Bulding on the Internet
It's been three years since I retired and sometimes it seems as though it was only three months ago. Time has flown and I sometimes wonder how I ever found the time to work as my life is filled with so many other things to do. Then I remember that I didn't work, I got a job in computing instead. This year has been particularly hectic and so there are probably going to be three diaty updates. This one describes some of our early antics in our French farm cottage, as this is where we have spent most of the time so far and to start off, we need to talk about drains.
The internet has changed the way we work, how we study, the way we shop and how we interact with our friends, but I hadn't realised until now that it has also changed the way we build.
Russell, the English fosse installer we found, has done a sterling job and we arrived in Montgomard in February to find a working flush toilet. Cami and I are both a bit control freaky where building work is concerned, we knew we were taking a considerable risk when we signed up to have a major work undertaken without us being here. But Russell was also taking a risk as he was prepared to complete the job before he saw any of our money and that made us feel just a little more comfortable.
Installing a fosse septique is not a trivial task. It provides drainage for all the foul water produced in the house: Toilets, baths, sinks, washing machines, etc. Everything but rainwater is processed through the fosse, then filtered in a sand bed and finally discharged into buried pipes which allow it to soak away into the ground. There are three parts: The fosse itself, which is a large underground tank, where bacteria break down the effluent; a twenty five metre square sand pit, around one metre deep and about forty metres of drainage channel. All that, so that two people can have a pee.
Apart from the scale of the work, there is also the associated bureaucracy. A building permit from the local mayor's office is needed before work can commence and the local water company has to sign off on the completed installation. Russell handled all that side of the job, whilst we just sat in Reading twiddling our thumbs and suffering from low level anxiety. After a couple of months of waiting for permits, the installation got under way and within a few days the first photographs arrived.
This is the sand pit being dug just behind one of the old barns.
The next photo shows the trench running to the sand pit from the fosse, up by the house and passing between the two barns. Admit it, there is nothing quite like gazing at a picture of a well dug trench is there now?
Work started on the 2nd of February and by the 12th the job was complete and signed off by the man from Veolia, the water company. During those ten days, regular emails arrived detailing progress, along with 179 photographs in all, showing every aspect of the installation. It was almost as good as being here ourselves.
Our favourite photograph is this one. The cattle next door are clearly keen to learn about drainage techniques.
At the end of it all, here is the finished product. Not a lot to see is there? The sand filter pit is somewhere in front of the barn, about half a metre underground.
Once we arrived in France, we visited Russell's yard, over in Le Grand Bourg, to drop off a few bottles of Bordeaux in return for the extra trench that he had kindly dug for us.
As well as carrying out civil engineering projects, Russell also hires out equipmemt and his yard is a magic place because, as well as all the full sized equipment, there are loads of mini-diggers, mini-back hoes and mini-load carriers laying around for all those renovation projects that don't require full sized machinary. It was like walking through the playground of a giant child.
Anyway, if you are in the Limousin and need a fosse installed; or some cute mini-equipment, this is the guy to contact. http://www.legrandbourg.com
Not only did we manage a French building project from England, we are now handling an English building project from France. When I am not here working on the pig farm, I am getting our English house ready for either rental or sale. Whilst redecorating a back bedroom, it became apparent that the window frame was in need of serious repair. Not having the time to do it myself, I managed to persuade Cami to have it replaced with a UPVC window. Those of you that have read earlier letters will know Cami's views on plastic windows and, in general, I totally agree with her.
Many of the early plastic windows have needed replacing long before a wooden frame would have done, so the percieved cost savings have never materialised. They also needed to be so thick in section to provide even a small proportion of the strength of wood that they look horrible. However, the world turns and the windows we have installed in our extension are fairly close in section to the original wooden windows. Some of the details are still a bit naff, but they are getting better and the build quality is a huge improvement on what was available five years ago.
We contacted Dave Herbert, the builder who did our extension, a few days before we left to come to France, and asked for a quote. That was some weeks ago and a couple of days ago an email arrived with the quote. We have therefore arranged by email for Dave to pick up the house key from Neil, a neighbour who very genorously looks after our mail and by the time we get back, the window should be installed and I can carry on with the rest of the decoration.
