Tag Archives: les guis

Saturday 24th March 2012 – JUST FOR ONCE …

… The 2nd XI of FC Pionsat St Hilaire had a little bit or two of luck in a football match.

On several occasions Loubeyrat’s forwards broke clean through the centre of the Pionsat defence with only François to beat – a rather regular occurrence unfortunately – and twice they hit the woodwork and on a couple of other occasions they either put it wide or over the top.

They did actually score two goals, but so did FC Pionsat St Hilaire, and the match ended 2-2. It’s the first point that they have won in an age, and considering that Loubeyrat are second in the table this is a good result for Pionsat.

This morning though I was working up here – preparing for a radio programme or four. Doing the gardening bit and also the French expressions.

Tomorrow I have to do the main part of the programme – the information.

We’re running out of stuff to present but I collared Max at the football tonight. He’s the part-time secretary at a couple of mairies and he did promise me to let me have copies of the arretes prefectorials – the local by-laws.

But he keeps forgetting.

And so I have to keep on reminding him.

And seeing as it was so nice today not only did I have a solar shower (35.5°C and with a saucepan of hot water from the dump load thrown in to warm it up even more) I did a load of washing.

“Up-to-date” I hear you say, and it’s true that everything that was hanging around, as well as what needed washing from this last week has now been attended to, but of course I found some more stuff lying around that I had overlooked and so the pile hasn’t diminished any.

What was nice about the wash was that the temperature of the water was well over 70°C. What I did was to run part of the clothes through the wash at 70°C and then left them to soak while I went off to do a quick bit of shopping at St Eloy les Mines.

When I came back the water had of course cooled down and so I put the woolly jumpers in from winter and gave them a run round in the machine. That will have sorted them out.

But what with one thing or another there seems to be plenty of surplus energy around. I think that I’m going to have to switch the fridge on for 24 hours every day so that the batteries can run down a little overnight.

If it’s a miserable grey day I can always unplug it in the morning.

-3

Friday 23rd March 2012 – WE HAD A …

… change of plan today as well

I got to Liz and Terry’s at lunchtime and after a quick butty Terry and I hit the road to Ambert to see this dumper.

But we didn’t go any further than Les Ancizes.

We started to talk about the pros and cons of having a dumper as opposed to a large powered barrow. While a dumper can carry much more soil around, when you consider what a mini-digger can excavate, then rapidly filling a dumper to capacity isn’t going to be much of an issue.

There are several other things that might be an issue, namely

trying to manoeuvre a dumper around the kind of tight spaces that you might expect to encounter on building projects around here – the very reason why we went for a mini-digger and not a JCB in the first place
if you are going out to a site you will need to make two trips, namely one to move the digger and a second to fetch the dumper. With a powered barrow, the barrow will go into the back of the van and so you only make one trip

With a few other discussions along these lines, we decided that maybe a dumper wasn’t quite what we wanted and so we did a U turn and went back.

Browsing around the internet for powered barrows we became distracted and it seems that I have spent some more money that I can’t really afford.

The old in-car DVD player that I use to watch DVDs in here is slowly giving up the ghost. The battery failed ages ago and now it’s being very selective about what DVDs it plays.

But there on the internet on sale was an AKAI 12-volt TV with build-in DVD player (the new generation DVDs as well), Freeview TV box, 15-inch screen and loads of other bells and whistles and all for … gulp … £214.

And with all of that, it draws less that 20 watts.

i spend a lot of time watching DVDs and I reckon that I ought to have something decent to watch them on without straining my eyes on a tiny 7-inch screen.

Not only that, I didn’t buy myself a birthday present last month.

Once we’d done the internet bit we went outside (it was a gorgeous day) and did bits and pieces in Liz’s garden, and I swapped the tyres over on her car from winter tyres to summer tyres (just you watch the snowstorm now).

Well, it was better than me singing for my supper, and the tea was beautiful as usual.

This morning though, I did some work on my web pages for the journey to Canada last autumn. First time since 6th of January.

I’ve loads of other things to do as you know, but I wanted to do something on these pages as a gesture of recommencement.

Tomorrow I have to write four or five radio programmes. That will keep me out of mischief.

-2

Thursday 22nd March 2012 I DIDN’T QUITE MANAGE …

… to do what was going to do today – “no surprise there ” – ed – but I had a pretty good go at it.

