That's better

We decided to paint the window shutters, the gates and the outbuilding doors a deep, rich green and the new gates were duly painted before being transported to France. Naturally, all this took some time as it had to be fitted in between my weekly perambulations, but eventually the gates were taken out to France.

Removing the old gates was no problem - it was simply a case of lifting them off the brackets: removing the hinges for re-use on the new gates was a different matter. The nuts had rusted onto the bolts and gave every indication that they had been attached with something stronger than the strongest superglue I have ever come across. I made a trip to Mr Bricolage to buy what I hoped was penetrating oil, I visited the supermarket and bought some best butter, I even thought of asking the old lady next door to boil some olive oil for me. But the penetrating oil must have worked more slowly than I expected. As the sun sank through a glorious sky, the first nut started to move. Later, sipping a glass of wine as I waited for my escargots to be served, I couldn't help but feel a rather smug self-satisfaction - even if I was half a day behind schedule.

Gated

I have always envied those people who have the ability to use their hands to play a musical instrument or to carve whistles and toys from odd pieces of wood. When I hold a tool I know what I want it to do and I am certain that I send the correct instructions down to my fingers. But somehow the instructions always seem to change subtly along the way. It's a bit like that old Chinese whisper game where the first child is told to repeat the message "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance", only to find that by the time the message has reached the end of the line it has changed to "Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance". I've just realised that anyone aged under about forty-five will be quite unfamiliar with the old pounds, shillings and pence so perhaps in these days of decimal currency the message should be "Send thirty-four pence…".

But enough of this hilarity. I blame it on the fact that I did metalwork at school, woodwork not being an option. Woodwork would have been much more useful – I might even have learned how to use a saw to make a straight cut, something I can never manage. How often does one want to make a toast rack or a garden hoe, which is all I learned to make? Come to that, how many people have the equipment needed to heat metal sufficiently to make it workable?

I needed to replace the prison gates at Les Lavandes and all my attempts to buy ready-made five-bar gates had come to naught. The French don't make them. They do make a wide variety of plastic gates that would fit, but none of the designs suited Mrs S, and none of the prices suited me. It didn't take me long to discover that, in England, five-bar gates come in standard sizes, all of them in imperial measurements. Our gateway was a standard size - for France. It was a metric size. No gate that could be bought off the shelf in England would fit: I would have to design and make my own.

So I made a pair of wooden, five-bar gates to fit a three metre gateway. I even allowed for the hinge brackets that reduced the width of the gateway slightly. I was very proud of those gates. Indeed, they were such beautiful gates that I thought of offering them to the Design Centre to be put on exhibition. After all, most of the supposed right angles were pretty much ninety degrees and most of the saw cuts were nearly straight.

Napoleon said...

Now the French always seem to me to be terribly blasé about their electrical wiring. Just look at the way it is strung between poles along the side of the street. Along country lanes I have seen the poles broken and bent with the electrical cable lying in a water-filled ditch. It is not unusual to see a single power point in a room with adaptors plugged into it and each other apparently at random with a maze of leads running round and across the room to power standard and table lights, television, radio, music centre and grandma's foot-warmer. The wiring in our house must have dated from a period even before blasé came into fashion. Cables from the main fuse board (we did at least have one of those, archaic though it was) were stuck to the walls with a substance remarkably similar to hair gel. These led to an occasional dodgy-looking power point and to fizzing light switches. Attention was required.

The owner of the restaurant in the village had given me the name and telephone number of the electrician he uses and I had arranged for Emmanuel to come and quote for the job of rewiring the house. Mrs S and I marked the walls where we wanted power points using a very gay pink-coloured masking tape.

Emmanuel arrived at exactly the time agreed and raced around the house in two and a half minutes flat. I explained that we had marked the walls where we wanted power points, to which Emmanuel replied that he had seen that.

"Would it be possible," I asked in what was probably execrable French, "to bury the wires in the walls?"

"Napoleon," he replied haughtily, "said that nothing is impossible."

"And if I accept your quote, when could you do the work? And how long would it take?"

"It would take four days, and I could possibly fit it in sometime around July."

Bear in mind this was in February. It had been October when we exchanged contracts to buy our French dream house. Even allowing for a three-month delay before completion of the purchase, we decided there would be plenty of time to undertake the fairly minimal restoration work needed – well, minimal compared with what we had seen in other houses – before we could start recouping what we had laid out by letting the house as a holiday home during the summer. We had placed advertisements and our first guests were due to arrive in mid-June. If the rewiring could not be done before then we had a problem on our hands. But Napoleon had said nothing is impossible!

I managed to stop myself quoting Napoleon back to Emmanuel but explained the predicament.

"OK," he said, smiling broadly. "17th April. I'll be here at nine o' clock."

I was so relieved that I agreed the date and time without even thinking. It was only later that I had reservations. So much later, that I was just getting into bed the following day when I realised we had apparently accepted a quotation we had not yet received. I lay awake worrying about the budget. Mrs S never seems to be bothered very much by minor matters like budgets and slept seraphically while I tossed and turned.

