The perfidy of human nature (or how low will you go)

Saturday 7 March 2015

Huge blue skies - ground frost warming to 13 degrees

The morning's entertainment consisted of wire brushing about a hundred years of petrified soot from the chimney breast in the new rental unit.  Previously concealed under a Barry Bucknell type plasterboard facing, from which OH had been trying to prise out a nail,  and instead the whole wall came away to reveal a whole hidden part of the room.  After I had taken off the loose material, and was standing back and thinking I had finished, OH handed me a long file to rasp down the lumps. Rasping takes a very long time.  I don't know how people ever manage to conceal rasps in cakes and it is not surprising that prisoners took so long to file their way out of their shackles.  Random, yes, I know.  Count of Monte Cristo was on the radio not long ago.

Soot has a very individual odour and is produced by incomplete combustion of the articles burned.  Its particles are really, really teeny and it gets everywhere.   OH, not the most observant of men, suggested I might want to go and wash my face before going to buy some bread.  I looked like a bad study in charcoal.



Back home and go for a walk to get the soot out of my lungs.  This is the first day in weeks when there is some warmth in the sun.  The trees are full of birds and immense skeins of cranes are heading back north and the air is full of their loud 'crew crew' calls.

Out for a walk

Mistletoe didn't get where it is today by being easily accessible

Silvery birches

Later on in the day, and despite my best zen intentions, I am still brooding on the would be buyer who has tried to cut me out and purchase directly with the seller.  

http://leavingmynormal.blogspot.fr/2015/03/a-day-of-surprises-and-some-knots-untie.html

I think of all the points I would make, and exactly how the conversation would go.   I chop onions in a vigorous manner whilst I ruminate.  The phone rings and who should it be but the would be buyer so I channel my French estate agent and he gets the full contents.  What particularly stupefies me (but not for very long) is that in his opening sentence, he says he is ringing me out of honesty.  He says he has negotiated the sale himself so therefore he doesn't really owe the agency anything but he is prepared, out of generosity, to offer an amount as damages.  Would he treat another professional in this way?  I put the phone down and feel rather satisfied that I had actually expressed myself clearly and fully.  And right between his eyes.

I have been fortunate to encounter his type of honesty only twice whilst working in real estate.   In my experience as an agent in a national French estate agency chain, you are more likely to be shafted by your colleagues than by the clients.  This is where I learned to stand up and defend myself as it is a case of she who shouts loudest, doesn't get her commission split with people who are trying it on.

Over the eight years, there were a lot of people who came and went.  Estate agency is one of the few jobs in France for which you need no formal qualification.  We had air hostesses and engineers, artists and hygienists, lorry drivers, taxi drivers, hairdressers and drain cleaning specialists.  Some lasted a year or two, some a couple of weeks.  If you are thinking of trying the job and you haven't the tenacity of a terrier with a rat and the hide of a rhino, I have a word of advice - actually two - don't.  One guy cracked relatively quickly and confided to me that he would really like to sell up and leave the area and forget all about real estate.  I went to see his house to give him an estimation.  He said he liked to paint and showed me his latest tableaux.  They were tonal oeuvres - mostly in grey but some of them were very dark and had deep lateral slashes.  I thought of the Fast Show.  I thought, I really really mustn't laugh.  I was actually scared - and tend to burst out laughing at completely inopportune moments.  He sold his house privately to a couple who were driven mad by the bells of the local church.  I had a second bite at the cherry when they came back to the agency in order to sell and I found a lovely English couple who are still living there.

The phone then rings again and it is the guy I have been trying to track down to show the big rental unit.  I blabber on about going to the Chinese restaurant to try and find him and he says he is from Vietnam and I think I had better stop jabbering before I create a cultural incident.  We arrange to meet tomorrow morning.

OH discovers something has been eating his ground bait and so heaves out everything from the laundry room, spreading much ground bait all over the kitchen and bathroom.  I am required to examine the droppings and say what it is.  It is obviously something big. An hour later and the laundry room is looking more tidy than it has in months.  Just as well, as I get an email saying we have a visit on Saturday.

