Flood & Mud

Finally we emerge from 6 months of muddy trauma. It was not caused by poor weather, (although that certainly didn't help) but we sort of brought it upon ourselves.
Those of you who have visited may remember that our gas tank on which 2 central heating systems depend was sinking slowly into a mysterious hole at an alarming angle. Finally, Totalgaz refused to fill 'er up again. M. Cabriole, (not quite his name, but I'm going to be rude about him & don't wish to find out how French Libel law works,) swanned over in his Gucci loafers with a young acolyte in tow one day in, oh, must've bin early November. When he wasn't using them to brush back his elegant grey hair or tap on his phone, his waving hands indicated various tank-relocating possibilities, while pouting, pwuffing & shrugging to indicate how easy it would be.
Already I wasn't sure. OK, he said Totalgaz would charge us nothing, but there was that oh so often - used French phrase that I have learned to use, that you hear everywhere, 'Il faut que..' followed by the subjunctive. We hardly use it in English, 'it is necessary that one should'..do whatever.. is a rough translation."Il faudra..", (he used the future tense. Please note I am showing off here.) " It would be necessary that I should find a builder who could place a platform of beton that should be... much flourishing of extended tape measure & soaking of loafers in long, wet grass... so many meters by so many. Then il faudra que .. an ever - elusive plumber -electrician be found to cut off the old gas tank & re-connect the new. Did I know anyone? O KAay, yess.. we had had (pluperfect) a lot of work done, I know people...
" Bon, alors, lets go & have a coffee & sign some contracts"
We slop back to the house & I am fairly pleased to note the state of his lower legs. Over coffee, I discovered the acolyte's use was not only tape-measure-holding but he could draw a mean plan-to-scale on p1 of a many-paged contract. With much repetition of information in his, admittedly, very rich, deep voice, M. Cabriole enjoyed telling me that I should make all the arrangements, That a lovely tank would be delivered by February 2nd, the old one moved beside it, & that everything should be completed by mid-February, "et voilà".

At first, everything is fine. Philippe the builder trips up to assess the job. The plombier-electricien says fine, just give him a ring when we're ready & he'll be over. A lovely fine, fair December comes & goes. Early January... Around the 7th, it starts to rain. We are not that far inland from the Bay of Biscay & when it rains it means it & lasts for days. Philippe's boys, their jcb & mixer arrive on the 9th. By the 11th, the job is done. It looks like this. Things are no longer 'fine'.
And this.
There had been a thriving vegetable garden here. Great trenches cut this area of the garden in half.
(gosh, I do hope I manage to put the pictures in. If not, use your imagination. Although nothing like as bad as Hull; somehow my story rather pales in the light of the last fortnight in the UK).


We return from a trip to the UK to meet our new granddaughter to find the company delivering the tank have sent us a letter saying, if we phone to say the concrete is down, they'll do the biz. We have missed the date in the letter. I telephone, we arrange another date, I get hold of the plumber, it starts raining again.
On the new date, the lorry rumbles up. 2 very nice blokes, in wellies & overalls, M.Gucci-Shoes please note, get out & look at the site. And the sight. Heads shake. They can ( & do) deposit the new tank, since the new site has a lane alongside. But there is no way in which they can get their lorry over all that mud to pick up the other tank & relocate it, & anyway, where is the plumber who is to disconnect it? My turn to shrug. It doesn't seem to have the same devastating effect on them as it always does on me. They are kind but what can they do? Phone when it dries out a bit, they say, & drive off.
A few days later, a gas tanker arrives on a normal top-up trip. I don't remind the driver that Totalgaz said we couldn't have any gas & let him top up the old, tilted, tank. We are getting low on fuel & the in-laws need to keep warm. So now, apart from the destroyed corner of the garden & depressing sight, we can forget about the job for a while & get on with decorating jobs inside.

It is now April & the whole of western Europe has summer. All the mud dries out. Then I get phone calls, why hasn't the job been done? The contract specifies everything should be done by mid-April. Hadn't spotted that. B*gger. When in doubt, get cross, - mud, GLI won't shift tank, plumber doesn't come, M.Gucci-Shoes no bluddy help.... A few days later, while Paul is out, M. G-Shoes - &-probably-Knickers phones to say he's coming over. I get onto the plumber, who miraculously agrees to come too. It is so hot when they arrive that we stand in the shade of an old shed & the order of work is decided upon, M. Smug-Knickers finally acknowledges that it might not dent his dignity to make a few of the arrangements & phone calls himself, pats the plumber & calls him Pierrot, & things finally seem to be moving.

