Blackened - before

I didn't take many photos of the fire damage, or keep many of those I did take. But here is one of the cupboard under the stairs, where it originated, before the cleaners had done much clearing of it.

It can be seen how the front of the cupboard bore the brunt of it, and you can make out the polystyrene wine racks at the back, from which we salvaged the contents successfully, and also the parfait jars of sloe gin and the already decanted bottles, to the right, and behind them a cellophane wrapped box of PG Tips tea bags, all of which were OK, and the sea grass shopping basket also was fine after a bit of time outside to blow the smell off it. The powdery mess and wrappers in the foreground were mostly the residue of Tom's late lamented curry spices.

Below is another view of the site of the fire, after everything had been cleaned up but not redecorated, the underside of the rebuilt staircase; you can also see into the blue room behind it from which the the wallpaper had been stripped and the furniture pushed to the edges so that the floating parquet floor could be relaid (it sustained little damage but enough round the doorway, caused mostly by water and some heat, to make it necessary to replace the lot). The actual fire damage on the wall itself is more evident.

The scorch marks, smoke blackening, molten plastic drips and holes from where the shelving and electrical installation had been removed, made some interesting shapes and patterns in sombre monochrome. Before it was covered up, I made some abstract studies.

Today, the last of the painters and decorators finished and left, they've been very good. Tomorrow I'll take and post some photos of what it looks now, and of the staircase in its entirety.

And I thought Brexit was an 'oh shit' moment.

Here goes. I can't swear to the order of events, we both remember it somewhat differently, and some things we can't really remember at all. It's making me a bit shaky and sweaty still to even start retelling it in writing here, though we've both been over and over it, in English and French, many times since.

Just under a week ago, at about two in the morning. I woke up, aware Elfie was at the bedroom door, and Tom was suddenly wide awake beside me too. A strange smell. 'Diesel?!' said Tom, we opened the door and I remember him shouting 'Oh God it's fire!'

I ran out, shut the door behind me, established it was coming from the electrical fuse box under the stairs, that it was too advanced to smother, that the stairs were beginning to burn, made a futile shout from the landing window, got back, grabbed Elfie who sleeps without a collar on, and threw her over my shoulder, and we all got down the stairs and out the front door coughing and retching. I grabbed a lead for Elfie and tied her to the gate, got a coat, bag and mobile from the hall, and while Tom doused the fire with water, despite my protestations that it was electrical, since he maintained quite rightly that otherwise we'd lose the whole house. I tried to ring for help a couple of times but there was no mobile coverage.

I left them there and went to our neighbour Josette's house. Her dog woke her up when I knocked, and I rang the pompiers. I seem to recall my French came surprisingly readily and clearly. I went back and unhitched Elfie, at some point I must have grabbed her downstairs dog cushion because she and I spent much of the remaining hour or so snuggled up together on it, covered in some more coats from the hall. Later I noticed she had chewed halfway through the sturdy nylon lead while she was tied to the gate. The pompiers arrived in a full sized engine, it seemed like ages but probably wasn't, they come from a couple of miles away and have to scramble a crew. They fetched Tom a chair, forbade us to re-enter, and did various things like taking our blood pressure and cutting the cables from the main meter box.

Monsieur le Maire (mayor) of the commune arrived hot on their heels. They told us we had to go to hospital for smoke inhalation. We are not leaving our dog, we told them, many times, while they did everything to compel and cajole us into the ambulance. M le Maire will look after her, they said, he is a hunter, he has many dogs. We are absolutely not leaving our dog with M le Maire, we asserted.

You really must get into the ambulance, they argued, so we can give you oxygen...

Not without the dog. Point.

We do not transport dogs to the hospital...

Finally I said I would be prepared to leave her with Josette or her sister Helene, but only if I see her go with them. A sweet young female pompier promised she would hold her by the door of the ambulance so we could see each other until M le Maire fetched our neighbour. Helene appeared in pyjamas, kissed and stroked and reassured us and promised to look after her. Elfie's anxious little face looking round at us in masks then seeing her pulling back, looking over her shoulder as she was led away will haunt me to the end of my days, though I trusted Helene completely.

Four hours later we emerged from the urgences, still blackened and somewhat bruised. The quiet American, who gets up early and whose number was the only one I could remember without mobile (can't remember where I left that) or address book, came out and found us standing on the hospital's roundabout, Tom in his dressing gown and shabbiest slippers, me in short pyjamas, winter jacket, hospital gown and crocs.

'This is Brexit in action;'  I was able to quip.

He suggested we come back for breakfast and shower but we needed to find our dog. She trotted out to meet us quite calmly, having suffered nothing worse than wriggling out of her harness and having a stand-off with Helene's cat. Josette came by with an enormous tin of Pedigree Chum, they gave us coffee and biscuits and Josette phoned her electrician friend at about 8 o'clock (the pompiers told us an electrician should be our first call) who said he'd be around that afternoon.

We trailed back to the house, and very shortly afterwards M le Maire drove up again and proposed we go and stay in the chalet park owned by the municipality, and arranged it on his mobile. At this point I remembered that my brother who lives in the Mayenne was supposed to be arriving to stay with us later that day on a cycling tour of the region, and though I was able to contact his wife and daughter at home he proved unreachable, so when we came back for the electrician he was sitting on the doorstep eating cheese sandwiches.

'You seem to have had a disaster' he observed, typically laconic.

