Christmas wishes

I'm 'driving home for Christmas' to celebrate it with wife and daughter, my wife's brother and family are also heading for Sigogne on Christmas Eve, so there will be a nice family atmosphere round the fire side.

Thank you very much for looking at and reading at my blog over the year, and no doubt I will give you a Cristmas update from France.

Merry Christmas to you all.


Darren, Franca and Fleur

Christmas decorations inside

Christmas decorations outside

Wonderfully Sunny Weekend

Well after a horrible week of weather in the UK it was great to be able to see the sun again. Some folks in the north of the UK had between 10 and 20cms of snow where as in London we just had 4 days of dreary rain and cloud. It was lovely to touch down in bright sunshine at Limoges airport on Friday morning after having got up at 4:30am to catch the 8:00am flight out of Stansted. Not so nice this morning to be delayed by 2 hours following a protest at Stansted airport which meant our out bound flight was delayed leaving Stansted.

The weekend however was great, we managed to spend almost all the daylight hours in the garden. On Saturday we put up the external Christmas lights on the house which took quiet a long time because I had to run a new electrical supply to the outside of the house to power them. We got all the Christmas decorations out the cottage so we could sort them out in preparation for putting them out next weekend.

Sunday was spent doing a lot of tree surgery, I removed one tree that was not really growing, I was able to lift it straight out of the ground, so for the three years it had stood there it had failed to take root, so that went onto the bonfire. I started work on another much older tree that want to chop down as it mostly hangs over the neighbours garden and just produces those helicopter seeds that readily take root and spring up every where. We will replace these trees with fruit trees when we have worked out our new garden layout, and it will take me a couple more weekends before I have completely cut down the helicopter seed tree (I can’t remember the real name), and it will give us some nice logs for next winter.

So I’m finally on the plane to London, 2 hours late, some of the team I work with are going for a Christmas lunch today, which I have now missed, but maybe I’ll go for a drink with them afterwards depending upon what I find when I get to the office.

With so many jobs lost in London why is there no extra space on the trains

I mentioned in an earlier post that thousands of people in London were loosing their jobs at the moment. It is strange but you really cannot tell if you are in and around the City of London. Have ALL the jobs been lost in Canary Warf? I would not know as I never go there. My train is just as full as it ever was, the 6:19 from Lee to Charing Cross is so full you cannot read a newspaper, you still cannot get on a tube in rush hour unless you live close to the end of a line, and the huge commuter army marching over London Bridge in the morning and evening rush does not appear to have diminished either.

Yet when I go to my usual sandwich bar Paulo and Claudio, the owners say business is terrible. I have to admit here and now to taking sandwiches for my lunch at the moment, but that is because in the West End of London where I end up most lunch times, it is so expensive and the queues are still very long that it is easier to take sandwiches, as well as the need to save money. As I have said before, a contractor taking sandwiches to work, times must be hard. But with the exchange rate between the Euro and the Pound approaching equilibrium I have to make savings where ever I can.

I must be thankful I am still working, it is not nice being unemployed, but I still can’t help wondering if there are thousands of Clives out there, still going to work even though they have been made redundant. Clive is the side kick of Alex in the cartoons of the same name published in the Daily Telegraph.

Well since I am employed I had better get on with some work….

Cheers

Christmas is coming....

Its well over time that I updated the blog again, but what to write, Tell it like it is, as the instruction goes

I drove down from London to Sigogne this weekend as I had both my cars in London for MOTs bad timing having them both so close together but that’s life. So on Friday morning I drove down to Sevenoaks to leave the car at the train station, this means I do not have to drive out of London in the middel of the day, and it gives me a 20 mile head start on the drive to Dover. The ferry was over an hour late by the time we reached Calais having set off 45 minutes late due to congestion in the ports. ETA in Sigogne was originally 11:00pm so this was going to be a late one. A decision had to be made, do I go via Paris or Rouen. Since we were an hour late I would not hit Paris until after 7:00pm going in from the North so I thought I would risk it hoping that I had missed the rush hour. No such luck and it took an hour and a half to get round Paris all because there was a big jam for one junction on the peripherique, so now I’m another hour late, but the rest of the went without incident and I arrived home at 12:45am so I made up some time, as the roads south of Paris were empty.

Another weekend of work saw a bit more progress on the bathroom though not as much as I would have liked as I had to keep re positioning a wall where the shower was due to be installed. I re plumbed it 3 times!! But hopefully the wall and the pipe work for the shower are now in the right place.

Bogdan our builder is making good progress on the main rooms, my new bigger hallway has been made, 30 centimeters wider than the old one, but nearly 2 meters higher at its highest point so it should give more of a feeling of space as people walk up the stairs, everyone has been laughing at me for moving a wall 30cms so I hope I will be proved right, otherwise it will be known as Darren’s folly.

The weather was aweful, it rained almost the whole weekend, with a big storm on Saturday night/Sunday morning, so it was a staying in weekend. Franca did lots of Christmas Craft work with Fleur, which meant I could get on with working almost undisturbed, which was really great of her as she looks aftrer Fleur all week on her own. The slight down side is that Fleur is now getting exited about Christmas and its only the 1st of December. This coming weekend I have to put up the Christmas lights on the outside of the house, so Fleur can help me do that. so I hope the weather is going to be better than last weekend. Then the following weekend it will be time to decorate the Christmas tree and the inside of the house, if Fleur can wait that long.

Cheers for now….

John Sargent quits Strictly Come Dancing

Well reader its nice to see the newspaper media keeping thier senses of proportion in these troubled times. The London Evening Standard, tagging its self as London's quality daily paper leads this evening with Fans Furious as John Quits Strictly. A reference to John Sargent's decision that he is going to stop being the butt of everyone's jokes in the BBC's hit Saturday night show Strictly Come Dancing, so what the hell I may as well jump on the band waggon as well. After all its not that important that another 10,000 Londoners lost thier jobs today, I guess that is just not news any more. Even another interest rate cut on the cards did not enthuse London's Quality Daily, and the coverage of the Baby P enquiry has reached that point where it slides from the front pages to the inside as the papers wish for something else to come along and grab thier attention, as they start to run out of things to say.

But back to the band waggon... I mean.. pressing news of the day... did John Sargent jump or was he pushed, I'll let you make your own mind up.. but lets get the swingometer out to measure public opinion, what does Mr Obama think, I'm sure he is tapping a note to the BBC on his Blackberry at this very moment, will John's poor timing affect the England performance tonight..

ok ok enough is enough :-) or is it....

