Better motor trade experience today. A local firm is now servicing our make: before, we had a 45-minute trek to the nearest dealer. No less ruinous for routine servicing, but thorough and friendly, and for once the car was spotlessly clean inside and out when we collected it. Back to negotiations on the Egg 1 replacement tomorrow, however, so I’ll make sure there’s enough hot water for a prolonged shower when I get home.
The garden really is waking up. The magnolia is better than ever, and a small tree I hadn’t hitherto identified (or even paid much attention to at all, in fact) turns out to be an ornamental cherry, with blossom this year for the first time. Those were about the only (potential) flowering things when we moved in, apart from some escallonias and viburnums of singularly little charm. Oh, and a rather sulky daphne. Well, the place is a whole lot more colourful now. I’ve sowed more seed today for summer colour, and have countless pots and trays of stuff coming on. We’re going easy on the containers this year, since they’re rather high-maintenance – and in any case, the pots are planted with spuds now!
Tuesday 27 April 2010
Sunday 25 April 2010
25 April
Martyn’s fix on the pond seems to have worked, and I’ve spent a few hours in the garden, planting out pansies grown from seed last autumn, potting up achillea seedlings and potting on penstemon cuttings. I’ve also set up a water butt to collect rainwater from the conservatory roof, and it turned out to be much less of a job than I’d feared (thus quite the opposite of most DIY ventures I’ve undertaken). Too late to catch this morning’s rain, though. While Martyn was pond fettling yesterday, I gave the grass its first cut with the mower on a high setting. It looks like nothing on earth, but will be better once I give it its next cut.
Spent longer than is entirely comfortable yesterday in the company of the motor trade, which always makes me feel like I need to count the fingers on my right hand and take a shower. We’re toying with trading Egg1 in for a minor Chelsea Tractor, and have found a model we could live with. Mr Motor Trade spent a lot of time disparaging the trade-in and trying to get us to buy a vehicle he had in stock, packed with extras we don’t want and lacking those we need. Ugh. Shudder.
Spent longer than is entirely comfortable yesterday in the company of the motor trade, which always makes me feel like I need to count the fingers on my right hand and take a shower. We’re toying with trading Egg1 in for a minor Chelsea Tractor, and have found a model we could live with. Mr Motor Trade spent a lot of time disparaging the trade-in and trying to get us to buy a vehicle he had in stock, packed with extras we don’t want and lacking those we need. Ugh. Shudder.
Friday 23 April 2010
23 April
We have wildlife in profusion. There are newts and some sort of snail in the pond, together with several hundred tadpoles (pollywogs, to you Colonials). The woodpeckers are drumming away, and we seem to have the same maddening chaffinch as we had last year, with his 'silly old widow!' flourish at the end of his repetitive song. Someone's had a go at one of the blackbirds, to judge by the feathers on the back grass.
Yewf court yesterday was as depressing as usual, though it was refreshing to sit with a chairtaker who administers a good bollocking! We had one punter we won't see again. but the rest were largely familiar faces, each a foot taller and wider than when I first saw them, and about to graduate to the adult court, where it'll be my job to to talk to them and tell them that we're no longer looking at their welfare as a priority, but putting punishment at the head of the list.
We've been to the optician again today. When I got my current specs, they were so ill-suited to working at the computer that I ordered a set of readers suitable for the job. Well, I got them home, and they were useless, and made me feel queasy. Replacements on order, and the varifocals have now been adjusted so that I don't actually need the readers. Deep sigh. Still, the good news is that Martyn's new specs have been similarly adjusted, and seem much better.
Yewf court yesterday was as depressing as usual, though it was refreshing to sit with a chairtaker who administers a good bollocking! We had one punter we won't see again. but the rest were largely familiar faces, each a foot taller and wider than when I first saw them, and about to graduate to the adult court, where it'll be my job to to talk to them and tell them that we're no longer looking at their welfare as a priority, but putting punishment at the head of the list.
We've been to the optician again today. When I got my current specs, they were so ill-suited to working at the computer that I ordered a set of readers suitable for the job. Well, I got them home, and they were useless, and made me feel queasy. Replacements on order, and the varifocals have now been adjusted so that I don't actually need the readers. Deep sigh. Still, the good news is that Martyn's new specs have been similarly adjusted, and seem much better.
Thursday 22 April 2010
22 April
The journey back from Southern France takes its toll a bit these days. Our drive on Sunday was easy enough, but I somehow didn't actually do anything on Monday except shop for essentials and sit and surf/read/snooze. Made up for it with a manic Tuesday: three lots of washing, two batches of baking, potted up alyssum saxatiles, tended various dried out pots on the staging, replaced a dead hebe with a potentilla and planted aubrieta and a. saxatile beside it, planted out snowdrops and filled a hanging basket with blue pansies, and so on and so fifth. Yesterday: did nothing until the bench half-yearly in the evening. Yewf Court today, so if the pattern holds, stand by for a day of utter sloth tomorrow.
The fitter from Jokers Я Us Home improvements came on Tuesday as promised to replace a double glazing pane on which the seal had failed. Polite and competent, in total contrast to the dim, rude creatures one has to speak to at their call centre. He reckons that phoney leaded lights like those chosen by our predecessors are more prone to the seals failing than the lead-free variety. So if you're toying with replacing your windows, keep that in mind.
