Tag Archives: montmarault

Wednesday 25th June 2014 – WHERE AM I?

Ohh yes – I’m in a parking space on the side of the road near Dole, 250 or so kms from home, busily making a list of things that I have forgotten to bring with me, such as all of the fresh fruit and the soya desserts in the fridge. The soya desserts will be out of date by the time I return, but seeing as how I’ve closed all of the windows in the attic (in the middle of summer) I shudder to think of what the fresh fruit will be like by the time that I return home.

So with the customary couple of hours on the computer, after lunch I emptied a ton of cememnt out of the back of Caliburn and gave him a good brush out. He’s still not very clean inside and so I laid some sheets of OSB and plywood on the floor – at least that is clean and so should keep me clean.

I then loaded him up and I brought the gas cooker even though I have no gas – I’ll try to find some en route as I travel around. For the bed, I’ve brought a foam-rubber folding chair thing that Marianne gave me a few years ago when she was cleaning out her cellar. I’ll have to see what that is like one day, so why not now? Roxanne had one in her room for when she had friends for sleepovers and no-one ever complained. Mind you, I can’t for the life of me remember how or why I forgot about the folding bed thing that I bought ages ago.

I’ve also disconnected the dump load. The cables are still running too hot for my liking and here in Midsummer and I’m not there, better to be safer than sorry. I really ought to fix this properly one of these days.

I’ve sorted out some clothes and some food (except the fresh fruit and the soya desserts) and drink, made myself a flask of hot coffee, put the Gibson, the Roland amp, the Carlsbro amp, microphone and stand into the van and then hit the road.

I played tag with a woman in a silver-grey Peugeot 206 estate all the way from Montmarault to about 20kms short of Montceau-les-Mines, and stopped at Montceau for tea. I found a Turkish kebab place that made me a gorgeous Oriental salad and chips, with bottled water, all for a very democratic €8:00 and we spent most of our time chatting about our experiences living in a foreign country.

So back on the road in the dusk and here I am

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Saturday 30th November 2013 – IT WAS THE DRIVING RAIN …

… that woke me up early this morning and as I was lying there in my stinking pit I was thinking that if this keeps up for the rest of the day it’s going to be quite amusing in Pionsat this morning for this little open-air celebration.

But never mind. By the time I plucked up the courage to tear myself away from my stinking pit it had stopped raining and there were even a few little streaks of blue in the sky. Only a couple, mind you, and they didn’t last for very long, but they were indeed there for a moment and that was encouraging as I hurtled off to Pionsat.

patrick poivre d'arvor olivier poivre d'arvor pionsat puy de dome franceHere in Pionsat, at the Old People’s Home, we were treated to the spectacle of a couple of ex-celebrities doing the old book-signing bit. Nearest the camera we have a certain Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, a name that might mean nothing to anyone reading this rubbish, that’s for sure, but in fact formerly a well-known French TV presenter and author, one of whose books we found in this house when I bought it.

Standing at the table, further away from the camera, is his brother Olivier who is also a well-known author (however, not well-known to me, I have to admit) and who is also supposed to be signing copies of his books, not that there were so many of his on display.

nouvelle salle de fetes pionsat puy de dome franceThe book-signing isn’t actually the main reason for the presence here in Pionsat of the brothers Poivre d’Arvor – it’s a mere opportunism.

The real reason for their presence is that if you have been following these pages over their many reincarnations, you’ll be aware of the story of the “Maison Ducros Maymat”. A fine Art-Deco house of the late 20s and early 30s left to abandon and bought by the town of Pionsat simply to demolish it and to use its enormous gardens for building housing, a new medical centre and a new salle de fetes

patrick poivre d'arvor olivier poivre d'arvor rue jean d'arvor pionsat puy de dome franceThis necessitates the construction of a new road through the site and it was decided to name the road after the famous early 20th Century French poet Jean Jeuge dit d’Arvor who was born in Pionsat back in 1883.

The town asked Patrick Poivre d’Arvor and his brother if they would perform the opening ceremony and now that Patrick has “retired” from the silver screen he could spare the time to come down to the birthplace of his maternal grandad and do the honours, and at the same time do some rehearsing for the local gurning championships. The brothers were born with the simple surname “Poivre” – meaning “pepper” – but Patrick, at least, added his grandfather’s pseudonym to his own surname upon the death of the latter in 1970.

patrick poivre d'arvor laurent dumas pierrette ray brice hortefeux pionsat puy de dome franceWe were also highly-honoured by the presence of all kinds of dignitaries here at Pionsat for the ceremony.

