Still not a bank holiday

...and still a good hot August day. Our neighbours say that thunderstorms are on their way later in the week, but who knows? The grass is now looking distinctly parched.

Marcel the menuisier was back at work today, and the barn doors are now finished off properly with the fixed upper portion in place.



The upper part hadn't had a coat of linseed oil when the picture was taken earlier today, but it has now. I am not sure how much of a good idea it is to be at the top of a tall and rickety stepladder with a saucepan of near-boiling oil, but fortunately this time there were no problems. It needs three more coats though, so there's still plenty of time to do something stupid.

We spent the morning putting up more glassfibre wallpaper (on the chipboard ceiling). One more day and it should be done, and it'll be a good thing as it's a really horrid job, prickly fibres all over everything. Then this afternoon off to the tip with a carload of cardboard, formerly protecting the new wood floor. The tip experience here is quite different from Ashford, where large numbers of surly council workers try to make you feel unwelcome and resolutely ignore you if you're trying to shift something heavy. There's just the one man at the Maurs dechetterie, and he shakes your hand when you arrive, helps you unload the rubbish, and compares (favourably) the ability of the Dutch and the English with that of the French when it comes to sorting out the recyclable stuff before they get there. Of course, I've no idea what he says to his French friends about the repeated visits made by the Dutch and the English.

But he wishes you a polite au revoir and bon continuation as if he genuinely hopes to see you again soon.

The cardboard might in principle have gone into a bonfire. We consulted a neighbour about having one. He considered the pros and cons, yes it is a bit dry, you'd have to be careful, make sure the grass doesn't catch - only mentioning at the end that in dry weather like this it is actually interdit. That's presumably a minor consideration round here.

Not a bank holiday weekend here ......

... so of course the sun has been shining and it's been a lovely day.

Quite a lot has been going on over the last couple of weeks: we've had Jane come to stay, just back from her honeymoon and still married apparently she says. She's helped out a lot and we've gone ahead with some serious work - tiling and grouting the terrace outside the bedroom, painting the large main room, walls and ceiling, putting up fibreblass wallpaper on the ceilings in the upstairs bedrooms and a whole lot more that I have already managed to forget (it'll come back to me, Jane, really it will).

Here's the finished terrace:



After it was done I discovered that I hadn't quite got the fall of the surface right, and if it should ever rain (I had to simulate it with a sprinkler on the garden hose) there'd be a big puddle right outside the door. So I got out the angle grinder and diamond disk, cut out three of the smaller stones and relaid them a centimeter or two lower as a gutter. This has either solved the drainage problem, or at least moved it somewhere else. You can hardly see the joins.

Then at last the menuisier got his men back on site, and we've now got the balcony in place, with two-thirds of the floor planks down. But there's no sign of a railing round it - that has all yet to be ordered, which is about what we should have expected. Still, we'll have plenty of time to decide what it should look like. Monsieur G has promised us a temporary rail, probably scaffold poles and netting - tatty chic maybe?

Here's the balcony in situ:



It was installed using M Vaissiere's nice new farm tractor. The tractor had to come in via the field and M Espeisse's woods, as it was too wide for the public track behind the barn. Fortunately Monsieur V lives opposite Jean-Louis Carriere, who farms the field, and was able to ring him up and ask permission to cut the fence down. This is how it's done, health and safety please look the other way:



Then on Friday Marcel came with young Sebastian and installed the main doors. We immediately had him take them back off again so we could treat them with linseed oil and turps, and - pricked by our conscience - we recruited Sylvain and Aurelian to help us put them back on, feeling it might have been rather a lot for Marcel to manage by himself on Monday morning. Here they are, and the doors too:



The upper, fixed, section should go up on Monday, and then we might have the "barn door" look we've been aiming for. Four years on and it will look like it did before we bought it, an achievement for sure.

Finally, I had to do something to prevent weeds growing in the wall between the new balcony and the main room. The menuisier suggested concrete, but I decided to use a concrete infill (this helps to hold the balcony to the wall - there are great big bolts embedded in it) topped off with a couple of inches of mortar and some more of our tiles. I liked the result:



I was using up what I had left over, so the larger tiles, which are 28 x 28cms, were cut down from 60 x 40cm slabs, and the smaller ones were offcuts from everything else.