Well, bugger me, you can even do building work on the internet.
Pruning budgets in the winter
By far the most important tool in any renovation project is a spreadsheet software package. It is the tool that determines the success or failure of the project, because it contains that most precious of project raw materials, the budget.
In January, I took the opportunity to thoroughly revise the budget for the restoration of Montgomard, before major spending started this spring. During the renovation campaign season, the budget gets updated and validated every day and during the fallow months all the major assumptions are revised and design changes are factored in.
The overall budget for the first phase of renovation is just 55,000 euros, so it may seem a little obsessive to pore over a spreadsheet working out exactly what every euro has been spent on and whether we are going complete this phase within budget. But, like most people, apart from Bernie Ecclestone and the sultan of Brunei, we have limited funds and are determined to spend them wisely. This certainly doesn't mean trying to complete the project for the least possible cost. There are questions of build quality, resale value and our own personal indiosyncrasies to take into consideration. But it does mean trying to get our definition of the best bang for our buck.
I occasionally watch a television programme called Grand Designs, where an architect follows the progress of self-build and renovation projects and what always amazes me is the complete inability of most people to plan and manage a budget. There are two major problems; unrealistic starting assumptions and reluctance to change the budget as reality unfolds. These problems are exactly the same as I have come across in large scale commercial projects to install computer systems and merge companies. Yet little intellectual effort is needed to get it right; just a cautious approach and a healthy dose of scepticism.
As an aside, if you are involved in any project, personal or corporate, that purports to give a payback period of less than five years, then you have either just invented the iPhone or you have got the figures wrong.
I am not going to bore you here with the details of our renovation budget, largely because I have got the process so well honed now that I feel there is a commercial possibility in the self build and jobbing builder market, so I am working up a software product called something like "You can't change the cost of cement, stupid!' What I will give you is the story of how our Godin cooker moved in and out of the budget.
Godin is one of those quintiessential French marques that, despite all evidence to the contrary, show how different France is from England. They are a mid-range supplier of cookers and wood burning stoves, but what makes them so French is the inclusion of frilly bits. This is form following function and then being embellished because function looks so boring. Of course, you will point to examples of this happening in products from all over the world - not that products come from all over the world any longer, they only come from China - but nobody does the embellishment quite like the French.
This is a Godin Chatelaine cooker; the model we were taken with. Nothing really special as a cooker and I am sure Jamie Oliver would turn his nose up at it, but to us it said "Put me in your French kitchen."
However, we had €1,500 in the budget for a cooker and a Chatelaine costs some €6,000 with a cooker hood. What is to be done? There are three approaches, from a budgeting standpoint:
- 1 - What the hell, we want a Chatelaine.
- 2 - We didn't plan for it, so we can't have it.
- 3 - Can we lose some other cost to accomodate the Chatelaine?
Anything other than the third option is madness. A budget has to be able to handle the idea that our design goals change, so we reject the second approach, but every budget must also be able to prove that it has fulfilled its function of enabling project completion for a set price, so the first approach is useless. There is of course a fourth option. just buying the bloody cooker without ever incorporating it into the budget. This is the most popular option, both at a personal and corporate level. Doh! However, it is not our way.
Anyway, we put the Godin in and shaved some other luxuries, ending up projecting a final overspend of €4,000. If we proceeded carefully, we reckoned we could pull back the €4,000 with other savings or absorb it in our contingency fund. What? You mean, you don't start off a project with at least a 10% contingency fund?
Once we got here, Cami decided that we really needed a garden fence. Perhaps the bit of electrified wire that kept the cattle out of our garden didn't seem civilised enough. A quick trip to the local garden landscape company came up with a price of €1200 for 100 metres of post and wire fencing to go down one side of the desolate wasteland that we call a garden, so bye bye Godin, hello fence. With a few other changes, we are now projected to underspend by some €2,000. Will we end up with a Godin cooker? Who knows? But what will not happen is that the final decision will be made without reference to everything else in the budget.
Anyway, at the end of the day, the winter budget revisions were finalised and we were ready to start on this years major works.
