You can never have too many buckets.
This was one of the profound thoughts that occurred to me while we were not-busy emptying (very slowly) our hot water tank of 200 litres of water, so that Simon could fit a new groupe de sécurité, and insert another water pressure regulator into the system, so that the tank would cease the endless drip-drip-dripping that has recently resulted in us having to us to limit our water pressure to an insanely irritatingly low level. Continue reading
Friday came, and eventually (only two hours late) so did Monsieur Gaume.
M Gaume was a man of few words, but undoubted skill and experience. In a few minutes, he had a large hose assembled and stretched out from the lorry to the hole. Without hesitation, he chipped through the cement and levered up the top off the tank. Continue reading
When we first visited the farm, we couldn’t help but notice that there was no conventional toilet. We wondered whether the occupants were evangelical environmentalists, who insisted on using an earth closet for high-minded reasons. However, not wanting ourselves to “Sprinkle a layer of earth after every use”, we asked about the septic tank whose existence the estate agent had claimed. “Oh yes,” we were assured, “there is a septic tank, but we don’t know where it is.”
Bravely (or foolishly) we didn’t let this put us off. Continue reading
Let me tell you about the penguin. I don’t mean the aquatic, flightless (and, let’s face it, just plain weird) bird who lives in the Antarctic. I mean the cheap and cheerful chocolate-covered biscuit bar filled with delicious trans fatty acid that graces many a child’s packed-lunch box. And, in particular, I mean The Penguin bar that sat atop a door frame in my house for many many years, gathering much dust and surprisingly little comment from visitors to the family abode. Continue reading
Today is our first rainy day for quite some time. I would like to be able to say exactly how much time, but Simon’s computer is sick and in a coma, until it gets a graphics card transplant next week. And our wonderful all-singing, all-dancing weather station has nowhere to send all its amazing information at the moment. The senses are sensing but the brain is not perceiving. So, in the absence of anything approaching objective evidence, I’d say that my impression is that it hasn’t rained here for some weeks. In fact we have had a period of absolutely gorgeous summer-like weather, and I had sort of forgotten about rain and the impact it has on daily life. Continue reading
I am sitting here staring at a blank screen waiting for inspiration. If a blog is to be a blog of substance, it has to be kept up to date. It has to have new stuff on it that people can read. And I hate the thought that, after a large number of days with no exciting posts to read, our audience will begin to desert us, one by one, like bored children at a circus, tired of watching the pathetic clown doing his same old falling-off-the-chair act, whilst waiting impatiently for the flame-swallowing elephants on unicycles that they had been promised.
Well, I’m sorry to say that we are a bit short of metaphorical flame-swallowing elephants at the moment, so I’ll just have to do what I can to make the chair-tumbling clown seem more interesting. Let me start with Lenny the Turbulent. Continue reading
