Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Wednesday 12 September 2007
Over recent months I have enjoyed my free subscription to The London Review of Books, but had decided not to take out a subscription of my own as there always seemed to be so many other things I either wanted to read or felt I should read. So I threw the first two reduced subscription offers into the waste paper basket, before finding myself saying more than once to friends and family last week that I had read so many interesting articles in the LRB lately! Happily, I received a third offer, and quickly sent off my cheque, explaining all of the above. It is certainly very useful to read while travelling - even on the metro - as unlike a book it takes up virtually no room in my bag.
Apart from the articles and reviews, I enjoy the very entertaining small ads at the back and while reading my last free edition in bed this morning, came across one offering free accommodation in northern Tuscany during various winter months in return for looking after some cats. N and I agreed that this was just what we needed - as we currently have neither a house in Tuscany nor a cat - so I have sent off an e-mail asking for more information.
The weather continues bright and sunny, and is set to stay that way for a few more days, which is just as well as daughter Madeleine is arriving on Saturday for a short stay; we shall go on to Paris after she has left on Tuesday. We are still managing to have lunch in the garden on most days, while still appreciating the heating night and morning. No response from Monsieur A to my request for a service for the boiler, but Monsieur B the TV man is coming on Friday afternoon.
N is still busy in the second outhouse; he has temporarily left off plastering the walls in favour of repairing the door (says he likes being a carpenter more than a plasterer) which needs the whole bottom section replacing, as it was rotten. The rotten part - a replacement too - had the remains of a cat or dog hole in it. He has made several trips to Bricomarché at Conches to get more wood, plaster, glue, nails, and also more paintbrushes to replace those I finished off on Sunday.
Today I shall make Poule au Pot, as all the requisite vegetables - potatoes, carrots, turnips, shallots and leeks - are now available in the garden.
Thursday 13 September 2007
Poule au Pot was good, apart from some strange thickening agent which gave it the appearance of semolina. We ate the remaining sauce and vegetables for lunch in the garden today, and afterwards sat out in our chairs until it got too hot! Why it can’t have been like this in the summer proper, I don’t know. The weather reminded me of two years ago, just before I left Cambridge when it was warm like this, and I remember going home for lunch in the garden very briefly when N was there, before going off for a final visit to the solicitor.
This morning N took down (almost) all the various onions and shallots from where they had been drying in the sun, and we sat at the little garden table and rubbed off all the dry skins and long dry shoots and put them in various flat baskets to store in the outhouse. There are more than last year and I don’t think we’ll need to buy any more for a long time. Must think about making onion soup too, to use our special « Gratinée » dishes. I took photos of the two baskets; the square one looked especially decorative, with onions of four different sizes and colours. It was a very pleasant rural activity, and seemed somehow particularly French to be sitting in the sun preparing onions in Normandy; N said is this how I thought living in France would be, and I had to admit I didn’t really know.
N has been thinking about taking the slightly broken red Italian garden chair to Monsieur P the carpenter to see if it can be repaired, and we have since decided we should ask him to replace the little broken window frame in the second outhouse and (considerably more expensive) replace the door to the verandah. The latter is really ugly and badly fitting, and since we have improved so many other aspects of the verandah it just looks worse and worse.
Tuesday 18 September 2007
Friday afternoon was very eventful. We were expecting Monsieur B the TV man; N was busy plastering in the outhouse and I made an apple cake ready for our guest the next day. This left only one egg, so I decided to go to the traiteur to get some more in time for Saturday breakfast, and at the same time to see whether the Quincaillerie stocked the salt tablets we need for our water purifier. These are like giant moth balls, and we had just finished up the two sacks we’d had six months ago when we had the purifier installed.
They had some of different brand, and I said that was fine, we would come and get them one day in the car (they are very heavy) but the chap said as it wasn’t far he would bring them. I paid and we both set off with the shop wheelbarrow; I said I needed to stop at the traiteur on the way, and he said he would take the receipt (to some depot down an alley!) and see me outside the traiteur in five minutes. I got my eggs and waited, and eventually he showed up with the sacks in his barrow, and then went off down the road at amazing pace, with me trying to keep up. He brought them all the way round to the verandah door, and then set off again with his empty barrow - I wondered if I should have given him a tip. N helped me get them into the boiler room and we both sat down in the garden chairs in the sunshine for a rest, and although it was still early I made some tea.
