Whoever invented persiennes ......

.... had obviously never painted them.

Persiennes are the things known in English as louvre doors (why???). I like them. But painting them is truly chiant. Oh yes.

I'm one third of the way through painting and patining seven of them, front and back. Each door has 66 slats. Each door needs three coats: one base, one wash coat and one patina coat. That's 2772 slats, if you count both sides. Each one is at a silly angle so that if you're not hyper-vigilant all the paint runs down and pools venomously on the other side, forcing you to leap like an ant-bitten maniac from one side to the other every twenty seconds.

It's - how can I put this? - interesting ...........

Just another manic Monday

Kalba to Lapeyre: Oi, where's my stuff? Your driver is a plonker. And I've wasted two whole days waiting for him to arrive at the times he has promised. Do something. (Or words to that effect).

Lapeyre to Kalba: Not my problem, madame. I have put you in touch with our driver. That's my job finished.

Kalba to Lapeyre: I'm desolated but I am not in agreement. I have paid you an arm and two legs for this shower screen, plus a small mortgage for the delivery. It was promised for early July. It's now early September. It's your responsibility. Get on with it.

Lapeyre to Kalba: C'est impossible.

Kalba to Lapeyre: No, no, no, I am not at all in agreement. I think it's perfectly possible, and your moral responsibility.

SILENCE.

Lapeyre to Kalba: I'll think about it and phone you back.

Kalba to Lapeyre: I'll hold on.

Lapeyre to itself: Sigh. Rustling of paper.

Lapeyre to Kalba: As an honourable exception, madame, I will contact the driver and phone you back.

Kalba to Lapeyre: You have five minutes.

THREE MINUTES PASS. PHONE RINGS.

Driver to Kalba: It wasn't my fault. Lapeyre didn't load it onto the van.

Kalba to driver: How strange. It was there at lunchtime when I last spoke to you. You will be here in the morning, non?

Driver to Kalba: Oh, well, I'm not sure ..... maybe Wednesday.

Kalba to driver: C'est impossible. Tomorrow morning, before noon. I'll expect you. That's guaranteed, non?

Driver to Kalba: Oui mais non mais .... [sigh] d'accord.

Kalba to driver: So just to confirm - tell me again when you're coming ....

Driver (in small voice): tomorrow, Tuesday, before noon.

Bets, anyone?

Help - there's an elephant under my sink ....

Finally, the plumber returns. Not without a degree of trauma: a phone call at 8.30pm to say he'd arrive the next morning - impossible, as I have clients booked in here and other arrangements for the afternoon. Little room for negotiation: it appears to be then or ... October. Hmm. Trying to discuss the fact that we do both have work commitments and lives and needed a little thing called a tad of notice leads only to my being told that "I'm not more important than his other clients" (where oh where do I find these people?). Eventually, in the interests of hot water, I agree that we'll re-jig our afternoon plans so that he can come after lunch.

I have to go out (no, honestly, I do) so I leave him to John's tender mercies. When I get home there's good news and bad. The good news: the water heater has been successfully pressure-tested and wired in, and all the water and waste is connected. The bad news: there's an elephant in the cupboard under the sink.

Not the prettiest bit of plomberie you've ever seen, quoi? Ugly-and-out-of-sight we can live with (sort of), but there's a problem: this is not just a sink unit, it's an all-singing all-dancing double-drawered small-mortgageable dooflop thingie that holds not only all the usual under-sink stuff but also a special system for sorting three types of recycling. And there is no space to get either drawer in, let alone both. This has of course been delicately raised in my absence with the plumber, who pronounces that "it cannot be done". "Okay", says John, "do what you can", this usually, in the land where 'it's impossible' means no such thing, being quite enough to turn no into yes.

But not this time. "Okay" says John with a sigh, "put it back together in elephant fashion so that we can test the whole system and then I'll re-do it myself". "Hrrrrummppphhhh" says plumber. "If I can't do it, you certainly won't be able to". (That's the most he's said all afternoon). And leaves.

A couple of days pass. John girds his loins and his spanners. Two hours plus a length of flexible waste pipe and the job's done. As it happens, it's a piece of the proverbial. The elephant has gone, and both drawers fit.

Tonight. A phone call to the plumber to report the missing elephant and hope, perhaps, for a small consideration on his eye-popping (wish I could get away with charging 58 euros an hour ...) bill. No such luck. Within moments, and without even mentioning a reduction, John is being told that his bill is his bill and that's that and we WILL pay it, and that (and here I quote) we are "nothing but trouble and are a pair of wa*&ers". For once, words fail me.

And so, dear plumber, if you should happen to be reading this: I don't ask for the earth from those who work here with (please note that word) us - a little respect, a little pleasantness, and a willingness to understand and do what's needed, well. Anything more is a bonus - nice, but not essential. You will get your cheque, because it's not important enough to fight over. What you won't get with along it, however, is my good grace, or any form of recommendation. Nor, naturally, an invitation to return.


PS ... if anyone is confused about yesterday's missing post, I did indeed post this yesterday but in the process it was somehow, and rather bizarrely, 'invaded' by something malicious that kept navigating away, to a spam-type site (no, I don't understand it either). I had no alternative but to delete, and rewrite, it. So no, you haven't lost the plot .....

On heat

It's hot. And that's official.

Like the rest of the country, we're in the midst of a heatwave: temperatures have hit 38 degrees in the shade over the last two days. A couple of cooler days forecast for Wednesday and Thursday, and then more hot and sunny weather; this will, we're told, be the pattern for the rest of the summer, with temperatures distinctly higher than average. Good news for the ratatouille bed in the potager which was planted so late: it's already showing signs of catching up.