Birthday weekend....

Last weekend was a special weekend, it was Fleur’s birthday. Friday was her actual birthday and she took cake and drinks to school as is the tradition in France, and now apparently in the UK too, never happened in my day that I can remember…

Saturday was the day of the Fleur’s birthday party, and to be honest it was something I was slightly dreading. The thought of having ten 6 years running around that I could not understand, and they not being able understand my feeble attempts at French, was not my idea of fun. However as it turned out I had nothing to worry about it all went well and I understood most of what was said to me and I think I mostly made myself understood as well.

Franca of course did most of the talking and she did an excellent job of organising all the games, and marshalling the children. We did all sorts of old fashioned games such as musical chairs, musical statues, blind mans buff and a few others I had never heard of, and all the children took part enthusiastically. Everything was conducted at 100 decibels or more and at lightning speed, as six year olds never walk they always run (not like Sting’s Englishman in New York). After three hours Franca, her mother and I were exhausted, but it seems like children had a good time, and fleur enjoyed herself which is the main thing.

Fleur got lots of lovely presents I think more than 20 in total as well as quite a lot of money too, from us she got a new bike, a proper one which is just a tad too big but she was enthusiastically riding it around the garden on Sunday. She also got a traditional Dutch game from Franca’s mum which we played at the party called Dutch Shuffleboard, which is quite addictive. Thanks to all those who sent pressies and money Fleur appreciated them all.

No sooner is Fleur’s birthday over than thoughts turn to Christmas, I popped in to Toys r Us in Bordeaux as it has been years since I have been in a toy shop (excluding Hamleys once a year for stocking pressies), to look at potential Christmas presents, and the queues at the checkout were enormous, I was glad I was not buying anything, Still my Christmas shopping weekend is this coming weekend as I am in the UK, still with the credit crunch hopefully the shops will not be too crowded.

Christmas in France is not as huge as it is in the UK luckily so we will not be mortgaging the house for presents like some folks do, though we seemed to have joined in the competition to see who can get the most lights on their house, though we are way down at the bottom of the league thank goodness. Christmas is a one day festival in France with the 26th being a normal working day. The turn of the year is marked very quietly too, no crazy parties, and no fireworks, though the French do push the food boat out even further than normal with a 12 course meal and midnight almost passes without acknowledgment in comparison to the UK and Holland.

leaves on the line.....

Its that time of year again in the UK, when all the trains are delayed by leaves on the line. For 2 weeks or so each year during autumn when the wind and rain combine they strip all the autumn leaves off the trees in a very short period of time which for railways is a fatal combination. The weather in the UK over the weekend had been wet and windy so...

This Monday I landed at Luton on time and the shuttle bus was waiting to take me to the railway station, so we got there nicely on schedule, I just had time to buy a ticket and a sandwich before the train arrived. Then it started, "First Capital Connect is sorry to announce...." and then three trains in a row were cancelled or severely delayed, so instead of arriving at the office at 2:00pm it was after 3:00 when I finally arrived. Travellers were confused as first one train was scheduled to arrive then suddenly it is changed to another. Luton Airport Parkway station may be unique in suffering from too many public announcements, the automatic announcements are so loud that you cannot hear the ones made by the station controllers, so you are none the wiser.

There was also chaos at London Bridge in the evening as well as trains were delayed or cancelled there were changes of platform, and a total lack of announcements about the situation as the destination boards flipped back and forth trying to keep up what was going on on the ground or should I say rails.

To be honest we really do not know if it was leaves on the line or something else entirely as nobody told us, but as it appeared to be so widespread we can only assume that leaves were the problem.

oh the joys of being a London commuter, why don't we give it all up and move to France..... ah....

Silly Me...

I have to come clean here and admit to my English language reader (because Franca has already told it in Dutch) about the howler of a mistake I made last week.

It is probably one of your worst nightmares, next to loosing your passport in a foreign country, it is also why there has been no blog for a week or so, I flew back to the UK last Monday as usual with no problems went to work and then at the end of the day headed back Lee for a well earned early night. However when I got to the front door of the house I could not find the keys, and then the sudden horror dawned on me that they were probably still in France, so I phoned the wife and yes they were on the bedside table. Franca phoned the house owners in the hopes that they had left a spare key some where and indeed they had, a neighbour had a key, trouble is you need two keys to get into the house. So I had no choice but to go back to London and then to my parents in Southend, going via Next & Boots on the way to buy some clothes and toiletries. Luckily I had somewhere to go otherwise it would have been London hotels and it would have cost even more, just when we are trying to save as much money as possible for the house.

Such is life, I still do not know what the keys were doing on the bedside table, I never take them out of my jacket pocket in France, the departure checking before leaving the house will be even more rigorous, and I will get a spare second key cut to leave with the neighbour,... and Joy I appreciated the text on Sunday night hahahaha...... I don't think I will forget keys ever again...

A Marathon Weekend....

This weekend was Jarnac Marathon weekend, we had 9 runners staying with us on Friday evening, and they all needed breakfast at 6:30am on Saturday morning so no lay-ins for us on Saturday either. So having feed the runners and waved them off at 7:30 we cleaned out the rooms ready for our marathon run on the washing machine, and I got to work trying to install the new ceiling for the new bathroom I am working on.

I worked the whole day Saturday until the light ran out and it really did not look like I had done a great deal, but as they say it is all in the preparation. Bogdan our builder told me on Friday afternoon I needed to double up on the insulation I had put up which meant lowering the ceiling by installing ceiling rails that hung from the existing wooden roof struts. He told me I was putting them in the wrong way, I was fixing the rails along the roofing struts instead of across them, but this worked out better for installing the marine plasterboard. By the end of the day my arms and my shoulders were really suffering, I find it hard work working above my head for a whole day, marine plasterboard may only be 1.5mm thicker than normal plaster board, but that still makes it a lot heavier than the normal stuff, so I collapsed in bed around 9:00pm and slept quite soundly.

Sunday was tidying up day and cake making day, it is Fleurs birthday next weekend, so we needed to make cakes for school and for her party on Saturday afternoon. Fleur and I did the tidying up together, we tidied up the mess I left from yesterdays work and the mess that Bogdan left on Friday, I’d rather tidy up for him, then I get a bit more real work from him for my hard earned Euros.

