It's true!

Every cloud does have a silver lining.  Yes, I know that is a cliché, but so what?  I have discovered it to be true.  Or maybe it's just a bit of positive thinking.  Or lateral thinking.

Whatever, I have discovered the silver lining in this particular cloud.

I have fond memories of a family holiday way back when I was a young teenager.  My parents rented a cottage in Somerset, with the Bridgwater Bay beach just across the dunes from the cottage door.  Lunch each day was fresh bread, New Zealand butter and real Cheddar cheese.  It's those lunches that I really remember.  Food fit for a king. Good, mature Cheddar has ever since been just about my favourite cheese, although Stilton and Roquefort are pretty high up the list as well.  You can imagine, therefore, my horror when my doctor informed me that cheese, especially hard cheeses like Cheddar which are 30% fat, is now off the menu as far as I am concerned.  That is, if I want to reduce my cholesterol level to bring down the 1 in 3 chance of heart problems.

The silver lining in this?  I have rediscovered Bovril and now, instead of lightly salted butter and Cheddar cheese on my lunchtime rolls, the first is spread with a butter substitute and Bovril while the second is scrumptious with homemade jam, strawberry, raspberry or apricot.  Life is still pretty good.

(The Bovril web site is quite fun.  And the packaging has hardly changed since I was a boy.)




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Back in the courtyard of our French cottage, the flower border was full of colour with three different roses (one peachy cream, one white and one red - only just visible in the picture), a purple clematis in the far corner and blue lavender which was almost hidden by the foxgloves growing just outside the border.  I rather like the herb Robert at the foot of the drainpipe with its pink flowers and red foliage even though most people see it as a weed.  I call it God's gardening.

Here - and there

I had just finished a bowl of cereal at breakfast time when I glanced once again out of the window.  What I saw was much the same as yesterday morning: mist and a very light drizzle.  In fact, pretty much as the Met Office forecast for today as shown to the right.  Then I looked at the forecast in the morning paper: sunny with temperatures between 20 and 25 degrees (67 to 77 for those still using old money).  The front page of the paper announced that we are to have a heat wave with temperatures of 30 and more - starting next week.  Reminds me of what the Red Queen told Alice: "Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today".

Meanwhile, I wait with bated breathe (not literally) to see if this sea fret will clear as it did yesterday.  As we drove along the cliff top in the evening sun to the Lions dinner meeting at Rottingdean the English Channel looked positively Caribbean in colour.

On the same table as the Old Bat and me was a member of Burgess Hill Lions who I have not seen for a good while.  He and I travelled with a Lions aid convoy to Bosnia soon after the war out there had finished and we spent part of the evening reminiscing.  (I posted the Secret Diary of the Sarajevo Seven on this blog back in 2010, starting here, so you can follow our adventure from there if you feel inclined.)

And for the second month running we won a raffle prize!  This month it was just one bottle of wine, but that brings our winnings to seven bottles in two months.  Perhaps I should buy a lottery ticket.

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After I had visited the boulangerie in Pouancé last Sunday morning (a baguette and a couple of strawberry tartlets) I drove to the lake in the hope that the great crested grebes might have returned and nested.  The lake almost forms a partial moat at the foot of the castle ruins.

The field opposite is where the crowd congregates to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, but last Sunday it was a crowd of fishermen who were occupying the bank. There was a fishing competition in course!

Meanwhile, a fisher of a different sort waited patiently on the other side of the lake.  That's a heron on the fishing stage.

Water torture

DIY is not, and never has been, my strongest suit.  I can't quite work out why that should be the case, although the same applied to my father.  He had great difficulty in hanging a piece of wallpaper but in all modesty I have to say I have acquired that skill to a greater extent than poor old Dad.  All the same, since both my grandfathers worked with their hands - one an electrician, the other a shipwright - I do sometimes wonder just why mt brother manages to use tools correctly while I struggle to turn a screwdriver the right way.

