Rain at last

After so many months of dry weather, as I sit here tapping away, I can hear rain on the roof.

I’m glad I can hear it because it is much quieter than it has been in the past now that Jon has been working so hard boarding up the ‘walls’ in the loft, and we can hear (or not hear) the benefit of all his hard work.

It is very long, slow job as our dear old crooked house never has had a straight line and to make anything really straight would mean making it small too, so to maximise the space Jon has painstakingly cut each ’slat’ to exactly fit its hole.  We think that the end is in sight for this particular part of the project.  But, reader, don’t worry, we still have plenty of work to be carrying on with.

September songs

Suddenly the mornings are looking misty and full of mellow fruitfulness. Children are back at school or college, most people have completed their summer holidays, our influx of tourists is beginning to dwindle, even the light has changed.

We are enjoying warm days after a couple of rainy days which arrived far too late to save vegetables and flowers.  The fig tree outside the kitchen is groaning with fruit (which I actually don’t like), so the fruit is rotting on the branches. 

 

 The other reason that the fruit is rotting is because the tree is emitting a constant humming noise as, for the first time that we have noticed, it is alive with wasps and hornets,  flies and butterflies.  The garden resembles Sheffield(*) on a Friday night as these creatures are getting drunk on the rotting fruit and picking fights with each other.

Meanwhile, up in the loft, Jon is doing sterling work on putting the lambris walls in and enjoying his new toy, a compessor which works his nail gun.  This neat little tool sits quietly most of the time and then, just when you least expect it, bursts into life, whirring away to build up pressure again. 

Along with all the school children I will be returning to school tomorrow as I have found an advanced French class to attend.  I will be packing my satchel with sharpened pencils and a notebook and hoping to relearn all those tricks (including the dreaded subjunctive) which seem somehow to escape me when I am trying to make ‘intelligent’ conversation.

 

(*) I have never been to Sheffield on a Friday night so this comment is made purely on what I have seen on my TV screen

Who dunnit?

Someone has pinched my muse.  They must have. 

There’s tons going on here but I haven’t been inspired to blot recently.

• Jon has been busy making banisters to stop the rug rats falling out of the loft when they arrive. What a fantastic job he has done (pictures to follow)
• We’re still battling against the drought and trying not to lose our new plants.
• We have new desks each in the loft/study/bedroom, and very nice they are too.
• I’ve been organising the paperwork and trying to tidy, de-clutter and generally reduce the paper mountain
• We have a bit of a social life too.

But my muse has been missing.

Maybe I’ll find her under the paper mountain when I get to the bottom of it.

Dark days and warm places

St Gatien

Not terribly unusual that I was up early this morning – the unusual thing is that it wasn’t because the cats dragged me out of bed.  Quite the opposite in fact.  Figgy, who has been sleeping on our bed every night for the last week or so since we ‘liberated’ him from the cattery, was nowhere to be seen.

He crawled in late last night and after a brief kneading of Jon’s lap disappeared somewhere in the house and hid.

He didn’t stir when I popped down to the kitchen to give him his late night Whiskas kitten food (the only ‘wet’ food he gets) a ritual he usually loves and waits for.

So when I woke early and he still hadn’t stirred I began to worry.  As I roused myself, Misty appeared and asked to be let out, so I pottered down to the kitchen at 6am and couldn’t be bothered to go back to bed.  Figgy finally appeared about 15 minutes later but I still don’t know where from.

They’ve both been out on their usual morning patrol and are back indoors looking for fires, blankets and warm spots.

At 8.30am it is finally just about light.  I hate these dark mornings but then in the UK I used to hate the dark evenings.  There was nothing worse than going to work in the dark and arriving back home in the dark.  If I didn’t get out of the office at lunch time it was as if I didn’t see the light of day for weeks.  Our weather has been very dull for a week now but there is light on the horizon as the forecast for Sunday is sun all day.

We had a good day yesterday.  We finally were both fit enough to spend a day insulating the loft, and are very pleased with our progress.  The majority of it is now done but the last few sheets will have to wait for a few days.

Why?

Because Jon is now injured again after he fell (and we still don’t know how) off the ladder in the loft.  Luckily it is nothing more than a nasty bruise and a sprained shoulder and, like a good trooper, he climbed straight back up the ladder to finish the job.  Today he will be very sore and probably won’t be able to use his arm again for a couple of days, but we do hope he will be able to play the piano for our friends Christmas Party on Sunday afternoon, otherwise the carols will be very dull.

Bugs, germs and rolls of insulation

Ste Odile

We both seem to have collected nasty germs during our trip to the UK. Poor Jon has been coughing and sneezing all over the place and I have got some sort of virus which has kept me immobile for days, mostly on my back as the room spins uncontrollably every time I stand up. However, I think we are both on the mend. Which is just as well given the busy fortnight up and coming.