Now that the grass has been fed and weeded, we're hoping for fair weather at the weekend, else we could be in machete territory! There's no doubt, though, that the grass is vastly improved by Green Thumb's ministrations. When I tried tackling the moss and weeds myself, the stuff cost more than the quarterly maintenance visit, and we finished up with a zebra-striped lawn.
The fitter from Jokers Я Us Home improvements came on Tuesday as promised to replace a double glazing pane on which the seal had failed. Polite and competent, in total contrast to the dim, rude creatures one has to speak to at their call centre. He reckons that phoney leaded lights like those chosen by our predecessors are more prone to the seals failing than the lead-free variety. So if you're toying with replacing your windows, keep that in mind.
Now that the grass has been fed and weeded, we're hoping for fair weather at the weekend, else we could be in machete territory! There's no doubt, though, that the grass is vastly improved by Green Thumb's ministrations. When I tried tackling the moss and weeds myself, the stuff cost more than the quarterly maintenance visit, and we finished up with a zebra-striped lawn.
Monday 19 April 2010
19 April
Still no sign of either ADSL or an answer to my snotty letter by the time we left on Friday. Pleasant drive up to Annie's, with a stop for lunch in Moissac, where I spent some time during a boating holiday 35 years ago. (I grew a beard during that trip, and my chin hasn't been shaved since!) From there we did a bit more motorway as far as Agen, where we headed over to the beautiful Auvillar and Nérac and thence to Annie's via Casteljaloux. The road runs practically dead straight for mile after mile, part of it through the pine plantations of the Landes.
We arrived at Annie's to find a number of problems. The water heater had burst in the frosts. The water was off at the mains, and when I tentatively opened the stop cock outside, there were instantly shrieks of 'turn it off!' from inside the house. Fortunately, we managed to find an isolating cock on the boiler, so if there was no hot water, there was at least indoor sanitation and water for cooking. That wasn't all: her co-owner had left food out in the kitchen: it took the three of us two hours to clean up all the mouse shit. Worse still in the linen cupboard: something large had been nesting in there, with consequent mess. Fortunately the sheets and towels were in closed plastic trunks. Despite all that, we spent a couple of nights there, enjoying each other's company and the pretty countryside round about, and catching up with some old friends.
We left yesterday at sparrowfart, so the road as far as Bordeaux was practically empty - we passed three other vehicles. The traffic came and went a bit, but by the time we reached Le Mans, our average speed (not counting lunch and comfort breaks) was 73 mph. Even taking into account all the stop-go stuff in Le Mans (which was lousy with motorbikers) and at the tunnel, as well as the return through Kent on speed-limited roads, our overall average was still 64 for the whole journey, and we got over 38 miles to each gallon.
Nice to be home. It was a good surprise that a lot of my seedlings have survived being dumped in the cold frames for over 2 weeks. The daffodils are going over, but other things are starting: fritillaries, polyanthus, primroses and aubrieta are in full flower, as well as a few stalwart pansies. One or two of the echinaceas I started last year from seed are growing strongly, and all the hostas we got from a colleague are starting into growth in their pots. Of the four in the ground, only one is showing signs of life so far. The grass needs a cut, but with Green Thumb coming to do their stuff on Wednesday, it's too late: I won't be able to tackle it till next weekend now. Good excuse for a lazy day, eh?
We arrived at Annie's to find a number of problems. The water heater had burst in the frosts. The water was off at the mains, and when I tentatively opened the stop cock outside, there were instantly shrieks of 'turn it off!' from inside the house. Fortunately, we managed to find an isolating cock on the boiler, so if there was no hot water, there was at least indoor sanitation and water for cooking. That wasn't all: her co-owner had left food out in the kitchen: it took the three of us two hours to clean up all the mouse shit. Worse still in the linen cupboard: something large had been nesting in there, with consequent mess. Fortunately the sheets and towels were in closed plastic trunks. Despite all that, we spent a couple of nights there, enjoying each other's company and the pretty countryside round about, and catching up with some old friends.
We left yesterday at sparrowfart, so the road as far as Bordeaux was practically empty - we passed three other vehicles. The traffic came and went a bit, but by the time we reached Le Mans, our average speed (not counting lunch and comfort breaks) was 73 mph. Even taking into account all the stop-go stuff in Le Mans (which was lousy with motorbikers) and at the tunnel, as well as the return through Kent on speed-limited roads, our overall average was still 64 for the whole journey, and we got over 38 miles to each gallon.
Nice to be home. It was a good surprise that a lot of my seedlings have survived being dumped in the cold frames for over 2 weeks. The daffodils are going over, but other things are starting: fritillaries, polyanthus, primroses and aubrieta are in full flower, as well as a few stalwart pansies. One or two of the echinaceas I started last year from seed are growing strongly, and all the hostas we got from a colleague are starting into growth in their pots. Of the four in the ground, only one is showing signs of life so far. The grass needs a cut, but with Green Thumb coming to do their stuff on Wednesday, it's too late: I won't be able to tackle it till next weekend now. Good excuse for a lazy day, eh?