In fact what distracted me was that every time I moved something in the garden I uncovered a huge bed of nettles underneath it, just on the point of springing into action.

Of course, digging over raised beds and planting seeds is not the kind of thing that is timed to the second, but all of these nettles about to burst into life may well be. So, wearing thick gloves this time, I set to with the gratter and pulled up as many as I could.

And there were thousands too, and I haven’t finished yet by any means.

This morning though, I was editing photos. and not just any photos but the ones from the last couple of weeks of footy.

I’m keeping the footy photos separate, on a fast-action SD card, the fastest one I could find, so that the camera reacts quicker to me pressing the shutter.

It’s for that reason too that I bought a 50mm lens with manual focus – that I could set it to infinity and it wouldn’t waste time recalibrating for every shot.

>But in fact I’m pretty disappointed with this lens despite the money that I paid for it, if the truth were known.

The focusing has a tendency to float away from infinity and sometimes I forget to reset it (and I don’t see why I should have to either) and as well as that, the lens is nothing like as sharp as I would like, especially considering how much I paid for the lens.

I can crop sections out of my cheap generic 28-105mm zoom lens and magnify them quite impressively, but with this lens, even a normal-aspect image is not sufficiently good.

Anyway my reverie was interrupted by Terry who was going past and so came for a chat. and while he was there someone phoned me up about a dumper that he had for sale.

Terry and I have a day out tomorrow, so it seems.

I did manage to clear one of the raised beds in the middle of all this. But planting seed will have to wait until next week. I’m busy now for a few days what with one thing and another.

-1

Wednesday 21st March 2012 – I WAS GARDENING …

… this afternoon

High time I had another session in the garden now that spring has sprung and the grass is riz.

And having been meithered by the guy at the football, who chats to me quite a lot about gardening and who has been telling me for about four weeks to plant my peas, I put the first row of them in this afternoon.

That involved digging over one of the plots that had spuds in last year and pulling out the weeds that had grown since I did it a week or 10 days ago, hoeing it to break up the lumps of clay, raking it over, adding some wood ash and hoeing that well in, and then putting in the first row of seeds.

I bought a new packet this year because with all of the seeds from last year being out in the lean-to at -16°C and even colder over the winter, I’m not sure how they might have survived.

Anyway, I put a new seed and a last-year’s seed in the same seed hole to make sure that something might happen. I can always pull up any excess.

I’ve put one of my black bin-liner covers over the raised bed – to keep any frost out and to attract the heat of the sun. When I go for row 2 in a fortnight’s time, I can check on the germination of the peas that I did today.

After that, I dug one of the raised beds that had had the peas and beans in last year. That was pretty much overgrown and it took some clearing. It looks quite good now.

But I’ll do it again tomorrow before I attack the bed next to it. It’s in these two beds that the brassica – cabbage, cauliflower and sprouts – will be planted this year. Some of that can go in now and so I’ll do a couple of rows tomorrow.

Normally I would plant these seeds in small pots and let them grow in there but that’s very time-consuming and I’m struggling for time. I’ll just go for planting right from the beginning in the raised beds and let them take their chance.

I’ve also been clearing up around those raised beds – piles of thistles, brambles and nettles underneath the old grey Ford Cortina and so I raked them out as well as much as I could. Now I’m back with the tingling hands again.

I really must wear gloves when i’m ripping up nettles.

So that was this afternoon. This morning I had a pile of stuff to do on the computer but what with winding down after my efforts of the last few days I didn’t do very much. I really need to get weaving as the stuff is piling up.

And talking about the efforts of the last few days, I had a letter from the Post Office at Pionsat. It was the receipt for the sending of my paperwork yesterday.

And they did indeed manage to send it off in time if the datestamp is anything to go by. But not that it will do much good with some of the important stuff missing.

GRRRRRRRR!

-1

Tuesday 20th March 2012 – I WAS BUSY TODAY

First thing, after breakfast, was to check all of this paperwork that I’ve been doing, and then take a few pieces down to the mairie to sign or countersign.

Back here then, I then had to photocopy everything, or scan it for reference.

Bill rang me up too – he was having computer issues and needed help sorting that out and so I told him that when I had done my errands I would go round to help.

Off to Pionsat, and first stop was the bank, to pay an outstanding bill. And talking of bills, there was Bill in front of me. He managed to make the woman at the cash desk crash her computer and so we all had an agonising wait while she tried to fix it.

