So, what do you miss about Britain ?

During the Christmas break and our return to the UK I was asked this question several times.

So, in no particular order, here's a short list:

1 - Proper Beer
It was a real delight to be able to drink some really good British beer over the two weeks. Ringwood beer at the Owl's Nest, Gunner's Daughter at the excellent Old Cannon Brewery in Bury St. Edmunds, Greene King IPA at The Nutshell - Britain;s smallest pub, the rarely available Abbot Special Reserve at The Oak and Harvey's Special at the Pelham House Hotel.

2 - Free Delivery
Our trips back to the UK are characterised by large numbers of deliveries and packages arriving at our host's houses; things we can't buy in France (spares for our lawn mower), things that are cheaper in the UK (satellite decoder, paint) or things that I just can't find on the internet in France (anti-butterfly netting for our cabbages). But everything comes with free next day delivery - here we are always charged for delivery even on purchases over a thousand euros from Muzillac 10km away - and rapid delivery is three days. I know we are in a distant part of France and the country is much bigger and the population more spread out than in the UK but distribution here is hopelessly inefficient.

3 - Weather forecasts that make sense. I've just watched a programme about the sixtieth anniversary of the first television weather forecast that included clips from the various styles of forecast over the year - Meteo France is stuck somewhere in the early eighties at present.

4 - High quality retailers
Nothing in France even comes close to Waitrose.

5 - BBC iPlayer
We're blocked from using it in France. We may possibly be subscribing to a VPN service shortly ,,,,

And, for contrast, 5 things that work better in France

1 - Traffic congestion
Our ferry arrived at 6:30 in Portsmouth, we cleared passport and cutoms at 7:00 and drove straight onto the M27. At 7:15 we were stationary in our first (but not last) traffic jam .....

2 - Car Parking
We spent a small fortune on parking charges in Southampton, Bury St. Edmunds and Lewes. Mostly it's free in our part of France, you have to pay to park right in the middle of Vannes but the option is free parking and a 500m walk. I've been tempted to find out if a foreign registered car will be just too difficult for a traffic warden but not been brave enough so far ....

3 - Energy
There's been a lot of wringing of hands in the UK in the past few months over rising energy costs. Despite a "free market" the costs just seem to go up and up. In France it's a bit different, technically the electricity market is open but 97% of houses are supplied by EDF whose prices are regulated by the government. 83% of electricity is generated from nuclear sources so costs are all pretty stable. For our energy at present we're paying less than half what we did in Fleet in 2010.

4 - Customer Service
Never thought I'd write this ..... but I've been having a long negotiation with Veolia over installing a new water meter. I've twice been into the local office run by a friendly lady who's run around and found the person handling my request and got them to come and speak to me ( and once to call me as they were out). I'm sure the service is a bit more expensive than in the UK but actually I'm happy to pay for this.

5 - Diesel prices
It's a government tax thing but I'm paying about £1.08 per litre for diesel (my UK fill was £1.39 per litre).

Pointing the way

On 11th April we started the pointing of the old building. This consists of raking out the old clay jointing, removing any loose stones or pebbles, cleaning out any gaps and then ramming the lime and sand mixture into the deep holes, filling any wide gaps with galettes (small biscuit sized stones) and building out the pointing to the original stone lines. With cement the process is to get the surface as flat as possible before leaving it to set, there's a much more beautiful and fulfilling process with lime that takes much longer and consists of leaving the jointing surface rough until it has gone firm and then brushing it with a stiff bristle brush to expose the grain and let the jointing surface flow smoothly flow around the stones. The final effect really integrates and brings a sense of consistency to the varying sizes, colours and shapes of the stones and makes the walls look as if they are a single entity. In reality of course they were built at different dates, have been patched, repaired and neglected in equal measure and stone is a natural material with great variability.

We stopped pointing on the south wall in June when the temperatures made it impossible to keep working - lime goes off too quickly in hot sun. Adam re-started the work at the end of October - really very late in the year to try to point with lime which doesn't like cold or frosty weather either. Apart from one disasterous night - when driving rain washed out all the previous day's work - the weather has been on our side and today the final area was finished and the wall signed off.

Four Years On

I found a picture that the architect did for our Permis de Construire in October 2009. It was his mock-up of how La Basse Cour would look at the end of the work.

Here's how it looks today at the conclusion of the pointing:

 

Tonight's Sunset at La Basse Cour

As the UK was being battered by gales and threatened by floods we had a quiet and gloriously sunny December day that even tempted out a couple of lizards to bask on the barn wall.

The sunset was spectacular and, with all the frantic work we've been doing we rarely take the chance to stand back and enjoy the surroundings. The south-western sky was a great sight this evening with Venus at nearly its brightest close to the new moon - the pictures don't really do it justice .....

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 ....