It starts raining again, well, you remember what May was like. The day before GLI are to arrive to move the tilting tank, Pierrot & his acolyte arrive, cut off the gas, join up some connections in the trenches which covers them in mud. However, the ground is still firm & he reckons the lorry & lifting gear will be fine.
Well, he's very kind. The next day he telephones. Are you sorted? Shall I come & connect all the tanks up?
Well, no.
Merde, why not? Did GLI not come?
Oh, they came.
?
The refilled gas tank now weighs 1.6 tonnes & is now 0.3 tonnes overweight & can't be moved.
Merde.
However, they were very kind & say they know a man with a terracer which will move the tank & they have phoned him & he is driving over from Monségur (20 mins away) & will be here in 2 hours & please will you come & connect us.

Well he did & he did: (picture here?)

After this the in-laws had gas. It only took another 2 weeks for all the paperwork to get to the gas Inspectorate so we were allowed to get the new tank feeding our house filled. It wasn't too cold, & we did have a new immersion heater serving the new bathroom, (we nearly blew ourselves up with it but that's another story,) & we got used to having a 'shower' with a bucket of hot water...
Anyway. That was the end of May & an early, cold June, & the gas came 1 day before all the family including granddaughter, & very hard work by Paul & a lot of grass seed later it now looks like this...

Please hang on for these pics, it is dinner time & tomorrow we're out...

Doing & dashing - exhausting!

For weeks we have been stripping & plastering & scrubbing & plumbing & tiling & grouting & painting & papering. Result, one super dooper bathroom & 2 more guest rooms.
For two days we did pushing & carrying & shoving & arranging to get all the furniture & 'room dressing' in in time, then one day shopping & polishing.
Then we got half a day off, Phew! Flop. Snooze! as the visitors, son, partner, grand-daughter, the 2 other grandparents, didn't arrive till the evening flight.
Then for 8 days we've been talking, eating, DRInking, filling the dishwasher, emptying the dishwasher, barbeque-ing, Drinking, packing into cars, rushing off, rushing back, dandling the baby, cooing at the baby, changing & feeding the baby, (just a thought, how did Sarah Parrish in that drama 'Me, Sex & the City' last night have time to drink vodka & lie on the settee while caring for a baby?), getting more shopping, more drinking, photographing, sitting in the sun or the shade, singing, shouting, showering,

And now they've gone. It's oh so quiet, shh, shh.
And I'm sighing & moping, cleaning & doing the washing, drinking pints & pints of.. water.

Dunnit!
Got the missing blogs from the 9th & 13th May on this page, but not necessarily in the right order.
Have just returned from a vide grenier which is 1 step down from a Troc. Apopros of this, no, Mrs W, there isn't a prize for knowing what this is, & Auch is osh as in gosh not ouch!

09 May 2007

balloon head
back after a busy day, with a swollen head....2 compliments in one day. No, not"Why, Miss Jones, but... you're beautiful..." The time for that is, if not long gone, then certainly autrefois. But at my French cours, a pretty intensive language course held by a superb, energetic teacher of a foreign language, Marie Delaye, I was kept back to be told I had made the most progress of all her students at level4 that year. Wow! It was worth mastering the subjunctive& reading le Fig to understand the election. Here I am in my fimtyumph decade, longing to please the teacher & chuffed to bits when I do!And this morning's teacher, Christine the line-dancing queen, earned my undying devotion by including me in her teacher's pet-quick-learners group & teaching us a faster, more complex dance than the rather dull stomp & scuffs we've been doing. In celebratory mood, & having forgotten to defrost some pastry before my late return from class, I nearly suggested we went out to eat - it is a blessed evening of calm sauternes sunshine - but wiser caution & the remembrance of the bank account prevailed.Tomorrow it's back to the decorating, 2 rooms to finish by June, & you know what they say about the bloke who invented decorating...

