So far this week, although we’ve had nice temperatures around 15 degrees C, unfortunately we’ve had some very strong, gusting winds to go with them. It’s a strange combination after the recent cold weather – the wind which was previously coming at us from the north and had a chill edge to it, is now blasting at us from the south-east and is quite warm. I don’t know who’s the more surprised, Toddie or me 😕

But anyway, it hasn’t been comfortable working outside because of the strong gusts, so I decided to batten down the hatches and stay indoors for a day or two until they’ve passed. The gusts have been forecast to be as high as 117 kmh (70+ mph) today, so we’re not talking about a light breeze here, and could still be more than 60 kmh (40 mph) tomorrow. Although they are forecast to become fewer and farther between, it doesn’t look as though things will be getting back towards normal much before the week-end, so I doubt I’ll be getting an awful lot done on the X-Air until then. The best laid plans… 😡

I didn’t really get as much done yesterday as I wanted to, but as I’m retired, nowadays I don’t have to worry too much about that sort of thing 🙂 The main reason was that I really needed to get a hair-cut but when I first popped my nose through the barber-shop door, there was a bit of a queue. So I went off and did a bit of shopping and came back again at about 11.55am. Sacre bleu! This is France, monsieur. The barber stops for lunch from mid-day to 1.30pm, so how could he possibly start doing a hair-cut at that time of the day 😀

So I had to go back again after my own lunch, which meant that after I’d got home again and removed the X-Air’s covers, there was only time for me to attach the prop and run the engine for a bit to blow the cob-webs out, warm it up and get rid of any moisture hanging around in the crankcase. Considering that it still has the fuel that the previous owner put in the tanks in the Summer and I haven’t even taken the plugs out, I was pleased to find that it started really easily and sounded great. Nothing nasty like a big mag drop or anything like that and although one cylinder did drop a little bit more than the other, I’m told this is fairly usual on Rotax 582s. When I’d finished, a young member of my neighbour, Jean-Claude’s family who has a quad bike and was attracted by the sound of the engine, came over to take a look and find out a bit about ULMs. If you click on the pic below, you can see the short video that I shot and put into the Video Gallery.

While I was at it, I also put the little video I made showing Wim’s Weedhopper in the gallery and also one I made when I first came to Le Bousquet showing Jean-Claude mowing my long grass with his tractor.

I keep telling myself the same thing but something else always crops up that is more urgent. I’ve spent the last two days cleaning right through my house – I had to because although I’ve done a ‘bit of light dusting’ in the meantime, the dust created by my fireplace work was still everywhere that I looked. But it has been worth it. I’ve still got a little bit to do in the kitchen, but the rest of the place now looks clean the way it should, and I’ve got nice shiny polished wooden surfaces again 😀

So although I’ll probably be phoning to register with one of the doctors in Rouffignac so I can get the signed certificate I need for my French licence, I really am going to get cracking on the X-Air work tomorrow as well. We’ve got fantastic weather forecast for several days, dry and sunny and a temperature of 17 degrees Celsius on Monday, so I must take advantage of it as I’ll be able to work uninterrupted outside. This is more like it 😉

I picked up another bargain today. After my experience slopping through all the mud outside my house this Winter I decided that I need to put a path in as soon as possible really. After all, we can get heavy storms just as easily during the Summer and the result would be just the same – a small river and an expanse of mud outside my door. So I’ve been keeping my eye open for a cement mixer on the small ads web site. I didn’t want one that would be too small, only able to mix 100 litres or so at a time, because there’s nothing more frustrating when you’re laying concrete to have the bed you’ve laid going off while you’re doing another mix. Ideally you don’t want to have joins showing. On the other hand, there would be no point my having a mixer capable of producing industrial volumes of concrete as I only want to lay a couple of paths, build a couple of sets of low steps and lay a base to park the car on. I was thinking that one with a ‘cuve’ of around 160 litres would be about right.

Several have come and gone over recent weeks with, as usual, none in the immediate vicinity which always seems to be the case. Nothing I’m interested in ever seems to be in Aquitaine – it’s always miles and miles away! But on Sunday I saw a new ad for a 160 litre electric mixer, in good condition from the pics shown, and at a price of only 60€, which is about a quarter of the new price! So I phoned up immediately and after a couple of questions said I’d like to buy it. Yesterday there was too much snow left on the ground so we re-arranged our ‘rendez-vous’ for today at 1300 hrs at Layrac, just south of Agen. I’d left some sand in my trailer which I decided I’d take out as it accounted for quite a bit of weight and I didn’t want to overload my little trailer, so I was out at about 10.00am this morning bagging it up. As the temperature was around -2 degrees Celsius, it turned out that the sand was frozen almost as hard as concrete and I ended up breaking it up with a club hammer and cold chisel, but managed nevertheless to be away by around 10.30am as I’d planned.

As seems to be the usual whenever I look forward to a drive through a picturesque part of France, for most of the journey south I could hardly see a thing. It was around -2 degrees Celsius almost the whole way and there was a lot of standing snow around and the trees were all covered in frost. This was very pretty except that it caused a lot of mist which became quite thick as I ascended into the hills of the Lot and Garonne. It didn’t slow me down at all but it did prevent me seeing the sights and views that were any distance away, which was a bit frustrating. I arrived at Layrac at the agreed time and my seller met me outside his house. He was a very genuine guy and said that after me he’d received hundreds of calls about the mixer, which I said didn’t surprise me. He showed me it working, helped me to load it onto my trailer and he then returned to work and I headed off back home.

The journey back was a lot different to the one down because although at the southern end, it still didn’t quite get above freezing, the mist began to clear. As I approached the Dordogne the temperature rose to 5 or 6 degrees Celsius and I was treated to the most glorious clear blue sky and some of the most breathtaking views imaginable of chateaux, ancient villages perched on rocky hillsides and fertile farmland hemmed in by tree-covered hills. It’s one of the reasons why I love it here. I was home without incident by about 4.00pm and when I unloaded the mixer from my trailer, it came off a bit quickly catching me unawares and scratched one of the lenses of my glasses, which I always hang on the neck of my jumper. Very annoying – there always has to be something to bring you back down to earth again, doesn’t there 😐

We’ve had a glorious past couple of days. Today I saw 15 degrees Centigrade on my car temperature gauge and although it’s forecast to get a bit cooler by the week-end, I’ve got a sneaky feeling that Winter really is almost behind us. On Sunday I saw my first butterfly of the season and bees were buzzing around the end wall of my house that had been warmed up by the sun. Yesterday I saw one of Benjamin and Aurelie’s cats playing with a small animal of some sort. It turned out to be one of the lizards that hang on my house walls sunning themselves when it’s hot. Evidently this one had been tempted out by the sunshine but was moving a bit slowly as the temperature is still a bit low for it and became easy prey for the cat. When I put it back on the wall it quickly scuttled away and disappeared.

The fine weather has also helped me by allowing work to proceed far more quickly on my fireplace. I’m now really pleased to be able to say that I finally completed the job early this evening. By completed, I mean the building work. Now I intend to let it stand, dry out and cure for a short while before treating the new tiles to make them water-repellant and shiny. Once that’s been done, I’ll be able to begin to tie things up by installing my new wood-burner. I can’t wait for that, believe me 🙂

I’m pleased with how the job’s come out. Here are a couple of pics showing ‘before’ and ‘after’, the latter taken just after I’d finished off grouting today. I tried to make it as ‘French’ as I reasonably could and in keeping with the style of my house and I think I’ve succeeded, although time will tell when visitors are able to tell me what they think.

I’m feeling pretty tired just at the moment after completing the work, some of which has been quite heavy, so I’m looking forward to being able to take it a bit more easy for a day or so. It’ll now give me a chance to turn my attention to X-Air stuff and I’ll be thinking about the coming flying season, what lies ahead and what needs to be done. And about time too 😀

After a trip to the shop, I spent the rest of yesterday just trimming tiles. My plan was to be ready for today, when I hoped to quickly go outside and use my polishing machine to curve the edges of the ten tiles that will be on the front of the wood-burner platform and then spend the rest of the day tiling. My hope was that I’d then be able to finish off all my tiling tomorrow so I could begin to turn my attention next week to the X-Air. As Wim pointed out when he came over on Thursday, the weather is already quickly improving and it won’t be long before the real flying season starts, so I need to get it ready and also sort out my French licence.

And he was right, because after a frosty start, today has turned into the most gorgeous Spring day that you could imagine! The sky is clear and blue, there’s no wind, visibility is perfect and the temperature has been around 13 degrees C. As a result it was impossible to get started on my plan! Instead, after taking Toddie for a couple of walks over on the field opposite I decided to fit the mudguards that I’ve had for several weeks, to my trailer. And bloomin’ good they look too! And as a bonus, while I was working on them outside, Claire, a neighbour who I’d not met before and was walking past, came and introduced herself. She is a charming lady, French of course, and I was reminded again just how lucky I’ve been to end up with such lovely neighbours. Here are a couple of shots I’ve just taken at 4.45pm, looking eastwards over the field. In the second one on the horizon just in from the right you can see the cement works at Le Lardin that I’ve mentioned before, that is 9 miles away as the crow flies!

