Hot sunny day, with clouds in the background, but never seeming to come to the foreground.<\/p>\n
I got up early with only one thing on my mind \u2013 to try and get the kitchen units finished.\u00a0\u00a0 I had breakfast first, of course, and I felt particularly brave enough to venture off the All-Bran and back onto solids.\u00a0 It being Tuesday, the bread-van came at eleven, but I still had enough bread to last me the day so I didn\u2019t have an excuse to go out and chat in a neighbourly way about bread (or weather) related matters.\u00a0 Shame!<\/p>\n
Basically, I spent all day doing woodwork.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cutting, filing, chiseling, screwing, drilling, planeing, hammering, measuring, nailing, glueing, smoothing, filling, laughing, skipping, dancing \u2026.. \u2026. oh no forget the last three they got into this woodwork list by mistake.<\/p>\n
How come though I spent just as many (if not more) hours effort into the same job today and there doesn\u2019t seem to be so much as progess made?\u00a0 I mean, I did a whole load of stuff yesterday and the results were very visible, yet today there just seems to be just more mess and still a whole bunch of stuff to do before the job\u2019s finished.\u00a0\u00a0 It might be down to music.\u00a0 Yesterday I was listening to music all day \u2013 I found a CD with 111 of my favourite tracks on it and I listened to it all as I worked.\u00a0 It took pretty much all the day listening through it and it seemed to make the day go quicker.\u00a0 Today I didn\u2019t have any music on and that doesn\u2019t seem to make things happen.<\/p>\n
Just before midday,\u00a0 Mrs Tronche came venturing into the driveway (which she\u2019s never done before).\u00a0\u00a0 No drama though, she just had a huge punnet of strawberries she wanted to give me.\u00a0 I thanked her very much, although to be honest I still haven\u2019t got through the last punnet of strawberries she gave me which I put in the freezer.\u00a0\u00a0 Trouble is, that you either eat the bloody things fresh with cream & sugar, or you have to freeze them with a view to making something exciting some other time.\u00a0 I still haven\u2019t got round to the some other time yet, so I just ate my way through as many of this fresh punnet as I could and put the remainder in the fridge.\u00a0\u00a0 Oh well, things could be worse \u2013 I mean I\u2019m living next door to a farmer whose produce includes strawberries, veal, and beef.\u00a0 What to do when she comes round with a plate of veal, I wonder?<\/p>\n
Got my phone bill today and it was \u00a3190 for last month.\u00a0 \u00a3190 for one month!!!!!\u00a0\u00a0 So I thought I was all very clever with the contract that I\u2019d chosen and I had only made TWO calls last month and they weren\u2019t very long so I imagined that I would have something in the region of a \u00a330 bill.\u00a0 What I didn\u2019t realise though was that I was paying everytime Ilka phoned me from Germany, and that amounts to about 300 minutes of \u2018extras\u2019.\u00a0 So she pays 9 cents a minute from her home phone, and I\u2019m paying 50 PENCE a minute to receive the call.\u00a0 Bloody rip-off that is.\u00a0 I knew these mobile phone thingies were expensive, but I didn\u2019t know by how much.\u00a0 You see what a molly-coddled existence I\u2019ve led in the corporate world all these years.\u00a0 Next, someone will be telling me you have to pay tax to keep your car on the road!\u00a0 Outrageous!\u00a0 Anyway, from now on Ilka & I have now resolved to go back to the old ways \u2013 which means me waiting outside a public phone box at an arranged time.<\/p>\n
I was so knackered after my (9 or 10) hours woodworking today that I couldn\u2019t face cooking.\u00a0 Instead I thought I\u2019d phone for a takeaway.\u00a0 Of course, you can\u2019t really phone for a takeaway round these parts (and in any case it would be an international call for me and that would cost in the region of \u00a3100 once I\u2019d tried to explain that I didn\u2019t want the complimentary veal cutlets with the foie gras McNuggets).\u00a0\u00a0 The only takeaway is a pizza and that is one you have to pick-up yourself and that involves a 10km round-trip and after a few glasses of wine that\u2019s a no-no\u2026..<\/p>\n
\u2026.So with no takeaway options I opted for baked beans on toast instead.\u00a0 I realise, of course, that I can\u2019t just have baked beans on toast because this is France and if any of my neighbours happened to pop by and see me eating baked beans on toast I would be ostracised and probably not invited to attend the next organ recital at the Chapel de Penitents<\/em> (my local Church). \u00a0\u00a0So I had the beans with a bottle of Cahors<\/em> 2004, and made sure I had a cheese course.\u00a0\u00a0 And in any case they were Heinz<\/em> Baked Beans so that\u2019s practically gourmet isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n Just for good measure, I slapped a fried egg on top.\u00a0 Delicieux.<\/em><\/p>\n Afterwards I went for a walk up the hill as the sun was setting.\u00a0\u00a0 I also took the opportunity to nose round the grounds of a couple of the holiday homes in the vicinity.\u00a0 Especially the one with the swimming pool \u2013 this still looks inviting at this time of year with its crystal-clear water and drop-dead panoramic views of the Dordogne.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps I\u2019ll be tempted to steal a swim in there again one night \u2013 champagne and company permitting of course.<\/p>\n For the moment I\u2019ll just make do with a shower and an early night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hot sunny day, with clouds in the background, but never seeming to come to the foreground. I got up early with only one thing on my mind \u2013 to try and get the kitchen units finished.\u00a0\u00a0 I had breakfast first, of course, and I felt particularly brave enough to venture off the All-Bran and back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living-in-france-2007"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1336"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1340,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions\/1340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}