The cake making was nothing short of a disaster, for someone who spent a year making them professionally. It came down to not knowing your ingredients, or at least trying to match an English recipe to French ingredients, and then learning the French way of doing things. The first two cakes I made did not rise a millimeter, then I discovered that although I had got flour for patisserie it was not self raising flour. Then it was trying to get the amount of baking power right, which I failed to do on the third cake and I think only just got right on the 4th cake, so finally after 4 hours of cooking we managed one dubious cake for decorating, I then discovered that my ready rolled lazy persons icing had gone missing, so Fleur and I made our own, and finally we managed to get one cake decorated. (you can see the results on Franca's blog). Franca is going to have a go at another cake during the week, using a French recipe, and I think that is the key, trying to use French ingredients with an English recipe does not always go smoothly, as we have discovered more than already.

So its Monday morning in the rain, which has fallen for most of the weekend, and I am at Bordeaux airport waiting for my Easyjet flight back to Luton, November is nightmare flight month, as everything is expensive (half term holidays), the winter time tables have started, and the best time slots have been given to winter destinations, so I am on a 12:20pm flight back to the UK and on Friday the return takes off at just after 9:00am so I am loosing a lot of billable time, luckily over the last few weeks I’ve built up a lot of additional hours credit to tide me over.

Snow in Southern England Today

This is extremely rare but it has been snowing in Southern England today, the earliest many can ever remember...





Snow in a Stevenage garden with thanks for the photo from a www.netweather.tv member

The step

Short Weekend....

A couple of faultless flights from London Stansted to Poitiers and back again find me sitting on the Stansted Express train going into London on a Sunday night, after a lovely, but short, weekend in Sigogne with almost wall to wall blue sky and temperatures into the twenties, this is why we moved to France.

It was a busy weekend since it was a short one, normally I fly back on a Monday morning. So I got stuck into the building work with a vengeance, though it is one of those weekends where you really can’t see much evidence of work representing a day and a half of toil. There was lots of measuring and scratching of my head going on as I worked out where the new walls were going to go and then marking up the floor, walls and ceilings accordingly.

It’s always jobs that you think are small that turn into the big ones and this weekend something that I thought would take an hour to do ended up taking 4 or so. All I had to do was chop out some poured concrete to lower a step by about 6 inches ready to be built up again to the correct height for the new lay out.

I started off by trying to save my tired muscles and so got out all the gadgets at my disposal, which comprised my mini kango drill, and when that was not working well it was joined by an angle grinder with a concrete cutting wheel, but between the two of them after and hours work I had not shifted more than a few square inches, so in frustration I hit the step with a hammer that happened to be laying around and a chunk bigger than that managed by the angle grinder and kango just fell off. So it was down to the garage for a club hammer, and after 45 minutes of brute force most of the step was off, so much for modern technology making things easier, there’s no replacement for a bit of brute force and ignorance.

Before I can go much further though I am going to have to buy some more materials otherwise the work is going to grid to a halt (pardon the pun). Also during the week our builder put in a plea for us to stick to our original plan to put in a wooden ceiling in the upstairs bedroom we are building, as he had already fitted up the ceiling to take the wood and not the plaster board we had changed our minds to on cost. So we went to the local DIY store and discovered some wood at a reasonable price, so he will have to work out how much he needs then go with Franca to buy it. So I have to remember to allow for that cost in my purchase of materials in these challenging monetary times.

As I mentioned before the weather was stunning and so we decided to take Fleur to the local park, half an hour’s drive away, well actually she asked to go and I could not refuse since I had been working all day yesterday. So we set off just after 11, and alarm bells started ringing when we saw only one car in the car park, the park was basically closed for the winter, though you could get in and play on the permanent activities such as swings and slides, all the trampolines, water slides and pedelos had been packed away for the winter, as had the snack bar that is there too. So Fleur played a bit on the swings and roundabouts then we went for a short walk along the river before heading back home again somewhat disappointed.

So that was my short weekend, though for many that do the same commute as me, this was a normal weekend, I am lucky to be able to travel back on a Monday morning most weeks. The winter schedules for our band of long distance commuters is going to set us some interesting challenges, as the cheap airlines turn their attention to the winter ski and sunseaker destinations. I can still get my Monday morning flights, but Fridays is proving to be a bit difficult until after Christmas.

Bed and Bathroom no. 4

Work in porgress in the future shower room and part of the large bedroom to be!

Driving up and down France...

Well where to start with this blog, I guess the beginning. I drove the Jaguar back to the UK on Monday ready for it to go in for its MOT and then had a manic week getting the BMW fit for the drive down to Sigogne on Friday. I had to get new front brake discs and pads plus front shock absorbers from Kwik Fit as well as a service from BMW to keep the full BMW service history going. I also need 2 new tyres but they weren’t in stock so had to drive to France on the old ones which only just legal. I was also buying building materials to take back to Sigogne, but in the end I did not get as much as I wanted, the car was half empty. So on Friday morning I was up bright and early at 4:30am to head down to Dover to catch the ferry over to Calais then the drive down to Sigogne. I have to say the BMW, it’s a 1996 BMW 518 touring never put a foot wrong, easily keeping up with its younger counter parts, despite having a reputation for being under powered, obviously it does not go a fast as my Jaguar, but they both cruise at 130kph with no problems, the BMW just takes a little longer to get there.

So I arrived in Sigogne just in time to surprise Fleur and pick her up from school, so she was a happy bunny for a while until the excitement of having papa around and tiredness caught up with each other and then it was time to calm her down stories and sleep, just another Friday night at Au Bellefleur.

Franca was also a happy bunny because amongst the cargo brought from London was an Indian take away from Franca’s favourite Indian restaurant, it not only survived the journey but tasted great as the empty plates attested, and the good bit was there was enough left over for Saturday too.

During the week in London I did my good Samaritan turn and put up a new fluorescent light in a neighbours kitchen, and having almost no tools in London I was looking for the easiest and quickest way to put up the light without heavy duty tools. I chose to use metal screw in rawl plugs however I had not bargained on how tough 1930’s lathes were (I find they usually disintegrate on impact), and I pulled a muscle in my right shoulder forcing these plug in, even with a pilot hole, but in the end the light was installed and they were happy, I even got a tip of 2 cans of Old Speckled Hen mmmmm very nice they were too.