While we were sitting there drinking it we heard strange gurgling noises from the drain; the dishwasher was empting itself after my baking and under the grating it seemed to be blocked just as it had been last year. N said perhaps we shouldn’t open the trap to inspect things just as Monsieur B was expected with a large TV set, as he could easily fall in! Monsieur B then arrived with our set and N took him round to the grande pièce (he refused a cup of tea) and after a few minutes he came out again still with the same set - apparently it had worked fine in his workshop, but once chez nous again still had the same problem - the black band at the top and bottom of the screen. So he took it away again with many apologies, and we still have his large screen TV set! (Which I think is much better.)
N then opened the trap on the terrace to inspect the drain underneath; there was indeed a blockage and the pit seemed to be full of some kind of gunge which he removed with a spade into several of the (very convenient) plastic cement pots. This seemed a little disappointing given our expensive water purifying treatment.
This went on and off all weekend; the blockage seemed to be further along under the lawn in front of the « gardener‘s door ». Madeleine arrived on Saturday afternoon by a later train having missed the earlier one by a minute (buying tickets slowed her down) and we eventually collected her at Bernay mid-afternoon. The sunshine wasn’t quite as good as on Thursday and Friday, but we managed tea in the garden, and tours of the potager and outhouses. Although she had been to La Neuve-Lyre twice before, she had never seen the house or garden in the summer.
We had fondue bourguignonne for dinner in the grande pièce; much appreciated by all especially M who had never had it before and was taken with the set of little sauces in jars and got some at the village shop to take home. She brought us a very fine chocolate and orange cake and a little box of chocolates from Vienna where she had been working the week before. On Sunday morning we all went to a conveniently near foire à tout at Conches, under the tall trees near the market. M bought a « Pastis 51 » glass café carafe, N bought two little mirrors: a Martini one and a pretty ornate wooden framed one, and I got two more books of Promenades en Normandie to make up our set; we already had Flaubert and Proust and I then found Maupassant and Hugo. There were all the usual bizarre items for sale - washbasins, beds, pet cages, books, coffee cups, and also some little black puppies in a box.
We hurried home to get lunch in the garden - a previously bought chicken in a bag, roast potatoes, stuffing, gravy, carrots and spinach also from the garden, and Christmas pudding! Certainly the first time any of us had eaten Christmas pudding in the garden.
(This was the third of the four puddings I made last summer; the fourth one is for next Christmas.) Afterwards we had coffee in the salon and began reading The Wind in the Willows, having finished Beowulf the week before, luckily for Madeleine. The rest of the day we spent watching TV and DVDs, more eating, drinking and sitting around. The weather forecast on Sunday evening promised rain and cloud for Monday, and I was sure we had had our last garden lunch of the season. M and I planned to go to Rouen for the day (kindly driven to and from Bernay station by N; not before I had phoned Monsieur A and explained about the urgency of the blocked drain - he said Guillaume would come at 8.00 on Tuesday morning) but it seemed quite fine as we left, so M didn’t wear a jacket and I didn’t take my umbrella.
This was a mistake - after only a few kilometres we saw stations with wet platforms and by the time we reached Rouen there was thick mist and steady rain. I hadn’t seen any rain for three weeks so for a few minutes it was almost a novelty! I bought a cheap umbrella on the grounds that the one I had used so much in Britain in May had broken. M bought a cardigan but didn’t put it on.
It was all so different from the visits in April with Steve and Phil and then with Bobbie and Guthrie. Where there had been tables and chairs in the sunshine in front of the cathedral there were only rain covered cobblestones, and people hurrying to and fro under umbrellas. We did find an excellent restaurant for lunch however on the cathedral square; an old established one where I was able to have Simone de Beauvoir’s favourite salad from 1937, and very good it was too.
We spent most of the rest of the afternoon rushing from shop to shop under our umbrellas and spending time in department stores, instead of - as I had hoped - relaxing outside pavement cafés looking at buildings and watching the people. We did manage to get most of what we had gone for though; I wanted a new largish white tea-tray which M bought me as a (very) late birthday present, together with a little brush and pan for sweeping bread crumbs off the dinner table. She got a teapot to go with her teacups, and some kitchen tins; and we both shopped in Sephora and in a very nice card shop, where I was also able to get things for N’s impending birthday.
We got the 6 o’clock train back (a nice modern one again) and N was there to meet us at Bernay in the pouring rain. His news was that he had made Coronation Chicken for dinner from yesterday’s leftovers and that Guillaume had turned up during the afternoon and started work on the drain. There was indeed a blockage further along, which might possibly entail digging a trench along the front garden as far as the road! The « gunge » under the trap was apparently normal; Guillaume said it should be emptied once a year. We thought this rather odd, but perhaps it is because it’s a very old house with old plumbing.
