Painting by numbers

Walking Monday:  3.8km

Cycling Tuesday: 8.7km

Swimming Tuesday: 1.25km

Walking Wednesday: 3.8km

Cycling Thursday: 8.4km

Walking Friday: 3.8km

Quite a triathlon of a week ...... 

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Progress on the gable end house painting:

High work first coat.

End of day one - first sizing coat on all of the wall.

Start of the top coat:

I had assumed that the wall was originally painted but as we worked our way over it I'm more and more inclined to the view that it has never been painted in sixty years as we found no trace of any previous paint finish. There's a certain grey streaked concrete finish that one can see on houses all over France that might be original unfinished concrete or may be very well weathered old paint - it's hard to tell. Certainly our west facing wall takes all the wind and winter rain and the concrete had become very porous so as soon as the rain came the wall was visibly wet. Now two coats of Dulux Weathershield later it should resist the water and allow the moisture in the wall to evaporate.

Up high

Walking Monday:  3.8km

Walking Tuesday: 3.9km

Swimming Tuesday: 1.5km

Walking Wednesday: 5.2km

Walking Thursday: 6.9km

Walking Friday: 3.8km

Swimming Friday: 1.25km

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Sometimes our work projects extend over quite some time. We started repainting the house in June and finished the North wall but really this was just a warm up for the higher south wall and the much higher gable end. And with the summer weather that's where it ended for a time.

So, with the combination of more than one week without visitors and the promise of a settled spell of weather we decided this week to get the brushes, rollers and paint out again. And, for the first time in two years the scaffolding has come out of storage. In the list of things we expected to be doing as a job after stopping work, being a scaffolding rigger was never one of them. Actually, when Barbara asked what someone who put up scaffolding was called I wasn't sure. A scaffolder, a scaffold erector or a rigger? We agreed on rigger.

Here's the gable end scaffolded:

When Gérard last swept our chimney (it's done by pushing the brush down from the top in France rather than from the fireplace as in the UK) he stood on top of the stack and said he could see the sea. I declined Gérard's kind offer to join him standing on the stack so I could see the sea too, as is well known (particularly to Gérard) I'm not good at heights but the view off the scaffold over the garden is quite good:

Not everything in the garden has grown so well ....

Walking Monday:  3.8km

Walking Tuesday:  3.9km

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I've used several blog posts this year to explain how well most of our fruit and vegetables have performed.

Most is an important word.

Here's a picture of our entire melon harvest for 2015:

As a clue it is on quite a small cutting board ......

A Peach of a Harvest

Walking Monday:   3.8km

Walking Tuesday:   3.9km

Swimming Tuesday: 1.15km

Walking Wednesday:  3.8km

Walking Thursday:  3.9km

Swimming Friday:  1.25km

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I'm not very good at keeping detailed records of our gardening and the crops we grow. Barbara's better at it and we work out our crop rotations from the diagrams she draws each year in the diary and the lists of varieties and sowing dates.

One thing that is clear however is that for most of our crops 2015 has been a record year. During September we had so many courgettes, beans and peaches that we put out a "Help Yourself" table and barrow at the end of the drive. I've not seen this anywhere else in France and it's fair to say that it was initially treated rather suspiciously by passers by, they did get the idea however and we got a couple of thank you notes and positive comments from neighbours.

It's hard to pick out individual highlights from the harvest but for sheer luxury picking perfectly ripe peaches from the old tree takes some considerable beating:

The tree had seen many better days before we took over and was split with a big section of rotten wood at the base of the trunk. It looked so likely not to last long that at one point Gérard suggested taking a graft off the remaining healthy part to replace it when it succumbed to the inevitable. Some frankly trial and error pruning with the help of a book and the need to reshape the tree to open up the view from the barn door didn't bode well but the tree reacted by producing plenty of healthy growth and a good crop of flowers in March. Favourable weather and plenty of insects set the crop well and warm weather followed by a damp August produced a massive crop - easily twice the quantity in any previous year.

Here's a sample of the crop, this is one day's picking:

We've frozen peaches, bottled peaches, made peach chutney, frozen more peaches, eaten a lot, cooked a lot, given many away to neighbours and we have a whole fridge full of fresh peaches slowly ripening. The concensus from neighbours Claudette, Sue and Nicole is that they are very high quality and have a great taste. We agree, of course.

Here's another day's harvest .....

Swallows, Skycamps and Sport

It's not clear to me why the electricity wires outside Monique's house should be a magnet for swallows but, since the end of June, every time we have walked past her house in the morning the number sitting on the lines has increased. First ten, then twenty and thirty, forty by mid July and then more and more until by the end of August we counted over two hundred excitedly chattering together and flying around in small groups.

And then, a day before a storm arrived in early September, they were gone. The wires were empty and the air silent. A week later we spotted a dozen stragglers on the wires looking a bit confused - not sure if they had missed the departure day or if they were on the migration route from somewhere further north. If they were migrating it makes we wonder even more why the wires outside Monique's house are a magnet for swallows - do they have some internal navigation system, maybe it's word of mouth (or rather beak) or perhaps a coincidence. We really understand so little about how migrating birds travel it could be any of these. As the first swallows to swoop over our field in March provide an indicator that Spring is on its way so their disappearance means Autumn is gathering pace.

