Month: May 2024

Today is a special day for our small group of neighbours. It’s the day on which we all get together, about twenty or so of us, for a meal in the open air. It’ll be cooler than it should be for the time of year but luckily it looks as though we’re going to be spared a day without rain for the occasion.

We all bring along various dishes for us all to share and I was busy yesterday cooking my contributions. I made a quiche as well as some spicy potato salad together with some lovely plump chicken legs (called ‘pilons de poulet’ here) and some spicy chipolatas in my air fryer.

I’ll be leaving soon and taking them along with me together with some wine of course, and it’ll be most enjoyable getting together with all my neighbours again and finding out what everyone’s been getting up to. Always interesting!

This week’s main priority was to get my car serviced (Tuesday), have two new tyres fitted (yesterday) and get it through its biennial CT (equivalent to a UK MOT) today and I’m glad to say that the mission was successfully accomplished without a hitch. Amazingly, I’ve now had my Kia Sportage for ten years almost to the day and aside from having to have a second-hand engine fitted when it’s (expensive) Bosch fuel pump failed and destroyed its engine (I was lucky to get hold of a very cheap replacement in San Sebastian in Spain), it’s been incredibly reliable.

The tester was very complimentary about it (I doubt he’d have been if he’d seen it a couple of days ago before I’d thoroughly cleaned it inside and out) and he was disappointed when I told him that this would almost certainly be the last time he’d see it. I’ve used it to help me fetch and carry heavy and dirty stuff to do with my house build and other stuff in my old house and I intend to continue doing the same with the work I’ve now started in my garden. When that’s finished, though, it’ll be time to pension it off and get a newer car.

But that wasn’t all that happened today! The postman delivered my long-awaited new bed linen for my new bed. It’s taken a long time to come because I think it was made to order. It’s the biggest bed I’ve ever had (I ordered a smaller mattress and when the supplier replaced it they said that I could keep the ‘wrong’ big one for free!) and getting the duvet cover onto the enormous (to me) new duvet was a nightmare in itself. But ultimately I got it all together so I can sleep in it for the first time tonight and the results are shown in the photos.

The room is still very sparse as it only has the bed in it but you don’t think that I’ve gone… errrr… too yellow do you? 😀

Not a great deal of sunshine today but at least it stayed dry enough especially, for me to get outside and plant the trees that arrived yesterday. But first I did a little indoors job, finishing off my wall décor in my bathroom. I’m very pleased with the result and think that the bright colours nicely offset the otherwise plain gloss white of the walls.

The two little figures were on the wall of my old bathroom back in England but although I brought the starfish with me, I didn’t know that I had them until I came across them when I unpacked an old box that hadn’t been opened since I arrived in France twelve years ago. I think they go nicely. I’ve had to drill four small holes in the tiles but I’m not worried as I doubt the ornaments will be removed in my lifetime 🙂

I was then able to get going with the work in the garden, starting with replacing the apple that had been broken off with the new tree that arrived yesterday.

Then I moved on to replacing the two weedy little cherries that were bitten down to sprigs only a metre high by the deer with the new trees that also arrived yesterday. Here are the two trees that I took out.

And here are the two new trees that I replaced them with.

This is where I transplanted the old trees to, over on the left hand side of the garden. It’s up to them now (and the deer I guess) as to whether they survive and prosper or not 😐

Finally, a couple of shots of the new tree group showing the new apple, the two new cherries and the original plum that has also been given a bad time by the deer and has had quite a bit of bark and some low branches that produced some fruit last year, gnawed off.

I think I’m going to have to provide some protection for all the trees as although there’s plenty of other food for the local deer at this time of the year, they only have to hit the trees once to do an awful lot of damage and I don’t want anything to happen to the new ones, which are of excellent quality compared to the two original old cherries.

Taken all round, I’m finding things to be very annoying and frustrating at the moment. Although I’ve kept myself busy doing one or two small jobs indoors, almost everything that I’d like to be involving myself with is outside. I’ve had the materials that I need to clean and service my aircraft ready for weeks now, but aside from only one or two days when it’s been dry long enough to do the work, we’ve been subject to days of rain or constant drizzle making it impossible.

Luckily I found time between the showers to thoroughly clean my car inside and out as this week it has to be serviced (today) and have two new tyres fitted (Thursday) in preparedness for its biennial CT (equivalent to a UK MOT test) on Friday.

I’ve also taken some initial decisions in respect of my garden. Before I moved onto the land I was given two small trees to plant on it for my birthday by my good friends, a plum and an apple. Neither has really done that well in the intervening period. Last year the plum produced four or five fruit that I had to pick and eat because they were beginning to be attacked by birds and although the apple produced a bit of blossom it didn’t result in any fruit. And then to top it all, a few weeks ago it was broken off almost at ground level, probably by a deer.

I bought two small cherry trees two years ago and was most disappointed when they arrived because although one was a meter high, the other was only half that when both had been promised by the on-line supplier (Willemse) to be a minimum of 100 cm in height. Neither has yielded any fruit and because they were so small and weedy both have been eaten back to a height of about 50 cm by the local deer and will probably end up being unfit for purpose and useless.

So the decision I took was to replace both of the cherries as well as the apple, and the new trees arrived a bit earlier today. And I am delighted. Once again I bought them on-line but this time the supplier, Planfor in the Landes, has come up trumps and supplied product which more than exceeds my expectations. The trees were a bit more expensive than those I bought last time from Willemse, but not that much more, and are of far superior quality being a guaranteed three years old and 160-180 cm in height. They have also come in bigger pots because of their extra size.

Here are a couple of general shots of the three of them after they’d been unloaded off the Geodis delivery truck.