A treat yesterday, when the sun was blazing down in the middle of the day and the thermometer was showing 52 degrees in the sun: quite by chance I watched our baby black redstart leave the nest. He (or she. Here we go again) fluttered down onto the grass, looked around, and then bowed several times. Redstarts, if you haven't seen them, bow all the time, like robins only more so; I just didn't expect them to start so young. They're also intensely curious birds: an hour or so later I found him sitting in the brico shed calling furiously for food.

You could say that the heat is slightly less good news for us as we continue to clear the rock garden, but hey - what's a bit of sweat when you're having fun? And it does mean that during the hottest part of the day we get to take refuge inside and get on with all the interminable finishing jobs, like framing pictures and hemming curtains and sorting out all the kitchen equipment for L'Atelier. (Never, dear renovator, ever underestimate just how long this stage will take you. Why is it that I could tile an entire shower in the time it takes to frame and hang just one picture? And that's without the arguments about whether there's a speck of dust under the glass or whether it's straight or not). But we are getting there (even if - sigh - the water still isn't connected: plumber has been, plumber has gone, plumber hasn't finished, plumber is coming back. Just don't ask when).

It's been a particularly frustrating couple of weeks in that I've been getting lots of contacts from some really interesting people - mostly readers of this blog, as it happens - who've wanted to come and stay this summer, and because of everything you already know about I'm still having to say no, which frankly is a bit upsetting. Not for the money, though that would indeed be quite nice, but because without exception they've all sounded like people I would enjoy having around, and because I just have a whole big feeling that Grillou is now ripe for people to be here. It's the first time I've felt that as an actuality rather than as a potential, which means I think that something has shifted on an energy level (look away now if you don't believe this stuff) and therefore that we're on course for all to be well.

Only a f***ing rental ......

So after my last post I haven't, in fact, been exiled to the far corner of Can't-Get-It-Together-Land; rather, I had probably more supportive emails than I deserve - including one from somebody whose booking I had to decline - and a (very welcome and much enjoyed) dinner invitation from a friend in the next village. This was a Very Good Thing, as a few weeks earlier I had endured a long, angry and bitter angry tirade about how wrongly we were doing everything, how over-perfectionist we were being, how ridiculous it was to make our own paints/spend days and weeks restoring bits of furniture/strip and re-finish floors/put in an oak kitchen, and .... well, you get the drift. We should, apparently, just be spending as little as possible, slapping white paint on all the walls, and furnishing the place in a day by taking a truck to IKEA, because (and I quote) after all it's only a f***ing rental, the punters won't be able to tell the difference and in any case they'll f***it all up within months. I'm not going to tell you where this came from, but suffice it to say that I was particularly shocked, and offended, precisely because it came from where it did.

I'm not, and never have been, interested in quick fixes to make money - and let's face it, anyone who goes into either property restoration or offering hospitality to make a fast buck is very quickly going to be disillusioned. There's a wonderful French phrase, mettre en valeur, which has no direct equivalent in the English language: to do what it takes to show something to its best advantage, to enhance, to bring out and develop the best in something. Well, that's what we're doing here: for ourselves, for sure, but also for those who were here before us, for those who'll come to share our home with us from time to time, and for those who'll eventually take over as Grillou's guardians some time in the (hopefully distant) future.

And that's why I'm happy to have spent the last three weeks on my hands and knees; first hand sanding, staining and waxing the wooden half of the floor in L'Atelier's grenier-turned-bathroom, and then laying a new floating floor in the living area downstairs. The area we're (well, I'm - John's role is to bring me things and take them away again, a bit like an operating theatre assistant, while I crawl around the floor pushing and shoving and teasing and measuring and wiggling and jigsawing and guillotining. And swearing.) laying is only 35 square metres altogether, but it has no less than 11 different bits of wall, all at different angles to each other. Let's just say it's not the easiest thing I've ever done, which (like tiling the showers) is partly by my own design .... ideas above my station, my mother would have said. 


She was probably right. After all, it's only a f***ing rental, non?

On not counting your chickens

It's been a while since I was here. Well okay, it's been a Very Long Time. And it's a funny thing: the longer it is since I last blogged, the more difficult it is to blog - it's a bit like standing on top of the diving platform waiting to summon up what it takes to dive: the longer it takes, the harder it gets (and I should know - one Saturday when I was ten I spent no less than 6 hours hovering on the edge of the high board at my local baths ....).

It may of course also have something to do with the fact that I so do not want to write what I have to write, and I've been hanging on and hanging on to see if I could get away with not writing it. (Come on Kalba - stop being enigmatic and just ... jump ...). 

Okay. Here goes. In spite of everything I've said before, in spite of working seven long days a week for the last two years, in spite of the promises that we'd be ready by summer 2011 ..... I still can't give you a definite date for opening our guest accommodation at Grillou. I can't believe it, I'm really really sorry, and it's appalling.

We were doing okay. After my "Too many things to redo" rant, things started to come together remarkably quickly. We tiled and grouted showers and floors, finished plastering and painting, made and installed a set of oak steps, glazed doors and windows, restored various bits of old furniture and finished lots of other small but time consuming jobs. Out of the blue, a friend offered to make some curtains. By chance, we stumbled upon a newly set up artisan who could take on the remaining joinery work and start reasonably quickly; as a result I was able to take on some work elsewhere for three weeks while John pressed on with the jobs list. Things were looking good.

