Tag Archives: cloche

Thursday 20th December 2012 – WELL, FOLKS …

… I’m feeling a little better today.

I can cough without feeling that I have that piece of sandpaper stuck down my throat, although coughing does make my ribs ache. All I need to do now is to stop this runny nose before I run out of kitchen roll.

Apart from that, I’ve not been doing much. Spending an hour or two every so often writing the radio programmes – it’s difficult to concentrate to write a whole stream of stuff, and reading a few books.

But you’ll be pleased (or maybe disappointed) to learn that I’ve not had any interesting dreams just now these last few days.

I’ve also had a few phone calls from friends – such as Liz, Marianne and Rosemary, and that’s nice too. Cheers me up no end.

I hope that I’ll be feeling better by Saturday though because I have to go out and do some shopping. Must get the sprouts in for Christmas

And talking of Christmas and Rosemary, I forgot to mention that I’m still eating lettuce out of the garden. Yes – I built up a raised bed with some old planks and laid an old caravan window across the top.

That’s kept the weather out and while the leaves are quite small, they are still there and quite edible. That’s something of a surprise, especially with the horrendous weather that we’ve had.

We’ve had seven consecutive days of rain and since I’ve been back (2 weeks) we’ve only had one day of sunshine. I wish that the weather would improve because I could do with recharging my batteries some day soon – and those of the solar energy systems too

No wonder I’m all sad, depressed and miserable with all of this.

Talk about being under the weather – there’s a lot of weather to be under right now 

-2

Tuesday 10th July 2012 – YOU KNOW WHO …

… your real friends are when you ring them up and as if they fancy a trip to Montlucon on Friday morning – arriving there (45 mins from here) at … errr … 07:00.

“What’s the score?” asked Terry
“Brico Depot has some interesting stuff in the arrivages that has caught my eye but it’s big and bulky, and we need to be there early”
“I’ll bring the trailer then”.

I hate to tempt fate by making announcements about things that are outside my control but if this comes off it won’t ‘arf be a stunning development for round here.

So where was I? Ahh yes.

rendering concrete lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter the usual couple of hours on the web pages I went outside and spent a good deal of the afternoon putting the second coat of paint on the rendering of the lean-to.

You can see what the rendering was like prior to the painting if you look at the bottom left-hand corner where I couldn’t reach. I know which one I like better.

That took me until 17:00 when I went off and attacked the garden.

Clotilde gave me some of her lettuce thinnings yesterday and so I weeded and hoed a few spaces in a couple of the raised beds and planted them in … note to self – when I thin out the leeks, send some round to Clotilde in exchange … and then gave them a really good watering – not that they need it of course in this weather.

After that I checked on the carrots and beetroot that I planted a couple of weeks ago. They seem to be doing fine and so I planted another row of each. Certainly covering the sowings over with old caravan windows seems to be the way to go here

That took me until 19:00 when I knocked off. Thoroughly exhausted – you’ve no idea how much like hard work all of this is.

-3

Friday 15th June 2012 – TODAY WAS MUCH …

… more like a normal day.

I woke up with the alarm clock (no wonder it was noisy in bed), had breakfast, did some work on the computer and apart from the guy who came to pick up some parcels, that was about that for the morning.

But I’m glad all of the parcels have gone as I now have a little space.

And just as well too because I had a text message – my door is ready.

Rosemary has very kindly said that she will keep the door safe for me but I still need to pick it up, and that means emptying Caliburn of all the stuff I bought at IKEA at Christmas – hence it’s just as well that I now have the space where I can store it.

What I actually bought at IKEA was a trolley load of bits and pieces – all left-over or shop-soiled stuff – for €10.

I always pick one of those up if I can, and that particular lot that I have in the van is an excellent example because

  • there is a load of side panels for wardrobes, cupboards and the like with all of the holes pre-drilled in them for shelves and drawers and so on. Very useful, these, and I have plans for them.
  • there is a pile of sprung bed laths that I need
  • there is a pile of sides and doors from display furniture. You can make nice shelves in the shed with those.

Yes, it’s always a good plan to buy a load of that stuff when you see it.

I’ve done a pile of weeding along the pathways too and it’s much easier to move about now. It’s really only scratching the surface of course but it’s all progress anyway.

And while we are on the subject of weeding, I noticed that the potato beds were looking overgrown and so I spend an hour on them pulling up the rubbish. And you’ll be amazed how different all of that looks now.

