Here is another post not about pigs.
Except to say that we still await the arrival of the phantom piglets. Oh, and Fogarty has learnt to sit on command, to get an acorn treat. Oh, and pigs are clearly capable of learning from others’ mistakes (unlike my son, by his own admission). We know this because when Simon erected a little bit of electric fence to close off one of end pigland, in order to ‘prove the concept’ prior to Yoda’s imminent confinement, Fogarty immediately set about providing us with incontrovertible proof using his curious wet, and highly conductive nose. Yoda and Peppa observed his cartoon-like squealing retreat from a safe distance, and have been extraordinarily careful not to touch the offending wire even once ever since. I guess what people say about pigs being intelligent animals is true after all.
But, this post is not about pigs. It is about our roof.
Last week, Florian finished fixing the bit of our roof that was in dire need of fixing. Now this may sound like a somewhat prosaic subject for a blog post, but, as is so often the case with the commonplace, there is much more to that statement than meets the eye.
Florian, in his guise as Provider of All That We Wish For, first mentioned that he could ‘help us with our roof’ way back in those hazy, lazy days of summer, (which weren’t at all lazy or hazy, but which were at least warm), at the same time as delivering our wished-for hay, and mentioning that he could provide us with our wished-for puppy (or two).
Somehow, in the middle of all our vague thoughts about all the stuff we needed to get round to sorting out about the house, Simon got round to asking Florian to give us a quote for what he would charge to sort out the leaking ridge, and replace all the tiles in the back side of the 70’s extension part of the house (which were flaking, crumbling and sliding off with an alarming degree of regularity). As always, Simon intended to get a few quotes for the job, and choose the cheapest/best. However, as happens with increasing frequency in these chilled-out days of ho hum, he couldn’t be arsed. But he clearly felt a residual hangover from his previous self nagging at his newly laid-back underbrain, and he spent a few weeks seeking reassurance from me, and his trusting heart, before telephoning Florian to let him know we wanted him to do the work. So the cost was confirmed (Simon didn’t even attempt to negotiate it downwards – a New Man indeed), and the date for the commencement of the work agreed.
The morning of the agreed day arrived. Florian didn’t. And then, at lunch time, just when were about to give up hope, Florian turned up in one of his various disreputable vehicles, (the sky blue van) absolutely désolé, but he had been helping a friend whose horse had escaped from a field. It had started to rain.
Simon came back into the house after their greeting conversation to inform me that Florian had arrived and was ‘out in the lane, making his ladder’. I looked out, expecting to see Florian assembling some modular aluminium piece of roofer gear. He wasn’t. He was actually – yes I mean literally – making his roof ladder, out in the road, using old bits of wood, some nails and a hammer. This was going to be a Jolly Interesting Thing to watch.
Having not arrived till the start of the recommended French lunch time, we were just a teensy bit surprised when Florian’s blue van disappeared after about an hour and a half. Clearly lunch time continues to be sacrosanct, even when it’s not at lunch time. He had left his half-mantled ladder, his tools, an open bag of cement and a couple of big buckets in the road, at the entrance to the field outside our gate, where Mr Bull was observing proceedings with interest. I wondered idly what would happen if the farmer arrived with his big tractor to bring water to the bull while Florian was away.
Luckily, I never got to find out. Florian returned within an hour or so, finished his ladderish creations, hoisted it onto the roof, tying it oh-so-securely to another rickety one at the edge of the roof gutter (with a bit of string), scrambled about a bit in the drizzle examining the broken ridge tiles, and then came to tell us he would be back early in the morning. He left his bag of cement out in the road. In the rain.
Early next morning arrived. Florian didn’t. He arrived at about 11.00 am, and got straight to work hauling buckets of cement up to the top of the roof using an ingenious pulley arrangement (made of string), and replacing the ridge tiles, until he ran out of appropriate replacement tiles. Simon had a root around in the various piles of nettle-cloaked old tiles sited randomly (and somewhat inexplicably) around and about the land. Yes! There were some ridge tiles…. No, they weren’t the right sort. Florian called it a day, saying he’d be back tomorrow with some more tiles.