Stove and heating in general

Wednesday 25 February 2015

Wet and then very wet

Back at the rental units and I spent the morning trying to make the grouting look as if it had been done by someone who had graduated from nursery school.  There were fraught noises coming from downstairs.  I went down to find OH roundly cursing the parenthood of the skirting boards.  The basic problem was that the boards were straight and the wall was not. When the new floor had been put in, quite a lot of the old plaster had dropped out and OH had slapped in quite a lot of plaster, in his customary rustic style.  He had spent the morning trying to fill the holes between the wall and the boards with decorators caulk.  The caulk tube fits into a spring ratchet operated handle and it had stuck.  Instructing me to hold onto one end of it and not to move, OH grasped the other end and pulled.  I cannoned into him with some force.  He said I was feeble and if I wanted to be a builders mate, I needed to man up.  I assured him I had no desire to be a builders mate.  

I was sent off to sand down the floor in the bathroom.  The door top is so close to the ceiling that the door cannot be taken off for sanding.  The sander made no impression on the floor so I put some sandpaper under the door and rubbed it back and to, violently.  This also, is not apparently what a builders mate is supposed to do.

More swearing was coming from the bedroom and when OH emerged, hat over one eye, shouting 'where is my saw' and he was holding still holding it, I insisted we went home for lunch.

My thoughts turned to heating and I discovered the following, written six years ago:

When we lived in England, we had central heating.  Virtually everyone we knew had central heating.  This is not the case in France.  In old houses, such as ours, which is a typical mid 19^th century farmhouse, the only heating point was the large open fireplace in the living room.  In winter, the heavy wooden shutters on the outside of the house were closed and, together with the thickness of the walls, trapped the heat inside the building and stopped you freezing to death (in theory).  A 20^th century improvement was to enclose the fire in a metal and glass box in order to increase the efficiency of the heating.  This is called an insert and is found in most houses, old and new, today.  Our part of France has a lot of trees and coal is hard to come by, so people burn wood that is sourced locally.  The French word ‘cheminee’ has the meaning of ‘fireplace’ whilst the English word ‘chimney’ translates as ‘conduit’.  My neighbour Marcel told me that when the inserts were first introduced, they didn’t ‘draw’ properly and people were obliged to leave open the front door in order to get enough air into the room, create an updraft and get the fire burning well.

We bought our house in June when it was extremely hot and humid.  We happily ignored the fact that we had no heating to speak of.  We were too busy doing battle with the resident termites, bats and hornets.   We were living on a construction site and setting up a new business. 

So time rolled along and, in September, the free papers started advertising means of heating your house – inserts, wood-burning stoves, radiators and the like.  The days and nights were delightfully warm and compared to the East of England; we still felt we were in the midst of a very good summer.   Nevertheless, we popped along to a local shop and ordered a wood burning stove for the front room and a French version of an Aga for the kitchen.   Aga versions of an Aga cost around E6000 at the time.

October rolled along and was still mid 20’s during the daytime.  We went back to the shop to see where the stoves were.   Evidently the larger kitchen model was still on order.  The smaller wood burner had arrived and the glass was broken, so had been sent back.  October turned into November and the wood burner had another trip to and from the factory. 

Mid-November, it was if the outside heating had suddenly turned off and the temperatures dropped to below 10 degrees at nighttime.  The lady at the shop lent us a paraffin heater and we sat under duvets.  By the end of November, it was seriously cold and you could see your breath in the house day and night and finally, HURRAH, both the stoves arrived.

At last, we thought, the bees, which had replaced the hornets in the chimney, might be discouraged by the heat and smoke – and leave!   (They didn’t).  At last we could take off our woolly hats and actually be warm!  The wood-burner was duly installed in the front room and was admired by us and especially by the dog.  

The Godin (French Aga) was brought in by four burly French men and the plumber spent a day installing yards of copper piping and an outlet radiator.  It lent a ‘submarine’ type ambiance to the kitchen.  Then, the plumber added a few bits of wood and lit the fire.   The amount of heat that came out of the cast iron top was phenomenal.  The French electrician who was doing the rewiring of the house came down to admire it too.  We had hoped the cold might make him hurry up and complete his work quickly (it didn’t – he was there nine weeks). 

We cooked supper in the oven and boiled pans of water on the top and were very, very happy.  WF was especially happy because the outlet radiator was in his room.  After supper, we were sitting down watching telly when an ominous banging started upstairs in WF’s room.  It was coming from the outlet radiator.  The plumber came back again and said the stove was giving off too much heat for just one radiator and in fact we could run six radiators from such a large stove.  (Why didn’t he tell us that first?).  So, he spent the next week installing five more radiators. The banging radiator calmed down.  Only two of the new radiators worked.  The plumber came back again and said we needed to run the stove at full power to heat all the radiators.  This used up a lot of wood and meant dashing back into the kitchen every half hour to feed it. 