So having sorted that problem, it was off to the Post Office. They have a guaranteed 2-day delivery service, which is what I need, but of course none of the special envelopes that you need to do it. She can order one, but it won’t get here until the morning.

At my insistence, she rang the St Gervais office. They had one in and the parcel lorry was there and so St Gervais sent it down in the lorry.

The postal clerk put my papers into it, and handed it to the parcels driver to send it on its way. At least I hope that she did – it’s what she told me that she would do and she better had as well, for I am working to a strict time limit here.

Down to the boulangerie. There was no delivery this morning and so I needed to buy the bread.

But woe is me – the boulangerie closes for lunch between … errr … 13:00 and 15:00. This meant a trip to the Intermarché for some bread, so I picked up a loaf and wandered over to the till.

A woman with a full-to-overloaded trolley saw me coming and … quickly put her purchases onto the conveyor belt. Aren’t some people nice?

At Bill’s I managed to fix his computer for him and then we had a good chat for ages – all about old cars, buses and the like. It always helps to pass the time of day.

But it was cold today and so I lit the fire up here this evening. So much so that I lit the fire for the first time in 10 days. And taking advantage, I cooked baked potatoes and baked beans for tea.

Tomorrow I’ll do some gardening, I reckon. That is, unless the weather is really bad.

It’s clear skies and stars outside just now but this is the Auvergne and things can change in the blinking of an eye.

-1

Monday 19th March 2012 – SOLAR WATER HEATING OVERLOAD …

… from the dump load was not an issue today. We didn’t see the sun at all,

it was so grey and miserable. Winter is certainly back, and with a vengeance too.

It’s hard to think that only 3 days ago I was standing outside in the all-together giving the naughty bits a really good scrub under the solar shower. There was no danger of that today.

And so with not going outside at all, I stayed in and started to sort through a vast pile of paperwork that I had lying around. All kinds of stuff here, and some of it has been here for centuries by the looks of it.

Of course I ended up being sidetracked and branching off on something else, but it’s the thought that counts after all. I even found a few things that had been missing for ages, which just goes to show that you can do it when you really try.

I almost had the fire on as well. Temperature has dropped in here to about 14°C or thereabouts and that’s cold as well. We’ve had 10°C more than that just recently.

I had to pop into Pionsat to see someone about something, but I’m not going to go into details about it as I am rather disappointed (to say the least) about the outcome of this meeting.

All I can say is that for once I tried to do something correctly by the book, but even when you do try to do it, it never works out. Years ago, in my misspent youth, I would have forged a letterhead and done it myself.

I’m beginning to realise why.

-2

Sunday 18th March 2012 – WELL, WE COULDN’T MAKE IT …

… 3rd time lucky today.

FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 2nd XI were away at Le Quartier this afternoon, just down the road from me, in a match that they really needed to win. And it looked quite optimistic on paper too because they had a strong line-up today.

However, it all started to go pear-shaped early in the 1st half when Le Quartier took the lead thanks to yet another load of Pionsat powder-puff defending. But luckily Pionsat held them at bay for the rest of that half.

The second-half started in a most astonishing fashion. Le Quartier took the kickoff, Pionsat intercepted, went upfield and a substitute who had come on after the interval, scored with his first kick.

And direcly from the restart, one of the Pionsat players intercepted the ball, went four paces upfield and blasted a rocket into the Le Quartier net off the inside of the post

It wasn’t to last though. Le Quartier were going forward relentlessly and Pionsat were careless with the ball in possession in defence. François performed heroics in goal, the woodwork came to Pionsat’s rescue on several occasions, and the Le Quartier attack was way off target on many occasions.

But nevertheless, two more balls found their way into Pionsat’s net, one of them cruelly in stoppage time.

For years I’ve been complaining about the FC Pionsat St Hilaire 2nd XI’s defence. They now have a good goalkeeper in François but that’s about it, really.

And with the exception of Gaëtan who wasn’t there today, this was the strongest team that they could possibly put out.

But with yet another defeat against mediocre opposition I am really fearing the worst.

And winter is back too. When I checked earlier, it was a mere 1.4°C. Quite a far cry from the 12°C night-time temperatures of just recently.

-1

Saturday 17th March 2012 – I HAD ANOTHER …

… bad night’s sleep last night.

But I was still up and about at 08:30 in time to go to Montlucon.

