Working Hard - Honest

The past couple of weeks have seen us working hard on the barn, and making a fair bit of progress. Tina has now gone the length of the room with her pointing, up to ladder height while I have more or less finished the jointing on the walls up to ladder height as well, so we are both queueing up to use the scaffold.






The inside of the fireplace shows of the pointing quite well, even allowing for my slanting photo.

I'm not sure how well my jointing of the plasterboard on the walls is going. It looks OK at the moment, and I have been checking them all with a flat edge, but the moment of truth will be when we paint the walls, when I have a nasty feeling that you will be able to see every single joint that I have slaved over. Still, if the worst comes to the worst, we can skim all the walls and repaint it!

Mr Chatillon has now finished all of his work, including fitting the internal doors. I ended up working as a carpenters mate to help him finish, working until 7pm on Friday night. Outrageous!I hardly ever worked that late at the Banque de Cheval Nior, only if we were doing and installation, or if I was being threatened by fat Welshmen and coke head contractors (allegedly) .

We are not quite sure what Mr Chatillon made of our music. We like to listen to BBC 6 Music while we are working, and we're not sure that he was ready for indie guitar bands, and we could have turned him into a 60 year old goth after hearing the new Queens of the Stone Age single.( Je suis le seul goth dans le village ... as he goes to the news agents for his copy of Kerrang).

The doors look even better than we had hoped, and start to make it look like a proper room. Tina quickly varnished them, to try and stop me from dripping plaster all over them, as if that will stop me.












Away from the building work, we temporarily acquired some livestock last weekend. On Saturday night, at about 10 o'clock Tina looked up and saw a sheep at the top of our drive. We rushed out and tried to herd it up the road to the gate so we could put it back in one of Thiery's fields, but it was having none of it. We tried using French commands, venez, allez, allons y, but to no avail. And cats are no substitute for a collie at times like this.

Next, I ran over to Thiery's house to get some help, but there was no-one home. So I ran back home, got my bike out and cycled down the hill to get Thiery's dad. Five minutes later we were back, after me pushing my bike half way up the hill, but the sheep was nowhere to be found. Tina had gone back in the house for a minute, as she was worried that the sheep was getting a bit panicky, and when she came back out, it had gone.

I searched along the road, but there was no sign of it.

So the next day I went to tell Thiery what had happened, but I needn't have worried, the sheep was waiting for them when they got home on Saturday night. It turns out that the sheep had just been separated from it's lambs for the first time, so it had escaped and gone looking for them.

I also found out that it was an English sheep, so if we had tried herding it in English, it might have understood us!

Time Off

It's not all work,work, work over here. As the 3 day week has been wearing us out a bit, we have had a few days out lately.

Last month, we had a day out at the races, in Limoges, with our friends Jane and Pete. The course is quite small, with one sand, and it only costs 6 Euros to get in. We followed the French, and stood in the middle of the course, where there was a temporary bar, a food tent and the PMU bookmakers hut. A lot of people had their dogs with them, something you are not allowed to do in the UK, so Jane and Pete could have brought Archie their Border terrier, which would have provided entertainment between races, as he picked a fight with the biggest French dog he could find.

The racing was a mixture of flat racing and trotting ( with the jockey sitting on a buggy). The races all started late, in the French style, and you could tell when each race was getting ready to start when the stewards got on their cherry picker, and were sent skywards.

It took a while to work out the betting, as we thought that you could only do forecasts, but we found that you could also do wins and places as well. I actually had 3 winners in the end, so I was up on the day, even allowing for beer money and sausage and chips.

We left with 3 races still to go, as by this stage the races were 30 minutes late, so at that rate the meeting wouldn't finish until about 9 o'clock at night. They only have two meetings a year at Limoges, but we will definitely go back again.

We've also been to the Cinema for the first time in ages. We went up to Poitiers, where one of the Cinemas was showing the new Spiderman in English (Version Originale) . Strangely, we were the only English people there, but maybe some people prefer to hear the proper voices, rather than the same voice being dubbed over. It's an hour and a half each way to Poitiers, so it's another good excuse for a day off.

