Tag Archives: tidying up

Thursday 24th December 2009 – The one thing …

… about the drive down to Liz and Terry’s is the view from the birdwatching site just outside St Gervais d’Auvergne.

Although of course it’s always the same view, the different weather and lighting conditions make it seem totally different each time I drive by.

Although the snow has all-but-gone around here and even the Puy-de-Dome is bare, the Mont Dore and the Puy de Sancy are still plastered with the white stuff and look quite impressive.

This morning I had a lie-in until about 10:30, but I reckoned I needed it, being awoken by a torrential downpour at about 05:00.

So after a leisurely breakfast (I’m on holiday, remember) I bit the bullet, donned the chemical suit, the gas mask and the rubber gloves and cleaned the fridge. The fridge hadn’t been switched on for a few weeks (firstly as an electricity economy measure and secondly, who needs a fridge in this weather?) and was looking like it hadn’t been switched on for a couple of decades.

After lunch I read a book for a while and then went off to Liz and Terry’s as they had invited me round for the evening, which was nice of them. What was even nicer was never mind the vegan chocolate cake – Liz had baked me a vegan Christmas cake complete with icing. That was ever so nice of her and I am well-impressed.

And to tell you about the weather today, and how perverse it is. All day we have had heavy grey clinging cloud that has cut down once more the electricity I have available. But onn the way home tonight the skies were perfectly clear, thousands of stars, lovely bright conditions.

Why can’t we have this weather in the daytime? It’s about 4 or 5 times now that this has happened while I am in “energy saving” mode due to the overcast conditions since November 26th.

And you just watch tomorrow – as soon as the sun rises over the valley across the way, the clouds will close right in and I’ll be struggling again. It’s really getting on my nerves.

-12

Wednesday 23rd December 2009 – I thought that I would post …

… a pic of the completed stairs on the ground floor. It’ll take my mind off the gruesome weather.

I woke up this morning to that weird golden thing in the sky and not a cloud in sight. So I quickly shinned up onto the roof and onto the roof of the old Luton Transit to brush the snow off the solar panels to take advantage of everything.

But I needn’t have bothered for 10 minutes later the wind changed, a whole heap of cloud came over and blocked the sky. We had 10mm of rain!

And as I type I have the long-range weather forecast up and every day for the next week is totally overcast with rain forecast. Monday and Tuesday we are promised 15 and 16 degrees. They say Centigrade but I bet it’ll be more like Fahrenheit.

So I stayed in and shovelled up tons of rubbish and piled it up elsewhere and I now have a path through the rubble to the stairs. it’s impressive. I also tidied up a few things and sorted out the wood. You can see the door that I bought in the Brico Depot sale. That’s for the front – lots of glass to let in the light. Light is at a premium around here.

At lunchtime Francois came round, with a woman in tow. He was amazed at the progress since he last visited here in September. This woman is renovating and she is interested in recycled materials and Francois had told her about my reccycled plastic slates. She was well-impressed.

This afternoon I started to tidy up the verandah which I use as a kitchen. But my heart wasn’t in it “No surprise there – it’s a cleaning job” … ed – and at 17:00 I called it a day. And then crashed out up here for an hour. All this work has been taking its toll of me.

-6

Monday 7th December 2009 – I’ve fitted one of my verticals

You can see it in the photo – dead centre of the image up against the wall. Only one vertical though.

I woke up this morning to hear the rain lashing down on the roof again just like the other day. And just like the other day, even though I’m working inside, it’s not very encouraging. I’m wondering when we might have a dry day.

So when I eventually got out of bed and had my breakfast and went up to the first floor where I’m working, it was so perishing dark that I couldn’t actually see anything.

That prompted me hurling out of the window all of the old pallets that were in the pile against the wall and which you may well have seen in other photos. Some were broken, but others survived the fall and so I extended the pallet path that I laid 2 years ago. What with the marsh that’s developing outside, it seemed like a good idea.

So that was the morning accounted for, and in the afternoon I cut and fitted the vertical. It takes hours to do them as they need to be millimetre-perfect and so that involves cutting the lets slightly undersize and then filing them out to fit.

