Tag Archives: caliburn parking

Sunday 30th September 2012 – AND IF YOU THOUGHT …

… that last night was dramatic, what with the Miners coming back from the dead, you should have been at Briffons this afternoon, cos you ain’t seen nuffink yet!

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football briffons perpezat puy de dome franceFC Pionsat St Hilaire had no goalkeeper out there today for the match against Briffons-Perpezat for a start.

Michael Bucaud was in the orange and warming up behind the goals. Although he’s not been long at the club, I’ve never seen him play as a goalkeeper before.

And with FC Pionsat St Hilaire being 2-0 down with the game dragging on towards the end, it really did look as if that was that.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football briffons perpezat puy de dome franceBut then, suddenly, someone flicked the switch and the team burst into life.

And in the space of probably 20 minutes they scored 4 times to win the match and to progress through to the next round of the League Cup.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything quite like this – especially from FC Pionsat St Hilaire. They are much more likely to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as we all know.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football briffons perpezat puy de dome franceAnd I bet that you are wondering how come they managed to score 4 times in a match, especially as Cedric was having the day off.

But for a very pleasant change the rest of the attackers, once they had come to life, looked the part as well and tore the Briffons- Perpezat defence to shreds.

Even Vincent, an 18 year old lad who signed for the senior team this year, although about 6 feet tall but weighing about 6 stones, threw himself about and made two goals for his striking partner, as well as hitting the post in the closing stages of the game.

 It was a lovely day to be out as well, a really nice day for a long drive, and I arrived at the ground early en.ough to see the second half of the previous game

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football briffons perpezat puy de dome franceThat was a match in the Ladies’ League.

Briffons-Perpezat won that match quite comfortably – after all, they are second in the league – but the standard of play is much higher than I was expecting.

I was pleasantly surprised by it all. In fact it made me wish that I would have arrived even earlier to watch all of the game.

But this morning, I’m not sure what happened.

Chatting to Rhys until about 02:30, and with it being a Sunday too, I expected to be in bed until midday. But 08:45 when I woke up, and I could not get back to sleep.

So a lazy morning, but I did repair my two chests of drawers that are slowly starting to fall to pieces. At least now they open and close properly.

Anyway, back to work tomorrow. I need to clean out at the side of the lean-to and then move all of the stuff onto there from off the hardstanding.

That isn’t going to be the work of five minutes.

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Wednesday 26th September 2012 – IT WAS ANOTHER …

… day today where I heard the alarm go off properly but the accompanying cloudburst made me turn back over and … errr … wait for a while before arising.

So after the usual while on the computer I went outside and started work.

And in another major change to my usual lifestyle, I was still out there at 20:00.

First plan was to fit the new handles that I had bought the other day to the gardening tools that were lying around. The rake and the binette worked fine but this sledgehammer handle won’t work at all.

But anyway, using the newly-repaired tools, I hacked my way through a huge pile of undergrowth, ripped up piles of nettle and bramble roots, and laid a big tarpaulin on the floor.

Onto this tarpaulin I collected up all of the scaffolding that I’ve been using and laid it out on there. That was followed by all of the leftover plastic slates, and then I cleaned out all of the wood and the breeze blocks from where I had been working.

That gave me some more room to move around there and I could then hack out another pile of brambles.

There’s probably only about 30m² of land to clear back there and I reckoned that it wouldn’t take long, but I’m being rather optimistic about that. It’s going to take a while.

But it needs to be done because the next phase is to clear all of the stuff from where I park Caliburn and it’s there that I want to put it.

That took me up to about 19:00 and there was still a little job that I needed to do. The charge controller for one of the banks in the barn packed up ages ago and so I’ve been wiring the panels directly to the solar bank – not that there’s enough energy produced over there to worry the batteries too much.

But I need to measure the energy that’s going in, and so I disconnected the remote ammeter off the other bank and wired that to it.

Not so easy as it’s pretty cramped in there so I hope that it’ll work okay.

Still, we’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?

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Monday 4th June 2012 – I MADE A START …

… on work today.

Only a start though.