The biggest advantage of raised beds is that the soil has not been compacted because you don’t walk upon it – in fact the thorough hoeing and raking that it had before I went away coupled with all of the wet weather means that even the biggest and toughest weed can be pulled out easily by hand without any problem whatever.

From there I went on to pull the old caravan window off the plot in which I had sown some beetroot.

You couldn’t see anything in there apart from a mass of weeds but once I had pulled a pile of rubbish out, there were in fact quite a few beetroot sitting in there doing what beetroot do.

But that has confirmed something – quite a few seeds that I planted, like the beetroot and the brassica, I covered over with some kind of glass covering, and they have taken well. Other stuff that I planted and didn’t cover, they haven’t done so well.

There must be a moral in that.

In other news, I’ve been quietly seething about the Royal Bank of Scotland. I sent some instructions to them ages ago to do something and they replied with a whole host of reasons why they should not do it.

This afternoon I made up my mind that I really ought to take some drastic action, involving pick-axe andles and napalm, but even as I was speaking to myself the phone rang – and it was THEM!

Talk about timing!

And as for my steamed meal; I didn’t have that tonight. We had footy instead and I need a free evening to start with that.

-1

Monday 5th March 2012 – I WAS RIGHT …

… yesterday about the snow.

At about 15:30 this afternoon the heavens opened and for a couple of minutes we had a snowstorm.

Not totally unexpected either, because between about 14:00 and 15:00 the temperature dropped from 8.3°C to 4.1°C – quite a dramatic fall in temperature in such a short space of time – and it carried on dropping too.

Having spent much of the morning doing computer things, I went out to move these tree stumps that are in the way of where I want to put the compost bins. But rather than spending all of the time moving the stumps, I spent much of that time taking the handle out of an old abandoned spade to put in the garden fork.

That’s another tool handle broken – I’ve lost count of how many just recently. I’ve no idea what’s causing them all to pack in.

However, when I was at Bricomarche the other day I noticed a pile of tool handles. I shall have to go and mortgage my life away.

“But why did it take so long to change a tool handle?” I hear you say.

Probably because the handle in the spade was well stuck in and in the end it was a job for the angle grinder to cut away the neck of the spade. As for the fork, that involved drilling out the broken bit of handle and that wasn’t as easy as it might have been either.

But now the big tree stump is out, and so are a couple of smaller ones. I didn’t have time to remove the rest so that’s a job for tomorrow, always assuming that I can see them through the snow that is forecast to fall tonight

Another thing I did was to plant the lettuce. Did I mention that I bought a dozen baby lettuce plants on Saturday? A dozen cost €2:95 and the price for 6 – also €2:95. So seeing as a dozen lettuce all ready at the same time would overwhelm me, I planted 6 and gave 6 to Liz at the Anglo-French group this evening.

What I will be doing is buying a few small lettuce plants every few weeks and running them throughout the year.

A big mistake that I made last year was that I left the final lettuce out in the open and the frost got to them even though they were stiull going. I’ve therefore planted this lot of lettuce in the cloche with the strawberry plants and put the glass (really two old caravan windows) over them to keep the bad weather out.

And the lettuce from September onwards will also go into the cloche to see how long they will keep in there under cover

I also bought a few packs of seeds from ALDI and LIDL – €0.29 and €0.49 a packet depending on size. Not many varieties but enough to keep me going. I imagine that temperatures of -16°C have done for the seeds in store from last year.

I also need to think about seed potatoes, onion sets, garlic and shallots. It’s getting to be about that time.

All in all, things are starting to become busy around here. I need to put my skates on.

-1

Monday 22nd August 2011 – It was 09:30 …

… this morning when I was burned out of bed by the heat. It’s quite astonishing just now, all of this. It was only a week or so ago that I was complaining about the cold weather.

Anyway, I’ve finished the web pages for the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry and they are on line. And well-worth a read too because I managed to blag my way in to see the world’s most controversial railway engine. But that’s all the web site stuff that I’m doing now until I go back next week – is it really only a week away?

The web pages took me nicely to lunch and I actually managed to find a decent tomato in the megacloche. How nice that was as well. Afterwards I was back up the ladder again. It’s now right into the apex of the roof – I can see over the roof line – and sfter today’s exertions there’s not all that much more to do up there. I’m out tomorrow afternoon so I’ll finish it off on Wednesday.

A short while after working in the garden I went for my solar shower. And a max temperature of an astonishing 60.5°:C was recorded. But don’t get carried away by that – I forgot to fill it yesterday and so the temperature sender was reading the air temperature. 41°C was much more like it.

