the last of the bedroom? I don't think so

For the last few weeks I have been working almost exclusively on getting the bedroom ready. I cannot quite believe how much time it has taken - put up the plasterboard, add filler between the gaps, add more filler when it's dry, sand the filler down so it's level (a job that would be better done wearing full scuba gear, as the dust gets everywhere) then paint the walls and the ceiling, masking tape all round. After two or three coats (more than 30 litres of undiluted paint, and the first couple of coats went on with a substantial addition of water), pull off the masking tape and then sand the beams to remove the excess filler and clean the new white paint off them. At this stage I discovered how dirty the inaccessible side of one of the beams was (a very narrow gap between it and the wall, so it hadn't been done with all the rest) and I then covered myself with old flaky limewash - straight down on my face of course, as it always is when you're working over your head.

Still, now it is done it looks pretty good. It's hardly worth posting a picture, as almost everything is white - a bit like a child's picture of a polar bear and a white kitten in a snowstorm - but nevertheless, here's the most difficult bit, restricted access, incurving beams, extra dirt, the lot. The surfaces here aren't quite as smooth as elsewhere, but it's a lot better than it was.



And this is a general view - the dark speck on the wall is a (taped over) plug point.




The bottom of the wall looks slightly odd as there isn't any skirting board yet, and I didn't want to paint right down to the flagstones. A skirting board is indisputably needed as the floor is heated, and has an expansion gap at each edge. That's a job for later though. I have yet to find a source of skirting ("plinthe" as the locals say).

I managed to find a bit of free time while the last bits of paint were drying, so I'm now just starting on the final volume of the Recherche du Temps Perdu. Luckily the AbeBooks supplier came up with the improved version just at the right time (today). The other books are the original late 1920s Alfred Knopf versions, all translated by Scott Moncrieff, but he had died before rendering the last volume (I'm not sure he even saw it in French), and his successor, Stephen Hudson, is regarded as having done a poor job. So what I have is the Mayor version, as successively revised by Kilmartin in the 1980s and finally by Enright in the 1990s, and I'll be able to make my own comparisons and see. I have, contrary to my expectations, come to be gripped by the narrative, and the last volume - largely written much earlier than the preceding ones, and possibly left in a better form by Proust - promises a lot. I was mildly surprised to find that the last eight or nine pages of "The sweet cheat gone" appear as the first few pages of "Time Regained", and I wonder what happened here (and indeed whose translation it was, as it is visibly the same as the Scott Moncrieff version, who gets no credit for it in the modern version).

I'm (almost) simultaneously getting into Updike's Bech books, which I had not read before, and they are well worth the read too. I have always enjoyed the four "Rabbit" books, but I'd seen dismissive criticism of the Bech ones, so I had never opened one.

It's a curiously mild (and dry) autumn here - the temperature in Aurillac today was 19 degrees at 4pm, and the grass is growing still, though the leaves have fallen from many of the trees - the beech and the oaks are still showing a lot of colour though.