Tuesday, September 25, 2007

A challenge to the rain god...

Is there a rain god out there, as my loyal reader must know this summer it nearly always rains when I head for the airport at the end of the weekend. Just to test the theory I changed my travel pattern last weekend, because I had a project milestone closing on Friday afternoon that went down to the wire. So I flew to La Rochelle on Saturday morning from Southampton with Flybe, I was joined on the train from Waterloo by several old (pensioner) soldiers heading down to Poole for a parade. It was only 8:30 in the morning but they had beer, whiskey and a few other beverages on the table and some sandwiches for a bit of ballast. The rest of the carriage appeared to be full of delegates heading for the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, very bad timing to get out a copy of the Spectator which I had bought just to see what it was like these days, not really my style as it turned out, but I digress. We departed our stand on time only to return 5 minutes later because the fuel manifest was wrong, so finally we were away 15 minutes late but a tail wind meant we landed only a couple minutes late. Just to fool the rain god, if he exists, I arranged to work from home on Monday and fly back to Stansted on the Monday evening flight. True to form on my journey to the airport it rained, so the rain god must be looking for my little white car travelling from Sigogne to La Rochelle before letting fly with the Monday deluge.

With this new flight arrangement no work got done on Saturday, by the time I arrived home it was 4:00pm, so we sat outside in the sun with a drink and did our usual catch up. Of course I had to look at the building progress, which was quiet impressive for a week. There are three builders working to complete room 2 in three weeks, and so a bathroom had appeared and the ceiling and two of the four walls had been installed.

On Sunday morning I started to lay the bricks, well to call them bricks is an under statement they are bigger than breeze blocks, to complete part of the wall next to ‘my’ new internal doors in the garage, to make that end of the house weather proof for the winter. After three hours work I had managed to lay 9 blocks, but they are, almost, level and straight, I spent the next 2 hours filling and pointing, and then cutting the next 9 blocks to be laid this coming weekend.

Then it was off to an open day at a local riding stable which had opened at the beginning of the year. We thought Fleur might like another ride on a pony, however when she saw some of her friends from school she was more interested in playing with them than riding ponies. The stables themselves are very impressive, especially as this was begun from a standing start, they already have a lot of horses and ponies, so after Franca has been back later to talk to them and find out what they offer for tourists, we may add them to our web site and arrange some riding packages for guests in 2008, watch this space, I can feel some horse power weekends coming on.

Back at La Rochelle airport on Monday afternoon, I found that my usual modus operandi had been scuppered. Normally I write my blog sitting in the departure lounge waiting for the flight to arrive, but they have either changed the usual security system by closing the security channel and customs post we used to use, or the hand luggage scanning machine was broken forcing them to change the security channel, but what ever it was, we were not allowed in the departure lounge until just before the flight and all our cabin baggage was scanned through the hold baggage scanning machine. Interestingly there were none of the usual French passport control officers there either. Could this be a sign of things to come, I'll write about this later.

Well I think that is enough for this article..... so until the next time ( if I can get a flight out to La Rochelle this weekend, it not looking promising at the moment, but that's another story)


Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Hocus Pocus.....

Some times a dad has to do .... what his daughter wants to do.....
and then Fleur turned me into a Hooligan. Face painting is one of her favorite things, but this is the first time it is not her face being painted.

Horsey Horsey don't you stop...



We went to the races at Jarnac race course but it was not quite what we were expecting, an afternoon of trotting races, but the weather was glorious and the racing interesting.

Encore.....La fête

Wine pressing the old fashioned way at the Sigogne festival, part of another successful weekend organised by our village.

La fête in Sigogne





Everyone lends a hand at the festival, even the new comers, as I get roped in to help get the homing pigeons in position before they are released to open the Sigogne festival weekend. Now where 's my flat cap....



Catching up three weekends

I am a bit behind in my blogging due to having to work for my living at the moment, so apologies for those sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for a report of the Sigogne festival.
Well true to form it's raining, so it must be Monday and it must be La Rochelle airport after a busy working weekend.

This is the start of my third week back at the London coal face, so there are three weekends to cover in this installment. The second weekend was the weekend of the Sigogne festival and the weekend that has just past was a proper working weekend. It is easy to cover the first weekend, as it consisted of me driving back to the UK and getting ready for work. The drive was not a problem as my Jaguar was built for trips like that. I managed to squeeze in a couple of beers with the lads in Old Leigh, Essex on the Sunday afternoon, and then it was up at 5:00am on Monday to start work.