Quite often, in France you need to ask the right questions in order to get the information you need.  Quite often, you don’t realise what questions you need to ask until it is too late to ask them.

So, our normal modus operandi is to get up and throw on many clothes (though the woolly hats haven’t been necessary since 2004) – and run downstairs to see whether the fire has stayed in overnight.

I would be a failed arsonist, and so would RJ.  OH and WF are arsonists manqué.  With just one match and a bit of wood or paper, they can create a blazing fire seemingly without effort.  If they lay logs on the Godin at nighttime, it will happily crunch away on them and can be easily teased back into life the next morning.  I, on the other hand, sometimes find firelighters a challenge to light….  This is not at all a bad thing as it means I am banned from touching either stove…

2009 January has been the coldest since we have been here.  We all have double duvets on the beds.  Ice has been thick on the car windscreens so we have taken to parking them facing east so the morning sun can start working on melting it and we don’t have to mutilate yet another fish slice.  Of course, when we are in the car and bowling along, or in a shop, in never occurs to us to buy a scraper. Last week, the light of the morning sun was diffusing gently through the most exquisite and complex ice crystal patterns.  They were on the inside of the landing window.

‘Eee’ said OH.  ‘Reminds me of when I were a lad…’ 

I too, seem to have spent a lot of my life in freezing houses.  One house, in Ashton in Makerfield, belonged to the local Water Board and my father was in charge of the Reservoir, which was attached to the house and supplied the local water.  It was fiendishly cold for most of the year.  My American cousins used to visit.  They, sensibly, lived in California.  Their heating budget was taken up with keeping the heat out of their houses.  Years later, one of them commented to me.

‘I used to think it was normal for English houses to have damp on the walls’.

It may be true that central heating breeds germs but I can say from experience that living in cold damp houses isn’t too good for you either because what I was quite often ill in bed, under many counterpanes and blankets, and with the fire lit in my bedroom whilst I read Enid Blyton.

http://www.galteemore.com/

Back home, in front of the roaring fire (we are back in the present day now, btw) I battle with setting up a blog on Wordpress.  It is not intuitive.  OH emerges from the kitchen, where he has been feeding his eBay obsession, and finds me muttering 'what is the effing difference between a Page and a Post? OH is happy to supply the following information ;  a page is what you find in a book and a post is what you walk into when not paying attention.  Where would I be without his help?

Hightailing around, hootenannies and shuffling off this mortal coil

Wednesday 21 January 2015

6 degrees, misty with sun later

Insisted yesterday that we start at 9.45 and on time.  Relieved to see them ready to roll when I arrived.  We headed off into a village 15 kms away to a property owned by an English couple.  I have had this house for sale for a number of years and the main reason it hasn't sold is the village in which it finds itself.  There are no shops there, not even a bread shop, and it is an equidistant 15 kms from the two nearby towns.  Having said that, it is a charming property with large open lounge, US style kitchen and good sized bedrooms.  The garden is a particular feature and is set to lawns and beautiful flowering shrubs and trees. The lady decides this is now her favourite - she isn't having financial input and it is the man and his business partner who will decide.  The best option if they want to let out periodically is the town house with swimming pool and parking where you can walk into town.  Apart from mistaking a free standing wardrobe for a toilet 'Jesus, my brain has gone' and thinking that the gypsies leaning out of their windows and smoking fags were traders (they probably are but not in anything she or I would wish to buy), nothing untoward was said.

I dropped them back off in my town and went home to clean as there is a visit upcoming on our house and alas it is still in an unviewable state.  Discovered that the bathroom walls have taken the opportunity to grow some mould.  Bastards.   It did come off quite easily.  I then moved onto the grouting, which was like the 'before' example in bathroom cleaner ads. Unfortunately the tile paint came off too.  We decided to tell the visitors that we were waiting for a man to come and do the bathroom.  We won't tell them that the man is OH...  OH spent hours outside with the Karcher.  Dog enjoyed being squirted too.

A number of notable deaths this week, Anne Kirkbride who played Dierdre Barlow for 44 of her 60 years; Leon Brittan former conservative MP and barrister aged 75 and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia aged 90.

