Buildings And Stoves (More Songs) ...

So, as is my wont, I took Jara and Emma out for their evening piddle the other night: this is usually around 23:00 just to make sure they're ready for it. (Believe me, it's so much better not to have to clean up crap in the verandah first thing in the moaning.) It's about five or six km for the round trip by the time we've headed up the road that leads out and under the autoroute and made it up to the old four à chaux, so it's often midnight by the time we get back home.

And as usual, we came back past old Henri Bataille's mausoleum (actually not exclusively his, it belongs to the mostly deceased Huc family, of which he was a member), which would be relatively unimpressive were it not set in a park of cypress trees behind a high stone wall (into which, incidentally, are set - in letters of gold - some of Bataille's less banal verses, he must have been channeling Baudelaire at the time) with, plonked directly in front of it, a replica of Squelette by Ligier-Richier: because, for some reason, he wanted that. A décadent manqué, if you ask me ...

Anyways, in principle a mausoleum is as quiet as the grave, there's generally little to worry about if you've not been over-doing the absinthe, but as we went past late that night there was a shuffling and a clattering and a low, weary snuffling, as it might be some fell fangèd beast tearing unenthusiastically at the cere-cloths. Or possibly the Hell Horse - "old, lame, and weary unto death, and who shall look on it shall die". The dogs seemed anxious, and then as a cloud drifted over the moon there came a clomping, and a great sigh and a snorting, and then a large friendly donkey poked its head over the wall. Hoping, I think, for a sugar cube.

None of this, of course, prepared me for last night's episode. We'd given old Henri a wide berth (just saying, no point in taking unnecessary risks, what with the undead and all) and were coming back along l'avenue de l'Alaric, a road which is basically the southern boundary of Moux, and south of that there are fields, and vines, then the autoroute and beyond that the last ridges of our little mountain. We were not troubled by donkeys, nor by faceless abominations beyond the imagination of man, but as we got up to one of the sparse streetlamps I could not help but notice, four or five metres off to my right in the field, two wild boar cheerily munching away. The dogs were too surprised to say anything - probably just as well - and the sangliers looked up, spotted us, and trotted off into the darkness.

That's rather more excitement than I really need for an evening. Also, we were probably lucky that they decided to trot off, because you really do not want to mess with one of those things.

The living room here at The Shamblings™ is now painted in a fetching combination of sage green and pale cream, which means that in a couple of days the plumber can come back past and put up the huge radiator in there, as well as one in bedroom #2 on the first floor and one in my office, and then we can push the go-tit on the central heating. Which'll be rather nice, as the Cers is blowing and they're predicting highs of 8° during the day for the next week or so. (This was not, incidentally, in the brochures when we bought down here, and Margo in particular wishes to make her discontentment known.)

Two things not to do: start plastering, and look for replacement stoves on the innatübz. I say this from personal experience. The plastering I have already mentioned: you start, you just can't stop. I take some solace in the fact that when furniture is back occupying most of the room, the defects in the walls will be pretty much hidden. In the future dinning room I shall have to be more careful with my work, as thanks to decades of rising damp there are large chunks of plaster that are only hanging on to the walls by faith, or quantum inter-connectedness, or something. Also, when previous persons bogged up holes in the walls due to - as it might be - running power cables down there, or whatever, they did a job that even I would sneer at as being amateurish, and sanding back was obviously an optional extra which they weren't getting paid for and what the hell, who'll look?

I see that I am going to get extremely dusty, because I do look, and incidentally believe in sanding. Which reminds me that the Velcro plate on my elderly Bosch triangular sander finally gave up the ghost (just when I really needed it, of course) and so I tracked down a replacement and ordered it. (Not that easy to find, actually. The thing's twenty years old and has seen heavy use: the Bosch part would've cost as much as just buying a new sander. Luckily, Wolfcraft have a more reasonable pricing structure.) About a week later a huge heavy box arrived: instead of my long-awaited sanding plate it contained three nattily boxed sets of conduit saws, such as you use for drilling nice circular holes in walls for mounting power points and such.

Nice to have, may come in useful, three is still two too many and in any case it doesn't help my sanding problems - so I rang the supplier and said as much. "Ah yes", said the helpful woman on the hell-desk, "there seems to have been an error. We shall send you the right article straight away."

"And I may assume that your delivery-person will remove these three elegant cases of saws? Because I neither want nor need them, to be brutally honest with you."

"Oh no, keep them. We have already wasted enough money sending them to you by mistake, we do not need to pay even more to have them returned to us. Besides, we already got one." Ah well, I shall ask around friends and neighbours, see if I can't find someone to give them a good home.

