life in the Limousin

BOUNDARIES SHOULD NOT MATTER.

I presume we are still entitled to contribute to the Blog regarding life in the Limousin, because our intention is to move to St Pardoux La Riviere which is in the north Dordogne. For those who have not experienced the delight of this lovely part of France, the border between the Haute Vienne part of the Limousin region and the Dordogne part of Aquitaine, is only about 5 miles from the house we are renting.

Yesterday our neighbours, Sue and Lester showed us around their holiday home, a barn conversion by Dig It. Ann and I were very impressed with the layout and quality of workmanship. The house we are renting is I believe a former farm cottage, done up to modern standards by Matt and his team, and when we leave it will be on the open market. The adjoining cottage is now vacant and if, as seems probable, it was to be incorporated with our cottage would make a very unique property indeed, with room for a garage and swimming pool, with one of the finest views anywhere.

When Helen instructs us ‘old timers’ how to post photographs with our blog, you should be able to see our meaning.

Driving home to Bort tonight from the building site at St Pardoux, was again a delight, made even more so by the magnificent sight of a whole flock of Red Kites enjoying a thermal.

The house at St Pardoux La Riviere is now coming on in leaps and bounds. We did however take a little diversion yesterday to visit a garden centre in St Junien, which is equal to the best in the UK, and we bought 4 small goldfish for our new pond. Does anyone know if they will survive a water temperature of 70F? It was that hot today.

We have made quite a few French acquaintances in St Pardoux, and for that matter in the small hamlet of Bort, however it was not until yesterday we realized that many French will not communicate with you other that to say ‘Bonjour’, because they believe you do not understand a word of French. We were asked by one of our neighbours in St Pardoux, ‘vous comprenez Francais’? Once you make the effort a whole new world opens up.

Apparently Helen was not impressed with my comment on the grey, perhaps I can show her what I mean, or maybe it is our screen, but here is a broadside Helen, your photograph on the home page surely would be better showing one of your lovely properties, or at least some of this gorgeous countryside?

I don’t know how much time I have to write but I’ll try and get something down anyway whilst the kids are eating and Matt is down at the bar in Champsac.. He’s just called to say that he’s met an old friend, amongst the hundreds of people who have congregated there, it being the night for the fish and chip van, and has just had a beer but is on his way back. That was over an hour ago so I think it’s fair to say that he won’t be back anytime soon!
Sadly we won’t be partaking of a fish and chips supper ourselves, due to straightened financial circumstances, and are having Ikea meatballs instead, which were kindly brought back from Bordeaux yesterday by Donald. As they had already defrosted I am having to cook them all at the same time and it looks as if the kids will be living on meatballs and spaghetti for the next few weeks - which is a result.
I am supposed to be trying to get some designs down for an eco-house for a Dutch couple who are interested in having one built at the land at Les Ollieres. It was originally going to be completely buried in the earth with just the south east facing wall, which looks over the lake, in glass but having had our inaugural meeting with Niall, our resident expert and architect of 25 years, who is hands on with the project, it appears that our scribbles will need tweaking.
We’ve been at it for days now and it just seems to be getting more and more complicated the further into it we get, with so many potential choices of materials to consider. Looking through contemporary house design magazines for inspiration isn’t helping either as the budget has now increased by about 500% as a consequence of the ludicrously expensive fittings that absolutely must be in there…..! I have now dug out the Ikea catalogue which is much more realistic.
Anyway Matt’s back now so it’s time to get back to the stove. Probably no blog tomorrow evening as it’s work all day and then people round to eat afterwards.
Here are the rest of the photos from the the trip up north ( and you’ll probably be pleased to hear the last of them) which include: yet another wood sculpture, a photo of us having aperitifs on the terrace with the people who put Alfie up during the festival and a snap taken in the B+B hotel just before we left. I felt that everyone ought to be able to put a bed to a name.
You may/may not be interested to learn that said beds were a sheet of MDF with a mattress on top and didn’t make for the most comfortable night’s sleep ….and that on top of the horrific heat.