Watched recording of Jules Holland's Hootenanny.   Ruby Turner, Ronnie Specter, Paloma Faith and Paolo Nutini were excellent.  Surprised to find that Boss Scags is not a black guy. OH says I am musical ignoramus.  I challenge him to spell ignoramus.  What a meany I am!

In case you wanted to know more about the origins of the word Hootenanny, and were afraid to ask:

Hootenanny is a Scottish word meaning "celebration" and / or "party", most closely associated with Hogmanay—the Scots New Year celebration which, traditionally, is the biggest celebration on the Scottish calendar.

With the Scots being one of the biggest groups of settlers in the Appalachian region of North America (bringing with them their whisky-making tradition and methods, leading to the area's "moon shining" tradition) it is not surprising that hootenanny became an Appalachian colloquialism, although it became used in early 20th-century America as a placeholder name to refer to things whose names were forgotten or unknown. In this usage it was synonymous with thingamajig or whatchamacallit, as in: "Hand me that hootenanny." Hootenanny was also an old country word for "party". Nowadays the word most commonly refers to a folk music party with an open mike at which different performers are welcome to get up and play in front of an audience.

"Hootenanny" was also used by the leadership of early firefighting battalions to describe a "meeting of the minds" of higher ups or various department heads. The term has trickled down to working companies and is now used, with some frequency, at working incidents and other circumstances that require a focused discussion between key individuals. Most recently it was adopted for use during the annual Fire Department Instructors Conference.  Logistics professionals for the conference employ the word to call together the required personnel needed to accomplish the prodigious assignments placed on them.   Thank you Wikipedia

Lazy Sunday and le désordre anglais

Sunday 18 January 2015

Frosty with sun later

Had a lovely long lazy morning lying in bed and writing.  Frost shining on the cars but my bed is warm and cosy with a big fluffy duvet and snuggly green and white chenille throw. Drink tea and edit for spelling and typing errors.  Am amazed to find I have written over 20000 words since the start of the Leaving Normal project.  I have always wanted to write a book and now I am doing it, one day at a time, at an average of 645 words a day.

I write between 8 and 9 am in the mornings, before OH is awake, and when the time is quiet and the brain is free of chatter.  A good time and conducive to thoughts about all sorts of things.

There is a visit on our house at the end of the week and the main courtyard is looking sad, full of dead plants.  We head to the one nursery which opens its doors on a Sunday.  There are a number of young families in there, enjoying the warmth and the opportunity to run around the aisles.  30% off polar bears, an offer I find very tempting, but OH says we are to keep focused.  Alas, no coffee shop.  OH stands in the middle of the house plant section and is horrified by the prices.  I take him by the elbow and steer him towards the bedding plant section.  I want to get something tasteful - some cyclamen and heather and ivy.  OH is more price driven and we end up getting a dozen garish plants which claim to be of the primrose family.  They are the plant versions of Jordan.  Oh look! I exclaim to OH, they have aquarium fish!   OH reminds me that we have bought two lots of goldfish from here.  Oh dear.  Must be the lack of coffee.  Must start taking ginkgo again.

We have a goldfish pond in the garden.  It measures about 3m2 and is the depth of half way up my thighs.  (more oh dear, I have just had to look up the word for upper half of legs - I blame learning so much French so quickly).  We put in 11 goldfish (the French version of a baker's dozen) and they bred with insane rapidity.  Before the arrival of the heron, they were very tame and would respond to our fingers, waving in the water.  Now they are fewer and very nervous.  Even so, there are well over 100 in there, varying from tiny brown slivers to fat, deep orange submarine original fish.  Over to Google Answers

Goldfish will grow faster if they are fed a higher protein food, or are fed more often, and, given an adequate food supply, they will grow faster the warmer the water temperature. In ponds, goldfish usually grow quite slowly, as their growth rate is minimal over winter. 
They may grow to around 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) but possibly more. If kept indoors in large, or heated, aquaria they will reach this size sooner and potentially grow even larger. Straight-tailed varieties will attain a greater length than twin-tailed types, but since twin-tails are fatter, their actual mass may be even more. 
Like the maximum size, the lifespan of goldfish is also variable. The record is 43 years, but it is uncommon for goldfish to live this long. Goldfish usually live quite long when kept in large aquaria or outdoor ponds, up to 15 to 20 years is not unheard of. In smaller or heated aquaria, a lifespan of five to ten years is quite achievable. 

