Why is it that when you ask a cyclist “how far is it?”, you can guarantee the reply will either be “not far”, or a totally unrealistically low figure? Or is it just men in general, perhaps?

On Wednesday afternoons the cycle club goes out for a ride, the same route that will be done the following Sunday, but at a slower pace. It was a lovely day, with plenty of cloud cover to stop it being too hot, so I talked Nick into having a break from roofing and go for a ride. I’m not fit at the moment and Nick wanted to get back to do more of the roof, so we decided to do about 40km; another club member was doing a short ride too, which he said would be 50km. I was feeling OK, so we stuck with Christian, but had already covered 56km when he announced that it was only 10km back to Nogaro; by the time we got home, we’d done 69km, and at a reasonable average speed too! Which leads me to wonder whether there are differing measurements for cyclists’ and other road users’ kilometres!

But no pain, no gain; it was nothing for Nick, but I was nearly on my knees coming up the last hill, so it must have done me some good 🙂

Nick has made good progress on the roof today, around the ride. We need to get more tiles tomorrow, but it should soon be finished.

It was still pitch black when Kieran left, at 7o’clock on Saturday morning; he’s gone back to England for 10 days, to see friends and, I suspect, to have a rest. 35 hours and 987miles later, he arrived at Alex’s.

He told us we can have a break too while he’s away, once we’ve finished doing the hangar (have to start calling it the garage) roof, dug the grange floor out to 50cm depth and re-sealed the shower -again! Yes, the shower’s leaking again and it looks as though we’ll have to dismantle the whole thing and build a wooden, frame-type structure under the basin to stop it flexing. Nick didn’t seem too impressed at the idea.

Still, he’s getting on with the garage roof; the back is done and the front has lats in place now and is ready to tile tomorrow, with tiles that we exchanged for breeze blocks with Adrian.

I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs while all this progress has been progressing. We tried the solar fruit dryer; it was OK, if rather slow, while the sun shone, but it did have certain problems, for instance, you had to bring all the fruit in at night and find space for it in the fridge since it took 3 days to dry a batch of figs. It was also considered a very desirable location for the many ants that live in the garden – not ideal. We tried standing the legs in water, but then the sun disappeared for several days. I borrowed an electric dryer from a neighbour; I wasn’t keen on the design as you had to slice things thinly before putting them in; no chance of drying whole figs, so I bought one online. It has removable shelves to accommodate larger pieces of fruits and veg and seems quite good. So far I’ve dried a batch of halved figs (the whole ones are still drying) and have put in a load of cherry tomatoes. It may sound ungrateful, but I think I’ll be quite glad when the tomato season is over; I weighed the first 50kg of tomatoes our little potager produced, but we must have had at least another 20kg since then and I’m sick of picking them! There’s no room in the freezer for anything else at all and the shelves are groaning under the weight of bottled produce; hence the dryer, to produce our own un-sun-dried tomatoes and figs.

Just a few photos, taken on a walk I went on last Sunday. The weather was perfect, the company good and I won a bottle of wine in the tombola included in the entry fee!

Having spent many hours doing the preparatory work, Nick and Kieran were today ready to start putting the chevrons onto the hangar roof. The weather was perfect; warm, with not a breath of wind, so they made a good start this morning. By the time evening came, they were tired but very pleased to have achieved so much; tomorrow they’ll be able to start putting the actual roofing stuff on (corrugated, bitumen-coated sheets on the back, to take the photovoltaique panels and tiles on the front).

Having spent the best part of this week sorting out our paperwork, I was given time off for good behaviour this afternoon and allowed to go cycling with the club. I only did half the ride as I’ve not done much over the summer; but I was shocked at how unfit I’ve become! Must get out more!

We love the life here; the climate, the space, the people, the lifestyle; but there has to be a down side and that is the red tape which entwines itself around so many aspects of French life.

As you may know, Nick fell off his bike on Sunday; his injuries aren’t serious, but we have had to jump through a series of hoops since then. I don’t know how we’d have coped had it not been for our friend and fellow cyclist, Maithée, and her husband, Pierre, who have taken us through every step. They downloaded the four page accident report form and filled it in; everything from the time of the incident to the weather forecast, the condition of the road to whether Nick was in a group or on his own, had to be reported. He had to go to the doctor to get a medical certificate and we needed to include our house insurance contract number as well as Nick’s cycling license. Maithée had to phone Paris and Strasbourg for clarification of certain points and we had to buy Nick a new helmet, to replace the one that was damaged, today at the latest, to include the bill so he can be reimbursed.

