Monday and it's back to work

so it's just like not being retired, in fact.

Our tiler turned up at 8am - just as he had said he would - so I had to get out of bed pretty quickly and go out and say hello. I managed to have a bite of breakfast before starting work with him, putting in the "carreaux de platre" round the bath. As before, he did all the skilful work and I carried the heavy stuff, cleaned the tools, made coffee, etc. What are carreaux de platre you ask? It's a lot easier just to post a picture:



On the left of the bath there will be a flat surface at bath level, with a small cubby-hole underneath at child-accessible level for shampoo, bleach, rat poison, caustic soda etc (just joking). In the left foreground are a couple of the carreaux, which will eventually (tomorrow?) form the tiled surface there. On the right we've left a gap so that there will be access to the taps and drains afterwards. It will have a removable tiled panel there, held in with magnets. We are now making grandiose plans for the extensive use of this newly-discovered material upstairs: tiled surfaces, shelves, boxed-in pipes - just about everywhere, in fact. As I plan to be doing it myself we can possibly expect something a bit rustic.

Here is the hearth, as finally finished. The tile propped against the wall shows what colour the terra-cotta was before the layers of linseed oil went on. And maybe the grout stained it a bit too. The tiler said it was OK. Now all we have to do is get the stove carted back from Sellindge to France and installed here.



The electrician was hard at work all day, and - almost a miracle after such a long time running everything in the barn from a single extension lead - we now have working plug points in two of the rooms, lights in the same rooms, and a power supply to the kitchen too, all of them fused and safe. The rest, he said, will follow fairly soon: he didn't want anything live before fitting lamps, spotlights, sockets in the appropriate places. But as he's now gone off to lay a 200 sq meter heated floor elsewhere, we shan't see him for a while. On the other hand the boss turned up unexpectedly to see how the work was going on - and, I think, to apologise for the heated floor interruption to it all - and we were able to get him to agree to install the cooker hood for us. That was good news.

And Caro went down to the Tresor Public in the local town to pay our income taxes. She said she was the only paying customer there, which was something of a surprise, as tomorrow is the deadline for final payments for the year. The man behind the counter was really charming and helpful. He even wrote out the cheque for her ("it's not often I get a chance to write a cheque this big" he said, but with luck he was joking). Next year it will be monthly instalments, much less painful.

Edgar Wallace's Bulboro is proving to be a better book than I'd thought, not that I've had much time for reading today. I now find myself wondering how this particular copy got where it was: the people selling it clearly spoke very little English. Next time I buy an English-language book here I'll remember to ask. Or more likely, forget.