He came back to the chalet with us and stayed the night, since he didn't really have anywhere else to go, and in fact it was helpful to have him around, he's an undemanding person who doesn't fuss or get embarrassed, which is what you need when suffering nervous exhaustion, residual smoke inhalation and post-traumatic flashbacks.

In the meantime, I had gathered up all Elfie's bedding and driven out to the big laundromat in Quessoy to put it through a long hot wash and the big beast tumble dryer so there was no residual smoke smell in it. Along with emptying the freezer the following day and distributing its contents around various freezers in the locality, this was one of the things I was very glad I found the will to do in the aftermath. Although our insurance agent, the kind and redoubtable Nellie, shrugged and said the latter action wasn't really necessary, we could just claim on it, a freezer full of dripping and festering food until the professionals came to do the clear up, would have been demoralising in the extreme.

The chalet personnel, including an English manager who's been here for a long time, were wonderful. Nellie from the insurance, who badgered the expert (assessor?) to get round straight away, was wonderful. The expert, who spent two compassionate hours in the evening with us, extra to his normal day's work, explaining, reassuring us and forensically examining the carbonised remains of the electrical installation to confirm exactly what had started the fire (a certain kind of switch), and that he's seen it often before and that it was certainly not our fault in any way, he was wonderful too. He then badgered the clean-up people, whose agent turned up the following morning (and was wonderful), and the dry cleaning people, who contacted me back and agreed a time to come.

The expert told us it will be a three month job before we can move back in, so furnished accommodation would be a priority; the insurance will pay up to the rentable value of the house, which amount sounded good but doesn't actually go very far in Brittany in the holiday season. We had to get out of the chalet by the weekend, so I rang around B&B places as an emergency measure. The one in Plémy where I left a message before provisionally booking another called back and said they had a gîte available for a fortnight, dog no problem, and that's where we are now. The couple who run it are wonderful, and the gîte itself feels like the most wonderful place on earth.  Here's the view from our door:

and here are Tom and Elfie being cosy on the chaise longue (Elfie has her own quilt to keep her hair off the furniture, she's almost all on it):

After that, our friend J has contacted her friends from Guernsey who have a second home here, and they have kindly said we can stay there a fortnight, dog no problem. And it turned out the electrician (who's been wonderful) has a furnished studio flat coming free from the beginning of August. It'll be a tight squeeze and no garden for Elfie, but we won't be choosy beggars.

So, just about everyone has been wonderful: our friends and neighbours of diverse nationalities who have picked us up, taken in our food and washing and dog, offered us shelter, fed us and looked after us (albeit with a note on the door 'food for the homeless' when we arrived at the Quiet American's and German Doctor's house on Saturday night), and  the strangers and professionals who have extended great kindness and help above and beyond (and we'll forget anyone who wasn't wonderful). And Tom and Elfie have been wonderful too, though that goes without saying.

Indeed, this is a wonderful place to live in so many ways, and I shall always be grateful and glad to have been given the freedom to come, live and work here, and not to have been seen as the unwelcome, unwanted, begrudged foreigner, not now, not ever. And come what may, we're bloody staying.

BIS records, and the importance of copyright

You may remember that at New Year I posted a video slide show I’d made and posted on Youtube, from snapshots and short video clips of Iceland, accompanied by the music of Jón Leifs’ Requiem which I’d lately heard for the first time on the radio.

Then a few weeks ago I revisited the video, and found the music had been withdrawn from it for copyright reasons, though the visuals were still there. I was disgruntled; what killjoy had been so mean as to spoil my pretty little artistic and sensitive creation? For the first time I looked up the details from my purchase of the music, and with possibly even less thought than when I used and published it, I wrote to protest, and ask to be made an exception of, to the recording company, BIS records in Sweden.

Oops.

Ouch.

I will gloss over the rather painful details of the e-earbashing I received, in person, from their CEO, Robert von Bahr, or indeed of my rather puny and petulant initial reaction to it. However the gist of his response and what I learned from it is important.

It turns out the withdrawal of the music is an automatic procedure based on ‘fingerprints’ on the recordings, and it’s done for a good reason. With all the free stuff that’s available on the internet on tap, and with recorded music everywhere, it’s too easy to take it for granted and even assume an entitlement to it, and to do what we want with it, without giving a thought to how it gets there and how much it costs to produce it. The recording companies, especially of classical and other rarer and more specialist kinds of music, pay a lot for the privilege of recording, it’s a labour of love and patience. They make little enough from legal downloads, nothing from illegal ones of course and unauthorised distribution is a huge problem for them, and people taking the line that they are doing them a favour by doing so must be exasperating to say the least.

Not always but sometimes, however, one’s more bruising experiences can end up being the more rewarding ones. Mr von Bahr, like many other stratospheric, passionate, fierce and direct people who don’t suffer fools gladly, turned out finally, and indeed quite quickly, to be quite as good, nay better, at being generous, warm, helpful, charming and funny as he was at being cross. The exchange of emails continued, since, happily in this instance, both he and I are the kind of people who cannot bear not to have the last word, and gradually they became more friendly. He went on to extend a gracious and unlooked-for apology for his gruffness, while still explaining, with patience, eloquence and integrity, how very important copyright matters are and how unacceptable it is to go around thinking you can ignore and abuse them.

If copyright holders themselves choose to release material freely, for advertising or simply out of generosity, that’s their prerogative, it’s not mine just to take it. The fact that I’ve paid for a recording doesn’t give me the right to distribute it; MP3s can be stripped from videos on Youtube, (something I wasn’t aware of) and anyway, taking something for your own uses without consent, just because you can and lots of people do it, is simply wrong, and ignorance is no defence. There is plenty of legitimate free stuff on-line, and there is music which it’s permitted to use as long as you don’t monetise what you make with it, but it’s the copyright holder’s right to decide whether and how they make their property available.