The trouble is though that after only about 3 hours sleep I’m never in a good mood, I can’t concentrate and I can’t think straight. I couldn’t remember what it was that I needed from Brico Depot and when I did find some things I wasn’t able to summon up the energy to load them up onto Caliburn’s roof rack.

In fact, for several reasons I wasted my time in going.

It didn’t help in that the Auchan only had early seed potatoes. No onions, no garlic, no shallots, no maincrop seed potatoes and so that was a washout. In the end, I went to Mr Bricolage to see if they had anything exciting.

Nothing at all, as it happened but firstly I bumped into Rob and Nicolette from down the road and we had a good chat;

And then who else should turn up but Liz and Terry. We all had a good chat and then Liz, Terry and I went down the road to Jardiland. They had everything that I needed in the vegetable line, but at quite a price.

Never mind though, Liz and I went halves on most things and so it wasn’t too bad.

After a coffee together my early start ended up being one of the latest returns from Montlucon that I had ever had and I almost missed the start of the footy matches back at Pionsat.

There were two tonight – the 3rd XI of Pionsat St Hilaire against Biollet-St Maurice and the Ist XI against Malauzat.

In the away match at Biollet St Maurice the 3rd XI had led for much of the game but faded away at the end to lose. But today, with a full team out (but no goalkeeper) they looked the business.

At one stage they were 3-0 up but faded away at the end and hung on grimly for a 4-3 win. And if Biollet St Maurice hadn’t have missed a penalty earlier in the game it would have been a different story again.

But a win is a win, and it’s a rare enough event for the 3rd XI so they are quite right to celebrate it.

The big difference in the team today was that Simon, who used to play for the 1st XI, was out there playing at centre-forward. He now lives in Switzerland but luckily the club has retains his French football registration.

He he had come back this weekend to visit his family and one of his friends from the football club had talked him into playing.

It was his irst match for over a year, he told me after the match and to be honest, it looked like it too,

But there was no denying his skill and ball control, and he and Stéphane Gomet, playing on the left wing, spent most of the match tearing the Biollet St Maurice defence to shreds.

It’s a shame that they can’t find a decent goalkeeper for the team because that really is the difference.

FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 1st XI were playing ESV Malauzat in the second match and they also won their match.

2-0 the final score was, and they never ever at any moment looked under any pressure. I don’t recall Matthieu having much to do in the FC Pionsat St Hilaire goal.

However ESV Malauzat’s keeper was working overtime and if it wasn’t for him we would have had a cricket score this evening.

The weather broke too at about 22:00 and now it’s pouring down. And I’m off to bed because I’m really whacked.

-2

Friday 16th March 2012 – I HAVE HARDLY …

… been outside today.

I’ve been a busy boy inside – piles of paperwork that all needs completing by Tuesday and so there’s no time like the present to do it even though I’m not really in the mood.

Apart from that, I had to change the batteries over in the outside temperature gauge and that meant moving the dustbins with the sawdust and the kindling. And while I was doing that I cause a huge pile of wood to fall over that was propped up there and so all of that had to be repositioned.

Such is the exciting life that I lead.

But in other news, the dump load was registering off the end of the temperature gauge as early as 14:00 and there was that much power going through the dump load controller that the heat sink was positively boiling – and I had a few papers and a plastic fuse holder sitting on top.

I’m surprised that the whole thing didn’t go up like Joan of Arc like the brazier did yesterday.

This dump load is clearly to small for summertime use – it needs more than 25 litres of water. But if I do that, then there will be not enough useful heat in the winter.

What I need is two tanks therefore, each with its own water heater element.

But the overload controller only handles 60 amps, and each water heater element is rated at 500 watts, which (at 13 volts) is about 40 amps or so, and so it won’t handle two elements. And anyway, imagine how hot the heat sink would be.

The clue for this might well be twofold, and as I don’t know the implications of what I’m talking about, I’ll write it here and invite comments.

Basically, I could have two elements and have them both wired to the battery circuit, but have them wired via relays that are powered from the overload controller. After all, the relays that would drive the heater elements need just enough power to overcome the resistance of the spring, namely a few milli-amps or so. That way the heat sink wouldn’t be so hot.

But a refinement of this is to have the second relay wired to a heat switch that is attached to the side of the water tank that is heated by element number one.