Just to surprise us, he arrived at the ludicrously early hour of 10.00am the next day, this time with his green wreck of a barely-legal car, towing a trailer full of reclaimed roof tiles, and a battered wheelbarrow. He also brought his dog ‘Vague’, who is our puppies’ mother. (Although this may seem a humorously appropriate name for a member of the Florian household, this is of course a French dog! The name translates as ‘Wave’, which is very nice, but hardly humorous at all.) There was much woofing and chasing and pissing about, and general doggy merriment, as Rufus and Stubbs tried to decide whether they were children who wanted to suckle, or grown men who wanted to mark their territory and establish dominance. And in the midst of all the canine kerfuffle, Florian trudged stolidly back and forth with wheelbarrow-loads of tiles, which he piled neatly behind the house in readiness for the next stage.
The it rained some more, and the next day Florian didn’t come. He phoned and said he would continue when the weather improved. Time passed. The weather improved. “This is great weather for for fixing roofs” Simon said. Florian still didn’t come. He did however ring to say he’d come on Friday morning. The weather forecast for that weekend was not great.
Friday lunchtime arrived. Florian didn’t. Friday afternoon arrived. Florian did too, with his big, battered truck. We moved our car, and various bits of equipment, and took down the washing line, and Florian manoeuvred his big truck the long way round to the back of the house, parking it close to the bottom of his dodgy ladder. Then the crashing began, as he proceeded to remove the old tiles and hurl them into the back of his carefully positioned truck.
Soon the sun was setting and we expected Florian to cease crashing and depart. How could he see what he was doing in this fading light? Then the sun disappeared altogether, but Florian’s truck was still there, and so was he. By the light of a nearly full moon, partially obscured by ominous clouds, Florian continued his dismantling activities while we ate dinner and listened to the Archers. And then somehow, between the finishing of the dinner and the washing up, Florian, and his truck full of broken tileage disappeared.
The next day arrived under the cover of a grey sky. The air smelt like imminent rain. Simon looked at the naked roof at the back of the house – mere strips of wood (with gaps in between) separating his attic room full of precious tools and electrical equipment from the elements. He looked at the weather forecast again, willing it to not say rain was due. He failed. He looked at the sky. He looked at the roof. He looked hopefully up the lane for signs of approaching dodgy vehicles. He tried not to worry.
We went about our usual chores, and returned to the house to find that a number we didn’t recognise had rung the land-line, but not left a message. We thought it couldn’t have been Florian because he always rings Simon’s mobile. Simon distracted himself from his concerns with thoughts of the Arsenal match he planned to watch that afternoon. Then Florian arrived, with Vague, and his friend Patrick, and Patrick’s teenage son. He had tried to call to ask if it would be ok, but there was no answer. Patrick was going to help with the roof work, and they had had to bring his son, because his mother had ‘gone away’.
Florian explained that Patrick’s son was ‘handicapé’. Simon said, ‘no problem’, because ‘Valerie used to be a psychologue scolaire’. Valerie thought ‘thanks a bunch!’, and realised with a sinking sense of inevitability that the task of occupying Patrick’s son whilst his father and Florian worked on the roof, and Simon worked on not getting too upset while Arsenal lost, would fall to her.
So, while the men went about their manly business, I went about trying to establish some degree of communication with Patrick’s son. Using the best French I could muster (and feeling surpisingly confident about doing so, knowing that this audience was in no way likely to be critical) I tried to make conversation. I managed to decipher the words ‘chocolat’ and ‘piscine’ from many of the lad’s indistinct utterings. However, try as I might, I failed to discover his name. We fed the chickens. We threw damsons to the pigs. We wandered about and Time Passed Slowly. I got him a drink and a chocolate bar, and we sat at the outside table in the not-sun. He said things I did not understand, but my lack of understanding was not because he was speaking French. I said things he didn’t understand, but his lack of understanding was not because my French was bad. We reached an understanding. We began to communicate without words, and I rediscovered all the skills I had developed over many years of assessing children with all manner of special needs, whose most common feature was an absence of functional language ability. I found some English children’s books, and together we looked at the pictures and took turns to label things in them. Time started to go a bit quicker.
Then somehow it was lunchtime, and Florian and Patrick sat down with Patrickson on various up-turned buckets to eat the picnic they had brought with them. I offered them drinks but they had bottles of beer and something unidentified in a leather-covered flask, that Patrickson had been carefully looking after for his dad all day. I detected the unmistakable odour of strong liquor on the breath emanating from the vicinity of Patrick’s pony-tailed beard, as he asked me if I would sell him and Florian two ancient, mouldering leather saddles that he had discovered in one of our ruinous outbuildings. He could apparently make medieval things out of the leather. Or something.
We bartered. I refused to accept any payment. He insisted that he couldn’t take them for nothing. I said I would be pleased to be rid of them. He said, no – he would be more pleased to have them. In the end he promised to ‘make me something’ as a gift, and Florian promised us some home-made apple juice in return for his share of the musty hide.