This morning both Guillaume and Monsieur A came early and worked on the pipes. N followed them round watching, encouraging and helping. They brought some high-powered pipe washing equipment which dislodged the blockage (due to cleaning wipes which were supposed to be flushable, but obviously weren’t) so there was no need for any trenches across the garden, at least today. They also found a broken pipe by the verandah door, which might explain why the rhododendrons never grew properly at that end, and why we have some wet patches inside on certain walls inside, and also the reason for the hitherto unexplained nasty drain smells we have from time to time. It was also discovered that the down pipe for the rain off the main roof just went straight into the ground, with no proper exit for the water.
The broken sewage pipe by the verandah door caused even nastier smells in all three bathrooms for a while, and in all the rest of the downstairs, but by the end of the morning it had been mended and all the excavated earth put back. Monsieur A had taken notes and gone away to prepare an estimate for having the rainwater from the down pipe properly channelled, and all was finished for today. This was a relief as weren’t sure whether we would be able to leave for Saint-Denis tomorrow, in time for the chimney sweep and the opera on Thursday! N is still reminding him about the replacement trap/manhole cover on the terrace and the service for the central heating.
While all this was going on Madeleine helped me clean the garden furniture and try to put it away for the winter in the studio, as the Box Office - where it went last winter - is still undergoing a makeover. It was all a great success except for the large table; even when we had taken the middle leaf out with some difficulty, the wide legs just wouldn’t go through the narrow door, so it had to go in the Box Office after all, and will just had to be moved around as necessary. The smaller « luxury garden furniture » is still on the terrace for a while, and hopefully will have been replaced by next summer. N’s new doorstep withstood yesterday’s rain well. Of course now we have put the garden furniture away, it is nice and sunny! Not really warm, but a pity it wasn’t like this yesterday.
After a quick and early lunch, Madeleine left by the 1.16 train from Conches, and we came back here for a quiet afternoon, with no-one digging up the garden, and no nasty smells. N even found time to put up the « Sonnez SVP » notice by the front gate bell; and we had tea from our new tray complete with Austrian chocolate cake.
Over recent months I have enjoyed my free subscription to The London Review of Books, but had decided not to take out a subscription of my own as there always seemed to be so many other things I either wanted to read or felt I should read. So I threw the first two reduced subscription offers into the waste paper basket, before finding myself saying more than once to friends and family last week that I had read so many interesting articles in the LRB lately! Happily, I received a third offer, and quickly sent off my cheque, explaining all of the above. It is certainly very useful to read while travelling - even on the metro - as unlike a book it takes up virtually no room in my bag.
Apart from the articles and reviews, I enjoy the very entertaining small ads at the back and while reading my last free edition in bed this morning, came across one offering free accommodation in northern Tuscany during various winter months in return for looking after some cats. N and I agreed that this was just what we needed - as we currently have neither a house in Tuscany nor a cat - so I have sent off an e-mail asking for more information.
The weather continues bright and sunny, and is set to stay that way for a few more days, which is just as well as daughter Madeleine is arriving on Saturday for a short stay; we shall go on to Paris after she has left on Tuesday. We are still managing to have lunch in the garden on most days, while still appreciating the heating night and morning. No response from Monsieur A to my request for a service for the boiler, but Monsieur B the TV man is coming on Friday afternoon.
N is still busy in the second outhouse; he has temporarily left off plastering the walls in favour of repairing the door (says he likes being a carpenter more than a plasterer) which needs the whole bottom section replacing, as it was rotten. The rotten part - a replacement too - had the remains of a cat or dog hole in it. He has made several trips to Bricomarché at Conches to get more wood, plaster, glue, nails, and also more paintbrushes to replace those I finished off on Sunday.
Today I shall make Poule au Pot, as all the requisite vegetables - potatoes, carrots, turnips, shallots and leeks - are now available in the garden.
Thursday 13 September 2007
Poule au Pot was good, apart from some strange thickening agent which gave it the appearance of semolina. We ate the remaining sauce and vegetables for lunch in the garden today, and afterwards sat out in our chairs until it got too hot! Why it can’t have been like this in the summer proper, I don’t know. The weather reminded me of two years ago, just before I left Cambridge when it was warm like this, and I remember going home for lunch in the garden very briefly when N was there, before going off for a final visit to the solicitor.
