A September to Remember

The summer weather has been really good here - it was dry and sunny through most of June and July, August was disappointing but September has been fantastic. We have had no rain since 30th August, the days have been sunny and the evenings remain warm and light.

The sunrises and sunsets have been remarkable - our morning walk last Tuesday was enhanced by an flypast of the International Space Station (ISS) which came over our shoulders from the west and flew into the brilliant sunrise. (See ISS to find out when to see the ISS next where you are).

We are blessed with dark skies here and last night the new moon formed a brilliant sight in the last of the evening sunset.

Peachy Girl and Onion Johnnie

The old peach tree that has appeared to be on the way out since we bought La Basse Cour (the trunk has a huge hole nearly right through it) failed to produce any peaches last year. This year it has surpassed itself and we've been eating the most wonderful peaches for the last four weeks. Hopefully our cold store will enable us to enjoy fresh peaches for another couple of weeks and then there will be frozen and, the greatest gift to a cold winter evening, peach chutney.

The shops and markets are full of "Oignons de Bretagne" and "Oignons Rose de Roscoff" at the moment. I think I can just remember, when I was about 5, seeing one of the "Onion Johnnies" who travelled over to the UK (in the days before cold storage, lorry shipments and supermarkets) with strings of onions for sale. We're storing ours in the traditional way this year:

923 Days

Here's how we normally describe to people how we ended up at La Basse Cour:

"We knew we wanted to move to this part of France, we'd been to the Morbihan many times before and we did lots of research. We saw 14 properties in 6 days and this was the last of the 14. It had the best aspect and most potential of everything we saw."

We usually also add, slightly ruefully: "we were looking for a project - maybe not this big a project."

With a fair bit of experience of renovating houses in the UK we set up a budget based on what we knew, what we extracted from "knowledgeable" artisans, experience from our whirlwind renovation of the house attached to the barn, some research and a fair bit of guessing.

Timescales are always a difficult thing to estimate - when did you ever hear someone say their project came in 6 months early? So, in the words of a former colleague at work, our schedule was "perhaps more of a wish than a plan". I thought it would be 18 months, Barbara 15 - allowing for a few weeks off work for UK visits, one holiday in three years and a new hip we took 27 months.

923 days of our life.

Budget was close to our first projection thanks to Barbara's wide-ranging procurement and tight accounting, doing the work on a self-build basis meant we came in below the architect's projection.

And how has it turned out? You be the judge - here are some before and after pictures:

The Barn in July 2010

And the same view four years later in July 2014

The eastern end of the Barn - September 2011

Eastern end of the Barn July 2014

Another view of the staircase and kitchen

North-east end of the Barn - September 2011

Same view in July 2014

Looking towards the west end of the Barn - July 2014

and the same view in July 2014

North wall of the Barn - new windows, roof and pointing

Our oak dining set has returned from storage

Living area furnished by Barbara, John Lewis and Wren Living - July 2014

Staircase up to the mezzanine level

Lean-to with asbestos roof - July 2010

 In July 2014 it has become the utility room 

923 Days

Up the Amazon Without a Paddle

We subscribe to an English Language French monthly paper called "Connexion". It's useful for keeping up to date with changes to the ever increasingly complexity of the already complex French Tax System, reading Simon Heffer's acerbic Francophile column and generally getting an English language view of life over here.

If you don't know Simon Heffer he writes for the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph and, although Connexions doesn't espouse a political line of any sort, contributions to its letters page ould easily be written by the same people who write to the Mail/ Telegraph.

"France would be such a lovely country if only these French would just make it more like Surrey" - you get the idea.

Like some UK papers it does specialise in reporting the barmier things that are in the news - "Men in Toulouse strike for right to wear skirts" was a memorable one. So,when it arrives one or other of us usually produces a Victor Meldrew like "I don't believe it!" as we read thorugh the articles. The trouble is it's getting harder to tell "Barmy" from "New Government Policy".