I have to get the package of papers in the post, first class, first thing in the morning, as the claim must arrive in the insurance company’s head office in Strasbourg no later than five days after the accident.

So thank you so much, Maithée; you’re a true friend, we couldn’t have done this without you 🙂

Joel, our builder, came round last week to see the plans for the inside of the house, take measurements, etc. I had misunderstood when I thought he was going to start in October; he’ll start at the end of the year, unless we have a very wet October and we’re ready to go. So it’s all hands on deck now, to get the preparation done in case it rains a lot next month. Kieran’s broken up all of the concrete floor in the grange with a noisy breaker-thingy, so we’re ready to start removing it. Hopefully a local farmer will want at least some of it and the rest will go to the tip.

Of course, this involved emptying the grange, Kieran’s motorbike parking up to now; he’s thrilled with his new, clean garage area – my arrière cuisine!

But Sundays are rest days, the mornings anyway; so I went walking and Nick went out on his bike this morning. He hadn’t gone very far when he thinks his wheel got caught in a rut in the road on a fast descent; it pulled his handlebars sideways and sent him spilling across the tarmac. He’s removed a considerable amount of skin from his leg, hip and shoulder; yes, the same side as always, which has already sustained a broken hip and bears the scars of several tumbles. His new shorts and favourite jersey will have to go in the bin, along with his helmet, which is well scuffed and broken internally. But it could have been a lot worse; typical Nick, he cycled the 10miles home!

When I had my interview with the careers advisor at school, I don’t remember digger driver being mentioned as a possible choice. Perhaps that’s just as well.

Joel, the builder, phoned today to say that he’s bringing forward the date to start work on our house to October; fantastic! But that does mean we’ll have to get on with the preparation sooner than we’d planned; so while Nick and Kieran lifted beams into position on the roof of the hangar this afternoon, I started digging the trench through the grange to run the water pipes in, for our new house.

All went well for a while; I’d dug out the entire length to about half the required depth and was making my way back, digging further down, when I noticed one of the tracks was quite close to the edge of the trench. I tried to reposition the digger, but as I was going backwards, I turned the wrong way. The digger started to lean as the track went closer to the edge, then the weight of the digger started breaking the edge off, making it slide even further into the hole!

Kieran just happened to come in at this point and stood, laughing like a drain at my panic; so I did what any sensible woman would do – abandoned ship (or digger) and left him to sort it out. Such was my fear that I’d broken the digger and possibly my son into the bargain, that it didn’t even occur to me to take a picture; sorry! But I needn’t have worried; by propping the digger up on its bucket until Nick could wedge enough huge lumps of wood into the trench to take the weight,  he was able move it onto solid ground 😉

It was 7.30pm by then, so we decided to call it a day.

Here is Hugo, coming downstairs now, pad, pad, pad, on his little paws, almost being trodden on by Kieran at every step. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs and when he reaches the bottom, he’s in the hall and ready to take a stroll around the garden. But today the front door is shut, so he sits by it to wait patiently.

Unbeknown to Hugo, Adrian has arrived for a visit, bringing with him Oscar and Bramble, his trusty, canine companions. It’s been decided that a meeting between Hugo and Bramble would not be a good idea, so Hugo will stay in the house today while Oscar and Bramble will be given the run of the garden; but Bramble can smell cat and sits quietly waiting just the other side of the door.

Carol, our visitor, is helping take food for a barbecue out to the garden. She opens the front door, just a crack. But it’s enough to let Bramble shoot through the door like greased lightning, and up the hall, after Hugo, who dashes as fast as he can – into the dead end of the bathroom. Adrian is now moving faster than I’ve ever seen him move before, to prevent a very unpleasant incident. He catches up with Bramble in the nick of time, swooping her away from Hugo, perched on the loo seat; where he stands, back arched, hissing at anyone who approaches. Catastrophe averted – phew! That was close!

