Month: December 2021

And it was in the X-Air, mainly because it hadn’t been flown for too long – since 20th August to be exact – and needed to get some air under its wings and some charge into its battery. My original plan was to take off from Malbec and fly south-east down to Figeac where I’d do a touch-and-go. I’d then head back north west to Sarlat where I’d do another touch-and-go before returning to Malbec.

The whole flight was to have taken about 1 hour 45 minutes but I was plagued with problems just getting everything ready to go. For a start I had to remove both aircraft from the barn, which took longer than I’d planned because I got drawn into something else. Then I had to do two trips to Carrefour to pick up fuel because I needed 35 litres and although I had one empty jerrican, the other had fuel in it and for the life of me I couldn’t remember if it had oil added or not.

And then, to cap it all, when I returned to the caravan and went to print off my chart, my Canon printer that has been working for ever refused to print. Luckily I also have my large Epson printer in the caravan and was able to print it on that, but I still lost another half an hour because of it. And it didn’t end there. When I’d taken off already a lot later than I’d have liked, my GPS let me down and I had to return immediately to Malbec to sort the problem out.

It wasn’t serious, just something I couldn’t do in the air while flying single handedly, but it resulted in another 15 minutes lost, so when I finally did get airborne I was already considering cutting the flight short. My mind was finally made up while I was approaching Figeac and it was evident from the radio traffic that the whole world and his brother (and one sister as well, actually) were flying circuits there.

That was good news in one way because it meant that flying might now be getting back to some kind of normality post-Covid, but it was bad news for me, because I didn’t fancy getting embroiled in my slow X-Air in a circuit full of fast GA traffic. So at about three-quarters of the way to Figeac I decided that I’d do a gradual right hand turn to intersect what would have been my track from Figeac to Sarlat and shorten the flight. It turned out to be a good decision in the long run as I ended up packing the X-Air away in the barn and putting its covers on while the dusk was becoming darker and darker.

I shot a GoPro video of the whole flight and managed to capture both take offs and both landings, which I was very pleased about as usually the battery runs out before I get back to Malbec. Otherwise I took fairly random shots from the air with my Coolpix still camera which turned out not to be that impressive because of the terrain’s boring winter colouring and the very unflattering quality and angle of the winter sunlight. The first three shots below were lifted from the GoPro video and show the first take off, the landing back following the immediate return and the second take off.

The following pics were all taken pretty much at random using my little Nikon Coolpix. Apart from one or two they’re not that noteworthy so except for the ones I’ve picked out below, I’m not even going to bother trying to identify where they were taken or what they’re of 🙂

This shot shows Souillac in the far distance.

The next three shots are of the magnificent 12th century Chateau Beynac perched on its promontory overlooking the River Dordogne. I circled around it but was at 2500 feet which was a bit too high really for good photographs. It was fortunate actually that I’d decided to fly at that altitude. The majority of private pilots trundle around at 2000 feet (it’s the same in the UK) and being higher or lower helps to avoid tangling with one. And to prove my case, a few minutes before I got to Chateau Beynac, a light aircraft went swooping across my nose about 500 metres in front of me descending to fly over the river at low level. It was caught on the video too.

And finally after about 1½ hours I got back for a safe landing at Malbec. Here’s a shot that I took of 24ZN in the area in front of the barn shortly before I turned it round and pushed it in (with some difficulty over the mud…) before putting its covers on in the gathering gloom.

So that was the end of my flying for 2021, a disappointing one as I only managed a dismal total of 8 hours 20 minutes. This was my worst year since 2013 shortly after I came to France and had lost MYRO and was even worse than 2017 when I was receiving chemo.

But the upside is that there were good reasons for the shortfall, to do with the sale of my old house and my plans for the construction of my new one. The latter will come to fruition in 2022 (my builder has assured me that work should begin in the second half of January) so I should have a happy new year to look forward to.

So may I wish A Happy New Year to everyone who’s still following me here on My Trike and reading about my life and exploits here in France and hope that all of your hopes and plans for yourself and your loved ones for 2022 come to fulfillment too.

The stunning view southwards from Labattut just before dusk yesterday evening.

Happy Christmas everyone!

No, not because it’s probably going to start raining before I’ve finished it, which it probably will do, or because I’m having big problems with my new ‘anti-sanglier’ fence. On the contrary, things are proceeding quite smoothly although there is one thing. I’ve not really managed to fathom how the wire tensioners are supposed to function and although I’ve invented my own method that seems to work, there’s always the danger that it won’t in the long term, the wires will loosen and the fence will start to sag. And that I do not want!