We sadly missed our first Christmas party on Friday due to the bugs which we were very disappointed about, but we did have a very pleasant surprise on Friday morning.

You will recall my numerous moans and groans about slow, late or just vanishing deliveries over here Sarkozyland. Well, in the hunt for insulation materials I came across a website which promised delivery ‘in under 48 hours’. Fat chance, we thought, but since we don’t have the transport with which to collect 7 rolls of 15 sq m of insulation, we thought we’d give it a go, expecting the stuff to turn up sometime after Christmas.

I placed the order on Wednesday afternoon just before 3pm and had an immediate acknowledgement by e-mail. Nothing very surprising there as these things are usually automated.

On Friday morning the telephone rang at 9.30. I was still struggling myself into a sitting position in bed (it’s been taking me a while) so Jon handed the phone to me. It was a delivery company asking for directions so that they could deliver our rolls of insulation. Within 15 minutes the van was at our door, unloaded and paid for.

Wow.

Jon thinks it will take the two of us a couple of days to put it all in place in the loft, so we should be toasty here for Christmas when we have cut out the draft coming down from the roof. Just as soon as I can stand up straight we can get on with it.

Meanwhile my eyes are beginning to work again so I can plan my Christmas Day menu, and my canapes for our friends ‘bit of a do’ next Sunday, and we can rehearse our turns for the same little party. Jon has been asked to play carols and accompany me and a few other friends. I haven’t quite decided what to sing yet though.

The weather has been rather chilly this week but now it has started to rain. We hope we don’t get quite as much rain as the UK has had this weekend, we don’t want a repeat of last years’ floods, thank you very much.

Seeing the light of day

St Saturnin

Ooops

Don’t worry, it’s not serious.

On Thursday our builder friend arrived to start work on the Velux windows. We knew that it would be one day’s work per window. He was still with us at 6.45pm on Thursday evening.

This was the state of play on Friday morning.

Luckily he had a better day and had completed window number two by 4pm.

Over lunch on Thursday we reminded him that we would be going away for a few days next week, but not to worry, we could leave him a key.

Oh no. He wanted to finish it all before the rain comes on Monday.

I was amazed actually at his faith in Mr Meteo’s predictions. As you all know we have very little faith in his accuracy and have virutally given up even looking more than a few hours ahead these days. Our friend, however had seen that rain was forecast for Monday and that was that.

He returned this morning at what seemed like first light (we are not early risers these days and as it was the third day on the trot we were feeling a little jaded). He has been working away all day and finished in the middle of the afternoon.

It was just as well because as he finished his cuppa and slipped our rather large cheque into his back pocket this happened………

I don’t think he had seen THAT coming on Mr Meteo!!!

A touch of glass

St Tanguy

Did you see what I did there?

Our Velux windows were due for collection today. Being organised (Who said ‘that makes a change?’ I’ll get you later), I decided to call the store yesterday to be sure that they would be there this morning.

Automated machine tells me to make my selection. That was easy ‘Press one to verify the status of your order’.

Thank you. ‘Please hold and you will be transferred to the relevant department’.

Goodie.

‘Please enter the 10 digit order number’.

OK. Done that.

‘Your order number is 1234567890. Press 1 for correct, press 2 to re-enter’

Pressed 1.

‘Your order is not available. Good bye’

What? ‘Hold on, I want to talk to someone’

Disconnected.

Tried again. Exactly the same thing, no option to talk to a human being.

So I thought I’d look at the website and see if that was any more helpful. Oh yes it was. I entered the the number of the first order. ‘Your order is not yet available’. Tried the other order ‘Your order is not yet available’. The website told me that the order was expected to be available today but I believe nothing.

You can therefore imagine my surprise when I went through the whole rigmarole again today only to learn that my order IS available. Lovely. My chauffeur collected me, drove me to the store, we collected the windows and brought them home.

As I felt we were on a winning roll, I suggested that this afternoon we try for the fifth time (no exaggeration) to purchase two pieces of glass, one for a small window in the loft and the other to replace the glass in our ‘bullseye’ window through which gales howl even on a still day.

My chauffeur from this morning had suggested a little shop which we had never been to before. It is slightly out of town and seemed to be a wallpaper and ceramic tile shop. However we thought it worth a try.

A very nice young man asked if he could help us as soon as we entered the shop. Did he cut glass for windows? Certainly he did. We gave him the measurements and were told to go shopping for an hour.

