Tag Archives: endives

Tuesday 25th December 2012 – THE FIRST NOEL…

… the Angels did say was at about blasted 07:45 this flaming morning.

That’s because despite it being a Bank Holiday and accordingly a Day of Rest, where nothing ever moves before perishing midday, Brain of Britain here forgot to switch off his sodding alarm clock, didn’t he?

Still, the early start gave me plenty of time to relax and open my presents.

Lots of DVDs, CDs, books and computer stuff. All a man could desire – except for Kate Bush and Jenny Agutter of course, but you can’t have everything.

And once breakfast was out of the way I sat down for the start of my marathon DVD session.

Lunch was the typical Christmas Day lunch – nibbling on bits and pieces, and then having had a suitable repose, I prepared the veg for the evening meal.

Boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, carrots, endives and sprouts – all cooked in the steamer.

Cécile came round in the late afternoon, just in time for Carry on Don’t Lose Your Head.

Not my favourite Carry-On film but one that she would understand, with lots of visual humour. High time, given the state of globalisation in the world today, that I started spreading around the spirit of Carry On humour.

So a few more films, a Christmas meal (the aforementioned plus seitan slices in onion gravy, Christmas pudding and vegan cream followed by coffee and Christmas cake), and a good chat, she went home and I went to bed.

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Saturday 22nd December 2012 – I’m still here today too.

Although, given the weather, I wouldn’t have minded in the least if the world had come to an end. I can’t remember if this is the 9th or 10th consecutive day of rain but nevertheless, it’s still been very wet and once more, the four banks of solar panels haven’t received any electricity worth talking about. It’s not just the weather that’s in a depression.

I made it out today – into St Eloy-les-Mines and a quick thrash around the shops. Most importantly, I have my brussels sprouts and endives for Christmas Day now. That’s vitally important of course. They well go nicely with my roast spuds, seitan slices, stuffing and onion gravy for Christmas Dinner. That’s if I get any Christmas Dinner – the fire is playing up right now. It’s not burning, just sitting there smouldering and blowing clouds of smoke back into the room. I’ll have to look at the pipework to see whether a mouse has hibernated in the chimney.

One thing that I did do today though was to go to the launderette. There was a load of washing here and waiting for fine weather and hot water will be like waiting for Godot I imagine. There will be more chance of meeting him here right now. So a huge pile of it went into a machine and now it’s all clean.

That means clean bedding tonight and seeing as how I had a good strip-down wash this afternoon, a clean me too. Yes, a strip-down wash. If anyone thinks that I’m standing outside taking a shower in this weather they are mistaken.

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Friday 20th July 2012 – WHAT A SHAMBLES!

And, just for a change, I’m not talking about anything to do with the Open University Students Association.

At 10:00 I needed to be at Radio Tartasse in Marcillat-en-Combraille to record the rock music programme and thanks to a 07:30 start this morning I had everything ready and so I was there on time.

15 minutes it takes to record the programmes – I set up all the music at home and copy them onto a memory stick – but it was blasted flaming well 11:50 before I managed to leave.

It seems that someone has been messing around with the computer there and there’s a file running in a kind of algorithm that is stopping the sound card working correctly.

They had the manager and two technicians trying to fix it and in the end Yours Truly was so fed up that he imposed himself in the office and managed to free off the sound card by disabling the background program via the Task Manager so that we could make a start.

Then, they managed to lose the program that we had recorded and so after they gave up, I searched all of the hard drives for it and it wasn’t there at all, so we went to re-record it, with much GRRRRRRing.

And then the program wouldn’t open as “an instance of this program is already running” – seems that the Manager had entered a file name but had forgotten to save it and had then minimised the window.

No wonder it took so flaming long.

At lunchtime I took Bill to Montaigut-en-Combraille – he had bought a new bed and needed it transporting home and that was not as straightforward as it might have been either, for reasons that I shan’t go into.

But to cut a long story short, it was 15:00 when I finally stopped for lunch and I was dismayed.

lean to repairing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceSo having been driven up the wall all this morning it was only natural that I was back on the scaffolding this afternoon.

If you compare this photo with one of the ones from earlier this week you can see how much progress I’ve been making.

But the real proof of progress is the fact that you’ll notice the new-looking breeze block in the wall by the bottom-right of the photo – when I started to repair the lean-to, that breeze block was the first stone that I had to lay.

Everything from and including that breeze block is what I’ve had to put it.

Anyway, after a few hours on that, it was 18:50 when I finished a load of cement and so I called it a day on the wall.

That gave me 10 minutes to sow a row of endives ready for the winter. You can see how organised I’m becoming these days, can’t you?

So back up here to warm up and dry off because today we were back in winter – cold and wet.

Summer has been and gone, and that was your lot.

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Monday 29th August 2011 – I had another early start this morning.

I don’t know why – but I was downstairs making breakfast when the alarm went off at 08:15. What’s going on there, then? It’s not like me.

And so this morning I packed everything up ready for going to Paris on the train tomorrow evening. The suitcase is all done – it just remains now to do my backpack and to sort out the camera and one or two other bits and pieces.

I’ve also printed off a pile of stuff that I needed to print – the radio stuff and also my rail tickets and so on. even managed to find the time to plant some winter cabbage. But talking of the garden – I planted some endives a couple of weeks ago when I pulled up the new potatoes, and covered the plot with a black plastic bin liner. When I lifted it off today, much of it had sprouted. That was good. Mind you, despite how warm it was today, the temperature last night dropped to about 9 degrees – the lowest so far this summer. Autumn is acumen in. Lhude sing the falling leaves.

Round at Liz’s we prepared our radio programmes for tomorrow and Liz cooked a nice tea. we also weighed my suitcase – 3kgs overloaded. I’ll have to do some trimming down of what I’m taking.

Now I’m back here chilling out. The next news that you have of me won’t be from here, that’s for sure.

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