The rain has hardly stopped all week; rivers are nearly bursting their banks and fields which haven’t flooded in living memory are flooded. We’ve hardly seen Joel since Monday; his next task here is to build the boiler room on one end of the terrace, but it’s just been too wet. One of his lads arrived on Tuesday with a truck-load of bricks, which he and Nick unloaded in the rain, and Joel brought round some roof tiles so that we can choose a colour; the oldest, muckiest-looking one will do nicely, thank you! In a dryish spell yesterday, the lads managed to concrete the plinth to stand the pompe à chaleur on, so that’s ready to go.

Nick and Kieran have continued working on the arrière cuisine and it’s down to me to get the tiling done now. This isn’t as easy as it may sound, as I’m now teaching five language classes a week; two English and three French. In between times, when I’m not preparing the next class, next meal or next lot of clean clothes, I try to do a bit of tiling. So far, it’s taken 2 weeks to do that little wall, but I’m getting quicker!

I was gobsmacked yesterday when a friend phoned to ask if I fancied a week in Strasbourg next month; she sometimes works as a translator for an organisation, but can’t do their March convention and wondered if I might like to give it a try. I was very flattered and did attempt simultaneous translation of an article I found online; but I was rubbish at it; the bit of my brain that does the “input” doesn’t seem to work with the “output” part at all and I could only manage an occasional word here and there – certainly nothing that would have made sense to a listener! So bang goes my jolly! Tant pis!