I thought that I might get some ideas from looking at other fences in the area but putting it delicately, I don’t think that I’d be able to learn very much from them as to a one, they all look as though they’ve been thrown up, maybe without any tensioners at all. So I’ll just have to see how my method works in the longer term.

I got all the bottom tensioners fitted but only managed to get three wires into position today, the upper and lower in the far corner and the lower in the longer segment of fencing along the bottom end of my land. Here’s a shot of the far corner which now shows how high the fence will be and how much I’ll need to trim off the tops of the posts to bring them down to a suitable height.

Here are some shots showing what I mean about the tensioners, the first showing a ‘tensioned’ end.

Obviously, I don’t need to tension both ends and here’s a shot of a ‘starting’ or ‘untensioned’ end.

The next shot shows the longer segment of fencing between the proposed gate and the corner for which I fitted the lower wire as my last job of the day.

Here are the two tensioners ready for wires either side of the proposed gate in the longest east-west section of the fencing.

Now that I’ve done a few wires, work should proceed far more quickly for the remaining ones. One thing I have discovered is that using just a coil of wire is tricky because as the wire falls off it, it comes off with twists in it. What’s really needed is some kind of cable drum from which the wire can be rolled off smoothly without twists. The pros probably use something like that but I guess I’ll have to keep muddling on the way that I am 😉

I put all of the remaining fence post bracers in place today so everything’s now all ready for the suspension wires to be strung tomorrow.

I realise now that the corner post has been considerably weakened by being double-notched and that it would have been better to have put two posts there but it’s too late and hopefully it will still be strong enough to support the fence wire. I think that it should be but lesson learned, although hopefully this is the last fence I’ll ever be putting up!

And something very interesting. I mentioned in my previous post that the boar had been coming straight up onto my land from the open area below without ever going to the left or right onto the neighbouring land. Well, when I went out this morning I noticed that for the first time they’d been on my neighbour’s land to the north ie they’d come up and turned right.

So I wonder if that means that even just having the posts there had been some kind of deterrent – maybe they thought that an electric fence had been installed on them? But whatever the reason, does this support my theory that when they come and encounter the barrier posed by the wire that I’ll be erecting that that will also be enough to make them continue behaving in the same way, as I planned, and keep them off my land? I hope so!

This was the scene that greeted me when I peered outside my caravan this morning – a carpet of frost that almost looked like snow. The image below doesn’t really do it justice.

So I couldn’t get cracking very early, even if I’d been ready to, which I wasn’t as I had some other minor things to attend to, because quite honestly it was too darn cold! However, it soon warmed up in yet more bright sunshine and then I was able to start work. The trouble was, though, that as well as doing the work today (main task: putting the diagonal bracers in place ready for when the suspension wire is hung and tensioned) I also had to work out the best way how to.

I tried just cutting a bracer to length, adding a point to its end and banging it into the ground with a club hammer. It wasn’t very satisfactory and to cut a long story short I eventually found that the best method was to prepare the bracer with a point on one end and the angle to mate with the fence post on the other, then to notch the fence post to take it and prepare the ground before banging it in with the pick-axe. Once the bracer was in place and secured with a single large nail the ground around its bottom end could then be replaced and hammered back down again, possibly with a few rocks of which I have plenty, to hold the end of the bracer even more firmly than it would be without.

As you can see from the following images, the trickiest bit was accurately notching the fence posts to take the bracers. I only managed three today (four actually, as I had to re-do one) and I think that when I’ve finished putting the rest of them in tomorrow I’ll have to pin some small blocks in the tops of the notches above the bracers. This will prevent the bracers loosening in time and moving upwards, which would have the effect of allowing the posts to sag inwards.

Here’s the bracer for the topmost fence post.

Here are the two bracers either side of the posts in the longest border that will carry a gate. Don’t be misled by their appearance in the following shot that seems to show that they’re splayed outwards. They’re not, they’re vertical and parallel. It’s just distortion from my phone’s camera.