Thursday 15 April 2010
15 April
This Times article capably sums up all the ills that beset the criminal justice system in England and Wales:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article7089547.ece
Amen to all that.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article7089547.ece
Amen to all that.
Tuesday 13 April 2010
Bulk blog - from early April
13 April 2010
Third anniversary of our move to the western fringes of Disgustedville, which we have not regretted for a moment. It was hard for Martyn to give up the family home in Rochester, but needs must when there’s residential care to be paid for. Oddly enough, I had absolutely no pangs about leaving Smith Towers, the first house I’d bought, and which I’d owned for over 26 years. By the time I left, Martyn had moved in, so we were tripping over each other all the time, and parking was a nightmare. Each morning we’d to stop and think what street we’d parked in the night before, and it was often at the other end of a dark alley in which the lighting was out of action most of each winter, and which also flooded rather regularly. It was a nice little house, and it served me well for many years, but now that we’ve started to get the new place the way we want it, it’s always a pleasure to return. We bought it on the rebound from a purchase that was going slowly tits-up in a new development near the county town. We were hoping to buy from a nice couple who were being sriously and expensively messed about by the fellow up the chain from them. Our vendor for the abortive deal runs a business fixing people’s sewing machines, and oddly enough, he turned up to do a job across the road from us a few days before we left. All’s well that ends well: they bought a bungalow in the same street as that of the difficult fellow, and are very happy there, and we’re in quarters that we like.
And it will almost certainly be from there that I update the blog. Having ordered an ADSL set-up in Lagrasse a couple of weeks before we set out, I was hoping it would be in service by the time we got here. Not so, alas, three days before we’re due to leave for home. I have spent in aggregate well over an hour trying to get some sense out of Frogtel. This morning, as I was sent from pillar to post, I was told:
• the original order is still being dealt with.
• the order has been completed, and the connexion is up and running.
• the order has been cancelled.
• the order has been reinstated.
Having got no sense out of the various departments, and having been told I’d have to ring another department just to cancel the order, I slammed the phone down, wrote a letter to the Director of customer relations, put a stamp on it, and entrusted it to my friends at La Poste. As I wandered round town doing my errands, apologising for my vile temper and explaining it, I was regaled with everyone’s grizzles about Frogtel, the electricity company, the tax office and all the rest of the tottering current and former instruments of the state apparatus.
12 April 2010
Another fine day yesterday, so we headed out for a stroll up the valley as far as the weir, then back down the other side. Quite a nice walk, and the first time we’d done it: the only problem was that it involved quite a long stretch on the main road. There is still no sign of foliage on the vines; yet another sign of the late spring. But the bee orchids are starting to pop up out of the grass verges.
Dreich this morning, and just what was needed to get one in the right frame of mind for a phone call to Frogtel: ‘We can’t connect your call, everyone’s busy’.
Later: ‘We’ll connect you within six minutes.’ Not wrong, but not helpful either. ‘Oh, you should have been up and running by 7 April; I see the order isn’t yet marked as completed; I’ll send a message to our techy bods and ask what’s keeping them – they’ll contact you.’ ‘Can’t I contact them directly?’ ‘Yes, you can call 3900 and press 1.’ ‘Last time I did that, they told me to call 3900 and press 2, and here I am, talking to you.’ ‘Ah. They’ll contact you on your mobile – ah, sorry, your mobile is on a UK number. Can’t call that – sorry. But they can send an SMS to your fixed line.’ ‘[Deep sigh] OK, I’ll wait to hear from them. Will that be today?’ ‘Ah, that I couldn’t say.’ Watch this space – if ever I get this into cyber-ditto.
Thence to Brico d’Oc to buy a refill for the gas bottle. Waiting for service, lady behind counter struggling to get a lid back on a can of some sort of glop: ‘Ah, putain!’ says she. ‘Faut dire “Maman travaille”, Madame, n’est-ce pas?’ Reversal of a dialogue between me and one of her colleagues a few years ago, on my being shown the miserable colours in which the authorities would allow me to paint my shutters. Next stop, the grotty shop that sells meter-diameter paella pans and attendant gas rings, huntin’ ‘n fishin’ garb and sundry kitsch. Absent a dumb waiter, we use a supermarket-style basket to carry stuff up from the kitchen to the roof terrace. It’s known as the blind waiter. Last year I over-estimated its resilience when, a couple of apéritifs into the evening, I dropped it down the stairwell to be refilled, taking a number of lumps out of it. It’s now in the nearby garbage bin, replaced by a larger, lurid yellow thing intended for carrying laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. It will do the job just fine.
10 April 2010
A fine day, we thought, for a ride over the hills to lunch in Limoux, a habit of ours for years at some point in each visit. Always the same café, usually a pizza, since they do them so well. The roads between here and Limoux are narrow and winding, so it’s more fun for the passenger than for the driver! We were treated to some fine views of the Pyrenees as we came into Limoux, and again on the road from Montréal back into Carcassonne.
