… of seeing pictures of my blasted attic and this flaming roof. But not half as fed up as I am with doing the perishing thing. It’s never going to be finished at this rate.
About another two hours on this side of the roof tomorrow and then I can crack on with the other side. And for that, as well as having to cut around the central beams, I have to make the framework for round the windows.
Mind you, although it took me ages to get going this morning by late afternoon I was well into a rhythm and it was a shame to stop, but I had to go to the Anglo-French group.
I was working with Marianne the journalist tonight and it turns out that she is a reader at the Departmental Archives at Clermont Ferrand. She goes there every Wednesday and she’s promised to take me there one of these days and show me round. She’ll even help me get a readers’ ticket.
But talking of the Anglo-French group, yours truly might be making a dramatic return to the silver screen. My last TV appearance was in late December 1999 when I was interviewed (in Flemish, by Flemish TV) at Brussels (Zaventam) Airport for a TV programme about people travelling to celebrate the millennium. I was in fact off to New York.
rior to that I hosted (again on Flemish TV a programme about my favourite places in my local commune, which at the time was Schaerbeek. It’s one of the poorer communes in Brussels but it does have some magnificent and undiscovered corners. When I first went to live there I spent every weekend walking around getting to know the place.
My first TV appearance was just as memorable. August Bank Holiday 1974 – the Windsor Free Rock Festival and a TV news crew scanning the field looking for “typical rock fans” and Andrew Jenkins and I staggering into shot, each with a Watneys Party 7 can under each arm. Of course, my parents would happen to be looking at the news just then, wouldn’t they?
But back to the plot. A Dutch television producer wants to film the Combrailles and the efforts that are being made to welcome foreigners to the area. It seems that our little group has attracted their attention and they want to film us. These days we are about 12 or so regulars who come week after week after week more or less. Liz is sending out a mail to all of the subscribers to tell them of the filming. I’ll be interested to see how many of them turn out for the camera. Nantwich Parish Church usually has a congegration of about 15 for the evening service but when “Songs of Praise” was filmed there in the late 1960s you couldn’t get into the church for all of the dramatically-born-again-Christians who crawled out of the woodwork and into the church.
