Tag Archives: parrett

Monday 31st May 2010 – First of the year

home grown lettuce radish les guis virlet puy de dome franceLunch today consisted of the usual salad butty only today it featured home-grown lettuce and home-grown radish as well as all of the other ingredients.

I’ve been using home-grown garlic and home-grown herbs for a while but today was the first time that I had pulled something important out of my new vegetable patches for food purposes. I’m well-impressed by how well they seem to have grown and while the taste at the moment is a little insipid it will improve over time.

In fact the lettuce would have definitely done with another fortnight in the ground but things are getting rather tight in the lettuce bed and it needs some thinning out, so pulling up a usable lettuce to eat was probably as good a way as any of making a space for everything else.

But in the greenhouse the tomato plants that have been dormant for ages have now started to go berserk. Rather too late now to expect anything profitable but never mind. It also seems like there might be some pepper plants coming up now that I have bought some, and another pea plant is now emerging from underneath the soil. That makes a grand total of two.

mini digger les guis virlet puy de dome franceI went round and had another look at the digger today. This is what it looks like, in case you have forgotten, and it’s huge!

I bet it made short work of the rubbish.

I’m eager to see it back in action shovelling the stones into place but there seems to be some kind of difficulty about that and I don’t understand why.

I have to have the stones delivered by a lorry as I need over 30 tonnes of the stuff and 15 trips with the Sankey down to the quarry at Montaigut is a little too much. I have the number of someone with a tipper but they can’t give me a precise date for coming to deliver the stuff. And I need to know a precise date as I need to have the digger driver here to shovel the stuff and spread it out.

I can’t believe that it’s so complicated. Arranging a one-hour spec for a lorry to deliver two loads of stones seems the simplest thing in the world to me. But at least it gave me time to pull up all of the roots and brambles and thistles that were lying around in the way. And I also met the farmer who has taken over the field next door from the late Farmer Parrett. We had a nice friendly chat too.

In other news, the Zionists intercepted this aid convoy and stopped it delivering the supplies to the Palestinians by the simple expedient of murdering the aid workers. It’s high time someone put a stop to this behaviour and if the west is refusing to intervene then you can’t blame Hamas and the rest of the Arab world for having a go.

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Monday 26th October 2009 – I didn’t do an awful lot today.

In fact, it was a day of interruptions.

Starting as we mean to go on, I wasn’t upstairs 10 minutes before the phone rang. The man from Nazar …. errr… DHL rang to seek directions to chez moi. I carried on with tidying up last night’s wiring efforts and Terry rang, asking if he could borrow my compressor.

Then Terry came round – and he helped me finish the wiring. I was struggling to get the 2x10mm cables for the heater element through the conduit – not something it’s easy to do yourself, so while Terry started it off I went to look for my patent cable dragger. And by the time I came back with it, Terry had threaded it through on his own. It pays to have an expert around the place.
In fact, I had a friend who was acknowledged as an expert by everyone else.
But in that case, it was spelt ex-spurt and ex is a has-been and spurt is a drip under pressure.

After that the man from DHL turned up with a little package for me, and then it was lunchtime.

Once lunch was over I played the usual game of “hunt the keys for Caliburn” and when I eventually found them I drove Caliburn round the back here and loaded him full of scaffolding to take round to Terry tomorrow – all the time half-expected to be confronted by The Ghost Of Farmer Parrett and his pitchfork again.

attic concrete base woodstove tile brick edge
In the attic I did manage to do some work today. All of the chimney is now connected up, sealed and clamped together, and I’ve also done something to the concrete base.

If you follow the comments to the various entries (they are often the most exciting part) you’ll know that Krys and I have been discussing the edging to the concrete. I wanted to put a raised edge around it although Krys thinks (and rightly so) that it will be difficult to keep clean.

I’m still worried about flying embers though, but there’s no point in soliciting advice if you don’t intend to take any notice, so what I did was to put a raised edge around the front and most of the sides, and leave the back open so I can brush out around there.

And what did the man from DHL want? Well, he brought me my new lens that I talked about the other day. And that was quick delivery – I wish Amazon would be this quick from the States. And €36 customs and charges – that’s an enormous rip-off if you ask me.

I’m disappointed with the lens though. It’s very small and you would hardly notice it. Freud had a thing or two to say about camera lenses, something along the lines of them being substitutes for part of the anatomy in the same way that guns and sports cars might be. And I was hoping for a whopper. The filter size is 49mm, which I don’t have, so that means a 20-quid order to the 7-Day Shop.

The lens is a manual focus (not a problem because with the footy, the focus is always “full on”) and that reminds me of a story I heard about the two blondes on the beach, being approached by the beach photographer.
“Keep still” said one. “He’s going to focus!“
“What? Both of us?“

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 – I SPENT MOST OF THE MORNING …

fitting load spreading joists in attic floor les guis virlet puy de dome france… putting these two crossbeams in. This is where the door into the room will be.

You can see that the old beam in centre-pic is pretty well eaten. I can’t rely on that supporting the weight of people continually coming and going, especially when I knock down the wall underneath it in the very near future, and so it needs plenty of reinforcement to spread the load.

fitting new joists attic floor les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut these beams have to go in exactly right if they are to do any good. Millimetre-perfect is almost essential so you have to cut the lets undersize and the beams oversize and file them down until they fit. That’s what takes the time.

This afternoon I was interrupted by a couple of visitors. Firstly, Terry and Liz turned up, to borrow back their cement mixer. Terry, keen reader of my blog that he is, has suggested that I go with him tomorrow late afternoon to collect a ton of gravel and take it to his house.
“You have to say the magic words” I said.
“Liz is baking” he replied.

After Terry and Liz left I carried on and fitted some more flooring and tried out Rhys’ idea of screwing the plasterboard. Lucky I bought a pile of 4×60 screws. And with the drill on the lowest speed setting and with a low torque setting it drove the screws up nicely. I’ll try some more of this.

But I wasn’t at all in the mood for carrying on working as my second group of visitors brought me some news that has left me numb. Followers of my blog from its previous home will recall that back in early spring I had an “interaction” with a local farmer that got rather out of hand and attracted the attention and involvement of the local gendarmes.

Criminal charges were preferred and a summons was issued, and when the gendarmes went to serve it on the aforementioned farmer, I very much regret to say that they discovered him no longer in a position to receive it.

I’m totally devastated by this as I’m sure everyone else in the locality is. I don’t hate anyone at all so much that I wish them dead. This guy, much as he was a thoroughly obnoxious character, was quite simply a guy living a traditional French peasant lifestyle and caught up in a changing world with which he was in no condition to cope.

I just hope that wherever he has ended up, he is happier there than he clearly was round here.

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