But I must get myself back under control tomorrow because time is passing and as Wim said, the weather is now picking up quite rapidly. Next week is forecast to be clear and dry and although there will be the odd chilly night, daytime temperatures will be on a rising trend in the 15 Degrees C bracket. We’re getting into flying weather so I have to get my fireplace work completed so I can get the X-Air and myself prepared for what’s to come 😀

The weather is just about chucking everything at us at the moment and just as you think you can sniff a bit of Spring in the air, Winter comes back again. But I guess it shouldn’t be unexpected at this time of the year, as I said in a previous post. But I’m pleased to say that today I don’t care for reasons I’ll come back to shortly 😀

I wanted to polish my floor tiles yesterday using the polishing machine I’d got off Ebay but to do so I’d have to go outside because of the amount of spray it throws out. But the day was horrible and it looked as though the rain would never stop. I tried to start a couple of times in brief breaks in the downpour but as I had to use my spray bottle rather than connect the machine to my water tap, my attempts were not very successful. The machine came with only a very short connection tube which meant that to use it I’d have to be very close to the tap out in the open and I didn’t much fancy that with the possibility that the rain could start pelting down again at any moment. But suddenly the sky cleared and the sun came out! I took the chance to move close to the tap and connect up the machine properly. It then worked like a charm and made the job considerably faster. I would have liked to spend more time making the tiles really glossy but I was very pleased with the finish I achieved and I had the added bonus of being able to get everything cleared away before the rain started again.

So today I don’t have to worry about the weather outside! I’ll be indoors engaged in what I think will be the most satisfying part of the job so far, getting the tiles laid. This morning I laid them out to get an idea of how they’ll look compared to the existing ones and the results are shown below.

I’m pleased with how they looked. The first two batches are now soaking in my sink so I’m off to change my togs and get started. I just hope the finished result comes out as well 😉

I didn’t get a whole lot done on Friday but what I did do was useful. I cleaned off all the hard adhesive residue left from when the old tiles were removed, something that’s very important in order for the new ones to bed down nice and level with the tiles that surround them. I’ll also have to use one of the tile samples that I bought in some time ago, from a factory at Millau, which is quite a bit thicker than all of the others that I’ll be using, so I got out my angle grinder, put on my mask, went outside and just ground away at it until it was down to the required thickness.

Saturday morning dawned dull but dry, but shortly after I’d taken Toddie out it began to lightly slow. I had visions of deja vu and more time about to be lost, so decided to jump in the car and drive to Brico Depot in Perigueux to buy another bag of concrete (I already have one) for filling the hole on my living room floor and a couple of bags of adhesive for the new floor tiles. By the time I left it was snowing pretty hard but nothing was settling and as I drove down into Plazac it almost stopped. However, on the way to and from Perigueux the snow became quite heavy so it became pretty obvious that I wouldn’t get any more real work done that day. I didn’t mind too much though, as I wanted to watch the Rugby Six Nations, anyway 😉

There was a bit of snow left lying here and there this morning but it soon cleared away and it began to rain. As I was dead set on not missing the England-Ireland match this afternoon, I knew I had to press on regardless if I wanted to get the hole in my lounge floor concreted in today so I would have the opportunity of making more progress tomorrow. I’ll not say that the rain was relentless but it hardly stopped all day and I got pretty wet mixing up and walking buckets of concrete into my living room through the back door. I thought that two bags of ready-to-use concrete might be a bit tight to finish the job off and decided to stretch them a bit by adding some extra sand and cement. The extra fines would also help me to get a reasonable surface finish as well. And it was lucky I did, because even with the added sand, I only just had enough concrete to finish the job. See below for how it came out.

So at last the hole in my living room floor is gone, but I’ll not forget it in a hurry. It was a total pain in the back-side. As well as falling into it a couple of times and well-nigh breaking my ankle, it also collected all the muck and dirt going and was just a horrible unhygienic pit. How anyone could have lived with it I do not know, even using it as an open hearth, and I can’t believe that it existed for all the years that it did. So I’ll not miss it, as I won’t the ruddy rain that’s now dripping non-stop down the chimney into sundry tin cans and other containers that I’ve had to lay out to collect it. Rain, rain, go-away for goodness sake 😡

I mentioned the two perfectly good tiles that I nicked the edges of yesterday and how I was going to repair them. Well I’m not. I decided that I couldn’t leave them as they were and they had to come out. There was also another tile that has always got my goat because it had a large chunk taken out of its surface. It has always been like that but was an eyesore and always would have been if I’d left it. So today they all had to come out. I tried just using a bolster but damaged yet another adjacent good tile so there was nothing for it but to get my angle grinder out again and cut all of them out. It was taking a risk because I would only have just enough floor tiles to do the original job plus these and if I’d caused any further damage I’d have been in real trouble. But luckily I didn’t. I didn’t bother with the big tarpaulin so once again the whole house got smothered in dust all over again, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. I’ve cleaned up most of the living room now but still have the kitchen to do and I might just leave that until tomorrow as I’m tired. But I don’t like compromises, never have done and I think it was worth it.

Today has been absolutely horrific. I always knew that it was going to be but in reality it turned out to be even worse than I’d expected, by an order of magnitude. Today was the day when I cut out the damaged floor tiles in front of my fireplace in my living room.

I knew that it was going to be awful because of the amount of dust that I knew would be generated and I knew that try as I might, there was no way that I’d be able to stop it. I tried to make an enclosure over the area I’d be working on using my big black tarpaulin that I bought to make covers for the X-Air from, but it was impossible to seal all the gaps up. And when I started grinding the joints away around the damaged tiles the amount of dust that was generated was tremendous. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the house had been empty, but it wasn’t, and there wasn’t even the option of moving stuff temporarily outside because of the incessant rain storms that kept passing through today.

I thought that I might reduce the dust level by using a thinner blade rather than the edge of the grinding wheel that my ‘meuleuse d’angle’ came with so I stopped work immediately and nipped down to ‘Les Briconautes’ in Montignac to get one. I also bought some protective goggles but when I went to use them, I found they were useless as I had to wear a dust mask and when I breathed, my breath came out of the top of that and immediately steamed up the goggles. Although the dust level was lower with the thinner wheel, it didn’t seem to be by much so in the end I just had to bite the bullet and carry on regardless, having covered as much of my stuff up with every bit of suitable spare cloth that I could find.

But before continuing, I’ll back-track a little because I was unable to post yesterday due to an Internet outage as a result of a huge storm that went through in the afternoon. I managed to complete the rendering on my wood-burner platform as planned and was very pleased with the results which are shown below.

I achieved just what I’d hoped for – level surfaces, a nice sharp straight front edge and a vertical front face – things that will make it easier to tile and get the sort of finished job I’m looking for. But now back to today. Here are some pics of the horror story that was my living room today.

When I emerged from under the tarpaulin, I found that even though I’d opened the doors and windows on both sides of the house, the place was full of thick clouds of dust. It got everywhere. Even things I’d covered up were plastered with it when I removed the covers, especially if there had been any chink in them, through which the dust had penetrated with ease. Everything in my kitchen was covered with the stuff and although I’ve already done a bit of a clean-up, it’ll take ages to get rid of it all. I’d left my bathroom door open and it had even managed to double-back on itself and get in there. It’s got a gritty kind of texture to it and seems to stick to anything. I left one of my mobile phones out on a ledge between the living room and the kitchen and when I picked it up, not only was it plastered with dust on the front but it was also covered on its back. I could hardly believe it 😐

But at the end of the day, the job is done, well the bulk of it anyway. There’s still some tidying up to do before I can press on, concrete the floor and tile it, but at least the bit that I knew would be awful is now behind me. Here are a couple more pics of how the floor now looks.

Because of the poor conditions I was working under and lack of visibility, I have nicked the edges of a couple of the good tiles that were next to damaged ones. I think that I’ll be able to repair them using some ‘terre cuite’ paste that I’ve now got quite a lot of in my tile cutting machine. But after the event, I wonder whether I really should have followed the advice I received to cut away the joints surrounding the damaged tiles as I did. That’s what created all the dust and led to me nicking the edges of two good tiles and I suspect that I could have done just as well if I’d just taken a bolster to the damaged tiles and lifted them without cutting away the joints around them. It’s always worked for me in the past but it’s too late now and I just have to plough on and try to get the job finished as soon as possible. Then I’ll be able to get back to some sort of normality 😉

There’s nothing wrong with mud. It has its place in the order of things, I suppose, and I’m sure it must have lots of uses. But I can’t think of any that might be relevant to me. It’ll take a while before I can lay a proper path along the front of my house and for the life of me, I cannot fathom how previous occupiers managed all the years that they did without one. Until then I’ve got to make do as they obviously did for all that time. Maybe I’m a bit less patient than them, but I can’t see how every time it rains heavily, you can be happy staggering along slipping and sliding in a slop of mud and when you get to the kitchen door, then walking a couple of bootfuls in with you every time, that you then have to clear up.