I don’t think I’d mentioned that we’ve seen mimosa in flower here this year for the first time. Its flowering season is usually well over by the time we get here. Hence it’s perhaps not surprising that the wisteria is so late in coming into flower. One fence in Ribaute that is usually covered in flower at this time of year is showing a few flowers, butthat’s partly because it has been smothered by ivy. Up on the back road to Ribaute, the irises are now starting to flower, just five days after I failed to find so much as a bud. The vineyards and meadows are full of honey-scented white flowers (a relative of candytuft, I think), and the cowslips are blooming fit to bust. In our little flower beds at the front, the periwinkle is keeping other subjects at bay to the left of the front door, and the mint we planted last year on the right hand side is asserting itself over the annual weeds. When I bought the place, there were a couple of miserable conifers either side of the door. One obligingly croaked, and I helped the other to join it shortly afterwards, replacing them with oleanders, which seem to have shrugged off the severe winter. But, since the house face north, we have few hopes of floral magnificence. If the seedlings have survived back in England, perhaps we’ll bring a box of bedding plants in the summer. (Last time I tried that, I sneezed all the way…)
As for local wildlife, I hear a cuckoo from the roof terrace, and we’ve seen quite a few jays as we’ve been out on our travels. A local donkey contributes to the dawn chorus, and it seemed incongruous today to hear a chaffinch (one harangues us repetitively in the garden at home) while admiring a panorama of 50 miles of snowy Pyrenees.
9 April 2010
Another grey day yesterday, so we had a morning of cooking, reading and model-making. Martyn ran out of materials – he is fashioning catenary poles and gantries for the model railway out of brass wire and box section – so suggested a ride into Narbonne. One promising address, a modelling shop in the Place Voltaire (which we approached, unnecessarily, as it turned out, via rather scary back alleys), had vanished without trace since our elderly Yellow Pages were printed, and another out in the industrial estate turned out to be a sort of gallic Toys Я Us, hence of no use to us. We eventually tracked down exactly what he needed in one of the big home improvement sheds. It always surprises me that, for a nation reputed to be somewhat fiery, people people seem content to stand in a line of 20-30 people waiting to get to one of the two cashiers on duty at a bank of 12 checkout desks.
Since we were going to Narbonne anyway, I decided to look at gas hobs. The one we put in a few years ago (and regulars will recall the story of my getting stuck inside the cupboard) has never really been satisfactory. It had the wrong jets for bottled gas à la française, so always put out far too much flame, incorrectly mixed, so that we regularly had singed eyebrows and always filthy black pot and pan bottoms. Well, we had a look at our old friend Darty, who were offering a wide range of hobs, but all at eye-watering prices. At this point, we repaired to their competitor, the oddly-named But, to find the place covered in clearance sale posters: it is about to be totally refitted, evidently. So we picked up a neat and easy-to-clean hob for €129 after a discount of €50. And then queued for 20 minutes at the delivery bay.
Then, of course, the problems began. It took an age to get the old unit freed from the working surface – old screws with chewed heads driven into damp plaster, and not quite the right size of screwdriver to hand to get the buggers out. And when we did manage to get the new one hooked up, it took an age for me to realise that the ignition didn’t work on the same basis as on the old one, hence visions of having to reverse the job and trekking back to Narbonne, where we knew we’d had the last one in the warehouse. Cutting a long and bad-tempered story short, it’s in, neither of us is immured, and it works beautifully. And the expanded polystyrene packaging provides a perfect means of transporting Martyn’s handiwork home. Always good to get some use out of the ghastly stuff.
Today we took a ride to our local déchetterie to dump a certain disused hob. Quite often, when we’re ditching serviceable stuff, we just take it and leave it beside the communal dustbins, and I toyed with disposing thus of the old hob. Last summer, we did that with our surplus terrestrial TV aerial, and it had disappeared long before the bins were emptied! On reflection, however, given that the hob isn’t set up for the gas pressure hereabouts, we thought it was safer to dispose of it définitivement. We also dumped the packaging from its replacement, together with that of the new telly we bought last year. My 1991-vintage BT France Toshiba followed the same itinerary. It’s funny: the fellow in charge wants to know where you’ve come from, so that the commune isn’t subsidising the disposal of garbage from foreign parts, like Lézignan-Corbières. (I had the devil’s own job a few years back to persuade the Lézignan déchetterie to accept a handful of spent batteries.)
After we’d done our junk-dumping, we took a ride out to check out some possible subjects for paintings, and ran off a few megabytes of virtual film. One or two possibles, but we’ll wait and see, eh? We parked the car outside Laroque de Fa, a funny little village built round one of the rocky outcrops for which the region is famous, and had a good wander round. In one of the back yards there’s the wreckage of an old Peugeot 203 pick-up truck. Pleasing to the eye, but I won’t attempt to paint it (though I think I know a man who can…).
7 April 2010
Grey day: we neither of us felt motivated to go to the market, though we did do our small amount of shopping on the outskirts of the town. As I was drawing the curtain across the stairs the other day I managed to dislodge a framed poster from the wall. Down it came, with dramatic sounds of breaking glass. I bought the frames from a cheap-and-nasty furniture shop in the outskirts of Munich in 1999, since they were of a size (and of just adequate quality) to house a set of posters of the terroirs of the Corbières wine region. They are clever collage depictions of the region, and inspired me to do a few collages myself (though with inferior materials!). In fact, they’re distantly related, in a sense, to one of the acrylics we brought down with us: a landscape of the Col de Rousset in the Drôme. I did it years ago in collage, using junk mail envelopes, but they have faded badly, and I tried the same subject again in acrylics. Not my finest hour, alas. Still, as a small canvas, seen from a distance in a large room, it is not totally rebarbative.