Youtube are going some way to addressing this problem, there is a page of FAQs on the subject of copyright, an audio library of freely available music and a music policy directory to find out the status of a piece of music, but the last is by no means exhaustive and it’s not the simplest matter to get information from them on the subject, as I’ve subsequently found out when I tried to contact them to find out how to go about doing things properly, it wasn’t easy to get an informed and satisfactory answer; they don’t really seem all that interested in creating a better, clearer relationship between their users and copyright holders. Essentially, if you wish to use music and are unsure about its copyright status, it’s better to try to obtain the right permissions than just use it anyway. Recording companies or other copyright holders are usually not difficult to find and contact if the recording’s in your possession, if you ask politely and are honest, as Mr von Bahr said, it’s quite likely you’ll be allowed. A copyright holder can release the music when the video is uploaded and they have the URL, even though it has been automatically blocked.

And you never know, you might make some interesting connections. The experience and the path it led me down was enriching, not only in raising my consciousness in a salutary way. As I said, I’d not paid much attention to who had recorded the music, but BIS and their catalogue are a wonderland. Though they began in a very small and personal way in 1973, they have become one of the most important names in classical recording recording, while maintaining a very individual touch; they are the oldest recording company still run but its original founder and unusual in keeping all their previous recordings available.

Their digital arm, eClassical has an even larger on-line catalogue, since they now distribute material from other labels as well as BIS, and they are nice and easy to browse since you can do so by many criteria: period, genre, orchestra etc as well as artist or composer.

And BIS are certainly not mean with their musical property. Their own catalogue contains an abundance of free listening if you take the time to browse, not the parsimonious 30 second snippets to be found elsewhere, but whole, quality tracks, not downloadable but listenable on-line unlimited. EClassical’s downloads, not only MP3s but also 16 and 24-bit FLAC flies, lossless (love that word!) and very high quality, are probably the best value you’ll find anywhere; they also do a very good ‘daily deal’ - an album download, often something rather unusual, at half price; their latest release e-mail newsletters are a delight, with interesting, personal and informative blurbs, and maybe even a free video about one of the albums or musicians featured.

In fact they have their own channel of professionally made videos on Youtube. Amongst these is a one not to be missed of Carolina Eyck talking about and playing the theremine, the strange ‘invisible’ instrument invented a surprisingly long time ago, once used for spooky effects on old sci-fi movies but now with its own, growing repertoire. From their channel I was also led to an interview with RvB himself.  The man is frankly something of a star, and moreover (as he slipped in with a touch of very understandable uxorious pride) he is Mr Sharon Bezaly. She is the best flautist in the world and, with her shock of hair and smouldering eyes and her gold flute made by an anonymous Japanese master, looks and sounds like something out of a fairy tale. And that’s before you’ve even heard her play...

Another video released under their auspices is this beauty, food for any lover of Tallis: New York Polyphony in a little church in Sweden, performing ‘If ye love me’, with a sound of incomparable depth and richness,

If ye love me,
keep my commandments,
and I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another comforter,
that he may 'bide with you forever,
e'en the spirit of truth.

Play by the rules and truthfully to keep what you love, perhaps?

And in a short time, Mr von Bahr stretched out his hand at a word when I had reposted the Jon Leifs/Iceland video, properly amended with credits and acknowledgements, to lift the block so it is now visible again with the music, in all its ethereal wonder, and I have embedded it once again in the New Year post. For which much thanks.

Getting up, falling down; bio; good gloves

Hearing a car door at some very darkling hour of the morning (about 6.30, I think, the time I used habitually to get up, for work or blogging), and on jumping heaving myself out of bed and peering out of the landing window, perceiving headlights, I assumed the district nurse had taken me very literally in the message I'd left on the collective answering machine (you never know which one you're going to get, or quite when) when I said as early as possible. We really aren't good at hanging around in the morning à jeûn, with not even a cup of tea to sustain us. I plodded downstairs and opened the front door and squinted myopically into the fog, the car was next door's, and I think I discerned the elusive Steve, whom I've not seen since we conferred over hornets back in September, standing beside it and raising a tentative hand in my direction. I mumbled 'ça va' and went back to bed. Tom was thoroughly awake by this time and sceptical about my ability to not go back to sleep and to hear the coming of the nurse, so he got up, considerably more energetically than I had. I lay in bed for a while, feeling rather comfortable and thankful for my life, and got up at my leisure about half an hour later. I came down just as Tom, dressed and busy over the breakfast things, was letting in the very nice Martiniquan male nurse, Frederic. He took Tom's blood uneventfully while I poured orange juice and sorted out the money; I explained I needed to do everything in advance because afterwards I was going to fall over. He seemed rather concerned about this, while reassuring me 'c'est normal...'

He had rather a lot of forms to fill in this time, so much paperwork these days, he grumbled good-naturedly.

I'm hungry! I muttered under my breath.
Oh dear, should he do it straight away and do the papers after?
No, no, I apologised.
It's not so much hunger as fear about the blood test? he suggested.
No, I said, I'm not frightened, I'm just hungry, I'm English, I like my breakfast, it's my favourite meal.

