Day: September 9, 2014

With all the disruption and toing-and-froing to do with my phone and internet problems, work on the new wood store took a back-seat last week. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a bit of progress, but not that much I have to confess. Since I last wrote about it on August 31, I have only got as far as finishing off the shuttering and getting the surface pegged out ready for concreting.

Anyone who doesn’t know might wonder what all the pegs are for. My dad was an expert and I learnt almost everything I know about doing DIY and building work from him and I watched him do this on many occasions. The pegs are banged into the ground in regular intervals to exactly the height that you want the surface of the concrete to be. The area between each set of four pegs then becomes a ‘bay’ and this is useful if, like me, you are working alone, can only mix the concrete in small quantities (ie one mixer load at a time) and can’t lay it very quickly. Then you can mix and lay a bay at a time working to the level of the pegs, knowing that the finished surface will end up level. As you reach each set of pegs you can either remove them, using the new concrete edge as your level, or leave them in even depending on how the base will be used in the future. I’ll be removing mine as I go.

I only need to add hardcore before concreting and I mentioned in a previous post that as I don’t yet have a tow bar on my Kia, I investigated having some ballast delivered from my local builders’ merchants, as you routinely would in the UK. It would cost me 29.60€ to pick up a 400 kg bag of ballast in my own trailer from Brico Depot. However, Point P at Montignac wanted over 60€ for the same quantity of ballast and over 90€ to run it the four or five miles up the road to my house. Clearly I have to get a tow bar fitted and I now have one on order. In the meantime, work on the wood shelter has come to a halt while it is being delivered from… Poland. As usual, it’s much cheaper to buy one in from hundreds and hundreds of miles away than to source one locally from France. Will they ever learn?

We had some pretty nice weather last week while my life was being disrupted by my telephone and internet problems, so I was bent on getting at least one decent flight in by way of compensation. However, when it gets hot down here during the day it also gets very thermic, which can make for some very uncomfortable flying as I’d found out when I flew out to Vergt on 18 August. That’s why lots of pilots fly early in the morning or in the early evening, when conditions can be almost perfect. I left it too late on Saturday because at this time of the year you need to be back on the ground by 7.45 pm to give enough time to put the aircraft to bed before it gets too dark, so I decided that Sunday it would be and gave myself plenty of time to fuel up 56NE and get airborne. Lucky that, as I had to return home after starting out having forgotten to bring some sticky-backed dacron that I’d recently purchased and needed to put over a small slit that I’d carelessly put into an aileron skin with my thumbnail while re-fitting the covers a few weeks ago.

I had a flight already loaded into my satnav, as shown below, that was planned to take about 52 minutes. The dark green line shows my planned route and the red one the track I actually flew.

I planned to fly north-west up towards Périgueux flying close enough to get a view of Bassillac airport and taking in Boulazac and Trélissac where all the big stores and warehouse outlets are to the east of the city and Périgueux itself, before turning south over the motorway to Bordeaux and heading back south-east to return to Galinat. I got away at 6.37 pm and immediately knew that my timing was perfect. I was only wearing shorts and a tee shirt and after the heat of the day, the air felt warm against my arm. But despite the heat, the air was perfectly smooth, and so it remained for the whole of the flight. Unfortunately, I knew that at that time of the day the sun wasn’t going to be very sympathetic to any photographs that I took and also that most of the main ‘sights’ would be on the other side of the aircraft from where I was seated, but I hoped to get a few decent ones nevertheless.

As I headed off to the north-west I saw my house pass under my starboard wing and 20 minutes or so later was approaching Périgueux Bassillac airport. It isn’t as grand as the name might suggest and that’s it in the large ‘clearing’ behind the wing strut in the shot below.

And then on to the adjacent commercial area of Boulazac/Trélissac.

I didn’t really expect to get any decent pictures of Périgueux itself but took a few pointing my camera out of the other side of the aircraft, of which the following two were the best.

Four or five minutes after leaving Bassillac behind me, I turned over the motorway interchange to the south of Périgueux to begin my return journey to Galinat. It was a surprisingly uninteresting sight with very little to see but I took a shot nevertheless 😉

The short southerly leg took me to my final waypoint, Eglise-Nueve-de-Vergt, where I turned to the south-east to head back towards Thonac. There was hardly anything to see there either, but I decided to take a photograph anyway.