I’ve been sketching from some of the photographs I took in the hills on Monday, but think I’ll need to be a bit liberal in my interpretation to get anything decent.
6 April 2010
I spent a moment this morning getting the bikes out and pumping up the tyres, and at a suitable moment will give them a squirt of WD40, and give the frames a wash and polish. One of the more charismatic characters of the villages is a totally unhinged border collie called Sancho, who is given to chasing cars on the main drag. I also learned this morning that he is equally given to jumping out and nipping the ankles of passing cyclists. Fortunately (for him and his master) he didn’t break the skin.
Trekked into Carcassonne later in search of ADSL filters and information on when we should expect service to begin. At €12 per filter, we left it at one: evidently another couple should come with the kit when it arrives, and we’ll need all three – if they don’t turn up, we’ll dispense with the upstairs telephones for the duration, and I’ll find a way of adapting the BT plugs on our numerous spare filters to FT sockets. We’re due to have service from the 11th, though it took a lot of effort to get the dame at Frogtel to look at her records when I told her I’d ordered by internet, rather than in person at an office. Why?? Sigh. (I gather there’s a plague of suicides at Frogtel. They must be catching it from their customers.) Meanwhile, attempts to reload the dial-up software reveal a Trojan on the Tiscali-supplied CD. I did once have a Frogtel dial-up account, but it was for ever prompting me to connect when I was working off-line, so I swatted it out. I shudder to think how many e-mails will be waiting when I finally do get connected: 10 days’ worth will quite possibly run into the hundreds. It’s amazing how one comes to rely on the internet for instant access to information. But nice, too, to have to refer to old favourite reference books again!
5 April 2010
Fine day: as I write, Martyn is roasting up on the roof. We took a ride out into the hills this morning, looking for views of snowy Pyrenees, and got them in profusion. The tiny daffodils are flowering like mad (and I’m so far resisting digging them up…) but the dwarf irises are showing only a few leaves. On previous Easter visits, the irises were all but over when we got here. On the resplendent (if invasive) wisteria I photographed on 9 April last year on our neighbour’s house, there is still no sign of colour.
We did the tour of inspection this morning at Kate and John’s house, and found no new problems: on the contrary, a rather fine, re-paved roof terrace (which was news to Kate when I SMS’d her a moment ago). It is a huge improvement, and the workers haven’t wrecked the place in the process. The slabs are a bit mobile, but they are well jigsaw-puzzled in. Don’t know if they plan to come and cement them down at a later stage.
4 April 2010
To make the best of Martyn’s Easter break, we’d decided to leave on Good Friday, with 95% of the population of South-East England taking a similar approach. The queues at Cheriton were longish, and very few of the automated check-in desks seemed to be working, so we were a little later leaving than we had planned. Temperatures in the Auvergne were forecast around freezing, and the west side of the country was likely to be grey and wet, so we opted for the Autoroute des Anglais : the A26 from Calais to Reims and on to join the A6 at Dijon. Fine decision so far as the weather goes, but the roads were pretty busy all the way. The prospect of Lyon on a Friday night commended to us a little hotel at Fleurie that I last used maybe 17 years ago. It is half a mile outside the village, near the camping site, where on that occasion a bunch of us were to rendez-vous with Annie and Vic. It hasn’t changed much, except that the rooms are cleaner and better decorated, and there’s a huge pond at the front of the hotel, full of koi carp. The place appears to be run by two young chaps of Martyn’s and my persuasion, so there was no scope for criticising the curtains, flowers or general attention to detail! All it lacks is a restaurant, and those in Fleurie being either ruinous or mediocre, we opted for dependable mediocrity at the Courtepaille in Mâcon. That’s probably why it took us both a while to get to sleep, but once we were off, we slept well, since the place is so quiet.
Lyon yesterday was pretty painless, probably because we got there around 09:00, before the traffic really built up. There were a lot of other British and Belgian overnighters on the road, and much of the A6 was on speed restriction because of the heavy traffic – I think the logic is that it’ll reduce the pollution: the road goes close to a lot of towns, eg Vienne, Valence and Montelimar, and the valley is quite steep-sided in places. The A9, which brings us from Orange to Narbonne, was barely quieter, and even the A61 was pretty busy. We did our shopping in Lézignan, which always feels a bit like tempting fate: at that stage we haven’t seen what condition the house is in, and this time it had been left empty for 7 months. Would we arrive with a fridgeful of shopping to find the place uninhabitable? Well, we need have had no fear – the house has looked after itself as usual, and is starting to warm up. It was quite mild when we got here, so it was significantly warmer outside than in!
It isn’t obvious whether our ADSL service has been connected yet: though I brought some filters, we don’t seem to have any adaptors that will connect a BT plug to a France Télécom socket. So we’ll have to wait till the shops open on Tuesday. What is clear, however, is that the dial-up service isn’t letting us in. I’ll dig out passwords and try again [Later: failed.].
Not a whole lot of change in the village, though the bakery and Pharmacy are now installed cheek by jowl in what used to be Foucher’s garage. The old pharmacy is evidently to become another pizzeria: the old bakery, being the property of the toon cooncil, will probably just become derelict. Cynic that I am!