After (a rather-late) breakfast, I worked on all of the photos of the holiday and wimp that I am, there are only 1200 of them. Not a patch on the 2500 or so of my epic 2010 voyage around the Trans-Labrador Highway, but considerably more than the 78 of my first visit to Canada.

All the photos have now been thumbnailed and had the copyright text added and they are now on-line. I’ll post a link to them in due course and you will be able to see them for yourself.

DEPANNEUR QUEBEC CANADA MAY 2012That took me to a rather late-ish lunch and then afterwards I prepared a little game for the Anglo-French Group.

I took all of my photos of the Québecois language and asked them to see what they could make of them.

No-one came even close to guessing what this was all about so if you have an idea – without cheating and looking it up – make a suggestion in the “comments” bit below.

That left me an hour and a half and so I went out to tackle the weeds. There’s only so much you can do in that kind of time and I didn’t do much, but at least I can walk between the front door and the downhill lean-to now, and the area around the solar shower is free.

And if we have some sun any time soon, I might even be able to use that.

But the disappointment is the hard-standing that we laid down for parking a couple of years ago.

Every day I made it a task to pull up a dozen weeds and I’ve kept it pretty weed-free. But 6 weeks away when everywhere is going mad has just about done for it. Not only is it swamped in weeds, their roots are so deep that they are pulling up the gravel and hardstanding when I try to remove them.

It seems that the only solution is whatever is the local equivalent of Agent Orange.

This is depressing as I have tried ever since I came here to avoid the use of chemical weedkiller but as I am on my own and I’m not as young as I was, I don’t see what alternative there is.

If you can think of anything non-chemical, answers on a plain brown envelope to …

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Friday 27th August 2010 – It’s been an exciting day today.

This afternoon I had a good wander around the vegetable plot checking up on things as it’s been a while since I’ve had a really good look, what with one thing and another.

cucumber cloche les guis virlet puy de dome franceOne of the things that I did was to check in the smaller cloche where I have the strawberries and the one surviving cucumber plant. That has just been growing and growing with plenty of flowers but nothing much else, however today I noticed for the first time that the cucumbers are set.

There’s just three of them at the moment, still quite tiny but it’s nice to see some kind of progress in there. If the way that the courgettes have burst into life is anything to go by, within a week they should be monsters.

After that I went and checked on the tomatoes in the mega-cloche. They are just growing and growing with tons of flowers and fruit and so I took an executive decision and topped them all. No point in growing stuff that is never going to ripen and letting perish the fruit that is already there. Topping them will hopefully concentrate all of the energy into the fruit and they may even ripen.

gherkin plant greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceThere’s a stray tomato plant in the greenhouse so I went to check on that. And fighting my way in past the gherkin plants I noticed that they are finally starting to do stuff.

And that’s about time too. Thousands of flowers and not the least sign of a fruit, and all of a sudden a few of those have burst into life.

Now what do you do with a gherkin? If I could get malt vinegar over here I might be tempted to pickle them but I can’t so I’ll have to think of something else. All  suggestions are welcome

I followed that up by pulling the veg for tea. I had a veggie-burger lined up and so I pulled up some carrots and spuds, and picked some beans, spinach, sage and rosemary. Add a garlic clove and an onion to that lot and it really was a nice tea. Quite enjoyable. And I sowed the last of my parsnip seeds in where I’d removed the carrots. I’ve no idea what they might do but they won’t do anything in the packet.

The rest of the afternoon I’ve been sawing wood. I need to move the wood to erect the dividing wall in the lean-to where the composting toilet is. I keep on moving this wood around and nothing ever happens to it so I’ve decided to remove it by cutting up for burning, no matter how long it takes (and it will take a while). Winter’s not far away, you know.

This morning though I spent until midday working on my website. It’s almost up-to-date – I reckon another week will see the monthly pages done up to August 2010, and about time too. Nevertheless I was interrupted by a buzzing coming from across the yard – the water boiler that Smon gave me sprung into action at about 10:00. The weather today was terrible (it’s still pouring down now) and there wasn’t enough current to really fire it up, but it ran for a total of 3.5 hours. And more of this anon.