Tonight at the Anglo-French group we had a couple of new arrivals joining in – a French woman and an Austrian woman. They are Buddhists and have come here to be close to the Buddhist monastery in the area. Those of you who remember my blog in its previous home will remember my visit there one Sunday afternoon. And Marianne, the local journalist who sometimes comes to the meetings – she liked my pic from last night and intends to use it to illustrate an article on the village. Not that there’s any dosh in it but if it’s in the paper the villagers will see it and they might be interested in having a copy for themselves. It’s worth a go.

The proprietors of the Hotel in Pionsat where we meet have announced that they are leaving imminently – where to, they don’t know. You need a special kind of mentality to run a place like that and you can’t do it if you have small children and want a family life. Someone is taking over so our continuity is assured. But not so at St Eloy. You may remember that we were locked out of our venue the other week. It seems that the tenants (they were only tenants, not owners) have fled, leaving behind something of a financial muddle. We’ll have to find somewhere else in St Eloy now. Antoine is on the case.

And tomorrow I’ll be carrying on with the verticals if I can trouble myself to climb out of bed. The weather forecast is “no change”.

-9

Wednesday 25th November 2009 – Now you see it …

… now you don’t. That could either refer to all of the mess in what will eventually be the bedroom, which has all been swept up and bagged for binning, or the wall between the stairway and the bedroom, half of which has been demolished.

That wall needs to be demolished and moved one roof-beam in towards the camera. And then with my patent narrow stairs I can fit a U-shaped stairway in.

The space that will be saved by having the stairs in a U-shape will be the bit by the window (at the foot of where the stairs are right now) and that’s where the shower room will be. I’m not sure if you can fit all of the OUSA Executive Committee in there, though.

I need to fit two floor beams in and that will be tomorrow afternoon’s job after I’ve demolished the rest of the wall.

Yes, I’ve gone berserk with a sledgehammer. And also a broom too.

And why not tomorrow morning? Well, Terry is coming round. He needs a hand to fetch some sand and as he has no tow-bar as yet on his new van to pull the trailer, we need to bag it up at the quarry.

Rhys and I were earlier talking about brassieres and the subject seemed to veer round to chastity belts. It reminded me of the time just before Nerina and I were married and we had to go to see the priest.
“Are you chaste?” he asked Nerina
“Quite often” I replied. “And she always lets me catch her“.

And in other news, Day 2 of this public enquiry is going down a storm. Apart from the Government’s case having fallen away to nothing already (and there’s another 9 months to go!), we have a plainted “(Iraq) had shown itself willing to use weapons of mass destruction on its own people and its neighbours and was flouting a range of UN disarmament resolutions.”. We know this of course from yesterday. It was our best friends the Septics who sold the weapons of mass destruction to Iraq and provided the intelligence to enable Iraq to use the weapons to the best effect. And it was also a whole series of British and American companies, in some cases aided and abetted by the British Government, who were encouraging Iraq to flout the resolutions.

But if you want to talk about a country that is using weapons of mass destruction on its own people and flouting a whole range of UN resolutions, where is the criticism of the Zionists and the crimes they are committing against the Palestinians, many of whom are Jews and some of whom – shock, horror – are CHRISTIANS?

And while we are on the subject of the Zionists, there’s this huge outcry about the fact than Iran may one day sometime have a nuclear bomb. Well, so what? The Zionists have plenty and no-one says anything about that. So if they have them, why can’t Iran have them to balance out the power? Keen students of british history will know that all through the 18th and 19th Century it was British foreign policy to keep the peace by having a balance of power.

During the period that the Soviet Union was “confronting” (which it wasn’t – it was strictly abiding by the terms of the Yalta Agreement) the west, the wars involving European powers were few and far between. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA and the UK have been dragging the world through the mud.

Vive la Soviet Union! say I.

-8

Tuesday 24th November 2009 – I lit a fire in my brassiere this evening.

I started off by putting samples of all of the construction material that I had been using in the attic. And I’ll tell you – the effect is frightening. The plasterboard took the longest to burn but eventually it did. Everything else was gone in minutes.

No wonder there are so many conflagrations in domestic property. There won’t be much left of my place if it sets alight.

