Fresh air – marvellous!

We’re into a run of superb high pressure winter weather and for now there’s no end to it in sight. This means that we’re getting clear sunny days with bright blue skies with the air itself being cool at only around 7 or 8 degrees Celsius but with the sun’s rays surprisingly warm. The converse is that with the clear skies the nights are cold at a degree or so below freezing with ground frost, but that’s a small price to pay for how marvellous the days are, and I’m not finding it too difficult keeping warm in the caravan in the meantime.

Up to today I’d not had a chance to get back to working on my ‘anti-sanglier’ fence – the ground at the bottom of my land was still too wet to work comfortably down there and yesterday I had to busy myself despatching the bow-and-arrow set that I originally bought to rescue my drone from the tree that it had crashed in last autumn, but ended up not using. But anyway, I at last managed to sell it a few days ago on Le Bon Coin.

I thought that I’d never manage to do it. I had enough interest but delivering it was the problem because of the parcel’s length. None of the usual services would accept it. DHL and the like would but at a cost that was more than the value of the item, so they were ruled out. By a bit of luck I at last found that Chronopost would do it and at an economic cost too, so long as I used ‘Chronopost Relais’. This involves dropping it into a local ‘point relais’ ( I chose le Bugue) and having it delivered to a ‘point relais’ near the recipient. I was just glad to see the back of it, quite honestly.

So today I was free to get back to working on the fence. The first thing that I did was completely finish fixing the mesh in place on the small segment in the bottom corner, and here’s how it came out.

I’m very happy with the result. Unlike the locals, who just nail the mesh to the fence posts, mine is not only nailed to the posts but also suspended on the three tensioned wires at its top, middle and bottom. This should mean that unlike the locals’ fences that all look pretty shabby after only a short while, because they can easily be bent at their top and bottom and bulge when pushed in their middle, mine should stay taught and tidy pretty much forever. Mine will also resist any attempts by animals to push their way through beneath its bottom. Anyway, time will tell if the considerable extra effort (and cost) that I’ve put in was worth it.

Here are the other shots that I took after finishing at 16.45 this afternoon, just as the sun was dipping below the trees on the other side of the road.

Apart from the segment in the corner, the other lengths of mesh have been nailed on the end posts but otherwise not yet been fully secured. I’ll get going again tomorrow and get the final run of mesh into place and secured in the same way. Then I’ll be able to concentrate on just wiring it all to the suspension wires, which I’m managing to do quite quickly as I’ve developed a method to do it. All that will then be left will be to construct the two gates, but at least in the meantime I’ll be pretty much reassured that I won’t be getting any more visits from my little piggy nocturnal invaders 😉