Brutal wake up call. The fuel delivery for the boiler was due between 7am and 12. The French phone rang at about 8:20. Not a good time of day for me but I managed the standard ‘Oui, d’accord, j’arrive’ (yes, ok, I’m coming) – if I can convince Matt to answer the French phone I recommend that he just uses this and puts the phone down. If it’s more complicated they will call back but almost every call is a delivery – or waste of time. Anyway, another 800Eur later and we have another 1,ooo ltr of fuel. With any luck this will get us through to Spring and the installation of proper heating. I shan’t hold my breath mind.

Once they left I had the almost heartbreaking decision – do you go back to bed or not? When it is cold the hardest thing is to get out of a warm, cosy bed. I decided I couldn’t put myself through it twice in one day, so started work instead. We even started baking bread ready for lunch!

More fresh baked bread, cheese, ham and tomato toasties.

More work and a brief outing up to the village centre.

French solidarity is recognised worldwide, they are heavily unionised and love a bit of a protest – all in a very calm and civil way of course, they are French. If you’re British, and particularly the South East (Vicky) you’re familiar with blockades to/from Calais. Even Duolingo (the online French learning platform) had a session dedicated to protests. So, while we didn’t make it to the dechetterie as planned today, we did drive up to the Marie and recycling in the village and saw our first French protest.

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We’d seen a notice about the school at the garage the other day when we collected the car. The resounding thing that stuck in my mind was that whatever action they were going to take was going to be at 8:45am so I rather dismissed it. There was no way I planned to be up at that time in the morning. As I understood from the poster it was maybe about reducing the number of classes within the school (so possibly consolidating year groups due to low numbers, but I can’t say I really delved into the detail so it may be something else entirely).

There was however a presence from the Gendarme (blocking direct access to the recycling bins so had to park in the road – very glad I bought the masks!) There was a small group of parents and a few kids in front of the Marie but all pretty sedate – I hope they hadn’t been there since 8:45am though as was about 4pm when we got there.

Big news of the day – more Forward Forwards progress!

As the sun was setting in the mountains Matt made a start on the kitchen ceiling. First job was checking the location of the first joist. If we got that wrong then the entire ceiling would be wrong and we’d end up missing every one of them.

Matt is a true believer in ‘measure twice cut once’ – I have no idea how many times he was up and down the scaffolding, moving it around and checking it multiple times, but I have seen first hand that this is not a bad way to go. It is however a bit of a solo job so, if I’m honest, I hid in the living room and cracked on with some more governance work. I checked in on him a few times and eventually put the oven on for dinner.

After a considerable amount of double checking and drawing lines on the ceiling it looks as though we have it in the right place and Matt’s now marked out the first 16 of the 130 or so anchor points that will support the new ceiling [I am confident that this falls within the Discordia rules that “if it’s worth doing, it is worth over engineering”]. He’s also installed one section of the edge rail so things are definitely moving forwards and hopefully we will have some real progress this weekend.

It may not look like much, but it is a distinct and vital move in the right direction.

Baked cheese inadvertently turned into what you an only describe as fondue but hey, can’t call that a problem. Ham and cornichons and we were good to go.

What a cock-up! I had the first shower when it was only 9deg in the bathroom. By the time I got out and finished faffing it was 17 deg for Matt to have a shower. When he came out it was over 20 deg; probably the first time any room in this house has reached such heady heights. Lesson learnt, always have the second shower!!

We have a big day tomorrow so having an early night. Night all xx

[21 January 2021]