The well-built man standing to the right of the image is Laurent Dumas, mayor of St Magnier and the representative of the Canton de Pionsat at the Conseil General of the Puy de Dome. To his right, cropped unfortunately from the image, is Pierrette Ray, mayor of Youx and Vice President (yes, they cater for all kinds of things) of the Conseil Regional.

Patrick Poivre d’Arvor is there of course in his raincoat, and to his right (and our left) in the expensive suit in centre-shot is Brice Hortefeux, the area’s Member of the European Parliament and with whom I later had a very friendly chat about Brussels.

foule maison de retraite pionsat patrick poivre d'arvor puy de dome franceThere followed the usual round of speeches and presentations, under cover back at the Old People’s Home. Hardly the many millions of telespectateurs to which Patrick Poivre d’Arvor is accustomed, of course, but a crowd is a crowd is a crowd, as any celebrity will tell you.

The mayor treated us to his vision of the Pionsat of the future, which includes some kind of shopping mall at the Intermarche supermarket. And while I for one applaud his vision – he is quite right in saying that we need to progress in order to survive – but
firstly, I’ve seen the shopping mall at the Intermarche at Commentry, a town 10 times bigger than Pionsat, and that can’t sustain half a dozen independent retain outlets

secondly, there are enough empty shops already in the town, with several businesses having closed down since I’ve been here. If exisiting businesses with exisiting clients can’t sustain, what hope for any new ones? And what hope for the ones that remain when the new shops open? It reminds me of the situation when the main-line standard-gauge railway arrived just up the road in Marcillat in 1932. They had closed the narrow-gauge tacot that had run into the town for years, and built the new line right through all of the old earthworks, totally destroying them. However the new railway never made a bean and closed in 1939, but because the tacot had been destroyed, the town was left without any rail connection at all even though the rest of the tacot system was running quite happily everywhere else. I can see this happening in Pionsat with the shops. And we’ve also seen, for those of you who were with me in Labrador in 2010
 that while the town of L’Anse au Loup may well be growing in importance due to the concentration of coastal Labrador’s services there, that has led to the collapse of the infrastructure of all of the other towns along the Labrador coast. I can see this happening in the Combrailles. Other towns will be forced to compete with Pionsat to keep themselves afloat, we’ll have a spending war, and it will all end in tears.
thirdly Pionsat is one of the communes of France with the largest per-capita indebtedness. So where is all of this money going to come from?

This evening, Pionsat’s match against the Goatslayers was postponed – a waterlogged pitch which is hardly surprising as everywhere is waterlogged around here right now. There was footy at Marcillat though – the 2nd XI taking on Montmarault and so in the freezing cold and frost I went to see the worst football match that I have seen for some time. Marcillat were awful, Montmarault were even worse but were better-organised and from a 3-2 lead, Marcillat suddenly found themselves 3-6 down. They clawed their way back to 6-5 before the final whistle, but I can’t say that they deserved to.

As a matter of interest we had a female referee this evening – that’s quite a rare event here. And I’ve seen worse referees too.

And my chips, beans and burger for tea were absolutely gorgeous. A good investment, this woodstove.

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Tuesday 5th November 2013 – I’M GETTING TOO OLD …

… to sleep across the front seats of Caliburn these days.

Despite the ignonimity of having to stop for a sleep on the way home, and despite having taken precautions of rescuing two small cushions, one to wedge down between the seats and the other to use as a pillow, I still had the worst night’s sleep that I have ever had. I managed to avoid the cramp from the last time I slept in Caliburn, but I had an enormous pain in the neck all night and I’m not sure why. I just couldn’t get comfortable.

Still, I had had 8 hours or so of “rest”, if you can call it that, and that totally surprised me, but anyway I took to the road in a driving rainstorm (so much for the beautifully clear evening we had had last night but I did think that “driving” was quite appropriate) and with the odd stop for roadworks and for food at the Carrefour at Montmarault, I was back at Pooh Corner by midday.

I’ve unloaded a few things … "just a few" – ed … but I’ve spent most of the day chilling out and catching up on the sleep that I’ve lost. I’ve also lit the fire – the first of the year of course, and for two reasons too. Firstly, it was cold in here – at just 11.2°C and dropping, and that’s below the threshold for the fire. Secondly, I rescued some dry wood from Marianne’s and all my wood outside is thoroughly soaking due to having been exposed to the rain for the last 6 months. Consequently I need to dry it out, and sticking a load of it over a hot stove is the easiest way to go about doing that.

And with that, I crashed out yet again, and that was that.

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Saturday 19th October 2013 – THERE HAVE BEEN A LOT …

… of changes around here – it’s amazing what cam happen when you’ve been away for as long as I have.

new road junction montaigut quarry puy de dome franceSteaming down the hill past the quarry at Montaigut on my way to the shops at St Eloy this afternoon and I came shuddering to a halt. That’s because a new road, and of course, a new road junction seem, to have miraculously appeared.