Sorry about a technical hitch that prevented me posting my blog last night..that being that I didnt remember the new log on details but as it took me ages to compile this drivel youre getting it tonight whether its wanted or not!

This week’s contribution is going to be brief and probably a bit disjointed for a number of reasons. Firstly, I have to put the chickens away….done that,  bring the washing in, done that, feed the horses….done that, fly masks off, done that, feed Tess and Romey, done that, water plants……. maybe later,  cook dinner,… I might just have a glass of vin rouge instead, watch footy on telly,….. ok, now I can concentrate.

Rozzy has flown back to the UK today for a cash-accumulating trip hence the list of things for me to do. Normally we share these tasks but as I have been out working for a while Roz has been in charge of all things domestic. Her day will be every bit as busy as mine and just as long so for me to fit both occupations into one day is going to be a challenge I shan’t even try to meet….cue large bowl of washing up and rammed full laundry bin.

We finally fitted our new doors at the weekend. I started building them last September so the celebration of their “opening” ( and closing, several times) certainly warranted the cheap bottle of bubbly that Roz got from the supermarket. Its flavour was enhanced by satisfaction of the completed job and the glow of early evening sunshine on our faces as we sat back in our garden chairs getting ever so excited about at last having double-glazing in one of our ten opening. As you see there is still some way to go before sub zero temperatures in our bedroom can be avoided and presently winter is sufficiently far from current not to have to give it too much thought….although I do have to order some firewood from Monsieur Bushes ( no, that’s not his real name, that’s what it translates to in English but I can never remember the French word for bushes)

I have to report now another fantastic example of French ness. On my way to work the other morning I stopped to buy some bread for my lunch at the flashing neon lighted 8 til 8 store in Piegut…..it didn’t open til nine, shut between  twelve and two then closed again at seven and didn’t open at all on Wednesdays. Is it just me or are they missing the point of a business called 8 til Huit. I guess a shop named “open at nine, shut between  twelve and two then closed again at seven and dont open at all on Wednesdays” was never going to work.

Piegut  incidentally, is pronounced pee ayy goo and not “pie gut” as I and many others I expect called it for a few weeks until we heard how to say it properly. Its not that I really thought it would be pronounced pie gut but its much more fun than making some vaguely French sounding guess at pronunciation. I enjoy irritating our Francophile friend by regularly and childishly referring to Le Penas ( lur pena) as Le penis. Our local village Chalus,(shalloo) is often referred to as Chalus , Ch (as in in church) alas, as in Smith and Jones, as it was unwittingly renamed by our brummie mate They never seem to sound how you expect them to. In fairness no-one is ever going to be sure that Rochechouart is simply a Chinese persons attempt to say Rod Stewart or a town in France called rosh – sher-shwah . A local town, Aixe-sur vienne seems to cause near ructions amongst us Brits. The sur vienne bit is not a problem but the Aixe, which I personally pronounce aches, can be heard as axe, ixe, ikes and probably several other permutaions. Its all very confusing, lets not even get started with La Chapelle Montbrandeix or Exiceduil. On a slightly different tack, a hamlet we drove past today was called Chevre Mort which, although quite easy to say, I think means dead goat ….I may well be wrong ….answers on a post card please

The Brits are down and aperitif season proper is about to commence - right here right now. In which case tonight’s blog is made up entirely of photos.

This is where we found one of the only parking spaces left when we arrived in the town of La Bresse after crossing the mountains of hell. We were all keeping our eyes peeled for Alfie and then realised that we had parked directly opposite.
Second photo is of Davide’s winning sculpture carved in wood. You could buy a raffle ticket for 2€ and mark on it the piece you wanted to win. The winning ticket then won the winning sculpture. Sadly only the wooden ones could be voted for, so there was no chance of Alfie’s winning - although I think it was clear from the first who was going to be taking home the prize.