And then the plot was lost. The just-set-up joiner left the country just days before he was due to start his contracted work with us. At the same time the artisan who installed the water and waste systems pulled out of coming back to finish the work of testing it and doing the final connections. Splat!! That was the sound of a finishing date cracking into a thousand pieces on the floor .....

So there we were. Are. It's almost 1 April, the magical date when I'm supposed to be taking bookings. (Ah ... maybe that was the problem :-)). I've been away from Grillou for three weeks. We have a kitchen and two bathrooms with no water; we have a mega cupboard to build and a 5 metre long windowsill with highly irregular measurements to make and install; we have a plumber-electrician to find who doesn't object to signing off and commissioning someone else's work and can do so before 2012 (and no, that's not a joke). To say I'm unbelievably, insanely, homicidally mad might be a teensy weensy bit of an overstatement. To say I'm pissed off and disappointed, however, is most definitely an understatement.

Splash.

Deadlines

I love deadlines.
I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Douglas Adams, but clearly written especially for Grillou, February 2011.

Rakes and pains

For the last five days now we've had amazing weather - clear, cloudless blue skies and genuinely warm, spring-like air. At lunchtimes our thermometer has looked like this:

Pretty good for January, huh? Reminds me why we came to live here and not one of the many places I've fallen in love with over the years that are farther north .....

For the first couple of days I huffed and puffed around inside, carrying on doing things that were on the jobs list like finishing the staircase, plastering a wall and cutting the tiles for the bathroom floor, while gazing longingly at the bright yellow thing in the sky outside. By Sunday morning I could take it no more. Reluctantly I decided that Leaving The Premises was, given the length of the jobs list, just a step too far, but a couple of days working in the garden ... well, it's still work (and therefore okay), no? So on went the shorts (yes, really) and wellies, and we set to on the mammoth task of clearing up the garden ready for spring. Here, that means first and foremost raking leaves: living in the middle of several hectares of woodland is a wonderful thing, but trees have leaves, and leaves fall off. Most of them head Grillou-wards, or at least that's what it feels like, and every year we fill seven or eight huge leaf containers that we've made from chicken wire and hidden in strategic places in the woods (where else?).

Although I wouldn't swap it for anything, there are times (usually when I'm mowing ...) when I wish we had a nice, flat grassy garden instead of half a hectare of of rocky nooks and crannies on various degrees of slope, but a day of raking and barrowing and green has reappeared: always a wonderful moment. Next, we started pruning and shaping hundreds of shrubs, and beginning the task of clearing rocks and head-height brambles from the area around one of our ancient oak trees so that you can get near enough to hug it, and generally cleaning out some of winter's debris. Yesterday evening, the forecast end of the good weather, felt like the end of a holiday; I couldn't bear to come in and was still on the end of my rake, in bright moonlight, at 7.30.

At 8pm I realised that I was a bit stiff. By 9pm, I ached all over. By 10pm I could hardly move. It was great. Much of what I'm working on at the moment requires standing for long periods in one place, usually in a silly position, doing things that need anally perfect measurements, and my body had been crying out for some stretching and some physical effort. It got it.

This morning the sun came out again. But just to make you feel better if you're shivering in colder climes, winter is apparently returning on Thursday, with a 'high' of just 1 degree forecast for Friday ......

Too many things to redo

Someone I once knew - I think it was my ex-partner's mother, but don't hold me to that - used to say when she was flustered "Arrgh! Too many things to redo ...". If you're wondering why I've gone a bit quiet on the renovation front recently - well, that's why. Since I've been back working full-time here at Grillou I seem to have spent much of the time not doing, but re-doing. And re-doing not things that I've done myself (I'm far too tediously and anally perfectionist not to get things right at first pop), but things done (or sometimes not done) By Others: in some cases by our predecessors, in others by - well, no, let's not go there ...

And so whereas by now I should be engaged in a deep and meaningful relationship with my sewing machine, I'm still up to my armpits in things infinitely more messy. This weekend's project, for example, is replastering the two walls that butt up to the new, scarily-expensive-but-worth-it, French double doors we've just had made and installed in L'Atelier's kitchen by a local artisan. But before I can do that, I need to repair the huge holes in the plasterboard that were made in a failed attempt to repair the previous door .... When I'm not doing that I'll be on the end of my angle grinder cutting the pieces of stone mosaic that will form the border of the tiled area on L'Atelier's bathroom floor .... and when I'm not doing that I'll be working on putting together the bits of the metre-high staircase we've built to join our hallway with the new dining room.

After that, there are four Big Jobs still to contend with: one shower to tile, two floors to level and lay, and a huge cupboard to build out of reclaimed materials. And after that? Five pages of small(er) jobs, several pieces of furniture to finish restoring ... and twenty curtains to make. If it sounds daunting, it's because it is.

It's two years almost to the day that I signed the devis for the building work that would make Grillou what it (nearly) is today. A couple of weeks after that, we started preparing the ground for the builders: removing acres of old tiles, cupboards, kitchen fittings and all the rest. If someone had told me then that two years on we'd still be working ten hour days, seven days a week they'd have probably got short shrift. But it's a very common tale; we're by no means unusual, blah blah blah; and This Too Will Pass.

But do you know what would be wonderful? To be able to get up in the morning and not put on working clothes ...

