Home in the Charente

Christmas and NewYear

2011-01-06T13:32:00.005Z

For Christmas and New Year we have been all together in Rotterdam at my mother-in-law, where we had a great time. We did some catching up with friends and family, spent a full day at the Efteling http://www.efteling.com where Fleur even had a go on ice skates. New Years eve with the Dutch traditional 'Oliebollen' and applebeignets and of course fireworks at midnight, with champagne and luxury fish dish. We only had the sparkling stars for 1€ and a happy daughter, while NL spent 65 million Euros on fireworks this year.

Oh and we had a White Christmas throughout New Year!

For pictures see Franca's blog: http://portersonthemove.blogspot.com

Darren goes USA

2010-12-13T18:27:00.000Z

http://www.wanderingeducators.com/

A new sister

2010-12-09T14:09:00.002Z

We have added a new sister to our blogs! As you know both Franca and I like to cook, eat and drink so this resulted into a new blog about cooking, recipes...well have to a look for yourself and enjoy!

http://aubellefleurskitchen.blogspot.com/

back again

2010-11-01T08:01:00.005Z

Hello folks, well I am back again after a somewhat longer break from writing this blog, than I expected. Its an interesting day to come back too as it is All Saints day in the Christian calendar, which as I am sure you are all aware comes a day after All Souls day, or as most people know it these days, Halloween.

Up to this weekend my daughter Fleur has always been afraid of Halloween and we have had to close the gates and keep a low profile so that she was not frightened by trick or treaters. This weekend all that changed, having been fed a diet of Halloween editions of all her favourite TV programs for the last 3 weeks, she wanted to dress up for the Halloween party we were going to on Saturday night. We did not have much time so we had to try and make a Halloween costume, and whilst she enthusiasticall y joined in the printing cutting out and colouring of all the Halloween bits and bobs we were going to sew onto her Princess dress, once they were all tacked on she suddenly came over all self concious and thought she looked stupid, so they were all ripped off again. So she went to the party as a normal princess, this time next year I think we will be in full Halloween and trick or treating mode. Fleur even plucked up courage to come and see the costumes from the 2 trick or treat visits we received on Halloween night, which were very good. Next year we have a lot of work to do I think, the children of Sigogne set the costume bar very high!!

For some reason I was in the work groove on Saturday and so I worked on our latest project from 10am until midnight, and then went to the afore mentioned party until 4:00am. So I was mightly pleased to discover there was an extra hour for sleep, courtesy of the clocks being turned back one hour. But I was still awake again at 10.00 and back working on the house, the French think we are mad, they are probably not that far wrong.

So we had a really busy weekend, we have once again ended up with a challenging target to get some building work completed before our next B&B guests arrive. I think we will just about make it, I have a whole weekend to point an internal stone wall and finish off re routing some electrical cables, so it should be achieveable provided I do not meet any unforseen challenges along the way.

Franca's mum has been through the mill over the last 6 weeks, with 3 operations to blast away a tumour in her bladder. She is well on the road to recovery now, but it did mean we had some unplanned visits to Rotterdam, which is never a bad thing, but as usual the timing was not perfect, but that is life all over, we are just pleased the Franca's mum is fit and well again.

Until the next time...

Arkwrights till alive and on the Paris Metro

2010-07-24T19:47:00.001+01:00

I really must not laugh, but I can't help it, watching people with luggage trying to use the Paris Metro with its amazing 2 seconds to grab your ticket and get through the gate before it closes. As I was passing through the Gard du Nord a party of English school children were trying and failing to master the gates with humans on one side of the gate and luggage on the other. By the time I arrived it was too late to offer assistance as most of them were already through, nursing bruises and dented suitcases. I'm sure the manufacturers of Arkwright's till on Open All Hours must also won the contract to build the access gates to the Paris Metro.

I am travelling home by train today, because the flight was too expensive, mind you the train was not cheap either, but then it is summer time and everyone is on the move, travelling to or from their holidays.

I am on a modern TGV I did not realise that there were 'ancient and modern' TGVs, but apparently there are. This one is travelling from Paris almost to Spain, I'm not sure if Henday, the final destination of this train, is in France or Spain. The advantage of this train is that the first stop after leaving Paris Montparnasse is Angouleme, it takes 2 hours 15 mins station to station, half the time it takes me to drive it.

I love the French idea of first class in the TGVs in general, the only difference between 1st class and 2nd class, apart from the price of the ticket, is the size of the seat, and to be honest the difference in price of the ticket is not huge. On the Eurostar the price of first class is more than double that of second class but then you do get a meal and a free bar, both on the train and at the station before boarding.

Blog update..... first class on this TGV has reached new heights, we have an at seat trolley service, now I am not sure what the French are going to make of this, as they have already brought their lunches on board with them, but the tourists are making good use of it. Poor guy needs to get the hang of it a little better though, as everytime someone orders something he has to race off to the buffet car to get it, I wonder what is actually in his trolley. This is the first time ever, in over 4 years of French train travel that I have had an at seat trolley service, long may it continue and Viva La Republique:-)

automotive choices

2010-07-06T07:47:00.004+01:00

Apologies for not posting a new blog for a while, I am hoping to get back into the swing of things soon, so here is a starter for 10 talking about some of the cars I have hired in the first part of this year.

So, this is a bit of an automotive blog inspired by some interesting hires I have had recently.

I am also still looking for a replacement for my Jaguar S-Type which is being retired after 4 years of very good service to and from SW France, but I will not be selling it or trading it in.

. I am looking for a largish comfortable diesel for the runs between London and SW France,capable of towing a trailer and having a large boot area, I don't think that is not too difficult a specification, but its hard finding just the right car for the job.

I am lucky enough to be hiring a lot of cars in the course of my travels, so it gives me the chance to try lots of different makes in a similar class, and given that you have no choice in the car you are loaned it means driving all sorts of vehicles.

Most of the cars I rent are either group C or group D 1.6 diesel or petrol cars but one of the advantages of being a regular hirer at the same hire company office is that I occasionally get a decent upgrade when my group of choice is running low, and recently I was given what I thought would be a good upgrade which was handy as we were actually going to do a lot of kilometers that weekend so a bigger car was very welcome.

I was given a Mercedes B180, a weird looking piece of kit and to be honest not a very good car overall. It was very bland inside unless you like black on black with more black. It drove reasonably well but the 1.9 diesel engine felt under powered for the car, the steering was aweful, it had so much under steer that I nearly hit the first car I tried to overtake. After a whole weekend of driving it grows on you a bit and it is pretty sure footed on the bends, once you've got the hang of the understeer, but over all it was a disappointing experience as I have found most Mercedes, and I really don't like the new designs they have come up with recently.

The weekend before I had a direct comparison with the B180, a brand new Renault Scenic, which was also rather disappointing with poor handling and steering, which is odd for a Renault which normally has very precise steeringand reasonable handling, we love the Senic II that my wife drives. The 1.6 diesel engine in the new Scenic was again under powered for the car, maybe the 1.9 with a 6 speed gearbox is better. One thing that did impress me was the full colour TFT dash pod Renault put in this version of the Scenic, its the first time I have seen one on a standard production car. Renault and Ctiroen are always at the leading edge of car design and this Scenic makes the Merc look very dated. Looking at the two cars I have to say I would not buy either, neither of them were really drivers cars, and they had too many negative points.

Still top of my list and just in budget, is the Citroen C4 Grand Picasso despite the wishy washy gear change on the one I had recently. The engine is amazingly strong and economical, the driving poistion is ideal with everything in easy reach of the driver, and it is very comfortable on a long journey. The Grand Picasso has bucket loads of storage and so for the job I want my next car to do Citroen are the manufacturer to beat, at least within my budget. Now I just have to save up the money or find a good 0% finance deal...

BBQ Time from the Charente to.....

2010-05-25T15:37:00.003+01:00

Because the weather was so beautiful and warm lot's of people had the same idea to lit the BBQ, reason to create another international blog by Franca.

Have a look at http://portersonthemove.blogspot.com

Strawberry fields / Twitter Meeting in Dordogne

2010-05-18T08:50:00.004+01:00

For this time I refer to Franca's blog, which is in English, about our weekend in the Dordogne.

http://portersonthemove.blogspot.com

Ash clouds and sunshine

2010-04-27T12:01:00.004+01:00

It has been a liitle while since I have had a chance to write a new entry in my blog and quite a few things have happened in the intevening period.

We have all started to learn the really complicated name of an obscure volcano in Iceland, most of us who travel in Europe have experienced delays and cancelations to travel plans, missed events and even found some ingenious routes to and from various places, all caused by volcanic ash clouds in the wrong place. For me it meant missing my wife's birthday, as I had to stay in London, having worked out a route to get home in time for Franca's birthday I was then stood up by the car hire company, but at least they let me know before I travelled, so Avis are still my friends.

I was expecting to have to stay a second weekend in London, however the volcanic ash clouds miraculously parted, and we were flying again, so I flew back home on Friday as usual on an almost empty plane, as most people had already made alternative arrangements. I a not sure how things will pan out in the coming weeks,volcano wise, we will just have to play it by ear
.
The weather has been amazing for the last two weeks in France, with almost wall to wall sunshine, my wife and daughter are taking on their summer tanned colour already, and I have been sun burnt, even though I have been working inside this weekend.

We have managed to get the final letting room ready for guests again after our winter drain problems, it seems a long time ago now that I was digging holes in the garden in the snow, though the scars of the work can still be seen in the garden, that is the next job, to fill in all the holes.
Franca's birthday came and went, and somewhat passed me by, as I was in the UK, luckily Franca had her Mum down to stay to help celebrate, and they had a great meal in one of our favourite restaurants, complete with birthday cake.

The B&B is starting to get busy and next weekend we will be full for the first time this year, so things are looking up now that spring has arrived. It is hard to believe that it was still winter just over 3 or 4 weeks ago.

Basic PC maintenance

2010-04-21T19:26:00.002+01:00

I have seen a number of folk recently complaining of downloads speeds gradually getting slower and slower on their broadband connections. This is not always down to your network provider getting overwhelmed or your neighbours all deciding to download movies at the same time. The source of the problem can be staring you in the face, or rather you may be staring at it, your computer.

First things first when doing work on your computer;

Please remember the most important thing regarding computers, ALWAYS MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACK UP before undertaking any work on your machine, you never know what may happen. If you are unsure get some who knows a thing or two to help you. Things do go wrong from time to time even when doing the simplest of jobs on a computer, so back it up. As the absolute bare minimum, make sure you have your precious data backed up, remember only doing this will mean a long time sat inform of your machine rebuilding your applications. There I think I have covered my self enough now if something does happen to go wrong, and as you can guess I am not taking responsibility if there is any data loss as a result of follow these instructions, sorry folks but you have to do this these days.

Down to Work

It could be that you have installed some new features or programs that have just tipped you over the edge in terms of available disk space or computer memory, in which case hardware upgrades are probably going to be your only answer.