In truth, I might have told him that the next meal is usually my favourite meal, but I am truly fond of breakfast. He looked puzzled. Finally he set me up very tidily - even offering to have me lie down while he took it, to which I demurred, I didn't want to be that much of a wimp - and inserted the needle so neatly I barely felt it, encouraged Tom to come over and talk to me to distract me, but after a moment or two the black curtain descended anyway. He drew out the requisite amount and then sent me off to the sofa while Tom brought me orange juice, uxoriously.

Somewhat embarrassing really; I've tried everything to stop it happening; I'm not bothered about the tiny sting of pain, or needles generally, I'm very good at the dentist, I don't mean to be a wuss but I just can't seem to help it. But what the hell, having not just one but two lovely men fussing over me is not something to which I am accustomed as a general rule, so I decided I might as well lie back and enjoy it. In fact forestalling the falling over bit by lying down immediately I was very quickly back to normal and able to see Frederic off and enjoy tea, more orange juice, coffee, toast, Marmite and marmalade. I am truly fond of breakfast.

~

Later we went out, partly to get out of the way of the hedge man, to the supermarket and DIY store, and decided to try the little lunchtime restaurant near to the bio* co-op shop. They offer a hot meat main dish and a vegetarian one, and a self-service bar for cold entrées and desserts; wholly vegetarian restaurants don't seem to exist here, or not beyond Paris anyway, and bio shops always have a meat counter and are light on the dried legumes compared to their British equivalents. We had the vegetarian option, a generous and crusty lentil loaf on a bed of carrots and cauli and that funny fractal broccoli in a creamy sauce, with a good green side salad with bright shreds of raw coloured carrot, and nice fruit and nut bread with an interesting sort of nutty veggy pâté instead of butter. Proper vegetarian food, in fact, unusual here: substantial, colourful and tasty, and very reasonably priced. Turned out the chap in charge was an old hippy Canadian, and the woman chef also seemed to be anglophone, but they clearly had a happy, mixed regular clientèle of local people, men in suits as well as beards, and young families with babies and smart women lunching alone.

There was a kind of urn with a ladle, and some cups beside it. I asked if it was soup. No, said the Canadian, it's just hot water, with sachets of tisane and sugar you can help yourself to. In the summer he does chilled water with slices of lemon and cucumber and other fruit, in the winter the hot drinks. The French mostly don't eat breakfast, he remarked, by late morning a lot of people come in here thirsty and tired and grateful for a hot sweet drink, and everyone likes something for free.

~

Our trip to the DIY store proved less successful; the new plug fitting for the kitchen sink turned out to be the wrong size. However, I did procure these microfibre dusting gloves:

Soft and fluffy and a very funky purple (there were other colours), one simply slips them on and runs them over all one's surfaces and treasured objets and bibelots, then go outside and clap your hands! I didn't know dusting could be such fun. These are the second pair of fit-for-purpose gloves I have lately acquired, the others are these gardening gloves, the best ever:

Not quite sure what they're made of, some kind of synthetic, reinforced rubbery coating over a knit textile base, but they're lighter and more supple than the softest leather and tougher than the thickest, withstanding even the berberis thorns within reason, and quite waterproof without being sweaty. 

Good innovation in design in small things is something to rejoice in.

~

Got the blood tests back from the pharmacy this evening, everything seems to be OK, except my cholesterol is slightly up, so perhaps I should eat nut pâté instead of butter more often.

 * that's short for biologique, the equivalent of 'organic', and just as semantically silly. Also pronounced like B.O., which I've just about stopped tittering and making puerile jokes about.

A sorry tale and a whole bunch of self-pity.

Well, here goes, and I hope it's cathartic, it can't really make me feel any worse.

A long stretch of my usual regular route in the direction of St Brieuc and everything on the way, including one of my coaching jobs, has been closed for roadworks for a very long time.  I've taken the recommended diversion route when I can, though it's a great deal further and the other evening a normal forty minute trip took me nearly an hour and a half.  But when it comes to the teaching job, out in the country, just for an hour early afternoon, this is just so out of the way that it's barely worthwhile going.  At lunchtimes, and after five o'clock, I frequently followed the example of numerous other drivers, not all of whom were residents, including the school bus, and drove around the route barrée signs, going carefully round the ruts and bumps and potholes, to no ill effect.

Then one evening a couple of weeks ago, at about five-thirty, a small posse of gendarmes stopped me, told me off for driving on it when I didn't live there, let me off magnanimously but told me not to do it again, or else, a fine and points.  If they caught me.  But I'm not one to push my luck, as I thought, so I sussed out a back route of winding lanes which brought me satisfactorily to my destination.

I set out yesterday, nice weather, feeling fine, stopped at a tricky junction, pootled at sensible speed -  you really can't do anything else in my car - round a downward sloping bend, and was confronted by a large white van coming at speed in the middle of the muddy road down the opposite slope. I braked and tried to move over, as you do, but there was so much mud and so little time that the brake turned into a skid and I hit the side of the van, who was veering to avoid me.  Without the skid I'd just have made it through the gap, but only just.

I removed a length of his trim and gave him a bit of a scratch, he trashed most of the front of my car.  I was shaking, he was somewhat discomposed. He repeated several times what a hurry he was in for work - he was delivering medical and pharmaceutical supplies - he asked for my address and details and I had the presence of mind to get his off him before he hurried away - he'd not have given them of his own accord, though he did make sure my car was still drivable before he left, yanking at the stoved-in bumper and wing that was fouling the wheel. I called Tom, who offered to come out, but I said I'd turn round and come straight back.  I hadn't really registered how bad the damage was, but I didn't want to wait around there anyway.  I cancelled my lesson and limped homeward, every rightward turn of the wheel drawing protesting scraping noises from the car.