Third anniversary of our move to the western fringes of Disgustedville, which we have not regretted for a moment. It was hard for Martyn to give up the family home in Rochester, but needs must when there’s residential care to be paid for. Oddly enough, I had absolutely no pangs about leaving Smith Towers, the first house I’d bought, and which I’d owned for over 26 years. By the time I left, Martyn had moved in, so we were tripping over each other all the time, and parking was a nightmare. Each morning we’d to stop and think what street we’d parked in the night before, and it was often at the other end of a dark alley in which the lighting was out of action most of each winter, and which also flooded rather regularly. It was a nice little house, and it served me well for many years, but now that we’ve started to get the new place the way we want it, it’s always a pleasure to return. We bought it on the rebound from a purchase that was going slowly tits-up in a new development near the county town. We were hoping to buy from a nice couple who were being sriously and expensively messed about by the fellow up the chain from them. Our vendor for the abortive deal runs a business fixing people’s sewing machines, and oddly enough, he turned up to do a job across the road from us a few days before we left. All’s well that ends well: they bought a bungalow in the same street as that of the difficult fellow, and are very happy there, and we’re in quarters that we like.
And it will almost certainly be from there that I update the blog. Having ordered an ADSL set-up in Lagrasse a couple of weeks before we set out, I was hoping it would be in service by the time we got here. Not so, alas, three days before we’re due to leave for home. I have spent in aggregate well over an hour trying to get some sense out of Frogtel. This morning, as I was sent from pillar to post, I was told:
• the original order is still being dealt with.
• the order has been completed, and the connexion is up and running.
• the order has been cancelled.
• the order has been reinstated.
Having got no sense out of the various departments, and having been told I’d have to ring another department just to cancel the order, I slammed the phone down, wrote a letter to the Director of customer relations, put a stamp on it, and entrusted it to my friends at La Poste. As I wandered round town doing my errands, apologising for my vile temper and explaining it, I was regaled with everyone’s grizzles about Frogtel, the electricity company, the tax office and all the rest of the tottering current and former instruments of the state apparatus.
12 April 2010
Another fine day yesterday, so we headed out for a stroll up the valley as far as the weir, then back down the other side. Quite a nice walk, and the first time we’d done it: the only problem was that it involved quite a long stretch on the main road. There is still no sign of foliage on the vines; yet another sign of the late spring. But the bee orchids are starting to pop up out of the grass verges.
Dreich this morning, and just what was needed to get one in the right frame of mind for a phone call to Frogtel: ‘We can’t connect your call, everyone’s busy’.
Later: ‘We’ll connect you within six minutes.’ Not wrong, but not helpful either. ‘Oh, you should have been up and running by 7 April; I see the order isn’t yet marked as completed; I’ll send a message to our techy bods and ask what’s keeping them – they’ll contact you.’ ‘Can’t I contact them directly?’ ‘Yes, you can call 3900 and press 1.’ ‘Last time I did that, they told me to call 3900 and press 2, and here I am, talking to you.’ ‘Ah. They’ll contact you on your mobile – ah, sorry, your mobile is on a UK number. Can’t call that – sorry. But they can send an SMS to your fixed line.’ ‘[Deep sigh] OK, I’ll wait to hear from them. Will that be today?’ ‘Ah, that I couldn’t say.’ Watch this space – if ever I get this into cyber-ditto.
Thence to Brico d’Oc to buy a refill for the gas bottle. Waiting for service, lady behind counter struggling to get a lid back on a can of some sort of glop: ‘Ah, putain!’ says she. ‘Faut dire “Maman travaille”, Madame, n’est-ce pas?’ Reversal of a dialogue between me and one of her colleagues a few years ago, on my being shown the miserable colours in which the authorities would allow me to paint my shutters. Next stop, the grotty shop that sells meter-diameter paella pans and attendant gas rings, huntin’ ‘n fishin’ garb and sundry kitsch. Absent a dumb waiter, we use a supermarket-style basket to carry stuff up from the kitchen to the roof terrace. It’s known as the blind waiter. Last year I over-estimated its resilience when, a couple of apéritifs into the evening, I dropped it down the stairwell to be refilled, taking a number of lumps out of it. It’s now in the nearby garbage bin, replaced by a larger, lurid yellow thing intended for carrying laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. It will do the job just fine.
10 April 2010
A fine day, we thought, for a ride over the hills to lunch in Limoux, a habit of ours for years at some point in each visit. Always the same café, usually a pizza, since they do them so well. The roads between here and Limoux are narrow and winding, so it’s more fun for the passenger than for the driver! We were treated to some fine views of the Pyrenees as we came into Limoux, and again on the road from Montréal back into Carcassonne.