This morning N took down (almost) all the various onions and shallots from where they had been drying in the sun, and we sat at the little garden table and rubbed off all the dry skins and long dry shoots and put them in various flat baskets to store in the outhouse. There are more than last year and I don’t think we’ll need to buy any more for a long time. Must think about making onion soup too, to use our special « Gratinée » dishes. I took photos of the two baskets; the square one looked especially decorative, with onions of four different sizes and colours. It was a very pleasant rural activity, and seemed somehow particularly French to be sitting in the sun preparing onions in Normandy; N said is this how I thought living in France would be, and I had to admit I didn’t really know.
N has been thinking about taking the slightly broken red Italian garden chair to Monsieur P the carpenter to see if it can be repaired, and we have since decided we should ask him to replace the little broken window frame in the second outhouse and (considerably more expensive) replace the door to the verandah. The latter is really ugly and badly fitting, and since we have improved so many other aspects of the verandah it just looks worse and worse.
Tuesday 18 September 2007
Friday afternoon was very eventful. We were expecting Monsieur B the TV man; N was busy plastering in the outhouse and I made an apple cake ready for our guest the next day. This left only one egg, so I decided to go to the traiteur to get some more in time for Saturday breakfast, and at the same time to see whether the Quincaillerie stocked the salt tablets we need for our water purifier. These are like giant moth balls, and we had just finished up the two sacks we’d had six months ago when we had the purifier installed.
They had some of different brand, and I said that was fine, we would come and get them one day in the car (they are very heavy) but the chap said as it wasn’t far he would bring them. I paid and we both set off with the shop wheelbarrow; I said I needed to stop at the traiteur on the way, and he said he would take the receipt (to some depot down an alley!) and see me outside the traiteur in five minutes. I got my eggs and waited, and eventually he showed up with the sacks in his barrow, and then went off down the road at amazing pace, with me trying to keep up. He brought them all the way round to the verandah door, and then set off again with his empty barrow - I wondered if I should have given him a tip. N helped me get them into the boiler room and we both sat down in the garden chairs in the sunshine for a rest, and although it was still early I made some tea.
While we were sitting there drinking it we heard strange gurgling noises from the drain; the dishwasher was empting itself after my baking and under the grating it seemed to be blocked just as it had been last year. N said perhaps we shouldn’t open the trap to inspect things just as Monsieur B was expected with a large TV set, as he could easily fall in! Monsieur B then arrived with our set and N took him round to the grande pièce (he refused a cup of tea) and after a few minutes he came out again still with the same set - apparently it had worked fine in his workshop, but once chez nous again still had the same problem - the black band at the top and bottom of the screen. So he took it away again with many apologies, and we still have his large screen TV set! (Which I think is much better.)
N then opened the trap on the terrace to inspect the drain underneath; there was indeed a blockage and the pit seemed to be full of some kind of gunge which he removed with a spade into several of the (very convenient) plastic cement pots. This seemed a little disappointing given our expensive water purifying treatment.
This went on and off all weekend; the blockage seemed to be further along under the lawn in front of the « gardener‘s door ». Madeleine arrived on Saturday afternoon by a later train having missed the earlier one by a minute (buying tickets slowed her down) and we eventually collected her at Bernay mid-afternoon. The sunshine wasn’t quite as good as on Thursday and Friday, but we managed tea in the garden, and tours of the potager and outhouses. Although she had been to La Neuve-Lyre twice before, she had never seen the house or garden in the summer.
We had fondue bourguignonne for dinner in the grande pièce; much appreciated by all especially M who had never had it before and was taken with the set of little sauces in jars and got some at the village shop to take home. She brought us a very fine chocolate and orange cake and a little box of chocolates from Vienna where she had been working the week before. On Sunday morning we all went to a conveniently near foire à tout at Conches, under the tall trees near the market. M bought a « Pastis 51 » glass café carafe, N bought two little mirrors: a Martini one and a pretty ornate wooden framed one, and I got two more books of Promenades en Normandie to make up our set; we already had Flaubert and Proust and I then found Maupassant and Hugo. There were all the usual bizarre items for sale - washbasins, beds, pet cages, books, coffee cups, and also some little black puppies in a box.
We hurried home to get lunch in the garden - a previously bought chicken in a bag, roast potatoes, stuffing, gravy, carrots and spinach also from the garden, and Christmas pudding! Certainly the first time any of us had eaten Christmas pudding in the garden.