Dear old Monsieur Turbin, our long time garagiste, sometimes rather rough in his humour but very reliable, a trailer-truck always at the ready, conveniently situated on our way home and his number always on our mobiles, has just taken his retirement, without having found a buyer for the business.  He recommended a friend with a Citroen garage in Ploeuc, but that's in the opposite direction, and not somewhere we go very often.  On the last leg, it became quite apparent that this car really needed to be in a garage, and if I got it home I wouldn't want to take it out again, so I turned towards Tredaniel, where I knew there was a general garage who had occasionally been helpful in the past, and I drew in there, having phoned Tom and told him what I was going to do so he could come and get us (Mol being with me throughout).

The people there, at that moment a young female receptionist and young male mechanic, were incredibly nice, kind and sympathetic and competent. They said I should never have driven it home, they would have come and fetched it, and I felt they were rooting for me from the start; the young woman helped me talk through it and gave me really good advice about dealing with the situation.  Tom did what turned out to be a sensible thing, and insisted that once we'd just looked in at home to confirm that our insurers - who have also just retired, closed the local office and the agency has moved to Ploeuc also - were indeed closed on Wednesdays, we go out shopping as I had planned to do after my lesson and try to get on with our day.

Just as I was going out of the door, the phone went, and it was the other driver, who asked if he could come round that evening after work to fill out the constat amiable for the insurance. We stopped at the garage to finish emptying the car, and I told the young woman, who encouraged me to stick to my guns, he was at least partly to blame and it would go harder on me than him anyway, since I'd lost my car already and didn't need to be further penalised by the insurance any more than necessary, when for him it was just a question of relatively light damage and his employing company's insurance.

Shopping was OK, except Tom took me for a cup of tea in the supermarket bar and they were playing a fairly indifferent version of Leonard Cohen's Alleluya, which was nevertheless quite enough to undo me.

On the garage woman's advice, I filled in the constat fairly minimally, and roughed out a statement of events as I recalled them.  The guy arrived, in another van, and he had done likewise, but he refused to agree that he had been travelling fast down the middle of the road.  I'll spare you the ins and outs of the argument, we remained civil but neither of us was prepared to budge.  We both professed our good faith, but he said quite plainly that if he were to say anything that put him at all in the wrong, he would suffer for it at work.  So we concluded there was no point discussing it further, filled out all the relevant information, noted that we were not in agreement on the events, and didn't sign it, which one is at liberty to do.

I don't know whether it will do me any good; the fact that I undeniably lost control of the car, despite the fact that I was, as I saw and still see it, forced to brake to avoid a worse accident, will probably count against me.  Both the garage people and our insurance agent were wide-eyed at his statement about how he couldn't accept any responsibility because he'd be penalised at work, and they both said, of course he was in too much of a hurry, those van drivers for those businesses always are.  The agent says she'll talk to the insurance company, photocopied and sent my statement, and we must wait and see.  The refusal to agree means it may go 50/50, if I'm lucky.

So there it is.  Everyone around me so far has been wonderful, they always are, and I'm weathering it, just, but I'm tired.  Tired of having to deliver another car-related tale of woe, tired of my poor friends and family having to find more sympathetic words when the fact that I have written off two cars in less than four years clearly indicates that I am an incompetent, unfit to belong to the adult world. Despite reassuring myself that this time, it wasn't entirely my fault, I'm still going over all the ways it might not have happened, could have been avoided - braving the gendarmes and their fines would have turned out cheaper.  I'm tired of the insomnia and bad dreams and waves of tears and panic and despondency that keep washing over me, that I know aren't finished with me yet, and the dark fears and sense of imminence of future, worse loss and trauma that any loss and trauma calls up. I'm fairly bloody tired of trying to count my blessings and be grateful it wasn't worse and look on the bright side.  While I'm very well aware I have a blissfully easy life compared to most normal people, I'm tired of having to sort out problems and find ways through, though I perfectly well know that that's life, and it doesn't stop till life does.  And I ache with that kind of ache that flowers up from between the shoulder blades and grabs at the throat. I'm overall quite tired of myself. It's all so tedious.

And I'm heart-broken because I loved that car.  Much more than the old BX even though we'd had that a long time and it had lots of memories, because it never really quite fit me and I never quite trusted it, it was under-built and over-powered.  The Saxo was perfect, small and compact yet a bit rough round the edges, it ran on a cupful of petrol, the colour stood up to all the mud and dirt we can't avoid round here, and to me it was the small dark green thread that stitched together so many of the individually insignificant elements of my life and made them into a satisfying patchwork whole, and now that seems all ripped apart. I know it's not sensible to get so fond of a car, but it was special in ways that would come across as altogether sentimental, superstitious or fanciful if I were to outline them.  I shall never be that fond of a car again, and I had it for just three and a half years.

Anyway, we think we may have found its slightly bigger sister to take its place in Lamballe; another Saxo of the same vintage, and the same colour, but with four doors, which I guess is a bit more practical, especially for Mol to get in and out, and Tom's happy about it.  It's got lots of funny little naff details like a Cosworth fin and a snazzy steering wheel with Saxo in funky letters and flowery seat covers, which I'm hoping indicates a loving and caring owner, who says she's only selling it because she now needs to drive many more miles for work and needs something more substantial.  The price is pretty good without being suspiciously cheap. The main difference is that it's left hand drive, because it seems now really must be the time when I bite the bullet and learn how to drive one, I've wimped out  about it long enough.  I don't really feel very much like rising to any more challenges, but I hope by next week I might. I'll build up to it slowly, go out with Tom for practise drives at first and make sure we don't fall out.  It also means Tom can drive it, as we've always had a policy of he drives only his LHD car and I drive my RHD one, but that's rather limiting of options sometimes.  If it's good we'll buy it, and our friendly new garage people will help us with it.