I’ve heard a great deal about this proposed new road – it’s something that’s been proposed for quite a while. For years, heavy lorries from the quarry have struggled through the medieval streets of Montaigut, snarling up the traffic and rattling the houses, and all of the local inhabitants are thoroughly fed up of it.

new road junction montaigut quarry puy de dome franceBut not any more. While I was away, a new road has been consrtructed that by-passes the village and goes off to the N144 on the outskirts.

There, the traffic is not obliged to enter into the village at all and that will please everyone.

It will please me greatly too. I often need to take the N144 and then turn off for Montmarault and in order to do that I have to go down some quite narrow windy roads with, more often than not, the sun full in my face at the most inopportune of moments. Now I can just steam on down to here and then hang a left on the new road, and I’m there in no time.

new road junction montaigut quarry puy de dome franceThere’s another part of the road that is in the throes of being built. That part will take you onto the road that leads to Pionsat, and that’s another piece of road that should have been built centuries ago to by-pass the village.

All the traffic on there, if it isn’t going to the village itself (which is highly unlikely as there is nothing in Montaigut tha Pionsat doesn’t have) is going to the motorway at Montmarault and so is being channelled through the village and as anyone will tell you, traffic in Montaigut can sometimes be impossible.

No, when they finish this, it should be a good thing.

However I am getting ahead of myself. This morning I was intending to go to Montlucon but I’d seen some interesting stuff that would do for the radio programme, so I wrote a couple of thousand words on the tax changes that took place in July.

After shopping, I went round to Marianne’s to catch up on all of the latest news, and then to Cecile’s to unload Caliburn of the stuff that Cecile had chosen from the other Marianne.

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire nord combrailles puy de dome franceWe had footy this evening too. Pionsat’s 2nd XI were relegated to the fourth Division at the end of last season and are doing fairly well here. Tonight they were playing the Miners of St Eloy but they would only muster a team of 10 and which was not a particularly strong team either, with several faces missing from the squad.

They started off brightly, with the Pionsat n°9 ( a guy called Fred, a new signing) playing a total blinder up front and looking as if he could take on the entire Nord Combraille side on his own.

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire nord combrailles puy de dome franceIt didn’t however work out like that as Pionsat couldn’t keep going, being short-handed like that.

The Miners gradually came back into the game and eventually the goal that they had been threatening to score for quite some time went into the back of the net, despite the best efforts of Christophe who seems to have taken over the goalkeeping jersey on a permanent basis, given the illness, injury and retirement of everyone else around the club. There have been quite a few changes over the last two seasons.

Nord Combrailles scored a second goal late in the game to put the issue beyond doubt.
fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire nord combrailles puy de dome franceBut that wasn’t quite the end of the story, because this guy Fred, who had quite impressed me throughout all of the match, was still going at the final whistle.

Here he is bursting through the Miners’ defence right on the final whistle, shrugging off a few strong tackles, and putting a shot across the face of the goal beating the keeper easily. But it hits the post and bounces to safety – about the third or fourth time that he had hit the woodwork. He would have been my man-of-the-match on any day of the week in any team, that’s for sure.

Even more astonishing was the weather. We were all standing on the terraces in shirt sleeves. This was one of the nicest October nights that I can remember.

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Tuesday 23rd July 2013 – WELL I MADE IT

And if you ask me very nicely, I’ll make you one like it too – which is a story that I have told before, but don’t let that worry you.

I left home just after 21:00 – stopped for 5 minutes at the Carrefour at Montmarault to drop a little fuel in (I was going to fuel up at the Carrefour in Riom earlier but of course we went in Liz’s car instead), then 15 minutes at Melun for a total refuel and a stretch of the legs.

I arrived here at 04:05, which has to be something of a world record seeing as how it’s about 732kms. Good old Caliburn.

But I cheated really, because I’ve abandoned my traditional route over the mountains and despite the péage, these days I’m doing it all on the motorway.

Well, not quite.

I’m leaving the motorway at Fontainebleu, passing around the town and heading for Melun where there is a cheap petrol station, and then onto the N104 – the Francilienne – at the other side of the city.

That cuts a huge chunk off the journey and completely misses out the suburbs of Paris. It’s much less stressful and I’ve had enough stress right now.

Except of course when someone in a Porsche Cayenne is overtaking a long line of traffic, sees the radar, slams on his brakes and cuts in right in front of me. He got both barrels of Caliburn’s horn and when he pulled alongside me to … errr … remonstrate with me, he got what can best be called an “offensive gesture” too.

I was in no mood for messing about.