On progress, and the revolting French

This is a bit of a sad week for me: yesterday was my last day (for this year at least) working at the yoga centre, which is about to close for holidays until next May. I've done some lovely stuff with some lovely people from all over the world, met some other folk living locally who came, through word of mouth, for regular sessions, and reclaimed a bit of me that's been filed under 'pending' in a cupboard for the last eight years. Much as I'd love to have carried on working with my local clients over the winter, reality (as in a seriously unfinished réno and a long suffering partner who'd probably kill me) has set in and so it's back on with the blue overalls seven days a week, head down, and full on with all the outstanding bits of work.

Have you ever noticed how things that you set up in your mind as terminally difficult actually turn out to be relatively straightforward (and vice versa)?. Just a week ago, we started to put up the bookshelves in the new dining room, which on its mezzanine level has an alter ego as a library. We swiftly discovered that the wall consisted of plasterboard dotted and dabbed onto hollow brick ... some 10 centimetres away from it. Now why oh why oh why would you do that?? The dots (or is it the dabs?) were dabbed (or dotted) at random, so no chance of screwing the shelves through them. And a brief attempt to fix through the placo and into the brick was not exactly successful - it chewed up the placo then fell out of the brick, in spite of the biggest wall plug in the world. Clearly there was nothing for it but to build a made-to-measure shelving system from scratch - a solution we'd hoped to avoid because of the bizarre dimensions of the space. Sigh. So with heavy hearts, a design was swiftly put together - to accommodate sloping walls, sloping ceiling and sloping floor - wood was duly bought, and over the week the carcasses were duly made (by John), lasured (by me), and hoisted up to the mezzanine (by both of us),

And it worked.

(Yes, I know there are no shelves. Be patient. There will be.)

I'm beginning to think that creating this dining room is just about the most dramatic, and rewarding, thing that we're doing: not only does it give us a whole new room and link up the two previously separated bits of the house, it really opens up a sense of space and light as you walk into the hallway from the front door: whereas once you saw this

now you see this:

Which is just a great step forward, and gives us both the courage and the wherewithal to go on. So the next month (maybe more) will see us putting up a spiral staircase to the library area, building new oak steps down from the hall, fitting oak windowsills and skirting boards, repairing and sanding and finally painting the balustrade and window frames and doors, deep cleaning and oiling the terracotta tiles and building cupboards across the back wall using some reclaimed shutters we found in a local depôt vente.

Meanwhile, unless you've had your head in a paper bag this last week or so you'll know that the French are revolting: ostensibly at the proposed pension reforms but also I think, underneath, out of sheer despair at Sarkozy, his style of leadership and the general unfairness that his policies engender in so many levels of society. Schools are closed, transport is affected, fuel is desperately short with a quarter of petrol stations empty and millions of people, including large numbers of students, have taken to the streets. Life as we know it has been inconvenienced but do you know what? I'm proud to live in a country where people care, and are willing to show outwardly that they care rather than living in depressed apathy and/or finding a scapegoat to kick. The French, I believe, feel no differently from those living in other European countries where policies increasingly ask 'the people' (for want of a better phrase) to pay while capital continues to accumulate in the hands of the few: they're just more accustomed to showing it. And so the protests have my support, as well as that of over 70 per cent of the population, who clearly feel the way one protester on Saturday did:

The placard reads: "Carla, on est comme toi, on se fait niquer par le chef d'état" ...

 Look it up!

House of ladders

Blog silence has reigned for a couple of weeks while we've been ... up ladders. Not 'a' ladder, you'll notice; no, the plural is deliberate.

We've been (finally, and only two years later than originally scheduled ...) lime washing the walls of the goat-shed-turned-office-now-turned-dining-room. It's - er - five metres high. Hmm. Plans to use the scaffold that The Perfectionist had brought in were quickly scuppered when it had, rather suddenly, to move on to another project. We were left high and dry - or rather, dry but not high. We considered our options. Short of attaching a rope to the central beam and swinging backwards and forwards, or turning the highest wall into a climbing wall, there was only one: another scaffold. The grapevine swung into gear, and within a couple of days we'd borrowed a tower from some friends. Another couple of days (and much swearing, ranting, cursing, foot stomping and crockery smashing) later, it was up.

The problem is that the dining room is a room of lots of different heights. We've built a mezzanine gallery, which is going to house a library; there's a central beam; and the ceiling slopes down towards the windows at the front of the house, where the height of the wall is only four metres or so. And so we needed not one, but many ladders, which is why for the last fortnight the room has looked like this:

Six days, seventeen thousand colour tests, and four coats of lime wash later, the room looks like this (don't panic, the orange pine will disappear very soon, as will the white painted walls at the far end ...)

and we've got quite fond of the scaffold (yes, the same one that we spent six hours trying to fit eight bolts into to hold the two platforms ...) and will be sorry to see it go. It's made a long job hugely easier, so a big thanks to the mob at Camping Le Montagnou at Ustou for lending it to us - we owe you one!

All we have to do now is to take it apart. So don't expect to see either of us any time soon ....


PS ... look who dropped in to visit today:

It's a praying mantis. Isn't he lovely?

Comfort me with shopping

All good things must come to an end. (Or so I'm told. Personally I don't see why they should. Sounds a bit like a Puritan conspiracy to me. However.)

For a start, summer seems to have left us, suddenly and definitively. One day I'm outside wearing - well, not much, and sweltering; the next I'm reluctantly pulling on long sleeves. And today even I, the anti-clothes queen of Ariège, found myself putting on jeans - and, heaven forfend, a denim jacket - for the first time since the spring. I know of course that it's (probably) not all over bar the shouting - we can, and often do, get a wonderful Indian summer. And then there's l'été de la Saint Martin, around 11 November, which is often (more often than you might expect by chance ) an unusually mild and sunny period, after the first frosts but before the first snows - and almost exactly six months apart from the Saints de Glace. But all this aside, today I felt chilly, and I'm not good at that.