I am not sure if I have already mentioned this, apologies if I have, but having had the summer away from building work, not only has my girth expanded a notch on my belt but last weekend being the first weekend I had taken on any serious building work since July, my muscles were aching like nothing on earth, having cut and laid 12 sheets of 22mm flooring. Now this weekend I have the added disability of being unable to raise my left arm above my shoulder, things are not going entirely to script at the moment. So Saturday morning I tidied the garage, to get myself moving again, which also meant Fleur could help which she likes to do these days. Then it was time to start tackling the planning of the two new bathrooms I am working on. Planning is hard work because neither of us are very good at visualising the finished article from an empty space so a certain amount of building was done in the form of putting up the frame of a wall to give us the size of the room and putting a shower tray and toilet into the bathroom for scale which we just happened to have laying around, as you do. So the wall moved 3 times, and that was before Franca saw it, but luckily it was OK for her. The upstairs bathroom is not as big as I had imagined it to be so there is not really enough room for a bath so it is now going to be a luxury shower room upstairs and a proper bathroom for the room downstairs. Both have to be built together for the services like water and waste to be run correctly, though each will have its own hot water supply. Sunday was more of the same though to preserve my muscles so they are usable over the coming weeks I stopped at lunch time, much to Fleur’s delight.

The weather I hear you ask… it was absolutely fantastic, summer has finally arrived, well it feels like that, though by UK standards the summer was great, but looking at the grape harvest going on all around us most of the grapes were still quite small and very very bitter in taste…

A day out in the cottage

This is no where near as grand as it sounds, our cottage is a leaky breeze block building we use to store all the stuff we do not currently have a place for in the house. The cottage mainly has a lot of Fleur’s toys and things in it, on one side and building bits from me on the other. It was in a mess after a summer of getting things out and just throwing them back so we were on a mission to clear it all up, and get rid of as much rubbish as possible. We need to do this as the cottage has sprung a couple of leaks in the roof, and it has to last as a store room for a few more months before the new storage area is ready. Then we can demolish cottage to make way for the swimming pool and associated out buildings. It took most of Saturday to get the non building side sorted out as Franca and fleur were going through every photo album which somewhat slowed the progress of tidying but did mean we got rid of lots more rubbish, so worth it in the end and quite a few memories along the way.

Sunday morning I returned to building work with a vengeance, as I found some insulation and a couple of plaster boards I had forgotten about on the building side of the cottage which meant I was able to get and start insulating and boarding the ceiling in the new first floor bathroom we are building. That was the start of tidying up the building side of the cottage, well I got rid of two bales of insulation and 2 of the three plaster boards lurking against a wall.

Progress is pretty slow at the moment as our cash is flowing out faster than is good for us, but it is our expensive time of year, hopefully by November we will be back to positive cash flow again and able to push forward with the refurbishment of the next two rooms for the B&B.

On Sunday afternoon we went to a 60th birthday barbeque, at some friends of ours that Franca first met through her blog. They only live 45 minutes away and it was a nice drive from Sigogne to somewhere near Ruffec. The barbeque was great fun, with good food and drink, great company, and very friendly Belgian hosts Jan and Simonne, a better afternoon you could not wish for, and the weather was fantastic too. I think it may have been made better by the fact that on this occasion I did not have to concentrate hard to understand all the French being spoken, as there was hardly any, for once it was my two languages Dutch and English, probably never to be repeated, so I’d better get on and learn French. See tne blog below for the pictures....

Whilst flying to and from the UK I use the time to study classic car magazines and the market prices of classic cars in preparation for trying to set up a classic car hire business as an add on to the B&B, I am quite pleased with my self so far that I have not gone out and bought a car yet, I’ve seen some absolute gems which would be perfect for the business, and good fun for me if I am honest, however it will probably be yet another year before I can seriously start investing any of our meagre funds in what looks on the face it a somewhat frivolous enterprise. So perhaps I should be reading Practical Builder, or even Swimming Pools monthly as a better use of my ‘air’ time.

Next week I will be driving back to the UK as the Jaguar needs a new MOT and a service, so the BMW estate will be switching places with the Jag for a while, so another opportunity to bring some materials from the UK, I’ve almost run out of emulsion paint again.

Party-time

On Sunday we were invited to Jan's 60st birthday party, (we know Jan and Simonne through Franca's blog, you never know where blogging will take you). Well, the Belgians certainly know how to lay on a party. The bbq tasted fabulous, the company was a meltingpot of all nationalities, Belgians, French, English and Dutch.
What a great (and typically French way) to spend an afternoon, thanks Jan and Simonne!!

Autumn Crocussus in our garden

'College' Girl, see her penny-shoes

Circuit des Remparts - Angouleme 2008

Qualification for The Bugatti Race

















A Lovely old Peugeot

more from the Circuit de Remparts

More From the Bugatti race qualification

Two photos of Jackie Stewarts's Matra Cosworth from the Tyrrell Team 1969
(that is not Jackie Stewart driving)

Some of the cars in the static exhibition

Circuit des Remparts – Angouleme 2008

This year marked the 30th Anniversary of the staging of Circuit des Remparts in Angouleme, a classic/vintage/historic car rally and race our the city walls of Angouleme on a street circuit. I knew it was on around this time every year and last year being our first year here in the Charente we did not realise the significance of the event. This year unless Franca had not read another blog we would have totally missed the event, as it was we missed the Saturday, because we only found out on Saturday afternoon. So Sunday morning we got up early and took the 30 minute drive to Angouleme where we were lucky to find a parking place in the centre of Angouleme not far from the action. Luckily the French do not do early mornings, later in the day Angouleme was basically grid locked, if you pardon the pun...

Being a car nut I was like a little kid in a free sweetshop, I did not know which way to turn, luckily I had a disinterested wife (and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but cars are not her thing), and a 6 year old daughter to keep me under control. There were literally hundreds of historic, classic and vintage cars to look at on static display at various points around the city, Angouleme it appears has several car clubs, we came across the Mini club and the Alfa Romeo club but there are several others.