The apple is called Reine des Reinettes, which is one of my favourite supermarket bought types being both crisp and sweet and as shown in the following pics, it has come with quite a few fruit already on it. The cherries haven’t, of course, and it’s really the wrong time to be planting them but I’m hoping that I’ll get away with it while it’s still cool and wet.

I’ve already given the pots a good watering after their journey as they were despatched four days ago. They should be OK, though, as Planfor specialise in shipping their products all over Europe but in any case, I’ll try to get them into the ground as soon as possible.

Just to keep those who are following this saga in the picture, today was another interesting day. Getting helpful information out of French bureaucrats is like getting blood out of a stone and if you let that be the deciding factor, you’d never achieve anything.

It appears that the man from DREAL was not giving me all the information I’d asked for after all. He said that it isn’t the role of DREAL to do what manufacturers ought to do when it comes to obtaining a Certificate of Conformity ie homologation, for vehicles like my bike. I’ve delved deeper into things today and it appears that that isn’t the whole story – DREAL do have a role to play.

A vehicle for which approval is being sought has to be inspected and if necessary, subjected to tests at an approved testing centre (as you might expect) but no-one in an official capacity has told me who or where they are. But I found them myself today. I’ll not say any more about that for now but it appears that procedures have been laid down and when they have been followed and the results determined, these are then forwarded to the DREAL for the issue of a Certificate of Conformity.

Usually it’s manufacturers who do this for a proposed series of vehicles that they intend to market but it can also be done for one-offs that meet the relevant regulatory requirements both by manufacturers and individuals who have either built a one-off or imported a machine from another country as I have. So it appears that all is definitely not lost after all as far as my bike is concerned, which I think falls into this latter category ie meets the regulatory requirements for a vehicle of its class.

For the most part, the class of two and three-wheeled motorised vehicles is dominated by motor cycles (Category L3) and search as I might, I couldn’t locate the relevant paperwork to initiate a request to start a Certificate of Conformity project for a bike like mine. So I have sent a message to the testing body that seemed to me to be the most relevant and now await their reply.

If I’ve read the relevant material correctly, ‘creating a new dossier’ costs 85€ and for a motorcycle the total testing and approval programme comes out to around 2000€. This is more than I’d like to pay but I think it would be a small sum for Dakeya to pay if it opened up the whole EU market for their bikes. I also think that as electric bikes like mine are not subject to tests for eg emissions and noise, the cost might be quite a bit less, but I’ll have to wait and see.

The very helpful man at the DREAL sent me a reply. He said that he didn’t have detailed information on my bike’s actual model but he told me the category into which it would fall. Which it does.

From the research that I’ve done, which has been pretty detailed, I also know the features that it must have in order to be classed as a ‘Cyclomoteur’, whether powered by an internal combustion engine or an electric motor. Which it has.

I’m therefore pretty much convinced that if my bike was subjected to inspection, it would be granted approval.

I’ve therefore just sent Dakeya in China a detailed proposal for me to act on their behalf to submit my bike for test. This would require them to pay for the cost of the inspection (whether the bike passes or not) and indemnify me for my expenses and the cost of my bike if, due to the delay presented by the test process, I am unable to recover it from the seller if it does not pass.

So yet again I’m waiting for another reply. I never give up until I know all hope is lost 😕

I know I said that I wasn’t going to spend any more time on registering my bike but I thought I’d have one more roll of the dice. I contacted the DREAL for Nouvelle Aquitaine, a government department that can help out with this kind of problem and received a reply the very next day.

In summary this said that it’s not their role to undertake the tasks that are the manufacturers’ responsibility and that as my bike has been imported, it has to conform to local regulatory requirements including having a Certificate of Conformity granted to its manufacturer. Their advice was that I should seek to annul the purchase with the seller, which I have taken steps to do.

But in the meantime, I thanked them for their reply and sent them the following message.

“.. overall I think that this is a good, well-made bike that is fit for purpose and meets regulatory requirements. It is also at a price at which many people could afford to use it for short journeys instead of their cars, as I want to, which is not true for competitive products that will inevitably always remain as minority products for enthusiasts.

Could you advise me, if I wanted to act on behalf of the manufacturer, how would I go about securing a CDC for this product and what costs would be incurred? I ask because I am not familiar with the French registration system and any advice you can give would be of value.”

So now I’m waiting for a reply.

Sadly, it is now more or less certain that I’ll be unable to register my new bike, meaning that it’ll be illegal for me to use it on French roads. I received a message from the registration authority yesterday after my third attempt to do so, when I had been confident that I’d submitted all the documents that were needed. But I was wrong.

The message said that I’d only submitted a declaration from the manufacturer that it conformed to regulatory requirements whereas what was needed was a copy of the official Certificate of Conformity issued to the manufacturer for the machine by an agency of an EU member state’s government confirming that it did so.

So, as I suspected might be the case, Dakeya, my bike’s manufacturer, needed to have applied to the appropriate French agency, for example, to sell the bike in France and for the agency to have checked that it conformed, possibly tested it and issued the relevant certificate. My guess is that a hefty fee would have been involved somewhere along the line which is possibly why the manufacturer hadn’t done so.

It may be that the process is more straightforward than I think it might be – after all, it can’t be as stringent as obtaining type-approval for a new motor vehicle – but I don’t have the time or motivation to take the matter any further as I now have other priorities to attend to. Like servicing my aircraft and getting them back into the air and getting the interior of my house ship-shape.

I’m disappointed that it’s come to this but French bureaucracy is so intractable and it’s not worth spending any more time and effort. I’ve now requested CDiscount, the web site through which I bought the bike, to arrange for its return for a full refund and I hope that they’ll cooperate without making a fuss as I’ve been a pretty valuable customer of theirs over many years. But we’ll just have to wait and see what transpires from here 🙁