And then there's the diminishing of the light. Whereas just a couple of weeks ago we were happily eating outside at 9pm, now it's dark by 8.30, and by the time you've put all the outside lights and something warm on, to be honest the whole thing kind of loses the plot and so on the whole we've retreated indoors. I think we must be becoming French, or something. Mind you, to a sunlight freak like me there's something terribly depressing about the daily loss of daylight we have to endure for six months of the year, especially as it starts in June when summer hasn't even got going: the summer solstice may well be the beginning of summer, but it's also the beginning of the darkness. (Now the winter solstice ... that really is cause for celebration ....)

As if that weren't all enough, we're going through our own, slightly belated, rentrée: after our fantastic Ariège holiday week we're back at work with a vengeance ... and The Perfectionist is back for a final (well final-ish) fling. Much as I love my builder, however, I don't love the lime and plaster dust and mackerel tins that he has a habit of trawling along with him ... The good news though is that the new dining room is now lime plastered, has a door, and almost looks like a room and not the goat shed that it was (you do still have to leap a metre down to get to it as there are no steps yet, but I'm told that will change by  ... December. Sigh.); the good-and-bad news is that the next couple of weeks will see us borrowing some scaffolding from a friend and lime washing the entire room, the walls of which are - gulp - 5 metres high.

And so maybe all this goes some way towards explaining why a quick trip to Saint Girons market to buy broccoli plants this morning got waylaid into coffee with friends, and then into a bit of food shopping, and then into the buying of a half price barbecue, and then into a fully fledged shop-till-you-drop session for new clothes. Both of us have dropped two full sizes since we moved here and now that the trouser-wearing season has returned we've both tended to look, as my mother used to say, like sacks of potatoes, which is not good for the ego (and hoisting your Andy Pandy trousers up 127 times an hour gets pretty boring too). Although I'm not generally a fan of shopping, do you know what? It was fun. And two hours, five shops and several carrier bags later, we're fit to be seen in public again.

Life after sawdust, and a taste of garlic

No matter how awful you think sanding a huge floor and a half is going to be, it's always ... worse. Given that John only has to look at a sanding machine for gouges the size of a ditch to appear miraculously in the wood, his contribution was limited to collecting the machine from the hire shop, and following me around holding its power cable. It was, of course, Muggins here who had to spend a twelve-and-a-half hour day wrestling with the thing, followed by the same the next day on my hands and knees, sanding all (51 metres worth ... groan) the edges.

I'll spare you more pictures of me in tellytubby overalls and the orange Etap headgear thingie I picked up from the Tour de France caravane; suffice it to say that three days and seventeen showers later the job's finished, with 'just' the more artistic bits - as in at least seven days on my hands and knees - to come. Fortunately the weather shone on us, so to speak: after the recent long and very hot spell, it proceeded to absolutely p*%! down, without break or let up (but with thunder, lightning and the usual array of power cuts), for 48 hours, during which time it was so dark that you could be forgiven for thinking that the sun had migrated to warmer climes.

Even floor-sanding tellytubbies have to eat, though, and when you've got sawdust in every orifice the need for feelgood food that will cut through all the crap becomes paramount. And so there was nothing for it but an ag and og.

Ag and og (or spaghetti aglio e olio, to be more precise) is so much a part of me that I've just had to rack my brains to think how I first came upon it or to remember when it wasn't a part of my life. In fact, I was introduced to it by an ex-partner-turned-friend, who arrived in our relationship with a little cook book, now sadly I think out of print, called something like Lotsa Pasta and Oodles of Noodles (yes, honestly) which contained a great, if rather garlickly-challenged, ag and og. Then I went to Italy, and there was The Proper Thing, from which is derived our current version. Ag and og is the ultimate convenience food, designed for those times when you really want something with a bit of oomph and pzazz but don't know what it is. When you don't want to feel clogged with cholesterol. When you're too knackered, or just can't be bothered, to fiddle around with lots of preparation or lots of ingredients. It does it for me, always and without fail. Here it is:

For two people:

6 to 8 big, fat, juicy cloves of garlic
a decent glug - half a small cup - of really good extra virgin olive oil
2 servings of pasta of your choice - long and thin works better than short and round, and anything with egg in it is a no-no

Peel the garlic cloves and cut them in half if they're really large, removing any green shoot-y bits from the centre. Put them with the oil into a saucepan and warm gently. Now, how you do this bit is really the key to the whole dish: you don't want to fry them - what you're doing is letting the warmth of the oil draw the flavour from, and at the same time gently soften, the garlic. If you go at it like a bull in a china shop you'll end up with brown, bitter, horrible garlic and it'll end in tears, you mark my words. Reckon on it taking 20 to 25 minutes at the lowest or next-to lowest hob setting. As the cloves soften you can break them up a bit in the pan with a wooden spoon; they should end up slightly golden, lightly caramelised, meltingly soft and highly aromatic (sorry to drool, but it really is that good ...). Cook the pasta, toss it in the oil and garlic, add a tablespoon of dried crushed chilli pepper, season, and serve, sprinkled with a little parsley, and with good bread for serious mopping. And wear an apron.