It has been very wet here but I can’t believe that the same thing doesn’t happen every Winter when it rains. I only have to take the dog out for a couple of minutes and when we come back in, the mud comes with us. It dried up a bit yesterday afternoon but then it began to drizzle again and it must have continued for much of last night. So what have we got again? Yup, mud, loads of it. To say I’m fed up with the stuff is an understatement 😐

I managed to make some good progress and find time to watch all of the rugby 6 Nations matches. For starters, it was good to see England win their opening match against Scotland. After watching France, who were the pre-tournament favourites, go down to Italy, it looks as though 2013 isn’t going to be their year. They weren’t convincing at all and never really seemed to be in touch. I think that Ireland were the most impressive this first week-end. There was something missing about the England performance – they deserved to win but there was something mechanical about their game and somehow they seemed to be ‘playing by numbers’. Ireland, on the other hand, were playing by instinct so it’ll be interesting to see how the tournament unfolds over the coming weeks.

I also managed to get some good work done on my fireplace which I continued with today. I might appear to be making a big thing about this work but as I see it, I’ve got just the one chance to do it right. I have to create something that will not only be decorative but must also be extremely effective. My wood-burner is bloomin’ heavy and its weight, of course, is concentrated on four small feet which are therefore each exerting a very large downward pressure. The platform must therefore not only support the weight but if there’s any surface weakness where the feet will be positioned, then things will start to crumble or move, tiles will start to crack and that will be it. So I have to do a proper job and not only that, when it’s done it should hopefully be a permanent feature of my ‘sejour’ for many years to come.

So my next task was to apply a good strong coat of rendering onto the platform’s top surface. This will need to not only take the load of the wood-burner but will also have to spread the load that might otherwise be too much for the lightweight concrete blocks that I used in the structure, through the tiles that will be fixed to the rendered surface. I made up a length of shuttering using the wood that the wood-burner was packed in actually. The shuttering not only gave me the depth of rendering that I wanted but by stepping it out at the front, when the rendering had cured and the shuttering was removed, it also gave me a hard edge to work to when I came to render the front of the platform. Here are a couple of pics with the shuttering in place taken just after I’d finished rendering the platform top.

That was where I got to on Sunday and today, despite the intermittent rain that we’ve got back again, I was able to press on with rendering the front. The depth of material that I have to apply is too much to do in one go, mainly because of the deep depressions in the faces of the concrete blocks that I used to make the bottom layer of the platform, so today I wanted just to get an initial coat on that will be cured enough for me to finish the job tomorrow. And that’s what I managed to do as the following pics show.

So tomorrow, all being well, I’ll have the platform in a state that’s ready for tiling. I also fired up the new ‘coupe carreaux’ over the week-end and got cracking trimming some tiles down. It’s turned out to be a great piece of kit and well worth the 60€ plus petrol that it cost me because in no time at all, I’d got over 2/3 of my tiles cut to size and ready for use. But they’ll have to wait for a while before that happens, because once I’ve finished rendering the platform, it’ll be time to start on the floor. And it’ll be a messy job because cutting the unwanted old tiles out will create clouds of dust. I haven’t yet worked out what I can do about that – maybe I’ll be able to make some kind of tent arrangement over the fireplace that I’ll be able to work in, with a mask that I have already, to keep the dust from spreading into the rest of the room. I’ll have to think about it a bit more before I get going with that job 🙂

To say the least! It’s been helped by a period of spring-like weather which I’m sure has made everyone feel so much better compared to when we had day after day of almost continuous rain. There are buds on lots of the trees and shoots from the daffodils and other spring plants have emerged into the daylight and are growing visibly bigger by the day. Obviously we must expect for there to be a few more cold snaps and even some more snow during the next few weeks, but there’s a tangible feeling that Spring is in the air and that maybe we’ve turned the corner and are heading away from the gloom of Winter.

With the progress I’ve made on my fireplace, I still only had vague plans on how I might decorate and finish-off the platform on which my wood-burner will stand, so on Monday I decided to bite the bullet and make another long car journey, north into the Vendee to another tile factory that I’d found on the Internet. The factory is in Aizenay and I knew that the drive there and back would take me a whole day. I left Plazac in bright sunny weather and although I hit roads that were wet after recent rain storms as I headed north-west towards the coast, I didn’t actually end up driving through any heavy rain the whole day. What was noticeable though, was how the whole of the south-west of France has been thoroughly drenched over recent weeks with many of the fields and other land at the sides of the roads having the appearance of mangrove swamps with trees and bushes growing up out of what were quite substantial lakes in many places.

We tend to take technology for granted these days, but I’m still amazed how I can feed an address into my satnav and end up right outside it after a few hours driving. It makes the journey so much more enjoyable than in the old days when we had to rely on maps and constantly keep our eyes peeled in case we missed vital signposts. So a few hours after leaving Plazac, I was turning into the car park of Les Terres Cuites d’Aizenay. I spotted the factory immediately as I began to cross over the main road that I’d just left, with its massive piles of scrap wood and its old stone kilns burning away with smoke coming out of the tops. I was soon greeted by a chap wearing an old jumper and with holes in the knees of his jeans and it turned out that he ran the whole place and was the great great grandson of the gentleman who originally started the business. I explained what I was there for and he took the opportunity to practice his English, which he said he hadn’t been able to use in some time, and over the next couple of hours, our conversation continued in an interesting mixture of English and French.

After a few minutes he said that he was firing up a kiln (cooking it, he said) and would I like to come and watch? We walked across the yard and descended into a shallow pit at the back of what was obviously the original building on the site housing the kilns. Two iron doors were open with fires blazing away inside with several large lengths of wood hanging out of them with their ends on the floor. The heat coming out of the open doors was quite intense, so I stood back a bit, but my new friend seemed quite unperturbed. It turned out that the reason why the wood was protruding in such a way was because the lengths of the scrap wood that the factory buys up, whenever it is available from the look of the enormous stacks on the land across the yard, are too long to go straight into the kiln fire boxes, so he just shoves in what he can and allows the fires to burn and break them. Then he just pushes in the bits that are hanging out and adds some more, even talking away animatedly on his portable phone if he needs to while doing so.

I would love to have seen what was going on in the factory itself as it uses only traditional materials and traditional manufacturing methods, but unfortunately there just wasn’t enough time. So we headed off to look at some of the stock stacked on pallets outside to see what I could use. The tiles (‘carreaux’) that I thought I’d be interested in turned out not to be suitable, which was a bit of a blow as the photographs I’d seen on their web site had looked so promising. However, I’d spotted some other ‘carreaux’ in the small showroom which had given me another idea. These were half the size of the ones I already have on my floor and available with or without a lovely decorative motif in the form of a white fleur de lys and I worked out a new design for my fireplace there and then based on the measurements that I’d brought with me. I then found that actually the tiles were slightly bigger than I really wanted – 16cm square rather than 15cm – but I loved them so much that I decided that I’d just have to find a way of trimming them down

So we loaded them up into the back of my car and sat down for my bill to be calculated. Wowee! Unfortunately I’d not checked the prices before loading up the car and it turned out that the ‘carreaux’ with the motif were 7€ each! But maybe it was for the best, because if I’d known that I either wouldn’t have bought them or would have settled for a compromise. As it is, I know that they will be perfect for what I’m trying to achieve and the cost will end up being worth it.

Toddie and I arrived home pretty late on Monday night so we both took it a bit easy on Tuesday. I dealt with a couple of domestic issues (I have a dispute with EDF who are trying to over-charge me for the electricity I used due to a faulty meter from when I arrived here until they replaced it in December, and also with an English company who supplied me with boots of the wrong size and can’t be bothered refunding me) and spent some time thinking about how I should go about trimming down the ‘carreaux’ I’d bought. I checked the web sites of companies who supply tile cutters and found that although you can buy smaller models for ‘domestic’ users from as little as 40€, the heavier ‘professional’ table-mounted versions that I would need for my kind of job ran out at about 200€. I couldn’t run to that after investing as much as I had in my ‘terres cuites’ so on Wednesday I decided to have a look at the small ads on Le Bon Coin. Unbelievably, a table-mounted tile cutter, used once it said, had been put up for sale only about an hour or so before, at a price of only 60€! It seemed to me that fate had taken a hand, so I called up the seller and after asking a couple of questions, agreed to buy it 🙂

And so it was that yesterday Toddie and I found ourselves heading off north-west yet again to Saintes. We left Plazac in mist and drizzle but as we drove the weather gradually brightened. We drove through Perigueux, Angouleme and then Cognac, past field after field of vines and the distilleries of companies like Courvoisier, Reynac and many more smaller ones with puffs of steam rising above them. Then as the sun broke through, there was the most magnificent view across the rolling land of the Charente that by itself made the drive worth it. It’s why I don’t mind doing it – each journey as well as having a purpose is an enjoyable experience in itself, a small window into France and French life that I find so rewarding.