Then there were the races and demonstrations themselves. I have never been to a motor race before, my reasoning is you pay £100.00 for a ticket to blink and miss cars rushing by, then end up spending loads more money and you still have not seen much of the race and your wallet is a lot poorer for the experience, so I prefer to watch on TV. However for the princely sum of €10.00 you can get up close to the action and because the circuit is so small you can get around most it pretty quickly and most vantage points have more than one view of the track so you can see what is going on. The noise of some the engines is glorious especially the GT1 and GT Plus cars, my daughter loved it too, but sadly this put the wife off even more. The highlight of the event for most people is the vintage Bugatti only race, it is not only unique, but fun as well, the later models being really powerful machines and the early models with less powerful engines that glide around the course with a certain elegance being lapped again and again by their later bigger engined family members. We were also able to get up close (almost too close) to a Jackie Stewart Matra-Tyrell F1 car with a lovely sounding Ford Cosworth engine.

I could go on for ages, hopefully my lovely wife will post a couple of pictures here for me, it was a great break from building work for me, thanks to my wife and daughter for letting this big kid into the sweetshop for a few hours. I'll back next year for lots more...

so I will leave it there for now, next year we hope to have some of the people taking part in the circuit des remparts staying with us, Au Bellefleur would make a great base for this special weekend in Angloueme's calendar.

A Euro A Euro, my kingdom for a Euro

Or Floored by a Euro – or the lack of one

On Friday night I knew the title of this blog, but events over the weekend changed everything. So first on Friday night after I arrived at Bordeaux airport I hot footed it along to the big DIY store in Bordeaux to buy some flooring to get the new bathroom floor started this weekend, only to be foiled by a humble 1 Euro piece, or rather the lack of one. As with all big stores you have to put a coin on the trolley to release it. One of my main objectives of the week before flying is to have as little in the way of coins in my pocket as possible, this week I had done particularly well, by giving Fleur my Euro coins to use at the fair last week, and just having enough English money to buy myself a car magazine at the airport, and hey presto no coins to carry through the x-ray machine. No coins for the DIY shop trolleys either... hey ho, so no floors were laid this weekend, which turned out not to be such a disaster after all, read on, although the way that the blogs are laid out you will have already read what I’m about to call the next instalment already…..

The A-team

Knights with Mucky Armour.....

Franca always says that if things are going to go wrong they always go wrong on a Monday just after I have left the country. Well this started at the weekend but took a turn for the worse on Tuesday when our drains started to play up. In fact with a full B&B suddenly a number of our waste pipes for bathes and the washining machine decided now was the time to completely seize up.

Franca gave a friend of ours, Steve who lives nearby, a call and he came round to have a look and spent a few hours draining down water that had built up in the waste pipes and clearing a block he had discovered ,(luckily not the toilets though), and recommended that we gave all the drains a good jetting. He was star to come straight round and the crisis was averted.

Then low and behold, today Steve arrives on the doorstep unannounced with Bogdan our builder and a big jetting machine to jet out our waste pipes. Better friends you could not ask for, and if you take a look at Franca's blog you can see the guys getting well and truely stuck in.

Being 500 miles away I can't thank them enough, as that was going to be my weekends work, but they cleaned the pipes in a hour or so, Bogdan having managed to borrow the machine from one of his friends. Sitting 500 miles away there are times when you feel completely helpless in this sort of situation, so it is good to know that there is help at hand should we need it. As I said on Franca's blog, who needs the A Team when you've got real friends like Steve & Bogdan, thanks guy I am in your debt....

A busmans holiday

A shortish blog this time, as for me most of this weekend was a busmans holiday sat behind a computer trying to rescue data and kill viruses and spyware. After a day and a half I rescued all our data, but I had to give up on rebuilding the computer, so I am bringing the hard disk back to the UK for a complete wipe and re-install, not my idea of a fun weekend, c’est la vie.

It was also the weekend of the village festival celebrating the vendage, the start of the grape harvest, though I think it will be a few weeks before it really gets going as the vines are still suffering from lack of sun.

We had the demonstration of the pressing of the first grapes, which if harvested in the fields around Sigogne must have been from a very favoured position judging by the sweetness of the juice.

Fleur had plenty to do with a fair in town, she is slowly graduating away from fishing plastic ducks out of a pool to shooting balloons, but the prizes are still the same old junk that 6 year old children find irresistible.

We ate out on Saturday night, (not in the tent as mentioned in the previous blog) though eating out gives it a much grander title that it deserves, we ate in the local bar, which a couple of our guests had tried and found to be OK, however all that was on offer on Saturday night was, sausage & chips, pizza & chips or steak & chips, we though because they were going to be really busy, but it turns out our table of 8 plus two other couples we were about the only guests for the menu rapide.

Eating out was followed by the Sigogne fireworks display, which for a small village is really amazing. It starts with a lantern procession for the children from the centre of the village to the football field where the display takes place each year. Fleur was a bit afraid of the loud bangs from the fireworks at the beginning until she got used to them, then she really enjoyed it, although throughout the display she would not let go of me, so after nearlly half an hour of holding my arms we devoid of all feeling. After the fireworks there was a disco in a tent back in the centre of the village which we went to for about an hour then it was time for bed as the B&B was busy this weekend so we had to be up reasonably early to make breakfast, well Fanca made breakfast I carried on trying to fix the computer.

Well that did not turn out to be very short...

Going home...

14 days of exile have come to an end and I am heading back to France for the weekend, and this is not just any weekend, this is the weekend of the Sigogne vendage festival, a tad early but I guess they do it for the weather, however the forecast does not look that handy.

The B&B is also full this weekend so we will doubtless be running between the festival and the B&B. We are due to do the usual eat in tent on Saturday night with the rest of the village, and luckily we are only providing dinner on Sunday night for some of guests.

Over the last 14 days I have managed to move from Southend back to South East London to the street where we used to live before moving to France. I am looking after the house of some friends of ours who have also moved to France, though nowhere near us. It was handy being in the UK last weekend so that I could get my self sorted out and organised. Living in SE London means I am only on the train for 20 minutes each way so I get 2 hours of my life back, thought most of that time is spend washing, cooking and cleaning, though this is preferable to commuting for an hour and half in each direction. Though I do miss my family when I can’t get back to France for the weekend it is useful sometimes to be able to sort a few things out.

It seems very strange to be back in the same road where we used to live, especially as I am on my own, but very handy. I have already met a couple of our old neighbours, the gossip network had already heralded my arrival, so they were not surprised by my sudden appearance. Most things have not changed a bit in the 18 months I’ve been away, not that I had really expected it to, which was reassuring.

This is my one and only run on Ryanair, in the coming weeks, as I use it to switch from La Rochelle to Bordeaux. The BA flights have already come down to the level where I can afford it and the convenience of the Monday morning flight is wonderful.