Oh, and for another taste of garlic, you might like to have a look at Keith Eckstein's impressive 'blog on blogs' that someone has just pointed me to. Keith has set himself the task not just of listing, but also reviewing blogs about living in France. As it happens, he's just reviewed this one. And I like his style: he really makes an effort to get underneath each blog (and blogger) and find out what makes it tick. And even if he does seem to have an obsession with 2CV driving, lingerie wearing nuns, he knows how to use apostrophes.

Woodworking week

We've both set to on wooden projects this week.

I've been stripping, sanding and re-finishing the staircase in La P'tite Maison, which was built and fitted by a local artisan well before our era, some twenty five years ago, but thanks to The Passing Of Time (not to mention builders' boots) was looking more than a little worse for wear. It's beautiful wood: I'm not quite sure what it is, though our neighbours seem to remember that it came from Morocco. And it's been one of those remarkably fast and very satisfying jobs, with (almost) Instant Gratification. What two days ago was scratched and sad and ugly now looks like this ...

while now its me who, after several full-on hours on the end of a sander, looks scratched and sad and ugly ...

Meanwhile, out in the barn, John's been cutting and planing chestnut planks ready to make a balustrade for the mezzanine floor in La P'tite Maison's bedroom. I've spent more than a year on this particular quest (yes, I am persistent, yes I am hard to please, and yes I am a Libran). I've looked at kits - boring. I've thought about wrought iron. Too heavy. I've had quotes for this and that. Two thousand euros? For four metres? Er - maybe not. But as ever the answer was not quite blowing in the wind, but staring us in the face in the barn in the shape of the remainder of our chestnut planks. I had one of those aha! moments, and then we went from idea to design to measurement to action in an hour and a half. 

This is the chestnut in its raw state - not especially promising, maybe?

Here it is after cutting, planing and the first two passes with the sander (yes, that was me again. Sigh):

But the real magic is still to come. Watch this space ...

Oh, and as if all this weren't enough, next week we'll be taking advantage of my part-week off 'work' (!) by sanding, staining, painting and vitrifying over 65 square metres of floor in L'Atelier d'Artiste ... but hey, the temperature's only forecast to be 32 degrees ...

Couple of hours off on Monday though to watch the Tour de France, which is passing just at the end of our road. Yippee - more Skoda hats!

Magic in the air

If you're one of those people who despises so-called rose-tinted, fluffy blog posts (yes, you know who you are!), then look away now. Because in our lovely green Ariège the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the insects are buzzing, people are smiling, and wherever you go, even if it's just to the builders' merchants, you can't help but feel a certain magic in the air.

The summer solstice really does mark the first day of summer here, and never more than this year, after our very, very long winter and pretty dismal spring. With just a week to go before les grandes vacances, the mood is upbeat and full of anticipation. It's deemed acceptable (almost normal) to wear shorts to do your shopping, barbecues are dusted off and butchers are falling over each other to sell the best ready-to-grill brochettes; there's a mad rush for sun cream, magazines are full of last minute diets to prepare your 'bikini-body', and swimming pool chemicals are the product of the moment in the brico sheds (though woe betide you if you're still, like us, looking for garden furniture. That's all sold out ...). The fête season is under way, beginning as usual with the Fête de la Musique, closely followed by the Fête de St Jean, and then - well, all hell breaks loose. It's as if the whole of nature is conspiring to attract us so that we can do nothing but be out of doors, out of our normal lives, out of ourselves. Hell, France are (oh joy) even out of the World Cup, so we don't even have to contend with that ...

The scent and sound of haymaking fill the air from dawn to dusk, and pasture after pasture changes its appearance from shaggy to impossibly neat, each with its stash of round bales. Many of the cattle are up in the estives - the high altitude summer pastures - where it's cooler and the grass lush and filled with nutrients after its six month covering of snow. Tourists and visitors are arriving; summer-only shops and buvettes are opening. Paradoxically, villages appear deserted as shutters stay shut through the day to keep out summer heat (it's said that you can always spot the house of an Anglo-Saxon immigrant by their ever-open shutters). And each day the mountains are a little less white ...

View from the track to Grillou, 2 minutes from the house

Here at Grillou, life has changed its rhythm a bit. Well, quite a lot, actually, because I'm working over the summer for anything up to three days as week as massage therapist at a holistic holiday retreat nearby. I've been a holistic bodywork practitioner for (gulp) over twenty years, though it's a few years since I've had the time to practise professionally. But it's been a big part of who I am for a long time and I've missed it, dreadfully. So when a completely out-of-the-blue opportunity came up a couple of months ago, I just couldn't say no. And it's an absolute joy to be back ... like it's been slumbering, dormant, just waiting to be embraced back into my life. And to be honest, although it takes me away from the réno a bit more than I'd anticipated, it's no bad thing for us here either: I can come to the work fresh each long weekend and truly enjoy doing whatever it is that's next to be done, and after thirteen years of working together under the same roof 24/7, John and I at last get some space to work independently. Life feels more normal, and we're both beginning to sense the balance that we came here to find.

There is a knock on effect, possibly (depending on your perspective) a downside. And that's that after a lot of thought and discussion, we're going to defer the opening of our guest accommodation until 1 April 2011. Partly in the interest of clarity, so that those people who've wanted to book for later this year (and there have been a surprising number) and have been waiting for news of an opening date have got time to make other plans. But partly because the bloody dining room is still a bloody builders' yard, and will be until the bloody builders come back and do their bloody thing in it in (we hope) September, which wouldn't give us long enough to move in afterwards and do all the finishing: limewashing and painting (both of which require scaffolding) and building cupboards and shelves and renovating floors and doing all the other 1001 minor-but-time-consuming things that you never take account of when you're planning a project ...