The seller of the tile cutting machine (‘coupe carreaux’) spotted me looking for his house, which was dead lucky because he had just left home when I arrived, to return to work. We quickly did the deal, loaded it into my car and Toddie and I turned round and headed for home. The machine was still in its original box so later on in the evening I unpacked it and checked it over and here are a couple of pics I took of it.

Everything worked fine but I found that the original owner had obviously just been cutting tiles by eye and had lost the adjustable guide that clamps to the ruler. It would have been useful if I’d had it because I have lots of similar cuts to do, but it isn’t essential and I can do my job without it. In the meantime, I may see if I can buy a replacement as a ‘spare part’ – I probably will be able to because the machine was made by Peugeot and is only two years old.

I’ve also shown the tiles I bought standing on the machine’s cutting table. They aren’t actually different colours – the plain one had been stacked outside in the rain so was wet while the decorated one came from the showroom, so was dry. Anyway, I’ve now got all the tools and materials I need to finish the job, so I’m rarin’ to go and can’t wait to get cracking again 😀

I just came back to say that earlier this afternoon I fired up my new ‘coupe carreaux’ and trimmed a couple of tiles. Here is a pic of the finished articles next to two originals.

Trimming the edges was a piece of cake and only took a few moments in each case. The new edges are great and the trimmed-down tiles both look excellent. I can’t wait now to get the job done 😉

No, I don’t mean the exchange rate, but I’ll come back to that later. It’s my fireplace. We had a lovely fine day yesterday but instead of continuing work on my fireplace, I went off to Brico Depot and bought the wood for my proposed temporary work shelter. Wood, and I think most building materials actually, seem to me to be very cheap here and I bought 13 lengths of ‘demi-chevron’ measuring 63mm x 40mm x 3m for only 2.75€ each. I also bought a hefty 2300W angle grinder (‘meuleuse d’angle’). I’ll need this when I start on the floor tiling and I couldn’t see the point of buying a titchy one as in the future I’ll need it for cutting paving slabs and goodness knows what else.

So it was today when I completed the next stage of my fireplace work. I had one more concrete block to go into the base, which I knew wouldn’t take very long, and then I had to put the lightweight slabs on top to get the additional height I need. Getting this next level on was my main aim today. The ‘meuleuse d’angle’ came in very handy making it amazingly quick and easy to cut stuff down to the sizes I needed and having started the job just after lunch-time, I was where I wanted to be in time for Toddie to have his dinner only half an hour late. But from the annoyed grunts from that direction, you’d have thought it was much later 🙂

I had one ‘You’ve Been Framed’ moment, though. After laying one block onto its bed of soft mortar, I was banging it down to level it up using the handle end of my hammer when I belted it down right onto the tip of my little finger. Fortunately Toddie is quite used to the odd profanity around our house so didn’t bat an eye-lid when I jumped up and down, loudly mouthing the appropriate words 😉

I took another look at the exchange rate today and the Pound/Euro rate had dropped further to 1.17.

However, I then took a look at how the Pound is performing against several other key currencies.

This was only a quick snap-shot and a proper analysis would need a good look back at trends over a reasonable period, but on the face of it, in the short term, although the Pound is collapsing against the Euro, it’s moving upwards against all of these other currencies, even including the Australian Dollar which I know has been performing very well recently. So what’s going on? Surely the situation vis-a-vis the Euro can’t just be a response to Mr Cameron’s recent speech on the EU, can it? Or to the noises from the usual voices from within the EU saying that ‘the Euro crisis is now over’ when it plainly isn’t? I don’t claim to know, but I am really cheesed off that the currency markets can be so easily led and volatile and can just hope that things are back onto a more realistic footing later in the month when my next pension payment is due to be made 😐

A few weeks ago, Mervyn King, he of the big mouth and very few other talents, began to talk down Sterling and the prospects for the UK economy proclaiming that he would like to see the Pound depreciate on the foreign exchange markets. Well, he’s got his wish. A year or so ago when I was just thinking about coming to France, the exchange rate was around 1.20€ and I got a rate of 1.22€ when I transferred the cash to buy my house. Remember, this was before the ‘Euro Crisis’ and as it played out, with Greece becoming an economic basket-case and major financial crises in Spain, Italy and Ireland, I had to sit back and watch as the rate moved to 1.25€ and beyond. What a difference that would have made for me at the time! But all the while, even at the higher rates, I’ve found that the major items I’ve needed to purchase have consistently been cheaper in the UK.

Meanwhile, Mr King and the bunch of useless politicians who run the economy of the UK have been sitting back watching as the ‘family silver’ ie companies and businesses that add value and create wealth, has been flogged off to foreigners, meaning that the profits they make in doing so will be sent to foreign investors and not remain in the UK and not only that, presiding over a tax regime that allows foreign owned companies to decide whether or not they will pay UK tax on the profits they make there!

Mr King’s simplistic analysis is that by reducing the value of the Pound, UK firms will export more thus solving the UK’s economic problems. But just how low does Mr King think that Sterling must go before this happens? If at Sterling’s current level, UK prices are already highly competitive, why does he think that by devaluing the Pound the export taps will suddenly turn on?

Today Sterling has fallen to its lowest value for something like 2 years against the Euro.

It would be foolhardy to expect that if there is little current propensity for UK firms to export they will immediately begin doing so because the Pound has fallen in value. Exporting for a company is a strategy which takes time and effort to develop – which products, which markets, which customers etc etc. You have to put in systems and an organisation. It does not and cannot happen overnight. But what does happen overnight is that when you talk a currency down and encourage a collapse in its exchange rate, everything that’s imported from that moment on becomes more expensive. It just so happens that the UK is a very import-dependent country – that shouldn’t be the case but it is – so by opening his big mouth and in effect causing a devaluation of Sterling of something like 5%, the clever Mr King is now importing inflation into the UK and squeezing companies, households and ordinary people and all for no apparent gain. Well done old chap, another own-goal to add to the growing number you’ve achieved over the years and God help us while such people are in positions of power and influence!

Just to finish off with a small foot-note, living in France I’m far from insulated from this, of course. My State Pension is paid in Pounds and converted into Euros before being transferred into my bank account, so unlike people in the UK who will feel the effects of Mr King’s (and Mr Osborne’s, let it be said) enlightened economic management gradually over time, I and others in a similar position have suffered an immediate and painful whack in the wallet. God Bless The Bank of England 😐

And it’s becoming very frustrating. Partly it’s to do with the time of the year and the weather has a lot to do with it too. I’m part-way into the work on my fireplace and the job ground to a halt with the snow which made going outside for materials just about impossible. Since the snow disappeared, apart from a couple of short breaks, we’ve had almost continuous rain which certainly doesn’t help things along. When I took the dog out this morning it was dull and misty and down here it doesn’t take much for that to turn into horrible drizzle. And as I type this that’s exactly what we’ve got and have had for the past couple of hours or so.

I’ve got things in the UK that I bought to help with the work I want to do on the X-Air which I’ve put off having shipped over in case I order anything else that could be added to the parcel. But even if I had the stuff here I couldn’t do anything with it because of the ruddy weather! I think I’ll have to take up Wim’s idea of making a temporary shelter outside to do the work on the X-Air in, when the time comes, but even pushing forward with the construction of that isn’t exactly straightforward all the while it’s raining 😐

I was talking to my mother this morning and she suggested that while I’m waiting, why don’t I start on my kitchen? The problem with that idea is that the first step will be to pull the existing ceiling down which will make a terrible mess and quite honestly, I couldn’t face having a mess in the kitchen and a mess in my living room at the same time, and both jobs only part-done. Looking on the bright side, we really only have February to get through before we can expect the weather to start warming up a bit and then hopefully it will be possible to break what is becoming a bit of a log-jam. Until then, I guess I’ll just have to make what forward advances that I can, in whatever breaks in the weather just happen to come along 🙁

I’m not a great snow lover. It’s nice when it first comes but I soon get fed up with it. We had a beautiful sunny day yesterday with a brilliant blue sky and although the sunshine felt warm if you were in a sheltered corner, it didn’t get rid of much of the white stuff. I’m just back in from taking the dog round this morning and I noticed that there was new snow in my old footprints so we must have had a bit more last night, but not a lot. It’s snowing again as I type this so as far as I’m concerned, enough’s enough! I’ve got too much to do and especially work on my fireplace so I can install my wood-burner. The electricity keeping this place warm is costing me an arm and a leg 😡

Well, the first big one since I’ve been here, anyway. And how! We had just a few small flurries the other day and although the forecast that I usually look at said that we should expect to have a couple of cold days, it didn’t say that we would also be almost snowed in! But that’s what has indeed occurred 😐

I happened to be out of bed at about 4.00am last night and when I took a look outside, my garden was completely clear of any frost or snow. But when I got up just before 9.00am it was snowing hard and there was already a covering of at least eight or nine centimeters. Since then it has continued without stopping and although the snowfall is now only very light, at the time of writing it is still coming down. It seems that a large weather system that was moving in off the Atlantic towards the UK decided to turn south during the night and aim for the west coast of France. As it came further south it linked up with another smaller system moving into France at the southern end of the Bay of Biscay setting up a kind of pincer movement. When the two systems had come together, they then dumped their loads right over us 🙂

I checked up to discover where all of this snow had come from and if you click on the image below you can see a short video that I made that shows what happened in the preceding 24 hours.