France is occupied again
Saturday, 12th March, 2011, a day when men abed in England will curse that they were not here, or maybe a day that will live in infamy forever. However it will be remembered in the annals of the human race, on this day we moved into the pig farm and left any trace of 21st century comfort behind. Apart that is from the microwave, fridge, washing machine, hot shower, supermarket down the road, coffee making gadget and, now that we have a working sewage system, flush toilet. But, apart from those meagre comforts, oh and a soft bed and the money to book into a hotel if the going got rough, we were now pioneers, carving out our little dream in a strange land.
How did it feel planting fresh roots in the soil that my ancestors had left along with William the Conqueror all those years ago. Strangely anticlimactic. We came, we saw, we said hello to the cows and then made the bed. As I dozed off I remembered that I had to call the victor of 1066 William the bastard this side of the channel. Not because the French think that he was a particularly awful cad but because, shock horror, he was illegitimate.
Now, it may seem a little rash to move into a house with no heating and that hasn't been lived in for more than two years, in early March, but we were relying on a phenomenon called thermal mass. A building with half metre thick walls and huge oak beams in the ceiling is not going to change its core temperature much whatever happens and sure enough, once you were out of the March breezes, the house was not much colder than we run our English house at, which is 18°C in the living area and around 15° in the bedrooms.
Many of our friends and neighbours seem to run their living areas in the low twenties, but the human body is a relative temperature feedback system (within limits). You feel cold if you are colder than you were and warm if you are warmer than you were, regardless of the (within some sort of normal range) temperature you started at. Schoolchildren in Siberia are allowed to put on coats and scarves, but not gloves, when the temperature in the classroom drops below 11°C.
We usually feel quite comfortable at 18°, but if not, then we can always boost the heat a little. In our pig farm, it is a lot more difficult to boost the temperature until we get the central heating sorted. As a hedge against freezing solid we bought two gas fires. One, an effete city model that runs off gas cubes, which are small, lightweight, plastic gas containers and the other, an agricultural model that runs on the standard 18kg gas bottles. Given that half of France cooks off bottled gas, it's probably a sign of greater sexual equality that gas is now being dispensed in smaller, lighter containers that even an elfin Parisienne could manage to move.
Anyway, we survived, with the help of the gas fires in the early morning and late evening and now, in the balmy temperatures of late May, we are glad to take advantage of the thermal mass of the building to keep us cool rather than warm.
Biting through granite
Granite is a most beautiful stone, thousands of tiny diamonds trapped in a multi-coloured resin, but shit, is it hard. Some rocks, like flint, are hard but brittle. Hit them and they fracture easily along some plane. Granite is hard but not brittle, it's cosmic concrete. Amorphous; without structure; it just bounces your chisel back at you.
French electricity regulations stipulate that cables have to be at least 30mm deep in a wall. So for our rewire, I needed to channel trenches 30mm deep and wide enough to take the cables in their protective trunking, in every wall and floor where we wanted electricity to run. All the power, all the lighting, all the comms. Everything channelled into granite walls and concrete floors.
It was relatively easy to define the edges of a channel with an angle grinder fitted with a diamond studded disc. Easy, but slightly dusty and expensive. A full face mask with particulate filters was necessary and after twenty minutes you had to stop as it became impossible to see through the dust cloud. The discs cost €50 a time for the small grinder and €100 a time for the larger one, which is why I have €500 in the budget for discs. But the real problem was removing the waste from within the channel. A 6kg hammer drill set to chisel took out about 30%, leaving a load of Granite projections. The angle grinder was then used to slice these into small enough pieces for the chisel to break off.
For drilling through walls I had brought with me some heavyweight masonry drill bits, 600mm long and some diamond core drill bits. The walls just laughed at the core drill bits for drilling large diameter holes. The problem is getting started in a surface which isn't perpendicular to the drill bit. No matter how hard I tried, the bits would slip sideways rather than bite in, as soon as they hit granite. I found out later that the French use a rig which is bolted to the wall to keep a core bit going in the right direction. But with that approach, you first have to knock out bits of the wall that you can cement or resin the bolts into, I instead resorted to an old fashioned hammer and chisel approach.