However you could be having problems because you have not done any housekeeping on your machine for quite a while, or maybe you have never done any. Just a few simple tasks done once a month may keep your life line with the internet in great shape for a bit longer, so here are a few tips on basic computer housekeeping.

I must also warn you that these instructions will vary between the different versions of operating systems and will also depend on which web browser you use; (IT Pros - no haranguing emails please, I’m keeping this a simple as possible)

I will base the instructions on good old Microsoft Internet Explorer running under Microsoft XP,

Round 1 – Internet Explorer clean up

Open Internet Explorer and click on the Tools drop down and select Internet Options from the drop down list, this will open up a box with a number of tabs across the top.

You should see a box called Temporary Internet files with three buttons in it, click on the Delete Cookies button, this will bring up a box asking if it is OK to Delete all Cookies in the Temporary Internet Files folder, click on OK, it will be fine honest, this will take just a couple of seconds to clean out.

This next step, I have seen take up to an hour!! Click on the Delete Files button, this will come up with a scary box that says Delete all Files in the Temporary Internet Files folder, there will also be a tick box asking if you want to Delete Offline content, tick the box and then click OK, this will take time, how long will depend on all sorts of factors but it may take a while.

The final stage is optional and involves the Clear History button, if you want to keep your browsing history so that you can go back to previously visited web pages quickly don’t press it, I clean mine out weekly as web pages addresses and links change frequently.

Round 2 – General computer clean up

This covers a multitude of general file area clean ups… these little apps can be found if you click on your START button, then select Programs then Accessories, and then select System Tools. From the system tools menu select disk cleanup, a little box will appear with a number of tick boxes in it, the following are the main ones to be ticked so that your machine is clean and tidy;
Temporary Internet Files (which should be almost empty if you did the previous step)
Recycle Bin
Temporary Remote Desktop Files
Setup Log Files
Temporary Files

If you are running out of disk space you want to tick the Compress old files box as well

Once you have done this then click on OK, and click on Yes to say you are sure you want to do this, the machine will then go off and clean itself up in a few minutes.

The final thing to do is to organise the files that remain on your hard disk, which you again reach by clicking on your START button, then select Programs then Accessories, and then select System Tools. From the system tools menu select Disk Defragmenter. The disk Defragmenter tool opens up and all you have to do is ensure that the C:> drive is highlighted then click on the defragment button and the machine does the rest for its self, if you have not done this for a long time it could also take up to an hour to run, especially if you are seeing loads of blues, greens and reds, and not much white space in those progress bars. Once you have done this you machine should be fit and ready to go again for a while.

Please remember the most important thing regarding computers ALWAYS MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACK UP before undertaking any work on your machine, you never know what may happen. Things do go wrong from time to time even when doing the simplest of jobs on a computer, so back it up, or at least as a minimum make sure you have your precious data backed up.

There are plenty of other things you can do to look after your machine but this will be a good start…

Good Luck...

Interview BBC Radio Essex

2010-04-04T08:57:00.003+01:00

In case you have missed it, here's the link http://bit.ly/92gYkt?r=td of the interview I have given to BBC Radio Essex on 1st of April 2010 on the Dave Monk Show.

Trains Trains and more Trains

2010-03-31T19:12:00.002+01:00

Taking the train from Lewisham, South East London to Jarnac in South West France, just a normal commute? Well not really, but here is the story of the eight trains it takes to get me home for the weekend and back again on Monday morning.

I'm cheating a bit by saying eight trains as four of them are tubes, but they are trains none the less. On this particular journey I set off on a damp and drizzly Friday morning to catch the 6.05 from Lee to London Bridge, I think lot of people were taking the day off because I got a seat, which is rare, even in these economically challenged times. Having reached London Bridge on time I joined the dash down to the Jubilee Line to take the tube to Westminster, where I needed change to the District Line to bring bring me to my first destination of the day, Victoria. The jubilee line at 6:30 in the morning is full of the manual workers of London heading for the morning round of cleaning, or getting ready for another day on the building site, I bet they are glad this winter is behind them now. The trains on the District Line are equally full as the come from the outer lying areas of London, the Circle Line by contrast is almost empty, and I invariably get a carraige to myself. A quick jog up the stairs from the platform entitles me to pick up an egg and bacon roll from one of the Italian sandwich shops just outside the station, and then head off to the office to get a few hours work done before heading up to St Pancras to pick up the Eurostar to Paris.

Having not done any of the work I intended to do itis time to make my way back to Victoria station to continue my journey home to France, and this time we take the Victoria Line to Kings Cross St Pancras. There seems to have been building work going on for ever at Kings Cross St Pancras tube station but finally there looks to be a light at the end of the tunnel (could not resist that pun - sorry). A whole new set of tunnels linking the Victoria Line platforms with the main line stations are now open, and they have put the signs up so you know where you are going It is very light and airy not at all like the old underground, so well done one and all. I have one little niggle, its one hell of a rout march from the Victoria Line to St Pancras International, it felt like I had walked half way to Paris by the time I got there.

Since I can't use my Oyster card to get me to Paris yet, I went to one of the Eurostar automated collection machines and printed out my tickets, its a great system you buy your tickets from Rail Europe on the wibbly wobbly web at half the price Eurostar want to charge, and just by putting in your collection code you get your tickets, its great when technology works, that is progress.

Once through the airline style security screening and French passport control we are in the very nice departure lounge which has everything a traveller would need, shops toilets, seats, wifi, power for your laptop even French and Belgian tourist information, but no bins!! We have been through security, surely we can be trusted not to put explosive devices in the bins, or don't they trust their security systems to stop explosive devices being taken into the departure lounge in the first place. I must admit that at both ends of the line the Eurostar security is not as strong as at the airports which always strikes me as odd, given the tunnels track record so far.

Any way I digress, onto train number 5 of the day for the 12:30ish departure to Paris, and I appear to have been placed in a carriage full of people of a certain age, (OK pensioners - by the way aren't pensioners looking young these days) no doubt spending the kids inheritance. As soon as the wheels started turning, out came the foil packed sandwiches and flasks of tea, how did they get foil packs through security? For me and my travelling companion, for this part of the journey, it was out with the laptops and Blackberrys. One small problem here, there are so many tunnels and cuttings between St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel we keep loosing the wireless broadband connection. The arrival at Channel Tunnel signals the end of wireless broadband usage until a return to uk soil, it is still way too expensive to roam onto another network to use broadband in foreign country, thank heaven for wifi hotspots. We flew through the French coutryside towards Paris at a rapid rate of knots, the train line follows one of the main motorways from Calais to Paris and I once did try to keep up with the Eurostar, but not a chance in the car. I am sure the line from the Channel Tunnel to Paris must be one of the fastest in Europe. It always seems to me that the Eurostar travels faster than the TGV, but perhaps its just that the Eurostar makes more noise so feels faster than the better insulated TGV trains.

The Eurostar is a great way to travel between London and Paris, I just wish it wasn't so expensive, but I guess they have the pricing set correctly as the trains are always pretty full. It is nice when I can get a bargain ticket to travel in first class either via a Leisure Select or even Business Premiere ticket. You are served an aperitif a meal with wine, tea coffee and a digestif should you so wish, a very nice way to make your way from London to Paris. First class on the TGV though is a completely different kettle of fish. Apart from a bigger seat you don't get anything extra for your money, but then with the price only being €15 or €20 more than standard class you could not expect much for your money. I stick with travelling standard class on the TGV and take the option of first class on the Eurostar if there is a bargain to be had.

On arrival in Paris at the Gare du Nord I have plenty of time to get across the city to Gare Paris Montparnasse for my train to Angouleme, so I stroll down to the Metro (bought my carnet of tickets from the buffet/bar on the Eurostar to save queueing) which is only a 5 minute walk from the Eurostar platforms. I head for Line 4 and jump on the train. It always amazes me that the Paris metro trains have rubber tyres so the are relatively quiet compared to their London counterparts, and you can even use your mobile on the Metro, certainly the lines I use have been wired for mobile phones.

The Gare du Nord and Paris Montparnasse are two completely different stations, the Gare Du Nord has beautiful facade and looks like a station that is about 100 years old with bags of atmosphere and nostalgia about it, I always get the feeling of starting or ending a great journey there. Montparnasse on the other hand is great big brash modern station all bare concrete and angles, no real sense of nostalgia here, just the hustle and bustle of a very busymainline station serving the south of France.

There is a system at Montparnasse to getting on your TGV should you choose to paticipate in the ritual. The trains to Angouleme normally go from platforms 1,2,3 or 4 and so from about an hour before departure you stand opposite these platforms staring up at the huge indicator board waiting for the platform number to be announced, usually about 20 minutes before departure. Once the platform number is displayed you dash for the train, and why this ritual, firstly to bag your seat in case it is double booked, but mainly because you need to grab a space for your luggage. The French appear not to know the meaning of travelling light and as a consequence if you are last onto the train you will not have a place to put your luggage!! Having taken part in this ritual I found my seat on the 17:40 to Angouleme, settled back for the 2 hour 15 minute journey while the train filled up around me.

I managed to get one of the TGV's that run nonstop from Paris to Angouleme, and true to form all the French use the journey as a chance for some shuteye, or to catch up on their movie watching or missed TV shows. For me, as usual my laptop is out and I am wrting blogs, tweeting on my Blackberry or reading a book. This generally passes the time really quickly because by now all I want to do is get home, this was train number 7 and there is still one more to go after this to bring me to my journey's end. On arrival at Angouleme I need to buy a ticket for the last leg of my journey, if I had bought it from Rail Europe my entire journey would have cost me and extra £150.00, and the ticket is only €6.80. 15 minutes to buy a ticket and locate the train should not be a problem, and so it was at 8:10pm I walked to platform 11 to get on the eigth and final train to get me home, it was one of the old fashioned French local services, with the really deep comfy seats we used to ave in the 60s &70s in the UK, and so it was that at 8:45pm I finally arrived at Jarnac station happy to have got home for the weekend only to do a similar journey in reverse on Monday morning to get me back to work. Making this journey by train is more tiring than using the plane but I like to travel by train, as you certainly get to see a lot more and have much more of a sense that you have travelled somewhere, even if you do arrive tired, but never the less happy to have travelled.

Masterchef 2010

2010-03-26T07:57:00.005Z

So how has it been for you

Mastershout 2010 (thanks @fannyingabout for the name), sorry Masterchef 2010, has come a long way from the days of Loyd Grossman and his deliberations and cogitations on the sofa with celebrity guests.

However like so many of these formula (or reality type) shows I think it is about to reach its sell by date. My view is that in an attempt to offer a new angle the show seems to be drifting towards what I would describe as an unhealthy emphasis on presentation first, flavour and ingredients second unless the dish has BIG FLAVOUR (sorry for shouting again), no subtlety here.

