Congratulations to Mat Follas Masterchef champion 2009

Mat is this years' winner of the BBC cooking competition Masterchef, he peaked at just the right moment to beat off the other two finalists, and turned out a truly glorious three course meal.

Having seen him set the bar so high, I think I will have to go away and practice for a few more years before I pick up my Masterchef entry form.

I love watching Masterchef, and although the finalists were stunningly good, some of the first round competitors were hopeless, I remember the guy who cooked a pork chop and got the dressing out of a bottle, and then burned the chop. If he got through what were the people at the auditions like?

Anyway well done to all the finalists Andy, Christopher and especially Mat for delivering everything he had learnt through the program in a sublime meal.

Spring has Sprung

Spring has arrived in Sigogne, France this week, the days are beginning to get noticeable longer, the sun has come out and for the first time this year the thermometer has passed 15 degrees in the shade, and in our suntrap the temperature reach 27 degrees yesterday afternoon.

Although winter is not officially over yet, I am hoping that this means better weather is now here to stay and we can get outside again. Yesterday Franca and Fleur spent all day working and playing in the garden. I just hope it lasts until the weekend when I get there..

My train theory as a barometer of the state of the London economy

I still do not understand, the economy is in a downward spiral, with, sadly 1000s of people still loosing their jobs, and yet the commuter trains are still jam packed in the morning even at 6:00am, when I commute into the centre of London, and it's the same story in the evening.

A walk along the end of the road in evening, where I live during the week, may hold one of the answers, there are 4 restaurants within 200m of each other and, the other evening as I walked home from the station just before 9:00pm all 4 of them were empty. You can see a similar thing happening in Central London as well, but more especially in pubs in the city of London, so many of them are almost empty by 7:00pm, unless there is football on .

So after the 'massive' job losses in the banking sector in London, most of whom appear not to use trains, it is becoming evident that the next area being hit hard is the service sector, and most of those workers do not use the train either, so using the occupants of my train journey to work in the mornings and evenings, at least in the London area, is not a good barometer of the state of the economy at the moment, as the number of people commuting does not appear to have varied significantly. It could also just mean that members of the banking sector and service sector do not live in South East London.

So what can I conclude from this, most people that use commuter trains in my area are public sector workers? We will have to wait for the next general election before that theory is proved or disproved.

Meanwhile I will continue to fight for standing room on my daily commute to London. Oh and yes, I am working in the public sector...

Sheep shed uncovered - maybe

Well Franca placed some photos of my handy work last weekend so here is some text to go with it. After 2 relatively easy weekends for me it as back to work with a vengeance last weekend. It was time to get down and dirty, well at least very dusty. I had to cut a slot in the concrete floor to put in a new toilet waste pipe to server 3 new toilets I am about to install. I then have to join the new waste pipe to the existing old one.

This meant taking out of action the bathroom and toilet we have been using for the last 2 years, gosh was it really that long.... and moving temporarily to one of the guest rooms upstairs whilst we go hell for leather to get the next two rooms finished in time for the summer. We have effectively reduced our capacity by one third at the moment, though being the quiet season it does not matter too much, as long as we are ready by June.

So big mess job number one was to cut the channel in the concrete slab, which took the whole weekend, by Saturday evening I had managed less than 3 feet and I thought I was going to have to give up until I could get some bigger tools, as my little angle grinder and electric hammer drill/chisel were making very slow work of breaking up the concrete, but Sunday saw me get a spurt on and I managed to get the vast majority of the channel dug out. In the process I found another floor under the concrete slab which may well have been where the sheep were kept, our house is a former sheep farm, and the previous owners told us they kept the sheep at the back of the house where I am now working.

Dust got absolutely everywhere in the house and it prompted a mass clean up on Sunday afternoon. I knew it was going to be bad because the angle grinder always creates a huge amount of dust, but just like pine needles from your Christmas tree, we will be clearing this dust up for ages to come.

Another one bites the dust

Interview Grant & Forsyth

If you are interested, here's the link to the interview http://www.guysndollsfan.co.uk
The 1st question is Franca's one.