But as for the oven - five burners (one a triple couronne, for woks and such) is non-negotiable, and I'm not going to pay fuck-all to buy a piece of crap (because I'm too poor to not buy quality), but do I want one huge oven, or would three smaller ones (one with a proper grill) make me happier? One gas and two electric would delight me, but there we're wandering off into hand-crafted stratospheric prices so I'll forget that. (I mean, the stoves are hand-crafted, lovingly assembled by maîtres-artisans from the finest materials, each signed with the craftsman's name. The prices too are hand-crafted, invented by the marketing people droids, and are designed to deter the hoi polloi from having nice things. Hey, I could buy a wood-fired one if I wanted, but then again I could buy a small Mercedes for the same price ...)

At this point I'd rather thought of inserting the minutes of the latest meeting of the Moux Dinning Club, but the napkin on which I jotted them down seems to have been used to mop up a massive wine spill at some point in the afternoon ...

Because we went off - about fourteen of us - to the chateau de Cavanac, a tad south-west of Carcasonne, for a birthday lunch the other Sunday. Lovely place, a good choice if you have visitors who want to try some très correcte traditional Frog cuisine: you'll not be startled by the originality of the menu but you'll not be disappointed by the quality either. Also, it's one of those rare beasts offering a fixed menu: apéro, four courses (with about six choices for each course), coffee and digestif plus all the wine you can drink for the outrageous price of 45€. The foie gras was excellent - only complaint there is one I have at every restaurant, which is "not enough thin, nicely grilled toast to go with it".

But then, although I am not French I have picked up a few French traits, and as anyone who's lived here for any length of time can tell you, the English may be a nation of shopkeepers but the French are a nation of râleurs. Show me a French-person with nothing to complain about, and I will show you a very miserable Frenchman.

Anyways, after a long quiet time I see that spam is back in my inbox, and those lovely girls Vera, Olga, Ekaterina and Inna (of the Tübz family, I assume) are reminding me just what a nice time we had a little while back. Individually, or possibly collectively - odd that I can't recall that, must be old age creeping up on me ...

I am a very conservative person and I hate chucking anything out, but I am having to seriously consider giving up my long relationship with Firefox. It was bad enough that the tabs are now hideous rectangular bricks - I guess the marketing consultants decided that "ugly" is what people want on-screen these days - but worse is that the latest version has bricked my more useful add-ons. Things like FireSSH, FireFTP, NoScript (without which I feel seriously and rather embarrassingly naked, not a pretty sight at my age): I am aware of the justification for this, I know that developers had plenty of warning if they wished to upgrade and yes, if I want to open an SSH session I can always use PuTTY but the thing is, I don't want to.

So I went back to version 52, and see I shall see how things go. Poorly, I suspect, and I shall have to change my working habits, which is always annoying.

And in other, unrelated news, the mayor's idiot nephew and the rest of the équipe municipale have been sent off to paint the railings and the park benches in the little square beside us. There are four of them: one to look after the paintpot, another to hold the brush, and two to move the benches back and forth.

Whatever, I'll leave you there. Those boxes of books are not going to shift out of the room by themselves.

High on a Hill ...

NOT The Shamblings™

As you may or may not have noticed - and if you had actually noticed, you could probably not give a rat's arse - there is a butter famine in these parts of the world. The more excited of the commentariat would have it that this is due to the evil machinations of the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu who has bought up the entire world butter supply; doubtless with the aim of using it to grease Chinese gymnasts so that they can excel come the next Olympics. More reasonable people have a slightly more plausible hypothesis but hey!, that's probably fake news.

Personally I too would not give a rat's arse, were it not for the fact that when I pootled around Carrefour today in search of another 10 kg of cholesterol to last us through the week the shelves were bare, apart from the margarine department which was plentifully stocked.

I know that some people do actually prefer margarine to butter, and I'm very grateful that they're safely locked away somewhere they can do no harm to themselves or others (and above all, not allowed access to any cooking utensils), but I will have problems with this. Olive oil is all very well but you can't spread it on a proper sandwich (for the sake of amicable relations, we'll agree not to talk about the pan bagnat here, because despite its undisputed merits it is not really a sandwich) and anyway I really, really, like butter for frying. Also, it's probably good for your complexion.

Be that as it may, we went away again last weekend, leaving Mad Karen's eldest son, Rafaelo, once again in charge of the dogs. For Rick and Mary were house/dog-sitting for a friend of theirs, who just happens to own a) a converted bergerie up in the mountains, just a shade north of Queribus, and b) a young and very enthusiastic sheepdog.

You tend not to think of the Corbières as being a mountainous region, but as you go south you get closer to the Pyrenées and you start to climb and go round twisty-turny hairpin bends to get up to the little cols (OK, at all of 600m altitude, but that's nothing to laugh at if you happen to be walking up it) and finally, when you get to the top of one such - assuming you take the time to pull over and admire the view - you have to admit that you were mistaken.