The trick is to chisel out the soft mortar and lever the lumps of granite out whole. You end up with a hole much bigger than you need, which you back fill afterwards with suitably smaller lumps of granite. Where do you find the smaller lumps you need, I hear you ask? Well dig over a square metre of the back garden and you will lift about 100 kilos of suitable stones. If you are still short, then just knock a bit more off one of the spare pig pens.
Drilling electric cable trunking sized holes (20mm diameter) is slightly easier, but no walk in the park. Again, the problem is meeting solid granite somewhere in the wall that is at an angle to the drill bit. As the bit slips sideways, it tends to jam in the hole, so that the drill and the person attached to it start revolving instead. The mechanical safety clutch on my heaviest drill doesn't kick in until I have done half a revolution and boy, am I glad of the muscles I have built up over the last few months, otherwise I am sure that I would end up flying across the room. To be fair, the instruction manual for the drill does say that you need to hold the drill "firmly" for the clutch to activate, but they shouldn't have been so coy. They should have just said, "you need to hold it as though you're life depends on it, which it does, and be wearing lead divers boots."
The cheese is killing me
You can't really talk about France without mentioning food and wine, so here are my current thoughts.
I have always had a taste for smelly unpasteurised cheese that is almost runny enough to pour onto the bread, but when such cheese can be bought as cheaply as it can in our local supermarket, then the temptation is irresistible. I can get a round of Camembert for €1.50, a bottle of very drinkable red Bordeaux for €2.00 and a freshly baked baguette for €0.55. Enough to feed four people for just over €1 each and that's the problem. There's just one of me eating a meal for four.
At the moment, its not too much of a problem weight wise, as I am burning off loads of calories knocking the house about, but taking in large amounts of dairy fat is a recipe for chlorestorel and diabetic problems, both of which I have successfully got under control.
The over indulgence in cheese is accompanied by a guzzling of wine and alcohol was the root cause of my heart problems. I only take one drink of wine, but as Commander Vimes observes in Terry Pratchett's book "Feet of Clay", that one drink comes in four or five glasses. So, reluctantly, I will have to give up cheese for a while.
Well, I haven't completely given it up, as I still occasionally buy a small lump of the local goats cheese, but no more of the heavenly cambenbert oozing all over a torn off piece of fresh baguette. Except of course at weekends and perhaps saints days. I wonder how many saints days they have in France? What, one for every day? No! - No! - No! Get thee behind me smelly spawn of Satan.
To be fair, there are other foods that will cause me problems once I stop using up 6,000 calories a day renovating the pig farm. Meat, of which I eat only tiny amounts in England, is so scrumptious in the Limousin, that I could easily polish off one of Desperate Dan's cow pies, you know, the one containing a whole cow, with the horns sticking out through the pastry. This is Dolly, the maddest of the farm dogs looking disgruntled that I have only left her the horn from the top of the pie.
In fact the inspiration for the cow pie may well have been French meat. For a laugh, I bought a tin of coq au vin the other week (that's chicken in wine to those of you just starting off in the French language) . Now to an Englishman, coq au vin means something served up in a fancy restaurant, to find tins of it on a supermarket shelf was so alien that I had to try it.
If you bought a tin with chicken in it in England, it would contain some cubes of pale matter that may have been pressed from Chicken fibres. My tin contained big bits of chicken. Not chicken meat; chicken! Meat, bones, skin, the odd feather or claw; chicken, pure and simple. The sauce was nice too.
Sensitive types should turn away now because I am going to talk about veal. When you live on a farm in the Limousin, you are probably going to come into contact with veal on the hoof. In our case, a shed about 100 metres from our back door, which can house up to fifty veal calves at any one time. There are two ways you can respond to this: Shout animal liberation slogans and undo the barn doors, or give a Gallic shrug and say "At least they were happy for a short while."
If you did open the doors, the calves might eventually wander outside, but not before they had consumed every scrap of food around the spot they started in. The fundamental truth about cattle is that they don't really like to move at all. When they are free to roam, they don't and if you weighed over a ton and had to get all your energy from grass, you wouldn't want to move much either.
