I don’t know what happened with the photos yesterday but I only ended up with one, and that thanks to Kevin being able to work out what had occured. As he and Moraig went off to England this morning if the same thing happens today I’ll have to do without - which will make this a very dull blog indeed, as really there’s nothing to say …except that ‘almost’ two rows of breeze blocks were laid today. Nothing spectacular in itself although it was very cold again today minus 3 this morning and only plus five in the searing heat of the afternoon ( so said my car) so doing anything outside is pretty impressive but also there was no water on site, which can add an extra frisson to activities. It meant that Matt had to go and borrow a big metal open top container from a farmer and then strap it onto the back of the pick-up so that they could mix cement. I didn’t witness the drive first hand but imagine that it looked as ridiculous as it sounds. Matt is a veteran of doing ridiculous things in vans, most of which I have been privy to. One occassion which I remember most vividly was when we built our house in Jumilhac and had a farmer friend in to level the huge pile of earth, left from digging the foundations, on what was to be the garden. My family were down on holiday and asking how we were going to flatten it out ready to be seeded ( I believe steam a steam roller was mentioned) at which point Matt got into the Peugeot pick up, which we had then, and proceeded to drive round it in concentric circles at top speed for the afternoon, doing wheel spins and throwing mud up all over the place. Very childish. It certainly gave the neighbours something to talk about and I have to say that although it looked less than perfect at the time when it was covered in grass it looked fine.

Anyway here, hopefully, are the photos:

Nope that’s not happening again. Great! No photos then until whenever Kevin gets back. They were fascinating too - but you’ll have to take my word for it.

<a href=”http://s366.photobucket.com/albums/oo109/limousinliving/?action=view&current=P1000327.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i366.photobucket.com/albums/oo109/limousinliving/P1000327.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Day 5 AM - corners”></a>

href=”http://s366.photobucket.com/albums/oo109/limousinliving/?action=view&current=P1000329.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i366.photobucket.com/albums/oo109/limousinliving/P1000329.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Day 5 PM - foundation walls”></a>

Actually it’s not day 4 - that was yesterday. Today nothing happened there, lest spirits be entirely broken after yesterdays’ performance when the ready mix lorry turned up not only an hour late but without the conveyor belt attachment by which the concrete would normally be poured directly into the foundation trenches. Luckily the digger was on site which meant that it could be poured into the bucket and then taken and put in that way otherwise it would have been disasterous as, because of the cold , accelerator had been put into the mix at the depot meaning that it went hard incredibly fast and that no one could stop until the job was finished.

It all turned out ok in the end -although Dave,who turned up at the christmas dinner he was having with his in-laws(before they go off to Spain) an hour and a half late, probably didn’t think so. Not so Laurent either, who didn’t get to eat until after 3pm.

Laurent, by the way was the undisputed star of the day - calculating the amount of concrete needed to within a barrowfull. The guy at the builder’s merchant,who organised the delivery ( and forgot the essential attachment), calculated 3m3 less than it actually took….! Still atleast he managed to negotiate a deal better than we would have got had we gone to Beton Perigord Vert, which although actually in Champsac charges 80€ per delivery regardless of the distance. Hopefully these credit crunchy times will spur them on to think a little more competively and adopt a more sensible system - although in reality we all know that they will more probably end up going out of business by spring time.

In other news - should anyone have bothered to look further than these rather dull photos - the kids forsook football training to go to a cross country afternoon with the school( which, as they’re off on a Wednesdays was extra curricula). They didn’t go willingly and we had the old ‘there’s something wrong with my foot’ routine from Etienne which was quickly dismissed but I did feel slightly guilty when I saw the snow starting at around 2pm and realised that they had another 3 and a half hours to go.

Roz has gone back to the UK today to earn some desperately needed dosh. As it has to many others this blummin credity bank crunchy thing has done us up like kippers. We do have funds but just cant touch them at the moment as they have half the value they did three months ago. I need to get a job here now as with virtual parity between the pound and the euro it makes it hardly worthwhile travelling to and fro. The government are introducing a new fiscal system here in January aimed at helping new and small business to get started by not taxing the life out of them before they even take their first order. It may have come just at the right time for me and Rozzy, otherwise we could be getting into a bit of a pickle. Anyone need a carpenter?

 So, I’m on my own for a week or so and missing me girl already. Obviously I’m not really alone as I have Tess and about sixty square metres of plasterboarding for company. Martin is going to show me how to achieve a rough plaster finish so then I will have about the same amount to plaster.