Tonmorrow I have to go to the mairie at Pionsat for some stuff for Radio Anglais. And then, I have to pick up another oil tank. This will be the “before” for the used cooking oil. I’ll also make up the leads for the batteries over in Canada.

-2

Thursday 26th May 2011 – I’ve been gardening today

herb garden trough les guis virlet puy de dome franceI need to as well as I have so many plants lying around that need to be planted before I go away.

I started on the herbs and they’ve now all been properly put in place. The troughs that I used at my apartment in Brussels for my hedge on the balcony – they are just the job for this. I’ve had to put the mint into a pot all on its own as it was going berserk and overwhelming everything else in the trough where it was.

There are just a few herbs remaining but they are in small pots in the cloche and aren’t really up to being planted out as yet.

unknown herb potager les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut I did find a plant that I didn’t recognise in the herb troughs. That, together with a couple of others that I can’t recognise, I’ve put on my Facebook page to see if anyone can identify them – you can see the link on the right-hand side.

If anyone has an idea as to what it (and the others) might be, let me know because I would love to find out what they are.

This afternoon I planted everything that I bought from the sale at St Gervais d’Auvergne, and there was tons of that too, and then made a start on the stuff growing in the cloche.

And so what with this morning on the computer again, this evening I went round to Marianne’s for a discussion and a perusal of the railway stuff that I received from Henri at Radio Tartasse about the tacot, the narrow-gauge railway that threaded its way through the Allier as far as Marcillat. And all of that is impressive too.

But basically Marianne and I have to go a-breaking and entering again, and we’ll do that when I come back from the UK.

-3

Wednesday 6th April 2011 – What an exciting day.

Breakfast outside in 19°C on the pallets that I’m using as an impromptu terrace for the moment, interrupted by the postie bringing me a huge (and I mean huge) box of goodies from Amazon – my birthday present in fact.

And then the rest of the morning gardening. I’ve dragged the herb beds out of the smaller cloche (they are in large plastic troughs) and put them by the verandah so I can get at them for cooking, and then spend the rest of the morning clearing up some more raised beds and sowing seeds – putting tons of stuff out in fact. And it was beautiful weather to be out in, that’s for sure. Summer is well and truly back.

home made 12 volt immersion heater les guis virlet puy de dome franceLunch on the terrace of course, and by the time I was ready to resume, the water in the home-made immersion heater (that takes its energy from the excess solar power) had reached the magical 50°C (did I mention that I’d insulated it this morning with a load of the left-over offcuts of the bubble-wrap insulation?) and so that called for a washday, and now I’ve a load of clean clothes drying outside.

But isn’t it nice to have piping hot water for washing clothes without having to boil an array of kettles?

While I was in the washroom I made a start on tidying it up too – years of rubbish accumulated in there. Only a start, mind you. There’s a lot of stuff in there that needs to be sorted and a lot of it can be binned or burned as well. In fact it might be an idea to have a fire around here and dispose of a pile of stuff.

Once the washing was done it was back into the garden and planting herbs in the herb bed and delicate stuff into pots to warm up in the smaller cloche (which is why I moved the herb beds out). I’m now curious to see what my crops will do this year. Last year was rather disappointing as you may well remember, with snow in May that killed everything stone-dead.

18:10 when I knocked off too, and the water in the solar shower was at 38°C. That called for a shower (and we aren’t talking about the Executive Committee of the Open Unversity Students’ Association either) and so never mind the clothes – I’m clean too (well, at least on the outside anyway).

Back up here I had my coffee, watched the first one of the 41 episodes of Sherlock Holmes – Complete Collection [DVD]  while I sorted through all of my purchases. I must admit I can’t wait to watch Bring Me The Head of Turdi de Hatred [DVD] [1974]  sometime in the near future.

Switching on the computer, I found myself the recipient of some astonishing news and it’s the best news that I’ve had since Monday. I’m not going to sat anything about it as yet because it is too good to be true and I’m not going to believe a word of anything until I have a piece of paper in my sweaty little mitt. I’ve no idea why it is that my luck has suddenly changed  for the better this last 9 months – it’s not like me at all. But things have certainly been turned upside-down just recently. So much so in fact that I’m convinced that there’s a huge banana skin waiting for me somewhere to compensate. But then again, if this news is as good as it seems to be then it won’t matter at all.

So now I’m listening to Made In Japan, and in particular “Highway Star” – the theme song for my trip to the Rockies and the Utah Desert in 2002 – at full volume before I go to bed. But no point in going to bed right now – I won’t be going off to sleep.

