The floor upstairs

I was becoming concerned about the floor in the upstairs bedroom. Mrs S might have been delirious about the terra cotta tiles, and I had to agree that the wavy floor added character to the room, but too many tiles were cracking and breaking along the ridges of the waves.

It so happened that Sue and Alan, an English coule living in France, had replaced the terra cotta tiles in their house with more modern ones and the old tiles were stacked in her shed. Every now and then she would take a few of them to the local tip. She told me she would be very happy if I took what I wanted as replacements for my broken tiles: at least that would be few less for her to dispose of.

My friend Chris and I went over to collect some. Unfortunately, few of them were real terra cotta and many were paint-stained. However, we sorted through them, picking out the best before loading the boot with as many as we thought the car could carry. We stacked them in one of the sheds before going back for a second load, and then a third.

But not only were those tiles made of something other than terra cotta, they were also smaller than those in our bedroom. Undaunted, Chris and I worked out that we could lift sufficient tiles from one corner of the bedroom to replace the broken ones and then lay the replacements all together in one patch. It might mean some jiggery-pokery, but we thought we could manage it. We arranged a tentative date to do the job.

~~~~~

The other day I posted a picture of the door of St Nicholas church, Chateaubriant.  Here is another view.

Reloading

If you have by some strange chance just dropped into my blog, you are very welcome.  But you will need to go back a couple of days to catch up with what is going on.

We eventually got under way with the double mattress on top of the two singles. I drove gently along the road with Mrs S sticking her head out of the window every few yards to make sure that the mattresses were behaving themselves. All went well until we came to a roundabout. Halfway round, the mattresses started slipping off the roof and I had to stop.

This would have to be the busiest roundabout in the town and traffic was soon stacked up on every approach road. A van-load of police in full riot gear appeared, seeming to arrive out of nowhere. My heart sank. I knew that the motoring laws in France were quite severe and that French police could not only levy large, on-the-spot fines, they were also empowered to confiscate offenders’ driving licenses in certain circumstances. I had visions of the car and mattresses being impounded until I had paid a fine of several hundred euros, and possibly having my license confiscated into the bargain. But all the police did was to clear a path through the traffic and help to steady the mattresses while I drove at a slow walking pace to a spot where I could safely refasten the load.

It did cross my mind to suggest to Mrs S that she should wait there with the double mattress while I took the singles home. I didn’t, because I thought she would object even more to standing beside, or lying on, a double mattress beside a busy roundabout than she had about doing it at the side of a relatively quiet road.

After reloading the mattresses, I sat for some time trying to work out a route that would avoid roundabouts and sharp bends. But I overlooked the fact that although the mattresses might slip sideways at bends, they could slip forwards or backwards on steep hills. And sure enough, as we were going up a hill on one of the quiet country lanes, they slid off the back.

By the time we got those mattresses home I was shattered. There was no way I could take the two singles up the stairs until the following day.

~~~~~

In Chateaubriant old town.  I'm not sure if it was this house or the one next door that Victor Hugo's mother lived.

Loading

We had bought new mattresses for our French house.  They had been brought to me at the store's collection point by a human gorilla who stood and watched as I loaded them onto the roof of my car.   I heaved the first of them onto the roof. This was the double mattress, which I had decided should be first as I thought it would be easier to put the lighter mattresses on top. I struggled slightly getting the first of the singles on top, but managed it in the end. It was rather too far to one side and I pushed it towards the centre.

It was a pity I didn’t allow for the fact that all the mattresses were packed in slippery, polythene covers. I must have pushed a little too hard and the mattress shot off the other side, knocking Mrs S to the ground in the process. I happened to glance towards the collection point, hoping that the human gorilla was not there to witness my clumsiness, but of course he was grinning hugely. Which was more than Mrs S was doing.

I tried again, this time pushing more gently.

The last mattress was, not surprisingly, even more of a struggle to lift onto the top, but between us we managed it without any further incidents.

Having been a Boy Scout in my youth, I had learned how to tie a number of knots, several of which I could still remember.  The bowlines, clove hitches, sheepshanks and round-turns with two half hitches that I used to tie down the mattresses would have earned praise from Lord Baden-Powell himself, so securely had I fastened the load.  I was proud of those knots, but I had to undo them again. I had pulled down so hard on the rope that the double mattress was folded over the sides of the car and we couldn’t open the doors.

By now the gorilla was not just grinning, he was slapping his thighs as he laughed out loud.

~~~~~

This house stands opposite the church in Chateaubriant and claims to be one of the oldest in the town.  It is now a creperie but the steps to the door are a bit of a challenge for the Old Bat, who prefers the menu at a competitor anyway.

New mattresses

We decided to be a little more extravagant with the new mattresses and look for ones with interior springing. Our hope was that although they would cost more, they should last longer than the foam variety.

A store about thirty minutes away had just what we wanted, and at not too high a price, so we duly bought one double and two single mattresses and drove round to the other end of the store to collect them. We had enquired about delivery, but this was ridiculously expensive and delivery could not be until after we had returned to England. My car – an estate – was fitted with roof rails and I carried a length of rope in the boot. The mattresses would not be too heavy to carry on the roof of the car so we decided to go for it and take them back ourselves.

After a lengthy wait, the mattresses were dumped beside the collection counter by one of the largest, surliest Frenchmen I have ever met. I hauled them over to the car – one at a time, naturally, although the man who brought them to the collection point had carried both single mattresses at the same time, one under each arm.

I was a little concerned about driving for half an hour with three mattresses on the roof of the car and suggested to Mrs S that she should wait with the double mattress while I took the others home. She baulked at the idea of standing beside the road, a mattress at her feet, claiming that she had no intention of being arrested for running an open-air, roadside brothel. So I suggested that she should drive and I would wait for her, but there was no way she was going to struggle to take a mattress off the roof of the car. There was nothing for it but to take all three mattresses at the same time.