Then last night when I thought I had the formula worked out they turned it on its head, the contestant with the best presentation skills and a good grasp of flavours and cooking beats the cook with the same attributes but with no presentation skills. If I'm right and this was a blip in the formula, this person, who does great food, will not get much further.

In an earlier round they did not put any body through from one contest for a quarter final place, a good move as none were good enough, but then in another show 2 excellent cooks went home whilst a couple of mediocre cooks were able to compete for a quarter final.

I know it's a tough job that John and Greg have but I think sometimes they are some what wide of the mark when judging what is in front of them, unless there is something else that we are not seeing.

Then there are the contestants themselves, most, though not all, want to win Masterchef so that they can open their own restaurant, well WHY, oops sorry shouting again, do you have to win Masterchef before you do it, if you are any good and you want your restaurant half as much as winning Masterchef then you won't need the competition to achieve your aim.

So why go on Masterchef, that's a tough one, and I would like to do it, given the time to practice, for me it would be to push myself in all the different areas that you get to experience going through the rounds, you must also learn a lot from the top chefs and just to be in all those different cooking environments working with people at the top of their game, now that would be fun and challenging.

Talking of fun, and this is my point in all this, FOOD SHOULD BE FUN, sorry shouting again, food is something that brings people together, the biggest moments of our lives almost all involve food somewhere along the line and luckily most occasions are happy ones, with the food and drink helping people feel even better about that special event.

Yes food has to look good, but people don't really remember food by saying wow didn't that plate of food look good, no above all it has to taste good, then it stays in the memory, a bad tasting meal also has the same effect on the memory, good looking or not. So far this series there has only been one dish that has stuck in my mind that I want to try and that was John's lobster and crab omelette, and I have been ill every time I have eaten lobster so far in my life!

I have enjoyed, no loved, watching Masterchef over the years but I think the time is approaching where it is time to hang up the aprons, let John and Greg's vocal chords recover from all that shouting, and move on.

Good luck to all the semi finalists in 2010, you have done a great job getting where you have, you are way better than me at the moment, and deserve to be there. My wife and I love cooking, we cook for our guests in our B&B, and we have fun doing it, we hope the guests have fun eating it too because that is what it is all about, there is no better sound than the buzz of people talking and laughing and enjoying, good company, good food and good wine. We come from the Mitra (8th Semi finalist on masterchef 2010) school of presentation, put it onto the plate and let the food do the talking.

We are getting better with our presentation, however we care more about our ingredients, where they come from and how they taste, presentation is second to having a good time cooking with good local ingredients and enjoying eating with happy contented people around the table, THAT'S tops for us, THAT'S what we call Masterchef.

I could go on for ages but I'll stop now and sorry about the shouting

Cheers

Darren

Easter is coming!

2010-03-09T16:33:00.002Z

Come and stay for Easter in Au Bellefleur!

Enjoy spring time in Southwest France without breaking the bank.

Stay 4 nights in one of our luxury fully en-suite guest rooms* and pay for just 3 nights, but don't leave it too long to book or we will be full!

Period: Thursday 1st April to Tuesday 6th April 2010.

*Based on 2 persons sharing, including a special breakfast, exclusive local tourist tax.

Don’t fancy going out in the evening to a restaurant? We love to cook, and for just 25€ per person we will spoil you with a 4-course meal, including a carafe of house wine, a special aperitif a glass of Pineau de Charentes, the speciality of our area.

Book through: info@aubellefleur.com or call us on 0033-5-45325961 and quote the Easter Offer 2010.

Have a look at our website http://www.aubellefleur.com

Storm Xynthia hits SW France

2010-02-28T18:18:00.004Z

An incredible strom blew through Spain, Portugal and France last night and was due to head on up to Denmark today.

We were warned that there was going to be a big storm coming through over Saturday night into Sunday morning, and during Saturday evening the storm warning was upgraded from an orange warning to a red warning for some areas, notably the departement that we border, so we knew we were in for an interesting night. After a family debate we decided that battening down the hatches would include for the first time in a long while the closing of all the shutters on the house, something we don't often do.

We were actually watching the unfolding tsunami situation in Hawaii, and when it failed to materialise at around 10pm France time we decided it was time for bed. The wind at this point was nothing special, just a strong breeze, so we all went to bed and to sleep.

At around 2am we woke to the sound of a howling gale and flapping shutters, so I went downstairs to investigate, and indeed one of the shutters had been blown open by the wind, so having secured it again I went back to bed. The wind was so noisy, there was no chance of getting back to sleep, though Fleur slept through the whole thing. Half an hour later, the next shutter broke free, so I went back downstairsto find one of the bistro shutters flapping in the wind, so having secured it again I decided to make a cup of tea and wait to see if anything else broke free in the wind. I was amazed that we still had electricity, since normally if a pigeon burps at out power cable the power goes off, so I was able to tweet with some of the other twitter community in SW France to compare notes. After 45 minutes nothing else was being damaged by the wind but the power was starting to come and go so time to go back up to bed. The wind blew and blew, until about 5:30am, or at least that was the last time I saw the clock before falling asleep until 9:30am. So in the end no major damage for us though on the coast there was extensive damage and flooding, and sadly to date it has been reported that 22 people have died in France, and 45 in total across Europe.

A powerful weekend for mother nature, reminding us who is incharge!!

Corned Beef Hash recipe

2010-02-24T21:40:00.002Z

Ingredients

2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 large onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped
340g/12oz tin of corned beef, diced
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
4 tablespoons freshly chopped parsley

500g or a 1lb smallish potatoes
4 tablespoons milk
25g/4ozbutter
Freshly ground black pepper
Freshly ground salt

Put the potatoes on to boil for 20 mins or until soft enough to make mashed potato

meanwhile for the corned beef, start by heating the olive oil in a frying pan and putting in the chopped onions and garlic and cook until soft, and lightly golden in colour
then add the chopped tomatoes and cook gently for another 5 mins, if it starts to look a little dry put some water in the empty tomato can and then add it to the
pan slowly to keep it moist. Add the diced corned beef and allow it to break down in the pan, after about 5 minutes the corned beef will melt into the mixture
keep this mixture on a low heat until your potaotes are cooked

Mash the potatoes with the milk, butter, salt & pepper

now put the parsley into the corned beef mixture, then after a minute add the mashed potato to the corned beef mixture and serve

If you want to give it a bit of a zing you can add a few drops of chilli sauce

2 tablespoons of corriander will also give it a lift

Putting the mash in at the last minute keeps the whole thing nice and light

you can also add a little red wine for depth or even Guiness in place of the water added to keep it moist

So there you have it I hope you enjoy it

Cheers

Darren

New PC in the offing...

2010-02-23T21:36:00.001Z

After the panic of nearly missing my flight last week I got up 15 minutes earlier and left for the airport half an hour earlier than normal and of course I ended up in Bordeaux airport a whole hour earlier than I normally arrive, but better too early than too late. It also means there is plenty of time to blog this morning. This weekend was quite leisurely for me, my main task was to get Au Bellefleur IT systems back up and running after the network card in our long term loan machine from the office decided to give up the ghost.

We pressed our very old PC but not much used PC back into service, and although it is slow it is working fine, and now the task of buying a new computer for Au Bellefleur begins. I am certainly not going to be buying any more small form factor machines as they have no room to insert an expansion card in the event that something small, like a network port, fails, which basically means the end of life as we know it for the small form factor PC.

We really are lost without an internet connection these days, all our contact with our clients being made over the internet we really cannot afford to be off air for too long, so I shall also be getting a mobile pay as you go broadband dongle as an emergency standby along with a little netbook.

We went out to friends for Sunday lunch which was great fun, even Fleur loved it as she had a lovely dog to play with, and she (Fleur) was showing our hosts some of her best dance moves, we eventually got home at about 8:00pm, so bang went any chance of me doing anything on Sunday afternoon, but I'm not complaining because it was good fun and I learnt a few useful things too..

Normality returns to Au Bellefleur

2010-01-26T15:48:00.003Z

A rare chance to get the computer out on a Ryanair flight means I can update you with goings on this weekend chez Porter in the Charente. I am flying via Limoges this weekend and next partly because of work and partly because of cashflow, I left it too late to book British Airways cheap fights, so here I am on Ryanair. Working in Nottingham means I am not too far from an airport either, so the car is at East Midlands and I am flying East Midlands to Limoges.

It was a quiet weekend at Au Bellefleur, though we had got guests who called on at the last minute, so a handy and timely boost to the cashflow as we do not have many guests at this time of year.

Our plumbing problems at least as far as blockages are concerned are behind us, I just have to complete the repairs to the drains an re-set the base of the shower in one of the affected rooms.
We have a nice new washing machine which was imeadiately pressed into action after its arrival on Wednesday and it has probably already done 15 washes, very quietly. We have never had such a quiet washing machine.

That was the extent of the excitment for the weekend, and it was nice to a normal weekend for a change, its just a pity that I had to head back to the UK on Sunday afternoon.

We are giving away 2 nights B&B in aid of Haiti victims

2010-01-21T17:31:00.006Z

Now then folks I have a challenge for you, we are giving away a free 2 night stay for 2 at www.aubellefleur.com with 2 x 4 course evening meals in a double room as a auction item in aid of the victims of the Haiti earthquake. The challenge is that its on a Dutch web site, as it is a Dutch appeal, however its easy to bid, you just go to http://www.twitterveiling.nl, click on the link on the left that says De Veiling and then click the link that says reizen/uitstapjes, scroll down until you see Overnachten in luxe Bed & Breakfast in zonnig Frankrijk. Bidding is already up to €175.00, auction closes at 21:00 on 31st January.

Done it, great, look now you can speak Dutch too.... well done :-)

We will also help you make your euro payment to the fund if required

Darren, Franca & Fleur

Good News week

2010-01-21T13:45:00.004Z

A little update on the blocked pipe situation, Les Dyno Rod chappies came in on Tuesday and finally cleared the blockage which appears to have been builders rubble, so the moral of the story is to make sure your builders, or yourself, do not put spoil down the toilet, and keep your pipes covered at all times while decorating. It was probably exacerbated by the fact that we have installed 6 new bathrooms over the last 18 months so a certain amount of rubbish would inevitably end up in the pipes.

The other piece of good news is that our new washing machine has arrived, so not only can we go to the toilet with impunity we can also have clean clothes... things are looking up, and as it is Thursday it means one sleep til home time

Cheers

how long is a sewage pipe - more than 20m in our case

2010-01-20T21:30:00.002Z

Time for a 2010 blog update as we are already half way through January, my least favourite month of the year, and probably lots of other people's least favourite too. Having missed going home last weekend because of working at The France Show in Earls Court, in London I was really looking forward to getting home this weekend. As it turned out I spent most of Saturday tring and failing to unblock the sewage pipe from 3 of our toilets, the other three in our B&B appear to be working normally.