But the tidying up is progressing, and it’s looking quite impressive downstairs. Another day or so and it’ll be done. The pallets that formed the old floor in the attic, they will have to be chucked out of the window but I can’t move the broken slates yet. They are destined to be used for the footpaths between the raised beds in the new vegetable garden once make a start on that later this winter.

And once the tidying up is completed it will immediately become untidy again as I demolish the wall between the bedroom and the stairway. All the rubble will be used for making the steps outside up into the house.

Claude came round today for a chat and bought me some news. Someone has had a really good stroke of luck – an exceptional one in fact. It’s bad news for me as it happens but I suppose that if I stopped being selfish and looked at it from other people’s points of view I should really be pleased at their exceptional fortune.

I can’t say any more about it right now as there needs to be something of a proper announcement at the right time by the right people in the right places.

In other news, the public enquiry into the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil has got under way. Many people wonder why I call it that, but don’t take my word for it – take that of Australia’s Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

But back to the plot. I was particularly impressed with the phrase “that Saddam had a “continuing intention” to acquire weapons of mass destruction, having used them in the past”. We all know by now that Saddam Hussein had Bacillus Anthracis, Clostridium Botulinum, Clostridium Perfringens, E coli, Histoplasma Capsulatum and Brucella Melitensis, and that he used them on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war. And how do we know this? Because the USA sold them to him and then gave him the satellite photos of Iranian troop movements so that he knew where to aim the chemical weapons.

The other bit that drew my specific attention was that “the sanctions policy in place against Iraq since 1991 …was steadily breaking down”. Here’s one reason why it was breaking down. And here’s another one. And there are plenty more where those came from. No wonder the wheels fell off the sanctions policy when Western companies put greed before ethics and legality.

Another Western company implicated in the breach of sanctions was Matrix-Churchill. They were one of the companies, by the way, that were named and shamed by Michael Moore as having supplied chemical weapons to Iraq. And would their “breach of sanctions” have anything to do with Saddam’s “continuing intention to acquire weapons of mass destruction”? During the company’s trial in a British court for its alleged breach of sanctions, the directors of the company claimed that their breaches of sanctions had been guided by the British Intelligence (there’s an oxymoron) Services and the British Ministry of Defence.

This startling revelation so clearly shocked the Court that the British Minister for Trade, Alan Clark was summoned to give evidence and under oath he was obliged to admit that he had been “economical with the truth” in an earlier statement denying all knowledge of the affair. Of course, the trial collapsed and the directors were awarded compensation.

This entire Iraq affair stinks to high heaven.

-5

Monday 23rd November 2009 – I made myself a brazier today…

… out of an old 25-litre chemicals drum.

Now a brazier is something that you use for burning stuff, not something that a woman puts her boobs in, Rhys. And I have plenty of stuff for burning.

Long-term readers of my outpourings will recall that I already have a brazier – the legendary galvanised steel dustbin with which I am very impressed. But it’s full of ashes and overflowing with other stuff and all of that is extremely damp with the hurricane that is still blowing outside. And the stuff for burning is piling up so I’ll use this, burn stuff in small amounts and then empty the ashes regularly.

Today I’ve started the megtidyup inside the house on the floor below here, getting ready to resume work. I have a brick wall to demolish so I need to make the space to drop it. Then I have to take the stairs out. I was going to make some stairs completely from scratch but it occurs to me that I can use the sides from the one Im taking out, and just narrow the treads and the risers.

In other news, the commune is organising a discussion evening in a week or so’s time. The subject?
“Cremation and Funeral Customs in the Auvergne“.
In a commune of just 270 people where there is an average age of 103 I bet that will go down a storm. Last time they did it, they went on a guided tour of the local crematorium. The superintendant of the crem. got talking to one of the visitors.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“I’m 104” was the reply.
“Well, it’s hardly worth your while going home again, is it?”

They are also organising a visit to an opera at Vichy – you can see what exciting lives we have here. But I’m afraid I shan’t be going. I’m sure I can find plenty of things much more exciting to do than going to an opera – such as visiting the dentists or emptying the beichstuhl. I’m a big fan of Kenneth Williams, who on one occasion was talkiing about the opera with a friend.
“You must admit that Wagner has some really magical moments” said the friend.
“Indeed” replied Kenneth. “But he has some dreadful half-hours“.