Once I’d knocked off computing at midday I went with Caliburn round to Lieneke’s and tidied up there. It seems that Terry and Simon have finished.

sankey trailer caliburn hardstanding tractor les guis virlet puy de dome franceI rescued the breeze blocks, the sand and cement, a huge pile of buckets my tarpaulin and ladder and a host of other stuff, heaved it all into the Sankey trailer and brought it round here.

I reversed it down the lane (hard to think that 20 years ago I did that for a living) and parked it next to Terry’s tractor where it can live for a while.

And it’s amazing how much room there is on there. I still reckon that the money I spent on having that done was money well spent. There’s room for another couple of cars on there I reckon if I tidy up a little bit better.

But the exciting bits involved the water heating.

Of course the day that I get everything ready for blast-off is the day when the weather turns miserable. The immersion heater in the house ran for a grand total of two minutes. But it was trying its best to fire up as the charge in the batteries bounced along the critical voltage. It was quite a windy day so I reckon that if there had been a wind turbine on the roof it would have worked a treat. I’m going to have to sort out this wind turbine.

As for the water boiler, even though the solar energy levels were pretty miserable it fired up in early morning once the batteries in the barn were fully-charged and ran for a total of about 3.5 hours. And the water, all 2.5 litres of it, was boiling away merrily to itself. So much so that with it being POETS Day ….
“POETS Day?” … ed
“Yes, that’s right. P155 Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday!”
… today I had a lovely hot wash and shave out of that boiler at 17:30 when I knocked off. And had it been less windy, I would have gone for the hybrid shower – the solar water (that struggled to reach 30°C) diluted by the 2.5 litres out of the boiler. Now THAT would have warmed it up.

I topped up the water with cold water once I’d emptied it, and it carried on warming itself for a short while until the sun went down and the solar charge stopped. And when I went to do the washing up after tea at 22:00 it was not very far short of being hot enough to do the washing up. A couple of minutes on the gas ring sorted that out.

All in all, I reckon that this is major progress and I’m really pleased with all of this. This place is slowly starting to take shape one way or another. I just want a nice sunny day now so that I can see what the immersion heater will do. But with all this rain that’s going on right now that isn’t going to be for a while.

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Sunday 20th June 2010 – The scaffolding is back here

kwikstage scaffolding caravan chassis trailer caliburn parking les guis virlet puy de dome franceTerry and Liz brought it round this afternoon. And it’s much more useful having a trailer to stick it all on so that you can just drag it round and leave it somewhere like this instead of having to maul it in and out of vans. That old caravan chassis is definitely the way to go.

And so is the hardstanding too. I wouldn’t have liked to have done this anywhere else around the place and there isn’t anywhere else really to leave it. The money I spent doing this hardstanding is money well spent if you ask me.

But the trailer didn’t half churn it up. That’s no surprise rally given the rain that we’ve had. I’ve been gradually flattening it by driving Caliburn, loaded with sacks of cement and so on, over the place where I can reach but the torrential rain is playing havoc with everything and it’s just like a running river. In the end we had to winch the trailer into position and I’ve had my money’s worth out of that winch too just recently.

We should all have gone for a wander around the brocante at Lapeyrouse after but the dreadful weather put paid to that. It’s rained on 14 consecutive days and then after a 2-day break it rained for 10 consecutive days before that. Of those 24 days, 11 days had rain of 10mm or more, and of those, 4 had more than 20 and another one reached 36.5mm. What can you say about weather like this?

And there is no end in sight.

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Monday 14th June 2010 – This is a significant photo …

hardstanding caliburn parking les guis virlet puy de dome france… and for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the first pic of Caliburn in his new home. At lunchtime I took him for a drive on the new hardstanding to flatten it down a bit. But the ground hasn’t dried up enough (and it’s still p155ing down now) so it’s no surprise that at one stage he bogged down. But I was expecting it and I had the chain winch ready.

It’s also significant in the respect that it’s the first pic with the new Nikon D5000. I was in fact all ready to use the Pentax K100D but the battery was flat and the ones on charge wouldn’t fire it up. So it seemed to he the right time to fire up the Nikon.