* Apologies to A A Milne!

Apart from the brief, exciting interlude and the very enjoyable barbecue, we’ve spent a great deal of time recently digging a trench to take cables from the hangar to the house. It was meant to be a fairly quick job that I could do; but that wasn’t taking into account the rock-like nature of the garden at the moment. It hasn’t rained properly for months and our soil is clay, which is now as hard as iron. The trench needed to be 80-100cm deep, but on the first day, when we all took turns at digger driving as the temperature was 30ºC in the shade and heaven only knows how hot in the greenhouse-like cab in the full sun, after several hours work we’d barely made an impression. Nick valiantly wielded his pick axe in the hope of breaking up the soil, but to no avail. So eventually we gave up, watered the indentation we’d made, drank beer and left it to soak overnight. Another two days hard diggering, with Kieran standing the digger on its toes in an attempt to sink the bucket into the ground, and the trench was deemed acceptable. They put in the conduit for the cable and we pushed the soil back into the hole.

Anyone who regularly reads this will realise that sealing showers with that squirty silicon stuff doesn’t appear on any list of my greatest achievements. I hope, therefore, that I’m not tempting fate when I say that since the lads dismantled the shower for me to reseal it a few weeks ago, it hasn’t leaked!!!!! It may not be the tidiest of sealing jobs, but I don’t care!

For the last few weeks, Nick and Kieran have been working towards converting the hangar into a garage; they have now finished building the side walls and are ready to start on the roof. They ordered the wood today and are hoping to borrow a large trailer from a neighbour as delivery, just 2 miles from Nogaro, will cost €70. The trailer is 4 metres long and the wood 7 metres, so it could be an interesting trip, but I won’t think about that!

Between bouts of bricklaying, while the cement dried, they’ve got on with a few other things; Nick had a day cycling in the Pyrenees and discovered a new, mobile form of Basque road furniture, commonly known as a sheepabout.

When the vineyard owner came round to inspect his vines last week, Hermione went for his dog, hissing and pecking and generally terrifying the poor creature; the following day she decided to go for a stroll – in the middle of the road. Typically, this happened while Nick was out and it caused the drivers great amusement to see me trying either to catch her or to chase her back into the garden, as we both ran, flapping wildly, up and down the road. So there is now a fence between our garden and the vines; very sad as we loved the unenclosed nature of the garden. But needs must and it doesn’t do to let your pet goose run riot or she’ll end up in someone’s pot.

No, it’s not a joke! There’s a sort of communal garden in Nogaro, run by someone I go walking with and another chap. Like so many gardens in France, it’s totally separate from its owner’s house, a bit like a single, large allotment. It belongs to a doctor who works in Pau, so doesn’t have time to tend it; Christian and Pierre were looking for a community gardening project and heard of this; they don’t have to pay rent and the doctor no longer has to pay a gardener, so everybody’s happy.

I was invited to go along; by working there one or two mornings a week, you get a share in any produce and, more importantly for me, you can mercilessly pick the brains of all the experienced gardeners there. Of course, the other advantage of this is that I improve my French into the bargain! As we’ve never owned any more than a Victorian back yard before and now have 5000 square metres to keep us from twiddling our thumbs, we’re on a steep learning curve, so I was delighted to go on Tuesday morning.

Everything in the garden is grown organically, the water comes from a well (hand drawn on Tuesday as Christian, who usually brings a generator and pump, was away on holiday) and only natural pesticides are used, made from nettles and other things. At this time of year, it’s mostly watering, cleaning up and harvesting that needs doing; but I was asked if I’d like the two baby walnut trees that had seeded themselves last year. No-one else wanted them, but they’d been looked after during the summer, so I happily helped to dig them up, bag them and bring them home in my bike paniers. With the baby fig tree donated by our neighbour, we’ve got the beginnings of an orchard in the back garden.

A few of the figs from our established tree, in the meantime, are drying nicely. Kieran and Nick have made a solar fruit dryer; it needs a few tweeks yet, to give it better airflow without too much loss of heat, but the first batch of figs is looking, and tasting, good after three days in the sun. I think I’ll cut the next batch in halves to let them dry more quickly and might try sun dried tomatoes too.