This is a nother wooden one by another Italian. As you can see non of the end products were finished in time and looked nothing like the original pictures. In fact there was alot of moaning going on by most of them that there wasn’t enough time - but I think if there’d been a little less partying of a nighttime…. honestly, artists nowadays….

This is one of Alfie’s. I didn’t realise until we’d got back that I’d hardly taken any of his as there always seemed to be people in the way. We left after having a buffet lunch with him, which was laid on for all the participants and left him to finish as they all had to stop at 4pm. We went off, desperate to find some shade and happened upon this lake about 2mins down the road. Thankfully Louis went off to watch 2 boys fishing and so peace was had by all for an hour.


That’s all for today. I’m now off to rustle up some aperitif nibbles. I mean by that of course hopefully finding an old bag of crisps at the back of the cupboard.

Finally our endless weekend journey has brought us back to the Limousin and for once we’re not moaning about there not being enough sun.
We had left on Friday expecting it to be colder up north but forgot to take any coats all the same, as the weather was warm here when we set off. It was only when we hit the Massif Central that we realised that we may have made a mistake when the temperature plummeted and we had to put the heater on in the car. Twenty minutes later, however, and temperatures started soaring again and only got hotter the whole time that we were there.
The journey was torturously long and Louis talked the whole way. The only eventful thing that happened in the whole 7 hours, and it wasn’t really that entertaining, was the continuous tatoo of suicidal butterflies on the windscreen. There were literally clouds of them floating out of the bushes by the roadside and splattering in bright orange powder on the glass in their hundreds. After about an hour it was like looking at some Hirstian/Pollock collaboration, until Matt tried to get rid of them with the windscreen washers and it all turned a bit Francis Bacon and rendered driving in anything other than a crouch almost impossible First stop when we had unpacked at the B+B Hotel in Belfort then was a trip to the shops to buy some multi- purpose wipes which successfully removed all traces of the massacre before we all went off to eat at the ‘reciprocal restaurant’ which was this time Courtepaille ( which translates as short straw) and obviously refers to those choosing the eponymous sauce to go with their steak. It was described as mustard based but what they didn’t mention is that it’s made not out of Dijon but the special ‘must de raisins’ mustard which is with the other condiments on the table and is made out of the remains of pressed grapes. Although purple in colour and quite pretty to look at it tastes horrific. I should really be singing it’s praises because bizarrely it is made at the Deslouis factory in our village of Champsac and other varieties have won awards as far a field as America. In fact just about everything we’ve ever bought which is made by them from mustards to vinaigres and their special ‘bouquets’ which is a mixture of concentrated fruit juice and vinaigre – which Matt uses to make his Saturday speciality of duck with apple jus- is fantastic. All except the purple one that is.
That evening non of us could sleep as it was so hot, although we were fortunate in being able to open the windows? as no one seemed to be using the motorway which was only about 20m away from our room. It turned out, when Matt asked the receptionist about it the next day, that the clima wasn’t working, but that a man was going to be coming out to fix it tomorrow. It sounds like an old tale familiar from our first stay at a B+B in Orange when we had no hot water. In fact they were the exact same words - but then it was the plumber.
Still at least the shower was working this time…………..
Here is a picture of an Alsace roof – although from the others we passed on our journey in no way typical.

This one is of the Ballon d’Alsace which we had to cross the next morning in order to get to La Bresse, where the sculpting festival was. An other tortureous climb up steep hills to 1200m and at the top a man who was about to do some parapenting. A small crowd had gathered, god knows where they came from, and the wind kept getting up and getting his strings in a twist just as he was about to take off. He was close to being swept over the edge on a couple of occassions and in the end he gathered it all back in and sat there in a strop waiting for everyone to go away.