If the switch were set to close at, say 65°C, then when the water in the tank is heated to that temperature and the heat switch detected it, it would switch on the second relay to heat the element in tank 2.

What would happen then though would be that the current would be split 50/50 between the two elements, so that would mean that the temperature in tank 1 would continue to rise as the temperature in tank 2 was continuing to warm up.

So supposing I had another heat switch on the side of tank 1 – this time a switch that opened at say 70°C and wired to the element in this tank. When the water in tank 1 reached 70°C the switch would open and this would cut off the supply to the element in tank 1 and stop the temperature rising.

Without heat the temperature in tank 1 would slowly fall and when it fell to 65°C it would cut the supply to tank 2 and restart the heat at tank 1.

This all sounds thoroughly complicated to me, but that’s the way that it would have to work. I just wish I knew enough to work out what the pitfalls would be in all of this.

Tomorrow I’m going to be heading to Montlucon if I’m up early. I need a bulk shopping session seeing as how I haven’t been there since January, and I need a pile of stuff from Brico Depot.

-1

Thursday 15th March 2012 – MY HANDS ARE …

… all tingling like heck

Yes, I’ve spent the afternoon pulling up stinging nettles.

I’m actually quite immune to them and having lived with Nerina for many years plunging my hands into a bed of stinging nettles and pulling them up doesn’t cause me much of a problem.

But about 30 minutes later my hands start to tingle and then I notice it, I can tell you.

So being awoken by the alarm – for the first time for ages – I went a-computing for a couple of hours this morning. And then outside in the glorious sunshine, because it really was nice again today.

The farmer was working in the field next to here and so I waited uintil he went, and then dropped a lighted match into the garden refuse that was on the site of where the greenhouse will be. That lot went up like Joan of Arc, with it being so dry, and within an hour it had all effectively burnt itself out.

I’ve never had a garden fire go up as well as that one before.

Where I had the fire yesterday, I raked that out levelled it all off. That involved putting the big leftover peices into the brazier that I bought a while ago and much to my surprise, that all caught alight straight away as well.

I then moved the pieces of the greenhouse (the frame and the windows) down to there so that they are now close to where they are supposed to be, for me to assemble when I’ve dug over the plot where the greenhouse will be going.

After lunch, with the weather being so nice, I did another load of washing. Water at 68°C in the dump load as well – that ought to get it clean and just to be on the safe side I did the wash cycle for 30 minutes.

It’s not made any impression on the leftover dirty clothes from last time – what I washed today were all clothes that had accumulated in this last week.

But that little tabletop washing machine that I bought for €10 from a brocante over three years is worth its weight in gold.

A full cycle of machine, if you can call it that because I have to do the filling and switching by hand, uses just 0.14 of a KwH of electricity and you can’t knock that.

While the machine was going on, that was when I was pulling up stinging nettles.

I had the bits for the greenhouse laid out bewteen the barn and the house and once they had been moved, I could see millions (and I mean millions) of stinging nettles and their tracks forming, ready to burst into life.

Consequently I spend two hours pulling them up and piling them up ready for burning.

I’ve even cleaned down the side of the house there opposite the barn.

All in all, it’s made quite a difference although there is still too much rubbish, as always.

Final thing was to check the solar-heated water in the black plastic tank. 31.5°C at 18:45, with it having reached 36°C at one time during the afternoon. But 5 litres of hot water out of the dump load brought the temperature back up to 36.5°C and I had another solar shower with it.

I’m all clean now and that makes me feel so much better as well. And with clean clothes too, I’m starting to become civilised once more. I hate the winter where having a shower and having clean clothes are something of a luxury, and I look forward to spring when things start to happen, such as solar hot water and washing and so on.

And spring seems to be here with a vengeance right now, doesn’t it?

-1

Wednesday 14th March 2012 – WHAT A SHOWER!

Even though it is soon to be the annual conference of an … errrrr … organisation (said he, using the term loosely) that featured quite heavily in these pages at one time or another, it is not to that which I am referring.

Neither am I referring to my visitors either.

And I use the term in the plural because I had more than one today.

First off at 09:00 this morning, the phone rang and it was Désirée, the local estate agent.

And 09:00 too, you might be thinking, but to everyone’s surprise, including Yours Truly’s, I’d been up for hours. And I mean hours as well. I’d been trying to speak to Désirée for a while and at last she was free and so she came round here for a chat.