But Sir Edward Appleton summed up operas succinctly as far as I am concerned. “I don’t mind whatever language an opera is sung in – as long as it’s sung in a language I don’t understand“.

And the temperature has plummeted. It struggled to 11 degrees outside today and it’s only 14.2 in here right now. I’ll be putting the heater on tomorrow if it doesn’t warm up again.

-11

Sunday 22nd November 2009 – Habemus Papam.

Coming back from Commentry yesterday I could see a huge cloud of smoke in the distance up in the hills in the general direction of where I live. And as I got closer to home the pillar of smoke got more and more intense.

I finally tracked down the smoke – it’s the Abbey at Bellaigues just across the valley from me. There was so much smoke coming out of their chimney that I had to check on the radio to see if the Pope had died or something.

But have a quick look at the church on the right-hand edge of the photo. Half the roof is tiled, the other half is rusty corrugated sheet. And on a building of historical importance too. And there are people who complain about my regard for Building Regulations and the like!

A couple of the buoldings in the shot are worthy of note. There is one where the monks go to deal with their filthy habits and underneath the toliets is a room where they bottle their own water.

Regular readers know that I once tried the monastic life but I had to abandon it due to the monotonous diet. Only two monks were allowed to work in the kitchens – the chip monk and the fish friar.

Today I was going to have my huge bonfire and bake my spuds outside. And it looked so nice out there too early on (if 10:24 can be called “early” – I don’t have a clue what it was like before that, for obvious reasons. After all, it is Sunday). Anyway I did a load of work up here and just as I was going outside I noticed the weather. We were having a hurricane, the big wind turbine was going round like the clappers and it was pouring down with torrential rain.

It’s the first day today since the 16th that the temperature hasn’t got up to around 20 degrees. It reached only 14.4 degrees outside today, still unseasonably warm, but it got up to over 18 degrees in here. It’s currently 16.8 degrees and I’m quite comfortable in here. It’s been 10 days since I had the heating on and it’s been interesting to see the temperature in here steadily rise since I moved in.

I’ll be interested to see what happens when the temperature plummets outside. In early January we had minus 15. I bet it won’t be 16.8 degrees in here then!

-12

Friday 20th November 2009 – On my drive down to Liz and Terry’s yesterday …

… I stopped to take my traditional photograph of the Gorge of the Sioule bathed in cloud. Each time I go that way in the morning I always take a pic as the effects of the cloud are always different.

Yesterday we had an island – the peak of one of the hills in the gorge that was just peeking out above the level of the cloud. It looked like something that Roger Dean would have drawn for the cover of a “Yes” album.

After breakfast I telephoned this radio guy as requested.
“I’m sorry, he’s not here“
“Well, I’ll leave my number so he can call me back later“
“Actually he’s out all day“
“Never mind – he can call me on Monday“
“He has meetings all day Monday and Tuesday. So it won’t be before Wednesday“.
So much for urgency.

The weather is still unseasonably hot – the last four days have all been round the 20-degree mark. So I burnt a pile of rubbish in my galvanised steel dustbin, with which I am very impressed. But much of the paper is still wet and damp so it needs more time to dry out. It if keeps fine by Sunday I’ll have another fire and bake some spuds while I’m doing it. After all, there’s no footy on Sunday.

I’ve carried on with the tidying up too.

And earlier this evening I was sitting quietly in my room when there was a terrific crash from outside in the stairwell. I had 5 or 6 boxes of screws all neatly stacked and for no apparent reason they all fell down the stairs. There are thousands of screws everywhere now.

I must have a ghost, I suppose. My house in Crewe is haunted and the local vicar told me that he would come round and exorcise it. I asked him why. As far as I was concerned the ghost was one of the family and had just as much, if not even more right to be there.

And Lee Pottymouth lives in a flat that is haunted by two ghosts, and he reckons that they are homosexual ghosts. “They don’t half put the willies up me” he said.

-7

Wednesday 18th November 2009 – At least I know now …

… why it is that my little room is getting so damp. I moved a pile of wood and the evidence is right before my eyes.

The soil has once more banked itself up against the kitchen wall (I keep digging it out every couple of years) and also, some of the pointing has fallen out and water is infiltrating between the stones.