In the event I am happy with the results. I was never expecting this fence to be a thing of beauty – it’s a rustic rural barrier after all – but I think that when it’s finished and the woodwork has had a splash of wood preserver on it, it will do the intended job and won’t look too bad, especially if I can eventually mount three rustic, rough cut horizontal boards on the posts on top of the wire. Time will tell… 🙂

I went off to Sarlat and received my third Covid jab this morning and while I was away the guys came back as promised, removed and repositioned the fence posts that had gone off-line on Friday and finished thumping in the ones that remained to be done. Here are some shots of the results of their handiwork that I took at around lunch time after they’d left.

One or two are slightly awry from hitting buried rocks but that was to be expected and I’m surprised actually that there weren’t more. And the height varies a bit for the same reason but I’ll deal with that when I’ve got the fence up by just cutting the tops down to the required height (about 110 cm).

I dealt with some other business that I had to attend to this afternoon and got a little bit of shopping in on the way home, so now my decks are clear and I’ve got no excuses for not getting out there first thing in the morning and getting started on hanging the fence wire. It’ll be a bit chilly to start off with, like this morning – below freezing – but it’ll warm up and I should be able to get a good bit done if I get cracking early and keep going all day. I’ve also decided that after Christmas I’ll carry on and fence the other side in too – it would be silly not to, I think 😉

After having set out my new fence posts yesterday in the positions where they needed to be banged into the ground, I went out this morning to take another look and decide what my next steps would be today. And what I found shocked and dismayed me. The ‘sanglier’ had come back again during the night, making it four times in total now, and done yet more damage. They’d even managed to move one of the fence posts, which are pretty heavy let me tell you, bringing home yet again how urgent it is that I tackle and solve this problem.

I sent a message to the guys with the fence post thumper to tell them how many posts there were and how urgent it had become and shortly after got a message saying that they’d be able to make a start this afternoon, which I was delighted with. We started in the far bottom corner (point 3 in the image in the previous posting) where I decided that I’d also place a gate and here are some shots taken from down there at the end of the afternoon.

And here are some shots taken from the other end (point 2) of that length of fencing.

The final two shots show the other longer length of fencing looking down from the top (point 1, say) towards the corner at point 2.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to finish off the job today because that’s when things went slightly awry. When sighting up from point 2 towards point 1 there was an error (the wrong tree was used I think) and it was found that the fence line was encroaching increasingly onto the neighbouring parcel of land, which was unacceptable. So sadly this means that the offending posts will have to be pulled back out again using heavy equipment on Monday after which the job can be completed.

This won’t matter too much to me as for the next day or so I’ll be working erecting the fencing along the bottom border but I do have my sympathies for the two guys who were working the fence post thumper who will be re-doing a large chunk of the work that they did today 🙁

Another lovely day today so as it would have been a shame to waste it, I made a reasonably early start and got quite a bit done. The first job was to hitch my small trailer to the Kia and trundle across with its contents to the décheterie at Rouffignac where I emptied it out and continued on my way to Brico Depot in Trélissac. There I purchased two 50 metre rolls of ‘grillage mouton’, 300 metres of galvanised wire on which to suspend it, a box of galvanised staples and a dozen wire tensioners. I already realise that I’ll be needing quite a few more of the latter, but that’s for later.

After unhitching the trailer leaving all of the above items in it until I can come to use them, I then cleared all of the dead oak leaves from my large trailer together with the remains of the temporary roofing board floor that I hurriedly repaired it with for my move from Plazac, parts of which have now warped in the weather and disintegrated. I then arranged with the sawmill that I visited two days ago to go and pick up the 2 metre fence posts that I said I would require.

When I arrived, the super lady in the office said that I could have 6 more (36) than I originally said I wanted for only a few euros more, which was a fantastic deal. I was extremely happy because now I’ll have almost enough to fence in the whole of my land as well as make extra bits like diagonal stabilisers on every few posts to keep them upright when I apply tension on the suspension wires. I’ll explain more about that when I come to do it.

I got back at the end of the afternoon and decided that in the time available I might as well start laying the posts out at 4 metre intervals at the positions where they will be banged into the ground and in fact much to my surprise, I managed to do the whole lot that I wanted to before the sun eventually sneeked down below the horizon. Here’s a shot of the posts that were left over for now in the trailer.

Here’s a plan of my land showing what’s going on and what I intend to do about it.

The ‘sanglier’ (wild boar) represented by the red arrow are coming up from the small valley and grassy area to the east below my land through a gap and up a small rise straight onto my land where they then create mayhem digging everything up in the search for whatever they’re looking for. They stay on my land, presumably because they can find everything there that they need, without deviating to the adjoining land on the left or right before presumably departing via whence they came.