I don’t think I’d mentioned that we’ve seen mimosa in flower here this year for the first time. Its flowering season is usually well over by the time we get here. Hence it’s perhaps not surprising that the wisteria is so late in coming into flower. One fence in Ribaute that is usually covered in flower at this time of year is showing a few flowers, butthat’s partly because it has been smothered by ivy. Up on the back road to Ribaute, the irises are now starting to flower, just five days after I failed to find so much as a bud. The vineyards and meadows are full of honey-scented white flowers (a relative of candytuft, I think), and the cowslips are blooming fit to bust. In our little flower beds at the front, the periwinkle is keeping other subjects at bay to the left of the front door, and the mint we planted last year on the right hand side is asserting itself over the annual weeds. When I bought the place, there were a couple of miserable conifers either side of the door. One obligingly croaked, and I helped the other to join it shortly afterwards, replacing them with oleanders, which seem to have shrugged off the severe winter. But, since the house face north, we have few hopes of floral magnificence. If the seedlings have survived back in England, perhaps we’ll bring a box of bedding plants in the summer. (Last time I tried that, I sneezed all the way…)
As for local wildlife, I hear a cuckoo from the roof terrace, and we’ve seen quite a few jays as we’ve been out on our travels. A local donkey contributes to the dawn chorus, and it seemed incongruous today to hear a chaffinch (one harangues us repetitively in the garden at home) while admiring a panorama of 50 miles of snowy Pyrenees.
9 April 2010
Another grey day yesterday, so we had a morning of cooking, reading and model-making. Martyn ran out of materials – he is fashioning catenary poles and gantries for the model railway out of brass wire and box section – so suggested a ride into Narbonne. One promising address, a modelling shop in the Place Voltaire (which we approached, unnecessarily, as it turned out, via rather scary back alleys), had vanished without trace since our elderly Yellow Pages were printed, and another out in the industrial estate turned out to be a sort of gallic Toys Я Us, hence of no use to us. We eventually tracked down exactly what he needed in one of the big home improvement sheds. It always surprises me that, for a nation reputed to be somewhat fiery, people people seem content to stand in a line of 20-30 people waiting to get to one of the two cashiers on duty at a bank of 12 checkout desks.
Since we were going to Narbonne anyway, I decided to look at gas hobs. The one we put in a few years ago (and regulars will recall the story of my getting stuck inside the cupboard) has never really been satisfactory. It had the wrong jets for bottled gas à la française, so always put out far too much flame, incorrectly mixed, so that we regularly had singed eyebrows and always filthy black pot and pan bottoms. Well, we had a look at our old friend Darty, who were offering a wide range of hobs, but all at eye-watering prices. At this point, we repaired to their competitor, the oddly-named But, to find the place covered in clearance sale posters: it is about to be totally refitted, evidently. So we picked up a neat and easy-to-clean hob for €129 after a discount of €50. And then queued for 20 minutes at the delivery bay.
Then, of course, the problems began. It took an age to get the old unit freed from the working surface – old screws with chewed heads driven into damp plaster, and not quite the right size of screwdriver to hand to get the buggers out. And when we did manage to get the new one hooked up, it took an age for me to realise that the ignition didn’t work on the same basis as on the old one, hence visions of having to reverse the job and trekking back to Narbonne, where we knew we’d had the last one in the warehouse. Cutting a long and bad-tempered story short, it’s in, neither of us is immured, and it works beautifully. And the expanded polystyrene packaging provides a perfect means of transporting Martyn’s handiwork home. Always good to get some use out of the ghastly stuff.
Today we took a ride to our local déchetterie to dump a certain disused hob. Quite often, when we’re ditching serviceable stuff, we just take it and leave it beside the communal dustbins, and I toyed with disposing thus of the old hob. Last summer, we did that with our surplus terrestrial TV aerial, and it had disappeared long before the bins were emptied! On reflection, however, given that the hob isn’t set up for the gas pressure hereabouts, we thought it was safer to dispose of it définitivement. We also dumped the packaging from its replacement, together with that of the new telly we bought last year. My 1991-vintage BT France Toshiba followed the same itinerary. It’s funny: the fellow in charge wants to know where you’ve come from, so that the commune isn’t subsidising the disposal of garbage from foreign parts, like Lézignan-Corbières. (I had the devil’s own job a few years back to persuade the Lézignan déchetterie to accept a handful of spent batteries.)
After we’d done our junk-dumping, we took a ride out to check out some possible subjects for paintings, and ran off a few megabytes of virtual film. One or two possibles, but we’ll wait and see, eh? We parked the car outside Laroque de Fa, a funny little village built round one of the rocky outcrops for which the region is famous, and had a good wander round. In one of the back yards there’s the wreckage of an old Peugeot 203 pick-up truck. Pleasing to the eye, but I won’t attempt to paint it (though I think I know a man who can…).
7 April 2010
Grey day: we neither of us felt motivated to go to the market, though we did do our small amount of shopping on the outskirts of the town. As I was drawing the curtain across the stairs the other day I managed to dislodge a framed poster from the wall. Down it came, with dramatic sounds of breaking glass. I bought the frames from a cheap-and-nasty furniture shop in the outskirts of Munich in 1999, since they were of a size (and of just adequate quality) to house a set of posters of the terroirs of the Corbières wine region. They are clever collage depictions of the region, and inspired me to do a few collages myself (though with inferior materials!). In fact, they’re distantly related, in a sense, to one of the acrylics we brought down with us: a landscape of the Col de Rousset in the Drôme. I did it years ago in collage, using junk mail envelopes, but they have faded badly, and I tried the same subject again in acrylics. Not my finest hour, alas. Still, as a small canvas, seen from a distance in a large room, it is not totally rebarbative.
