A Warm Day

It's nearly four years since we bought La Basse Cour - four years, how did that happen?!!

It was the Saturday before Christmas when we collected the keys aftera long and difficult drive across snowy Normandie - thanks again Honda CR-V four wheel drive system  It was a sunny day and, even in mid-December, we could feel the warmth coming back off the south wall and we sat on step and had lunch. The building runs east to west and the south wall collects all the heat so today during a sunny spell in late November some summer insects came out to soak up the sun and admire the new lime pointing.

A red admiral warming itself

Red-veined Darter Dragonfly

The last leaves of the Blueberry have turned scarlet

Some more common creatures were out enjoying the sun as well:

Jess warming herself on the terrace wall

Pip was unimpressed at being woken up by the photographer for this picture  ....

26th November - not sure if we'll get any later sightings of butterflies this year ......

Board Lines

After over two years on this build we've had lots of experience of jobs over-running; things go wrong, seem slower to do than we could possibly have imagined, nothing lines up straight (it's an old building ....) and we just do things wrong and have to repeat things. Of course, craftsmanship and experience are just the result of making (usually) controlled mistakes and learning from them. As I've written before, lots of things on this build we are doing for the first (and quite possibly the last) time so often our process is missing a whole feedback loop.

Sometimes, just sometimes, jobs go better or faster than we expected. We had allowed a week to get down the rest of the upstairs wooden flooring - we finished at 3pm on Thursday afternoon, fully 20% ahead of plan. The upstairs now has about 50 square metres of wooden flooring running seamlessly from mezzanine to corridor to bedrooms and even into the built-in cupboards. Are we pleased with it - you bet :o)

Bedroom 2 with underlay down and part boarded

Cupboard in Bed 2

Finished floor bed 2 i

Finished floor bed 2 ii

Main bedroom floor part way down

Adam fits the final board

Cutting and board preparation area

Main bedroom finished

Main Bedroom finished

Just 80 metres of skirting board to make, stain and fix now .....

A Good Year for the Roses - II

And it certainly has been a good year for the roses at La Basse Cour. Our Anglo-French collection of roses has, after two years growing, really got going this year. Shaking off the freezing winter and cold spring the produced a fine show of flowers. Here are some of the highlights:

"Mme Ghislaine de Féligonde"

"Altissimo"

"Mme Isaac Perriere"

"Lady Hillingdon"

"Jacqueline du Pré"

Interesting that most of the names are aristocratic or talented women ....

A Good Year for the Roses - I

"And, it's three top ten hits in ten seconds for Elvis Costello"

"Red shoes ..... The Angels Want to Wear my Red Shoes" - that was my contribution (memorable song from my first year in University).

"Watching the Detectives" - that one from Adam.

And, and .......... time running out ........ "Good Year for the Roses" - just got that one in before the time ran out.

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During the long periods working on the barn - especially the interminable plastering - the radio provided a distraction and background for us. We started with Bleu Armor and managed to listen to that for several weeks until we finally twigged that, with the absence of anything apart from news bulletins and adverts, it ran on a loop between 10:00 and 4:00 (so maybe that's why Phil Collins is on French radio so much).

Then we progressed to internet radio - there are thousands of stations available and we toyed with Absolute Radio 80's Hits (the music of the '80's is a sort of neutral ground between my age and Adam's; then we tried Abacus Radio '80's Hits (an American station, I suspect just an iPod on shuffle connected to the server); brief forays with Dutch stations, RFM and MacJingle 80's hits (a german station, again an iPod connected to a server) followed. Finally we gravitated back to BBC Radio 2 for Ken Bruce in the morning and Steve Wright in the afternoon (but Jeremy Vine between 12 and 2 caused us to shout at the radio too much - not good for getting a smooth plaster finish).

And so the popmaster game has become a continuing focus of the morning for us and it's concluding "3 in 10" competition.

We bought a garden

A new garden arrived at La Basse Cour yesterday. We took advantage of a 50% reduction on all stock at a local Nursery that's moving to site to buy an entire trailer load of interesting plants. We'll post pictures of them being planted over the next week or two on the La Basse Cour Grounds PicasaWeb Album - if you're not on the update notification list for this album but would like to be please email me and I'll add you to the list.

Le "Big Match"

Cyrille, the captain of Entrammes, our opposition last Sunday, greeted me with a single sentence: "Hello Tim how are you yes very fine thank you".

I've always had a good robust tussle with Cyrille in our matches (below in a cup match); last season he also came over to apologise for drilling a ball into our goal past my head. His English may be only slightly worse than my French but I appeciated his effort.

Probably the hockey team didn't really understand what they were getting when they asked me to be the captain - "Will you captain the side on the pitch - you're the only one who talks to us during the game". Quite ironic really as my sporting French vocabulary is still pretty sketchy.

So, we now have the team huddle before the match in English:

 "Are we here to look pretty?" - NO

"Are we here to have a nice day out?" - NO

"Are we here to win?" - YES Allez, Allez, Allez La Baule


 (Marianne spoke for most of the team I suspect when she said "I've no idea what you're saying but I know I have to shout NO, NO, YES")

But as well now the players know which position they are playing before the start, only one person talks at a time during team talks and I do spend a lot of time talking to them during the game. I'm even slipping into sporting clichés as I realised I'd asked at half-time for 110% effort in the second half.

And, despite a pitifully thin squad and erratic availability, after defeating Entrammes 3-0 our keen little team is now top of the table by six points. And the old guy at the back is still shouting at them in comical French ;o)