-2

Monday 29th November 2010 – I’VE BEEN GARDENING THIS AFTERNOON

With the weather having warmed up today, I’ve covered over the beds of spuds and carrots with some of the black plastic sheeting that I used to cover them just after I dug the beds out. This will hopefully trap the “heat” (after all, 6 degrees is “heat” after what we have been having just now and help them to thaw out, as well as protecting them from the frost until I can get to dig them up.

I also wanted to put my herb beds under cover too so firstly I grubbed out everything in the mega-cloche  and then moved the strawberry plants from the smaller cloche and planted them into the mega-cloche.

6 plants went into that cloche last spring, and 21 came out. I was impressed with that. They should do well in the mega-cloche and I might even have a decent crop this coming year.

The smaller cloche wasn’t big enough to take all of the herb beds so I had to tidy up the greenhouse and put the other herb bed in there. All of the stuff that didn’t grow was consigned to the new compost heap and now for once there is plenty of room in it.

But the plastic covering of the greenhouse has decayed and so I need to turn my attention to building the new greenhouse out of the windows that Simon gave me. Last year I made a space to put that, and the space where the plastic greenhouse is, I’ll build a garden shed there.

I’ve also given the inside of the back of Caliburn a bit of a clean-out too, and then I spent a pleasant hour or so crushing tin cans – I had a load of them lying around and so I’ve flattened some of them ready to take to the recycling. Plenty more to go, too, and I’ll spend some more time on that.

But this evening the temperature has plunged dramatically. When I went downstairs it was -3.3 and there was a really heavy frost. Seems like the temperature is in freefall tonight and we could well be on our way to the coldest night of the winter. And winter hasn’t started yet – it’s still November around here.

-2

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.

-3

Friday 28th May 2010 – It further occurs to me …

greenhouse plants les guis virlet puy de dome france… that you haven’t seen inside the greenhouse at all so far this year and so that was worthy of a photo.

It’s a cheap greenhouse from LIDL that I bought last year and it came complete with detachable staging. €49.99 if I remember correctly and that was a good purchase as well.

Most of the seeds have been planted in soya dessert containers. I learnt that from last year and the year before that – planting in seed trays just swamped me out all at once and having 24 lettuce all ready at the same time with none following on was bad news. Doing things like this – a few at a time – ensure a decent succession of crop.

You’ll notice plastic spoons and plastic knives in the pots. I write in pencil on them the name of whatever is in the pot so I don’t forget. Real plastic tags are quite expensive whereas plastic spoons and knives cost me 50 cents for 20 at the local cheapo shop.

plants outside for hardening off megacloche les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn fact this isn’t everything – not by any means. It’s pretty crowded in the greenhouse as you can see and so a pile of stuff has been moved into the new mega-cloche where they can be hardened off ready for planting.

Some stuff, such as the borlotti beans (they are the only ones that have taken) and some more sprouts were even further-advanced than that and so they have already been planted in the appropriate raised bed.

I can see that I’m going to have to work hard to keep up with all of this succession planting. And I’m having to start weeding too. That’s a novelty, isn’t it?

Once I’d done the garden I did some more work in the bedroom and then at 18:00 I nipped into St Eloy les Mines for some shopping seeing as I’m out tomorrow at a chantier communal at Jean and Elizabeth’s. I met Julie and Rob in LIDL which was a surprise as normally I meet them at Brico Depot.

And I still didn’t get to the two new shops either. They both close at 18:30 and I had the privilege of having a door shut in my face on two occasions.

At the chantiers we have to bring along some food to share and so I cooked a huge aubergine and kidney bean chili, some of which I had for tea and the rest I’ll take tomorrow.

But it’ll upset the locals – it’s …errr… rather spicy.

-4

Thursday 15th April 2010 – Tonight’s image …

ford cortina mark 5 gardening raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome france… is another aerial shot, and you can see what I have been doing today. I’ve lengthened the path down in front of the raised beds and filled the base with rubble. And then I’ve filled in the path between the new large bed and the two other beds just below it.

I’ve also done the path between the megacloche and the raised bed in front of it. Those two paths have been made of rubble with a layer of slate on top.

The piles of rubble on the ground floor inside the house are getting smaller and smaller and that is real progress. In certain places you can even see the floor now!

But I’m well-impressed with all of this. I started at the beginning of March so it’s all taken a mere six weeks to accomplish. It’s hard to believe that back in early March it was all looking like this.

