Friday

Exciting surprise with the post this morning, our ‘Carte de Sejours’ have arrived. This is basically our residence permit for France, easy movement back and forth to London and free travel in the EU.. oh, yeah… damned Covid. Guess for now it’s just another thing for Matt to carry around in his wallet.

Yet another busy day of work and juggling projects and meetings, thank heavens this submission will be done by Monday night. Just as I am completing my second to last call of the day Matt comes to drag me away but thankfully this one I can bring to a rather abrupt end. It seems that Jackie is arriving with the cherry picker (Matt has never met him and he only speaks French).

Jackie is brilliant, drives the picker over to the trees then gives Matt a hands on lesson. I’d have done it myself but realistically there is no way that Matt is going to allow me to be unsupervised with a chainsaw and certainly not at 10-14m off the ground!

With a few words of English and lots of nodding from Matt it seems he has the idea. Thankfully however he insists that Matt now tries it for himself under Jackie’s tutelage. It all went fine so Jackie shows us the important lunchtime shut off process and he’s off.

Following today’s workshop it’s time for the last call of the day and always my favourite, particularly on a Friday afternoon, a debrief with Mr Ward [if I were in the UK we’d be in the pub now, oh how I miss our trips to the pub!]

As I’m starting to close up the house I find Meow quite literally playing with a mouse. I’m not quite sure what to make of it as she clearly seems to enjoy the game and has trotted it back and forth multiple times quite careful not to hurt it. Eventually however I think she got a bit rough and it died so she bought it to us and demanded food as a reward… I’m not sure that’s how it works! Was a good game of cat and mouse though.

I eventually found Matt out in my potting shed, because ‘that’s where the vice is’ of course. He was working on the water manifolds again. I just hope that reducing the water pressure by half [it was at 7bar apparently, over twice what it should be inside the house and higher than some pressure washers…] by fitting a new pressure reducer, also a quick way to spend €75 apparently, and more goo will fix the leak problem. Time will tell.

Time for a quick call to Muma Camp and sending our love to Dawn and Russell. After dinner and TV time Matt was off to bed while Lee lured me into a game of golf so unfortunately was in bed a little later than planned. Thank heavens it’s the weekend….

[16 April 2021]