Some of my fellow travellers have uncovered a very cheap way to use the Eurostar/TGV to travel back and forth for only €49 each way. The French railways have a certain amount of cheap seats which if you book at the right moment are certainly are good value, and since I like travelling by train I will also look into this as an alternative to flying.

Rentrée

Today is the 'rentrée', back to school for French school children after thier 9 week summer holiday! For Fleur and Franca its an exciting day, as Fleur starts infants school. She's the youngest in her pre-prep. class and together with 15 other children she will continue with learning to write and will do more reading as well.

Some pictures

2 Princessess (Fleur is at the right).
Another pony ride through the vineyards.
Our daughter with our 'neighbours'.

two posts in one day

Well technically its three with this one, I forgot to publish the post from the bank holiday weekend so you are not seeing things they have both been published on the same date, only through my forgetfulness.

My lovely wife may see fit to pop a couple of photos into the blog for me as there seems to be an awful lot of text and no pictures.

Enjoy the read and hopefully a couple of photos, you know what they say, a picture is worth a 1000 words...

A water weekend of the right kind..

Monday morning, well Monday lunch time to be accurate, and I am back at La Rochelle Airport after a relaxing weekend. I was supposed to be putting down the floor between the two new bathrooms we are creating at the moment, but due to the quirkiness of the French holiday system, all the shops in the local area had run out of waterproof chipboard, and since all the factories close until September it will be a couple of weeks before the stores are re-stocked, so there was nothing I could do except enjoy the weather.

We had a water day on Saturday, firstly going off to explore a man made lake just out side Angoulême, which had been recommended to us as an alternative to going to the beach, especially if you were not going to make a day of it. It turned out to be a really good place for small children, not only was there a small beach by the lake, the lake itself had a nice shallow area of water segregated by lane makers depending on how deep it was, so it was nice and safe for the little ones. Being a park with a large lake you got the advantages of the beach, along with the advantages of a park just behind the beach, so there were playgrounds, mini golf, and quite a few other things such as Karting, a restaurant, merry go rounds and plenty of other things to do, so the kids will not get bored very quickly.

We spent Saturday morning in the park, and it was not in the least bit crowded despite it being probably the best August day we have had weatherwise. On Saturday afternoon we had been invited to spend the afternoon with some people who had a swimming pool, which Fleur thought was wonderful, especially when she discovered all the play things in the pool as well. Cathy and Terry and Becky had only just moved into their house, but one of the advantages of having the swimming already there is you can enjoy it from day one. Terry poor chap was slaving away in the UK, so we only met Cathy and Becky (2,5) both of whom were lovely. We also met Steph and Finn, who was just about 2,5 if remember rightly, but not Finn’s dad, Charlie, they too had only just moved to the area, and Steph’s other half was busy doing what I should have been doing, working on the house. No doubt we will meet the other halves at some point before then end of the year, unless it is my turn to be slaving away somewhere.

Sunday was designated a working day, but it was a bit difficult to know what to do to help the project along without materials. In the end I did one of the jobs I was saving for a rainy day, which was to switch the garage around because everything was on the wrong side having put up the floor joists for the storage area above the garage. I had to switch them around because we will need some head height to get onto the mezzanine when I eventually get around to putting up some semi permanent stairs, or maybe we will just use ladders, not sure at the moment. I had my work bench where the stairs/ ladders should go hence the big switch around.

The good news is that just like Friday the Easyjet plane is nice and early, so hopefully we will be away on time, and I will be in the office in time for my first meeting.. no rest for the wicked as they say….

Bank Holiday Weekend

Back at La Rochelle Airport after the English Bank Holiday weekend, so its Tuesday morning and the airport is quite busy, with a Jet2 plane in already, so the challenge will be to get this one off the ground again before my Easyjet plane arrives, not something La Rochelle have a great reputation at doing, so we could end up with a traffic jam of 2 planes.

We had a nice long weekend together, I arrived on the lunchtime Easyjet flight from Gatwick so I was at home by 3:00pm. We were not very full this weekend which means we could do some things together, as I have said I was not going to do too much work. As we had guests coming on Saturday night I declared Saturday the work day of the weekend and got on with putting up the rest of joists we bought last month for the mezzanine floor in the garage. This does not follow my rule of completing one room at a time but I did not want to leave the joists outside for too long in the rain……

Fleur had her helping hat on and so she helped me mix the cement to fix the joists in place and level them up, which took rather longer than anticipated but by 3:00pm everything was in place, just as the guests arrived. So that will be ready for boarding ovcr later in the year. Next weekend it will be back to the granary bathroom to lay the floor so that I can begin insulating the roof and working out the layout of the bathroom so that we can start running the first fix of pipework. Since we have two bathrooms one above the other I must make sure we fix both bathrooms together, to ensure the pipe work ends up in the right place. But that’s me getting ahead of myself once again lets’ get the floor down and insulation in first.

After Saturday it was time for the weekend proper, and even though the weather was not fantastic we played mini golf on Sunday and went boating on the Charente on Monday, and in between played lots games, washed the cars, getting extremely wet in the process and even going out to dinner on Sunday evening, for an excellent curry with our friends and neighbours Steve & Lindsay. Steve made an excellent curry, and Lindsay made a really tasty summer fruit pudding, so we ate really really well. We also discovered a new game which will probably appear on Fleurs birthday or Christmas list soon. It was called Sequence and is allegedly quite addictive. Steve and Lindsay’s choice of music was interesting at times as we were treated to White Christmas and a couple of other unseasonal ditties, but all in all it was a great evening apart from the fact that being the 24^th of August we would expect to be eating outside, but it was so chilly we were forced to eat inside, another sign of the very strange and unseasonal weather we are having.

An international evening

Another first for me in commuting terms, I am sitting at La Rochelle airport and it its 8:45 on a Sunday morning and I’m once again waiting Mr O Leary’s air-bus back to Stansted. August is definitely a strange travel month, and I’m at La Rochelle now trying to keep the price of my weekends down a bit, so I am saving about €150.00 by taking this flight instead of the Sunday evening flight from La Rochelle to Stansted.

