Didier’s not quite finished, because he’s been called away to a couple of emergencies; but we now have electricity in the new house. Never have bare bulbs looked so good! And, by way of celebration (?!), we worked till it was thoroughly dark outside tonight, Nick tiling the chaufferie floor, me taping plasterboard joints.

Today was my English class at the CLAN, where I work as a volunteer one afternoon a week. For the last few years there have been four English teachers, so the work was divided between us. But this year, due to various factors, there’s only me; so my ever-increasing class, nine today, squeezed into a room that comfortably holds six, has everything from absolute beginners to those whose command of the English language is very impressive. As someone whose practical teaching practice comprised two 10 minute lessons given over two weekends, it’s fair to say I’m struggling to keep everybody happy; I’m constantly worried that the lower level students won’t understand, while the better ones will be bored. So if there are any “proper” teachers out there, reading this, any suggestions on how to cope would be gratefully received!!

Our band’s rehearsal room is in a large building, run by an association whose aim is the promotion of “culture” within the community; there’s yoga, qi gong, traditional dance, art classes and us. A few weeks ago Stephane, who manages the building, came to a practice to tell us that Madame P, the deputy mayor of the town, who is also the “cultural” representative at the town hall, has taken a dislike to us and wants us out of the building, which the town hall leases to the association.

It was the association’s AGM tonight; Madame P was to be there; so we all went along to fight for our cause. We can see no reason why we shouldn’t use the room and Madame P accepted our money when we paid our dues for use of the room for 2014, just a few weeks ago. There were plenty of people at the meeting, but Madame P didn’t turn up; nor did she send a spokesperson; no reason given, just a message that she’d meet our representative sometime next week. Everybody was furious, both those in the band and everyone else present; nobody can understand why we’re no longer welcome and all suspect that she has a hidden agenda, not to mention that she must have known how much opposition there’d be to her stance. So we held the AGM, everybody getting very hot under the collar about the unfairness of the decision and wondering who’ll be next for the chop, but unable to do anything about it.

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.

The Emperor Adrian came to visit yesterday, bearing all sorts of gifts – mortar board, plastering trowels – oooh, how exciting! The emperor’s kitchen staff is away in England at the moment, so the poor emperor has to fend for himself, (no violins, please; he’s more than capable) but he doesn’t bother, preferring to use the time to lose a bit of weight, so he says.

So in exchange for lunch, he helped us to fill joints in plasterboards and between the three of us, we got most of the walls done. Just the ceilings to do now.

Kieran doesn’t like the fiddly tasks, preferring to apply himself to really manly jobs, like driving the digger, using the chain saw or erecting scaffolding. So he went to Alice’s yesterday and when she went to Bordeaux today, he’d arranged to go to Adrian’s; but at 3o’clock Adrian phoned to ask if we knew where he was, he wasn’t answering his phone or emails. We tried too, but with no success, eventually resorting to emailing Alice, who was also unable to make contact and obviously worried. She sent her parents round to the house to look for him and there he was – still asleep at 5pm!!! He won’t live this one down in a hurry!

It was a fairly manic weekend; the cinema Friday night; a gig on Saturday night, including songs to which I’d only written the harmonies during the week and instrumental pieces I heard for the first time on Thursday night. But it went surprisingly well, with people dancing in the narrow gaps between the rows of tables in the little bar in Riscle. I think everyone enjoyed themselves. Then Kieran, Alice, Adrian and Julie came for lunch on Sunday. Nick would normally have been cycling on Sunday morning and I’d have gone out with the walking group, but we were both very relieved to hear it pouring with rain at 7.30 on Sunday morning, giving us the perfect excuse to catch up on some more sleep, having only got home at 2am.

Kieran’s not around much these days, so when he’s here we make sure there are “big” jobs for him to do; the jobs that need two strong men. So they’ve finished plasterboarding my workshop, fitted the doors and door frame at the end of the hall and removed part of the outer wall where the new front doors will go. At the moment, the doors are taller than the space for them, but I’m sure Nick will find a solution!

When not teaching, I’m filling joints in the plasterboards and trying to convince the postman that I don’t have a secret admirer! A parcel arrived for me yesterday; it rattled just like a box of chocolates. Sadly it was only some stock cubes that Alex had sent, but Didier, who always stops for a chat to improve his English, thought Valentine’s Day had arrived early. Me?! Secret admirer?! In my dreams!!

It’s just too wet to do any work outside at the moment; walking to the compost heap without slipping and falling flat on your face in the mud is an achievement! But there’s no shortage of inside jobs to be getting on with; tiling and joint filling come high on the list of priorities.

The heating man returned yesterday to install the water heater; a ballon thermodynamique, it works on the same basis as our central heating system, taking calories from the air and using them to heat water; it claims to use 70% less electricity than a conventional water heater. We can’t connect it or try it out as we don’t have electricity in the new house yet, though the electrician has promised to return soon, to hook it all up. We need to finish tiling the floor in the chaufferie and fill and paint the walls before the heating man comes back to install the pompe à chaleur (heat exchange pump for the central heating) in a couple of weeks.