The work on the bedroom and bathroom is progressing slowly but we are making a bit of headway. The waste pipes are all in and connected and the water going in is nearly ready for connection, then I can see how many leaks I have to deal with. We have the floor tiles in the boot of the car and a host of switches and sockets to complete the lighting so it may be in a serviceable state for xmas…our poor parents. Its just as well they love us.

I have just been to my French lesson and I was absolutely rubbish. Sometimes it amazes me that I can manage to do things such as make complicated orders of things that I dont know the names of, yet tonight I couldnt say the simplest phrase. I think my brain has been fried by too many hours working out how to build a bathroom. Anyway, when I got back from the lesson there was an owl sitting on the fence post opposite our gate and he was in no hurry to move on so it was great to have a long look at him/her.

Tess found some new friends today when we went for a walk. When we reached the lake where she usually has a swim she was very excited to see a family of very large water rat type things known as coipu. They are a sort of cross between a beaver and a large rat and can be the size of a badger. I know this as I stopped to drag one unfortunate fella off the road where he had been hit by a car and he was simply huge. He will never know how unlucky he had been as an aquatic, pond dwelling creature to be run down and killed on the quietest road in France. I dont think I ever saw anything like them in the UK, not in the south anyway. The group Tess disturbed were not in the sightest bit concerned by her, they just slipped into the water and floated just out of reach. This wound Tess up no end and her frantic efforts to find a suitable launching pad for herself were thwarted by the dense brambles and bushes. I would quite liked to have seen what her intentions were had been had she got herself waterborne. Im sure she would have had great fun chasing after them and as she is no slouch herself in the water it would have been entertaining.

Ok, thats it for the blog, now…feed the dog and cat, light the fire, bring some more logs in, cook dinner, wash up from this morning………..hurry home Rozzy

Well it was 1-0 to the French paysan until about half an hour ago when I went out in the car and espeyed snow. It wasn’t much it has to be said and I think it’s stopped but I guess it makes it a draw until double and quits tomorrow.
I wouldn’t have been able to tell if it had stopped snowing unless I’d been outside, due to the blackness of the night, but was lured out there, just, by a couple of pompiers (firemen) on their annual calendar selling fest.
It is, sadly, the first of many such purchases, nearly all of which will be either used as fuel for the fire or more realistically deposited in the paper bin at the eco point around about March time and thereby cutting out the middleman ( a spare wall out of the sight line of passing eyes). Obviously as I have just paid 10€ for the thing this one can stay.
I have no idea what the going rate is for such a desirable item nowadays but remember that when we arrived 15 years ago it was about £2 and the urban myth at the time ( did I say urban – how silly!) was that if you didn’t give them the recompense they felt they deserved they wouldn’t bother to turn up if your house caught fire.
I don’t know if this is true having luckily never having had to use them for purposes more macabre than removing a hornet’s nest from a chimney over a decade ago but they do write your name and the amount you’ve paid in a receipt book. ….so they don’t embezzle the funds, or so that they can have you up against the wall come the revolution? We’ll have to wait to find out.
Anyway I thought that 10€ was over generous given the economic climate and considering I don’t want it anyway. As I’m going to have to buy into the whole football and ping pong thing aswell this year maybe I could use them to paper the downstairs toilet – some of the mug shots of the local fire fighters could have purgative properties I’m sure.

Anyway it’s done now – I’ve just got to get over it. 10€………!

Day 3 of the new build today and this morning the foundation trenches were finished. Dave spent the rest of the day making a access road to the property so that the ready mix concrete can get in tomorrow without incident – should the weather hold. In photos 2 and 3 I’ve managed to capture the neighbour and dog who both stood there for hours on end watching Dave at work. Although difficult to see him properly I think that his stance may give some hint as to his psychic bent for those able to read such signs. At this stage the jury’s still out but I’m egging him on to win the battle of the forecasters.

There is a dog on the end of that lead by the way. Those comedy leads of yore haven’t reached these parts yet.

Disregard this next photo. It’s for my mum’s buying purposes:

Today we’re back onto the new build diary which has finally reached it’s second day…hip hip…! This means that not only do I not have to think of anything to write about but also that the weather has held over the weekend and made the earth dry enough to entertain a brace of mini- diggers which this evening were still doing their thing in the dark …scooping well into the night. Although the weather’s been glorious all weekend it is, as always, apparently set to change at any moment and the concrete foundations have to be poured before that happens.
Although the various meteo sites, which Matt studies religiously many times daily, suggest that tomorrow we can expect rain/ snow - the neighbour, who walks past the site with his dog throughout the day, said today that the moon was at the wrong angle for rain and that it would be dry for the next four days! I’m on his side and hope that his old peasant sagesse wins the day as I hate the crap internet weather reports hedging their bets all over the place.
Anyway here are Matt’s documentary photos of today’s events. Tomorrow I shall report on the efficacy of peasant wisdom.