But never mind being bogged down – this was one of those days where problems seemed to come along in droves. After Terry came round for some of my scaffolding poles, I went into Montlucon to pick up these tyres for the trailer – and I had a puncture.  Then of course there was the bogging-down, and then on the way to St Gervais d’Auvergne I got stuck behind a circus convoy – “Showman’s Goods” as they are described in British Road Traffic Law or “Les Forains” as they are described over here. So it was 30kph (if we were lucky) all the way there.

And at St Gervais d’Auvegne I’ve ordered all my wood. The guy in the sawmill has undercharged me, and I pointed that out to him (I don’t believe in taking advantage of small businessmen – I wouldn’t like it if someone did that to me) but he insists that he’s right. But €126 for one thing and €99 for another and then a few other bits and pieces will never ever make €167 no matter how hard anyone tries to make it.

st gervais d'auvergne birdwatching centre ornithologique puy de dome franceOnce everything was sorted out in St Gervais d’Auvergne the next stop was to Liz and Terry’s to fit the wheels and tyres on the trailer.

The route as usual took me past the birdwatching centre at the back of town, which is my favourite spot for photographing the Puy de Dome. Now that I have the new Nikon D5000 I can take a pic from here and compare it with one of the photos taken with the Pentax K100D and we can see if there’s a difference.

Terry was out earning some folding stuff when I arrived and so I put the new wheels on the trailer and then helped Liz with some weeding.

Now we are all ready for moving this tractor tomorrow. What with all of the effort we’ve put into it, I hope it all goes according to plan.

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Thursday 10th June 2010 – Look what I’m having for tea!

home grown strawberries les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, strawberries. The first of the year, and all grown with my own fair hands too in my own garden.

Unfortunately there aren’t not all that many. It looks as if the local wildlife has been helping itself to them but nevertheless there were five left, and these, together with some soya cream, is a sure sign that summer is here at last.

Or is it?

rain fall in wheelbarrow les guis virlet puy de dome franceIt was raining again this morning and although it stopped for several hours, at about 18:00 it started up again in earnest and it’s still chucking it down now.

A quick look inside the wheelbarrow will tell you everything that you need to know about the amount of rainfall that we’ve had this last couple of days. Remember that this was empty just a couple of days ago when we were shovelling all of these stones around.

Liz came round this morning with my beans and vegan cheese and that’s good news. There are also some tins of curry and so it’s back to my Saturday night ritual again. We had quite a chat and it was a shame that she had to go.

And after that I carried on with the tidying up outside. Now that I have a hardstanding (or a wetstanding, or a notwithstanding) I’m moving over there everything that was propped up against the side of the barn. In a couple of weeks we’ll be putting up a scaffolding against the barn in order to do the barn roof, and I’ve been waiting years to do this. For many reasons actually – not the least being that I can finally move the solar panels off the roof of the Luton transit and onto the wall of the barn.

I’m tidying up a few other things too so I’m clearly not well. And when it clouded over at about 17:50 I called it a day and came up here. In fact I crashed out for half an hour.

In other news, I see that the new Conservative Government is planning to remodel University education. The Minister has considered several University models, including major part-time suppliers, ans has decided to try to remodel things on the lines of that well-known supplier of distance education, the … errrr … University of London.

As I said a few years ago when they set up a committee to consider part-time degree education and it consisted of staff from that other well-known supplier of distance education the … errrr … North Staffordshire University, the days of the Open University having any kind of significance and playing any kind of major role in shaping Government policy, these are long-gone. The OU has lost its relevance and has received yet another kick in the teeth.

Increasing prices and tuition fees brought an angry response from the National Union of Students. But of course they are a small-minded militant body made up of kids still wet behind the ears. So where was the response from the Open University Students’ Association – that body of 180,000 grown-up and mature students? The answer is of course “nowhere”. Either no-one considered the OUSA to have any relevance (which is a damning indictment of OUSA) or else whatever OUSA did say was considered to be not worth reporting (which is a damning indictment of OUSA).