An hour later we returned, were given to pieces of, not unsubstantial, glass and charged the princely sum of 5 Euros and 5 centimes. Wow! The same glass in the UK would have cost me at least 20 quid!

Now we have to wait for our builder friend to come and fit the Velux, hopefully next week, and meanwhile Jon will be learning how to make window frames for the two ‘awkward’ windows.

It’s curtain time

St Sidoine

As Jon is progressing in the loft, I decided that I must put in some effort into preparing the soon-to-be-extended sitting room.

I’ve been looking for some curtains but not been very successful until I asked the question on a local website of where I could go looking for reasonably-priced fabrics.

A few suggestions were forthcoming but sadly one of them, which we went in search of last week, seemed to have disappeared. This was the day we also intended to buy our Velux windows.

We thought we were doing the right thing by checking the supplier’s website first . Yes, the did them in the style we wanted and yes, they had three in stock. When we arrived in the showroom we were told that, in fact, they only had one in stock but could order the other two for two weeks time.

Fine. We would take the three fittings though.

Nope. We stood in line for the collection point only to be told that the one window claimed to be in stock wasn’t, and of the three fittings, they only had one in stock.

Next week a friend is taking us to Brive in their estate car to collect the three windows and the remaining fittings. Meanwhile we are hoping and praying that the following two weeks remain dry so that our builder can come and fit them.

So, the trip north was unsuccessful on all accounts.

Yesterday I met a friend in town and we ‘did’ lunch. She then directed me to a little treasure trove of a shop just out of town.

This, fairly small, shop was laden with fabrics of every shade, weight and composition. Wow. My eyes lit up. We edged our way between bales and rolls of furnishing fabrics. Madame asked if she could help.

‘What I’m really looking for, Madame’ said I, ‘Is inspiration’.

What exactly is Madame looking for? Curtains? For the dining room or bedroom. No, the salon. Ah, and does Madame want something bright, dark, lightweight?

Madame said she was looking for something fairly plain but with a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’.

‘I’ll know it as soon as I see it’ I said, helpfully.

Madame directed my friend and I to a pile of creams, beiges and whites, where we spotted a few ‘possibles’. Suddenly I saw a flash of aubergine colour at the bottom of the pile. My alcoves are painted aubergine. This was hopeful.

My friend insisted we took the roll of fabric to the door to look at it in daylight. Good idea, I hadn’t thought of that.

Yes, even better, the colour is just exactly what I wanted (even if I didn’t know it when I walked into the shop). Cream with a splash of aubergine.

I’m looking forward to getting out my super sewing machine, bought two years ago and very low mileage, to get going on making the curtains this weekend.

Whistling Jack Smith, remember him?

St Donald

Happy Birthday, Mum xxxxxxxxxxx

As I am writing this there are strange sounds coming from upstairs. Clonking, banging, drills and screwdrivers and the odd jolly whistle.

My Dad was well known for his whistle. I remember him coming home from work once on his birthday with a ’saucy’ birthday card and a present from his colleagues. It was a packet of budgie seed. I never did know for sure whether he was highly amused by this, or slightly miffed. I remember thinking that he must have been deeply upset to be teased, but then I was at a sensitive age when I hated being teased. I don’t think I ever grew out of it actually.

Anyway, I only mentioned that story because it is St Donald’s day.

The noises from upstairs are from the two rather good looking and very polite (before you start Lizzie – in the words of Lilo Lil in ‘Bread’ I am NOT a tart!) young men who are fitting our new front door and the staircase. They looked at the hole in the ceiling and asked if their boss had been and seen this.

Of course I answered that he had and had taken all the measurements.

A little later, of course after Jon had gone shopping, I was asked if I happened to have about my person a rafter, about 7 – 8 cm thick, 60cm long and approximately 22 cm wide.

I had to check very carefully of course that I didn’t happen to have one in my handbag, or better still, my pocket, but of course didn’t find one. I couldn’t call Jon and ask him to pick one up in the DIY store as he hadn’t taken the mobile phone with him on this occasion, but the polite young man said not to worry and he would just make a 2 hour round trip to go and buy one.

Nice young man.

He’s just got back with it and now it is all systems go on the staircase, the front door is already installed.

Do come back tomorrow for the photos.

Think of a number, double it.

St Paterne

So. The window/door/stairs man came today with his quote for the new front door and the stairs to the attic.

Ouch.

I drew in a sharp intake of breath and looked at Jon.

‘Of course’, said Monsieur D, ‘I could do you a staircase for 700 Euros but it would be of a very poor quality and it wouldn’t last very long.’

I translated, paused and Jon said …..

‘Seems OK to me’.

It appears his mental ball park figure was a lot higher than mine.

We ordered the stairs and the new door.