Last weeks football match became a very boozy affair particularly as the result meant I had to drink to forget. (Triggering a smug round of silence from Helen). Work was very, very difficult on Monday.

Today has been another day of fuzzy headedness, fatigue and liver acheage. Yesterday Mel and I managed to turn our friends daughters second birthday party into an all day drinkathon.

The venue, Didsbury Cricket Club is about 15 minutes walk from our house which on a crisp, sunny winters day is a lovely prospect. The birthday party didn’t start until 2pm so we’d planned ahead to walk to a newly opened restaurant nearby and then get gently imbibed in order to face the prospect of 30 screaming children.

The restaurant was lovely, the meal great and the red wine was moreish. We arrived at the party with ruddy cheeks and a vicious thirst. We were therefore delighted to discover a free bar. Never one to turn down an opportunity to test the freeness of a bar I moved onto Gin & Tonic. There were lots of old friends there and we spent a couple of hours chatting to them before making a tactical withdrawal following a party poppers incident that reduced every child in the room to tears and wailing. Mel and I often think we would like a family, yesterday afternoon we did not.

On the way home we sampled cocktails from a couple of hostelries and made it home just in time to catch the Strictly/X Factor televisual “treat”. Mel loves these shows whereas I use them as chance to let off some steam by ranting about every aspect of the contestants/judges/production. I think Mel quite enjoys my caustic observations.

All in all a very satisfying end to a challenging week. Firstly, Mels parents arrived in Chalus to discover that our boiler was not fixed and that the plumber was struggling to correct the problems caused by the dick of a plumber who installed it last year. Thankfully Julie (or St Julie as shes become known in our house) who helps us to make things happen in France had donated some of her wood so they could at least warm the house with electric heaters and the wood fire.

In the few days that Pat and Fred have been there, they have made really good progress fitting ‘foldy’ doors between the dining room and the living room and today a door between the living room and the kitchen. This really has been fantastically quick progress and I suspect that Fred has used his labour to keep himself warm. This week we have a specialist from the boiler company meeting our plumber at the house so I expect a lot of chin stroking, sucking of teeth and a large bill at the end of it. It’s a race against time to get the heating fixed for when we visit in three weeks time.

The Christmas party season starts this week and already my weight loss programme has proven somewhat lacking in any success whatsoever. I’m going to have really knuckle down this week if I am to enjoy my Yuletide gluttony properly.

Nothing happened this week – really, totally nothing. To celebrate this fact and in a mystic harmony with the weather, the misery of Jason Molina and ‘Blue Chicago Moon’ (darkness and desolation and the endless, endless, endless, endless, endless, endless depression - see left), I sat at the computer ploughing through more work and it rained almost continuously.
The new supermarket opened but I would be too embarrassed to describe that as the highlight of my week (despite the fact that it was and I have visited four times already). I did have a very small incident at the butcher counter, because of the (vague) similarity in French between the words for liver and goose, I inadvertently asked in the butcher yesterday for a kilo of chicken goose. An error I realise, but just imagine such a creature……mmm…chickeny goosey goodness.

As it turns out it would seem that the French eschew chicken liver as something quite disgusting (not dissimilar to the parsnip) and can’t imagine why anyone would want to eat it. The butcher gave it a lot of distressed hand waving action - distressed hands, I hasten to add, that were waving above a tray of cow stomach, cow tongue, cow brain and cow intestine.

Despite being thwarted in my search for poultry liver delights I have still been on the lookout for interesting new apero snacks (after that fateful day when my mini sausage, roast potato and horseradish nibbles were so widely rubbished – I really don’ t think I can be blamed for the shoddy tensile strength of the french cocktail stick, they’re just not up to the job of a proper, manly, British food morsel) so you can imagine my untrammeled delight to find the ‘oven baked cheese and bacon roll’ (my wife insists, rightly, that I would quite happily add cheese and chillies to any dish in Christendom and frankly, why wouldn’t you) I won’t trouble you with the whole….ahem…recipe, here are the pictorial highlights.

…mmmm….cheesey bacony goodness.

Apart from that I have searched out another video clip for your entertainment, whilst 64 million people may be quite happily watching this clip of a baby biting his brother’s finger I think I prefer the fascinating topic of guidance control units relative to chicken head stabilization…with it’s mix of crap science and a hint of animal abuse it is truly that for which the internet was invented.

and finally……parasol anyone

No new building today due to the dreadful weather, which was very windy and wet again.