But it won't be the same.

Nostalgie du béton

Jean-Paul finished his work for us last week.

It was messy, it's true, but there was much of interest to look at (I wouldn't necessarily include JP's back view in that...)

There were his ingredients,

and his bits of wood,

some of which were in fact our bits of wood, which he had helped himself to, for shuttering and wedging the scaffolding and this and that.  Rough-cut, coarse-grained, dry and cracked, crusted with mortar and stained (the wood, not JP.  Then again...).

The self-seeded pansy which had sprung from the base of the wall he soft-heartedly spared from trampling and death by concrete, by putting a bucket over it and working around it.

This is what the wall looked like when he had finished it, the grey will soften and lighten in time, like the lower part is here.

When he had finished the pointing, he laid a concrete floor under the lean-to barn, extending one we'd already started, which will eventually form the base for a proper shed.  We had been preparing this area for ages, collecting any rubble and waste we could as hard core for the base. This included all kinds of broken kitchen crocks: fragments of tea mugs, my old slow cooker pot which I'd had since student days and which cracked right round when I tried to slow roast garlic in it a year or two ago, Molly's red water bowl which was really to big and heavy and difficult to pick up for purpose but which I found in Noz in a pile all of which only had the letter 'M' on them, a beautiful hand-thrown fine tea bowl I found at a pottery fair.  All of these had history and affection attached, and the breakage and loss of them often occasioned real tears, but we found that being able to lay them to rest in the rubble for the shed base, so that we could continue to see them around for a bit and know they would still be integrated in the fabric of things, went quite some way towards mitigating the grief at their passing.  Perhaps that's why one finds so many bits of old pottery and china buried in gardens, people preferred to mingle them honourably with the clay of home, or something.

And he moved this stone into place to make the eventual step for the shed.  When we first moved to this house, fifteen years ago, there was a truly, monstrously, hideously (there is sometimes a case for over-egging the adverbial pudding) enormous brick fireplace in the middle of the main room.  It was perhaps early 20th century, no older, and it was painted with brick-red gloss paint.  We were told it was useless as a fireplace, it smoked and absorbed all the heat; the old people who lived here had a very smelly, leaky oil range which they supplied from a can which they filled from an oil tank at the back of the house - there was no back door either so they had to go out the front to the road and walk all the way around, but this was still preferable.  Tom smashed the old fireplace down with sledgehammer and pickaxe - the rubble from that went to form the floors in what are now the hall and my blue room - and when that had been laid low there remained the old hearth stone, which is what you see above.  We scrabbled at it like terriers, prized it out, and got it outside on rollers, where it stayed for some time.  One day some ladies from the tax office in Loudeac paid us a visit, since they refused to believe that after some three years or so, we were still living such a semi-derelict ruin as to be paying such pathetically low habitation tax, we must surely have owed them more...

They went away satisfied that indeed we did not owe them any more money, we really were living in a semi-derelict ruin, and as they pulled away, reversed into the old hearthstone and ripped open their rear tyre. They changed it with equanimity, and we didn't see them again.  We do now pay quite a bit more habitation tax, and live in rather more comfort.  The stone made its way to the back of the house at some point, from where JP moved it here to its final resting place.

The concrete as he laid it was lovely,

sleek and glossy and shining in the westering light like sand wetted by waves.

He finished most of it that evening, and just came back to finish the last chunk the next morning.

Towards lunchtime, he took the shuttering away to put the stone in place, came in for coffee and chocolate biscuits and payment, and went on his way.  After lunch I went outside with the camera.

New concrete.  Wet sand.  Virgin snow.  Irresistible.  I forgot myself, forgot everything I have learned in fifteen years as a bricoleur's mate, forgot common sense, even forgot that the last section had only been laid that morning, entranced and hypnotised as I was by the sweeping, cloudlike, watered-silk patterns in the new concrete.

Reader, I walked on it.  The prints of my vinyl sabots gave me away, and they will be there to remind me of my transgression for ever more.  Tom's incredulity was boundless; I walked on wet cement, and found myself in deep shit.

But I think it was worth it.

~

Kitchen, Breton clichés in onions and books, and a shadowy angel.

More from the diary of home improvements.  But it is something to be quite smug about: top cupboards all done. We got spice racks that hang on poles from Ickier-and-ickier, then my motley collection of ancient and encrusted old spice jars, reused jam jars etc didn't fit and really looked a bit yuk, so for the first time in my life I have a set of matching, spring clip spice jars (not from Ickier), all lined up and new and shiny.  My slight unease that I may have sold out my make-do and mend anti-consumerism, that I have descended into the final stages of Stepford wifedom and my brain has shrivelled to the size of a pistachio, is easily allayed by the sense of order and the quite immoderate delight I take in spring clips.  I didn't throw out the old spices, mind.  I observe that I own very few dried herbs, only really oregano and tarragon, preferring fresh ones.