Although not exactly unconcerned about Emmanuel's quote, I had become resigned to the situation by the time we were back in England. It was a considerable relief a day or two later to see that his quote was nowhere near as high as I had thought it might be. That meant I could give my full attention to another matter.

Floored!

My heart sank as I lifted the second layer of lino. It was clear that the floor underneath was comprised of terra cotta tiles and, as in the bedroom downstairs, these had been screeded over. And this room was almost half as big again as the downstairs bedroom. What's more, this screeding was anything up to an inch and a half thick. In fact it proved much easier to clear than the downstairs screeding. It seemed to be a different composition and it was a matter of digging it off with a shovel in same places and merely prising it off others. All the same, there were a few stubborn spots that needed scraping. Mrs S and I filled thirteen rubbish sacks, all of which had to be carried downstairs and dumped in the so-called garage along with the lino, the carpet and the wallpaper I had already scraped off the living room wall.

By this time the garage was getting quite full and I had not yet managed to locate a tip. While driving around I had deliberately taken a variety of routes, partly to see a bit more of the local area and partly in an effort to track down a décharge publique. Once I had bought a decent dictionary I discovered that I had been looking for the wrong thing all along. What I needed was a déchetterie, and I had seen three of those sign-posted!

This, however, was a minor problem compared to the floor of the upstairs bedroom. This was distinctly uneven with ridges and valleys up to three inches deep running from the front of the house to the back. That was not what concerned us – it added a bit of character, we told ourselves. Far more worrying was the hole right where people getting out of bed would put their feet. I must confess to a little exaggeration there. It was not really a hole, just three or four badly broken tiles, but the sand on which they were laid had mysteriously disappeared leaving the broken pieces considerably below the level of the whole tiles around them. A little thinking time was called for so I sat on the doorstep in the weak sunshine and smoked a cigarette. Two cups of coffee later, I was still without inspiration. I wandered back upstairs and gazed disconsolately at the hole. I think I might have been hoping that it was not really as bad as I had previously thought. I sighed and looked round the room. It was then I realised that the surface area of each tile was not much different from that of two house bricks laid side by side. All I had to do was bring over a sack of sand and a few bricks and my problem would be solved. By now my brain had shifted into overdrive and I quickly dug out some whole tiles from the corner of the room nearest the attic stairs, scooped out some sand with my mouse-removal trowel, and set to work to relay the damaged section of floor. Needless to say, it took me several attempts to get the level of sand right, but eventually I had effected a passable repair.

A few bricks in the corner did the trick nicely on a later trip, and we placed a chest of drawers over of the patch of bricks to obscure them from view.

The story continues

"What story?" you ask. It's the story of Les Lavandes, the house we bought in France. I started the story here when it ran every day for about a week, then again here for another week, and again here. The last episode appeared here. For those who can't be bothered to turn back the pages (and it's not compulsory) or if you just want a quick recap, I had commuted my pension on retirement and we bought an old farmhouse on the edge of a small French village. It was basically sound but needed freshening up.

Two weeks later I was back in France, accompanied this time by Mrs S as our trip had coincided with the half-term holiday. No camping out for me this time; it would be a hotel or nothing for Mrs S until the renovation was much closer to completion and blow the budget, which is exactly what we did. But credit where credit's due, she did buckle down to scraping the floor tiles so that by the time we returned home the downstairs bedroom floor was perhaps ninety per cent cleared.

The floor of the upstairs bedroom was covered in a somewhat unhealthy looking linoleum. Even through a couple of centimetres of dust it looked a bit gruesome. It would have to go, all sixteen feet by twenty feet of it. For someone whose regular hard labour is pushing a pen, rolling up a twenty foot length of lino is not particularly easy. Picking it up is even worse. It took me three attempts to roll it in an almost reasonable fashion, but there was no way I could lift it to heave it out of the window. I went in search of my trusty old Stanley knife to cut it into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Maybe it is just something that happens to me, but no matter what I am looking for in my toolbox, it has worked its way underneath everything else and I have to empty the entire contents of the box before I find the tool I am looking for. This time was no exception, but at least I did manage to find the knife. Unfortunately, I did not find any blades. I could have sworn there were still two left in the packet and that the packet was in the tool box, but there was no sign of it.

I returned the tools to the box, except for the knife, and made the first of many trips to Mr Bricolage, the DIY store in Châteaubriant some twelve miles away. Back ‘home' again I put the Stanley knife back in the tool box and unwrapped the new one. Blades for my trusty old friend were not to be bought in any of the three large DIY stores in Châteaubriant and I had been forced to buy a new knife. But it did a superb job of cutting up the lino. Both layers. Did I mention that the floor was covered with a double layer of lino?

A holy conundrum

It has, somehow, never seemed quite right to me that I should have to pay to go into a cathedral. It grates that I can't gaze in wonder at what has been built to the glory of God and offer my own humble prayer of praise and thanksgiving without having to pay several pounds for the privilege.