Of all the various DIY departments, plumbing is perhaps the one I dread the most.  I still remember vividly the time I attempted to replace the washer on the kitchen tap.  All I succeeded in doing was to half flood the kitchen and we had to call an emergency plumber to put things right.  As it was a Sunday afternoon this proved an expensive failure on my part.

If you have followed the story of Les Lavandes, our French hideaway, you might wonder how it is that I managed to achieve so much by way of renovation and improvement.  The secret to that is that for most of the jobs - except the very basic painting, paper hanging and kitchen unit putting together - I merely acted as gofer to my friend Chris.  But there came a time when the shower tap needed replacing.  When we bought the house there were two taps in the shower, one hot and the other cold, and getting the balance right was extremely tricky.  Chris and I eventually changed those two taps for a mixer unit thingy which had a on/off tap at one end with a knob at the other which could be used to set the temperature of the water.  It was even marked with the degrees Celsius.  As is the way with these gizmos when they are bought on the cheap, the temperature control packed up.  Much to my surprise, I managed to replace the unit in a satisfactory manner.  That was a year or so ago and, until very recently, remained my one and only plumbing success story.

I now have a second.

It took until about the third day of our recent visit before the dripping tap in the kitchen finally got on my nerves.  Until then we had usually managed to minimise the dripping if not eliminate it completely by turning the tap tighter and tighter, but at last I became desperate.  I had to visit the supermarket for something or other - kitchen rolls, I think - so I decided to look for replacement washers and an adjustable spanner.  (I had not bothered to take any tools with me and leave only a couple of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers and a hammer out there.)  I got the spanner easily but they had no washers.  However, the builders' merchant nearby had them.  Lots of them, in a wide variety of sizes.  In my ignorance, I had believed that tap washers came in two shapes and two sizes: flat or domed, kitchen (and basin) tap size or bath tap size.  Not here.  Their washers ranged in size from 6 millimetres in diameter to 22 mm and varied between several thicknesses, usually 4 or 5 millimetres.  On my return to the house I trotted off into the field next door to turn off the water before struggling to remove the tap which seemed to be almost welded together.  Then, of course, it was another struggle to remove the washer.

Back at the builders' merchant's I offered up my washer to those on display.  It appeared to be 18mm in diameter, 4mm thick.  No matter how hard I looked - which was a bit tricky as it was rather dim in that corner of the store - I could see none that size.  There were packs of 17 x 4 and packs of 18 x 5 along with many other sizes that were quite obviously wrong.  I mentally tossed a coin and chose the 18 x 5.

There was nobody at the till but I eventually found the lady lurking by the racks of drawer handles.  She asked me if I had found what I wanted.  At least, I think that was her question.  I told her I hoped so, although what I really wanted was a washer 18 x 4.  I showed her the old one and the pack I had selected.  "This one's been compressed," she said, returning the old one to me.  I wasn't entirely sure.

It was a fight to get that 5mm thick washer onto a 4mm stud but I did manage it in the end.  I put the tap back together and turned the water on again.  Marvellous!  No dripping!

Until the next morning.

I turned the water off again, dismantled the tap and spotted a tiny piece of grit on the washer.  After wiping the washer clean, I put everything back again.  Once again, the dripping had stopped.

That afternoon the tap was dripping again.  There was another tiny piece of grit on the washer.

The next day it happened again.  I turned the water off for the fourth time and dismantled the tap.  This time I found that something had cut a groove in the edge of the washer.  It was lucky I had bought a whole pack of them so was able to replace the new old washer.

When we left, three days later, the tap was still not dripping.  I had another plumbing success story to relate.

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I have said how the flowers of the old rose by the gate start off a peachy colour and turn almost white.  Here they are.  I wish i could arrange for the scent to come out for you.

Busy busy

OK, so we got back to Brighton yesterday evening looking a bit like a pair of boiled lobsters.  It was so good to see some sun while we were in France that we both overdid sitting and just occasionally working in the courtyard.  This was not at all what we had expected so neither of us had packed shorts and we had no sun cream.  Could have bought some, I suppose, but didn't think of it.  Anyway, it was quite enough hassle just driving to the boulangerie every morning without making diversions.