The only cupboard remaining to be built is the one over the cooker hood. We had begun to hate the old cooker hood, which was quite a few years old now. It was noisy and inefficient, bits had broken off it, it had sharp edges inside which would cut us when we tried to clean it. Tom tore it down and took it to the tip. I understand steel, which it mostly was, is totally recyclable and recycled.  We got a new one, from aforesaid  Swedish-home-store-bent-on-world-domination-much-hated-by-many, with charcoal filters.  In the picture above it can be observed held in place by a piece of kitchen string, an interim arrangement.  It came with its own screws and rawl plugs, Tom began construction of the cupboard above it, removing the string, believing he could trust said fittings for a short time while he did so.  He stepped outside the door to cut a piece of wood, where I was already to be found, probably doing something pumpkin related or putting away the deckchair after an interlude under the sumac tree with a cup of tea and Mr Weston's Good Wine, for such is the indolent and whimsical life I lead while my husband toils to improve our worldly lot. 

We hurried inside when we heard the crash.  The hood lay prostrate on the cooker rings; it was still plugged in though the pins were rather bent, but the motor and even the bulb still worked.  Our beloved yellow tea pot, Tom's new china tea mug with the periodic table of the elements on it, and various other important, cherished or simply potentially messy items which were close by the scene of the catastrophe were mercifully untouched. A saucepan of peas defrosting on the cooker had been interestingly catapulted across the surrounding area, but there was no water in the pan, and they were easily picked up and rinsed, though one or two showed up in unexpected places later. Tom was mortified and could only see the calamity, while I could only imagine how much worse it could have been and felt rather silly with relief.  I don't tend to think of myself as a glass-half-fuller; I suppose if it had been something for which I had felt responsible it might have been different.

The screws turned out to be pathetically inadequate wood screws, and barely to make an impression in the ill -fitting rawl plugs.  They were replaced by something more fit for purpose, and as I write now, the whole structure is much advanced, the cupboard largely built and, like the rest of the kitchen for which Tom had sole responsibility, it is of industrial strength and solidity.

~

And while we're in the kitchen, I did the done thing with the Roscoff pinks, or the ones which were up for being kept, there were a few which were damp affected and needed to be used straight away.  It's not exactly a bicycle-handlebars' worth, but they're very good and satisfyingly strong-stemmed for plaiting.

~

Mr Weston's Good Wine. Though I'd read a few John Cowper Powys books over the years, and knew about this one by his brother Theodore, for some reason I'd never picked it up before, and can't remember quite how I came to decide to do so now, except I've long been fond of Salley Vickers' Mr Golightly's Holiday, but only lately understood its debt to Powys's earlier novel.  Though in an afterword Vickers acknowledges this debt, while asserting that the essential idea which they share came to her initially independently, I hadn't quite realised quite how much of an after type of work Mr Golightly is. I felt somewhat cheated, as the whole conceit of that book, which ideally one shouldn't spot immediately, but which once you do, makes you want to re-read it again to pick up all the previously unseen pointers, jokes and references (such as the line about how, within the firm, Michael was considered to be a 'perfect angel', which the first time I read it was unconsciously with the stress on the word 'angel', then, with hindsight, it shifts to the word 'perfect') seemed so original and surprising, whereas now I know that if I'd been acquainted with the earlier work I would have seen everything straight away and wouldn't have been so pleased and surprised. 

I  had a bit the same experience reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty before I read Howard's End.

This doesn't constitute a review, and is somewhat elliptical, I know, but I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't read the books but wants to.  I don't actually like trying to write reviews; picking up that Wiki link about Zadie Smith, or anything of the kind really, gives a glimpse into a world of ideas such as hystoriographical metafiction which I am too atrophied, dull and limited, and always was, to gain admittance.  Never mind, there are always kitchens and pumpkins.

I keep wondering whether to give up on contemporary literary fiction altogether.  One way or another I often seem to finish up feeling cheated and or unsatisfied, but then I'd miss out on so much too, cutting off my nose...

B the German doctor passed on a Joanne Harris, Coastliners.  I really wish she hadn't, I'd given up on her (JH) once but felt I ought to try again as a friend had offered it. Anyway, I just found this review of it which made me heave a sigh of relief that it wasn't just me who felt that way, but in the same sigh made me miserable that I didn't have the courage of my convictions, or couldn't have expressed them so forcefully, or that even perhaps I saw something of myself and what I do here as practising something of the same crass romanticising dishonesty ... 

Anyway, at least I didn't waste my time trying to finish it, and my excuse when I returned it was a genuine one, that I really can't cope with the strain of dialogue which is supposed to be in French in the story written in English.  I don't know how this can be done well, or at least to my satisfaction; it will either sound like it's written 'with a French accent', using words and idioms conveyed as transparently and literally as possible, which ends up sounding cod and self-conscious, or else you write in ordinary, colloquial English which is equally unconvincing because of course language isn't only about expressing the same ideas using different words, the words actually shape the ideas, people think differently, express things differently in different languages, or even different dialects or versions of the same language, which is why Americans writing as Brits and vice-versa can seldom quite pull it off.  I just keep finding myself thinking, yes but can you, would he, no you couldn't ever say that in French, or if so, how? It may be partly a block of my own; I'm frustrated that I wouldn't know how to say those things in French myself, and the strain is greatly increased when the characters concerned are Anglophone's supposedly speaking French amongst French people, so that a sense of jealously mingles with the unsuspended disbelief that they should achieve such a degree of mutual ease of expression and comprehension when I can't. Whatever, it gets in the way. It got in the way of my owning the conviction that Joanne Harris writes totally meretricious rubbish (at least in this book, and in the other French set novels of hers I've read, I quite liked that spooky Victorian Gothic pastiche she wrote before she got famous with her winning formulae), because I thought perhaps it was just my problem, and it perhaps gets in the way of my appreciating better writing when I can't get past it.