It seems that OUSA has outlived its relevance too. But we all knew that, and a long time ago. A couple of years ago when the Labour government considered the idea of increasing costs and reducing subsidies, the response of that grown-up and august body of mature students was to … errr … sign a petition! I mean! We did things like that in Primary School when we were 10 and 11. Was that really the best that OUSA could come up with?

I once worked in a multinational multi-government organisation and we used to receive petitions from all kinds of people in all walks of life, on a regular basis. And do you know what we did with the petitions that we received? Well, we never bought any toilet paper, that’s for sure. That’s how petitions are treated in organisations such as that.

And the strawberries were delicious!

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Wednesday 9th June 2010 – Those of you with long memories …

… will recall the 11th of September 2008 when I had a whopping 48mm of rain in one day.

But that was an exceptional case – most of that fell in a brief half-hour period as the result of an incredible storm. Nothing that we have had since has ever come close.

caliburn parking harstanding flooding les guis virlet puy de dome franceThat is, until today. When it rained and rained and rained for the entire day non-stop. This horrible drenching rain that soaks absolutely everything and I don’t think that it’s ever going to stop.

And when I took the stats at 22:00 as usual I recorded 36.5mm of rain in that 24-hour period. And that’s the most rain that’s fallen here (apart from 11th September 2008) by a country mile.

My hardstanding has a river running down it right now as water cascades from just about everywhere in the neighbourhood. The whole of the ground is like a sponge.

Clearly working outside was impossible so after lunch I did some work in the bedroom but knocked off early as it was far too dark to see anything.

The weather really was that depressing.

fox les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut I did go down the garden to check up on all the plants, and my attention was drawn to some movement in the field.

We get to see plenty of wildlife here, deer and all that kind of thing. But I never normally have the camera with me. But today I did, quite luckily, and I was able to stand and watch, and reel off a pile of shots as a small fox played “pouncy pussy” with an object in the field.

fox les guis virlet puy de dome franceSo absorbed was it with what it was doing that it didn’t notice me there so I watched, getting soaking wet in the process, as it rounded up and then captured its latest meal.   I really don’t know who was the more absorbed, me or the fox. But it was interesting all the same.

I think that foxes are beautiful and I just don’t know why it is that people want to hunt and kill them. And in my book, huntsmen who dress up in ridiculous garments and set a pack of dogs on an animal like this and tear it to bits as a public spectacle are on roughly the same social level as paedophiles if you ask me.

I think that they are all thoroughly sick in the head.

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Wednesday 2nd June 2010 – The quarry opens …

montaigut quarry tipping 30 tonnes of stones les guis virlet puy de dome france… at 13:30 after the lunch break and at 13:40 the lorry turned up. It took him a good 15 minutes to negotiate the tight angles and corners around here, but once he was in position, he promptly deposited 15 tonnes of gravel.

The lorry then went away and half an hour later it was back with another 15 tonnes which was likewise promptly unloaded.

There is a downside of all of this, and that was that he left with a cheque for €628. Hasn’t that torn a huge hole in my budget for this year?

mini digger hardstanding caliburn parking les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd if that wasn’t enough, at 16:30 Sebastien and Bernard turned up despite their bereavement and immediately set to work.

They were only here for an hour or so before they were all finished, so it didn’t take too long. Mind you, they did tell me that they were here all Saturday afternoon digging out and moving about 30 trailers worth of rubbish and so on, depositing it in the waste land up the lane, and they did an hour of spreading and tamping down with the digger.

hardstanding caliburn parking les guis virlet puy de dome franceIt’s cost me another €200 for the labour and machinery for everything that they did, which might sound like a lot to some people (but certainly not to me) but when you think about it, at a minimum wage of €8:50 per hour, €200 represents about 24 or 25 man hours of labour alone. And would this ever have been done by a man working 25 hours with just a shovel?