I’m glad that I’m going round to Terry’s tomorrow morning to have a pointing lesson with Mark. I can see me putting this to use in a very short space of time.

In other news, I’m still tidying up the garden, albeit in a rather desultory fashion. Most of what I’ve been doing is to sort out the scrap wood into what is useable elsewhere and what is only fit for burning. I’m also pulling up brambles and nettles in a sort-of tidying up of the scrub for I need a place to put the compost bin that I bought a couple of weeks ago and everywhere else is full up.

And what else? Ahh yes. I’ve dug over the carrot patch and the potato patch and rescued some veg. I fact I had home-grown potatoes and carrots for tea just now. I’ve also tidied up Caliburn’s cab and cleaned the inside of the windscreen which was all greased over and filthy. We’re off to Liz and Terry’s tomorrow and Strawberry Moose has been promised a huge hug from Liz. He’s quite looking forward to it.

And in other news, Rhys and I have been looking at cement mixers on the internet – Rhys has to lay a concrete foundation for his new shed. But never mind the cement mixer, Harbour Freight has a heavy duty concrete vibrator for just €99. Now isn’t that right up Lee “I’m a potty-mouth” Prostitute’s alley?

-6

Wednesday 4th November 2009 – Well, folks – here it is!

And about time too, I hear you say. One attic duly completed (more or less).

If you look very closely you can see that all of the skirting board is fitted, even in the little cupboard. And the room was emptied and brushed out by 18:15 too.

Tomorrow is going to be cleaning and tidying, and then moving in. And I’m going to have 10 days off and put my feet up to relax.

It goes without saying that a great big thanks is due to Terry, who came along, got me motivated and got me started on the roof back in July.

A big thanks too goes to Liz, who kept me going with supplies of vegan chocolate cake, to Dave who came to join in for a couple of days, and also to Rhys and Krys who kept me at it with loads of virtual cyber-support.

And we really put our backs into it too. It’s very hard to imagine that it was only on the 18th of July that the attic looked like this.

So here’s a little quiz to keep you all going until tomorrow.

I said that tomorrow I’m moving into the attic once I’ve cleaned it. The bed-settee, the desk and the coffee table are already up there. What you have to do is to guess which domestic item is going to be the first to be moved up there from anywhere else. An easy one if you know me – not so easy if you don’t.

As for this evening, we had an exciting jam session in a living room in Montaigut. I took the acoustic bass as I don’t have an amp and speaker for the Gibson but I needn’t have bothered – the living room was like something out of a who stage set, complete with soundproof room for the drums. Michael had only ever played once before with other people – I haven’t played with anyone else for about 30 years, but the drummer would have been out of my league even back in those days. His mane won’t mean anything to you but he was formerly the drummer in Gong – Daevid Allen and Pierre Malherbe’s group from the 1970s. Strangely enough, he’s interested in getting together again so when Michael comes back from the UK I’m going to teach him the basics of 12-bar blues and we’ll take it from there.

Meantime I need to talk to Trixi about some singing lessons. Last time I had to sing in a rock band Sue Willett gave me some lessons and some tips – but I’ve forgotten those.

What a day!

-7

Wednesday 21st October 2009 – WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE …

… in this pic is all the varnish on the tongue and grooving. That’s because, for once in my life, I’ve found some clear varnish that really is clear.

So clear in fact that I couldn’t see where I was up to each time. I was impressed with that.

What you also can’t see is all of the rubbish, debris, sawdust, polystyrene offcuts and the like. I decided to start by tidying up and picking up all of the stuff.

And after half an hour of this I thought “This is ridiculous – I’ll be here forever” and got out the yard brush. One reason why I started from the top is that you brush the rubbish downwards.

And when I get to the ground floor? well, that’s easy. I’m putting in a suspended floor and all of the rubbish can go underneath.

Which reminds me – it rained today – about 8mms – and I happened to put my hand on the sandy soil that is the ground floor of the house (at least where I dug out for the battery box) and it is as damp as heck. A suspended floor is pretty much essential, I reckon.

And while I’m on the subject of that, now that I have the door on upstairs, the temperature is keeping pace more-or-less with what I get in my room. But it’s a totally different kind of temperature – like it’s a dry temperature upstairs and a damp wet one down here. I’m surprised I haven’t caught pleurisy living in here and I can’t wait to move in upstairs.