I’ve been sketching from some of the photographs I took in the hills on Monday, but think I’ll need to be a bit liberal in my interpretation to get anything decent.
6 April 2010
I spent a moment this morning getting the bikes out and pumping up the tyres, and at a suitable moment will give them a squirt of WD40, and give the frames a wash and polish. One of the more charismatic characters of the villages is a totally unhinged border collie called Sancho, who is given to chasing cars on the main drag. I also learned this morning that he is equally given to jumping out and nipping the ankles of passing cyclists. Fortunately (for him and his master) he didn’t break the skin.
Trekked into Carcassonne later in search of ADSL filters and information on when we should expect service to begin. At €12 per filter, we left it at one: evidently another couple should come with the kit when it arrives, and we’ll need all three – if they don’t turn up, we’ll dispense with the upstairs telephones for the duration, and I’ll find a way of adapting the BT plugs on our numerous spare filters to FT sockets. We’re due to have service from the 11th, though it took a lot of effort to get the dame at Frogtel to look at her records when I told her I’d ordered by internet, rather than in person at an office. Why?? Sigh. (I gather there’s a plague of suicides at Frogtel. They must be catching it from their customers.) Meanwhile, attempts to reload the dial-up software reveal a Trojan on the Tiscali-supplied CD. I did once have a Frogtel dial-up account, but it was for ever prompting me to connect when I was working off-line, so I swatted it out. I shudder to think how many e-mails will be waiting when I finally do get connected: 10 days’ worth will quite possibly run into the hundreds. It’s amazing how one comes to rely on the internet for instant access to information. But nice, too, to have to refer to old favourite reference books again!
5 April 2010
Fine day: as I write, Martyn is roasting up on the roof. We took a ride out into the hills this morning, looking for views of snowy Pyrenees, and got them in profusion. The tiny daffodils are flowering like mad (and I’m so far resisting digging them up…) but the dwarf irises are showing only a few leaves. On previous Easter visits, the irises were all but over when we got here. On the resplendent (if invasive) wisteria I photographed on 9 April last year on our neighbour’s house, there is still no sign of colour.
We did the tour of inspection this morning at Kate and John’s house, and found no new problems: on the contrary, a rather fine, re-paved roof terrace (which was news to Kate when I SMS’d her a moment ago). It is a huge improvement, and the workers haven’t wrecked the place in the process. The slabs are a bit mobile, but they are well jigsaw-puzzled in. Don’t know if they plan to come and cement them down at a later stage.
4 April 2010
To make the best of Martyn’s Easter break, we’d decided to leave on Good Friday, with 95% of the population of South-East England taking a similar approach. The queues at Cheriton were longish, and very few of the automated check-in desks seemed to be working, so we were a little later leaving than we had planned. Temperatures in the Auvergne were forecast around freezing, and the west side of the country was likely to be grey and wet, so we opted for the Autoroute des Anglais : the A26 from Calais to Reims and on to join the A6 at Dijon. Fine decision so far as the weather goes, but the roads were pretty busy all the way. The prospect of Lyon on a Friday night commended to us a little hotel at Fleurie that I last used maybe 17 years ago. It is half a mile outside the village, near the camping site, where on that occasion a bunch of us were to rendez-vous with Annie and Vic. It hasn’t changed much, except that the rooms are cleaner and better decorated, and there’s a huge pond at the front of the hotel, full of koi carp. The place appears to be run by two young chaps of Martyn’s and my persuasion, so there was no scope for criticising the curtains, flowers or general attention to detail! All it lacks is a restaurant, and those in Fleurie being either ruinous or mediocre, we opted for dependable mediocrity at the Courtepaille in Mâcon. That’s probably why it took us both a while to get to sleep, but once we were off, we slept well, since the place is so quiet.
Lyon yesterday was pretty painless, probably because we got there around 09:00, before the traffic really built up. There were a lot of other British and Belgian overnighters on the road, and much of the A6 was on speed restriction because of the heavy traffic – I think the logic is that it’ll reduce the pollution: the road goes close to a lot of towns, eg Vienne, Valence and Montelimar, and the valley is quite steep-sided in places. The A9, which brings us from Orange to Narbonne, was barely quieter, and even the A61 was pretty busy. We did our shopping in Lézignan, which always feels a bit like tempting fate: at that stage we haven’t seen what condition the house is in, and this time it had been left empty for 7 months. Would we arrive with a fridgeful of shopping to find the place uninhabitable? Well, we need have had no fear – the house has looked after itself as usual, and is starting to warm up. It was quite mild when we got here, so it was significantly warmer outside than in!
It isn’t obvious whether our ADSL service has been connected yet: though I brought some filters, we don’t seem to have any adaptors that will connect a BT plug to a France Télécom socket. So we’ll have to wait till the shops open on Tuesday. What is clear, however, is that the dial-up service isn’t letting us in. I’ll dig out passwords and try again [Later: failed.].
Not a whole lot of change in the village, though the bakery and Pharmacy are now installed cheek by jowl in what used to be Foucher’s garage. The old pharmacy is evidently to become another pizzeria: the old bakery, being the property of the toon cooncil, will probably just become derelict. Cynic that I am!
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