(This was the third of the four puddings I made last summer; the fourth one is for next Christmas.) Afterwards we had coffee in the salon and began reading The Wind in the Willows, having finished Beowulf the week before, luckily for Madeleine. The rest of the day we spent watching TV and DVDs, more eating, drinking and sitting around. The weather forecast on Sunday evening promised rain and cloud for Monday, and I was sure we had had our last garden lunch of the season. M and I planned to go to Rouen for the day (kindly driven to and from Bernay station by N; not before I had phoned Monsieur A and explained about the urgency of the blocked drain - he said Guillaume would come at 8.00 on Tuesday morning) but it seemed quite fine as we left, so M didn’t wear a jacket and I didn’t take my umbrella.
This was a mistake - after only a few kilometres we saw stations with wet platforms and by the time we reached Rouen there was thick mist and steady rain. I hadn’t seen any rain for three weeks so for a few minutes it was almost a novelty! I bought a cheap umbrella on the grounds that the one I had used so much in Britain in May had broken. M bought a cardigan but didn’t put it on.
It was all so different from the visits in April with Steve and Phil and then with Bobbie and Guthrie. Where there had been tables and chairs in the sunshine in front of the cathedral there were only rain covered cobblestones, and people hurrying to and fro under umbrellas. We did find an excellent restaurant for lunch however on the cathedral square; an old established one where I was able to have Simone de Beauvoir’s favourite salad from 1937, and very good it was too.
We spent most of the rest of the afternoon rushing from shop to shop under our umbrellas and spending time in department stores, instead of - as I had hoped - relaxing outside pavement cafés looking at buildings and watching the people. We did manage to get most of what we had gone for though; I wanted a new largish white tea-tray which M bought me as a (very) late birthday present, together with a little brush and pan for sweeping bread crumbs off the dinner table. She got a teapot to go with her teacups, and some kitchen tins; and we both shopped in Sephora and in a very nice card shop, where I was also able to get things for N’s impending birthday.
We got the 6 o’clock train back (a nice modern one again) and N was there to meet us at Bernay in the pouring rain. His news was that he had made Coronation Chicken for dinner from yesterday’s leftovers and that Guillaume had turned up during the afternoon and started work on the drain. There was indeed a blockage further along, which might possibly entail digging a trench along the front garden as far as the road! The « gunge » under the trap was apparently normal; Guillaume said it should be emptied once a year. We thought this rather odd, but perhaps it is because it’s a very old house with old plumbing.
This morning both Guillaume and Monsieur A came early and worked on the pipes. N followed them round watching, encouraging and helping. They brought some high-powered pipe washing equipment which dislodged the blockage (due to cleaning wipes which were supposed to be flushable, but obviously weren’t) so there was no need for any trenches across the garden, at least today. They also found a broken pipe by the verandah door, which might explain why the rhododendrons never grew properly at that end, and why we have some wet patches inside on certain walls inside, and also the reason for the hitherto unexplained nasty drain smells we have from time to time. It was also discovered that the down pipe for the rain off the main roof just went straight into the ground, with no proper exit for the water.
The broken sewage pipe by the verandah door caused even nastier smells in all three bathrooms for a while, and in all the rest of the downstairs, but by the end of the morning it had been mended and all the excavated earth put back. Monsieur A had taken notes and gone away to prepare an estimate for having the rainwater from the down pipe properly channelled, and all was finished for today. This was a relief as weren’t sure whether we would be able to leave for Saint-Denis tomorrow, in time for the chimney sweep and the opera on Thursday! N is still reminding him about the replacement trap/manhole cover on the terrace and the service for the central heating.
While all this was going on Madeleine helped me clean the garden furniture and try to put it away for the winter in the studio, as the Box Office - where it went last winter - is still undergoing a makeover. It was all a great success except for the large table; even when we had taken the middle leaf out with some difficulty, the wide legs just wouldn’t go through the narrow door, so it had to go in the Box Office after all, and will just had to be moved around as necessary. The smaller « luxury garden furniture » is still on the terrace for a while, and hopefully will have been replaced by next summer. N’s new doorstep withstood yesterday’s rain well. Of course now we have put the garden furniture away, it is nice and sunny! Not really warm, but a pity it wasn’t like this yesterday.
After a quick and early lunch, Madeleine left by the 1.16 train from Conches, and we came back here for a quiet afternoon, with no-one digging up the garden, and no nasty smells. N even found time to put up the « Sonnez SVP » notice by the front gate bell; and we had tea from our new tray complete with Austrian chocolate cake.
# posted by Chez Katherine @ 7:24 AM 
