Day: January 15, 2013

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’ 🙂