Kieran arrived home today, after his holiday back in Harrogate; so tomorrow will be back to getting on with big projects.

While Nick’s been working on such things as helping Didier, the electrician, tiling the windowsills, ready for when the windows and doors arrive in a couple of weeks, and generally tidying up, I’ve been on gardening duties. We’re eating mange tout, broad beans and strawberries every day now, and the lettuces are nearly ready, so I’ve been busy planting the stuff for summer; spinach, green and yellow French beans, radish and rocket.

I got a bit carried away at the market; there were veg plant stalls everywhere, selling varieties I’d never even heard of, such as blue tomatoes and white aubergines, as well as the bog standard stuff. I came home with the car loaded with little veg plants; tomatoes of every shape and hue, purple and white aubergines, long and round courgettes, yellow peppers, chilli peppers and onions. They’re all planted now, but there’s very little space left for the seedlings in the cloche, grown from seeds we saved last year; 40 or so cherry tomato plants, a similar number of beef tomato plants, red peppers and yet more chillies. I think we might have to dig another “overflow” bed! I hope we get lots of keen gardeners visiting this summer; if I had nothing else to do but garden, I might just about keep up with it……

You may remember that the people we chose to fit our photovoltaic panels were supposed to start work in March, but didn’t turn up and didn’t reply to any form of contact, but called round while we were in Spain. Kieran wasn’t quite sure what the guy said, but thought it was something along the lines of they’d start in 10 days time. So we waited. Nothing.

I phoned and emailed; eventually we had a reply, explaining that their original supplier had gone bust, the next one they tried had an eighteen week delivery delay, but they’d just found one who could supply the stuff sooner and they’d be starting work on May 6th, at the latest.

May 6th came and went; I phoned and emailed, but what a surprise – no reply. I phoned the Greffe Tribunal de Commerce and was pleased to hear at least that they hadn’t gone bankrupt. So Nick and I went to see them this afternoon. The office was locked up, but their van was in the driveway of their house. I chatted to a man working on a nearby building, who said he’d seen several people come to see what was going on with their orders and he thought they’d simply taken on more work than they could cope with.

We rang the bell – nothing. We hammered on the door and eventually monsieur appeared at an upstairs window so we asked if we could have a word. He didn’t recognise us, but as Nick was in cycling lycra, he could be forgiven. He claims the last piece of the kit only arrived this morning and that their phone and internet haven’t been working for the last few days, but that they will start work next Monday. I’ll believe it when I see it.

While that work hasn’t been going on, we haven’t been idle; we’ve finished the bike shed, applying a coat of crepi (somewhere between paint and plaster) to the walls and painting the ceiling white. I don’t think I’ll ever make a plasterer; I hardly managed to make any of it stick to the wall and the pile on the floor just grew and grew. Just as well Nick was there to do 90% of the work!

He’s put a velux window in the room upstairs that we hope will eventually become a family guest room; in the meantime, it’s going to become a temporary sewing room, largely because I spent a small fortune on patchwork fabrics for a quilt for the spare room last week. Better get on with a design then……

Maithee and Pierre called in yesterday to bring us a CD they’d found in their collection; it includes a song called “La 4L de Jacky”, about a Renault 4L, well about Renault 4s in general.They suggested we might like to sing it in the band!

If you watch the youtube clip, you’ll soon see that it’s not the most complimentary video ever made; the song tells of how they have to be pushed up hills, are covered in rust, how you get soaked every time it rains (yes, there’s something for everyone!) and how noisy they are. All true – but we still love our Betty!

The grass was in desperate need of mowing, due to the continuing wet weather; all the locals claim they’ve never known such a wet few months as we’ve had since January. Even Joel’s given up on us, claiming that every time he comes to work on our house, he gets soaked; he’s told us he’s not coming back till June, by which time even our Englishness can’t make it rain!

