La Vie En Rose: At Last, Someone Thought I Was French!

Wow, furry walls

Dateline: March 30: I finally ran out of excuses today and as Easter and our important visitors will soon be upon us, I had to go and take one for the team and make the drainage connection to the foul sewer.

The actual hard work was digging the fairly shallow trench from the house to the last manhole on the property, a distance of some six mighty metres and like any digging at Le Clos de la Rose, it involved rock. So much rock in fact, that I used the pick axe as much as the specialist all steel trenching spade. This latter, sleek and all black model, was acquired as much because it seemed a specialist tool was essential to have in my arsenal of manly tools, even although it’s not a power tool. It did however make life much easier, as its clever design made light work of forming a suitably narrow trench with much less spoil to shift.

Dusty, sat in the business end of the trench, deep in combat with my manly yellow and black power chisel, breaking through into the place of unmentionables, I heard a van pull up and someone addressing me. Not hearing much above the chatter of my weapon, I stopped, stood up and took off my gloves to greet my admirer. Me being a courteous sort, I had previously learned the correct phrase to use when interrupting someone and was pleased to hear this polite young chap apologise for disturbing me and realising I was a local builder working on a property, asked me for directions to a particular wine producer’s domaine. I was simply overjoyed as I knew it and gave him the directions he needed.

It’s possible that many of you wont realise the significant importance of this milestone event of my life in France. Every single French person knows before you ever breathe a word that you are English and when able, will always answer you in English, not French, whereas my van driver actually thought from the outset that I was French and understood my simple, yet hopefully effective directions. Life is cool!

Meanwhile, upstairs, Mr Beast is making great progress with the bathrooms and we now have furry walls, as the new partitions are filled with sound insulating quilt, in readiness for the final layer of plasterboard. A further trip to Bricoman and a most helpful Briconaut assisted us with getting the tiles and by the end of the day, we not only had the walls to the guest bathroom (my sister’s and husband Roger’s), but the first tiles on the floor.

In the next exciting episode: ‘Deep in the Merde’

That’s all folks, see y’all soon now,