This last photo of the evening - I’ve got loads left for the rest of the week, dont worry! - is of what looks like a primary school project but was actually a story board made up for each of the sculptors with information on where they’d come from. Here you will see just what the English are renowned for, in French eyes, taxis, Alfred Hitchcock and beefeaters - as well as the people’s princess lurking there in the bottom corner with the Beatles. No doubt they now think there to be Amish farmers over there too after that photo of Alfie at the top

Staircase moving!

A very short blog today, as it is 10.30pm and Ann has volunteered to write it as Robin is exhausted after a busy week and just now cutting the grass (again) at Bort.

We started the week moving a very heavy oak staircase, which had come out of a house in Oradour Sur Vayres, from the shed in Bort where it had been since Matt and an army of helpers put it there earlier this year for us, to St Pardoux where it is now in position in our new kitchen.

As there were only the two of us to do this job, it needed a lot of ingenuity on Robins’ part to achieve it. So with two wheelbarrow wheels attached to an axle fixed to the center of the stair, which meant we could push it out of the shed, a bit of jacking up one end and then a block and tackle, we managed to get it onto Matts’ tipper truck he very kindly lent us. That makes it sound much easier than it was, it took about 3 hours and a bit of cursing along the way, but we felt very pleased that we had done it. Getting it off the other end was much easier, with a couple of strong planks and the trusty block and tackle it was off and in the house in no time.

We have also made a pond in our garden and built some more of the pergola than runs from the house to the gate. The garden I have to say is coming on faster than the house, but we felt we had to make the most of the lovely weather.

That’s it, we are off to bed!

Thanks to Roz and Al for taking the time to share their thoughts on the greyness of my website. I think Roz is right when she says that the title on the homepage looks a bit dowdy. Now that I look at it it does seem a bit gloomy and hardly representative of such a vibrant, verdant region, in fact I can’t imagine what I was thinking of when I did it. I shall have a look at it on Monday and try and come up with something a bit more cheerful. My mum emailed earlier to say that she was doing some research on the subject but had so far only asked one ‘young’ person at work what they thought. They said that it looked ‘professional and classy’. That’s Mancunians for you. Very tasteful people. I’ve told her that she can stop asking now, I’ve heard enough.
We had yet another holiday today, this time for Ascension, although it didn’t end up being much of a day off as it just meant that instead of doing up other houses our attention was turned to this one,,with the pool to clean, garden to cut (again), and the houses itself which hasn’t been dealt with for weeks. Matt also spent atleast three hours with some Cillit Bang trying to get the tar off his white car. It was absolutely covered in it after the route departmental was re surfaced last week. Nothing else had any effect atal but…. Bang and the tar was gone! God knows what’s in it.
As it was a holiday today everyone is doing the ‘pont’ and taking tomorrow off too to make a long weekend of it. So in the morning we are off to La Bresse, where Alfie is taking part in the sculpting festival. We’ve just printed out the directions on Mappy and it’s going to take 7 and a half hours just to get to the hotel which is still 100km away from where he is. I can’t say that any of us are particularly excited by the prospect of spending so much time travelling in a northerly direction when, in the same amount of time we could be at the Cote d’Azur - but duty calls. The B+B hotel is booked for tomorrow night and we’re already talking about what could possibly be wrong with the shower at this one - having failed to find a fully functioning one on either of the previous two we’ve stayed at. We discovered the B+B in Orange and it seems to be the only one where you can find a room for 4 people. Despite it’s flaws we’ve come to regard them as as much of a second home as the static caravan we stay in by the coast.
Dinner will be in the Hotel Ibis,no doubt, or La Campanile, whichever one the hotel has a reciprocal arrangement with - which will ensure 20% of the normal menu price. I know it doesn’t sound very exciting but as the hotel will be on an industrial estate and as near to a motorway as is humanly possible there won’t be much choice in the restaurant department apart from those places frequented by travelling salespeople. The last two that we’ve eaten at cost under 50€ for all four of us with wine. I shall tell all on Monday when I will also be able to report whether it was possible to turn off the heating in the room - something we haven’t been able to do on either of the previous occassions thereby rendering sleeping almost impossible. Being so near the motorway if the window is opened the sound of traffic is defeaning, so there’ll be no sleeping in that event either. In fact I think as it’s past 11pm I’d probably better go and catch up before we’ve even started.