Several people have told me that they are like little bulldozers and that you can’t stop them, but I’m not so sure. My thinking is that if you block their way with a fixed barrier, even a relatively flimsy one like the fence I intend to erect, they’ll just turn either to the left or right and continue their quest on whatever piece of open land is available to them.

So my plan is to block off two sides of my land with new fencing marked in blue on the plan. Then as they come through the gap from below and breast the rise they will initially meet the barrier between points 2 and 3 marked in yellow on the plan. As point 3 is actually within the small belt of trees on sloping terrain at the foot of my land, my thinking is that they will then therefore turn to the right towards point 2.

When they reach point 2, they might then think that by turning left again they’ll be able to circumvent the barrier and get onto my land with all of its succulent porcine delights as they have been doing up to now. However, they’ll not be able to because it will extend right up to point 1 which is in the belt of trees at the top of my land close to where my caravan is situated and therefore they’ll either decide to give up at that point and go home, or more likely, stay on the neighbouring land to the north of mine and dig that up instead, which won’t be my problem 🙂

Here’s a shot looking up towards point 1, which is the boundary marker with a red top next to the large tree.

This is a shot looking down the length of the intended new fence from point 1 towards point 2.

This shows the bottom portion of the new fence between points 2 and 3 and also the small valley, the grassy area below my land and the gap through which the ‘sanglier’ are coming.

This shot was taken from point 2 looking towards point 3.

The boundary marker at point 3 is the post with a red top that can be seen in the bushes in the next shot. I don’t intend to place the fence post as deep in the bushes as the boundary marker as to do so would need removing some of the bushes, which would defeat the object somewhat. If the boar are clever enough to find a way around the end of the barrier at that point I’ll just have to think of another way to defeat them – perhaps by placing some barbed wire or some other alternative in the bushes.

The next shot shows the gap through which the boar are coming and the grassy area below. I’ve placed two fence posts closer together just there so I can have a gate, not for the ‘sanglier’ but in case I need to get down there for any reason without having to hop over the fence.

The next shot shows a boar’s-eye view of my land as they come through the gap and up the small rise. You can see from the brown patches what I mean about how they’re not going either to the right or the left but just continuing straight ahead onto my land and proceeding to dig it up.

This is a shot taken from point 2 back up towards point 1.

This shows the grassy area below my land and how the boar have made a mess of that. The field beyond has also been damaged but by no means as much. The reason for that I think is because there were cows in there and the ground is pretty much plastered with cow pats which presumably the delicate snouts of the discerning ‘sanglier’ find rather offensive.

This final shot shows the rise that the ‘sanglier’ have to ascend, not a great challenge for them, in order to get from the grassy area and onto my land.

So that brought me to the end of what I thought was a satisfying day’s work. The next job will be to bang the posts into the ground and I’m waiting to hear from the guys who laid the concrete base for my new tool store who have a ‘fence post thumper’ that attaches to the back of their tractor and should make short work of what would be a gruelling manual job.

Before that’s done I’d like to get some wood preserver onto the tips of the posts. I think that they’ll probably last as long as I need them to anyway as they are but they are nice posts and if I regard the wire fencing as a temporary measure, they’ll still be an excellent future basis once my new house is finished for a fine rustic barrier with horizontal boards right around what will then be my garden. When I’ve got my dog, that is 😉

This was the site that greeted me when I stepped out of my caravan today on what was a glorious morning and looked down towards the bottom of my land.

Yes, I’d been visited yet again by the ‘sangliers’ – the wild boar. And as I got closer, I could see that the damage they’d caused was worse than ever.

The damage they can do is incredibly severe as the following pictures show.

And this time it extends further up the land as this image shows looking back towards my caravan .

Enough is enough. I can’t have this every few weeks, especially when my house is finished and I’m trying to establish the garden. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but they didn’t come back after the last time all the while there were cows in the field in the valley below my land, which have just been moved on. On the other hand, it could just be that they’ve become more active again after a few warm days.

But whatever the reason, I’ve got to do something to prevent this happening in the future. It’s noticeable that yet again, they’ve come up onto my land through the gap from the valley and haven’t touched the land on either side of mine, presumably because my grass is a bit shorter giving them easier access to the roots as I mentioned in a previous post. So what I’ve decided to do is erect a barrier preventing them from getting access to my land in the hope of discouraging them.