We are, it seems, in good company. I subscribe to a French magazine, Accueillir, which is aimed at those running maisons d'hôtes; recently they've been contacted by a TV producer looking for people whose projects have been seriously delayed and who are willing to be followed by a production crew for three months while they try to catch up (no, we're not, before you ask!). Apparently, they've been inundated.

Maybe it's la belle saison working its magic.

Karma yoga

Three weeks ago we took a break. A short one, but away from each other, and for me, away from Grillou too. And as so often happens, those three days became a sort of punctuation point during which we both realised things that we hadn't consciously realised - or rather, hadn't allowed ourselves to realise. One of those things was that we both felt - feel - completely incapable of continuing to live in the sort of building site shite that our house and garden had become. When we set out we'd anticipated all that bit being over and done with in 6 or 8 months, and to live like that for a short and finite period seemed a perfectly realisable, if not particularly pleasant, choice. That was 14 months ago. It's now intolerable.

Although we can't do much about the fact that the work isn't finished, we decided that what we could, and would, do was to make a priority of sorting out the bits of the house that we live in, and the garden. Six solid days of house cleaning later for both of us (yes, really), I could see surfaces I'd forgotten were there and no longer felt the need to issue protective overalls and masks to anyone foolish enough to visit. And so we turned our attention to the outside, in my case to the frontage of the house which is not only the bit you see first as you walk or drive up, but the bit that's been covered with cement mixers, lime, cement, sand, tarps, tools, materials and builders for over a year. From our driveway a wide gravel path sweeps along the whole length of the house; even before our time it hadn't been maintained or raked or topped up and so was not only full of grass and weeds but also completely impacted and encrusted with moss as hard as cement. What started as a simple - or so I thought - job of weeding and raking turned into two weeks on my hands and knees breaking up the moss with a hand hoe and then pulling out every strand of greenery with my fingers. It's a bit like one of those tasks you get given on a meditation retreat: mind-numbingly tedious, and faintly pointless.

This is what I started with:

Not pretty, is it? (Nor are my hands. Or my knees). But at least I could sit in the sun, listen to the birds singing, and watch this year's pair of black redstarts feeding their young in the nest just a couple of metres away from where I was working, and then leading them out on to the barn roof for the first time. They're curious birds, and seem as fascinated by me as I am by them. Both parents are the browny-grey colour usually reserved for the female (the male is generally a dark steely grey, almost black), and for quite some time I was convinced that I'd spotted the world's first pair of gay birds. Sadly though I'm not about to go down in the history books; according to some obscure Scandinavian paper that Google dragged up for me, it's recently been discovered that quite lot of young male black redstarts spend their first breeding year in drag, only dressing appropriately for their gender when they're two. Oh well.

So now, just to convince you that Grillou is wending its Slow way towards being beautiful (and open!), and to indulge my current and rather smug feeling of Having Done Something Useful, here's a glimpse of what you'd see if you were to arrive here tomorrow:

Aaaargh ....

I am

pigged off by pigments
left cold by Castorama
livid about lime
grounded by gravel
trodden down by Tridome
sunk by sand
beaten by Bricodepot
pee'd off with paint
burnt out by Bricoman
done in by making decisions
bored with Mr Bricolage
defeated by dust
miffed at Leroy Merlin
crevée by cement
irked by IKEA
tired of tiles
demented by dirt
all done with Tout Faire.

I don't want builders' hands
I don't want dust everywhere
I don't want my garden to be invaded by tools and machinery
I don't want to keep spinning plates
I don't want 80% of my house to be a builders' yard
I don't want the other 20% to be a tip because I don't have time to take care of it
I don't want every shopping trip to be for 'materials'
I don't want to keep taking three steps forward and two and a half back.

I just want to sit in my garden
And listen to the birds
And weed and plant and hoe and look after my vegetables
And go for walks with the dog
And read a book
And go to the sea
And cook interesting things
And go shopping for ordinary things.

Rant over.

This too will pass.

Normal life

So, over the last month or so we have - against all odds - managed to resume something of a (more) normal life. That doesn't mean we've stopped the réno and are now swanning round like retired gin-swilling colonels (heaven forfend ...) but it does mean that we've actually left the premises on more than one occasion: to go to the market, to drink une noisette on a café terrace, to see friends. Seeds have been sown, plantlets have been planted. Birds have been watched and listened to. Sun beds have been sat upon. A few days break for each of us on our own, plus a camping holiday together, have been planned. And I've taken up a completely unexpected, out-of-the-blue opportunity to do some work that I love, away from Grillou but only a few minutes up the road, over the next few months.

We've spent much of the time outside, clearing and cleaning and laying another stone terrace. Not a whole lot has progressed inside the house. But ... I'm beginning to hear the spaces between the words again, and to see Grillou as the house that we fell for over three years ago, not just as The Project. The weather has helped: it's been truly glorious and springlike for much of the time. The garden has suddenly come to life, full of blossom and tulips; the grass is growing, the first leaves are just beginning to unfurl and the roses are in bud. In many ways this is the most delightful time of year here - the birds are singing their socks off, snow still covers the peaks, the hillsides are white with the blossom of wild cherry and plum and vibrant green with new growth, purple orchids are everywhere, the markets are bursting with asparagus and strawberries. The sun is warm enough that you know you're in the south of France, but not so hot that you can't walk in it or work in it. Layers of clothes are shed, and legs see the light of day. Chilled rosé and ice cold beer take over from warming reds and hot chocolate.