I decided that there was no point trying to get anything done today because it would have been a thankless task bringing materials indoors through the snow. Things I left outside are under quite a few centimeters now and I couldn’t face trudging indoors with tons of the stuff on each boot then having it falling off all over the floor. Toddie loves the snow and we’ve been out in it several times, but even he’s found it a bit heavy going now that he’s older. So I decided that I’d just spend the day taking a few pictures around my house and garden to show what it’s like and sticking them up here on My Trike. So here they are.

And finally, one taken much later in the day looking east out over the field across the road from my house.

And to round the day off, if you click on the pic below you can see a short video I shot of today’s snowfall.

The forecast is that over the next couple of days or so we’ll have temperatures as low as -11 degrees C so I guess that we’ll not see much change until things start to warm up again around Saturday. Until then I think the best idea will be to stay indoors and keep warm 😉

To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s immortal words, it’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning …of my fireplace, that is. And I’m already totally knackered 🙂 Here’s a pic I took a couple of days ago when I’d finished pointing in the stonework.

In the meantime, I’ve had a couple of other things to do. For example, after yet more internet searching, I’ve found yet another tile manufacturer about 200 miles away up in the Vendee who has a range of tiles that look the closest yet to what I have on my floor. They also have them in every possible size and yesterday I phoned them to arrange for some samples to be sent down to me. I don’t know whether I succeeded because after I’d told her what I needed and offered to pay for them using my banker’s card, the young lady said she would phone me back but hasn’t. I guess I’ll have to wait and see. I found them while I was looking for tiles for the platform I’m constructing but if their tiles really are as close to my existing ones as I think, I’ll buy some more for the floor and won’t bother using the ones I bought from the Point.P builder’s merchants.

So today I got cracking on the platform itself. I have to confess that I haven’t been looking forward to this job. I have to work to some fairly critical dimensions for the tiling I have planned to work and I always knew from experience that this job would be heavy work too. Anyway, I nearly finished it by this evening but decided to stop with one more block to go, when I ran out of mortar and it had got dark outside. And besides which I was tired with an aching back after lugging the concrete blocks around that I’ve used to form the structure. Here’s a pic that I took after I’d had a hot shower and a meal showing today’s progress.

I’ll finish off the basic platform structure tomorrow and then it’ll be ‘onwards and upwards’ – literally, as it still needs to be made quite a bit higher. I’ve got the plans for that in hand already 😉

It occurred to me today that in the last few months I’ve spent much more time talking about things to do with my house than with microlighting. In part this has been due to the time of year and the weather especially, which has meant that it’s been impossible to work on the X-Air outside whereas I have been able to do things inside my house. But the way I see it, microlighting and my house are inextricably linked – I came to France for a new life in which microlighting will play a pivotal role, but in order for this to be possible, I have to have a viable home. That’s it in a nutshell really, so although the balance will inevitably alter as the year progresses and circumstances change, while microlighting is ‘on the back-burner’, I’ll be taking the opportunity to devote as much time as I can to working on and in my home and talking about my experiences here on My Trike while I’m doing so. But it’ll be nice to be back up in the air soon, though, which reminds me that I must sort out a doctor and get a letter organised so when the time does come, I can get cracking on my French ‘brevet’ 🙂

If I’m not careful I shall start to adopt the French habit of downing-tools at the drop of a hat for an extended lunch! I began pointing my fireplace this morning but didn’t really get going as early as I should have. When the mortar that I’d mixed ran out at about 12.30pm that was my excuse to wash my buckets and trowels and have my lunch. It’s already nearly 1.45pm and at this rate I won’t get started again until 2.00pm at the earliest so I’ll have had a lunch break of truly French proportions 🙂

Once again, it’s not a very nice day to be doing anything that involves going outside. We’re still stuck in this high pressure ‘anti-cyclonic gloom’ which means that it’s cold and misty and everything is dripping wet. So every time I go outside to get anything it’s like being in a Scotch mist and when I come back indoors I walk in mud and soggy leaves, which is getting very annoying. The last time, it had begun to gently drizzle so I had to cover the new sand, which is still in my open trailer, with a small tarpaulin that I bought yesterday to stop it getting too wet.

When I go down to Montignac, as I did yesterday, I leave the mist behind and it’s just dull but as I come back up the hill to my house, I ascend into the cloud base which must be just about at the level of the tops of the hills around Plazac. I went to Montignac yesterday for the best of reasons. First, I needed to replace the ‘water squirter’ bottle that I’d left behind in England (I’m finding that I could now do with more and more of the things from my old garage that I left behind) because it’s the best way to damp down the joints on my fireplace that I want to point in, and while I was in ‘les Briconautes’ I also took the opportunity to buy a hose pipe. But the highlight of the visit came when I then dropped into Point.P from where I’d received a phone call a little bit earlier to pick up the further four ‘parefeuille’ floor tiles that the lovely lady there had managed to find for me after I’d mentioned it to her the other day. How good of her was that!

So I’ve now got more than enough to do the floor in my ‘sejour’, which is really good news and means that I can now press on at full speed to sort out my ‘cheminee’ and get my wood-burner installed. And the other bit of good news is that as I’ve been typing this, I’ve checked the bit of pointing that I did this morning and it looks as though it will dry out to be the perfect colour. So now I must get off my lunch break and back to work – well, after I’ve had a quick cuppa that is 😉

7.55pm and I’m back to say that although I haven’t finished, the job has gone well today. The mortar hasn’t by any means dried, but the one or two very thin areas which are the most dry have come up satisfying light. The rest still looks pretty dark so I’ll have to wait and see how it looks tomorrow. Although we have had a succession of horrible misty, damp days, we haven’t had rain for a little while. The annoying thing is that this evening it’s decided to give us a hard drizzle, which has resulted in a small amount of water running down the chimney and over an area of the pointing. So far it doesn’t look to have done any harm so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it stays that way 😐

At last! My new wood-burner arrived this afternoon. I was pretty lucky actually because I had to go out today as I’ll explain later, and somehow I instinctively knew that I’d missed something when I got home. Deliveries have arrived several times when I’ve been out and it’s OK when I then find a non-delivery slip left by ‘La Poste’ and can pick the item in question up the next day at Plazac’s little post office. But somehow I sensed that today was different, and sure enough, when I checked my home phone there had been a call from a mobile about twenty minutes earlier. To cut a long story short, when I rang the number, it was from the driver delivering my new wood-burner and I had to explain (in French of course) how to find my house from Montignac from where, coincidentally, I’d just come.

The young driver reversed his truck down towards my house and shortly afterwards lowered my wood-burner to ground level on its tail lift. He was kind enough to then drag it on his trolley across the soft ground and deposit it right in my kitchen, and lucky he did too, because it’s a very large lump of cast iron and weighs a heck of a lot! After I’d removed the protective wood packaging, here’s a shot I took of it.

Here’s another shot I took with the door open showing the ‘foyer’ which takes logs up to 50cm in length.

I’ve still got a bit to do to prepare my fireplace to take it and already I can foresee that getting it up onto the platform I’ll be making for it to stand on will not be the easiest thing in the world. Maybe when the time comes, I’ll get an experienced pro in to do it for me, the way it says to do on the label on the door 😉

The reason I missed the driver’s initial phone call was because I’d been down to the Point.P builders merchants yard in Montignac. Over the week end I’d tried to make a start on my fireplace and the first job is re-pointing all of the stonework inside it to repair the damage done to it in the past when it was used as an open hearth. I’d bought some sand for the job from Brico Depot and was worried at the time about the colour – the existing pointing is a gorgeous pale honey colour and I was worried about the new sand being too dark. And I was right. As soon as I put some against the stonework it was obvious that it was not only much too dark but also just didn’t match the colour of the stone at all. So I’d just used what I’d mixed up to re-cement a loose stone and to do a few small repairs on the front wall of my house, scratching out enough of the cement afterwards so I could eventually point in using mortar of the correct colour. I’d then checked on the internet and the Point.P web site said that they stocked soft yellow sand in 35kg bags. Sorted, or so I thought. I’d then gone to Point.P yesterday only to be told that they didn’t stock bags of sand but could supply as much as I wanted ‘en vrac’ (in bulk) and did I have something with me to put it in? I said that I didn’t but that I’d be back with my trailer today, so that’s where I’d been when the driver had made his call.