A glass of Champagne, what else

I had a sudden thought at the weekend, my wife can be described as a true fan, where as I probably am not, when it comes to music, her choice of singers, bands etc. Since we have known each other 3 people have come into my life whom I would never other wise had given any thought to let alone listen to. The first is Julien Clerc, a French singer, and my wife’s number one favourite of all time, I think I scrape in just ahead of him in the popularity stakes but it’s a close run thing as my daughter and I found out at a concert of his in Bordeaux week or two ago. It was a sit down concert, however the point came in the concert when you could go down to the stage, the wife handed me my daughter and just ran for it, leaving us to sit together for the rest of the concert. The other two people are Julie Forsyth (daughter of Bruce) and Dominic Grant, now a duet, but formerly 1/3rd of Guys 'n Dolls a pop group from the seventies (if I'm allowed to describe them as that). We had guests staying with us at our B&B over the weekend, but for two hours whilst Julie and Dominic were appearing on a BBC radio show she was lost to us, sat in front of the computer emailing and listening to the show on the internet. The guests did not seem to mind as they were busy house hunting on the internet, so Fleur and I kept them fed and watered and answered their questions on house hunting

I am obviously not a true music fan as none of my favourite groups would illicit such a reaction from me, the odd classic car might have me running across a road to take a closer look, but that is about it.

Having said all that I would not change the way Franca is for anything, its part of her character and that’s what I love about her. So what did we do on Valentines Day, well I serviced the lawn mower for Franca, dug the vegetable patch and planted up some flowers with Fleur and Franca prepared a room for our guests. Luckily the weekend before was the weekend of the Julien Clerc concert, so it was an early Valentines Day present for Franca. We did surprise our guests when they arrived by opening Champagne for them, well it wouldn’t be Valentines Day without a bottle of bubbly now would it.. oops perhaps that what I am a true fan of :-)

In Surrey....

....everything is white...snow paradise for children.....and some adults....

Julien Clerc Live Concert

A weekend Break

Last weekend I did not do any work on the house as we had a mini weekend away in Bordeaux. Julien Clerc (a French singer for those that don't know) was giving a concert in Bordeaux, and since Franca is one of his greatest fans we had to be there, well she had to be there, we went along to make sure Julien was OK. By we I mean Fleur and I, it was Fleurs' first live adult concert, she has seen the Balamory show live, but this was her first music concert and she loved it. I am not a fan of Julien Clerc but his music is good in parts and so was the concert. He is undoubtedly a good live performer in a French sort of way, what do I mean by that, well you get a much deeper explanation of some of the songs, and all the collaborators get a mention, and even the road crew got thanked by name during the concert. I enjoyed it, and Franca thought it was absolutely fantastic, it would be the other way round if we went to a Pink Floyd or Genesis concert, though I am not sure where Fleur would stand on that one.

Fleur also enjoyed the fact that it was here first time in a hotel, that she can remember, she has stayed in quite a few hotels but she was too young to remember, she certainly enjoyed her breakfast on Sunday morning.. and in the end her eyes were of course bigger than her tummy.

Well now its back to work, the plane flew as normal this morning, and the trains were back to normal as well, just in time for the next storm to arrive! time to batten down the hatches again..

Snow snow snow

Well last week was an interesting week to say the least. Loads of snow falling in South East England meant last Mondays' flight from Limoges to Stansted was cancelled, forcing me to drive to the UK to get to work. All the way up from Sigogne to Lewisham it rained. I had no problems on the roads and I reached Lewisham in the time I normally do in the dry. I saw lots of laying snow from about Paris up wards to London, but I did not see a single snowflake fall.

Tuesday, I got the train in to the office, the train was almost empty and again no travel problems at all. Tuesday evening I decided I'd better get my car from the airport car park before I needed a mortgage to pay the exit fee, so I jumped on the Stansted Express for the 46 minute journey to the airport. 3 hours later I finally arrived at the airport after a points failure outside Stansted Airport meant the train had to go back to Bishops Stortford, that was after and hour of waiting for the points to be fixed, then the engineers deciding they could not fix it, so they sent the train back down the line to Bishops Stortford to catch a bus to the airport. So almost everyone on the train missed their flights that night, and I had a wasted evening.

Wednesday, and the great British public decided they would go back to work and so the trains were packed again, so I was lucky to actually get on the train at all.

Finally Thursday was a near normal day, though I had to go and meet my accountant so I had to sneak off early to drive to Southend, where I got bad news from the accountant and a hearty dinner from my mum. Friday morning saw me setting off at 5:00am for Dover. It was dry when I left London and there were just a few spots of rain as I got to Dover. The rest of the drive down to Sigogne was done in sunshine and rising temps so that by the time I got home it was 12 degrees. Mean while in the UK the South East had once again ground to a halt under a blanket of snow.