The Sigogne festival was a great success, starting with the demonstration of treading the grapes and producing grape juice for the assembled masses, then of course there was the fair, which was a big one for village standards and of course Fleur had to have a go on the fishing the duck game and several rides on the merry go round. I don’t think there are many prizes left on the fishing the ducks game that we do not have. In the evening there was a fire work display, starting with a procession lead by children carrying lanterns and a marching band, from the town square to the football field where the display was to be held. The display started with the ’Sigogne Drummers’ miming to a piece of music I know but cannot place at the moment, then the fire works started and they were good, it went on for about half an hour which was a very impressive display for a small village.

Sunday was the big Sigogne brocante which literally took over the centre of the village, so as usual it appears that when Sigogne does something they do it really well. The only person to buy anything at the brocante was of course Fleur who got another doll house to play with, not bad for 5 Euros. Fleur also got her face painted by a lady from Yorkshire (who now lives in the area), again she was very good, she might get booked for Fleur’s birthday party.

On the Sunday afternoon we went to the races at the Jarnac race course, I tried to find the list of runners and riders on the French Jockey club web site, but to no avail. We discovered the reason for this when we arrived, the races were all trotting races, a horse with a very light weight trap behind it. Needless to say we did not win any money, but the racing was fascinating, however in the heat some of the horses were definitely struggling.

It was a great weekend, and it was the end of Franca’s mother’s stay with us, apart from the first day when she arrived, the sun has shone continuously during visit.

Then it was back to Stansted and back to work, the immigration crowds were massive, it took almost as long to go through the airport as the flight took.

So to this weekend, which was a working weekend. The first job was to finish removing the plaster from the stone wall in room 3. Once we have decided what to do with the old wall lights and sockets I can start repairing and re-pointing the wall, at least the half closest to the window, I’ll have to wait until the new door way has been made before finishing the other side. After that I moved to garage to carry on installing a doorway between what will be our scullery and the garage. The doors are in and the walls are going up, I got as far as I could before requiring more materials. Luckily the builders are back in this week working on Room two (above the doorway I am making) so I have added my order to theirs so I should be able to get things finished, or closer to finished, next weekend. Once again we have hit a couple of snags around room 2, the floor joists are OK but the beams that support them which are made of metal are too weak, i.e. the steel is not thick enough, so as part of my construction for the new garage doorway I put a strengthening beam in but they have two more to install which are much more tricky. One good side effect is they are going to demolish the wall between the two parts of the scullery, that saves me a job, so that they can install one of the other strengthening beams, and they have to do something really clever with the last one, because there are central heating, gas and water pipes in the way.

Enough for this time, hopefully as if by magic a couple of photos might also appear to make this article look a little less daunting. You might not understand it but Franca also writes a blog in Dutch, her blog has more pictures than mine, you can reach it via
http://portersonthemove.blogspot.com/

Sunday, September 02, 2007

La Rentrée - and time to go back to London

La Rentrée is the term the French use for going back to school at the start of a new school year, and I am heading back to the UK to re-start work as Fleur begins her new school year.

My three weeks are up and I have actually already made the long trek back to the UK, giving myself a day to adjust to the idea of being back in the UK and going to work. Setting off at 5:30 I managed to reach Calais at 11:45. The roads were empty so without pushing it I made good time with one stop for re-fuelling. It was surprisingly busy on the roads around Sigogne at 5:30 in the morning, I thought I would be the only car on the road, it being a Saturday, but no, it was quite busy. Luckily the motorways were very quiet, mainly full of British cars heading back for the start of the new school year in the UK. I did notice there were still a lot of British and Dutch cars heading south, as one friend said, its time for the wrinklies to come out. September can often have the best weather of the summer, the days are still long but the seering heat has now retreated south over the Mediterranean sea, leaving us with pleasant warmth to get out and about in, its a good month to visit France, he says giving tourist industry a plug, and of course coming to stay at Au Bellefleur.

Looking back at the three weeks we have not achieved everything we wanted to do, and we have done some things we did not expect to do so I am pretty pleased with progress so far. We are ready for the next phase of building to begin on the 10th of September and I should have the wall stripped by the time they come to start on room 3 sometime in October. Our Dutch builder Peter is back in the saddle though still not 100% yet but he will be working with Christian and Jean-Luc on room 2 whilst he builds his strength back up, then hopefully he will be ready to take on the double bathroom build in October when we reach room 3.

The pain of me leaving for the UK has been lessened by the arrival of Fleur's Oma (Franca's mother) from Rotterdam for a couple of weeks. Her arrival has coincided with the 4 day Frairie festival in Sigogne which starts on Thursday 6th September, what is going to take place we are not really sure as this is our first year, but there is going to be a brocante, live music and dancing, food, wine pressing demonstrations (the old fashioned way with your feet) and many other things, so when we have recovered we will let you know what it was all about. Sunday also sees horse racing in Jarnac so being a bit of a fan of the turf we will take a break from the festivities in Sigogne to go and see how many euros we can win... or loose.