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 sto
ne 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/
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