We went to the funeral, of an old friend Peter Cross, in Limoges this afternoon. He was buried at the cemetery there and bizarrely the weather held for the entire ‘enterrement’, which took about an hour, it was only about 5 minutes after we’d all left that it started sheeting it down again. As there wasn’t a service it should have taken half that time but for some reason the stone at the enterance of the grave wouldn’t fit back in place so for half an hour we all stood watching two guys doing their best to chisel stone from the bottom of a granite slab and trying to prise it in place with a crow bar. When they had eventually finished and the stone was put back in place they went to their van and brought out a couple of tubes of mastic to seal it up with , which was very surreal but a no doubt necessary modern day twist to the old techniques. I have to say that they did a really nice job and no one would have been able to tell afterwards that it wasn’t mortar. I suppose all things must move on.

I pity that poor dog - but that’s cats for you….

The most important news today is that team Dig-It are all in rude health and came away for their medicals on Tuesday with clean sheets. When talking to Laurent about it today it transpired that Mark was the only one who took his trousers off – don’t ask…..!

When I wasn’t speaking to Laurent today he was talking to himself. I’ve heard rumour of this side of him but haven’t experienced it first hand or for the whole day. If you swapped his cordless for a pink fly swat he could have been David Van Day – although thankfully with more substantial leg wear.

Diary of a new build has come to a hasty conclusion after only the first day as yesterday the land was too sodden to dig and today was just ridiculously wet and windy. Matt brought Gary Davies to look at the land with a view to getting the digging done with a bigger digger as well as ours. When they got back to his farm ( he is a cattle farmer as well as digger driver ) he found one of his cows lying dead in the field. I don’t know how much money that is down the drain but who’d be a farmer?

A friend of ours, Martin, (partner of Nicki and one half of the Orange connexion) has a son who is training to be something in health and safety. Unfortunately for him this involves two years trawling around abattoirs and testing various parts of animals to make sure that they aren’t diseased. He has four minutes per carcas and has to test the tongue and lungs ….. apart from other parts which I can’t remember. Now that truly is a crap job. Who’d do health and safety?

Anyway onto more interesting things. …Tomorrow evening at the Lawrence d’Arabie in Chalus Peter Cheetham is doing a guest spot with his friend. You’ll either know him or not but it’ll be worth seeing and you’ll definitely be able to place him afterwards. I think that anyone ,who can, should turn up A rendition of ‘Teenage Kicks’ is on the cards. Who could resist that as a start to the festive season?

I am doing the blog for Neil today as the pre Christmas rush has started - not of the consumer type, but of the diy type. We invited all the family about a year ago to spend this Christmas with us, secure in the knowledge that our house would be if not completed then pretty close to it. Over the last year or so we found ourselves uninviting several of our fairly large extended family as it dawned on us that unless they want to stay in the stables (how very nativity like) or in the chicken house their accommodation was going to be nowhere near ready.

The most important downside to our house guest wise, is the lack of a second loo. In summer its ok for the men to go outside for a French style relief, but in mid December they might feel somewhat differently about it, and with both sets of parents arriving with possible weak bladders and prostate issues I have been uncharacteristically adamant about the necessity of toillette deux.

Of course its easy for me to say “we’ve got the loo - just plumb the bloody thing in!” without having any real concept of what’s involved. Water I guess, but before that I have discovered, is the need to put a velux in, a new floor down, then detra mat and tile it, stud the walls, work out wiring, plumbing, plaster boarding (acoustic and humid proofed), discover what electricity zone the lights are allowed to be in, where the door is going to be, height of the shower to allow the correct fall etc etc etc etc, so yes, there is a bit more to it than plumbing the bloody thing in.

Neil discovered some forums online which aim to share knowledge to first time renovaters on all aspects of living in France. A really useful tool as long as you don’t get several people coming up with different suggestions which confuse even more than you were before you started, or as frequently happens you have the misfortune to be answered by some pompous smart arse who, rather than offering helpful suggestions, seems to want to ridicule and belittle those who are only asking for help or support.

I guess one of the biggest problems is the different experience of those dealing with any issue in France. Meet the right person on the right day and to get anything done can be a breeze. On the other hand meet someone bureaucratic and unhelpful and you are stuffed. We are trying hard to learn French, but I don’t think that even if/when we are close to fluent every situation will be easier.

So, I have to hand it to my lovely husband. He works really hard all day, every day to try and turn this old house into something like a home and bit by bit he is doing it against all the odds. We have been offered the house of Dennis and Jane (new build - they were sensible) for Christmas should we not be ready, but I think, with a bit of luck, We should be sitting around our own table on the day.

Ps there’s been some bed swopping at chez nous