Moving the chassis of the Citroen 2CV I found another adder. And again I moved my hand before it could react. Grahame thinks that they must be slow worms, but certainly not. I listened closely to it and it was definitely going “two plus two equals four – three plus three equals six”.

And that reminds me “groan” … ed of the mother who rang up the school to speak to her son’s teacher.
“What kind of maths is this that you are teaching little Johnny? He’s been sitting here last night saying things like ‘two plus two; the sonofabitch is four – three plus three; the sonofabitch is six’ et cetera”
“Well, I don’t know where he’s learning words like that” replied the teacher “but I’ve been trying to get him to say ‘the sum of which is …'”.

0

Wednesday 14th April 2010 – I’ve finished all of the beds in the garden

raised bed gardening les guis virlet puy de dome franceYou can see the last one just here on the right of the image.I can’t go any further for to the right are some fruit trees, behind me is the scrap Ford Transit van and to the left of the raised beds are the old Ford Cortina and the diesel w123 Mercedes 240D. And once we get round to next winter I can think about moving all of the vehicles elsewhere.

But 9 raised beds is enough for now, what with the megacloche as well – you may remember that last year it was just 8 raised beds.

There’s a caravan window across the megacloche for the moment. My tray of radishes and my container of carrots are underneath it hardening off ready to be planted. I needed the space in the greenhouse for the April sowing of seed, which I also did today. But nothing much seems to be germinating and that’s pretty disappointing. I’m sure it didn’t take this long last year.

15 of us at football training tonight. We started off with a few laps around the pitch and then had a game of quick-passing football. After that it was a heading match and then we finished off with a 7-a-side game. There was a new player there tonight – someone who I hadn’t seen before. A big guy, bald and a little on the senior side and called Christophe, which is bound to complicate things as there are already more Christophes than you can shake a stick at.

It reminds me of the old days with the Cheese Hall pub in Crewe. If you wanted a labourer or two to help on a job you would stick your head through the door and shout “Paddy”. You’d be trampled to death in the stampede.

But I digress.

There’a a goalkeeping crisis in the club right now – just one fit keeper for all three teams … “I bet he’s busy then” – ed … and this Christophe is someone who somebody else knows who retired from playing a few years ago but he’s been enticed out of retirement to keep goal for the 2nd XI for the next few weeks while Francois, Michael and Philippe recover from their injuries.

But this training lark – I’m miles off being match-fit and at my age I doubt if realistically I can get back into the right kind of fitness. But there is hope for me yet. If Tomi Morgan can crack it in the Welsh Premier League at his age then I can do it in the 14th level of the French pyramid at two and a half years more.

The proof of the pudding will be when I wake up tomorrow morning and see how the bones feel. I did notice that I was running much more freely tonight, and that’s a good sign.

0

Monday 12th April 2010 – Well, we are all going to be famous now.

We were all filmed at our Anglo-French Conversation Group this evening – but there’s no need to get excited. It was just one guy with the camera and the microphone and that was that – all very low key. He asked me about 6 questions and then proceeded to film the attendees and ask them a couple of questions.

I was all on my own to do the organising though as Christiane had to work and Liz was busy rescuing Terry from the hospital where she had taken him yesterday. He had had a fight with his chopsaw and finished second.

home made cloche les guis virlet puy de dome franceToday I finished my megacloche and if I had have had time to photograph it I would have regaled you all with a photo yesterday. But anyway, here it is today. It’s 1m20 tall, 1m20 deep and 1m60 wide. The front slopes at 45 degrees and so is a veritable sun trap.

Or it will be when I put some glass in it. I don’t have enough old caravan windows to finish it but Simon reckons he has some old windows lying around and I can go and liberate them in due course.

Once I finished that I started moving the old pile of gravel that I had left when I was taken ill in 2003 and also digging over another raised bed. I know – I said that I wouldn’t dig any more but I have to fight my way in to where the fruit trees start, and there is a strip of about 3.5m x 1m looks so inviting for a bed of potatoes if I can get all the ground alder out.

Being on my own this evening I told Bill about Terry’s little contretemps and asked him to explain it to everyone, which he duly did.
“Not his whole finger? asked Mark incredulously.
“No” replied Bill. “The one next to it”.

0

Friday 9th April 2010 – This morning …

… there was a thick hanging stationary cloud over the mountain (as predicted last night) – the first one for ages. It was grey and drizzly so after breakfast I came up here and carried on with updating the footy website.

