Category: Uncategorized

Or – It  Ain’t Over Till The Fat Lady Sings

I was worried in my last blog that because of the continuing French days of action and strikes, Tom, Sarah, Brian and Sue wouldn’t make it over here.  I was right to worry, but they HAVE made it.  Here’s how.

In the days before their arrival, we all check Easyjet’s site, compulsively.  By the night before, it’s saying that their flight, alone of Easyjet flights to Toulouse, will depart.

BUT Ryanair cancels almost all French flights for the Thursday, which doesn’t lead to peace of mind.

Thursday:

Tom & Co. get up at 3.00 a.m. and go to airport for a 6.30 flight.  Thomas texts me,

5.59 BST: Still looking promising. Flight still on time.  They checked our bags in.  Fingers crossed.

In Laroque we listen to the French news and learn that this day of action is intended to disrupt mainly transport, and two thirds of all flights will not take place

At Gatwick, they all board as planned. They taxi off.  Over in France, we read on the website that they’ve taxied off, and so we depart for Toulouse.

Half way to Toulouse, this series of texts from Thomas:

7.59 BST: Still being held on plane at Gatwick.

8.09 BST: Just been told we expect to take off in 45 minutes

8.39 BST: We’re off.  Probably.

And so they are.  By 11.35 French time, they’re with us.  We are out of the auberge, and this particular lady, though not fat, is quite prepared to sing.

As I read this back, I see that this frazzled journey was only delayed by some two hours.  But the nail biting, the anxiety in the preceding days (To cancel?  To postpone? To bash on and risk its all not happening) has been….stressful.

On the day before, Wednesday, I was talking to an extremely militant French friend who goes on every available demo, waving placards and generally making his presence felt. ‘Nous ne voulons pas emmerder les gens’, he explained. ‘On veut seulement ravager l’économie’ (‘We don’t want to b***** people about, we just want to destroy the economy’).  He seems not to have succeeded in his first objective, but to be doing fairly well on the second

Martine won that medal of hers – see my last-but-one posting – for producing 6 children. Where would we be without that family?  She, Francis, and 3 of her children were responsible for getting rid of our garden sheds for us a couple of months ago.  Last week, Francis and yet another of her sons were responsible for demolishing the monstrously heavy & ugly asbestos chimney that emerged onto our roof terrace as the outlet for the now demolished central heating.  Malcolm sawed it up the next day: even the six pieces he made of it are horribly heavy. Now they’re safely wrapped up, and the whole thing’s at the tip.  Another job done.  Thanks, team!

The offending chimney. Big. Ugly. Heavy

Francis examines the problem…..

….and dresses for business

Half way down….

Three-quarters down

…down

Bits of last week were horribly unpleasant. Not as unpleasant as 6 hours on the English Channel in a Force 10 gale, but pretty nasty.

We have been getting rid of our central heating. It’s oil fired, and though it’s in pretty good nick, the radiators are too small for our rooms, and who wants a noisy, smelly boiler in their living room, especially one that caused one visitor to ask why we kept our washing machine in the corner of the room?

So it had to go. We had a keep-fit session that involved our manoeuvring a hundred kilos of boiler out into the garage, while before that, Mal had been curled up in impossible positions on the floor cutting away all the copper piping, then chopping it into lengths suitable to fling out of an upstairs window into the yard below.

The boiler dismissed, we had a large chimney to block off. That was my job (unskilled, you see). Head stuck up the bottom part of the chimney: it fitted rather well, like an oversized sombrero, and with little room to move. I tried to manoeuvre wads of lining and insulating material into place. Every time I touched the chimney, about a pound of gritty, oily soot fell down, covering my head (which I’d not thought to cover), sliding down my collar to coat my skin beneath my clothes, and the clothes too of course. I inhaled soot, chewed soot, was hailed on by small chunks of masonry. What kept me feeling even slightly fortunate was the fact that I wasn’t a skinny little 18th century child chimney sweep who’d actually have to climb up that chimney, and others like it, day after day.

Anyway, the pipes are done, most of the radiators are out, and that space in the living room is liberated. And, despite the dustsheets, dirty. Just now, the tame joiner (Malcolm) is shelving it out as a bookcase and log store. If you think that sounds fairly easy, you still haven’t registered that there are no 90-degree angles in this house, no straight runs of wall, and spirit levels don’t know what to make of our floor.