Is this all just a cheap justification for my love of French veal? Maybe, but again, this is not the tasteless white amorphous mess we get in England; this has muscle fibre, gelatinous fat and gristle. Who knows; it certainly tastes as though it was happy for a while. You can also buy tins of veal stomach, which is tripe by any other name. Camilla, who enjoys nothing more than eating bits of animals and birds that no one else wants: Eyes, brains, testicles, hooves, etc., tells me that it is delicious.
One thing that isn't a problem for anyone watching their calorie intake is French bread and that is because it is largely air. There is some special steam process that gives it the crust, but I don't know whether that also aerates it. The end result is tasty, but must be eaten on the day it was baked. Day old French bread is like some tasteless crispbread, but tougher to bite into. If you are in town early in the morning you see many people wandering about with their "pain de famille" (think fat baguette) tucked under their arm. Here, daily bread really does still mean fresh bread every day. Once upon a time, bread shops and butchers were the only shops allowed to open on a Sunday and it is still unusual to find anything but a food shop open on a Sunday morning.
There is a good selection of breakfast cereals here, as long as you want something chocolate flavoured. Cami reckons it's because only kids eat breakfast cereals, but I am not so sure. Chocolate flavoured Special K and chocolate flavoured All Bran wouldn't form part of the breakfast diet of any kid I know; in fact chocolate special K sounds like a cereal contradiction in anyone's diet. We are also too far south for oats to be known, so none of the oat based cereals which I am fond of are available, except for the odd packet of porridge oats lurking at the back of the bottom shelf in the supermarket.
We went to dinner with Gerard's sister the other evening. Her husband Daniel is my erstwhile survey assistant from last year. Gerard drove us over and Cami and Yvette chatted in the back of the car, whilst Gerard and I had a more stilted conversation in the front. I rarely feel comfortable being driven, but Gerard turned out to be one of the few people I am quite content to be a passenger with. Driving is all about being in exactly the right place at the right time and I think that fifty years of precision work with a tractor has given him an abundance of the skill necessary to achieve that.
The meal was very enjoyable; country fare based on good quality ingredients and served with copious quantities of fresh bread and great tasting red wine; the wine produced by a fishing friend of Daniel's. The pâté that we started with was made from one of the bulls that Gerard has been fattening as his swan song in livestock farming, superb.
After munching our way through the pâté, pasta salad, roast chicken, potato gratin, various cheeses and apple tart, we came to the final piece de resistance, a couple of plums in a glass. Nothing special you might think. Well these plums had been marinating in some fierce spirit for a few months and had the ability to kill off any incipient indigestion stone dead, whilst lifting your head off and carrying it away at the same time. The whole meal was a great eating experience, although the health police amongst you will have noticed that green vegetables did not appear anywhere on the menu. Lots of vegetables and fruit are grown and eaten around here, but for special meals, it is fish, meat and cheese that are featured, with bread and potatoes to mop up the flavours.
The other ingredient that made the meal enjoyable was the conversation. We ranged over a large number of subjects and even I was able to contribute. None of them knew that 25% of France is still covered with forest and only Gerard knew that Ash was a much better firewood than oak. From the last sentence, you might assume that I was holding a conversation with them in French, as none of them speak a word of English. Not quite. Every few words, Cami would have to intervene to provide U.N. style instantaneous translation from either English to French, or French to English. But, with that conduit in place, we did genuinely communicate. I need a lot more exposure to a French language only environment to hasten my understanding of the language.
A few weeks after our delicious meal, Yvette gave us a fresh hen, plucked and beatifully trussed. When I say fresh, I mean that a couple of hours before, it had been running around outside, trying to avoid the attentions of amorous cockerels. I had seen Gerard banging away at some strange white contraption for a couple of days and it turned out that he was servicing the chicken plucking machine.
There is a country & western song that says that there is nothing that an Ameican can't fix with some WD40 and a Craftsman wrench (that's a Stilson wrench for U.K. readers and a clé de molette for anyone tuning in from France). Well, let me tell you that there is nothing that a French farmer can't fix with a large hammer,
I never got to see the plucking machine in action, but I can tell you that, unlike all the other home killed birds I have come across, this one had no sign of a feather anywhere, Now a machine to pluck a single chicken would be an extravagance, but Yvette harvests all of her raised for meat birds at the optimum time in their growing and freezes them. So, one bird each and twenty three in the freezer. To a farmer, everything is harvestable: Animal or vegetable, raised or caught, grown or gathered.