The helpful young lady in the office had told me yesterday to just drive into the yard, load as much sand as I needed and then come back and pay for it in the office. So that’s what I did today. I asked whether they could supply me with one of the large plastic bags like the ones I’d left behind in England to load the sand in in my trailer and she said that they could, and a ‘Big Bag’ would cost me just over 12€. I expected the sand to be loaded with a shovel by hand but that didn’t happen. Shortly after I’d arrived, a couple of French guys turned up with a van towing quite a large trailer and ordered some gravel. The yard man arrived driving a motorised shovel like a smallish JCB, picked up a bucket load and just shot it straight into the trailer until one of the French chaps signalled him to stop, so that gave me an idea about what to expect. When it came to my turn, I told the man driving the shovel about my wanting a Big Bag. He asked me how much sand I wanted, 500kg? 600kg? I said that I only wanted around 200kg (even that was 6 bags-worth at the internet rate of 35kg/bag) and he laughed and gestured with his hands to show me how much of a Big Bag that would take up. So I had to laugh too, and just told him to drop it straight into my trailer. The shovel has a weighing scale attached to it, and after he’d dropped some in he told me that it was actually 300kg. So that’s what I told the young lady in the office, and she made me out an invoice for the princely sum of – wait for it – 8.53€ including tax. That’s about £6.45 and I was gob-smacked. That doesn’t seem like a lot of money to me, and the sand is an absolutely perfect match from what I can see. There were two sands to choose from, one a deep yellow and the other very pale in colour. I chose the latter and found out afterwards that it’s just called ‘sable a batir’ or building sand, and the deep yellow one is the one described as ‘sable jaune’.

While in the office, I also bumped into the lady who’d got hold of my floor tiles for me. I asked her if there was any chance that she might be able to find three or four more, and she said that although she didn’t think so, she’d ask the question and let me know. Do you know, I just love the people down here because they are so friendly and so helpful.

As the delivery driver was getting ready to leave, my friend Wim turned up for a cup of tea together. We chatted about this and that and I said that I’d give my right arm to have a covered workshop like the one Victor is building at his place, because the way things are going with the weather (yet another dull, foggy, dripping-wet day again today) I’d never be able to make a start on the X-Air at this rate. Wim then had a great idea. I still have the huge black tarpaulin in my ‘cave’ that I’ll be using to make covers for the X-Air out of. Wim suggested that what I should do is buy some timber, which is not expensive here, and make a temporary covered workshop using the tarpaulin to cover a framework made as a kind of lean-to against the side of my house. Pure genius. The vertical poles wouldn’t need to be fixed permanently in the ground and I could run a cable from the house into it for lighting and power. All I’d need would be to position it over the flattest area of grass possible, which would unfortunately make it cover my bathroom and toilet windows, but that wouldn’t matter for a few weeks. So that’s something I’m now seriously going to look into – what a really useful conversation, eh?

This morning I also managed to get up to Rouffignac to buy two more gas bottles for my hot water and cooking. One had been empty for some time and I’d been meaning to go for quite a while but hadn’t got around to it. The second one began to show the tell-tale signs of running out last night, so today was a good opportunity to replace both of them, which I managed to do without hic-cup. So today turned out to be an all-round good day, which was very nice. But I still gulp a bit every time I go into the kitchen and walk around my new wood-burner. In the flesh it sure is a bit of a whopper 😕

I’ve never met my old friend Vin, not in person anyway. Yet I feel that I know him well and have a great affinity for who and what he is and the life he has lived. Vin is now 80 and after bringing up a large and extended family, has given up his past life in New York State and moved with his wife of many years to a retirement home in Florida. It was Vin who, when I expressed my fears about moving from my life in the UK to a new life in retirement in France, told me to put aside my reservations and ‘follow my bliss’, so I am one who owes him a genuine debt of gratitude. I know that Vin deeply misses his old life and every now and again it stirs him and we are privileged to share a few glimpses of it with him. Vin has a knack of expressing the truths of life in a very human way with which I, and many others I suspect, truly identify and he did it again earlier today with a posting on a forum of which we are both members that harked back in a beautiful way to his past life in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. I have reproduced it below exactly as he wrote it and I hope others will enjoy it as much as I did.

“BUBO VIRGINIANUS”

Bethel Catskill Mts. NY 1970s

AKA the great Horned Qwl…A Magnificent Bird of prey.a Silent Assassin of Varmints!One of the good guys! I go back with them for many years!

Every January, in the afternoon,in deep winter,in the big woods.on Snow shoes,my Beagle and I,pursuing the Show Shoe Rabbit…Always very cold, Heavy Snow bending the conifers into a cathedral like effect, Dark Slate Grey cold Sky..and very still.

Nellie my hound would start cold trailing,then would burst forth with her singing saying I’m on him. Then round and round in great circles ,the Rabbit would run,Dog in chase!!..Tough on the dog,the deep snow,but for a Rabbit with Snow Feet? No Problem.But the end is always the same!

After we got the big White Rabbit,I would take what I needed.For the six of us Three would suffice.

I would make a fire of the dried evergreen limbs…Soon a roaring fire.The tidbits s from the dressed Rabbitt were welcome by Nelli.

While it may have been 15Deg..We were Wet,and sweaty,making it feel colder1..so Off with the heavy clothes,festooning them on limbs around the fire.Down to my shorts,except for my Sorel boots…Standing there .getting warm,and the clothes steaming in that cold air.A shot of booze helps!

It was moments like this the Great Horned Owl,would stat their Hooting.
would make the hair stand up on the back of yer neck

It was then I felt in harmony with nature, fire,dog, game,relieving the continuity of countless previous generation..A very familiar and gratifying feeling…Who knows..Neanderthal may live in me…

Owls lay their next generation that time of the year.And 26 to 35 days later,The chicks are born.In the Woods,March and April are a time for starvation.The deer getting heavy with fawn,food scarce.But the owl takes advantage,desperate Varmints throw caution away..results the chicks growing fat.

Then its home,retracing my trail,Snow shoes swishing,the added weight of the Rabbits,the thought of "Hasenpfeffer" in the pot.

Soon the unmistakable smell of wood smoke, wafting threw the fridged air ..Home is over the next rise..and its warmth,and glow make me go faster…

Then like the Great Hunter I ARE!, Bursting threw the door,covered in frost,I am received in the adulation of my Wife,and the kids…Who want to stroke the white fur..Of which it was used!

.I used to save and cure the foot of rabbits…A Rabbit Foot is a "LUCKY CHARM" whos power never should be never discounted!

But these memories are years ago !,The single memory I have,is hearing the distant hooting of lord of the winter woods..The Great Horned Owl!..I’m sure he will be always there! so will I as long as I can remember!! 😉

My goodness, here we are again, at the beginning of another year. The last twelve months seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye but I cannot remember a year in which so many changes have happened in my life in such a short time. It seems extraordinary that in a few days time, it will be exactly 12 months since I saw my house in Plazac for the first time and now here I am, living in it, and for over seven months too!

But as everyone knows, my plans didn’t all come successfully to fruition in 2012. My adventure flying MYRO almost the whole length of France in questionable visibility and arriving safely at my intended destination, a tiny grass strip in the middle of nowhere, was followed by the massive disappointment of an accident on take off that mercifully left me and my passenger uninjured but MYRO badly damaged. But this disappointment was more than offset by the support I received from the amazing new friends I have made here and with their encouragement I determined that I would only allow this to be a temporary setback. And that’s how it’s now turning out as I have since got back onto track with the purchase of a replacement aircraft, a French built 582 X-Air, that I plan to be flying early in 2013.

Sadly, I was let down badly by one person in 2012 who I had thought was a friend but turned out not to be, but the warmth, generosity and goodness shown to me by others who have since become true friends has more than made up for the spitefulness demonstrated by the one other.

I hope and believe that 2013 will be an exciting year for me and I look forward to sharing whatever it brings with my friends both here in France and back in the UK and also with my family. I doubt that everything will go to plan, things never do, but that won’t be important. What I’ve learnt as I’ve got older is that sharing the ups and downs with your friends and loved ones is what really matters. So as well as wishing everyone a happy, prosperous and peaceful 2013, may I also wish you all the good fortune of being able to do exactly that with those close to you in the coming year.

gone tomorrow. I popped down to the supermarket today to pick up a few things and there was hardly a trace of Christmas to be seen anywhere! Sure, there are still decorations to be seen here and there and the ones put out in the towns and villages by the local councils will still be there in February or early March if last year is anything to go by. But unlike in the UK where the Christmas break often drags out for a couple of weeks or so, here everything is already back to some sort of normality. Only Christmas and New Year’s Days are official holidays and this showed with the number of local commercial vehicles out on the road and businesses open for business.