Although we weather hasn't been great through August, the last week did provide some good clear skies and whilst we had some friends over from the UK held a "Skycamp" with the telescope down the field. Great views of the moon, Saturn and a good selection of clusters and other interesting objects - for people who have never looked through a telescope the moon is always a stunning sight.

On another subject I missed recording in the blog the remarkable achievement by the England women's hockey team in winning the European championship played at Lee Valley in the Olympic centre. The game at international level now bears little resemblance to the sport I started playing competitively forty years ago. In the early eighties I played several times for Camberly against clubs with international players in their team, they were good players, quicker and more skilfull than we were but they didn't seem a race apart. Watching the England ladies team beat old rivals Germany and Holland on the way to the championship Barbara and I were in agreement that, even at the height of our games, we couldn't have competed with these super fit, amazingly skilfull players. Recent rule changes have made the game an attractive TV sport and a great positive message for girls playing sports - it just needs more exposure and coverage.

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I've been a bit lax about recording our activities recently, for my records maybe rather than your interest here's what we've been doing:

Week of 17/8

Monday Walking: 3.8km

Tuesday walking: 3.9km

Tuesday Swimming: 1.15km

Wednesday walking: 3.8km

Thursday walking: 3.9km

Friday walking: 3.8km

Week of 24/8

Monday Walking: 3.8km

Tuesday walking: 3.9km

Tuesday Swimming: 1.25km

Wednesday walking: 3.8km

Thursday walking: 3.9km

Friday walking: 3.8km

Week of 31/8

Monday swimming: 0.12km (in the pool at La Roche, Gennes)

Wednesday walking: 3.6km (Aubrac plateau, Lozère)

Saturday walking: 4.6km (Le Puy en Velay)

Week of 7/9

Tuesday walking: 3.9km

Tuesday Swimming: 1.10km

Wednesday walking: 3.8km

Thursday walking: 3.9km

Friday walking: 3.8km

Friday swimming: 1.25km

Week of 14/9

Monday Walking: 3.8km

Tuesday walking: 3.9km

Tuesday Swimming: 1.4k 

Wednesday walking: 3.8km

Thursday walking: 3.9km

Au départ du Chemin de St. Jacques

We came down the 750km from La Basse Cour in two easy steps. And we had the caravan with all our needs attached. Unhook, connect up and in ten minutes it's a passable approximation to civilisation. 

In our trips this week we've crossed and recrossed the Chemin de St. Jacques, or the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compestella. The pilgrims in the Middle Ages faced a tough time, no decent roads, bad weather, thieves and two huge natural obstacles; the Pyrenees and the Mountains of the Auvergne and, where we are staying, the Aubrac plateau.

There isn't a single Chemin, rather a network of routes that come together in places. Along the way towns, monestries and cathedrals competed to attract pilgrims. We visited Conques, a film-set perfect medieval village around the Benedictine Abbey Church where the remains of Sainte Foy, martyred in the seventh century, were venerated and attracted many pilgrims. Actually the remains were stolen in the tenth century from the cathedral at Agen by a monk and brought to Conques - literal Medieval Skullduggery.

One of the major recognised starting points of the Chemin is at Le Puy en Velay. Le Puy has two main claims to fame; the venerated statue of the black Virgin that brought tens of thousands of pilgrims to Le Puy to begin their pilgrimage and Puy lentils - the slightly upmarket green lentils. Of course, this being France, lentils have an AOC label just like wine certifying their place of production and hence their ability to be sold as Puy lentils. 

According to the Michelin guide Le Puy occupies a remarkable site whilst the Rough Guide says it sits on the upper River Loire in a natural bowl. The geology is interesting and has left three prominent tall volcanic plugs in the bowl, these are now the sites of the famous Chapelle de St. Michel d'Aiguilhe

And the statue of Notre Dame de France overlooking the cathedral:

I'm with the Michelin Guide, Le Puy en Velay is a remarkable site.

Actually things are not quite as they might seem in Le Puy. During the revolution the statue of the Black Virgin was desecrated by revolutionaries and was actually found to be a remodelled statue of Isis from the Roman occupation of the area. And the statue of Notre Dame was cast from 213 cannons captured at the battle of Sebastopol.

British Architecture and French Engineering

We've travelled about 500 miles in all to the Lozère region, south of the Massif Centrale and the Auvergne, and one of our objectives was to see the Viaduc de Millau. This remarkable construction takes the A75 motorway soaring across the Tarn river 600 feet below.

The bridge was designed by Sir Norman Foster architects and is wonderfully precise and seemingly light structure to carry a four-lane autoroute 1.5 km across the valley. I'd read about this and seen a programme about how it was made but seeing it in real-life was a remarkable experience. The engineering task was lead by a French team and realising such a simple form in such a difficult terrain was a work of some genius.

We even broke a lifetime convention and took a "selfie" ... 8o0