Anyway, they’ve left behind them about 80 square metres of hardstanding. And you have to admit that this looks pretty good too. This was much better than I was ever expecting.

underground spring hardstanding caliburn parking les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut we’ve hit a problem in that we might have uncovered a hidden spring. Water is bubbling up and of you look closely in the middle of the image there’s a large damp patch. After they went I spent about an hour sinking rocks into it to bind together the sand and gravel and also to allow the water to bubble to the surface if that’s what is happening. It’s best to get it to come out in one place rather than undermining the hardstanding, and then I can simply lay a trench and pipe it away.

However I reckon that the weather might have something to do with it. You know about all the rain we’ve had recently and we had another 24mm today. There’s water everywhere.

Jean and Elizabeth and their friends popped round today as well to see how I’m getting on. Elizabeth is impressed with the garden and Jean is impressed with the work inside. It’s been a long time since they came here.

Tomorrow I’m going to take it easy. It was hard work shovelling that stuff today.

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Sunday 30th May – Sunday is a day of rest …

… as you know. There are no alarm clocks, no nothing. And I lie in bed until whatever time I like and I don’t care.

So what the heck was going on that I was wide awake and sitting up in bed reading a book at … errr … 06:52 this morning? And by the time 08:00 had come I had eaten my breakfast, drunk my coffee and watched an episode of Up Pompeii.

caliburn parking les guis virlet puy de dome franceFirst thing I did though was to stick my head out of the window and take a photo of the work that was done yesterday. And it’s even more impressive from up here. They did a really good job and I can’t wait for it to be finished.

Once I had taken the pic I made a start on a big mega-tidy-up here in the attic. It looks completely different now up here with everything where it ought to be (more or less) and it’s much more like a living room.

And do you know – that was that. I crashed out for an hour after lunch (no surprise there) and did nothing else of any importance. Apart from talking to Helena that is. She was the girlfriend of a mate of mine at school and we kept in a little bit of touch after that and then we disappeared. I briefly encountered her on a schoolmates website and we have now met up on a social networking site.

In other news, the nuclear talks in New York broke up with the contributors agreeing to a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. One group of people has objected and decided to oppose the idea. let me ask you to guess which group?

Hamas? The Iranians?

No – the Zionists! Now of course the Zionists refuse to admit that they have nuclear weapons (although it’s an open secret that they do and that they were built in conjuction with white racist South Africa) but ask yourself this – if they didn’t have any nuclear weapons, why would they be objecting to a nuclear-free zone? And while Iran agrees to suspend any question of nuclear activity there if everyone else does the same, then now tell me who it is that is the REAL obstacle to peace in the Middle East?

Yes, it’s high time that the west stops this absurd and illogical defence of the Zionists at any costs and starts to concentrate its activities on the Muslems, Jews and Christians that the Zionists are massacring. If the west pulled its support of the Zionists there would be peace in the Middle East inside a month as they would be forced to negotiate with their neighbours.

And in other Middle East news, there’s an aid convoy sailing from Cyprus to Gaza bringing in urgent supplies. The UN reckons that the Palestinians (many of whom are women and children and many of whom are Christians) need about 60,000 tonnes of supplies per week to survive and the Zionists permit only 15,000 tonnes – and no building materials so that the Palestinians cannot rebuild the houses that the Zionists demolish with bulldozers. So an aid convoy is setting off with supplies. And the Zionists have vowed to stop it.

This of course raises two important questions.
Firstly – have the Zionists forgotten already about the ships that brought them and their supplies to Palestine in 1947 and 1948 and which led to start of all the trouble in Palestine? Surely not, the hypocrites.
And secondly, how does the treatment that the Zionists are handing out to the Palestinians differ from how the Nazis treated the Jews back in the 1930s and 1940s. We haven’t got as far as ;ass murder yet, but we have the economic blockade and if you have been keeping up with the news just recently we are having the ethnic cleansing and the deportations. The Zionist treatment of the Palestinians has been described as a “pogrom” – and by a Zionist politician too!

When is the west going to put a stop to it?

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Saturday 29th May 2010 – Errrr….

… quite!