~~~~~

St Nicholas church in Chateaubriant dates only from 1870.

Question answered

The answer to the question I posed yesterday was, of course, really very prosaic: the mattresses were actually of pretty poor quality. We discovered this about eighteen months after we had finished furnishing the house. The beds and mattresses had been bought from a large chain store through its web site so we had no opportunity to see the quality of the goods before they were delivered. There was a double bed for the ground floor bedroom, and two singles to go upstairs. They had to be singles as we would never have got a double bed up the stairs, although I suppose it could have been hauled in through the window on the end of a length of rope.

Whether or not the beds we bought are typically French, I couldn’t say. I do know they are not typically English. They start off just the same, with the head and foot being joined by side pieces, but then they start to differ. The French beds then have an inner metal frame that is supported by lengths of timber placed between the side pieces of the wooden frame. This has timber slats fixed across it, these slats having been placed in position under tension so that they are bowed upwards, thus providing springs.

The mattress is simply a piece of cotton-covered foam rubber, about six inches thick. One advantage of this is that the mattress warms up very quickly on cold nights, but of course foam rubber also starts to compress after comparatively little use. After less than two years we needed to replace the mattresses, and that was after they had been used only lightly. Presumably this is why every French market has its mattress seller.

~~~~~

Another view of the market at Chateaubriant.

New mattresses for old

Every French town with a population of more than about two thousand has its weekly market and Mrs S finds them almost irresistible, although I am more than happy to avoid them. If I must go with her, I usually manage to lose her in the crowd fairly quickly and wait for her in my regular bar.

But there is one thing that has always puzzled me about those markets. It doesn’t matter what size they are, whether there are just a dozen or so stalls or whether there are a couple of hundred, you can guarantee that at one end of the street, sometimes at both ends, there will be a man with mattresses laid out at his feet. I can understand that butchers and fishmongers, greengrocers and haberdashers will expect to find customers every week, but is there really such a large market for mattresses, I wonder?  Is it really possible that Frenchmen (or Frenchwomen, for that matter) could wear out their mattresses any quicker than Englishmen? Do they use them as trampolines?  How much energy do French people put into their sex games to cause such a turnover of mattresses?

Not mattresses, but garlic in the market at Chateaubriant.  Unfortunately, we only saw him that once.  His garlic was very good and very reasonable in price.

Reprise

I was reminded yesterday as I walked through the Pudding Bag - which is part of Stanmer woods - of the times when my younger son came with me to walk the dog.  In particular, I remembered how, in his red wellies, he would scuff through the fallen leaves.  He would have been 5 or 6 and delighted in getting dirty by splashing in puddles.  Afterwards he would say, with a cheeky grin, "Mum's going to kill me".

There were times when he got tired and I encouraged him to keep walking by telling him a story.  He always preferred the ones I made up as we walked along, usually about a character called Henry Horse.

As I have a lot to do today, including visiting the quack, taking the dog to kennels, a little light shopping and packing the car for an away-day or seven, I will repeat a post from as far back as February 2010.  That's for today.  For the next few days I have scheduled some more of the story of Les Lavandes.  But I should remind you: it is nearly the true story of Les Lavandes since I may have been guilty of a little exaggeration or embellishment in some places. All the events described, well, nearly all of them, actually did take place and most of the people are real characters even if I have described them more as caricatures.

Back to today and the story of

Henry Horse Plays Football

Henry Horse was bored. He had played with all his toys, and now he was looking out of the window trying to think what he could do next.
Henry saw his friend Percy coming along the lane. Percy looked excited.
‘Hello, Henry,' called Percy. ‘Look what I've been given.' It was a football.
Henry and Percy went out to play football, but horses' hooves are not really the right shape for playing football.
It was Percy's ball, so he had first kick. The ball just went sideways!
Then Henry had a try. The ball went sideways the other way!
Percy had another go - and missed the ball.
Henry decided to take a run up to the ball. He ran at top speed...
...and kicked the ball hard. It went sailing through the air...
...and landed in the middle of some very prickly bushes. Henry did yelp as he got the ball back.
When Percy had his next turn he kicked the ball hard as well – right into the middle of some-one's picnic.
Henry decided to take another run up to the ball. WHAM! Up it went, up, up, and away...
...over the picnic, over the bushes...
...and right into the middle of a very muddy pond.
Henry waded in to fetch the ball, but when he came out he was so muddy that he had changed colour.
When Henry got home, his father had to wash him down with a hose before Henry could go indoors for tea.

(Illustrations by my cousin's son, now a Lieutenant Colonel, then a schoolboy.)