I’ve also installed all of the light fittings upstairs and started on the plugs at the “other” end of the room. It looks like I’m heading for an electrical day tomorrow.

-4

Sunday 30th August 2009 – I WAS UP …

… early again today, but not as early as yesterday. But early nevertheless bearing in mind it’s Sunday.

After breakfast I tidied up the verandah, in the garage and round about, and as you might expect, my visitors didn’t show up.But while I was waiting I also cleaned and tidied up the cab of Caliburn, so as to silence my critics on these pages, Graham.

After lunch it was off to the brocante at Virlet. Not as good as usual and not as many stalls but I did manage to find a chest of drawers – four drawers and quite big and just fits nicely under my bed – all for 7 Euros.

But so much for minimalisation – I have far too many clothes to go in it. I shall have to have a spell of throwing away clothes. There’s far too many for what I need down here.< That gave me an opportunity to have a decent in-depth tidy-up in my room. And this constant smell like something has died in here is due to the damp that is ingressing. I'm surprised that I haven't gone down with pleurisy or pneumonia - not like Christopher Robin who, as you all know, went down with Alice. Fitting the guttering may well help to do something about the damp but moving into the attic is the logical answer. If I get damp in there then I know that I've REALLY got a problem.

-5

Sunday 23rd August 2009 – IT DOESN’T LOOK …

… as if I’ve done very much today.

There are two circuit breakers now on the control panel. They are at the bottom right and are for the two solar arrays.

On the bottom of the board to the left of centre is the fuse box out of a late 1990s Vauxhall Astra. They are one of the reasons why I visit scrapyards in the UK so often. They have one heavy cable in and 8 maxi fuses (up to 100 amp) and 8 wires out – just the job for the 12-volt circuits I’ll be having in the house.

There’s also some of the wiring installed, and you can also see the insulation and 6 of the batteries already in what will be the battery box.

Mind you, don’t forget that it’s Sunday today so I don’t set the alarm – sleep till I wake up and so on. So at 06:55, a time that doesn’t normally exist on a Sunday morning except when I haven’t been to bed yet, I was wide away and at 07:30 I was up and about.

Another glorious sunny day was promised so I did a load of washing in the little tabletop washer that I bought for 10 Euros last year at the Virlet brocante. And I’ve had my moneysworth out of that. And while the washing was on the go I steamcleaned the verandah and I can actually get to the chemical toilet without falling over something and breaking my neck … "shame" – ed.

Following that it was lunch and then the obligatory visit to Claude’s to fix the trailerboard that Pascal can’t get working after he’s fixed it once.

This afternoon was the battery box followed by a big blazing fire in the grate in the living room to
1) aerate and dry out the house
2) get rid of a week’s accumulation of rubbish
3) cook my baked potatoes for tea.
And there’s definitely something about my own spuds. Shop-bought ones will bake easily in a hot open fire yet those I grow myself won’t cook. It shows you how rotten shop-bought spuds are, and how fresh mine are.

And we’re told that we’ll be having a storm tomorrow afternoon. I can try out my sump idea to see if it helps keep the rainwater clean. But if it’s anything like last week’s storm we’ll have 10 drops of rain and that will be that.

And today’s solar energy in the house? A mere 129.0 amp-hours.

-7

Saturday 22nd August 2009 – THIS IS ABSOLUTELY ASTONISHING!

The solar panels on the roof of the Luton Transit that feed the power to the barn (and originally to here with some very dodgy wiring) have been there since August 2007 and the most solar energy that they have ever received is 90.8 amp-hours, back on 22 April 2009.

Bearing in mind that fact that was some 2 months before the optimal date for capturing solar energy, you would expect that figure to be broken some time in midsummer but as yet it’s not quite managed it.

By contrast, the 3 panels on the roof of the house that are currently wired in capture a theoretical 21 watts more and although they are not angled optimally into the sun, they are situated in a much better location for catching the sun, so I had high hopes for these panels. But not 120.6 amp-hours worth.