Enough already of the walking commercial. But you might just want a tiny peep ....

Blossom on the cherry tree that we planted last year ...

... and quince blossom, amazingly delicate and almost exotic.

Looking towards L'Atelier d'Artiste ...

... and its dining terrace.

Oh, yes, the hairy thing in the last photo is Nouille, or Noodles, the latest addition to the Grillou clan. We adopted him from a family who found themselves having to return to the UK after living many years here; they, in turn, had adopted him when he appeared one day at their village bins, apparently abandoned. He's three years old, bilingual, and a Labrit (a type of Pyrénéen sheepdog); we think he's far too independent (aka stubborn) to have been the working dog that he was bred to be, which is probably why he was abandoned - one of the less endearing traits of some French farmers. He's also completely eccentric, besotted with people, has a real sense of humour and is wonderful company. Look away now if you're not a dog person, but if you are ...

I'd forgotten: you can never disappear up your own seriousness when there's a dog around.

Springing forward, and all that

So, the barn roof and the dining-room-to-be are going to be seriously - and I mean very seriously - en retard.

But - oh joy - the clocks have changed, it was light until nearly nine o'clock tonight, it's the end of closing the curtains for another eight months or so, and the clock in the car is right again (neither of us can remember how to alter it so it stays on permanent summer time ...).

And the first cuckoo's back and - er - cuckooing.

And the potager is (almost) dug, the moon planting calendar has come off the bookshelf, the purple sprouting broccoli is finally sprouting, and the broad beans are growing.

And the grass is purple and pink and white with sweet violets, the crocuses and the grape hyacinths and the daffodils and the tulips are all out together, and the track is lined with celandine and cowslips.

And today was a shorts day - the first of the year. And having driven 50 kilometres and back to collect a sofa, cut and fixed a decoupling membrane for the floor of La P'tite Maison's shower room and shifted nearly a tonne of stone several hundred metres into place ready to start paving the next terrace, I was still flopped on my sun bed, in the sun, at seven o'clock this evening.

The reckoning

If you're wondering why it's been a bit quiet on the blog front of late it's because I've been ruminating (and as my Aunty Connie used to say "can'tknitneatnall ...).

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and started to write a pedantically detailed list of everything that still had to be done in order to be ready to present Grillou to guests in mid June as planned. After 11 pages of A4, and with at least as much more to go, I gave up: without even trying I could see that it was as impossible as trying to find the square root of minus one.

We've been working at this now for just over a year, seven days a week, anything up to 14 hours a day. With the best will in the world, I don't think we can up that. And to be honest, I think there's a limit to how long we - anyone? - can go on working at that level. We were doing okay when we were working mainly on L'Atelier d'Artiste - although it's by no means finished, the work there went much more according to timetable, probably because it was effectively a brand new conversion and so was like painting on a blank canvas. But La P'tite Maison has stymied - and continues to stymie - us. Everything we've done there - and that's a lot - has taken three times as long as I'd calculated it would. And it's not just us - The Perfectionist has been working in the dining-room-to-be for what feels now like most of his life, but still has a good couple of weeks to go (and that's with everything going to plan - ha! - and a following wind ...). In moments of despair we've all wondered if La P'tite Maison is jinxed (and in really bad moments, whether it's haunted), but rationally I know it's because the whole area was never really finished in its previous existence and so we're dealing with all the aftermath of, for example, walls that had been plastered but never primed or painted, other walls that never made it beyond the rendering stage, radiator pipes that crossed a room hanging off a beam, and lighting either non-existent or in the most bizarre places (none of which were useful, or even functional). And all the rest, too boring to mention.

To realise that meeting the deadline I've been holding for two years looks nigh on impossible was depressing, to say the least. The other thing it did was make me realise just how tired I was. I was still doing all right physically, but mentally I was exhausted, mainly from holding all those blasted spinning plates up in the air for so long. Another couple of months pushing on at the same rate seemed do-able; another six distinctly not.

And so as those who bore the brunt of my miserable git-ness will testify, I spent a not too pleasant week or so trying to find my way through the whole dilemma. When could we expect to be ready? What would it take? Could anything be simplified or dropped? (No!) Could anything more be contracted out ? (No!) How to let down those people who've already expressed an interest in booking for early summer? How to stop the grass and the weeds from growing? And so on. Round, and round, and round.

Today was a beautiful day - blue skies, early 20s in the shade, birds singing their hearts out - and this afternoon I - radically - took some time out from La P'tite Maison to hoe the potager. And it's funny how going back to the earth puts everything into perspective and makes life seem simpler. Yes, we could choose to up the ante, work 18 hours a day, forget all the stuff about enjoying the process and just get our heads down and do the necessary. That way, we might possibly make ourselves beautiful enough by July. Possibly. That would mean no potager, doing nothing more outside than keeping the grounds under control, no apéros in the garden, no time away from Grillou, no time with friends, no festivals, no swims and probably no sleep. By the time you got here for your Slow Holiday we'd be foutus (look it up!). Now what on earth would be the point of that, either for us or for you? Call it corny if you like, but hospitality for us has always been about the joy of sharing our home and our food with others, not about 'being a business'. Or, we could choose to drop the deadline, breathe, carry on taking pleasure in what we're doing, still work hard but live something of an ordinary life at the same time. Which, of course, is what we came here for. (And I have a sneaking suspicion that in the contrary way of the universe, letting go of the deadline will actually free up the stuckness and let things start to flow again ...).

Eh bien. There's no contest, really, is there? I'm off to sow some carrots.