I now feel something of an expert on laying heavy stone tiles. If it needs to be hammered with a heavy wooden mallet into a bed of mortar, then I'm your man. Even the grouting is now something I can make work (funny word, grout, more one of Neasden FC's players than part of the English language. The OED says it was originally a word for a coarse porridge, then dregs or mud, and that the modern usage is only possibly derived from that, noting that there's a Fench word "grouter". Well not round here there's not - it's just "joint" in modern France. Possibly Mr Onions never used grout himself, and didn't see the resemblance to porridge before it sets).

hot and back to normal ..... almost

Why do I always feel the need to complain? It's very hot today, and even more humid, with hotter weather forecast. I think it's because I'd like to be getting on with laying those tiles, but it would be just a little too much. My back is pretty well normal again, and the computer is working - though I have lost all the addresses and e-mails in Outlook, so I'll scrabbling round to retrieve these and maybe this time I'll remember to back them up. Or not, of course.

I'd laid a few tiles on Sunday but used up the last of the sand and cement. So today I went and collected another ton of sand and some bags of cement from Maurs. It was shovelling the sand off the trailer into the sandpit that convinced me that it was too hot to work. I'm not entirely sure that I'm doing it right - I've a feeling that tiles bedded on mortar need a minimum thickness of mortar, and maybe I don't have that. And I can't increase it without running the risk of rain washing into the bedroom. It's probably better to have a few tiles coming loose - they can always be re-fixed, than having solidly fixed tiles that are just that lttle bit too high for draining away the rainwater.

So I am trying to relax and swim a little in the pool, and I'm keeping the shutters closed in an attempt to have a bedroom cool enough to sleep in tonight.

and then the computer crashed

As if my back wasn't enough, when I turned on the computer I had the blue screen of death this morning, followed by a corrupted Windows load - well, it didn't load at all. Eventually I reloaded Windows from the disc that had mysteriously arrived at Elm Grove a few months back (thus erasing all my settings, drivers, software, etc, but not the data files luckily), and after several chats with Simon I reinstalled the wireless driver and got back onto the internet.

I haven't yet been able to resurrect Outlook, though.

Still, it's nice warm weather and my back is certainly improving if I don't spend too much time hunched over the PC.

Last night it was Stephanie's (35th) birthday, and I joined about 25 other adults and a dozen children (though I may have been counting the same ones more than once) for drinks and a barbecue. I should have known that if I got there at 7.30 - as Didi suggested - the food wouldn't be served until 10.30, so there was plenty of time to chat. Too much of it spent listening to Jean-Pierre, but not understanding very much - summer problems with the weather I think. The children had a new kitten, which tolerated being carried around by the smaller children remarkably well. But then Leontine's dogs went for it, and it retreated under a car with a great deal of hissing and spitting. And THEN it retreated inside the engine bay, where it defeated everyone's efforts (including its own) at removal, until eventually Didi dismantled part of the engine shielding and got it out. Prior to that it could be seen inside the grille on the front of the car, walking back and forth and mewing loudly, and occasionally sticking its paws out through various small openings. After that it was confined to the house....

It was nice to meet Didi's and Stephanie's parents - the former a lot older than the latter (is Didi a youngest child and Stephanie an oldest one?) - but really the entire neighbourhood was there, so all in all a pleasant way to spend a summer evening.

work suspended

Not the best day yesterday. A lovely morning, clear skies, warm, sunny, as usual (I shouldn't say that), and I got ready to tackle the tiling on the patio. I'd ground down the excess cement round the existing tiles, chased out the gaps between them so I could grout later, and generally had everything ready to start.

Then, just as I got up from kneeling by the edge of the patio, a nasty pain in my back and I find I can't bend. It'll be a few days I'm sure before I can touch my toes again. So I had to force myself to an idle lifestyle, lying down and reading, and enjoying the peace and quiet.

Well, a quiet night (as they all are) with clear skies, and as I woke up about 4am, I went to lie down by the pool to watch the perseid meteor shower ("the Tears of St Lawrence"). It was a good (but not spectacular) show, as the moon was bright and quite close to the radiant. I might try again tonight, but the moon will be much the same: it'll depend on whether I wake early.

This morning feeling very slightly better I went to Calvinet for some painkillers in the car, then off to the supermarket, naturally leaving the shopping list behind. In fact walking about seems to make my back feel less painful, so I plan a short stroll this afternoon.

Getting hot but yes it's August

Hot sun all day today. First thing, though, while it was still cool, I went for a run - just the short loop round by Lestrade de Gales - it was the first time for I'd guess nearly a year. I can't say it was a real pleasure actually out pounding the roads, but it was nice when I'd finished. I'll give it a day or so before going out again.