Now, of course, comes the reckoning.  Piles of washing, seemingly dozens of letters and emails to deal with, I must remember to fetch the dog from kennels, there's shopping to be done, and so the list goes on.  (I'm not really complaining.  After all, I brought all this on myself so there's no point anyway.)

I set the computer in the car back to zero at the start of the week.  On our return it showed we had travelled 1035 miles and the fuel consumption was an average 50.7 to the gallon.  Granted, much of  that 1035 miles was spent cruising on motorways at 70mph (according to the speedometer, so probably nearer to 66) but we did have a couple of horrendous traffic jams - both in England on our way to the shuttle under the Channel.  What usually takes an hour and a half took two and a half hour so we missed the train we were booked on.  Even I don't allow for that much delay!

The wine rack looks a lot healthier this morning.

Must get on.

More about Nicholas

What I am about to relate dates from the few months after we had completed the purchase of Les Lavandes and while I was renovating the house, spending alternate weeks in France and England. I ate at the restaurant in the village at least once each week I was in France.

Nicholas has a style completely his own: untidy in dress, seemingly forgetful and harassed, scurrying here and there.  The problem is no so much that Nicholas has a poor memory, it's more a case of being disorganised and having too many other things on his mind. When he comes to the table to take the order he has usually forgotten either the order pad or, more likely, his pen. He then has to work out where he was when he last used the pen, but even when it has been located at the back of the bottles of spirits behind the bar or in a flower pot in the garden, the chances are that it won't write. I have taken to carrying a spare pen in my pocket when we eat there.

One day Nicholas was almost jumping up and down in excitement when I arrived. He couldn't wait to show me his latest acquisition, a set of plastic flower pots complete with plastic flowers for use as table decorations. He explained that he had bought them at a village I had never heard of. The name sounded something like Nasal.  Nicholas put me right: Noz was a new retail outlet that had recently opened in a nearby town.

‘I'm going there tomorrow morning,' Nicholas told me. ‘Would you like to come with me? I'll pick you up at nine o'clock.'

It was difficult to refuse him without appearing boorish, so I agreed, albeit less than wholeheartedly. That said, I rather expected that the proposal would have been forgotten by the morning so I was more than a little surprised to see a car stop outside the house on the dot of nine o'clock.

We drove to a down-at-heel industrial estate where the most dilapidated building of all bore a sign proclaiming in letters three feet high, "NOZ". The store was a cavernous warehouse and looked like an enormous jumble sale or a refugee clothing centre. Just inside was a counter loaded with socks, some in pairs, some lonely singles. There were green socks, blue socks, flourescent pink socks, and even one pair of red and white striped socks. Next was a section containing hundreds, or possible even thousands, of adjustable spanners about three inches long. They looked as though they were made of plastic, but when I picked one up I found it was actually metal. Exactly why one would want an adjustable spanner three inches long was beyond me. In any case, they looked pretty fragile and I reckoned they would break the first time they were used.

And so it went on: boxes of chocolates of a make unknown to me, just inside their best-before date; very large bras in canary yellow or leopard-skin-print; a rack of X-rated Spanish videos; sprays of red, plastic delphiniums (red delphiniums?). Trash, from front to back and from side to side. I took a chance and picked up a box of chocolates. (I tried one when I got home and threw the rest away.) As I joined the checkout queue, Nicholas rushed up, proudly flourishing four small bricklayer's trowels.

‘Just what I need for serving tarts,' he exclaimed.

I didn't have the heart to mock him, but I suspect Florence drew the line at using bricklayers' tools in the restaurant as I have never seen them in use.

Two coffees, please

I am breaking one of my cardinal rules today and re-posting something that originally appeared nearly two years ago on another blog.

I do like French coffee. Ask for a coffee in a French bar or restaurant and what is automatically brought to you is an espresso; small, dark, strong and (one hopes) hot. There is one bar we used to stop at regularly where I became aware of a bit of a scam over coffee and Englishmen. I ordered a coffee in exactly the same way as every Frenchman does - "Un café, s'il vous plait" - expecting the usual espresso. What came was un double, a large (double-size) espresso at twice the price. This happened several times before I twigged and insisted on being served a normal café.