That’s a pretty astonishing figure from just 390 watts, and with another 390 watts to come from the second bank of panels, you can understand why I’m optimistic about this set-up if I can generate these kinds of figures. This would represent just under 3KwH of electricity (1 KwH is about 88 amp-hours or so) being generated today on both banks of panels.

This morning I was awake long before the alarm went off and spent the morning tidying up, sowing some lettuce seed into a container in the verandah and rescuing some oregano and mint (with not having the time to do any gardening just now the whole place is going to pot!).

Lunchtime saw me in St Eloy shopping (or trying to shop if there was anything to buy – the place is rapidly going downhill) and when the DiY shop opened I went to get my polystyrene sheets for the battery box.
“We don’t carry that” said the owner. “You need to go to the builders’ merchants”
“Ok” I replied, heading for the door
“But it’s a waste of time going now. They are closed!”
This blasted country gets me down at times. The concept of customer service is getting to be as bad as the UK’s. Builders’ merchants closed on Saturdays when everyone has the weekend to do DiY, hotels that close for the summer holidays when they should be open for summer holidaymakers, restaurants “closed for lunch” (I’ve seen that!). No perishing idea.

If someone were to open a decent DiY in St Eloy they would clean up. And if Screwfix or Toolstation got their acts together and started to operate here they too would hit the jackpot.

So I piddled off the 40km to Commentry and the Bricomarche. Not only were they open (and that’s a surprise) and not only did they have my polystyrene (and what a price too! I needed oxygen after that!), they also had the missing bits for the guttering as well as the bits that I need to make a sump in my rainwater collection plan.

So …gulp … 68 Euros the lighter, I returned home, fitted the sump into the rainwater collection circuit (I’ll post a pic of it one of these days) and fitted the polystyrene into the battery box.

I put the other 6 batteries in there and I’ll remove away from the front door the 4 I’m currently using, and put them in the box. But that’s for tomorrow.

And while I was sitting drinking a coffee, an old beat-up little white Citroen pulled up at the back of the house. A couple had a look at the back of the house, had a good chat and then drove away. I wonder what that’s all about.

I suppose I’ll soon find out. But it’s been all go today, hasn’t it?

-4

Thursday 20th August 2009 – AFTER WORKING ALL DAY ALMOST NON-STOP ….

… I’ve finished the first part of the base of the battery box, as you can see.

The floor in the house is dreadful, full of cracks that let in the damp (a piece of wood that I laid on the floor across a crack rotted to nothing in 6 months) so I started years ago to dig it up.

Earlier followers of my organ will recall me pulling up a chicken that had been cast into the original concrete floor (such pagan rites were apparently practised here in comparatively recent times) but I abandoned the demolition of the floor for another idea.

The ceiling is pretty high and there is a large step uo into the kitchen, so I’m going to put in a suspended floor and seal in the old concrete with bitumen. This will give me enough headroom to put the batteries under the floor in the entrance hall where they will keep nice and warm, and the gases can vent out via a pipe laid to the outside passing underneath the false floor.< So the first job this morning was to rearrange everything in the living room so that I had the space to work. And as the fridge is just 50cms wide and the door to the verandah is 54cms past the obstructions, I made an extended worktop in the verandah and I now have the fridge right next to where I'm cooking.

Then I had to dig down a little further, lay a layer of sand to cover up any sharp bits that might puncture the damp-proof course, build a framework, line it with a plastic sheet as a damp-proof course, lay more sand to protect the integrity of the damp-proof course, heap a pile of rubble inside the framework and then cover with a layer of concrete.

That took me until 19:00 and then I had to go to Claude and Francoise’s. Claude has given his old caravan to his son but the electrics aren’t working and he has to tow it to near Marseilles (it’s not moved under its own steam for 20 years and the tyres are totally perished – just like the rest of the caravan).

After what seemed like hours , and me tearing my trousers on a nail that was being used to hold up the jockey wheel, I noticed that someone had wired the trailer plug up wrongly. I fixed that and after another few hours I managed to get an indicator light working.

The whole electrical circuit on this caravan is shot to pieces and the light units have all short-circuited. Pascal is going to buy some more stuff tomorrow and wants to know if I can rewire the caravan on Friday evening.

Ahhh well.

After all these exertions I’m off to have an early night. I’m totally worn out right now.

-4

EPIC HALL

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