My first job was to prop up the peach tree. It's now slung from the wall of the barn, using the now redundant electricity barckets. The slings didn't seem quite enough, so I cut a heavy crutch in the woods, and that's also holding it up. It's now just about possible to get in the door without bending impossibly low. Regrettably while coming down the stepladder, a brief wobble led me to speed up my descent, and I cracked my knee on the ladder quite painfully. What have stepladders got against me?

Then I grouted the tiles I'd put in yesterday and afterwards went to have lunch with Tony and Anne. Cheese souffles and nice chilled rose. We commiserated ourselves about the absence of M Goutel and the lack of progress on our respective bits of joinery: T&A are having to put up with some fairly rough temporary handrails on their stairs and balcony. But I think there's a good chance of getting Mr G back and working after the 21st. We'll see.

In the afternoon I shifted the patio tiles off the patio ready for work to start putting them down. It now really looks like a dauntingly large area to cover, but maybe that's just because it's so hot today.

Here are the tiles as they are today.



The picture makes the area to be done look fairly small, but in fact it's about 25 square meters. And ideally it would all be done at the same time (for better cohesion of the mortar bed), so I'll try to get all the preparatory work done, and the sand and cement in place, before starting up the mixer. But when I do the upright ones round the edge I should also be able to do the cut stones by the main door first, as these too need to be glued rather than cemented. That'll give a slightly smaller area to cover.

Monday evening

It's one of those magical evenings. The sun set about half an hour ago, and there's not a cloud in the sky and the colours blend from copper over in the west through progressively lighter then darker blues over to the east. A few lights are twinkiling down in the valley but the first stars are not yet visible. There are almost no sounds to be heard - perhaps a distant donkey, and the occasional voice wafting up from the Piganiols' farm down the hill. No birds singing, no dogs barking, not even a cicada. The air is just cooling down and the first bats are appearing.

Yesterday was a day off - overcast and cool. I went out to lunch with Peter Graham and Charles Barr - a delicious and well-sized duck, followed by Charles' blackberry fool and perhaps rather more wine than was entirely good for me.

Today I took the trailer to Rodez and collected half a ton of paving stones - 30cm square limestone flags. They'll be going onto the patio outside the bedroom, hopefully in the next few days. As the picture shows I split the load between the trailer and the back of the car.



The 120 tiles look suspiciously like quite a small load (it felt heavy enough loading them on at Rodez and then off at Lessal), but each tile weighs a little more than 5kg. I weighed a selection first before deciding to take the trailer.

The triangular gap between the lower and upper paved area has been niggling me for months. If our Moroccan builders had managed to get the end of the paving for the pool at right angles to the wall of the barn it wouldn't be there, but as the main paved area needs to be square there's a long thin fillet of bare concrete that has been asking for the treatment.

And today it got it. Here's before and after:




And the sun came out to show the difference. It's odd how the new tiles look as if they are set crookedly compared to the ones on the left: in fact they are all straight lines. Maybe it'll look better when the grouting is done (maybe that'll be tomorrow if I can find the grout).

By the time I was done it was nearly seven, and as I went for a shower my mobile beeped (this was very unusual in that the phone was switched on and I noticed the message). It was Janey reminding me to look at the Positano webcam where she and Mikey would be waving, slowly, as the webcam refreshes only every five seconds. And after a bit of an exchange of texts I could make out two small white specks (six pixels?) which were them - and it's a lovely evening there too.

Now at ten it's getting dark and the cicadas are chirruping away - so many of them it's a constant blended tone - and the stars are coming out too.

Warm today

I clearly shouldn't have mentioned the rain. It was back to temperatures in the thirties, clear skies, and not even a hint of rain. I was reduced to putting the sprinkler on in the hope that the grass outside the farmhouse hasn't died completely (that's what it looks like, though).

I spent the day doing little things punctuated by frequent cups of tea (there are three kilos of loose lapsang to be got through). So I improved the cover on the sand and gravel store - in time this will be the compost bin, really it will - and cleaned the pool, then swam in it (I had to check that the water was OK), dead-headed the roses - two of them look like they have a fatal disease - and then watered them just the same, cleaned the willow leaves out of the gutters - assisted by Aurelian, who clearly thought that me and ladders were a bad combination - I'd noticed the gutters were blocked when the storm arrived, evicted the redstart and her last remaining chick from the barn (now just outside the window, possibly complaining), thought about propping up the peach tree (there's already a branch broken on the apple from the weight of the fruit), hmm, that doesn't count as something I've done, does it?, read the rest of the appalling "Twilight" by Stephanie Meyer (don't get me started on how bad it is. In fact I wish I hadn't bothered getting started on it myself), and took the wedding beer down to the Piganiols.