On Friday evening on the way home I popped in to Leroy Merlin to buy some rods to hopefully clear the blockage from the sewage pipe, however on Saturday morning when I pushed 10m of rod into the pipe I did not hit any obstructions, so what to do next? I went to Leroy Merlin again and bought another 10m of rods. Having attached this to the end of the first 10m the second went all the way into the pipe, so now I have 20m of rod in the pipe and still no resistance, so no sign of the blockage. I then tried to use my high pressure jet
washer with the correct pipe clearing attachment, but that just stopped working after about 30 seconds. Time to give up and get the professionals in, this is no simple blockage and my DIY equipment was not making any impression on the blockage after 5 hours of messing about. So Franca has the unenviable task of finding the French equivelent of Dyno Rod to sort this one out. One could say that spending 5 hours in close proximity to the contents of out sewerage pipe was also an unenviable task, though
trying to explain all this in French will test even Franca's excellent grasp of the language, so I think she is going to enlist the help of a neighbour. As one of our other neighbours said it is lucky this did not happen in high season.

The net result was a wasted Saturday, nearly €100.00 spent and the pipe is still blocked, my high pressure washer is broken and to make matters worse when I pulled out the 20m of rods I actually only got 19m back! so to say I was not a happy camper was probably an understatement, though a hot bath and a beer later and I was a bit happier.
What is running through my mind at the moment is if this blockage cannot be cleared we are going to have one hell of a problem to get sorted out quickly as B&B rooms are unusable at the moment, worst case scenario could be we have to dig up a number of floors to find the blockage or even install a totally new waste pipe, hopefully it will not come to that. Watch this space for the next smelly installment...

On a lighter note Sunday saw the arrival of our first guests of 2010, so there was lots of cleaning and tidying to be done as we had let things slip a bit since the last guests departed before Christmas.

Fleur was obviously pleased to see me when I got home on Friday evening, though less than pleased that I spent most of Saturday with my head down a sewer pipe, so after my bath & beer we made cup cakes together, and I must say that they were very nice, so nice that Franca said that we should make some for Fleur's class at school, so as well as preparing for the arrival of our guests we had to run off a batch of 24 cup cakes, complete with marzipan decoration. I have to say that Fleur is getting so good at making cakes now that I'm only needed to check quantities of ingredients are correct and supply the muscle to cream the ingredients when Fleur's arm get tired.

France Show in London 8-9-10 January 2010

2010-01-07T13:26:00.003Z

Come and meet me in London during the France Show in Earls Court, Stand P142

Do you love France?
Do you love French food?
Do you love French drinks?
Do you love to read about France?
Do you love to listen to French music?
Do you love to spend your holidays in France?
Do you love the idea of buying a holiday house in France?
Do you love the thought of a permanent house in France?

It’s all closer than you think! Why don’t you come to the France Show and meet
http://www.aubellefleur.com and http://www.charente-immobilier.com, the best estate agent in the area, at stand P142.

More information can be found on http://www.thefranceshow.com/

Happy New Year

2010-01-01T08:40:00.004Z

It's January the 1st, the first day of a new decade, and so I wish you all a Happy New Year, and here is how we welcomed in the new year last night, French country style. It's called the feast of St Sylvestre or le Réveillon de Saint-Sylvestre and it has as many courses as you like, and goes on deep into the night. The feast tends to include special items like champagne and foie gras and since we are near the coast fruit de mere, ie loads of shell fish, including raw Oysters which I had not been brave enough to try before, but I must of eaten a dozen last night.

HAPPY NEW YEAR..... now where is that diet book

Twas the weekend before Christmas

2009-12-29T08:01:00.004Z

I have had an interesting few days one way or another, with the weather and a very petulant daughter who is over excited about Christmas, and full of cold. The snow in the UK on Friday threatened to stop me getting home, however in the end I was only delayed by an hour and a half. I took the car to Gatwick 1st thing Friday morning ready for a return to Nottingham on Monday, and to avoid any problems on the roads, and caught the train back to London to work.

The trains were all over the place timing wise, but there was still a good if slow service running, and so when I got back to London Bridge station to go to the airport I caught a train that was running over an hour late, but it actually meant I arrived at Gatwick earlier than normal. This being the last weekend before Christmas the tourists were out in force, having left their brains at home as usual, so security took an absolute age, especially as Gatwick security is amongst the slowest in the UK, they would say for slow read thorough, so combine the two and you spend a good 45 minutes looking through the metal detector arches before you finally take your turn.

Once we took off we were looking down on a winter wonderland all the way from the UK to Angouleme when suddenly the snow disappeared and we landed in a green Bordeaux, and bizzarely I saw no snow on the drive home from Bordeaux until I reached Jarnac, you could say the river Charente was the snow line so Sigogne was a winter wonderland, but our neighbours south of river were surrounded by the more usual winter green.

Our daughter is, for the first time, suffering from over excitment in the run up to Christmas which has resulted in some huge mood swings and some not so pleasant fits of temper, which we have never really seen before, when she does not get her own way. Now I can see why parents can sometimes say I'll be glad when Christmas is over. All this is not helped by the fact that she has a streaming cold at the moment so has been inside for 5 days, I hope she calms down whilst I am away otherwise I shall be returning on Thursday to an exhausted and exasperated wife and mother in law.

So its Monday morning and I am heading back to the UK for a short week of work, I'm only working about 3 days though I already have too much to do both in both my work and private life, but that is how it is a Christmas, then, when I get back home on Thursday afternoon I will have 10 days of staying on the same place with my family which I am really looking forward to. Weather permitting I am heading to Nottingham, Harrogate, Mansfield, Ashbourne, Bourne and Southend to name but a few before I head back to France in the car on Thursday morning.

Christmas 2009

2009-12-29T07:23:00.008Z

Its been an interesting run up to Christmas, with all the weather disruptions in the UK, the threat of strikes (by British Airways) and the Euro Tunnel shinanigans, so I was amazed that apart from loosing one day to the snow I escaped somewhat unscathed, and arrived home on Christmas Eve via the Euro Tunnel bang on time.

The family at Christmas, Christmas Table, Fleur & Oma singing Carols, and of course the one and only Franca happy now she has a bottle of Amaretto

The run up to Christmas is as always a great big panic, even though every year I try to get organised, this year the weather threw a big spanner in the works with the snow and ice meaning I was always playing catch up, especially as I was visiting lots of people in remote parts of Derbyshire during the bad weather, well at least trying to. One nice visit in Derbyshire, not work related, was to catch up with my oldest friend Alice whom I am ashamed to say, I have not seen for 17 years!, she has not really changed so why have I got all the grey hairs then! Christmas in Sigogne this year was celebrated in a fairly low key way, unless you were my 7 year old daughter, its the first time she has got really exicted over Christmas so of course we were woken up at 5:00am, 6:00am and she finally got up at 7:00am. Franca's mum was also with us which is always good fun, and since she had been here since the middle of December she headed back to Rotterdam on 27th. I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and have a Happy, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year

Time to get ready for action again...

2009-12-02T19:40:00.001Z

Made a bit of a boob this weekend, or rather I made it back in October when I made all my flight/travel bookings for the rest of the year. I managed to miss out this weekend for some strange reason lost in the mists of time. Hence I am now sitting on the Eurostar heading from Paris to London on my most expensive weekend return of the year. To get the trains I want I had to book the full 1st class return, but it was still £200.00 cheaper than British Airways wanted for a last minute return to Bordeaux.

In all it was a bit of a lazy weekend just pottering around doing little jobs. However this will have to stop as we need to get on and do things, if we are to be ready for the next season. To show willing and convince myself we had restarted work I knocked down a wall, not a very big one but it meant that things were starting to move forward again. We are coming into the Christmas season and this will slow things down a little as we are suddenly getting guests again so there will be no major work this side of the New Year.

I have a list of small jobs that all need to be tackled before the next major onslaught of guests, hopefully around Easter next year, the biggest of which is to fix the walkin shower which seems to continuously get blocked which means ripping up the shower floor and part of the bathroom floor to re-lay the waste pipe. Pipe work will take about an hour to do , ensuing tiling and flooring will take 2 or 3 weekends. So its busy busy time again, however we have some nice things to do again, it is Franca's mother's 75th birthday and we are celebrating it in Paris. As part of the trip Fleur is being taken to Disneyland, and she is already saving up all her Euros ready for the big day.

Winter is coming

2009-12-02T19:27:00.001Z

The weather has really decided to take turn over the last couple of weeks in our little corner of France. After July the sun shone and almost not a drop of rain fell, now in November the sky has thrown nothing but rain at us. From ground where you would need a kango to make an impression and where carrots refused to grow down into the baked soil, we now have ground that does not know if it should be liquid or solid.

I know we have fared much better than lots of people in both the UK and France in that we have not had any flooding, and it is highly unlikely to happen to us as we live the top of incline that runs down to the River Charente some 7km away, if we are under water the entire Cognac industry would be devastated, not to mention 10s of 1000s of people loosing homes & livelihoods, so we should count ourselves fortunate, though it does not stop us moaning about the weather.

One remarkable thing about our recent weather is that it is not cold, they are not reaching the heights of 30 degrees that we saw in October, we are still regularly reaching between 15 an 18 degrees, though when we left to drive to Angouleme this morning the car was showing an outside temp of 1 degree, so maybe that is a sign of winter arriving, but atleast that will hopefully mean the sun will make a welcome reappearance.

Being a bit of a snow-a-holic I have been monitoring the mountain ranges in France for the start of the snow fall for the winter season, and the Alps are doing well, the first snows of the winter have fallen in the Massif Central and it looks like the Pyrenees are get in on the act as well with a good covering. I am hoping to do atleast one weekend in the snow this season so Fleur can have a go a sledging and maybe skiing too, we will have to see what the winter snows bring..

Fleur's lucky afternoon

2009-11-18T21:27:00.014Z

Fleur's long awaited birthday arrived at the weekend the weather forecast said the weekend would be typical late autumn weather, i.e. wind and rain, so we were not too hopeful that the horse & carriage ride we had planned for her and her friends would be that good. However as Saturday mid-day approached the rain stopped and the sun came out, and it was a lovely autumn afternoon. The children all enjoyed the afternoon, and the horse and carriage picnic was a great success. The lady that led the afternoon was great with the children, the children could sit on one of the horses if they wanted. We had two horses to pull a lovely carriage which had room for 10 children and three adults.

We were pulled, sometimes quite quickly, through countryside between the vines, woods and fields, stopping for a picnic in a sheltered spot by a bridge, it was wonderful afternoon, and not much clearing up after the party either. Fleur got lots of lovely presents too with people being very generous in what they gave, so she has quite a few new books in French, lots of things for the bath and costume jewelry too.

From mum and dad Fleur had a PlayMobil castle, and with her Nana and Grandad contributing to the Castle building was started and completed by the end of Saturday. It needed a big table to put it on, and Fleur is very happy with it. From her Oma Fleur got a book of fairtales from the Efteling, if your Dutch you know that is a very famous Dutch theme park, going back much further than Disneyland, to say it was just a book does not do it justice, it is a fine work and wonderfully illustrated.

