… so hot that it was well gone 02:00 and I still hadn’t been able to lie down. Over 25°C up here, it was.

And so I did something that I’ve only ever done once, I think, before.

That was to leave the inverter running all night and I dug out the mains desk-top fan and left that running on the “low” position all through the night.

On that position the fan makes just a gentle humming noise and I think that that rocked me gently off to sleep.

Up at the usual hour of 07:30 as well (although I didn’t feel much like it) and after breakfast I carried on with the website for at least … ohhhh … half an hour, before the first interruption of the day.

Despite having his internet fixed on Friday morning, it’s gone down again so Rob was looking for the use of my cable for half an hour or so…

Ohh yes – who’s next? Yes, there’s this local Reactionary rag called the Trou des Combrailles – the local hippies and activists feuding within its pages.

They are doing an article on wind turbines and they want to feature something about me in it, so someone was sent to interview me.

Apparently they are against wind turbines because they “look ugly”, so I asked the reporter chappy if he would rather have a nuclear power station or a coal-fired generating plant up there on the brow of the hill,

However, in common with most NIMBYs (and these environmentalists are no different that anyone else) they would rather have their electricity from a nuclear power plant next to someone else’s back yard rather than something ecologically and environmentally-friendly near to them.

Eventually I managed to attack the shower room wall seeing as how we had some kind of good clear weather.

And after much anguish looking for my other arbour (which I eventually found) it was all systems go.

The hole that I started is now finished off, with the pipe cemented in place and with the outer filter fitted.

It just needs to be cut to length though on the inside of the wall and so I’ll do that when the plasterboard is in place.

As for the second hole, well…

The long arbour and the huge core drill are so heavy that I couldn’t lift the SDS drill. How I wish I had a small arbour!

There is one but that’s for an ordinary drill and so I tried that. The very small one is only a 10mm chuck but the other one is 13mm and that fitted, but I broke off the chuck key.

Tightening it up with a screwdriver didn’t work and so it was the SDS drill or nothing.

Of course, it’s a rubble wall on the interior and we collided straight away with a big lump of ironstone and that brought everything to a juddering halt.

But using the battery SDS drill with a 300mm (and then a 500mm) drill bit I spent a couple of hours breaking up the ironstone in situ and once that had been done I could attack it with the big SDS drill and the huge core drill.

By the time 19:00 came round and the power started to drop off (it IS 1400 watts, after all) I’d done well over half of the core drilling. And there was dust everywhere (and blood on my new wooden floor – drat!)

My hair was a real mess and so in the end I cut it all off and gave it a run over with the sheep shearer. After that I had a hair wash, a long chat with Marianne and another one with Cécile (her mum has had another fall and is now in hospital – a wise decision for Cecile to return).

Now I’m whacked and that is that.

Tomorrow I need to have another go with a standard SDS drill to break up some more of the rock in the wall and then, if nothing else goes wrong, finish off with the core drill.

If I can get all of that done I might have time to strip down the water filters and have a play with them.