I arrived in Sigogne on Thursday evening so I still had 2 full days here, its just that one day was a full work day, for my weekday job as opposed to my weekend job. Friday evening ‘after work’, we had some visitors and what started out as a reasonably quiet weekend for the B&B turned into quite a busy one. Our visitors were a Belgian couple and their two dogs who had ‘discovered’ us via Franca’s blog, they don’t live that far from us, in French terms at least, so they came over for an aperitif. At the same time we had guests from Paris coming to stay with us for the weekend having booked at the last minute. They had asked if they could come early to drop off their things, but in the end they did not arrive until about 7:00pm, we thought maybe we had a no show on our hands, but luckily not. So whilst we sat chatting with Jan and Simonne the Parisiens arrived, so they joined us for an aperitif, then Franca got a phone call from another B&B, asking if we had a room for guests they could not accommodate, and so 20 minutes late a car with Italian plates arrived with a very nice Italian family, then 5 minutes later their friends came too (though not to stay). So suddenly Jan remarked just how international this gathering was. When we looked at it, we had Belgians, Dutch, French, English and Italians in the garden. This was amazing because, to us, this is what running the B&B is all about. It only lasted a moment as all the guests then dispersed for their evening meals and left just the Belgians Dutch & English to carry on chatting.

Jan and Simonne are a lovely couple, they have two dogs which are equally lovely, and well behaved, though because they were a bit big, and one was particularly bouncy it took Fleur a while to get used to them. She is still wary (scared is the wrong word) of young bouncy dogs as they do things unpredictably, but in the end she was walking the oldest one around the garden, and asking us again if she could have a dog. So it was a lovely evening, even though I have to admit to struggling to understand Jan and Simonne's Belgian accent at times, and I believe we have an invitation to a barbeque in September at their house, to look forward to. I have to say thanks also for the very original presents too, which we will be tucking into soon.

With guests in the house it is difficult to get work done, especially as I was in charge of our quick change around on Saturday morning, in charge is a big word, Franca said I should clean the room the Italians were using, because I can do it faster. We were due to receive a family who had asked to check in at 11:00 as they had a family lunch to go to. All went well and the Italians left on time giving me 45 minutes to get the room ready for the next guests, so no problems there. In the afternoon I had planned to put up the main support for the joists for the new floor in the garage, I thought this would take a couple of hours to do because I didn’t know until I started drilling, what the wall was made of. In the event the wall was solid and the support went up in half an hour, so I also managed to install 6 of the eight joists, so for once I am a bit ahead of schedule.

Saturday night was a nice lazy evening, no cooking to do as all our guests were eating out, and so we just have some standard food, with the luxury of sitting down together, just the three of us, and after dinner we just played some games with Fleur and listened to some music, and were generally lazy, it was nice to do , a change from the hustle and bustle we have been going through recently.

Well the plane has arrived so time to join the boarding scrum….

Hotel AuBellefleur in full swing.....

Well here is a first for me since moving to France, its Saturday night and I am sitting at Angouleme airport waiting for Mr O Leary’s bus back to London Stansted. I have been at home in the Charente for a week to help Franca with our first full week of guests. Full week to us means that all three of our completed rooms have been rented out.

I arrived in Angouleme on Thursday night and our guests, the family of my old boss from the time when I worked in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam, at de Zeeuw & de Keizer, arrived Friday lunchtime, a little earlier than expected, but we were ready. He had always said that when we went into business he would be one of our first guests and true to his word he and his family arrived in Sigogne for a week long stay. Little did we know what a test he would put us through, and I mean that in a good way so to speak. We thought they would eat in with us for maybe three evenings during their stay, but in the end they ate with us every night except one, where we already had an appointment which we thought was going to be drinks and dinner, and turned out to be just drinks and nibbles. Our guests also stayed at the house for two whole days just relaxing, so that meant providing lunch as well, so I am now sitting at the airport waiting for my plane back to the UK and looking forward to going back to work for a rest.

I must say it was good fun but hard work, because in a way we had hired ourselves and our house out for a week, which is a step beyond a B&B but also very rewarding financially. We also learned a great deal, and at the end of the week lots of my old kitchen knowledge finally started to creep out of the back of my head where it had been sleeping for the last 20 years. Unfortunately too late for this time but we will be much better prepared next time. We did too many visits to the shops and were not very well organised with our time, and probably not disciplined enough in ourselves either. What it would be like if we had the swimming pool as well I really don’t know, though we already have our first volunteer to come and work for us during the holidays, as the eldest daughter of our guests was quite enthusiastic about come to work for us next year, at the moment we do not have a room for her, but we’ll have to work on that, because with 5 rooms in full swing and possibly a pool we will need help.

The family consisted of mum & dad, and three children aged 14, 10 and 7, which meant Fleur had three playmates for the week, which was just as well as I had no time to play with fleur. The whole family were ideal guests, the children were very polite, as were mum and dad! The whole family werehappy and enjoyed playing together, and when mum and dad wanted a chance to rest they could, though dad’s idea of a rest was a 40 mile cycle ride.

We managed to come up with unique recipes and menus every evening, and thank goodness nothing went wrong until the very last day when I let the children help me with the pasta, it was the first time I had made pasta in France and we ended with something that we just could not use, too dry and no matter how carefully I added more olive oil it just dried out again, so with three pairs of hands trying to help and time running out I had to give up and use that old standby stuffed tomatoes.

We are putting all the menus down on paper (which is what we should be doing anyway) so that planning is not such hard work next time. The work was full on for the whole time from 8:00am until midnight, I was able to wimp out around 11:00, as I had to read Fleur her bedtime story. It certainly reminded me of my time at the Rubens Hotel in London all those years ago.

The weather was not bad, though very changeable during the week, at one point the thermometer went off the top of the scale, and this morning when we put our guests in their car at 6:00am it was very pretty cold, not the best weather for the Charente in August when it should be fairly consistently around 28 degrees and sunny most days, but there is always next year!!

After we waved au revoir to our guests we went back to bed until around 11:00, and just played games with Fleur, until we summoned the energy to clean the kitchen. Luckily we have not guest tonight so the rooms were left until the energy returns, maybe tomorrow, though of course I will be in London.

We get a short rest before the next short invasion next weekend, though these guys are only staying for one night, and they are going to a family party, so we probably won’t notice them until breakfast.

So this is my first departure from my local airport, I’ve arrived here twice before, and it is the usual fun of a small airport, however it is very nice little airport, everyone is helpful and friendly, and although the arrival and departure lounges are basically tents they have made it very friendly, not your usual departure lounge. We of course have the usual chaos of a regional airport, but this also has a charm that La Rochelle, Poitiers and Bordeaux lack. I only hope Mr O Leary will make this a daily flight next year, and maybe every an all year round flight, but the chances of that are pretty slim at the moment. With the flights the way they are it does not lend itself to bringing and dropping off clients, though the Saturday night flight is not as bad as I first thought, so if it runs next year perhaps we will try a promotion and see how it goes.