Twenty minutes later, I was turning final for a landing back at Galinat and a touch-down that was the closest you could ever get to a ‘greaser’ on Galinat’s rather bumpy, it has to be said, grass surface. The whole flight took 53 minutes and averaged exactly 60 mph in conditions that were as near perfect as they could ever be. I went home well satisfied with a broad grin on my face after my trials and tribulations with Orange and a feeling that the world isn’t such a bad place after all 🙂

Except for the roads, for the most part the infrastructure in rural France especially, such as telephone, water and electricity is crumbling. And when you combine that with the fact that there is no real competition, since the state-owned monopolies still exercise almost complete control, and the general French attitude towards customer service, which is to fob the customer off and get rid of them for as long as possible, when things go wrong you have a recipe for disaster and intense frustration for the consumer. And this especially applies for anyone from northern Europe (eg UK, Germany, Holland) who are used to things being done rather differently.

This week I’ve been on the receiving end once more because yet again my telephone and internet went down for no apparent reason. This would not be an issue in northern Europe because after reporting it, a technician would have checked to see if it was a system problem and an engineer then despatched if all was found to be well technically, to check if there was a local problem. But in any case, telephone systems aren’t regarded nowadays in most advanced countries as being that complex and the problem would almost always have been resolved within a day or so.

But not so in France. As of yesterday, my service had been down for over a week and due to Orange (France Telecom) customer service spewing out a web of fantasy as to the cause, nothing had been done in practical terms to deal with or rectify the problem. The local Orange shop (which at over 25 kms I had to visit two or three times in order to try and get any kind of action) eventually just exchanged my modem, which turned out not to be faulty and I subsequently hit the roof after a friend insisted that Orange technical service (an oxymoron if ever there was one) who I could not call myself, called me and then, after a week they just asked me if I’d tried unplugging my modem and plugging it back in again. I ask you!

After I’d insisted, they eventually arranged for an engineer to call at my house despite my saying that nothing had changed here and that from my (long) experience both here and in the UK, it was obviously once again an internal Orange system problem as no signal was being received and that they should look within their system for the source of the problem. They told me that this is the ‘system’ and, monsieur, the way things are done in France.

Sadly the French can apparently see no connection with all of the above and why their economy is such a basket case. The stupid politicians will not break up the state monopolies, sell them off and encourage competition and hence greater efficiency as Mrs Thatcher did in the UK because such a notion is ideologically unacceptable to them. And the French just shrug their shoulders when you tell them about your problems, agree that the situation is awful and say that the same things happen to them too, so what hope is there that things will ever improve? I fear that unless there is a sea-change in attitude there never will be any improvement and France will continue to languish down the field or fall even further behind the other more competent nations. How sad if France is eventually viewed as just a beautiful country in which to live so long as you can put up with the down side that holds it back – short-sighted politicians, poor planning, bad management and ineffective administration. It’s a certainty in my view that France will never recover from the slump that it is in until these issues are addressed – and sooner rather than later I think.

A properly qualified telephone engineer arrived outside my home yesterday morning and was soon checking my line at the top of the pole on his elevating platform. He disappeared down the road a couple of times, presumably to the connection box about a kilometre or so away, and eventually had things back up and running in an hour or so. If only technology companies would stop having non-technical customer service departments who know nothing about the technology of their product and just end up wasting your time and theirs and irritating the customer big time. If the company had referred the problem to a real technician a week ago when they were first made aware of it a whole lot of time and aggravation could have been saved. And cost too, as a perfectly good modem was junked by the Orange shop – what kind of scale must that happen on if my case was anything to go by? But they never learn 😡

A footnote about attitude. As I do not currently have a tow bar on my Kia, I enquired at Point P, the local builders merchants, about delivering some ballast for concrete to my house. The cost for me to pick up a 400 kg bag from Brico Depot in my trailer would be 29.60 euros. The Point P depot is 7 or 8 kms from my house. They wanted over 60 euros for the same amount of ballast and over 90 euros to deliver it. I think that that says an awful lot. They had the last laugh though. I clearly have to get a tow bar for my car pretty quickly as otherwise work on my new wood shelter will come to a grinding halt with a change in the weather soon to be in sight. Only one problem. I couldn’t order one… because I had no internet. What a system, eh 😕