Then as twilight arrived and the day just began to cool down, I reheated yesterday's pork stew with home-grown apples (it's always better the second day - maybe it's the wine you have to add?) and - note for the future - just don't try cooking broccoli while writing up the blog. It'll be overcooked.

Back in deepest France

9am on Friday morning, and I've just had breakfast and unpacked the car. While I've been away it has hardly rained at all - the grass is looking very yellow and thin - while overnight and this morning there has been a spectacular thunderstorm with lightning on the hills all round the house, and heavy rain. Now it's daylight the thunder is still rumbling but the lightshow has finished, and we're up in the raincloud with no visibility beyond the nearest hedges.

11 hours driving yesterday and I was hit by that curious evolutionary (?) problem, coming over really sleepy between 2 and 4 in the afternoon - the heat of the day on those African savannahs, and the best time to lie down. Really difficult staying awake, and then it simply passed off entirely and the rest of the drive was so easy.

The wedding went off perfectly (and I'll write about it later) but now it's back to Mourjou and its builders. Three of them promised to work while I was away, but of the three only M Bouquier actually did: so we do have a kitchen, though as the plumber wasn't on site it isn't yet connected up and can't be used. The electrician hasn't shown up at all, while the menuisier, who positively assured me he'd be hard at work on the balcony, also hasn't set foot anywhere near here. But on the plus side, M le Maire has made a really good start in tiling the bathrooms, and he'd made no promises at all. The downstairs shower room is pretty well finihed - the one part he hasn't done is clearly waiting for us to say what we want him to do.

The weather has had a startling effect on the peach tree outside the front door of the barn: the large crop of peaches are twice the size they were before, and the tree is bowed down with the weight making it hard to get in the front door. The peaches are however rock-hard at the present, so it'll be a while before we start enjoying them.

On getting back late last night I knocked on Leontine's door and we had a chat about the wedding and the grandchildren, but didn't stay long as the house needed opening up. Lots of cobwebs (one of those fun jobs for later this morning), and the bats seem to have moved out of the kitchen window and into the attic. Everything else seems absolutely fine, which is distinctly encouraging, and no sign of the flies which can sometimes provide a field sport for the flyswatters.

This morning Jean-Pierre was filling jerricans of water for his cows, which he has moved to a field at Leynhac (not enough grass here), and the field next to our barn is only occupied by his pretty brown-blonde horse and her foal.



This might explain the absence of flies. Jean-Pierre helped me unload the bandsaw from the car, as it is too heavy for me to do by myself. Everything - particularly the grandfather clock - arrived safely and undamaged, and the clock is now ticking away happily in the room next door. It can't yet go into the barn - it will have to wait until the plugpoints are fitted and the walls are painted. Next week? Or next year?

We'll have a bit of extra decorating in the barn as the redstart has raised another brood in the barn, and the signs of occupation can be seen on absolutely every flat surface, but particularly - of course - on the wooden staircase that we sanded down so carefully. The (single) chick seems to be sufficiently large to be evicted, so I'll try to flush her and her mother out, and then make sure the windows stay closed as much as possible.

Jane and Mike's Wedding

After spending the weeks before the wedding helping get the garden ready, and getting the Austin ten not just MOTed but actually ready to drive (and I have the scars to prove it) the most vital task left was to get the beer in. Some very nice (they tell me) Pullman bitter from Hepworth's brewery in Horsham. I hope it had enough time to settle.



Finally Saturday arrived, threatening rain, but it held off till late in the afternoon.

I'd been practising with the Traction - the pedals seemed rather close together - and I was able to get the bride to the church in what I hope was real style. Jane looked lovely, and I felt very proud taking her up the aisle. Will's sermon was - shall we say - idiosyncratic: the first time anyone present had seen the preacher produce a real iron anvil in the pulpit. And by the end of the service Jane and Mikey were well and truly married, and back on out to the Traction.

Luckily Lydia's white umbrellas came in useful, and the guests had a bit of time to enjoy the garden. Mikey's two latest rockets whizzed into a darkening sky, and - I am sure this is a good omen - for the first time ever the retrieve parachute opened and we all saw the controlled descent.



Then into the marquee for drinks, a treasure hunt, goldfish (all safely swimming in the pond now) a good meal, a few short speeches, and The Cake




Followed - eventually - by the Cosmic Sausages, who were even better than we had remembered from Peckham.