Ours eat pond flakes but we don't tend to feed in the winter and the fish stay out of sight. We also have a wildlife pond which has returning generations of frogs and salamanders. OH has ongoing war against pond beetles which are bad for some reason or other and I can't be bothered looking up.



The ponds attract the velvet winged damsel flies with their shockingly iridescent bodies and massive eyes.  The wings are so dark purple as to appear almost black, until revealed by an angle of the light.



We also have many dragon flies.  There are some wonderful pictures of these complex and savage insects and if you want to find out more about their habits and talents, go here

http://listverse.com/2013/04/18/10-surprisingly-brutal-facts-about-dragonflies/

Take the dog around the lake.  All of the joggers are older than us and some go around the lake three times for our one.  I am never convinced all that running is good for you.  Must rejoin the swimming club.

Back home and rip out all the dead stuff and plant the little Jordans.  It is an improvement. Am suitably motivated to start cutting back the shorter long border.  I have not been in here since early Summer and it is a morass of old plant growth and weeds.  Gingerly hack at the immense brambles latticing their way over, under and through the mess.  You will get an idea of the chaos when I tell you that I came across a 6' tree sapling.  The Michaelmas daisy stalks were brittle enough to snap off but I had to get up close and personal with the Gaura Lindheimerai, a plant for which I had longed when in chillier climes, not knowing what a complete thug it is

Image Crocus.com

It ramps over the front of the borders and flowers for months, so I do appreciate it, but it does tend to throttle slower growing plants.  The Gaura battles it out with a variety of Evening Primrose, given to me by a passionate plant person, which has beautiful apricot buds before opening into the classic silky yellow flowers with their spicy evening perfume. The Evening Primrose is easily 6 feet tall and is a biennial which I leave to self seed.

Image Uniprot.com

I was also pleased to see many seedlings of Acanthus Mollis, a great structural plant and one which gives year round interest.  I let them seed and then move them in the Spring before they get time to put down their roots properly.

 Image +Robinsyard.blogspot.fr

My style is what the French call 'le désordre anglais'

OH came out and said he was turning off the electric in the house.  A lot of clanging and swearing ensued from my bedroom.  He emerged, flushed with success, an hour later and announced, with biblical overtones, that now I had light.  I used to have a lovely mini chandelier in my bedroom, with many sparkling little crystals.  RJ had hung it and had not attached it to the beams properly, with the result that the wiring always showed and it used to descend slowly over a period of weeks before I shoved it back into the ceiling.  Too heavy alas.  OH decided it looked bad for house visitors, and had just cut off the wire, meaning I had no main lighting for about six months.  I now had light and revelled in the luxury of it. The upstairs light circuits have decided to work again which is just as well, as the electrician says he is ill and can't come.  The thing with OH is not to nag, and to invite people to come and see the house.  

When the boys were small, and a visit from MIL was in the offing, we would make a big effort.  I used to say 'don't tell her we have spent a week, cleaning the mess'.  MIL would duly arrive and say to the boys 'well, what have you been up?' and the little rats used to exclaim 'we have been cleaning ALL week!'  I didn't think I did much cleaning, until I started writing this blog.  This is how I feel about cleaning

I do love watching Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners.  Must sign off, I seem to have done something to the text editor which means it is centring all text.

Why my man can't work a hotplate

Saturday 17 January 2015

Wet and windy 4 degrees - some sun later

Imminent arrival of guests drove us down town to rental unit this morning - me to clean and OH to fit new shelving.  Old shelving bowing in scary manner.  He unpacked the new hotplate, purchased yesterday, and took out the instruction manual.  In typical fashion, he then just pressed buttons.  The hotplate made a piercing beeping noise.  Nothing else happened.  I read the manual - you have to select the temperature and then the time and then press go.  It is an induction plate and heated a pan of water in truly amazing time.

Back home for lunch and I rang some suspects (unqualified prospects).  Most of them were out but talked to charming couple who are over soon and who are just looking for a straightforward holiday home.  Saints be praised!  Holiday home buyers are a mountain less difficult to please than people who intend being resident all year.

Rain lashed down and had to pin back the shutters.  Decidedly nippy.   Skies cleared later so I took the dog out and armed myself with dog bashing stick.  All was quiet - no barking even.

Made lemon meringue pie and fixed appointments for next week.  Felt very tired.