The farmers would just erect an electric fence to protect their crops but I’m not going to do that unless I really have to. Instead for starters I’m just going to put posts in the ground along my eastern and northern boundaries with what is referred to here as ‘grillage moutons’ (sheep wire) between them 1 metre in height. This I hope will blank off the entrance (for them) onto my land in a way that will be enough of a deterrent.

The local sawmill have fence posts at a very good price and I’ve told them that I’ll be along with my trailer to pick up 30 of them. I’ve also found that Brico Depot have the ‘grillage’ that I need at a very competitive price, although I’ll need to check their quality as I don’t want the wire to rust away in only a few months and start looking tatty.

I didn’t want to erect a fence around my land, certainly at this juncture, but I don’t see that I now have any choice. The upside is that if it works and doesn’t look too bad, especially with some bushes planted along it to break it up, it’ll allow me to have a dog as not only do the rescue shelters all demand it but it would also give me peace of mind if I can let my dog out to run freely and safely on my land without having to worry about it.

Watch this space!

It looks as though we’re coming to the end of over a week of ghastly, awful weather. We’ve been blasted with rain every day on or off which is not nice when you’re stuck in a caravan. OK, now I’ve got my own electrical supply and can leave the heating on 24/7 at least it’s quite cosy, but the constant drumming on the roof does begin to get you down after a while. Especially when you’re trying to sleep!

And the other thing is that with the layer upon layer of oak leaves that have plastered the ground, you only have to walk outside and because they are so wet, clumps of the ruddy things stick to the soles of whatever you’re wearing on your feet and come walking in with you. So you find that although you only swept them up 5 minutes before, the floor is covered with them again, even though you tried everything to remove them before you stepped inside.

The other thing I’m finding, and I have to say that I expected this, is that because the concrete base of my new tool store extends beyond the edges of its roof, rainwater is pouring off its roof and immediately seeping under its metal base rails that are screwed to the base, and inside. As a consequence, I’m very worried about the two ‘tounelles’ that are in cardboard outers that have already been damaged by damp while they were being stored under the caravan and are again standing in large, and growing, damp patches.

I always intended to run a ribbon of mastic around the outside of the base rails where they join the base but as it’s been constantly wet ever since I finished the building, it’s been impossible. Hopefully after tomorrow it looks as though we can expect a week of much better weather with no rain and temperatures in the range of 10-12 degrees Celsius, so with a bit of luck it should be dry and warm enough to do it. If so the problem of dampness inside the tool store should be resolved, I’ll just have to wait and see.

On the health front, I had a bit of what turned out to be favourable news yesterday. At my last follow-up consultation with my oncologist a week or so ago, I mentioned that I was suffering from some eating problems. In particular, discomfort on swallowing some foods (most actually) and even problems with some sticking on its way to my stomach and having to be ‘unstuck’ with gulps of water which often could take some time to work and could itself present further problems.

Yet again I was impressed by how quickly things to do with health (some anyway, but that’s another story) can happen here in France and on the day of my consultation, my oncologist arranged with a colleague for me to have an endoscopic examination less than two weeks later, yesterday. My brother-in-law had fed me some lurid stories of his own experiences of such a procedure and how awful it would be, but I think he was trying to spook me because it didn’t turn out to be so bad and was soon over. And the result was that… I have a small stomach ulcer, so two months of two tablets a day with a further examination half-way through and that should hit it on the head.

I’m telling this story mainly for others who have had the unfortunate experience of being diagnosed and treated for cancer. It’s most important to maintain a positive mental attitude afterwards and to believe it when you’re told, as I was, that the chance of it returning is ‘faible’. You mustn’t think that every ache and pain you experience afterwards is the dreaded disease coming back again because although regrettably this will be true for some people, for the majority of us it won’t. You must just keep looking to the future, getting on with life and dealing with problems, health and otherwise as they arise. Like everyone else has to.

The time has come to think seriously about battening everything down securely for the winter. I’m not quite there yet but I made a good start today by organising the stuff better that I’ve already put into my new store so the space available is used more efficiently and adding the bigger items, my ride-on mower and concrete mixer, that have to go in there. I laid some paving slabs temporarily in the entrance of the store to make it easier to get these in and here are some shots that I took afterwards.