A few weeks later friends John and Sue were over with their kids for half term, and we ended up having a couple of late nights, with the girls keeping us up, playing cards all night, so we ended up having days of the next day to recover.

This week was Tina's birthday, so on Thursday we drove down to Bordeaux to watch the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. Its 2 and a bit hours each way to Bordeaux from our house, so it was yet another day off.

We parked up in the centre of town, as it happens quite close to La Tupina. This is a restaurant that was featured on Rick Steins French Oddessy, and has been voted one of the top 50 restaurants in the world . We went along for a look, and it although it was a bit smart and intimidating on the outside, we gave it a go.

It was excellent. We had the menu du jour, which was a cheese salad starter. followed by beef carpacio as a main course, and coffee and petit four to finish, all for 16 euros a head ( Just over a tenner) . The food is all cooked on an open fire, which you pass as you walk in, and Rick Stein waxed lyrical about the chips, which are cooked above the fire, in a bowl of duck fat. Yum. My brother went to Padstow last year, and it turns out that take away fish and chips from Rick Steins chippy cost about the same as our sit down meal in La Tupina. Go figure.

Check out the web link, as it has a good tour, and some menus. They have a 3 course menus for 33 euros, which includes 3 glasses of wine. We will be up for that next time we are in town.

http://www.latupina.com/

We were a bit late getting to the cinema after our unplanned lunch and missed the start of the film, but luckily we knew a bit about the plot (Johnny Depp is a pirate etc etc ) so it didn't matter to much.

The next day, Tina's birthday, we went to Limoges to her some presents. Limoges was packed out, as there was some sort of parade on. It took ages to find a parking space, then our favorite restaurant was all reserved. We ended up in the restaurant next door, which was nice, but not in the same class as the one next door. It did though, serve up comedy deserts in a gallon brandy glass, with a ladle. Luckily they don't make you eat it all, as a gallon of chocolate mouse could probably kill you.

Shopping and birthday are over now, so it's back to the grindstone.

Henri the Building Inspector

Henri, our French kitten has always had a penchant for hide and seek, mostly hiding, but lately he has been taking this to a new level.

He likes to climb trees, and had found a way to get into the top of the pump house by climbing up on a laburnum, then onto the pump house roof, and finally into the attic through a hole in the roof where some tiles had slipped. This reminded me that I needed to fix the roof, which I duly did, much to Henri's disgust.

That stopped him for a while, but he still kept disappearing. Then one day Tina spotted him, climbing up the tree, then shuffling out on two tiny branches ( two paws on each branch) till he was opposite an open attic window, and finally leaping into the open window. On the way out it is even scarier, as he leaps into space, grabs one of the branches and wraps himself around it like a monkey. It's only 10 foot off the ground, but is still a bit scary.

Luckily, he has now found a safer alternative, and has found a way of climbing up the back wall of the study, and climbing in to the attic space there. He does pop his head out occasionally, only to drop down with a loud thud on the ceiling below.

Niemi is not far behind him in the explorer stakes, but being more lady-like, she waits until our bedroom window is open and then climbs out onto the roof from there.

She has also taken to exploring Thiery's field, again taking the lazy option of squeezing through the mesh on the fence, like it was a cat flap.

Henry has also started to dig around the lawn, but for mole crickets, rather than proper moles. The moles have been quiet for a couple of days now.

My friend John has had a bad reaction in his own garden when he put a couple of smoke bombs down. It seemed to make the moles angry, and dig up everywhere at once. This could explain why they have been quiet in our garden, as Charlie may not yet have the resources to fight on two fronts at once. However it may just be a coincidence, as Johns house is half an hour away, so it may not be the same moles.

On the house front, all of the plasterboard is up in the back room, and I have started jointing up the walls and ceiling, while Tina has started pointing the walls.

The pointing seems to bring out the stonework really well. The colour was a bit strange at first, as it looked a lot darker than we imagined, but it tones down nicely when it eventually dries out.