Wednesday night is a good time to travel to the wee hidey-hole. The roads to the coats are often traffic free, the ferry not overloaded with screaming schoolchildren, and a gentle drive takes me to the cottage to open shutters and turn on services whilst still having time to go to a local street market. Still the local, jovial baker is not there; I presume he will not be back – but the bar is, and so my post-shopping coffee is safe. However, the ferry costs more at night, so this time I wandered over on the afternoon crossing. By the time I arrived out side the cottage I was tired and cold so, the joys of driving a camper, I just crawled into a sleeping bag in the back and did all those annoying little jobs in the morning before going to market.
One of the random articles in the van was a washing machine, the old one having finally expired – when I acquired it, in excess of ten years ago, the Truffle-Major had rescued it from oblivion and resuscitated it, so it owed me little. I swapped them over, took the old one to the council tip – and found that the newer one did not work. Despite my best efforts it was not going to work – so it now resides back at the Truffle-Major’s awaiting his tender touch.
The week was beginning to develop as a major triumph for the Committee of Pomposity Pricking and Re-Arranging Wayward Thoughts. On Thursday afternoon I got half way to the tip before I remembered that it was shut on Thursday afternoon. On Friday morning, when it was open, I successfully managed to send it on its way. As I was out and about on Thursday afternoon (with a redundant washing machine in the back of the van), I went looking for some of the bits and pieces I would need for completing some of the outstanding jobs. Stopping for a coffee at O’Shannon’s, the faux Irish bar owned by a rugby-mad chappie, I was greeted by him with his usual French salutation and the question, “is there football on this evening?” It seems the low esteem in which I am held crosses international boundaries.
Friday was, fortunately as it turned out, a bright, warm, sunny day. An ideal day for grass-cutting and, as luck would have it, I had bought a brand new, shiny sharp blade for the brush cutter. Less fortunately, although I managed to get the old one loose I could not stop the whole assembly turning to totally release it. I tried various bodged up ways and was getting nowhere, when Charles and Lucien arrived. Lucien remarked that he had one the same and there is a small hole beside the nut which takes something to hold it all tight and Charles just said, “nail”. A nail worked perfectly, the new blade replaced the blunt old one and the grass was cut – enough grass to completely fill the Dalek-like composter. As I was putting everything away I looked in the bag of brush-cutter bits and found the little tommy-bar which fits in the hole to jam the thing up. But Lucien had invited me (and Charles, who is currently on his own as Daff has a holiday in the UK) to dinner with him and Anita on Saturday night.
After a trip into the loft to examine the pipe-work for the water heater I took my enormous French-English-French dictionary and went to the plumbers’ merchants – to find out that they don’t sell the type of heater that I want to install. That committee was in full swing – the toilet cistern decided to start leaking then, as I was fixing that, it decided to also not allow the water to fill up (which was not the way I wanted to stop it leaking).
From then it started to rain and didn’t stop until I was back in the UK. I did manage to watch TMA on Monday night – it was a slightly turgid game but Arsenal won 3-0. Again the van proved its worth; instead of sleeping for a couple of hours and then driving through the early morning I left at 12.30, cruised up to Ouistreham, and again crawled into the sleeping bag in the back. As a friend and her partner should be the next people to sleep there it saved me getting up even earlier than usual to strip the bed; very definitely a good thing.
Not only the outrun without a blether on the blog, but also the journey back. I can almost hear the sigh of relief.
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