I’m pleasantly surprised by how much space there is in there and I’m pretty confident that I will eventually be able to install a small bench and use it as a workshop as well as using it as a store. At present more or less half of it is being used to store my two ‘tounelles’ and my garden parasols that would usually be left out inside their specially tailored covers, so that space will be available in the future. I’m hoping that I’ll also be able to install a small amount of racking, but that’s for later.

My generator is still outside under a good waterproof cover but I’d like to get it inside as there is space for it, as well as the other two ‘non-runners’, I think, that I’d like to take another look at in the spring. All that’s left for me to bring to Labattut now are my two outdoor tables and my plant pots, none of which need to be put inside under cover.

I’ve kept a new tarp for the tables and now that I’ve moved my ride-on and concrete mixer and have got space behind the caravan I can go and pick them all up to be stored there until my new house has been built, or there’s been enough progress to make it sensible to put them out again to be used. But anyway, for now, once I’ve managed to get them all tucked away behind my caravan, hopefully in the next few days, then I will be fully battened down and secure for the winter.

No, I haven’t been out foraging for things to cook in my new air fryer, but I have been watching these two big boys grow for the past few days under the oak trees next to my land. One is about 12 cm in diameter and the other 14 cm and the big question is… are they edible or not?

I’m very dubious about eating any fungus you find in the wild, unlike the milkman I used to ‘help’ on his round delivering the milk to all of the local customers in my school holidays when I was a very young lad. About half-way round there was a small patch of woodland and almost every day he used to go off and come back with an enormous wild mushroom that he’d take home and have for his breakfast.

I know nothing about edible and inedible fungi (except that if you’re not careful, they’ll kill you if you get it wrong) and I’m not brave enough to take the risk, especially with something as menacing as these two appear to me with their little dark brown hats on top. I also didn’t find it very encouraging when I uprooted the first (smaller) one by accident and found a large slug nestling beneath its umbrella.

If they’re edible, now that they’ve both been uprooted, there’s a good meal waiting for whoever dares to eat them. But if they’re not, there could be a sore belly… or maybe even worse 😕

I’m not exactly renowned for being an early-adopter of new technology but my new air fryer arrived yesterday and I couldn’t wait to try it out. It’s nothing fancy. You can get ones that are controlled by an app on your phone but thank you, just a straightforward model with knobs on is fine by me.

Why would you want to control it using your phone anyway? It cooks stuff in just a few minutes so you’re hardly going to be using it while you’re out of the house and as you need to check on progress and turn some things over half-way through, you’re not going to be that far away from it while it’s cooking. And why would you want to have your phone in the kitchen next to the fryer where it can get wet, splashed with fat or otherwise damaged? Sometimes this generation with its fixation with smartphones leaves me rather bemused.

Mine has a capacity of 5 litres (there are models both larger and smaller – in fact the 6 litre version of mine was cheaper than mine) which I think will be more than enough for me and will also allow me to do a few hot snacks and things for the odd visitor on ‘apero’ evenings. It has two knobs on it to control time and temperature and a handle with a knob attached to a metal pan or basket into which the food is placed. In the bottom is a removable grid to keep the food separate from any fat that might collect while cooking is in progress.

Here are some shots of it – I was surprised to find that it’s larger than I expected it to be.

I already had some Nems in my fridge so while I was out yesterday I also picked up some Mini Samosas and some Shrimp Balls. After burning the machine off for the best part of an hour to remove the ‘manufacturing odour’, I chucked half of everything into the fryer and after allowing it a few minutes to warm up, cooked it for 10 minutes at 180 degrees C, turning it over half way through. And I have to say that although it could have done with either a minute or so more, or possibly a slightly higher temperature, it came out crisp and delicious, exactly as promised.

So I’m a happy bunny with my new purchase. I’m not sure that I’ll be doing lots of ‘frying’ as such in it, although the odd portion of chips (frites) from time to time won’t go amiss, but I see it as being like a mini version of the convection oven that I had in my old house, but smaller and more economical to use. I’m really looking forward to experimenting a bit to see what I can turn out with it and already think that it will be 69,90€ well spent.

While I was out yesterday I tried to buy a can of spray vegetable oil (none in either the local Carrefour or the Hyper Intermarché at Le Bugue) and some cooking tongs (same story) so I’ve ordered both from Amazon. For the former I’ve actually ordered a refillable oil sprayer which will be much more practical I think and it and the tongs will be along very shortly. What would we do without Amazon eh?