Electrics are done very differently here from in England; first you run lengths of flexible plastic piping, in several different primary colours – it’s very pretty, a shame to cover it up, really! Then you hide it all away, covering it with plasterboard or pouring concrete floors onto it. Once that’s all done, you take lengths of wire, the different colours on different spools, and pull them through the piping; then, of course, you can put in the plug sockets, light switches, etc.  Didier, our electrician, is well named; he must be all of 5 feet tall; but a lovely man, quiet and hard-working. He expects to finish the wiring on Monday, so we’ll have no excuse not to continue working when it gets dark then!

Apart from that, the main news item of the week is that Nick’s cleaned his workshop! As a result, the compost heap is about a foot taller with wood shavings from the floor. I’m continuing to fill the plasterboard joints, but hadn’t realised that the bits we did with Adrian last week were the easy, quick bits. Now I’m taping the corner joints; you mix some sloppy joint filler, trowel it either side of each corner, stick special paper stuff onto it and smooth out all the excess sticky stuff, leaving a neat finish. Once that’s dry, you then put on a second coat, covering the paper with a layer thick enough to hide the paper edges, but fine enough not to show. When the second coat’s dry you sand it all to a smooth, perfect finish. Well, that’s the idea anyway. I’m only at the taping stage so far, which looks likely to take many weeks of  “I’ve just got a couple of hours between lessons” time. Apart from that, we’re just pottering on with bits and pieces; tiling the chaufferie floor, crepi-ing the chaufferie walls and finishing off some plasterboarding. Kieran only appears on request now, turning up when there are big jobs to do, requiring two strong men – none of this filling, or painting or other “pinkish” jobs for him. He moved his computers to Dax this week, so I think he’s moved out.