Amongst the things about which we chatted, and probably the most important, was the building that I own in Montaigut. Long-term readers of these pages will know that I own something like a derelict warehouse there and I use it to keep some cars, namely the Traction, the 2000E and the Mark V Cortina estate.

Above it though is a large space that was formerly six large rooms on two levels, but the dividers, both horizontally and vertically, are long gone. I need to do something about this place and converting the upstairs into two apartments is what I have in mind.

And so I had a good pick of Désirée’s brains – after all, she’s the professional.

Another visitor was Bill, who came round with a radio-cassette player out of an old car. There was a tape stuck in it and being an electronic unit you can’t get the tape out without power.

At least, most people can’t get the tape out but with the aid of three long fine-pointed screwdrivers and a pair of fine long-nosed pliers, I can manage to do it.

All these years of a misspent youth, that’s what I put it all down to.

In between the visits I finally managed to light the fire, the first of the year. And that is busy (even as we speak) disposing of much of the waste wood and the weeds that I have been pulling up this last couple of weeks.

You’ll notice though that it isn’t on the site of where the greenhouse will be. There was far too much stuff to burn, and the trees were overhanging far too much.

But I’ve left some over there – I’ll burn that off tomorrow and that should kill off many of the weeds on the site of where the greenhouse will be.

But back to the shower thing. At 18:00 I noticed that the water in the solar water heater was at 31°C today, and that the water in the dump load was off the scale again. So 5 litres of that water into the solar water heater gave me 38.5°C and I had my first home-grown shower of the year.

Just for a change I actually feel properly clean.

And I was right about the wind as well.

Tuesday 13th March 2012 – A FEW MORE …

… records tumbled today.

We had the glorious weather again, so much so that the water that is heated by the surplus energy from the solar panels, the “dump load”, was heated to such an extent that it went off the end of the temperature gauge – ie over 70°C.

That’s the first time this year.

The water in the solar-heated tank (a black plastic box with a glass lid) reached 26.5°C and that’s the highest so far (but still a far cry from the 45°C of midsummer) and if it hadn’t have been so windy, I would have put some of the water out of the dump load into the solar-heated tank to bring the temperature up to about 38°C and I would have had the first solar shower of the year.

But it was far too windy – I would have died of exposure I reckon, and the fact that showering outside in the all-together is the way that it’s done around here, it would have been indecent exposure too.

Talking of the wind, it’s died down now, after the last few days, but once again I had more wind energy created today than the cumulative amount of wind since I installed the power meters 2 weeks or so ago.

Mind you, I don’t think that we will have that again tomorrow.

But here’s an interesting and little-known fact, one that I can now prove. And that is that you can often have more power from a low-powered wind turbine than you can from a high-powered one.

Confused?

Well, let me explain.

Most electric motors, and wind turbines are no exception, have magnets in them and these operate the coils of the motor. Of course, the bigger and more powerful the motor, the bigger and more resistant are the magnets. And so you need more force to overcome the resistance in the magnets.

When you have a low-powered wind it will overcome the resistance in the magnets in a low-powered motor, and make the motor turn. However, there will not be enough force in this low-powered wind to overcome the resistance in a big magnet in a high-powered motor so that this motor won’t turn.

And there I was today, watching the little Rutland 90-watt wind turbine quite happily ticking over and giving me 10 – or 15 watts for much of the day while the big 400-watt wind turbine was doing nothing at all.

And then, all of a sudden there would be a stronger gust of wind and the big Air 403 wind turbine would start to turn, and once it had built up steam it would be there with 50 watts, or 80 watts, or even 113 watts on one occasion, while the smaller wind turbine was giving out 30 or 40 watts.

But be that as it may, the smaller wind turbine chucked out in total three times as much energy as the larger one over the 24-hour period under review. And it’s done that consistently over the last few years.

There are lessons to be learnt here of course – namely a collection of low-powered turbines will do more good than one big one over a continuous period, especially in a place like this.

Monday 12th March 2012 – WHAT AN EXCITING DAY!

The first exciting thing that happened was me lying wide awake in bed for ages thinking that I may as well get up – and finding when I did so that it was all of 07:45 – a good half-hour before the alarm goes off.

And not only that – with having had the fire on up here last night to cook a pizza, it was 16.6°C in here too, and it actually felt warm as well.

So having had breakfast and another load of coffee I did a pile of stuff on the computer. And then it was off outside to survey the house and barn – something that, quite surprisingly, I have never done.