Sunday morning saw the return of the rain, and we count our selves very lucky that we ahd a great day on Saturday.

Aubeterre sur Dronne

2009-11-09T20:55:00.009Z

It must be getting close to Fleur's birthday as her grandma (Franca's mum) has arrived in Sigogne, we marked the occasion with a trip out to Aubeterre sur Dronne. Being autumn we managed to see all 4 seasons during our visit. We arrived in bright sunshine, lunched through an April shower and were attacked by a hail storm when walking from one end of this picturesque village to the other.

Aubeterre is one of the 20 best villages in France according to some body or other, but I can't remember which. the village is quite small, has a very neat little square which would obviously be full of tourists eating and drinking in the summer, but I could not help but think that the villaged looked pretty lifeless at this time of year even by French standards, probably way too many holiday homes here.

Aubeterre has an amazing church carved out of a rock face, with some of the best accoustics I have ever come across. To be honest there is not that much to see in the village, the Church being the highlight, there are the usual picturesque houses clinging to the rock face, 2 very nicely restored but unspectacular churches and a monastery which been turned into an old peoples home so you can only visit the chapel, and have to peer through a glass door to see the cloister. I think it is a nice place to stop and visit on the way to somewhere else, it certainly has one atmosphere in summer and a totally different one once the tourists have gone home.

Fishes out of water

2009-11-04T21:43:00.009Z

Autumn arrived in the Charente this weekend, it's almost like a switch has been flicked, all the leaves have decided now is the time to switch from green to golden, and there was wind and rain so a large leaf fall as well, but the temps were still around 20 degrees. We were sweeping up the leaves in our tee shirts and it was warmer outside than inside at certain points, though heavy rain on Sunday night brought the temparatures down outside.

On Saturday we had a day out in La Rochelle and the highlight of the visit ( for Fleur at least) was a visit to the aquarium, which I must say was amazing, I think the French really have worked out how to run a museum/educational venue in a way certainly we Brits have not totally grasped yet. The only slight disappointment, if you could call it that was that the sharks were so small, however I would probably be the first to complain if there were large sharks swimming around in something too small for them. There was a huge variety of fish and they did their best to create a habitat for them that was as close to the wild as possible. Overall a very enjoyable visit, usually we just give the gift shop a cursary look around before leaving, as it only has the same old tat with a different location name on it, but there were a few different things on sale at the aquarium including for the first time that we have seen, a gift with our daughter's name on it, so we had to buy it.

The perfect Victoria Sponge Cake at last

2009-10-26T20:14:00.003Z

Another weekend flies by, its strange but since I have stopped working flat out on the house the weekends seem to go by even faster.

I appear to be starting a new career reviewing cars, I have been hiring cars from Bordeaux airport to get home each weekend as it is almost as cheap as taking my own car to the airport and leaving it there all week. Sadly my reviews seem to be limited to the range of 1.5/1.6 diesels on offer from Avis, though it is suprising how different they all are. My favourite so far is the Peugeot 308 HDI, closely followed by the Renault Clio, then the car I had this weekend which was the new Seat Ibiza, a nice little car, very economical but lacking the power of the Peugeot.

We did not do a great deal this weekend, I tried and failed to fix 2 radiators on the central heating system which refused to get warm. I have a feeling that the delivery and return pipes have been crossed at some point, so the plumber has to come back and take a look.

I spent some time playing with Fleur, and for the first time in my life (I think) I won a game of Monopoly, it rained all day Saturday! The clocks went back on Sunday evening and of course everyone was up bright and early Sunday morning, human body clocks take longer to adjust than their mechanical/electronic counterparts.

Sunday morning was spend with Fleur in the Kitchen, making a cake, which we appear to have finally mastered, and we produced the perfect Victoria sponge cake, even though we say so ourselves, given another 6 months and I think Fleur will be able to make it on her own. We did manage to break our very old hand mixer in the process of making the cake, it has done us proud and probably originates from the late 70's so no complaints there apart from having to buy another one.

There was no blog last week as I was flying Ryanair back the UK, so what with queueing and lack of space on the aircraft there was no chance to blog.

I've got back into reading books in a big way and having just finished Freud On Course, Keith was the chap that got me excited about cooking, and I'm glad he stuck at it whilst I gave up, still trying to make up for lost time now.

To fly Ryanair or not to fly Ryanair

2009-10-26T19:56:00.004Z

A while back I promised a Ryanair blog, and whilst this is not a rant, it is hardly in praise of the little yellow & blue airline either, after it cancelled the last remaining Monday morning flight from SW France back to the UK. The reason I am flying British Airways at the moment is because of what appears to be Ryanair's not caring about the customer policy.

Ryanair had a sale recently, well I know they are having one every week at the moment, in which they were selling tickets to the only destination to SW France that they have not cut this winter, and so I was relieved to be able to book flights from Stansted on a Friday morning to Limoges, and back to Stansted on a Monday morning, for a reasonable price. I then discovered a pile of emails in my inbox informing me my Monday flight had basically been cancelled, or as the put it, my flight departure time had been changed, and they had re booked me on the Sunday morning (10:55) flight, with the option to accept or refund, so I took the option to refund, going back to the UK on a Sunday morning was not an option.

This left me with the option of either Easyjet or British Airways, with Luton being a nightmare to get to and timings which were not ot my liking, I was left with only one viable option, British Airways, and I have to say the price of the flights is not that much higher than the little yellow & blue airline.

I do not want to knock Ryanair unduly because they have done alot for the tourist industry in France, however they have taken a lot as well in the form of incentives etc.. In the world of low cost airlines their customer service has to be amongst the worst, they are still on my list of airlines to fly, but they are at the bottom of the list, in the same way that I, as a customer, appear to be at the bottom of their list.

Travelling via BA is such a different experience to Ryanair, and I think you have to do a couple of years of travelling on the little yellow & blue airline to appreciate the difference, just the fact that you have a booked seat on the plane makes a big difference, for me it saves 45 minutes in time, as I do not have to rush to the airport to ensure I am somewhere close to the front of the plane for a quick exit to the train or hire car desk.

A tip if you are travelling with Ryanair and have hired a car from Hertz, remember so have half your fellow passengers, Hertz is Ryanair's car rental partner, so make sure you get to the rental desk tout suite or you will be there for over an hour in the queue especially in summer. If you have hold luggage, send the driver(s) to get the car while the rest of you wait for the luggage.

I could go on for hours, but let me refer you to a book that sums it up Ruinair by Paul Kilduff, he also has another book out called Ruinairski which I have not read yet, Ruinair is a good read for Ryanair regulars.

They are the airline you love to hate but sometimes they make it so easy to hate them.

Well time to board my British Airways flight back to Gatwick...

Sleep over success

2009-10-12T19:32:00.011+01:00

I'm not feeling quite so full of the joys of spring today as I am not coming back to France for two weeks because of work, so everyone was a bit unhappy at home this morning when it was time for me to leave.

We did have another good weekend, the forecast was for lots of rain however when it came to it, not much fell and on Saturday afternoon I watched the thermometer climb to 28 degrees before it clouded over and started forcing the temps back down again.

Fleur went for a sleep over with friends on Saturday night and she managed to stay the night this time, last sleep over she wanted to come home at around 9:00pm, so we are pleased she did it, although we heard there was the odd tear when it came to bed time.

With Fleur away for the night Franca & I had a chance to spend some time together which was great, cooking together, chatting and of course the odd glass of wine or two? We decided that if Fleur wanted come home we would have to walk round to pick her up, but by the time 11:00pm arrived we figured out that she was going to stay the night and we could go to bed.

It was a bit of a lazy weekend, at least by my standards, I finished chopping down the Laurel tree, so wehave thousands of bay leaves slowly drying in the garden, wonder how much they would be worth, probably not enough to pick them off the branches, so they will nearly all go on the bonefire when the burning season starts again in November.

We made a slow start to Sunday, picked up Fleur at around 10:00am, popped back home and then we went to Chateau Rochefoucald, an impressive chateau to the east of Angouleme. The Chateau was indeed impressive from the outside a very large and imposing building, though less so on the inside. Fleur enjoyed the dressing up feature where you were allowed to try on medieval clothing, so you could be photographed in costume. I was impressed by the extent of the natural underground caves upon which the chateau was built. The Chateau lacks the extensive gardens of many Chateaux in France which is probably why many visitors feel a bit disappointed.

However its rooms are impressive especially the chapel and the views are grand too. The chateau is still lived in so not all of it is open to the public, and being in France it certainly was not overcrowded.

A quick post script to this message, I've had my weeks work changed around, and I have been able to get a flight back home, so everyone is happy again...

Sun Sun & more Sun

2009-10-06T18:08:00.006+01:00

It is always strange driving through the vineyards at harvest time before the sun has risen, dotted all over the countryside you see the white lights of the harvesting machines as they try to get an early start, the lights almost looking like diamond glinting in the light of the moon, and making it very difficult to work out if there is on coming traffic on the road ahead or harvesting machines in the vineyard next to the road.

We had another great weekend with teriffic weather, we keep saying this must be the last 30 degree weekend of the summer and then another one comes along.

We took Fleur to the zoo on Sunday and she thoroughly enjoyed herself, although even she was tired of looking at monkeys, there were so many different kinds. We went to Palmyre Zoo which is to the north of Royan, and very close to the sea. The zoo is one of the best I have seen, though I am still not sure it is the best place for all types of animals, even if you are trying to conserve them, having said this, they have made a big effort to make the animals comfortable, and easy for the visitor as well. We could get up really close to the giraffes which was fun, but they do have a strange addiction to popcorn! and playing with the goats was good fun too. Most of the animals appeared to be enjoying the last of the summer sun they were just lazing about in the sunniest parts of their enclosures. After the zoo we did our own lazing about on the beach for an hour or so before heading home.

Saturday was a work day, Fleur and I took 2 car loads of rubbish to the decheterie (the tip) and then we cleaned both cars on the inside, which was well over due, we'll get round to the outsides next weekend. I then made a start on cutting down our huge laurel (bay leaf) tree which is in the way of our garage/summer kitchen/swimming pool plans. The tree smells really wonderful and I must remember to keep some leaves for cooking. The tree will be replaced, but not sure if it will be another laurel or something else, I quite fancy a peach tree and a pear tree.

At the end of the day we went to another celebration of the vendange, if we had got there early enough we could have helped with the harvesting, however we contented ourselves with watching the harvesters and taking photos.

We were on organic vineyards and there was also a small organic farmers market, so we bought everything for our evening meal from the market, and may be the meat for our Christmas meal, if we can keep it that long.

And so it is back to Bordeaux airport for another week of work, but it was a great weekend!

Finally a blog update....