Another Fine weekend…

Flying Easyjet from Gatwick this week put me in La Rochelle at lunchtime on Friday which meant getting home by about 3:00pm Frenchtime, making for a relaxed start to the weekend.

Franca’s mum is still with us and an extra pair of hands for the garden or just entertaining Fleur is always welcome. The weather has finally turned summery with temperatures reaching 38 degrees on Saturday and Sunday in our sun trap, though I have to say it was a bit fresh this morning, which was a welcome break from the heat, as long as it only lasts a little while. In true Charentaise style, Monday is the worst day of the week according to the weather forecast. It happens so often that a fine weekend is followed by a breakdown of the weather Sunday night or Monday morning, and then it builds up again towards the following weekend.

The sun flowers are just starting to reach their peak about now with fields of yellow dotted amongst the vineyards and the newly harvested corn fields. The show only lasts about 6 weeks before they turn from the icon of the countryside into the eyesore of the countryside, as the sunflowers are left to dry out before harvesting. It’s a busy time in the French agricultural business, and that can be seen by the fact that the farmers are working 7 days a week, and all the daylight hours they can.

We had a nice easy weekend with our guests, Porte Bon Heur was occupied by a lovely Belgian couple who have friends in Sigogne, and so they basically used our house as a place to sleep, we did not even have to provide breakfast. Franca’s mum had Tournesol, and for one night only we had the guest from hell, who stayed out all night until 6:00am, Franca had said he could check out at 12:00 instead of the usual 11:00 but still he was late, when he finally appeared, wanting breakfast, it was 1:00pm, No chance, so he had a coffee and went back to his room to shower and was then on his grumbling and moaning way. This guy did not book, he just turned up on spec, and rule number 1 of running a B&B is not to take walk ins, i.e. people that have not booked in advance, so we have learnt our lesson on that one. Having said that our only other walk in were a charming French couple, so there is always an exception to every rule.

Building work this weekend was obviously curtailed slightly due to having guests in the house though I did manage, with Franca and Franca’s mums help, get the old scullery completely cleared, and one third of the ceiling removed to allow me to start to install the new, stronger floor joists to form the floor of the first floor bathroom/ceiling of the ground floor bathroom. It is not difficult work though it is pretty heavy work, so I only managed to install 2 new joists, with the delays caused by waiting for guests to leave, and me figuring the best way to do things, this was the first time I have done anything like this. So next weekend, I will try to get the other six joists installed, but that does depend if Bogdan has cleared the rest of the upstairs prospective bathroom, because he is using the other two thirds of the floor area as a storeroom. My summer task is to get the bathrooms ready for fitting out towards the end of September.

Back at La Rochelle airport this Monday morning for the return Easyjet flight to London Gatwick before heading up to Stansted to catch a flight to Ireland, hopefully there will be no repeat of my last visit to Ireland from France.

Where old meets new

14 Juillet; in our street

14th July....Bastille weekend celebrations!!

The 14th of July is probably the biggest day of the year in France as far as celebrations go, bigger than Christmas and New Year, celebrating or commemorating the start of the French Revolution, when 7 prisoners were freed from the Bastille in Paris.

This year in our village everything started on the 12^th of July. The village festival committee have been busy all year working on creating a two day extravaganza of eating, drinking, and dancing for the evenings, and during the day time there was a celebration of all things agricultural and mechanical from yesteryear.

There were demonstrations of harvesting wheat through the ages, from the time when wheat was harvested by hand to the latest in combine harvesters, and everything in between. We even had an old portable bakers oven from the 60's (it could have been earlier) to bake the bread. They have not worked out how to grind the grain into flour yet (but I'm sure they will) which would complete the process of ground to table and all done in one field, but otherwise they showed the whole process from beginning to end and they did a great job.

This was our second ‘Fete de Batages’ and it was every bit as good as the first, and since we are no longer strangers it was even more enjoyable. It is always interesting to see how different people celebrate, and it was good to be enjoying ourselves amongst friends, even though for the majority of the time I was struggling to understand what people were saying. It appears I have to go through this pain barrier when I learn a new language so maybe by next year I will be able to have a proper conversation.

It was also a weekend of firsts for Fleur, as she got a bit more freedom from her parents. We were not chasing after her every five minutes to find out where she was, though to be fair most of the time she was by our side any way. It was her first big party with adults, complete with a huge disco rig and dance floor, so once she got over her shyness you could not keep her off the dance floor.

More than 400 of us sat down on Saturday night to a 4 course meal of soup, ham, beans and salad, cheese and apple tart. Each course was interspersed with dancing, which started off with older style French music for the more senior diners, but as we progressed through the courses so, in each musical set the amount of more traditional music got less and the disco tracks increased, in quantity and volume. Once the desert had been consumed there was an exodus of the older members of the village seeking some peace and quiet, and, at it was past midnight, no doubt their beds as well. After the older folk made their exit there was a procession of mainly fathers carrying small sleeping children to their beds. We made it to 1:30, before it was our turn to take our, happy tired, but still awake little one to her bed, though I still had to carry her the length of the village, to get her home.

Sunday saw the procession of tractors around the village lead by 2 shire horses pulling a tradition hay wane, being a farming community it is only natural that the celebrate their past, and for those of us who are new comers it is very interesting, though the hour long presentation of the qualities and history of each of more than 40 tractors was rather too long, especially if you don’t understand the jokes. In one form or another this celebration was repeated all over France on what is the biggest party weekend of the year for the French.

Today is the 14^th July its self and I am back at Bordeaux airport to go to work while the French nation sleep off their collective hangovers. Though I did see a large group of dedicated athletes getting ready to ‘run’ the Jarnac 10K although I guessing at the 10K bit, its not the Jarnac marathon because that happens at the end of October or the beginning of November. It was good to see I was not the only one up early on a Bank Holiday.

One wierd foot note to the weekend was an advert I heard on the French radio station as I drove to the airport, in English for a shopping centre in Bordeaux which was going to be open on the bank holiday, what an enditement on the English way of life. The advert was then repeated in French so I guess they are starting to catch us up, heaven forbid....