It was not only glorious sunshine but a really strong wind and once more the wind energy today exceeded the cumulative total since I installed the power meter. And all of that was totally exciting as well.

Knocking off at 18:30 I discovered that the water in the dump load was heated to over 68.5°C and that’s a record this year. I had a gorgeous hot wash and shave with the water at that temperature and that made me feel so much better

At the Anglo-French group tonight we had two new attendees, Isobel from the Comcom at Marcillat en Combraille and her friend. We all had a really good night down there in St Gervais d’Auvergne.

And on the way home, the stars are the brightest that I have seen for a while. There are thousands of them out there, and Jupiter and Venus are wonderful. I can’t see Uranus from here though.

Back here, the water in the dump load was still 61°C and so I rounded the evening off by doing the washing-up with it, saving the gas supply for tonight.

So you can see what I mean about “exciting”, can’t you.

But in really depressing news, it’s three years tonight that Liz left us all. Time travels so fast these days but it can’t dim the lights.

-2

Sunday 11th March 2012 – CONTINUING ON …

… with the saga of weird football matches, I went to Terjat this afternoon to watch AS Terjat play a team from Montlucon – Bien Assis I think – seeing as how there was no Pionsat team in action this afternoon.

The trainer for Terjat, with whom I struck up some kind of conversation last time I was there and which carried on this afternoon, told me that in the league tables Turgid were well ahead of their opponents, and that they needed to win (which everyone was expecting) to keep up some kind of reasonable pretensions for promotion.

He was right about the “well ahead of their opponents” bit, because a more one-sided game you would not wish to see.

However from the first attack of the game one of the Bien Assis forwards had a weak shot on goal, well covered by the keeper and which would have been comfortably saved had the ball not taken a wicked deflection off the needlessly-outstretched foot of a Turgid defender and rolled into the far corner of the net.

For the remaining 89 minutes AS Terjat were camped in the opposition half with their keeper being merely an interested spectator.

And the final score?

Yes, you guessed it. 1-0 for Bien Assis.

As an aside, the Turgid keeper had one of the most powerful kicks I have ever seen and his clearances upfield were outpacing his attackers every time. And one of the Turgid central defenders was the best header of the ball that I have ever seen at this level of football.

In fact this game was quite a decent match for aerial prowess. I’ve not seen another match quite like this one for that kind of thing.

But the referee came out onto the field of play having left his cards in the dressing room.

At least that’s the only reason I can think of as to how we managed to reach the end of 90 minutes of this match without a single card being shown, despite the kind of goings-on that we had during the game.

“Hard-fought” is probably quite an apt description.

In other news, I had something of a lie-in today. In fact, 11:29 was when I crawled out of my stinking pit. About time I had a good lie-in.

We are also having a record day for wind power. I’ve had the power meter connected up for about 10 days or so, and we’ve had more wind today than the cumulative figure over the other 9 days.

It really is quite impressive.

-2

Saturday 10th March 2012 – BRAIN OF A DUCK, YOU KNOW!

Yes, Brain of Britain drove all of the way to Commentry to do his shopping this afternoon, only to find when he arrived there that he had forgotten his money, his wallet and his bank cards.

And so all the way back to here to fetch them and then go all the way back again.

That meant that I didn’t have time to do much shopping and so I just did the bare essentials – and then only some because I forgot quite a lot, I reckon.

And after that, a nip to the swimming baths at Neris-les-Bains.

It was freezing in there this afternoon and I wasn’t sorry to come out after an hour or so.

But I did have an amusing time watching a group of kids in there. All aged between 6 and 8 I reckon and all came in individually with parents, but after a while I noticed that they were all playing together in a corner of the shallow end.

It never ceases to amaze me how unself-conscious kids of that age are, and how quickly they all seem to integrate.

FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 3rd XI were playing Sauret this evening at football down at the bottom of Division 4 of the Puy de Dome District league in Pionsat.

For once they had a full side out with a couple of new players as well as a few decent players who have featured for the second XI. And so they spent most of the match peppering the Sauret goal whereas the opposition just contented themselves with a few breakaways.

And such is the perversity of modern football that Sauret won the encounter by 2-1.

This was another match that Pionsat threw away. They really do need to win encounters like this if they want to crawl away from the basement.

-2

EPIC HALL

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