Inside, the floor is now hard enough to walk on, though we must wait several more weeks, until it’s thoroughly dry, before we can start the tiling.  They don’t plaster over plasterboard here, just fill the joints and screw holes. Looking around, it seems a mammoth task; supposedly my job, but as I’m teaching three days a week, Nick’s offered to help.

It’s not all work though; we’re going to see an English film on at the cinema (subtitled in French) tonight and the band is playing our first gig of 2014 at a bar in Riscle tomorrow night.

It had been the kind of day that never really gets light. The kind of day when the sky hung heavy and dark, so low that you felt you could reach up and touch its cold dampness. The rain never stopped, occasionally interspersed with stinging showers of hail. The sort of day that made you feel that all you wanted to do was curl up by a log fire with a mug of hot chocolate and a good book.

The rivers running through nearby towns had already burst their banks, flooding car parks and camp sites, rushing along in swirling brown torrents, taking tree branches and anything else they could find in their wake, and flooding was making many roads impassable.

By the time we went to bed the wind was howling, whistling down the chimney and lashing the rain against the shutters. There are no street lights here and there was no sign of the moon or stars, so the night was as black as pitch, as we listened to the unaccustomed sounds of things being picked up and hurled around the garden. I woke about 2am; the bedroom door was rattling, so I found a “sausage” to put across the bottom of the door that leads into the rear part of the house, as yet un-wind-proofed. I wondered what damage we’d find in the morning.

It was still dark when another noise woke me; I came to, trying unsuccessfully to identify the sound. The door was rattling again, but this time it sounded different, as if there was some kind of force behind it and then the noise came again,  ………Hugo miaowing for his breakfast and head-butting the door!

If anybody out there has missed me, I’m sorry for the absence. After a week of fighting my back ache, I found an osteopath who would return my call and see me the following day; she contorted me and tied me in knots and left me feeling worse than before. No wonder she could see me so quickly! I’m now recovering from her less-than-tender ministrations and have taken her name off my list.

Nick, however, has been busy. The room that will, one day, be my work room is now plasterboarded, as is the entrance hall; he’s also tiled the chaufferie floor where the water heater is going.

Olivier has put down the chape liquide, so in a few weeks, when it’s completely dry, we’ll (and I hope that will include me!) be able to start tiling the house floors.

We were very impressed when the tile shop phoned, on time, to say our tiles had arrived. The big square tiles had arrived, the small square tiles had arrived, but where were the rectangular tiles? They’ll be here on Friday, they said; so I phoned on Friday, but there were no tiles for us. Ring Pau, they said, the shop where we placed the order; so I did, but no-one knew anything; the man who took the order would ring me back……. but he didn’t. It was beginning to feel very South-West France-ish. Then this morning the man from Pau rang to say our rectangular tiles hadn’t left Italy till a week after the rest, so they’d be here next week……… Five minutes later the Mont de Marsan shop rang; “Your tiles are here”. There’s no point fighting it, it’s just the way things are!

Nick and I went to London for a few days last week; mainly to visit the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern, but also to do a bit of shopping in the sales.

The exhibition was fantastic; I have loads of ideas for quilts inspired by his work now. When our new house is finished and we start letting the house we currently live in as a gite, we intend to decorate the bedrooms on the themes of artists, one of them being Paul Klee. We also managed a couple of hours visiting the surrealist exhibition; again, we loved it.

We bought a few things in the sales, as well as plenty of fabrics to make quilts; we had taken as little as possible with us, but, no matter how we tried, we couldn’t pack all our purchases , including my new coat, into the two small cabin bags we’d taken. So I travelled home in two thick sweaters, jeans under my skirt, and wore both my coats; I was certainly warm enough and felt like the Michelin man!

Unfortunately, all the travelling took its toll on my back, so I’m having to take things very gently this week, hence the lack of a blog for a while.

Christmas is over, so it’s back to the grind. We’d like to get the chaufferie floor tiled before the heating man comes back to install the stuff in there, so it had to be emptied. As they will live upstairs, the obvious place to put the cooker and fridge, weighing 130 and 150kg respectively, is upstairs, but we don’t have stairs at the moment. So Nick and Kieran rigged up a system to move them, using ladders, ratchet straps and a lot of brute strength, with me to position the wedges. It was a relief when we’d finished; now they’ve done the chape on the floor, when it’s dry we can tile it.

At the gite owned by the cycle club, they’re putting up an extension, but to keep costs down, club members are helping. Nick was asked to help Richard hang a door today; he said he wouldn’t be long, but………..  2 hours later, he returned, delighted to have discovered that Richard, a retired menuisier (carpenter), has a massive workshop, with huge planers, band saws and all the other boys’ toys that Nick hankers after. I suspect he might be going round there to play quite often.