Returning home this evening after the chantier I had a tremendous surprise

Those of you with long memories will recall that back in the winter 2008-9 I cleared a plot of land of old trees, weeds, brmables and the like ready to make a parking place for Caliburn and the trailer etc etc. But there were all kinds of rubbish stones and the like to move. And endless searches for diggers was fruitless. Eventually Bernard from the footy club told me of one and we made contact but since the guy’s visit here last week I’ve been waiting for him to get back to me.

parking place cleared les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnyway, when I returned home I found that he had been and gone, having dug out absolutely everything and a few more things besides.

It’s not exactly how I wanted it but habitual readers of this blog will have noticed that I have a tendency to vacillate. So, recognising my own failings more than anything else, I’m glad that he came to do it while I wasn’t here because it avoided me getting myself all confused and mixed up and he could get on with the job without me bothering him.

mini digger les guis virlet puy de dome franceBetter still, he’s left the digger here and he’s told me to go ahead and get the stones delivered as soon as possible – and then he’ll come back and do the laying. He’s also brought the football club’s heavy roller for compacting the stones and that has saved a whole pile of work.

So this time next week at the latest I’ll have a proper hardstanding to park some of my vehicles and I’m so impressed. I shudder to think of the cost of it all but it’s one of those things that I need to do, and the sooner the better if you ask me.

This is the most exciting thing that has happened to me since I’ve been here.

elizabeth mabit chantier communaux espinasse puy de dome franceAt the chantier there weren’t so many of us as in the past. It seems that the numbers of participants are falling off. But of course it isn’t quantity that counts, it’s quality and those who were here know each other very well and are quite good friends so that all helps considerably.

Some of the participants were involved in gardening and others such as Nan, Francois and myself, carried on with making this wooden toilet and shower block that we started last year. we had quite a production line going with Francois measuring and cutting and Nan and I fixing and nailing.

puy de dome franceWe had the work done in no time, including a pause for lunch and chat.

Towards the end of the afternoon we covered up the garden that the others had dug over. A length of breathable bio-membrane covered in woodchips Jean and I fetched the chips with the car and trailer and shovelled them onto the membrane and the others spread them out And just as we finished we had a downpour

It’s nice to work in the company of convivial and pleasant people, and it appears that I might have visitors on Wednesday afternoon

In other news, Dennis Hopper has died. This is desperate news for me and for many of my friends as he and Peter Fonda were our role models as teenagers and they inspired a whole generation of people such as ourselves. I’m going to watch Easy Rider again just now but it won’t ever be the same again.

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Sunday 16th May 2010 – Football isn’t everyone’s cup of tea …

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire puy de dome ligue de football league france… and as we were all staggering off towards the pie hut at half-time today during the match at St Maurice pres Pionsat I couldn’t resist taking this pic of a Biollet St Maurice supporter overcome by emotion due to the hectic pace of the game.

But the young lady fast asleep by the touchline and the blue sky will give you some idea of the weather today. Summer seems to be back – and about time too.

puy de dome franceMind you, I can’t blame the girl for falling asleep because it was one of THOSE games this afternoon. The heat was clearly getting to everyone and so it was played at something of a leisurely pace and in the end, finished as a 0-0 draw.

Pionsat were the better side though and did have one or two chances to take the lead during the match, but I do have to admit I’ve seen many more exciting games than this one. At least, is was a pleasant day out.

I woke up at 09:57 to the sun streaming in through my windows here. It looked beautiful and I couldn’t resist thinking to myself that it was so nice that someone was bound to spoil it. And right on cue the phone rang. Bernard, the football club chairman, wanted to tell me that his son (he who has the digger) wanted to talk to me and could he come round.

So I hauled myself out of bed to wait for him. I asked Bernard a while back if he knew of someone with a digger who can dig out where I want to park Caliburn and he recommended his son. But he was stuck on a chantier in all of this bad weather. It now seems that they’ve been able to work and it may well be that by Friday they’ll be finished. So he came to see the job and reckons he’ll ring me on Friday or Saturday to tell me when he can start.

I told him about Simon’s job and he’s keen to do that too. And by the purest coincidence it seems that where Simon is living is the old workshop of Bernard’s uncle and Bernard was born in the house just next to Simon’s.

This world is getting far too small for me.

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