The Old Bat likes her coffee white - which leads to several different complications. The first doesn't really matter, but we do find it amusing when her request for café au lait (coffee with milk) is repeated by the waiter or waitress as café crême (coffee with cream). She actually prefers milk to cream in her coffee but this doesn't matter as she is invariably served with milk. We have never fathomed why it is that in some bars, white coffee is café au lait while in others it is café crême.

The next question isn't always asked: does she want her milk hot or cold? It is always brought in a separate jug to be added as she wishes, but sometimes it is brought hot and sometimes cold - and sometimes, albeit rarely, she is given the choice. In our favourite restaurant the proprietor remembers that she prefers her milk cold, but he always makes a point of checking that is what she wants - especially in cold weather when she does sometimes ask for hot milk.

The really awkward complication arises in our village restaurant. What size cup does she want? In most places the answer is accepted readily: small. A standard espresso is served with its accompanying jug of milk. Except at Le Fourneau. Nicholas, bless him, complicates matters by asking is the size is normal, medium or large. The problem is that sometimes his 'normal' is the standard espresso but sometimes it is un double. A request for a 'small' rather throws him, even if the request is spoken in French.

Which reminds me of another complication that arose while we were in the Auvergne. It was while we were on our way to the source of the Loire and we decided to stop at a roadside bar for a coffee. There was a man behind the bar of about my age (ie getting on a bit) to whom I posed my request for two coffees, one white, one black. I spoke in French, as usual, in the expectation that my request would be understood despite my English accent.

[Going off at a tangent: I am told that the French consider French spoken with an English accent to be sexy, just as we think of English spoken with a French accent.]

So, I expected to be understood - but I wasn't. So I repeated the order. Still the Gallic shrug and a puzzled expression. I tried using slightly different words. 'Two drinks,' (waving two fingers), 'one black coffee,' (waving one finger), 'and one coffee with milk,' (waving one finger again). At this, the barman disappeared and returned with a lady (his daughter?). I repeated my request for two coffees, one white, one black, in my very best French with a sexy English accent. The lady turned to the man and said exactly the same as I had (but without the sexy English accent) and, wonder of wonders, he understood!

That is the only time I have had difficulty in making myself understood when ordering coffee.

Another of my favourites

Robert Goddard has long been my favourite author.  I was travelling to Plymouth by train years ago for a weekend with the Joint Services Interrogation Unit to which I was attached and was reading a Wilbur Smith adventure novel.  A man sitting opposite asked if I had read Goddard.  When I told him I had not, he recommended the books to me, suggesting I should first read In Pale Battalions.  I did, and was very quickly hooked.  Nowadays, when I suggest to people that they might enjoy the books, I always make the same recommendation: read In Pale Battalions first.

Back when I started reading his books, Mr Goddard had only about three published.  He has since brought out one a year, each one of which I have bought, and the next is due out on 4th July.  The synopsis/introduction I have seen is

1919. The eyes of the world are on Paris, where statesmen, diplomats and politicians have gathered to discuss the fate of half the world’s nations in the aftermath of the Great War. A horde of journalists, spies and opportunists have also gathered in the city and the last thing the British diplomatic community needs at such a time is the mysterious death of a senior member of their delegation. So, when Sir Henry Maxted falls from the roof of his mistress’s apartment building in unexplained circumstances, their first instinct is to suppress all suspicious aspects of the event...

 I shall be placing my order as soon as I get back to my computer.

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Meanwhile, this is probably where we will be eating tonight, the restaurant in our village in France.  The patron's wife, Florence, does the cooking and very good it is too, while Nicholas sees to front of house.  He has been described as a combination of Basil Fawlty and Manuel, which is not all that far from the truth!  A cabaret in his own right, but I do have to get myself into the right frame of mind to enjoy it.