The supermarket itself was relatively empty but the shelves that had previously been loaded up with Christmas goodies had already been stripped and were being reorganised before being re-stocked with regular items. There was hardly a sign of Christmas to be seen anywhere in the store. But at least here in France I have been saved the sight of chocolate Easter Eggs being splashed all across the shelves as I’m told is already now happening back in England 😐

We had a lovely warm, sunny day today (with the same or warmer expected again tomorrow) so I took the opportunity to pull my new little trailer out and give it a proper once-over. I must say, I’m very pleased with it. The dimensions of the ‘caisse’ (box) are 1.50m x 1.05m and there’s not a dent or ding on it anywhere. If I gave it a good clean up and its undercarriage a coat of hammerite, with a bit of TLC it could pass for nearly new – well, that’s if you close your eyes a little bit … 🙂 The best thing about buying something like this second-hand is that you can put it to work straight away without having to worry about all the scratches that you’re putting on it, and that’s important for me as I’m going to be carting around concrete blocks, rubble and all manner of scratchy stuff.

Not that I don’t want it to look nice. Today I ordered some new black mudguards for it, from the UK again. I searched quite a bit but found it almost impossible to find suitable replacement mudguards over here and what I did manage to set eyes on were grossly over-priced compared to the abundance of items available from the UK. So that’s where I ordered some from. Since placing the order, quite by chance I came across some similar ones on a French web site, while I was looking for a suitable ‘bache’ (cover) but it’s too late now.

The ones I ordered were in black plastic because although I would have preferred metal, I think I stand more of a chance of being able to re-use the same bolt holes if I get ones of similar shape to those that I’ve taken off. I also tidied up the cable run using cable ties in the best microlighting tradition, to replace the tatty old bits of wire that the previous owner had used and here are some shots that I took afterwards, this afternoon.

As you can see, it has a ‘roue de secours’ (spare wheel) and a ‘roue jockey’ which many trailers over here don’t have, especially smaller ones. I’ve now just got to wait for my new number plate to arrive, probably tomorrow as I know it has been despatched, and then for the new mudguards. They’ll not be here until after Christmas as the seller only ships to the UK (silly eh…) and they’ll have to be forwarded on by a family member. Until then, the trailer will stay tucked away in the handy place I have for it, under the tree in the corner of my garden, where it fits very snugly.

Today was also a cracking day for flying with excellent vis, bright sunny skies and very little wind. I heard Wim’s Weedhopper approaching from the other side of Plazac and to my great envy he did two low passes over my house. His little aircraft looked very pretty in the sunshine as he flew overhead. At least I know that every day that passes is another day closer to when I’ll be able to join him and do the same 😀

It’s been raining lightly, yes still :-|, for almost the whole morning so when it stopped I thought I’d take the opportunity to see if I could fix my trailer indicator problem. It seems almost impossible to find a clear colour coded wiring diagram for my car on the internet so knowing that I’d already searched and got the information once I decided I’d have to rely on my original notes. The left indicator wiring colour is black/white.

As soon as I removed my rear lamp I could see what the problem was. There are two black/white wires – the heavier one that I’d tapped into obviously does the reversing light and I just knew that the other one was for the indicator. I checked it the best I could using my Robin meter but by now it was already beginning to drizzle again, so I thought to heck with it, just re-do the connection. And I was right, when I connected the trailer cable and switched on the left indicator I heard the tell-tale beep sounding reassuringly loud and clear and the trailer’s indicator was flashing merrily away.

But this was with my new trailer lighting board which I still had connected. What about if I went for broke and plugged in the trailer’s own cable, which the previous owner had said was ‘a revoir’? By now it was drizzling pretty hard but I couldn’t wait to find out. I switched over the plugs and first tried out the rear lights. They were fine. Then I tried each indicator in turn, with and without the rear lights. Perfect. Now finally, the brake lights. I had to find a length of wood to wedge my brake pedal and they also worked OK – so then I had to try them with rear lights and with the flashers working. Everything worked great and even all of the bulbs were OK, so it looks as though the previous owner was just being cautious in his ad. By the time I’d cleared everything away I was pretty wet but I was pleased to have sorted everything out. I’ve already ordered a single registration plate (in traditional French aluminium rather than plastic) to go on the back of the trailer and I’m going to look for some aluminium to make some new mudguards for it. When they’re on I think I’ll have a nice little trailer that will be worth quite a bit more than I paid for it, so I think it was worth getting wet to find that out 🙂

Ever since I fitted the towbar on my car, the wiring for the trailer’s left indicator hasn’t worked. I’ve checked it over and over again and finally concluded that the problem was something to do with the little beeper alarm unit that you have to wire in nowadays that tells you if your trailer’s indicators are working or not. It remained distinctly silent whenever I activated the left indicator and, of course, the trailer left indicator light didn’t flash. I felt so strongly that the problem lay with the beeper unit that I even contacted the towbar supplier and got them to send me a new one, which they very kindly did, probably with a big sigh, although I’ve never got around to fitting it as I’ve not needed to tow anything since I brought the X-Air home. One of the things I took with me yesterday was my new trailer board that I’d never had to use up till then. The trailer’s previous owner had said in his ad that the electrics are ‘a revoir’ (need fixing) so I thought it would be a good idea to take it, and as he’d forgotten to remove his old number plate it was lucky that I did. So I came all the way home with my number plate and an almost full set of trailer lights except for the left indicator.

This morning despite the continuing rain, I thought that as the trailer was still on the car I’d nip up to the ‘déchetterie’ (waste disposal site) in Rouffignac and get rid of an old metal swinging hammock frame left by the previous resident of my house that has been outside my back door ever since I arrived here and that I cut up a few days ago. I started the car and swung it around and then put it into reverse to back the trailer up towards where the bits of frame were lying. As I engaged reverse I heard an instantly recognizable tell-tale beep and I immediately knew what it was. I disengaged reverse and the beep stopped only to restart when I engaged reverse again.

What a twerp! I’d wired the trailer’s left indicator into the car’s left reversing light! I have no idea how I managed to make such a silly mistake because I’ve checked the cable colour code time and time again without spotting it. But how lucky to discover it now because although changing over the wire on the car’s rear lamp cluster is a relatively simple job (if and when the rain ever stops), replacing the beeper unit is much more difficult and involves stripping out quite a lot of rear trim. I’ll soon have the trailer indicator working but it just goes to show – no matter how careful you are, it’s still easy to make silly mistakes. Lucky it was only a little bit of trailer wiring eh, and not something more serious 😉

I went off on another one of my French jaunts today, over to the Poitou-Charente to buy a small trailer. It was a bit of a way to go because the trailer didn’t cost a lot of money and it took me most of the day to get there and back, but I don’t mind because I welcome the opportunity to see a bit more of France and don’t see trips like this as just being a cost of petrol. Not that I managed to see that much today because the ruddy weather got up to a few tricks.

It was chucking it down while I loaded up my tool kit, some other things that I needed to take with me and Toddie so I was already feeling pretty soggy by the time I got on the road. I was heading for a town called Médis over on France’s south-west coast some way to the north of Bordeaux, and I was looking forward to driving through a large chunk of France’s Bordelais wine growing region which I’d last visited when I was working in the wine trade back in around 1974/5. I drove past field after field of vines but what was really noticeable was how flooded the land was with many fields containing what were often almost small lakes of standing water. And it was hardly surprising because for the first part of the journey the rain just pelted down non-stop, and even as the sky cleared as I got closer to the coast, some small but violent storms kept sweeping through with rain so heavy that at times it was like driving through a car wash making the road ahead hardly visible.

My trusty sat-nav took me right to the trailer seller’s door and as I liked the look of the trailer, which I’d only seen as a small picture on the internet, we did a deal in a few minutes. But before we could get it hitched to my car it began to fall down again and we had to rush indoors to keep dry. It stopped again after a few minutes and we shook hands and said our good-byes. On the way home I saw what I think was the most intense double rainbow that I’ve ever seen that seemed to have its foot in the field alongside the road and I could have kicked myself for not having my camera with me but as darkness fell, the drive just became more and more tedious because of the constant muck and spray being thrown up by the traffic.

But the little trailer ran beautifully. I’ve been told that unlike England, there’s no trailer speed limit over here and I was quite happy to whizz along with it at 110 kmh (70 mph) even in those driving conditions. Not long after I’d got home, my phone rang and it was the trailer seller’s wife. She speaks a bit of English and we’d had a conversation together about the trailer last night. She was just phoning to check that I’d got home safely because she knew that the weather had been bad. I thought that was a lovely thing to do and is so typical of nearly all of the people I’ve come across down here. Would it have happened back in England? I really don’t know… 😐

Yeah, I should be so lucky! Of the Pelforth variety that is. It’s just gone 4.30pm, I’ve just come in from the garden and I’m feeling quite warm, so a cold beer is going down a treat. The weather forecast said that it would get up to 12 or 13 degrees C today and I think it did, which was very welcome after the recent cold snap we’ve had. Yesterday we had non-stop rain all day and I think most, if not all, of the night too, and the forecast said that we’d have some more light showers today. As the X-Air has been standing outside for just over 9 weeks and hasn’t been either started or even had its engine turned, I’ve been wanting to get out there and get it running. But I needed a day that was warm and dry because when the cover is off, the cabin is completely open and also, because the prop is made of wood, I needed to have enough time to fit it, run the engine and take it off again afterwards.