Once the cloud lifted a little (and I mean a little) I went outside to start on the megacloche. This involved rooting around in the barn for the wood and this led on to searching through the old clothes and rescuing a few that are too good to chuck in the bin. Once that was all out of the way and I’d found the wood I cut it all to shape ready for after lunch.

So now the base has been made and laid in position, I’ve built the two sides, and I’ve got the wood ready to make the back so with a bit of luck it will be ready on Monday. It’s 1m60 wide by 1m15 deep by 1m20 high at the back and 15 cms at the front – so it will be a veritable sun-trap (assuming that we get more sun). Fenestration for the moment will be by somoe of the old caravan windows that are lying around here – a useful quarry of all kinds of spare parts is an old caravan.

The trip to Clermont Ferrand and back was uneventful but we finished early so coming through Pionsat I noticed that the floodlights were on at the ground. They are training, maybe. I hope so as they need some good results this weekend and all three matches are derbies against hated local rivals where considerable bragging rights are at stake.

In other news, there is to be a meeting shortly of nuclear powers and a motion has been tabled to quiz the Zionists about their possession of nuclear weapons. As a result, the leader of the Zionists has pulled out and instead is sending a minion who will doubtless reply “I know nothing”.

Although the Zionists refuse to comment, it is a rather open secret that they possess nuclear armaments – they had a secret arrangement with another pariah state – White South Africa – back in the 1960s and 1970s where nuclear technology leaked from the USA by Zionist and White Supremacist nuclear scientists, with the covert agreement of the USA Government, was put to use by those two groups. In the 1970s Jimmy Carter estimated that the Zionists had about 150 nuclear weapons. How many they have now is of course anyone’s guess.

Mordechai Vanunu, a Zionist “scientist”, was imprisoned for many years for trying to leak to sympathetic newspapers details of the Zionist nuclear arsenal, and the terms of his release forbid him to talk to any foreigners or any journalists and every time one of them hovers around his place of abode Vanunu is whisked off back to prison. Yet despite the furore about Aung San Sun Kyi in Burma (whose father as we all know was the person who “invited the Japanese liberators” into Burma in 1942 and co-operated (at least in the early stages) in the wholesale massacre of tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Burmese civilians, many of whom were women and children), no-one ever tries to rally round Vanunu.

There are just four states in the entire world who have refused to sign up to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty – Pakistan and India (who would wipe each other off the face of the earth in the twinkling of an eye given half a chance and never mind the consequences), North Korea (which has an American nuclear arsenal right on its doorstep) and …. errrrr …. the Zionists if I break my usual convention and accord them – for the purposes of this discussion and no other – some kind of de-facto statehood.

So if the Zionists have nuclear weapons and refuse to be called to account over them, would someone mind explaining to me what exactly is the issue that the west has about Iran and North Korea having them?

Nothing but rank hypocrisy.

If the Septics were to come to some kind of realism and tell the Iranians that they can have nuclear weapons as long as they point them at Tel Aviv, it might knock some sense into the Zionists. But as if that will ever happen!

-2

Tuesday 6th April 2010 – I think …

… that Spring might actually have made it.

Yes, a glorious hot day, but of course we have had these before. What actually did the business though was that the temperature in the heat exchanger got up to over 50 degrees – the first time since as long ago as 8th September, would you believe – and in the 15 litres of water underneath the caravan window we had 32 degrees – easily and by far away the highest temperature since I installed a permanent thermometer a few weeks ago.

Yes, Spring might be here but this morning wasn’t. That’ll teach me to mess around with this 3D animation program until it’s starting to get light outside. The boulangere woke me up – at 11:30!

raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut as I said it was a beautiful day, and I took full advantage by planting the lettuce that I bought on Saturday. They’ve gone into a bit of a raised bed that isn’t covered off by a sheet of corrugated iron.

They don’t half look insipid when they are transplanted though and a really good watering didn’t seem to improve matters. They’ll probably need a day or two or three to revigorate.

And after lunch I started to dig out where I’ll be putting the megacloche. And that was none-too-easy as the whole area is honeycombed with tree roots. Of course I forgot to buy a handle for my pickaxe and unfortunately I broke my really good spade, leaving me with just a cheap one. I’ll have to scout around for a new one and it’ll have to be good. Cheap ones don’t last long round here.

I was interrupted by this TV presenter woman who wanted a chat. It seems that she’s serious about talking to us. Our fame must be spreading!

And would you believe it – it’s started to rain now!

-1