So Saturday moaning we headed down in Margo's little MiTo and hardly got lost at all, apart from right at the end when we started down the wrong dirt track (also, backing up the wrong track, smoke started coming out from under the bonnet and there was a strong smell of burnt rubber, which we decided was probably just a brake pad and as nothing nasty has happened since we shall continue to ignore it), and wound up in this valley, surrounded by mountains, at about 300m altitude, with this old house sitting there in a sort of prairie with a small river running through it, and a lake, and lots of trees: cue a full-throated rendition of "The Sound of Music", specifically the song about the lonely goatherd.

And then we unpacked, and waited for Angela and Martin who were also turning up along with their two dogs, and drank a bit - as one will - to while away the time; and when they'd emptied their car of enough gear for an assault on Everest, by common consent we went off and had lunch, and more wine just because.

All this to fortify ourselves, because the main object of the afternoon was in fact going for a walk in the mountains. "Only three hours", said Mary cheerfully, "and about 200m of denivelé".

I would not have thought it of her, and had someone suggested it to me I would have been shocked, but she lied - both by commission, and by omission. But whatever, we set off along this little track that led us through woods and meadows and sundry other of Nature's delights (personally I always have this nagging doubt that I am actively profaning Nature with my presence, which is one reason I usually try to avoid such activities) until we came up to a bit of scrubby pasture which was mostly thyme - about in the middle of that photo below.

Walked on top of this one

Where we found the GR 36, which we were not allowed to take at that time for Mary insisted we go "just a little further up" so we pushed on through the shrubbery and found ourselves at the edge of a precipice (you see that outcropping of rock to the right?), which was, it seems, the ideal spot for a little snack. It is true that the view was spectacular.

 Then we were allowed back to the GR 36 and followed it sort of easterly, for it traverses the rock face and heads - mostly - downwards, on mossy paths through bosky whatevers, with a suitable screening of trees to the right as you go down, hiding the grim reality of your imminent lapidary death should you slip.

Which is all very well until you get to the part where a large section of cliff face has actually - doubtless out of sheer boredom or possibly plain old malice aforethought - fallen off, leaving something that I can only describe as an inverted pimple on the rock wall: but bits of the mountain decided to stay where they were, so the path brings you to a natural rock bridge over the goufre, with a pit to your left and a sheer drop to your right. OK, it was at least two metres wide, and the odds of death by being impaled on a larch whilst plummeting from 50m up are, statistically, pretty close to zero, but still ...

After that, clambering over this treacherous sort of ball joint sticking out of the rock (where the view down was merely vertiginous) to get back to the path was pretty much a doddle, and from thence it was but a stroll through an idyllic river valley to get back to the car. The next time Mary invites us on a walk, I shall make sure to ask for more details.

But we all survived, and ate boeuf bourguignon and fruitcake snug inside as the tramontane decided to blow, and Martin had - as is his wont - brought some excellent bottles, and as icing on the cake I had no need to get up the next morning to take the hairy retards out. Of course, it would have been the weekend that Europe changed back to winter time so I didn't really feel as though I'd taken advantage of that, but you can't have everything.

TL;DR version: it was a lovely weekend with good friends in an old house that had, to all appearances, been outfitted with the contents of all the antiquaires and braderies within a 50km radius: lovely for a holiday away from it all (I think even internet was over satellite, and gravity was optional) but no way we could ever have lived there. Not for any length of time.

We got back to find that, as per instructions, Rafaelo had not only occupied himself with the dogs during our absence, he had painted the ceiling and the rafters in the living room. I rather suspect that it was the first time he'd ever wielded a paintbrush in anger, for there are certain lacunae, but hey! it saved a lot of bother. Also, the ceiling is actually and certifiably white, possibly for the first time in I don't know, maybe fifty years?

Rather stupidly I decided to plaster up some of the more egregious holes and dings in the wall, which means that there is a fine dusting of plaster all through the place (for I am not competent enough to do a job that requires little to no sanding) - also, you can't stop yourself. You say to yourself "Right, that's the very last bit done and dried, just sand it off and we're good to go" and it's at that very moment, when your nose is up against the wall, that you spot another bit that really needs doing, and wonder how in hell you missed it the first time round. It is very annoying.

But never mind, it's done (actually, I gave up in despair) and we've chosen a colour with which we can both live, so now it's just a question of doing the actual painting. After which I can put up all the light fittings, we can shift all the furniture (and then some) back in, and we will have the luxury of five minute's quiet contemplation of the work that remains to be done in the future dinning room. Where there's half a wall that sorely needs replastering (rising damp): I think I shall call in a professional for that.

Mind how you go, now.