Over the last couple of days, Nick, Adrian and Kieran have continued to work like slaves on the maisie. The floor has turned out to be multi-layered; tiles over concrete, over tiles, over more concrete; it’s taken a lot of removing, using a road drill. But today it was deemed sufficiently gone to lay the new one on top. They’ve also resized the window that will be in the bedroom, to match one that Ade has laying around in his garage, and opened up another window into a doorway. This afternoon enough cement, sand and gravel were delivered to mix 3 cubic metres of concrete; tomorrow the big cement mixer will arrive, then it’ll be all go, starting on the reconstruction.

My patchwork club does a present exchange each March, anything home-made, but not food; so between shopping for and making huge quantities of food for the hungry workers, I’ve painted 3 terracotta pots to take on Monday.

I’m heading home tomorrow for my English class, but will be back here on Saturday for the Brassempouy hunters’ lunch; another meat-fest now that we’ve had time to recover from the one at Caupenne last weekend.

For anyone desperate to find out what was hiding under the mattresses, all is about to be revealed! No, not a badger, or a dog, or even an enormous, overgrown, GMO pea; but a rolled-up duvet! What an anti-climax, sorry! King Nick and Emperor Adrian were very disappointed when it wasn’t a princess.

On Sunday, I went to the Pyrenees with the Nogaro walking club. We drove to the Col de Soulor, where those of us who didn’t own “raquettes”, or snow shoes, were able to hire them; we then did a 12km walk  through staggeringly beautiful scenery. The weather wasn’t great; it rained a bit and was very cloudy, but that didn’t dampen the spirits of the 30-odd people who went.

Today we’ve been helping Emperor Adrian to start the renovations of his “maisie”, a little house on his land, which has seen better days. So the “demolitions r us” team moved in, ripping out ceilings, walls, bathroom fittings, windows; in fact, everything but the roof and outer walls. Tomorrow the new ceiling will go up, then the damp old concrete floor will be ripped out, and a new one laid over a damp proof membrane. I’ve not been idle while the works have progressed apace; I’ve been appointed catering manager and interior designer, so I’ve had great fun redesigning the inside of the building and choosing bathroom fittings and a new kitchen.

They’re all looking pretty wiped out tonight; I think we’re going to watch a film (or sleep through it!)

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there lived a kindly king called King Nick, known to some of his loyal subjects as Nick the Quick, on account of his speed on a pushbike. King Nick lived in a shabby, run-down palace with his long-suffering wife, Queen Jackie and their son, Prince Kieran of Linuxburg. There had once been an army of servants at the palace; gardeners, cooks, cleaners and handymen, but King Nick had, over the years, spent so much of the royal income on bikes, that one by one, they had all been dismissed, leaving King Nick to have to do all the maintenance on the family pile and Queen Jackie to play the roles of cook, cleaner, gardener, painter and decorator and general dogsbody (some of which jobs she did better than others).

One day Princesses Alexandra and Isabelle decided that they would visit their family, so Nick the Quick and Prince Kieran started to install a new bathroom for the important visit, causing much sucking of teeth and mutterings about noggins and 600mm centres on the part of the local plumber when he saw the wall they’d put up. They ripped up the old floor, removed the piles of dead and decaying mice and drilled holes for pipes.

In the meantime, Queen Jackie started to redecorate the spare room for the princesses; she was bemused to find a large stack of mattresses with an inexplicable lump under them and asked King Nick to investigate. This proved too arduous a job for just one man, though, so he invited his good friend, the Emperor Adrian, to visit and help him.

What will the two detectives discover under the mattresses? Will it be a princess for Prince Kieran, or just a pea?………Will the bathroom be finished in time for the visit?…..

To be continued…….