Once such example was a speech made by Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti in April 2013 where she attacked Amazon for its pricing, saying it “slashes prices to get a foothold in markets only to raise them once they have established a virtual monopoly".She went on to propose that free shipping of books should be made illegal as it undercut local booksellers (Amazon and other on-line retailers in France are already restricted to a maximum 5% reduction below the "official" price of books).

Not just a bit of populist political rhetoric or a shock story to be reported; the policy was introduced in early 2014. There's a general distrust here of globalisation and global businesses - at least in our distant part of the country.

Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti has already attacked Amazon for its pricing, saying it “slashes prices to get a foothold in markets only to raise them once they have established a virtual monopoly". - See more at: http://www.connexionfrance.com/news_articles.php?id=5097#sthash.thMYgpoM.dpuf

Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti has already attacked Amazon for its pricing, saying it “slashes prices to get a foothold in markets only to raise them once they have established a virtual monopoly". - See more at: http://www.connexionfrance.com/news_articles.php?id=5097#sthash.thMYgpoM.dpuf

Now, from my user's perspective Amazon operates on a Pan European basis, my UK account was seamlessly available when I first logged on to Amazon.fr, deliveries ordered off the French site often arrive from Germany, Holland or the UK and several times it has been cheaper to order books from the Amazon UK and pay the postage rather than order through Amazon.fr. Which is a pity as it will surely restrict the development of e-commerce in France and thus increase the number of people like us who frequently shop outside France from the comfort of their Internet link. We may not be typical French consumers today - but we might be in the future.

Blogger's Block?

I'm not sure if Blogger's Block exists (it's like Writer's Block only not so literary and with more pictures .....).

But I've had a strange long period when I've not felt able or prepared to post. It's particularly strange as the posts I've not posted (if you see what I mean) relate to finishing the Barn and moving in - complex. Of course, as I said to Gérard, a project like this is never finished but we got over the final crest and are now living in the barn.

Proper pictures and descriptions to follow shortly.

Flood Defences

I've blogged before (Springtime!) about the groundwater levels around the house, since the major storm on 23rd December we've again been suffering from water seeping out of the ground and coming across the driveway. One of the tasks we've had on our "to-do" list for a while is to get an interceptor drain dug to pick up this water, at the same time we wanted to put a concrete floor in our outbuilding known as "The Grange". We had asked Kevin from Furniss Terrassements back (in 2011 he had laid the flooring in the barn and dug the drainage that has progressively dried out the stone walls).

The weather has been foul of course and the time that Kevin was with us distinguished itself with rain, hail and - bizarrely - two sunny lunchtimes when we could sit outside.

The before picture - as Kevin gets to work the groundwater covers the drive

The new Grange floor installed

As the ground at the back of the Grange slopes up the drainage ditch was deep

The water level in the ground is evident in this picture taken before the drainage pipes were connected

18 tonnes of gravel turned up for the trenches and to re-surface our open area

A big improvement ......

As the drain is connected the water starts to flow ...

And flow and flow ....

As soon as the drain started to work the surface water disappeared all the way along the drive. Of course its hydrographics and physics and somewhere along the way I've probably done the equations to describe what happened, how fast the water flowed and what volume comes out every hour. But still - like machines that harvest peas and how planes fly - knowing the "how" doesn't take away the "wow".

And, after all the rain recently, the drain is still flowing and the drive is still dry.

Blown Away .....

The awful January weather has seamlessly slipped into awful February weather. As I write this the wind and rain are hammering against the windows - again. We have 100 kph winds and 25mm of rain forecast for tonight ....

On Saturday we went to La Baule to watch the France-England rugby match in a bar with the hockey club. Many fields were flooded on the way and the salt marshes looked like lakes (normally they just look like fields with reeds growing in them - I only know they are salt marshes from looking at the map). After we had just missed out 24-26 on another year's bragging rights the television switched to news coverage of the weather; from Biarritz through Bayonne, Aquitaine and into Bretagne the pictures looked almost the same as the ones we had been watching the evening before from Cornwall, Somerset, Wales and Scotland.

There are many historical links between the Atlantic coasts of Britain, Ireland and France. They are all linked by suffering from the same terrible weather as well this winter.