After the disappointment of not selling our little Peugeot
last weekend, there was nothing to do except advertise it again. There is a
wonderful website here called AngloInfo which is similar to Gumtree in South
Africa and is where a lot of English-speaking people advertise anything and
everything. As I already had pictures of the car, it was a simple matter of
writing something to encourage the buyers to flock to our door. Sadly, it hasn’t
worked……..yet. Mind you there are not a lot of people just longing to buy a seventeen-year-old,
right-hand-drive car, in France. Even if if it is going for a song. However,
there are cars on the same website that have been there far longer and are also
not yet sold, so I’m still hoping.
The bird community continue to entertain us in the mornings
as we sit in bed drinking our coffee. There are now several nests in the
various cracks in the church wall but I am not sufficiently well informed to be
able to say what sort of birds they are. They all look like sparrows to me.
Unfortunately, Mrs Pigeon turned down the ‘Des. Res.’ that Mr Pigeon had picked
out for them as that would have been perfect for bird watching. The hole in the
wall is right opposite our bedroom window and we were so looking forward to
watching the chicks develop. Other birds have arrived in the area though and
they are the most delightful singers. It sounds for all the world as if we have
a whole cage of canaries outside the window. And then there are a few birds
whose name I DO know and they are the Redstarts who make a strange rattling
sound when they are alarmed. For such a tiny bird, it is a very loud call.
Something we didn’t much enjoy was when we went outside some
day in the middle of the week, we found thousands of flies all over the
veranda. As soon as the sun went behind a cloud, they all disappeared again,
but when it reappeared, there they all were. Downstairs, outside the cellar,
was just as bad with flies crawling all over the grass and soil. We spoke to a
man in the hardware shop about it and he just shrugged his shoulders and more
or less said ‘It happens’. And although there are dozens of sprays for bees ,
wasps , hornets and mosquitoes, we only found one at the supermarket for flies,
which was useless, and a slightly better one in the same hardware shop. I seem
to remember that on one of the days when we came to view the house before we bought
it, there were flies everywhere and there again, the agent just shrugged and
said ‘It happens’. No-one seems the slightest bit put out by the hordes of huge
black buzzing things. Perhaps we are not yet French enough!
Another good job done and dusted was the completion of the
repairs to the cellar windows and shutters. We think that in an earlier age, the
road past the house was much lower but now after many years of rebuilding and
resurfacing, the cellar window is level with the road. When we arrived here,
the shutters were hanging by one hinge each and the glass panes in the window
were broken. Because the window has a rather unusual fastening device, Neels took pains to restore it as well as he could
and then started on the shutters which had rotted at the bottom end. He tried
to re-use as much of the original timber as possible and has done a good job.
When our neighbour, the previous owner, saw what he was doing, his comment was ‘You
can pick those shutters up really cheaply at any hardware store’ but we think
he missed the point.
We have also finally got the carpet laid in the lounge which
was a heavy job for us. It was lying rolled up to one side of the room which
meant that nothing on that side could be pushed back to where it should stand.
This meant that all the lounge chairs were standing in a group on the other
side of the room. So we decided that it was time to unroll it. Everything first
had to be moved out of the way; the underlay unrolled and the carpet rolled up
again behind it. (Did I mention that the two layers had been rolled together?) The
furniture then had to be lifted over the double roll so that we could finish
the unrolling. Then we could match the two edges of carpet and underlay and go
back again! But it is done now and we are delighted to have a proper lounge at
last. All we need now is to invite some of our friends over to come and sit in
it.
Two other small things completed our exertions for the week.
One was to get the necessary troughs and brackets from the supermarket and then
to get some flowers and soil to fill them up. Right outside the supermarket a
large marquee tent has been erected and this is done every Spring, and is where
one goes to buy seedlings and plants of all sorts. Of course we bought
geraniums, what else?! Only the flowers on our geraniums are not red, white or
pink, they are mauve and are beautiful. I have been told, however, that when
they re-flower, they could possibly be red or white. Perhaps it is just a dye
in the soil. I still think they are really pretty.
The final job on our to-do list for this week was to paint
sealer on the quarry tiles in the fireplace. It was a job that needed doing
long ago before the stove was put in, but we ran out of time and then couldn’t
do it while we were making fires every afternoon and evening. Now though, it
has been done and will probably get a second coat to make them shine to make
them shine but they look better already with a deeper colour.
The overall ‘to-do’ list is getting shorter by the week but
there are still some big jobs ahead – proper hanging space in the bedrooms, for
a start, to replace camping cupboards that fall over in the night! And
bookshelves that are long and low and will fit in to the minimal vertical wall
space we have upstairs. The list could go on and on, of course, but I will try
not to be too greedy.
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