We were talking to Jean Marie, the main farmer in the hamlet about him using our heap of building waste for road building when he had to excuse himself. "I have just killed a sheep and I think that the dogs are trying to get to it." To him, killing a sheep is the equivalent of popping down to Sainsburys for some lamb chops.
How did our fresh from the field chicken taste. Eh, like chicken. There is nothing you can do to a chicken to make it taste like pheasant or goose, but it did have a very subtle hint of game and the leg meat was a fair bit stronger in taste and tougher in texture than that from a factory reared bird. However, the revelation was what it did to the flavour of other things. I cooked the two legs and was left with a pan full of chicken fat and chicken juice. Braising some onions in this, I then added some dried cereal grains, white wine and seasoning. The result was a taste sensation. Fanny Craddock, step aside.
Table manners
I am writing tonight, sitting at our just delivered table. We have been looking for a good farmhouse table since we arrived and the other day, whilst we were mooching around our favourite second hand shop in Limoges, we found it; and here it is.
The top is three planks of oak, each about 50mm thick and just over 2.1 metres long. To find such planks in England would be a stretch, to buy them would take a mortgage. They sit on some simply turned legs, a scalloped top frame, itself thicker in section than most table tops and a solid foot level brace between the leg crossmembers that shows more signs of kicking on one side than the other. Must be where the kids sat.
It is of no particular style. Not Louis XV, although D'Artagnon could happily fence with at least three of the cardinal's guards on top of it. Not Henri IV or Empire, just the sort of table bought by thousands of astute, reasonably well off, country folk for the last 150 years. I rarely feel any sense of ownership with material things, tools aside; but this table speaks to me and I know that I shall enjoy working and eating off it. In the meantime I will be consulting my Fine Woodworking archive to find out the best way of restoring the finish.
The two delivery men really struggled to lift it out of their van, which should have given us a clue as to its weight. After Cami cleaned years of grime off the top we decided to lay it on its side to make cleaning the legs easier; bad move. We spun it over easily enough and then the full weight kicked in and we promptly dropped it. No damage to the table, as it would make a fairly good air raid shelter, but getting it back on its feet again involved considered application of the principles of leverage and the aid of a couple of pieces of rolled up carpet and two rolls of industrial cleaning paper to rest it on part way up.
Last time we were here, we found a nineteenth century marble topped Cherry wood buffet in a local antique dealer that was designed with drawers down one side and a cupboard on the other, which, amazingly, contained a safe. As it was the sort of large, iconoclastic piece that we needed, we bought it, but agreed that we would arrange delivery later. We had decided to pay the guy a visit to arrange delivery, but quite by accident, we bumped into him in the France Rurale store, where he was sticking up posters advertising the French four by four Championships. As well as restoring antiques, he rallies off-road vehicles. Mind you most of the local drivers seem to be rallying off-road vehicles when they go to pick up the bread.
So, here is another reasonably expensive piece of furniture that we can cover with building site dust and we can have great fun asking people to open a drawer on the right. You've got to admit, it does look pretty much the same on both sides and you should hear the solid click of the cupboard latch.
The safe, by the way, is installed separately, in the workshop, which, by perfect symmetry, means that we have a safe installed in workshops in both England and France. If either house catches fire, then as long as it doesn't spread to the separate workshop, our documents will be safe. The problem is that my key ring is already overloaded with keys to two houses, two cars and one safe. Putting another two keys on it (yes, it takes two keys to open the nineteenth century French safe) is certainly going to test the legendary strength of Levi jean pockets and no, I'm not going to get a key chain, in case people think I've gone Elton John.
One Swallow doesn't make a summer
But dozens of them do make a glorious spring. They're not all Swallows actually, Cami tells me that some of the earlier arrivals were Swifts and House Martins, but as it's only possible to tell the difference on the rare occasions when they stay still, for me they are all Swallows.