Lo and behold, today dawned bright and sunny and although the ground and trees were wet, there was a wind that was brisk and warm enough to start everything drying up. I had to nip down to the Intermarche to buy a few things because at this time of year it closes on Sundays, and by the time I’d done my chores, had some lunch and finished pottering around, you know what it’s like, it was going on for 3.00pm. And still no rain! So I decided that was it!

In no time at all I had the X-Air’s covers off, its prop on and some chocks under the main wheels. I decided to put Toddie indoors just in case, because although he’s normally sensible enough to stay clear of noisy engines and moving props, his hearing is going now and I’m worried that he just might not realise that he could be heading for danger. I wondered if the battery had held enough charge to start the engine but my fears were quite groundless. There is no fuel tap so all I had to do was pump fuel up to fill the fuel filter ‘and a bit more’. Then a turn of the key and after a few turns, the engine burst into life. There was loads of charge in the battery and the engine sounded great and after it had warmed up a bit I did a mag check. A tad more drop on the right mag than on the left, but all well within limits. I set the revs to 3000 rpm and watched as the water temperature came up. It steadied at around 60 degrees C which I thought was OK and then I made sure I was holding the brakes and opened up the throttle. The engine revs picked up very quickly, quicker than I can remember other 582s doing, and I had to make sure that I didn’t over-rev the engine. Maybe the quick pick-up has something to do with the wooden prop, but it bodes well I think. I’d noticed when I checked around the engine before starting it that there is quite a bit of slack movement in the throttle cables and this translated into a lot of free play in the throttle lever, so this is something that I’ll have to deal with when I come to it. But even so, the engine had a rev range from tick-over (approx 2200 rpm) to over 6000 rpm so there were no problems other than that.

I ran the engine for around 10 minutes to warm it right through and then switched off. Some 582s are pigs to re-start when warm so after I’d let it stand for a short while, I re-started the engine. No problems, it started as sweetly as anything. I repeated the cycle a few times and then decided that as the sky was greying up a bit, it would be a good idea to put the aircraft back to bed. Just as I began to remove the prop there were a few spots of rain, but I’d kept the covers and bungee ties to hand and pretty soon had everything covered back up, better than before actually. So that was it, I’d run the engine for the first time and was very pleased with the results. I suppose I should be really, because I think I was the last to fly the aircraft with Bertrand and it should be in a perfectly flyable condition if it was re-rigged. Here are some shots that I took of it this afternoon.

I’ve just looked outside again and the rain that threatened has not yet materialised. I can see the X-Air outside my window all nicely covered up but I can’t see me doing anything on it this side of Christmas. I will be able, of course, to make a start on my new panel when the stuff I’ve ordered arrives so at least there is that, but I can’t wait for it to be all back together again and ready to go. Here’s to 2013 😀

I’m writing this on a cold, wet Dordogne afternoon so the weather isn’t much to be cheery about. But a few other things that have been happening have put a smile on my face, though. First, my ‘sejour’ floor tiles. At the end of last week, I happened to drop into my local Point P builders merchants in Montignac in the hope of seeing some tiles that they show on their group internet site that they say are held in stock. The lovely lady there said that actually they didn’t stock them and that they’d have to be ordered in especially, which is hardly surprising considering the state of the economy, but was able to show me a sample from the same range but in a colour (‘Rose’) that I didn’t want. Somehow I just knew from the look of it that the ones I’d hoped to see, in ‘Rouge Flamme’ and ‘Languedoc’, also wouldn’t be close enough to match my floor and as there were no other customers in the showroom, we got talking about the problems I was having in finding the right tiles. I mentioned that I had some photographs in my car and when I showed them to her she immediately said that mine are old tiles called ‘parefeuilles’, which are characterised by their very variable colours and which are no longer available. However, she said that she might be able to help and got onto the phone. She asked me how many I needed and when she’d finished speaking said that if I left her my contact details, she’d have 20 for me the following week. I could hardly believe it! After driving around much of southern France without success, here was someone in the builders merchants just down the road saying that she could get me what I wanted 😐

And sure enough, after receiving a call from her on Wednesday, I went in to see her yesterday. She said that unfortunately, she could only get 13 tiles, but I could tell immediately that they would do the job. The reds are very close in colour to my existing tiles – you have to flood the surface with water first to imitate the treatment that you apply to make them shine – and the lighter ones, which are a little too light (but I’m not complaining) do indeed have traces of red in them that make them look very similar to the ones I currently have. But I’ve got another little trick up my sleeve 😉 The new tiles are unglazed and are therefore quite absorbent. They are also not perfectly smooth – their surface is a bit like comparing matt paint to gloss. But a few days ago I ordered a diamond concrete polishing tool from Ebay USA which I was originally intending to try out on a sample tile that I recently received from a supplier in Millau to see if I could make a rough, hand-made tile perfectly smooth. Now I’ll be able to use it on these new ones and because they’re very absorbent (water is just sucked into them) I’ll also be able to experiment with adding dashes of say, red and yellow concrete colouring to them to see if I can make them look even more like my existing tiles, especially the lighter ones. I can afford to give it a go because 13 isn’t enough to do the whole area in question but more than enough for the patch in front of my fireplace and also, amazingly, the lovely lady at Point P only charged me 20€ for the whole lot because they were an ‘end of stock’ disposal! So good news at last on my tiles!

I’ve also had an excellent result for my wood-burner! I’ve been relying during the recent cold weather on the electric heaters that I bought a few weeks ago and I must admit that they haven’t really been up to the job. Sure, the house isn’t cold, but it isn’t warm either and everyone has been telling me that I must get a wood-burner installed ASAP. The choice of wood-burner was also going to be influenced to a great extent by the availability of floor tiles to fill the ‘pit’ that currently exists in the fireplace and now I pretty much know how many tiles I have to play with, I have been able to work out a suitable design for a platform to stand the stove on in the hearth itself and the floor in front of it. My fireplace is quite wide and high so even with the platform design I have in mind, it will need quite a large wood-burner to look right. I’ve been searching the local small ads (petites annonces) for wood-burners (poeles a bois) for some time but without success. I love the French, but as I’ve said before, they seem to have some silly ideas about what second-hand items are worth. If you buy something like a stove for 700€ and use it for two or three years, in my mind you can’t then expect someone to come and pick it up from you and hand over 500-600€ for the privilege. But they do! The classic that I came across yesterday was an advertiser asking 450€ for a poele a bois that is currently being sold for 429€ in Brico Depot outlets all over France 😀

But I digress. Lots of the stoves that are being sold are also quite old, so as well as being a bit tatty, they are not as efficient as newer models. Most of the used stoves on offer are also of quite low power, and that’s if the seller knows the figure anyway, and I reckon I need at least a 10kW model for my house. And the latest ‘green’ models also have dual-burn designs to increase their efficiency and allow them to burn for 10 hours or even more so you can keep the house warm overnight. So taking it all round, stumping up 300-400€ for an older-design used poele a bois and also having to pay to pick it up seemed to me to be a bit of a false economy, but what to do? Search the internet, as usual, that’s what. So I did, diligently, and I came up trumps. Some time ago, I’d found a web site selling wood-burners called www.habitatshop.fr and to cut a long story short, when I returned to it this time, I realised that your first order is delivered FREE! Most similar web sites charge anything from 60-100€ to deliver a wood-burner, so this was immediately quite a saving. And in my search for what I was looking for, I eventually found this.

This is the Invicta Altea, a cast iron 10kW model of dual-burn, ‘clean glass’ design, that fitted my requirements down to the ground. I found it on various web sites for anything from around a heavily discounted 650€ on the web up to around 800€ in the shops, but I was very satisfied with the deal I got at www.habitatshop.fr of only 570€ including delivery 😀

So now I can get on with doing my floor and fireplace while I’m waiting for it to be delivered. What else? Yep, I’ve also moved forward a bit more with my X-Air panel design. I was rather disappointed to find that the current panel layout only has a water temperature gauge as I would also like to have an EGT (exhaust gas temperature) gauge to show the health of the engine in flight. It would need tappings in the exhaust manifold to take the sensors, just as MYRO had, but I thought it would be uneconomic to fit a replacement if the existing one didn’t have them, which I assumed would be the case. In fact, when I checked the other day, the tappings are there with blanking plugs, so I can go ahead and fit the EGT gauge as I would like. This, of course, means slightly modifying my panel design, and here’s what I’ve now come up with.

I’ve also ordered some hole cutters (80mm for the large gauges and 57mm for the small) from Ebay in the UK as well as a couple of very nice waterproof ‘cigarette lighter’ sockets from Vehicle Wiring Products, my usual supplier in the UK. So pretty soon I’ll be able to get cracking on my new panel. All in all, a very satisfying week 🙂