Sunday-Taxes & Ten Tors
Sundays are SOoo quiet here, apart from mainlaw's doberman barking, affronted, as a distant neighbour's visitors have the temerity to drive off with a merry beep. Hardly a car passes, but for the constant chirrup of cicadas & the breeze through the conifers my ears would be humming with dense silence. Perfect time to confront the Tax Form.Really it's not so difficult, the Hôtel des Impots sends us the easy pink form; our affairs are limited & simple, only a couple of sections to fill in, it's just that it's foreign, there's always the risk of making un erreur & if you're not Chirac a dim view is taken of financial mistakes. We might be hauled off to the Bastille, no, it no longer exists, that Island then, where Papillon was incarcerated , after all, you can be jugged for merely failing to balance your cheque-book & going overdrawn! Suddenly weeding the drive then painting a door seem terribly important. A bagful of broad beans is crying out to be podded & frozen, make P a cuppa while he prepares the guestroom's walls for tomorrow's papering, get the washing in... Oh well, I'm sure I'll do it before it has to be in the post for June 1st.I see the UK has the customary accompanying appalling weather to the 10 Tors challenge. Why don't they change the date? Every year it's the same. Still it was great seeing so many teenagers dressed in clothes not hanging off their backsides or pulling above junk-food-filled stomachs, articulate, grinning, if disappointed, having put in weeks of training, at being stopped from yomping over beautiful Dartmoor, reminding the world that it is only an unfortunate percentage of 13-20 year-olds who spend their time binge- drinking in town centres before puking & fighting in gutters. Although P pointed out that many of them will now be enjoying a night on the cider! Well, they've earned it.Well done the Hammers! Beat ManU!!

back to shedland...

One day I will have the time to look at lots of other blogs to see what a blog should be like...

But today it was off to Marmande, to take pa-in-law to an appointment, then a chance to shop for 2 items. Once again I trawle up & down the Bordeaux Road on Marmande's shedland, kerb-crawling with all the other punters who are on the look-out for consumer goods. Those of you who have had my conventional RRs e-mailed in the past will know that many French shopping areas are strung along arterial roads in aluminium sheds, and we still struggle to work out what some of them contain. Since becoming a grandmother I discover that 'Aubert' is a sort of Mothercare. 'Litomania' has beds &, apart from supermarkets is the only place in which I've found bedding. Hence my affection for The White Company & its over-priced mail-order service. Le Mutant is a meat supermarket, hmmm...

Today's futile quest was for moisture lotion. After happily using it for firtyumpty years, I am no longer able to find Almay lotion, so taking my last precious bottle for reference, I venture into a 'parapharmacie'. A size zero 17-year old in a starched white coat hears me out, looks at my bottle & indicates three products. Avène is made from spa water & a bottle 1/5 of the size of mine costs twice as much. Not being a believer in water being anything other than H2O, I move on to Caudelie, which is made from the remains of squished grapes. After the harvest, vignerons leave piles of these at special roadside points where the Min of Ag picks them up & turns them into industrial alcohol; they smell appalling. I pass on to Roc, again, a minute tube costs far more per centilitre than I am used to paying - I am going to have to grow old more gracefully. I show my teeth & escape in search of new baskets.

Sport 2000, thank goodness for an unambiguous shop name. 1 pair Reeboks, perfect fit, très confortable, parfait, succès! First decent pair I've had for ages despite years of step etc. Praps now I'll finally lose some pounds? Now I have good baskets? ( Ssh. Don't tell anyone. They're for line-dancing.) The French LOve line-dancing. I did go to a Guingette ( a dance studio,) in a shed on the Bordeaux Road, where 2 excellent teachers encouraged paysans, femmes de menagère & smooth young men, who must have worn sharp suiting during the day, to sailor-step & coaster-step and every one slung thumbs into big buckled belts that held up straight jeans that covered the tops of their studded cowboy boots. Some even wore hats. And the dancing was brilliant, all pas chassé-ing & quarter turning in perfect unison while the studs flashed.
Now I just enjoy myself in the village hall at Agnac, being taught by an enthusiastic amateur along with a lot of French & English ladies in T-shirts & cardigans, & 3, occasionally 4, men. There were 5, but Gerard, an ex-Parisian policeman, gave up. Sometimes, someone will sport a nattily knotted neckerchief, & several of us wear jeans, but except for Pauline who likes to clack her heels, we favour trainers. The floor is slippery & nobody wants to break a hip!!

Our favourite shed is a Troc. Now what do you think a Troc is? Answers on an e-mail please, I'll tell you another time...

missing on La-Annie

Right, missing blogs are on www.la-annie.blogspot.com , I think!
Next I will try to get the time setting right. Was on Pacific time, switched setting to W European but I'm still 2 hours out.