I was at one time a member of the Parochial Church Council and even a churchwarden so I do have some idea of where the cathedral powers-that-be are coming from and some considerable sympathy with their dilemma. Just like so many other countries, England is blessed with magnificent cathedrals (and some that are, frankly, less than magnificent). Some of the most glorious cathedrals are in small cities - Canterbury, Salisbury, Lincoln, Durham for example - and, indeed, in some cases they almost are the city. Somehow the city just would not seem right without them. But these buildings are old and require maintenance. The regular users - the congregations - are too small to be able to pay for the work needed. Ensuring a spire or tower stays up and doesn't fall through thr roof is not cheap. Even stopping gargoyles falling on the heads of passers-by costs a lot of money. And that is where the dilemma comes in.

The great cathedrals have become not the destinations of pilgrimages but tourist attractions. People visit Canterbury and Salisbury to see the cathedrals. Many, if not most of the visitors to these buildings see them as works of art, like Old Master paintings but on a larger scale. Those people don't see the cathedrals as offerings to the glory of a deity in which they don't believe anyway. So, why should they not contribute towards the upkeep of the buildings? The last cathedral I entered made no charge - Lichfield. There were boxes for donations and I did make a donation. However, that system has been tried and found wanting in other cities so turnstiles and tickets have become the order of the day.

Unfortunately, so great is the cost of maintaining these buildings that the entrance fees alone are insufficient. Go into many cathedrals now and the building almost resembles a covered market. There is a large book and souvenir shop offering not just devotional books but tea towels and mugs, postcards and pens. Even, in some cases, plastic Virgin Marys. There might be a tea shop in another corner. And if the visitor would like to climb the tower or descent into the crypt, that will be another pound please. Cathedrals have become big business.

But does the Church, be it Anglican or Roman Catholic or one of the Orthodox Churches, really need these buildings? Cannot God be worshipped in humbler surroundings? Granted, these buildings were erected to the glory of God, but I suspect they were also erected to the glory of some bishop or other long since dead and buried. Should the Church be looking to dispose of these religious stately homes, thereby saving themselves the cost of maintenance and allowing them to use funds to the benefit of people?

I suppose the big problem that would arise if there were any thought of selling such a building would be finding a buyer. The chances of any businessman being able to use the building for anything that would cover its costs and provide a profit are so slim as to be non-existent. So we fall back on the state or a cultural body such as the National Trust. But would the state want to take on the responsibility of caring for these medieval heirlooms, and could any body such as the National Trust afford to do so?

It will take a better brain than mine to sort out this problem.

Changing times

Language is an ever evolving thing with words coming and going or just changing their meaning. Sometimes things happen overnight, or so it seems, and sometimes there is a gradual change. There are now many words in the dictionary that are described as being archaic and in my blog yesterday I used one that is on the way to being archaic. It is a word that many young English people would fail to understand so how foreigners non-English people Would cope is a matter of conjecture. The word concerned is half-crown.

Up until about 40 years ago the word was in common parlance, in everyday speech. As were tanner, bob and (to a lesser extent) florin. Then "they" went and changed our currency. Overnight those old, well-known friends became no more. Finished. On the scrap heap.

Well, not quite overnight. We had two days to effect the change from pounds, shillings and pence to pounds and pence. Even then the old coins must have remained in circulation for a while and the names remained in use. But now those words are going the way of the groat - and who nowadays knows what that was, apart from it being an ancient English coin. Of course, even before the switch to decimal we had lost the farthing.

Back in the old days, there were twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. The penny had been divided into four farthings but, as I said, the farthing had been done in, put to death, some years before we went decimal. The halfpenny still existed, although it was never called a half penny: it was a hape knee - and was sometimes written ha'penny. The next coin was the penny, then there was the threepenny bit (or joey). Of course, this being England we are talking about, threepenny was never pronounced as it is written. It might have been thrupny or threpny or, more commonly, throopny ("oo" short as in foot not long as in loot). The next coin was a silver one, the tanner or sixpence piece. Then came the shilling, or bob. The two shilling coin was a florin. There was no coin for the crown (five shillings) except for special occasions such as the 1951 Festival of Britain or the coronation in 1953, but there was the half-crown, worth two shillings and sixpence (note that sixpence is/was one word, not two as six pence). The pound came as folding, paper money, as did the ten shilling note and the five pound note. There was also something called a guinea. This was a completely unofficial denomination worth twenty-one shillings (one pound one shilling) and it could be divided into two with half a guinea being ten shillings and sixpence (10/6).

And that - 10/6 - is how sums of money consisting of only shillings and pence would often be written in numeral form. There was also a semi-numeral form - 10s 6d. Throw pounds into the mix and and the numeral form changed and the stroke became a full stop - £6.18.3 or, in the semi-numeral form - £6 18s 3d.

I suppose it is simpler now in so many ways, but back then the pound could be divided in so many ways. Of course, inflation over the years has meant that we don't need to split the pound quite so much now. But I wonder just how much longer people will understand just how precious was that half-crown Pop used to slip into my hand.