2009-10-01T15:10:00.005+01:00

Finally I have found half an hour to start blogging again after a really busy summer both in the UK and at the B&B in France. The B&B has had a non stop stream of visitors since July and this weekend was the first time in a long while that we had the house to ourselves, so layins and being at bit lazy were the order of the day.

This also co-incides with the completion of all five en-suite B&B rooms after 2 years of work. For me this means that I am released from compulsorily doing DIY every weekend. There is still loads to do but the pressure is off for a while. The final rooms were not completed until August and so we have not had a full season with 5 rooms available, that will be next year's fun, however we have twice already been full with our new compliment of 5 rooms.

Transport wise, I have been using either the car, or the train over the summer as they were cheaper or the same price as flying, however now that autumn is here I am back in the air again flying from Bordeaux at least for the rest of 2009. I'll put the Ryanair saga into another blog a bit later.

It is great not to have the pressure of working the whole weekend and we have already started to take advantage and go out exploring in the local area, after all we need to advise guests about the local attractions, so we will be out and about quite alot whilst attractions are still open. We are also planning some bigger trips to La Rochelle, Bordeaux and Poitiers, more of which in later blogs when they happen.

So after having done three or four hours on Saturday working a new mezzanine floor in the garage ready to take the contents of the cottage, who's roof is getting less and less water tight by the day and probably will not survive the winter at least as a dry storage area, Sunday was relaxation and a trip out.

We are checking out attractions in the imeadiate area of sigogne and so we went to the Paleosite near Saintes, which as its name suggests is an attraction covering the prehistoric period. For a local attraction it is pretty good, there are lots of films explaining the prehistoric period, and the origin of the attraction, which is based around a large number of prehistoric acheological finds, the greatest of which was the skeleton of a young woman.

The site itself is modern, with 4 different cinematic presentations which are great, though our six and a half year old did not like them so I had to bailout after 2 films. There are lots of other interacive exhibits for children and adults and for €10 is it worth a visit, and will probable take 3 to 4 hours of your time.

Until next time which will hopefully be in week or so.

Parents' pride

2009-06-12T17:53:00.006+01:00

Fleur came home with the results of her 3rd evaluation this year and we are very happy to say that all has been very very good and in September she will be going to CE1 (Cours Elémentaire 1 - this name is used for the third year of primary education).
For the non-French readers the teacher wrote that Fleur's results are very satisfying. She reached good results with mathematics and a big progress in reading and writing. Bravo. A pleasant pupil and she will go to the next level up.

Let the harvest begin

2009-06-08T21:43:00.001+01:00

The sun is shining at Au Bellefleur and it would be wrong not to mention that it has also rained a lot but that does mean it is warm and everywhere is looking green, and things are growing like crazy.

The harvesting has begun and we are in the middle of a bumper crop of cherries, we’ve got 4 trees and after 2 weeks we are still harvesting No1, Strawberries are a bit slow this year, but tomatoes carrots and onions are going great guns, fuelled by high temps and a reasonable amount of natural watering, ok rain….

We also have a lot of guests staying with us at the moment, so things are getting very busy but that’s the way we like it. We still have some availability in each of the summer months, so if you are thinking of coming down to the sunny Charente there is still time to get your booking in. Don’t leave it too long though as we are starting to fill up.

Temperatures in the Charente are typically sitting between 20 and 30 degrees at the moment, tempting me outside but we have to get the last two guest rooms finished by July as they are let in August, so the pressure is on, watch this space for progress up dates.

Press Release

2009-05-27T11:52:00.000+01:00

Live Blogging

2009-05-25T18:54:00.004+01:00

On Saturday Jan and Simonne with their 3 dogs (1 mum and 2 puppies...6 months old now....., can you 'spot' the difference) came around to have a drink and a bite to eat. Jan and Simonne are from Belgium and Franca knows them from 'blogging' http://blog.seniorennet.be/Bas_en_belle/ for more than 2 years now. It's not the first time we've met each other and hopefully not the last time either. The weather was more than gorgious as was the rosé, the Chablis was fresh light, and the white asparagus (here they actually call them violet), was going down a treat; so we couldn't ask for anything more. It has once again been a very very good night out....literally, in the garden, the dogs were on their best behaviour, and the humans weren't bad either.

Thanks for the pressies Jan & Simonne and a great evening...

Fleur wins Bronze...

2009-05-21T09:39:00.003+01:00

Now which country will she represent in the 2016 Olympics, well maybe I am being a bit over ambitious, but it was school sports day yesterday and out of the blue our six and a half year old daughter won a bronze medal following a quintathalon , well she did well enough in 5 different events to come overall third, making mum and dad very proud, especially as it was unexpected. Fleur is always running around and dancing and jumping, so she is certainly fit enough, so all that exercise paid off for her WELL DONE!! from a proud mum & dad.

It was a tough day as the emergency services were required not once but twice to attend to injuries, luckily the injuries were not very serious. So you see there was none of this politically correct, everyone must get something, it's the taking part not the winning that seems to abound in the UK, this was a competition with winners. From the podium you will see that it was girls 2 boys 1! The medals were presented by a representative of the Mayor of Sigogne.

how not to get to you flight on time

2009-05-13T22:05:00.004+01:00

Our last trip to Limerick on business typifies what often happens to us, not on every trip but quite a few.

The 3 of us leave the office in time to get the correct train from London Liverpool St to Stansted.

We arrive at Liverpool St, 2 of us have got our train tickets Doug hasn't, and he has not got his reference number to collect his pre booked ticket, so he buys another one, and we get on the train to Stansted, to arrive in time to get the flight... Just.

We walk into the airport and Doug says have you guys checked in yet, yes we say, waving our boarding passes at him, oh bugger he says I haven't. Then Doug asks us if we have luggage to check in, of course we haven't, showing him our carefully measured and weighed cabin baggage. We looked over at the very long queue for the bag drop and laughed, you'll never get your bag dropped off and your self through Stansted security in time to catch the plane.

Doug was busy firing up his laptop to get his booking reference number off it, but he has so many things loading on the desk top it took a full 5 mins before it started up. At which point we left him trying to sort himself out, whilst we raced off to catch the flight. For once we chose the right queue in security and got through in time for a quick wizz round duty free, we are just walking out of duty free when we spot Doug walking towards the gate. Our flabber was well and truly ghasted. How did you manage to do that we asked in amazement, Doug said he put on his lost little boy look when a female check in person asked him if he needed help?. We think he parted with hard cash to get through!

So we are standing in the priority queue waiting to board and Doug suddenly disappears, the flight is called and Doug is still missing, just as we get on the plane he reappears at the back of the priority queue, saying, I just went for a quick drink at the bar... WHAT?

So began another team trip to Limerick with my esteemed colleagues, and a great bunch they are too most of the time....

Cognac region suffers a devastating blow

2009-05-12T12:09:00.003+01:00

In the Charente a Little before 6 p.m.on the 11th of May , the area was literally struck by hail storms with hail stones the size of 'large pigeon eggs', testifies Christophe Veral, a local wine grower.

In the area around Rouillac, clusters of almost 50 centimetres of ice were formed. The local function rooms and many houses were flooded. But more importantly damage was noted everywhere around, in the vineyards. The hail ruined any hope of harvest for 2009 and probably 2010. The bad weather also touched the areas of Rouillac, Merignac, Fleurac and Jarnac. The soil of the wine growing areas of Barbezieux has also seriously damaged.

This was a report in the local paper following storms last night all around Sigogne however it appears vines around Au Bellefleur appear to have been spared major damage, however for the local wine growers and the associated Cognac/Pineau industry it is a serious blow.

A bit of a strange (but profitable) weekend...

2009-05-11T21:00:00.004+01:00

Starting on Thursday when we, or should I say Franca, had a football team staying, so that meant that Fleur and Franca had to camp in our living room as we rented out all our rooms for the first time. I made it home on Friday afternoon and headed home after picking up 2 doors from the DIY store which almost fitted into the boot, so I drove home with the doors sticking out of the boot. Not really what you would associate with driving a Jaguar, but it handled it well.

On Friday and Saturday we had a lovely lady from Hawaii staying for 2 nights, whilst she was going house hunting with our favourite estate agent... Saturday night we had 2 Parisiens stopping over on their way to their holiday in St Jean de Luz, very nice, but they started their holiday with us and finally left around 12:30 so no time for me to do any work on Sunday. I managed to install the two doors I brought but no further work was possible.

Fleur does not like it when I leave on a Sunday so she will be pleased that I have booked a Monday flight back next weekend, Franca likes it too when I stay longer and so do I, its my boss in the UK who is not so keen :-)

Mission accomplished

2009-05-03T19:10:00.002+01:00

Its ready just in time, we have a working downstairs toilet, pity it is in the middle of a building site, but I guess beggars can't be choosers as they say...

The bathroom so far

2009-05-02T20:42:00.008+01:00

Well here is two days work, if I get the photos right No1 shows day one, it does not show too much as most of the day was spent plumbing but you can see the new ceiling rails, I still have to put the isulation in before I fit the plasterboard to the rails (the rails are the metal bits going in the opposite direction to the wooden joists).

The second shot should show the large sections of plaster board ceiling up, in France green means waterproof, I still have the little bits to do and you should also be able to see the frame of the toilet dividing wall taking shape..

and finally our builder has made a new entrance to the bathroom, it still needs finishing off, but you can just see he has started pointing the wall on the right hand side, you get a good impression of the before & after in this shot.

If all goes well I'll be able to post a picture of a new toilet ready for use, such an exicting life I lead...

I think I need to cut the grass

2009-04-25T16:15:00.005+01:00

After the high of last weekends birthday celebrations this weekend is a bit of a low since I cannot get back home to France, due to having to work in Limerick for most of Friday.

However this does give me a chance to do a few chores at London HQ, Joy & Simon I hope your reading. I must admit to negelecting the garden a bit, well be honest....alot, I've not been out there this year, so I thought it was time to cut the grass. So Saturday dawned and it was raining but it cleared up by 10.00 so grass cutting was on...

It would certainly would have been a lot more bover with a hover, taking words from a very old advert, so I purchased a heavy duty petrol powered strimmer, which we will need in France as well as it carrying out a little job for me here in the UK.

So I am ashamed to say this is the before shot....

and hopefully below it is the after shot with Toro the strimmer who made short work of the elephant grass in the back garden.

There you go Joy and Simon, next time your over you'll be able to sit in the garden with a glass of something, but don't leave it too long, don't think I'm due another weekend in London for a while.

Hopefully it will now be a lot less bover with a hover...

Time for a glass of something....

Franca's Birthday

2009-04-21T06:46:00.004+01:00

Last weekend was Franca’s birthday so the occasion had to be marked in French style which means going out for a meal. Franca chose the restaurant and so early on Saturday evening we headed off to l’Essille in Bassac. www.hotel-restaurant-essille.com/. Strangely I was talking to Sue one of my fellow commuters on the way over to La Rochelle and she was singing the praises of this very restaurant, at the time I didn’t know that it was the same restaurant Franca had chosen.