Ducks. The latest addition to our family is a brace of ducklings who seem quite happy waddling about in their makeshift accommodation, stomping in and out of the upside down dustbin lid filled with water and squeaking frantically at every movement. Tess  is fascinated, fixated in fact, by the new comers and spends hours watching them. I don’t think I fully trust her to not grab one if she has a chance but hopefully she will be deterred when she recalls the telling off she got when she nabbed and killed a chick.

The ducks have been compassionately named “Crispy” and “Bombay” and despite the daunting implication of such nomenclature they are fairly safe from the kitchen knives as Roz maintains they are pets. Hopefully, egg producing pets but we cant be sure of that yet as they are nearly impossible to sex. Two drakes are going to be pretty useless on the egg front although we understand they are supposed to be excellent slug collectors so they may have their work cut out in the garden to keep them out of the oven.

We had a pretty major scare with another family member last week when Amber, our aging horse fell or laid down in her stable and couldn’t get up again. Lying down, I have learnt, is not good for old horses with dodgy lungs, much as it is for old folk. The poor old girl was in quite a state, hot and sweating, wheezing and railing like a chronic bronchitic and becoming weaker with each strength sapping effort to get herself up. Luckily we had our friends Jane and Dennis with us and they were brilliant as usual. We tried coaxing Amber to no avail. We then tried getting a couple of ropes around her and when she tried to rise we pulled all we could, a futile effort really as she weighs close on half a ton. At this point we called the vet….on a bank holiday….kerrrchingg….Next we rigged up a scaffold pole through the stable roof, threaded one of the ropes through a double block and fashioned a girdle out of an old 1 ton builders sack. The vet arrived and gave her a shot or two of stuff to help her breath and sagely told us that we should not expect too much given that she was such an age. He left ten minutes after arriving and I think he was fully expecting a call back a bit later on to do the final deed. As advised, we waited a while for the drugs to take effect and then awkwardly slid the girdle under Amber. The next time she struggled to get up we could harness her effort with the block and tackle and hold her in the position she had reached. She ended up half sitting,half suspended and seemingly getting nowhere. The block had done as much as it could and the rest was now up to Amber, Poor Roz was getting very upset but without losing her composure and clear thoughts. After five hours she called it a day and asked Dennis to release the brake on the block. Amber would fall back down and never get up again. Dennis paused a second as the finality of his next action sank in, “Are you sure”, he asked Roz, she nodded and with that Amber sprang to her feet as if she had suddenly realised what was going on. Ten minutes later, after a wobble or two she was out in the field munching on grass as if nothing had happened.

Beaurocracy French style raised its head this week in possibly the most ridiculous and thoroughly absurd example of the phenomenom that drives even the lunacy hardened Frenchman to distraction. Roz wrote a few weeks ago how she had successfully jumped through every hoop presented to her in order to re register our UK car in France. It was just a case of waiting for the log book, the carte grise, to arrive. The posty dropped off an envelope addressed to Roz and I thought that it would be it, success but no! Inside was Roz’s cheque, her stamped, self addressed envelope and a letter telling us that the sum of 110.00 euros was no longer sufficient. They needed a cheque for 112.50. With gritted teeth we drove to the prefecture to hand them the re written cheque rather than allow possibility of further delays caused by the grinding, thunking wheels of painfully slow administration. When Roz presented the cheque she also handed over the same self addressed envelope that had been sent back to us. “Oh, we don’t need that now, the nice lady told us, “the extra two euros fifty is to cover the postage”……..so you have sent us back our paperwork and our money AND our stamped, self addressed envelope so you can charge us the extra 2.50 to post the carte gris that in fact still costs what it used to………