They arrived in early April to join a couple of hundred sparrows and both species have been larking about (bad pun, I know) ever since. I can't describe what it is like to wake up each morning to the sound of birds rather than traffic. Yes it's just as noisy, probably more so once you add in the dogs barking, the hounds baying, the cocks crowing, the ducks quacking, the guinea fowl screeching and the cattle lowing, but somehow, the noise of things which aren't human is just more gentle on the brain.
It may be that human generated noises react with my testosterone to create some sort of alien intruder tension which the sound of birds and animals do not; although I should test this theory on the sound of wild boar, of which there are hundreds locally. Anyway between five and six in the morning, I can gaze out of the window, first coffee in hand and marvel at the aerial acrobatics being displayed in front of me. Well, I was able to but we are currently halfway between the original electricity circuit and our shiny new one and we only have one phase connected at the moment, so we cannot boil the kettle until the water heater times out at 6 a.m.
I figure that birds really love farms because there are so many different openings to buzz in and out of, nooks and crannies to nest in, loads of roof ridges and gutters to sit and preen on, millions of insects to feed on; but not too many of those scary human things.
Our interaction with the natural world is a lot more complicated than "We are destroying nature". We can also provide a habitat much more varied and interesting than just trees. When we leave the big kitchen windows open, birds will fly in, turn on a sixpence when they see humans and fly out again. No panic. Just another experience for both them and us. On one occasion, when I was working in the cave with the door open, a couple of them swooped past my nose, banked over ninety degrees and angled up the stairwell to the cornucopia of spiders waiting in the attic.
The other non-domestic bird species that we see a lot around the farm is the Heron. They stand around in fields like upper class garden gnomes and Cami struggled long and hard to understand why they were in fields rather than the lakes and ponds which are strewn liberally across our part of the Limousin. Apparently, as well as their main diet of fish , they are also partial to lizards and there are thousands of those. Easy meat in a newly mown hay field.
I won't try to do a Charles Darwin description of the rest of the local wildlife because I know little or nothing about wildlife. I can tell a cow from a bull, the bull is the one chasing me and I can usually distinguish goats from sheep, although, confusingly, some sheep have horns, but for a city boy, that's about it. Everything I know about our mammalian and avian cousins comes from Cami who, unsurprisingly, has a low threshold of boredom for my inane questions about Zoology, but I will tell you about the cute little mice.
When we arrived, I expected lots of rats, but we haven't seen hide nor hair of one. There are two possible explanations: The trays of poison that we found in every pig pen or the farm terriers. The trays looked old and unused, so my money is on the terriers, of which we have three. There are four sorts of farm dog: The herding dog, some sort of collie; the guard dog, almost any breed; hunting dogs, ours are beagles, and those general cleaners up and bosses of all the other dogs, the terriers. With terriers around, you don't find many rats, but mice, I have no idea? What breed of terrier are they? They are the Tintin breed. You know, that small intelligent dog that follows Tintin about in the comic strip; all wire hair and feet that are too big for it.
Our mice are common, or wood mice; smaller than house mice, and thinner than field mice, they live in an extension of one of the old barns and yes, in rural France, even barns can have extensions, although not too many of them have conservatories yet. The thing that is endearing about them, the mice that is, not the barn extensions, is that they clearly do not understand the threat posed by humans. When they see you they will run and hide in a hole in the wall, but, like as not, a long tail will still be hanging out. So far I haven't been cruel enough to tweak any of the tails and anyway, that might lead to the evolution of super mice which took over the world. I just smile at yet another gentle joy of living in the country.
Since I wrote the last paragraph, I'm afraid that the status of mice has changed from cute country cousins to fiendish destroyers of civilisation. Cami uses the barn extension where they live as a potting shed and had been sowing lots of salad seeds on the potting bench. The cute little, no, slavering brutish, mice, have climbed into the pots and dug up some of the seeds. Now, there are many serious crimes, but right up there, alongside genocide and changing the presenters on Gardeners World, is stealing Camilla's seeds. No more Mr nice mouse; welcome to the world of poison and traps.
