April 2006

Garden

The garden is looking, even if I say so myself, very nice indeed. The combination of sun and rain is making the grass grow at a rate of knots and it needs mowing more than once a week. However, as I am boss here, it only gets mowed on Fridays.


Shed base

Major building work of the month was completing the base for the new abris de jardin (garden shed to those non French speakers out there). Sharon and I worked very hard and it looks great. Need something to seal the concrete before the shed arrives. Any advice in this regard would be greatly appreciated. It looks likely that we will use bitumen.



Renovation of The Barn

Went to see a conservatory built by Andrew the conservatory man. Just the job – exactly what we were looking for. We had to ask for a revised devis (estimate) as the architect plans are ambiguous (regular readers will not be surprised by this) and after careful measuring, it needs to be 5.5 metres long not 6.3 metres.

Agreed a start date with the builder – June 5th. Lets hope the Bank stumps up the money in time.

Proof, if proof were needed, That VaF is back to being a building site.

New friends / Golf partners

We have recently made some new friends here in France. They are Martin & Helen from Montpinchon and David & Sandra from St Denis le Vetu. Nice people and they play golf! We have had two round so far, one at Brehal and on at Periers. Played crap at first but my swing is slowly coming back to normal. There are not many practice facilities here so I have ordered a “David Letterman Swing Setter” from Ebay. The swing setter is a type of club with balls spaced out on the shaft. If you swing correctly the balls click together, good swing-click click, bad swing - no click. I will let you know how I get on.


Top field / horse

Unlikely as it seems I have just had a bit of good luck. I have started cutting the top field with the ultimate aim of having it as part of the garden. Martin (mentioned previously) kindly lent me his bush-cutter as my strimmer is a bit under powered for the job and would have taken me a month of Fridays to finish the job. If you thought that the simile should be ‘month of Sunday’s you would be correct, only there is an unwritten law here that you don’t use noisy machinery on a Sunday, so I mow on Fridays.
Anyway, Sunday afternoon we had a visit from a local farmer who asked if he could graze his horse on the field. What a turn up. I don’t have to cut the grass as the horse will eat it all and Sharon gets a new pet to play with.

Holiday / cup final / Sharon’s birthday/ Mick Laws

Off to Tenerife with Marg & Brian on Thursday. Looking forward to relaxing for a week in the sun. After the holiday we will be staying a couple of days in England to see the family (not). West Ham are in the cup final in Cardiff – guess where all my lot are? Yep, Cardiff. I will especially miss seeing young Jake. We will also miss his 2nd birthday party (bouncy castle) as we will be in Tenerife. Oh well.
Mike Laws even phoned from Australia to see if I had any tickets – he was quite prepared to fly over for the cup final. Tickets are scarce, but more importantly, it’s Sharon’s 50th birthday on May 13th (cup final day) . She doesn’t want a party of fuss made so we are going for a meal in a restaurant just outside Cambridge with Marg & Brian, Pete & Sue Bradley (now home from Florida) and Mick & Carol. Looking forward to it.


xxx