Anyway, I can’t believe that I left the apartment in Belgium in such a tip. I really don’t know what happened. It was as if I had been chased out by zombies and if Marianne had seen how it looked, she would have turned in her grave.

I went more-or less straight to bed and then up at 11:30, and a leisurely day recuperating. And also doing two big machine-loads of washing.

Now everyone makes mistakes of course, but what counts in life is how you get out of them. And here’s an object lesson in dealing with issues.

Tuesday night is cheapo night in the pizza place down the road – all medium pizzas at €5:95 and as I didn’t feel like cooking after all of my exertions, down I went and ordered a Country Vegetable without cheese.

When I returned (having picked up some wooden crates on the way back) I found that they had given me a ham pizza with cheese by mistake, so I rang them back to complain.
“Ahh – it’s you who had the ham pizza then. What’s your address?” which I duly told him.
5 minutes later the manager was round with my pizza. “I made you a large one, to make up for the inconvenience” he said, so I put some cheese on it and ate it all, musing to myself that “that’s how you get out of an embarrassing situation”.

Yes, hats off to them.

So an ealy night. It’ll be a day or two before I recover from the jet-lag.

Luckily tonight, I found Marianne’s cooling fan. And I needed it too.

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Saturday 14th August 2010 – A good few weeks ago ….

… I went to a talk about the history and one of the items that was discussed was the local railway network. With this area being situated on a coal seam and the existence of coal mines all over the place there was at one time a railway network around here that was much more comprehensive than you would think at first.

And most people immediately think of railways as being standard-gauge – 4’8.5″ with substantial earthworks and the like, and there is a great deal of evidence for that, especially for our famous railway down the hill here that was opened to traffic in 1932 and did’t even last 25 years.

I drive regularly (or I used to when I used to go to Brussels) along a certain road that runs into Montmarault from the Montaigut direction and I’ve been convinced that I’ve seen traces that correspond to what the Ordnance Survey would call “dismantled railway” along the side of the road, although there is nothing on any map that I have ever seen that would confirm anything.

But at this talk one of the items discussed was the railway line that ran from Marcillat en Combraille to Commentry. Now Commentry was a major ironworking centre and Marcillat has the remains of a few huge limekilns and so a line bringing the lime from the fields to the blast furnaces seems like a likely proposition. But the only line here as far as I am aware is the old standard gauge line that used to pass down here and which doesn’t go directly to Commentry.

But further enquiry revealed the existence of the “lignes economiques” – a whole series of narrow-gauge lines that ran on light railway principles with the minimum of earthworks, and the border area between the Allier and the Puy-de-Dome was littered with these lines. Anyone who has seen the the Father Brown film will recall what a “ligne economique” looks like.

The relics that I have seen not too far from Montmarault are in fact part of this light railway system but my attention for the moment has been seized by a narrow-gauge line that used to run from Marcillat to Commentry – and points beyond, as I have discovered. I’ve tracked down a list of the names of stations along the route but a casual look on an Internet satellite viewing program hasn’t come up with anything. That’s a shame – long-time readers will remember that we tracked down a bridge of James Brunlees by spotting it on a satellite viewer.

culvert underneath D2144 RN144 durdat larequille allier franceOne place however has crossed my mind as I have crossed it on many occasions. The railway passed through the village of Durdat Larequille somewhere and not too far from there is what looks like a hollow fold in the ground with what might be a bridge over it. And so on my way back from Neris les Bains I stopped for a look.

I’m right about it being an overbridge but if it’s for a narrow-gauge locomotive and train then it would have to be flaming narrow. I couldn’t stand upright in that tunnel under there

culvert underneath D2144 RN144 durdat larequille allier franceThere’s no evidence to suggest that the bridge has been infilled to any extent, suggesting that at one time it might have been of larger size, and I can’t see what might have been a track bed of a railway running to and fro underneath it.

I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that this may well not be a railway bridge after all, and that’s a disappointment – I had high hopes for this.

Yes – I was in Neris today. The weather is becoming colder and colder and there was no chance of a solar shower and so after shopping in Commentry (which was boring, I have to say) I went off there. 29°C in the water and only 20°C in the baths itself – but that’s because some person had for reasons best known to him-or herself decided to open up the side of the pool. It used to be an open-air pool complete with poolside cafe but it’s now covered with a balloon-type of marquee. And who on earth would want to open it up today in this weather?

But now I’m nice and clean so I’m going to change the bedding and have a good night’s sleep. And I need it too. I didn’t have the alarms on this morning and when the phone rang I crawled over to it and answered “ok Terry – see you in a bit” only to hear a French voice on the other end. Yes, I was totally out of it this morning. I’ll have to do better tomorrow.

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