Franca, her mother, Fleur and I set off for Bassac arriving at the restaurant bang on 7:30, making us first the guests of the evening. The restaurant was light and airy so they were off to a good start in my book as I do not like stuffy dingy restaurants, and l’Essille had plenty of charm too.

The meal was great and the atmosphere was good too, and by 8:30 it was pretty full, although the quality was reasonably high, the restaurant had a good relaxed atmosphere of people out to enjoy them selves. Sometimes high quality food means the atmosphere is a bit to still as if you are supposed to respect the food rather than enjoy the whole restaurant experience, and that was not the case with l’Essille. The food was well cooked and presented, everyone enjoyed what they ordered and the wine list was one of the better ones I have seen in our local area. The menu had a wide choice, but focussing on localish food, so lots of fish & seafood from the coast and meat from the Limousin.

We finished off the celebration with an excellent birthday dessert for Franca, so a good time was had by all and with Franca’s birthday well and truly celebrated we can recommend L’Essille the to one and all.

We are family

2009-04-19T23:03:00.004+01:00

Some family pictures with Franca, Fleur and my mother-in-law. Fleur's picture has been taken in restaurant l'Essille in Bassac where we've been on Saturday for Franca's birthday celebration dinner.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the office…..no really

2009-04-08T23:00:00.003+01:00

I was dashing through Liverpool Street station heading for the tube when I spotted a gap in the crowd to a free ticket gate, so I went for it.

It was only as I went base over apex flying through the air watching my mobile phone performing aerobatics above me that I realised why the gap was there.

A gentleman was pulling, perfectly concealed behind him, the largest wheelie suitcase I have ever seen (or not seen in my case - pardon the pun).

As I lay flat on my back on the station floor watching my phone trying to make good its escape through the ticket barrier I had a moment to remember something I heard on Danny Baker's 5 Live program the night before. He was asking had you ever been fouled in real life, well here I am laying on the floor of Liverpool St station waiting for the ref to show the puller of the titanic suitcase a straight red card...he took both my legs out ref...

It made a few commuters smile for a moment.... I hate wheelie suitcases almost as much as I hate umberallas.

They marched us up to gate 45 and marched us back down to 43 again

2009-04-05T20:51:00.003+01:00

Another busy weekend at Au Bellefleur, the change of Ryanair?s timetable means I have less time in France at the weekends for a short while. We also had guests staying with us and they wanted to eat with us each night so that kept the kitchen busy too. I also had to try and get at least one toilet ready for use downstairs before Easter as we are basically full over the Easter Break.

Friday was a farcical departure from Stansted, not only was it foggy, and Barack Obama was departing from Stansted shortly before us, but Ryanair could not work out which gate we were going to be flying from, so we were marched from gate 45 to 43 and then back again to 45, and then back to 43 again in the space of 15 minutes. We were also well over an hour late on departure, mutter mutter mutter. Then again it has not been a bad flying winter, the Stansted ? Limoges bus service was pretty reliable, I guess around 80% of our flights were on time, not many were early though. The summer is going to be a challenge as Ryanair keep changing flight times, so I have no flights settled past the early May bank holiday.

Our guests over the weekend were returning for their second visit, its always great to greet returning guests because it means we must be doing something right. One story which will go down in the annals of Au Bellefleur history was when our guests went down to Jarnac market, a cheese seller from the Basque country was selling his sheep cheese and giving away free samples. Our guests thought this cheese tasted so good they would buy some, unfortunately forgetting to look at the price first. They enthusiastically encouraged the cheese man to make the slice they were buying bigger and bigger. They handed over a €50.00 and €2.00 back, €48.00 for a piece of cheese!! Of course they never heard the end of it, cheese jokes all night? they took it in good spirits, or at least I hope they did, maybe if they never come back we will learn that they did not take the ribbing that well.

I was busy with new toilets for the two bathrooms I am building at the moment. I had the job of concreting in the waste pipes, always a scary moment as this is the point of no return or least not without and awful lot of pain. Fleur always wants to help, and so she must be one of the only six year old girls that knows how to mix concrete, and she did a good job working with a full size shovel. The pipes are concreted in and the plumbing for the toilet is half complete.

We are full for Easter which will slow production down, but the good news is that Bogdan our builder is back so things should speed up for a while after Easter.

I do not like flying back on a Sunday evening as this makes the weekend feel quite short especially as my flights to France in the summer are on a Friday afternoon, however, since I will be in France for 5 days at Easter this trip back is not so bad. But I will be searching the timetables for a Monday morning flight after Easter.

I am flying from La Rochelle, and a slower bunch of passport control and customs people I have never met. They were taking an eternity to process each passenger through passport control and then the security checks, if that is standard the I will be doing everything I can to avoid La Rochelle. Fellow travellers have said that flights have been delayed because they are so slow.

Another little move around

2009-03-31T07:38:00.002+01:00

We have had another little shift around in Au Bellefleur as we prepare the B&B for the Easter rush, and the ongoing building works for the next two rooms.

We now have a new cosy office with an en-suite bath/shower, as we have moved all our computer equipment into what was our old bathroom. Blogging from the shower, now that is an interesting concept, luckily the laws of physics dictate this is not a good idea, so please do not try this at home, as they say on some TV programs.

Having moved all the computers and cleared our old downstairs bedroom we are ready for the builder to knock through a doorway into the new bathroom I have been working on. I stripped a bit of the old plaster board off the wall around the window of the bedroom as it was wrecked anyway to see what sort of a damp problem we have, and it is what can only be described as potentially big. I have found another French stone wall that has basically been tanked meaning it is sealed on both sides so the moisture stays in the wall. If the whole room is like the little bit I have looked at so far then this room is going to be the biggest challenge yet to get sorted out. Hacking off all the old concreting & plastering could take weeks, gulp... I'll have to think about this...

Watch this space, more updates after Easter?..

Fresh scallops

2009-03-22T09:31:00.003Z

A rare moment Franca and I were cooking together for ourselves (and not for guests) and here's the result. Not a masterchef one, but it tasted delicious. Franca cooked a fish risotto with mascarpone and fresh grated parmesan cheese. To accompany the fresh scallops I made the warm tomato based salsa with red wine vinegar, garlic, sjalots, fresh herbs, etc.

Temperatures in the Charente today

2009-03-17T18:24:00.003Z

Sorry guys, don't want to make you jealous, but 'my camera never lies'.....Who remembers the song and the group? Don't google, let your brain work ;-)

From Darrren's other half :-)

Any one for tennis

2009-03-16T23:00:00.004Z

Time for another update whilst sitting on the plane heading back to the UK after a very energetic weekend.

On the flight over on Friday evening I was looking forward to a sunny weekend, having watched the forecasts on Meteo (the French weather forecasters) predicting a warm and sunny weekend. Franca had been sitting in the sun all week, so I thought it would be a certainty.

I woke up on Saturday morning to grey skies and thought to my self time to get on with some work as the sun will be out later. So I headed into the bathroom I am currently working on and started stripping 1970s render from the much older stone work. Franca went off shopping with Fleur whilst I made good progress with render removal. When the ladies returned they informed me it was raining, so disappointed I went on with chipping away at the render. Fleur came in to help me and I was surprised that she actually could wield a 4lb club hammer with some skill, and with my help holding the cold chisel she hacked off quite a large area before her arm muscles finally gave in.

Instead of sitting outside with a nice cold Ricard we were sitting round the fire playing 70's music and dancing to ease our muscle aches. It was also my plan to have the last bonfire of the winter season this weekend, no chance with all that rain about.

Sunday morning could not have been more different, there was a beautiful azure blue sky and the sun felt very strong on my back even at 7:30 in the morning. So the last fire of the winter season was back on, but first I had to finish removing the rendering and cart all the debris to my newly burgeoning stock pile of hardcore which will be used later this year to create the base for our new out buildings.

With all the rubble removed I set about some first fix plumbing for the shower and bath so that I can start putting up walls for a shower and toilet. At 1:30 I stopped work inside and switched to burning the last of the winter pruning which, because of yesterdays rain, created a large amount of smoke, however after an hour or so it was all gone. We also burned all the old bamboo that grows in our garden as it was getting pretty high, it had dried out so burned in double quick time accompanied by the fire cracker sound of the bamboo splitting as it got hot.

Then it was time to play with Fleur, we had a tennis afternoon, I had bought her a real tennis racket with a short handle, and suddenly she can hit the ball very well. I had to make do with toy tennis rackets, and each time I tried to return a ball the toy rackets just disintegrated, so I'll have to get a proper racket to be able play with fleur. Franca may even join in as well, OK so I'll have to buy 2 rackets, could this be the beginning of the Sigogne tennis club?

The outdoor life is back....

2009-03-03T09:01:00.002Z

Spring attempted to leap into summer this weekend, well only on Saturday really, the sun shone brilliantly all day and in the shade temperatures reached 22 degrees, amazing for February..

However Sunday brought us back to spring with a bump, it was cloudy all day and only 13 degrees, but as my wife said nice weather for working in the garden. The outdoor life is returning.

I was sorely tempted to change my plans for the weekend and start working outside however, I resisted and carried on with the first fix of the drains for our two new B&B rooms. It was one of those jobs that after 4 hours work you could not see what I had done. I needed to ensure I got the fall right and then the horrible job of joining the new pipes to the existing pipes, very smelly work. However the worst should now be over, everything is joined up and the junctions for the toilets just need to be capped off until I get round to installing the toilets. The rest of the weekend was spent hacking off the concrete rendering applied to the lovely stonework, whilst some of the rendering fell off rather obligingly there is a section which appears to have had superglue added to the mix which is taking an age to hack off and I am still going to have to go back with something stronger than a hammer and chisel to finish the job.

Meanwhile lots of work was going on in the garden Franca and Fleur were busy tidying up the garden after the ravages of winter (2 big storms and a week of snow), and it was looking rather nice once they had finished.

Now it is on to the next stage of getting some colour into the garden, we are going to start digging out a couple of beds to put flowers in. We will also have to work out where the swimming pool is to go, the biggest one yet, this one should be able to fit adults in, so once its purchased and setup it will be staying there for the summer. This is a temporary measure as we have no chance of getting a swimming pool installed until 2010.

Congratulations to Mat Follas Masterchef champion 2009

2009-02-26T21:58:00.004Z

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

2009-02-26T10:03:00.002Z

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

2009-02-26T07:30:00.001Z

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

2009-02-25T21:46:00.004Z

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

2009-02-23T17:29:00.006Z

Interview Grant & Forsyth

2009-02-23T17:27:00.003Z

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

2009-02-16T19:22:00.007Z

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....

2009-02-11T13:11:00.004Z

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

Julien Clerc Live Concert

2009-02-11T09:47:00.000Z

A weekend Break

2009-02-09T21:21:00.004Z

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

2009-02-09T21:15:00.002Z

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.

