Tuesday, December 23, 2008

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

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

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.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

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….