Don't know if this makes any sense, or if it matters or is of any interest. 

~

Jean-Paul has finished at last, and his work is beautiful.  More on that very soon.

~

Angel in the house.

~

Meddling with medlars,'and al was for an appil...'

The two medlar trees by a rather sombre, fairly modern house on a route I take every week are dropping so much fruit all about that no one seems to be collecting I was determined to try by fair means or foul to get hold of a reasonable quantity of it. So this week I stopped on my way home and somewhat trepidatiously took the steps up to the door at the side of the building which seemed to be the main entrance and rang the bell.  There were windows a-plenty open, and I was sure I heard movements and voices inside, but no one came, so I went back down and gathered an armload of dropped ones.  As I was doing so, a cheery group of bin men  stopped at the house.  A young black guy saw my haul and grinned, 

'What are they?' he asked

'Medlars (des nèfles)' his mates replied in chorus, and before I knew it they were all jumping down, picking up the fruit, chucking them about and engaging in an excited exchange about them with which I was eager to join in but I was a little afraid that all the brouhaha would draw the house's inhabitants out.  I repeated a couple of times that I had gone to the door to ask first...

'No, they aren't ripe, you can't eat them like that, you have to wait for them to rot...'

'Can you make jam with them then?' 

'What country are you from then?'

Etc etc.  Only in France, I'm inclined to think, would you end up in a discussion with a group of bin men on the gastronomic properties and virtues of medlars.  I scooped up another armful and tossed them into my basket in the car, and we went on our way, the bin men giving me a merry bip and a wave as I passed them.

The foraging bit between my teeth, I decided to stop at the sawmill and fill the boot with offcuts for firewood.  If you stop on the opposite side of the road from the mill itself, and only take from the piles of oddments, not the tied together bundles, it's free.  It's well seasoned and sometimes there are some very nice chunks. It's a bit grubby but my car's used to it.

That done, I walked Mol down the avenue of poplars and turkey oaks approaching the château of Bogard, then rang Tom to put the kettle on.  Just as I was approaching Beau Soleil, I thought the final cherry on the cake, as it were, would be to pick up one of the delicious-looking rosy apples that had been dropping on the verge there all this autumn to munch on the last leg of the journey home.  I pulled over, left the engine running, shut the door behind me, ran across the road, picked up three apples, ran back... and couldn't open the car door.

I had shut the buckle of the seat belt in it.  This happens quite frequently, perhaps because of the two-door Saxo's design, perhaps because I have to have my seat a long way forward, or perhaps, as was pointed out subsequently by our friendly, treasured, but sometimes annoyingly  know-it-all garage man M Turbin, because there is a rather clumsy velcro-attached thing on the belt to pad it against your shoulder, put there by the somewhat large people who had the car before me and which I've never taken off, which stops the belt from rolling back properly and makes it hang awkwardly. Hwever, it has never before resulted in jamming the mechanism of the door handle.

Everything, except for me and the apples, was in the car: keys, bag, mobile, Molly... the engine was running and the passenger door was locked.  The woman whose apples I had scrumped at this point leaned out of her window and looked curiously at me.

'I have a problem.'  I told her.

It was my greed (gourmandise, not quite greed as we scarcely reconstructed protestant Anglos know it, but I'll save the comparative semantics for now)  that has caused this, I confessed, I was stealing your apples.  This didn't seem to worry her, fortunately.  

'Hold on a minute and I'll get a wire.' she said, and came down with an unravelled coat hanger.  This didn't work.  Her arm was thinner than mine and she was nearly able to reach the button of the passenger door but not quite.  Molly barked a bit but happily didn't attempt to savage her, and let her stroke her nose through the opening.  Then she she said

'What about the boot*?' 

Why hadn't I thought of that?  Of course.  I opened the boot to reveal my haul of scruffy firewood.  Poor Englishwoman, she must have thought, reduced by the dismal exchange rate and the dwindling value of their savings to gathering old bits of wood and nicking apples.

'Would you like me to climb in?' my saviour asked kindly.  I assured her I could do it, scrambled in ungainly fashion over the wood and the back seat and asked her please to close the boot behind me.  The door proved to open perfectly well from the inside, the engine smelled a bit warm, Molly was pleased to see me and the tea was well brewed when I got in.  I confessed my sorry tale to Tom, who said 'Serves you right for scrumping', which Adam might well have said to Eve, I suppose.

Unfortunately, the door handle is broken, and M Turbin can't fix it till Tuesday, as he and all his suppliers are  'making the bridge' - taking a long weekend around a public holiday, so I am having to open the passenger door and lean across every time I want to get into the car, which is slightly less undignified that clambering in the boot.  All my frugality will be set at nought against the cost of the repair, I dare say, though our gallant garagist will always try to get a cheap salvaged part for us, which probably means I'll have a pillar box red door handle on my bottle green car, further to remind me of my folly (actually he said he's spray it for me if that happened, and perhaps it wouldn't be necessary if he could just rehook the mechanism, so fingers crossed).

~

Anyway, here are the medlars.

After research into the bletting process, I have arranged them on straw in an old winebox under cover in the woodstore, so I'll keep you posted as to their progress.

~

* trunk, if you're American.  This post seems to be one that almost requires a glossary.