Stormy weekend

2009-01-29T21:59:00.002Z

We prepared ourselves by closing all shutters and removing 'dangerous' obstacles present in our garden and we even extra secured the gates. The forecast was a violent wind who could reach 150km/hour, together with rain.

Luckily it hasn't been that dramatic as it was in March 2007, just when we moved to Sigogne, but it gives you a very good idea.

You see the famous Cognac house, Courvoisier in Jarnac, which is only about 3 kilometers from us.

What's been happening

2009-01-22T20:58:00.003Z

Barack Obama is now the President of the USA, more British banks are in trouble, and people are loosing thier jobs at an alarming rate, so it has been a tough start to the year so far. I count my self lucky that I have managed to avoid most of the economic fall out that is occurring around me at the moment.

What have I been up to since the snow fell in the Charente, well nothing out of the ordinary really. The bathroom for the family suite has finally been boarded out, which means the plumbing has progressed far enough that it is finally in a state where I can cover it up. We have finished the annex room to the family suite, it just needs carpet and furniture now, so it is on to getting the family room itself finished and the en-suite bathroom which is proving a bit of a challenge. I have to plumb everything taking into account the bathroom which will be installed directly below it downstairs, and a new cloakroom, OK its another toilet really, but this all has to be done in one go so that I do not keep undoing things. Project planning they call it…which is what I get paid for during week at the moment. Oh well back to the grind stone, I am really looking forward to those lazy summer days now, it has been cold and rain in UK since 2009 began, and in France too, it time for the days to start getting longer and warmer. Sadly I think we have another 6 weeks before we really start to see and feel spring time...

For all the mums, but dads can watch too!

2009-01-14T08:41:00.001Z

Snow in the Charente

2009-01-06T11:22:00.004Z

As you can see from below pictures, Sigogne has been hit by snowfall. The views are from Au Bellefleur towards the fence and from the fence to the house. The street with the trees is where our house is and the vineyard opposite us.
Fleur on her way to school and later on playing with a friend in the garden.

On our way to school this morning, for once we were early, only to find out that there wasn't school today. There was only one teacher and it has been decided that it was too dangerous to keep the school open to all pupils, at least that was thier take on the situation...., but believe it or not the whole of normal life here has come to a compete stand still. The lorry for the rubbish didn't come and nor did the postman...

Well, we're having a great time in the snow...

More snow in the Charente

2009-01-06T11:07:00.007Z

Once upon a time...

2009-01-05T19:27:00.005Z

...in the South-West of France....in a village surrounded by vine-yards, called Sigogne, there was snow......and last night was the night! It snows so little in the Charente due to its micro climate kept warm by the gulf stream, that when it happens it is a big event. It also snowed in London at the same time though it looks like more snow fell in Sigogne than London. Temparatures in the Charente are also lower than London at the moment, though it is getting colder in London now, its been a strange winter this year so far, hopefully the vines and other crops will survive this spell as January and February are planting out times normally in this area.

The promised Christmas & New Year Update

2009-01-05T07:52:00.003Z

The first blog of a new year, and a look back at my 10 day holiday which seems have gone by in the blink of an eye, there are a number of posts to read, so scroll down a bit... and as if by magic a bit later some photos will appear... thanks Liefje..

It all started at 4:30am on Christmas Eve when I set off for Dover to charge down to Sigogne, it was a dull day, but then that’s the best sort for driving. It was surprisingly quiet on the 06:40 crossing to Calais, unlike today which it is absolutely heaving, and so I guess the boat will be full, even the first class lounge, usually a quiet haven is full today.

Back to Christmas, I arrived in Sigogne in brilliant sunshine, which as usual came out just as I got to Poitiers, strange how that almost always happens, driving through France under dull skies only for the clouds to part at Poitiers. I passed our guests, Franca’s brother and his family, twice on the run down to Sigogne, Franca’s brother was coming down to stay with us for Christmas.

So by 6:00pm we were all around the fire with a glass of Champagne starting to get into the Christmas spirit. Enrico, Franca’s brother and Marlies, Enrico’s wife and 2 year old son Mauro came down from the Netherlands, so their drive was even longer than mine which meant an early night for one and all before the big day. Fleur was excited about Christmas for the first time, where as Mauro did not quite understand what was going on. Fleur managed to get to sleep and slept until 9:00am, so none of the getting up at 4:00am to see if Santa has been yet...

Franca and I said that we would not have so many presents this year but when you looked under the tree there still seemed to be an aweful lot of presents for such a small family, and it took and hour and a half to open all the pressies, everyone was very pleased with their low tech pressies, the only person who got high tech stuff was Franca, and I still have to set up her new radio for the kitchen which has an iPod connection, and the idea is to buy Franca an iPod so she can listen to all the songs she wants to when she gets fed up with the radio.

More from the Christmas & New Year update

2009-01-05T07:51:00.003Z

Christmas continued when Jean-Luc our neighbour dropped in, to very kindly bring Fleur a present, around 12:00pm and so we broke out the Pineau, which set the tone for the day. I was Christmas day chef along with Franca, who made her infamous broccoli soup, which as usual went down a storm, followed by a little salmon amuse. The main course was venison steaks with a red wine and black berry sauce with roasted veggies and roast potatoes, which was well received and then it was British Christmas pudding with brandy butter and ice cream. A very nice Christmas dinner, I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. There was of course copious amounts of bubbly wine, and a very nice bottle of red Margaux 2004. So that was Christmas day interspersed with playing a few games with Fleur, and loads of chatting of course, all in Dutch.

Boxing day, a normal working day in France, was Enrico’s turn to cook, so it was off to the supermarket for provisions and then off to Cognac for a walk around the old town and a visit to a few shops, followed by the inevitable visit to a bar for a drink, then back home again for Enrico to go into the kitchen. Enrico produced an amazing mushroom risotto, with left over roasted veggies which still tasted fine, the standard of cuisine was being set pretty high this Christmas.

The following day (27th Dec) was Roulliac market day and so despite the almost sub zero temperatures we headed off to the market for a tour round the clothing dominated market, which I find a slight disappointment as would like to see a lot more food stalls. Still Enrico had volunteered to cook again and stocked up with provisions from the fish stall and produced and Italien style ‘Fruit de Mere’ which again was fantastic. We retreated from the market after about an hour as it was really really cold. I needed to get back to chop wood, Enrico dived back into the kitchen to make his ‘Fruit de Mere’, whilst I set about chopping wood for the fire.

On Sunday the 28th we went to Au Fin Bois, a really nice local restaurant, for lunch giving everyone a rest from cooking. Since little Mauro was only two years old, he still punctuates his day with a sleep in the early afternoon, which was fine for us as it means everyone got a little rest, usually. It was a really great few days with Marlies, Mauro and Enrico. Sadly they had to go back home on the 29th as Enrico and Marlies had to return to work, as the saying goes better to quit while you are head and we had a great time and would certainly do it all again.

Christmas & New Year continued....

2009-01-05T07:49:00.001Z

With Enrico and family heading back to the Netherlands it was off to work for me back into my fledgling bathroom to try and complete the plumbing so that I could start putting up walls. It was my intention not to do too much work this holiday, even though we really needed to get on. Christmas is a family time and so it would be unfair to spend it all in work clothes. So I managed to get the plumbing done despite a little disaster of plumbing the hot cold water the wrong way round for the shower. I managed to get most of the plumbing finished and a couple of wall panels up with the help of Franca. The bathroom looks small but it still takes a few full size plasterboard panels, and the waterproof ones required in a bathroom are really heavy. That was the sum total of the work I did over the holiday, which was basically 3 half days. Two of the other halves of those days were spent in DIY shops and the third half was spent with Fleur outside digging the garden an burning a tree that Enrico enthusiastically chopped down for me, yes the tree with the helicopter leaves is no more….

The final chapter of the Christmas & New Year update

2009-01-05T07:48:00.003Z

On the final day of my holiday we went to the beach, I like the seaside in winter, you still get a strong sun on a clear day, which today was, and my neck is sunburnt to prove it. Fleur also loves the beach so even though it the temperature did not reach much over zero we took the bucket and spade and made sandcastles, we flew kites, well we flew Fleurs cheap Whinny the Pooh kite and crashed the stunt kite we bought for papa to play with 2 years ago. At least I can fly a kite with one string, I just need someone with patients to teach me how to fly a two stringed kite as I cannot get into the sky without it taking massive dives within a few seconds… a challenge for 2009 maybe. We had lunch at a restaurant on the beach, and to be honest the food was not great, but on the 3rd of January, it was the only restaurant open.

And so all too soon my 10 day holiday was over and I am sitting on the ferry after having driven up from Sigogne on a sunny but freezing Sunday ready to go back to work on Monday morning.

I was a great break and fantastic to spend 10 days with ‘my girls’, it’s the longest time I have spent with them in 2008. Looking at 2009 from the view point of the 4th of January it seems a daunting prospect that I have to spend another year commuting back and forth to London, but I know in December I’ll be saying where did 2009 go. I am lucky to have a job to commute back to in 2009 which despite the exchange rate problems will keep help our dream alive. The B&B already has some summer bookings and so things are looking good at the moment. We have rented out the rooms we are currently working on so there is real incentive to get these finished and the room below before we get into the summer season proper, signs of that programme ‘Chaos in the Castle’ on the horizon. One thing is for sure, there is never a dull moment at Au Belle Fleur.

Christmas wishes

2008-12-23T21:08:00.004Z

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

2008-12-09T15:04:00.003Z

Christmas decorations outside

2008-12-09T15:00:00.001Z

Wonderfully Sunny Weekend

2008-12-09T08:42:00.002Z

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

2008-12-02T08:02:00.003Z

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....

2008-12-02T07:33:00.003Z

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

2008-11-19T19:25:00.007Z

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....

2008-11-19T17:41:00.001Z

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.....

2008-11-11T07:45:00.006Z

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...

2008-11-11T07:26:00.005Z

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....

2008-11-10T17:50:00.005Z

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

2008-10-28T21:51:00.004Z

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

2008-10-21T07:20:00.000+01:00

Short Weekend....

2008-10-20T14:03:00.000+01:00

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

2008-10-15T14:39:00.005+01:00

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

Driving up and down France...

2008-10-14T08:15:00.002+01:00

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

2008-09-30T14:13:00.002+01:00

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

2008-09-29T08:57:00.005+01:00

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

2008-09-24T14:40:00.002+01:00

'College' Girl, see her penny-shoes

2008-09-24T14:38:00.001+01:00

Circuit des Remparts - Angouleme 2008

2008-09-23T14:35:00.004+01:00

Qualification for The Bugatti Race

A Lovely old Peugeot

more from the Circuit de Remparts

2008-09-23T14:25:00.007+01:00

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

2008-09-22T22:08:00.003+01:00

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

2008-09-22T22:07:00.000+01:00

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…..