But Wednesday was dry, and even slightly sunny; so I started mowing the grass. All was going well until suddenly the mower began to make a strange noise, started rocking back and forth and making a burning rubber sort of smell; I turned it off and did what every good mechanophobe does in such circumstances – felt horribly guilty for not having seen whatever I’d run over, hidden in the long grass, that had caused such a disaster. I could clearly hear Kieran’s voice in my head – “You’ve broken it!” I called in the resident engineer, who muttered about women drivers, sucked his teeth and shook his head; it was completely locked up, even refusing to move when pushed. I could see the repair bills mounting, maybe I’d wrecked it completely and we’d need a new mower…… Nick felt about under the body of the mower until finally he found the cause of the problem; the belt had broken and got caught up in some of the workings. What a relief! It wasn’t my fault after all, but a perfectly ordinary, repairable fault. We bought a new belt which Nick will fit tomorrow (hopefully) and I can get back to the mowing.

In the meantime, the weather hasn’t stopped fruit and veg growing; we’ve had our first mange tout peas and our first strawberry this week. I’ve sown seeds for all sorts of stuff, but as nothing had germinated by Thursday, I went to Eauze market and bought plants for courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes of every conceivable shape and colour (blue tomatoes?!), peppers, chillis, basil, and a few things I can’t even remember. If all the seeds germinate too, I could end up digging a lot more garden to plant them all!

I’ve just heard from a young man who I tutored in English earlier this year; he’s been accepted at a university in Australia to do a PhD in marine geochemistry. It was an intense couple of weeks, helping him prepare for his English exam, but this news makes it all worth while!

A friend told us it was the Fources Flower Festival this weekend; Fources is a beautiful little village and since I’m just getting over a nasty bout of bronchitis and hadn’t been out for days, an afternoon out seemed appealing.

When we arrived, along with half the world, the whole village seemed to be involved in some way, as car park attendants, ticket sellers, there was even an army of children and teenagers, armed with wheelbarrows, to help buyers take their purchases to their cars. Every street and alleyway in the village was overflowing with plants and flowers; there were also garden ornaments, jewellery stalls, armagnac and floc stalls offering tastings and a man on a sort of pushbike, playing the banjo.

There were hundreds of varieties of veg on offer; white aubergines, black tomatoes, any number of varieties of pepper; we came home with five different flavours of mint! There were bonsai trees and 10 year-old vines in tiny pots (which they said were NOT bonsais, but came along with Bansai Tree growing kits), lemon trees covered in fruit, and gnarled olive trees in half barrels. The flowers were no less impressive, from the inevitable mass of geraniums to exquisite roses and bird of paradise plants, bouganvilleas in every shade imaginable and lilacs that filled the air with their perfume.

By next year, we may have an idea of what we want in our garden, which sounds like a perfect excuse for a return visit.

We’ll need, as you can see from the photo, a new door for our new house. I’ve been looking on le bon coin (an internet selling site) for months, but mostly they were too tall, too wide, too narrow or just too tatty; I was beginning to think I’d never find what we wanted. But on Saturday I found it; a double door, the right width, in good condition and only slightly too tall, so yesterday Nick and I headed off for St. Savin in the Pyrenees, a two and a half hour drive away, to have a look at it.

We arrived a couple of hours early and went for a walk up through the forest above the village, up a ridiculously steep path and had a picnic beside a fast flowing stream – if the ascent had been hard work, the descent was just plain scary!

We found the seller’s house and negotiated a price for the door. It’s as well the lady spoke no English as we argued over who would do the negotiating and what price to offer; neither of us likes bartering. Nick won, on the grounds that my French is better than his, so I made our offer and was relieved when she accepted without any argument. She invited us in for coffee before we loaded the door into the trailer; then we had to visit the Englishman who owns the hotel opposite her house (well don’t all English people know each other? It’s a small island, after all…) More coffee, a brief tour of the hotel, a quick look at his art collection, then back to load up the door. It’s solid oak and weighs a ton! We struggled into the trailer with it, strapped it down and headed home after one of the most enjoyable shopping trips I’ve ever had.