[Fast forward a month] OK. It's becoming hard for me to keep up with the status of the mice. They have had young and apparently the young mice are so cute that they have rescued the whole barn extension mouse population from slaughter. Damn; I was so looking forward to walking in and saying in a quiet voice, whilst lighting a cheroot, "we can do this the hard way or we can do this the easy way."
Oh yes, renovation
I suppose that I ought to say something about how we are getting on with the rest of the renovation but, when all is said and done, its a bit boring.
I've laid the foundations for the walls in the cellar which, as you can see from the photo, are startlingly beautiful and I have now started laying blocks on top to form the walls of the new cellar. The lightweight concrete blocks are held in place with a cement based glue, giving joints that are no wider than 5mm..
I have channelled seemingly miles for the electricity and stuck all the socket holders onto the walls,.
Look, here are some.
There is a tiny point of interest here in that I discovered MAP, which means plaster adhesive mortar. Think of it like industrial strength polyfilla, which comes in 25kg sacks and is used to stick insulated plaster board to walls. Electricians have cottoned on to the fact that it sticks electrical boxes to uneven granite walls much better than the plaster they are taught to use in technical college and as I am labouring for the electrician, that is what I am using. Brilliant stuff.
You could argue that using such modern materials goes against what is supposed to be a happy coming together of twenty first century function with faithful renovation of nineteenth century fabric. But any renovation of an old building is going to be a compromise between what can be restored and what must be sympathetically replaced. We cannot live with ancient electrics and a few dollops of modern adhesive to hold the new electrics in place is a fair exchange for the acres of oil and plastic based products that we are ripping out.
I have knocked out an old staircase and punched a doorway through from the kitchen to the cellar and here it is. Another exiting image of accros supporting a temporary lintel.
You may be wondering how I can go sideways from a kitchen to a cellar. It's because a cellar is called a cave in France, but cave covers a more general idea than cellar. A cave can, in theory, be on any floor of a building; ours is on the ground floor and was originally someone's house. It has an earth floor and tiny windows and measures about five metres square, a fine size for what is going to become a scullery, but a hundred years ago and maybe much more recently, a farm labourer's family would have used it for all their non-sleeping requirements.
Mind you, it did have a solid oak staircase up to an attic area, but then again, they burn oak here as firewood. I have just realised that I don't know what a scullery is called in the twenty first century. The French call it a back kitchen and in my young day it meant a small space adjoining the kitchen for washing etc., or the kitchen itself, depending on which part of the country you came from.
But, all this aside, the really important news about our renovation is that we have permission to do it. Before we left for a short stay in England at the end of March, we dropped off our 'declaration preable' at the local town hall. In France there are two levels of planning permission: A building permit for major work and a declaration preable, literally a "This is what I am going to do" notice, for general improvements and minor works.
For the latter, if you haven't been notified of any objections within two months, you can start work. We arrived back in France three weeks after we left and found a letter confirming that there were no objections to our work. Now many Brits had told us how difficult it was to get permission to do anything, so we had been expecting some problems and we could not really be sure, and neither were the town hall, whether our work was covered by a declaration or needed a building permit. So how had our application sailed through. Easy; attention to detail and respect for the poor sods who have to decipher all these applications.
My anal retentive, no sorry; scientifically astute French wife, pored over diagrams and photographs for many hours, making tiny adjustments in CorelDraw so that all our representations of what existed now and what we proposed should exist could be matched millimetre for millimetre. I like to think that I contributed a small amount in that I described our proposals as clearly as possible in English, before Cami translated them, but essentially there was a meeting of anal retentive, no; sorry, sorry, scientifically astute French minds and we got permission in record time. Even the mayor's office was impressed at how quickly the planning department had responded.
If you don't believe what a joyous relief it must be to receive a correctly completed and professionally presented planning application, just try working in a government department for a week.
Here is the official notice that we have now put up declaring our property to be a building site. You buy them at local DIY stores and fill in the permit details. Needless to say, I objected to paying €4 for it when I am advertising the Brico Marche DIY outlet, but it's kind of cute to be proprietor of a building site, although thinking about it, most of the houses I have ever lived in have been building sites.
Last updated 05 June 2011