipe-down surface and varnished pine boards don’t work.

I’m even going to tile the floor in there too – something that I said that I wouldn’t do, but cleaning has to be the thing with a composting toilet. Consequently, I spent about half an hour going through all of the odds and ends of tiles to find enough for the job.

I’ve started to refit the plasterboard too, which of course I’ll need to do if I’m going to do the tiling.

In other news, I’ve made advances with the electrical system here. Having had a test-bed in the barn with the old internet Livebox running on 12-volt DC non-stop for 10 days, I’ve set up the new one in here and that’s now running on 12-volt DC instead of the mains and an adapter. It took ages to set up, but the situation was greatly eased when I remembered to switch on the Livebox.

But this is yet more progress around the house.

And on my travels during the night, I was joined by someone else with whom I wouldn’t aprticularly care to pss any real time. I was in my car and explaining to the aforementioned about MP3s in car radios with either memory sticks or SD cards – an invention which hadn’t, apparently, penetrated into the depths of darkest Crewe.

But all of these unwelcome people turning up in my nocturnal voyages. Whatever is this all about?

-3

Monday 13th April 2015 – I SMELL ALL WHEATY TODAY

And the reason for this is that I’ve had another shower.

I started off today by dismantling the solar water heater and giving it a really good clean out. The solar water heater by the way is a black plastic box with an old caravan window over the top, and the back is insulated with some of this space blanket insulation. It’s stuck on the roof of the outside shower cubicle where it catches the sun quite nicely. The water then descends by gravity through a tap and then to a shower head.

It needed a really good clean too as it’s not been used in a while and there were all kinds of dead leaves inside the tank busily decomposing, and the window needed a really good clean too.

Next job was to fix the guttering on the uphill lean-to. The guttering has become detached because it’s too low and the door into the upstairs but where I keep all of the paint keeps knocking it.

But this wasn’t as easy as it might sound as I needed the folding ladder, and that’s all overgrown with brambles that have grown over the wall from Lieneke’s field and which one of the days we’ll have an accident with 5 litres of diesel.

I had to cut the ladder out of the brambles and that led to a general clearing of the patch of ground in front of the woodshed. Now I need a place where I can have a garden fire to dispose of all of the dead brambles.

So once I’d freed the ladder, I could dismantle the guttering, reposition the brackets and then refix the guttering. Now, not only does it slope all of the right way, but it clears the door too.

I’ve run a mains cable through from the house into the downhill lean-to, via the hole that I drilled through the wall ages ago. And with the electricity now in there, at lunchtime I did another load of washing. That’s come up nicely but there’s still a pile to do. It might not be done this week though as the water level in the water butts is quite low. 5mm of rain would do quite nicely right now to fill the water back up again.

I found 3 centimes in the bottom of the washing machine too. I hope that I’m not going to be done for money laundering.

After sitting outside eating lunch (it was really beautiful today again) and supervising the washing, I went and attacked the shower room and that’s almost empty now. Tomorrow I can start on fitting the shelves in there and the composting toilet.

Finally, the water in the solar heater was at 33.5°C. 5 litres of water at 61°C out of the 12-volt immersion heater soon sorted that out, and I had a really nice outdoor shower, followed by a shave and a change of clothes.

2 showers in 2 consecutive days? Whatever next? I’ll be washing myself away at this rate.

And I was on my travels during the night, working on behalf of the occupying forces during the day but directing resistance activities during the night. Nerina was here in this journey and we were somewhere in the UK in one of these areas with small Victorian detached houses with big gardens. The road to where we lived was a tortuous route though this built-up area but all of a sudden someone had put a direct road through the houses that curved around to where we were.

-2

Sunday 12th April 2015 – I SMELL ALL COCONUTTY AGAIN.

A gorgeous day again, clear blue sky, tons of solar energy and temperature of 46°C in the verandah. Obviously, a nice warm shower is called for, even if it does consist of a bucket of hot water out of the home-made immersion heater and a jug to pour it on.

Now I’m nice and clean, with nice clean clothes and I’m even going to have new clean bedding tonight. Ohhh luxury!

What I might even do tomorrow, if the weather keeps up, is to do another load of washing. And then maybe even a third sometime this week too. If I can clear all of the backlog I shall really be in my element.

Apart from that, I’ve not done much today. I should have gone to Montfermy to see Pionsat’s 2nd XI play but after they let me down last week and I drove all that way and back for nothing, I wasn’t feeling like having another long wasted journey.

Not only that, today’s football match in the Welsh Premier League between my team, Bangor City, and Connah’s Quay Nomads was being streamed live on the internet. So I wasn’t going to miss out on my weekend’s helping of footy.

Mind you, I don’t know why I bothered. Today was the first time that I’ve seen 90 minutes of a Bangor City match this season, and it’s clear to see why they are struggling near the foot of the table. They were totally disinterested, lacking motivation, and playing as if they were out for a Sunday afternoon stroll. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen two such ineffective forwards in my life. They seemed to be totally out of the game and didn’t put the Connah’s Quay defence under any pressure at all.

On the other hand, Connah’s Quay have recently signed veteran old warhorse Cortez Belle and they played him up front today. He was an absolute nightmare for the Bangor defence. He was up there all of the time, putting the defence under continual pressure, and that was what made the difference.

But if Bangor City do survive this season, then next season is going to see some very thin pickings indeed if the team can’t find any better motivation than this. You don’t need to be particularly skilful to sow all kinds of seeds of panic in an opposition defence as long as you have the right kind of drive, determination and aggression, as Cortez Belle proved today. Bangor City needs to find that, and find it pretty quickly too.

-2

EPIC HALL

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