We’ve ordered the windows and doors, bought the oak for the frame for the stained glass window, and cleaned off loads of tomettes (terracotta tiles) to reuse as windowsills. The lorryload of plasterboard, montants and rails (to attach the plasterboard to the walls), insulation and various other bits arrived today; sadly there wasn’t room in the lorry for the 2 tons of sand and gravel, but that will have to come later. It took a while for Nick and Kieran to carry all 100 sheets of plasterboard indoors, but they did it. Joel’s promised to lend us his plasterboard lifter to help put them in place; not the sort of service you expect from most builders!

Joel and Seb arrived this morning to remove the horizontal beams from the upstairs of the new house. They propped the roof up on pit props and started cutting away the beams, then Joel had an idea; why not leave the bits of beam that support the uprights in place instead of replacing them with ugly lumps of concrete; Nick can carve them into an attractive form. So Nick now has another skill to learn, to add to his already impressive repertoire, that of wood carver (though I suspect a lot of it will be done with a chain saw).

We went to the 50th birthday party of a friend on Saturday; the men had to wear moustaches and the women false eyelashes; some of the men wore false eyelashes too, but then Philippa and Dav are hardly what you’d call conventional!

They were only servicing the brakes, but when the lads took Betty out for a test drive, water started pouring out of the engine compartment; the water pump had gone. So she’s sat in the garage now, looking very sorry for herself, waiting for the postman to deliver some replacement parts.

I can cope with most phone calls in French now, but not when the caller is Joel, the builder, who speaks SO quickly that I struggle even face to face. I’d emailed him a question (and sent him a text to tell him to check his emails, as he doesn’t very often), but rather than email a reply, he phoned this morning and as neither Nick nor Kieran will answer the phone, it was down to me. After 5 minutes, most of which seemed to be me asking Joel to slow down because I hadn’t understood, he decided it would be easier to come round. The answer to the question about how soon the floor level beams would be removed, to allow the underfloor heating people in, was “Non, non, non, non, non!” Easy to understand, that. We’d got it all the wrong way round; you don’t put the floor down first; that’s the last bit! First we order the windows and doors, contact the electrician, while waiting for them we can put up the ceilings, then fit the windows and doors, insulate and plasterboard the walls, build any remaining internal walls and then, and only then, can we think about floors. That way you don’t get the cold coming in in the winter because the edges of the floors are against insulated walls.

So Nick went to the builders’ merchants this afternoon and ordered 300 square metres of plasterboard as well as heaps of rails, montants and various other stuff, which will arrive on Monday. Tomorrow morning we’re going to Mont de Marsan to order windows and doors, which should arrive about 10 days later.

A friend who lives in the village supplies and fits kitchens, so he and his wife came round for aperitifs tonight and to discuss plans for the kitchen. He’s got lots of ideas for the design and is quite happy to supply it for Nick to fit. Things seem to be moving on apace and after another couple of worrying weeks when, once again, we heard nothing from the photovoltaique company, they finally got in touch; Bosch, who made the panels, have stopped doing so, so they’d had to find another manufacturer; the first supplier quoted them an eighteen week wait, but they have now found someone else and should start work by May 6th – we’re crossing fingers and toes!

It’s just amazing; last Friday we were wrapped up against the cold and the rain, at 6o’clock this evening, just five days later, it was 29ºC in the shade. It’s just a pity Alex and co. had to leave a few days too early.

We held this morning’s French class in the open air in the courtyard of Rosie’s beautiful old colombage house; does life get much better than this?

The peach tree outside the kitchen has been declared dead; it looked sad last summer and showed no signs of life this spring, so sadly, Nick and Kieran chopped it down. Masses of blossom has appeared on the apple, cherry and plum trees and the wisteria has suddenly sprung into bloom, filling the garden in front of the house with its heady perfume. Naturally, the weeds are growing faster than anything else, especially in the potager, where it’s difficult to find the remaining leeks and cabbages under the growth of weeds taller than them! I’ve spent many hours over the last few days weeding there and around the strawberries, which, again, were difficult to find for the weeds. The heavy clay soil is rapidly turning to rock under the heat of a few days’ sunshine and we already need to water every day. It must be about time to plant tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes and other veg reminiscent of summer; I think we’re going to be busy.