By the end of the day, Arsenal had beaten Spurs (much to Simon’s delight), Patrickson had learnt the English word for ‘oiseau’, I had spoken more French than I have spoken since we moved here, and the roof was about a third covered in new, old tiles. Simon apologized for hiding indoors all day, saying it was all a bit too weird for him. I said it was ok – I can do ‘weird’ quite easily. It’s ‘normal’ that I have problems with.
Overnight there was a little light drizzle. Not enough to penetrate the untiled bits of roof, but sufficient to penetrate Simon’s sense of calm. Sunday morning found him staring with a degree of agitation at satellite pictures of a miles-wide vortex of cloud, covering the country to our west, and heading in our direction. He tried to calculate how many hours remained before it would reach us.
Florian arrived alone, except for a bear-like dog who turned out to be our puppies’ grandfather. They have an interesting heritage. He was Florian’s first-ever dog. He was big and his front-end was very furry. Florian tied him to the wheelbarrow, took off his jumper and dropped it on the ground. He climbed the ladder to start work. The bear-dog sniffed at his jumper, cocked his leg and pissed on it. Florian didn’t seem to notice.
The cloudy Sunday passed. The cloud thickened. In the afternoon, we took the puppies for a rampage round the plan d’eau. As we left, Simon called up to Florian that the rain would be with us in 45 minutes. We wondered at the apparent lack of any tarpaulin-like appurtenance anywhere in sight. When we returned Florian was busily laying out the tiles that he and Patrick had stacked on the roof the day before, shimmying up and down the precarious roof ladder in the light drizzle that was coating everything with a slippery film of foreboding.
Five minutes before the heavens opened, Florian knocked at the door to say he was leaving. He explained that, although the tiles were not yet fixed, they were covering the whole roof, and so nothing would get wet. We felt reassured. A bit. He said he would be back to finish it off soon, when the weather improved.
Days passed. The weather improved. The weather got worse. In a big gale we lost power for more than 12 hours, and the roof ladder flailed about, trying to dislodge as many of the lightly-resting roof tiles as it could. The roof looked a mess, but it maintained its suspect integrity, and kept out the rain. We lit the old wood stove to keep warm, lit a lot of candles so we wouldn’t tread on the kittens in the dark, and enjoyed an extraordinarily pleasant evening of no TV, no internet, no phone and no electrical-hum.
I wondered whether we (Simon) should ring Florian to ask when he was coming back. Simon said no. Florian would be back to finish the job, because he was a good guy. And besides, we hadn’t paid him anything yet. We recalled our unfortunate experience with a roofer in Derby who had talked-the-talk, and seemed to be doing a good job, until we wrote him out a cheque on the day when he said he was nearly finished, and only had another day’s work to do. He went home that evening, clutching our cheque to his deceitful heart, leaving all his roof ladders in place, and the new plastic guttering in the garden. We never saw him again. In the end, after weeks of trying to track down the elusive roofer, we had to employ someone else (who took the roof ladders in part-payment) to finish the job. (And if any of you unsuspecting Derby readers are thinking of having any roof work done, whatever you do, DO NOT employ chummy old Jim ‘you-can-trust-me-I-never-tell-a-lie’ Whiting.)
So we stopped thinking about the roof and got on with Life. And sure enough, Florian turned up one day out of the blue, and carried on with the work, as if it was only yesterday that he had last been here. I conjectured that he must live in a parallel Universe where Time behaves differently. He fixed all the new-old tiles securely on to their wooden supports, neatly finished off the edging, and then moved his ladders round to the front, to do a bit of tidying-up of loose tiles and to clear the debris from the gutter. And somehow Everything Got Done, within a couple of days of Florian’s planned departure to the Muscadet region to prune vines (using hand shears, because it’s piece work and he is slower with electric shears).
And just before he left, in culmination of the extended conversation Simon had had with him over the previous few weeks, (about roofing, grapes, dogs, chickens, Life, The Universe, Everything and pigs – yes, Florian also has pigs!) he granted another of our unspoken wishes, and told us he could arrange for us to get a supply of not-ridiculously-expensive-commercial-pig-food from his friend who makes it and sells it for hardly-any-euros per giant sack. He promised that, when he ‘returned in the Winter’, he would take us to visit his pig-friendly friend.
And with that parting vow, he donned his gnome-like hat, shook our hands, winked conspiratorially and left.
