Destruction and construction

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This is the week when, apparently, England came to France. What I mean is that it has rained for most of the time. Oddly, we haven’t minded a bit. We really do need to get on with things in the house, and now we can willingly stick around indoors battling with the dust that billows as you’re trying to drill walls as thick as your arm, or attempting to part certain floor tiles from the tough cement they were fixed down with some 60 years ago, while leaving others that surround them intact.

When the mild autumn sun is shining on the snowy peaks, and the trees develop a New England richness of colour (not that I’ve been to New England, but I’ve seen a few pictures), and there are winter pansies to plant, garden weeds to attack and healthy walks to be done, DIY is not enticing. But it has to be done. Everything here is just so plain difficult. Not a wall is straight. Not a surface is intact. Nothing that we need to remove wants to be parted from where it’s been fixed for the last century or so. Removing doors so they can be repaired and painted takes unbelievable muscle power: the ones downstairs are large thick, heavy, and covered in deeply unpleasant brown paint. The gas and water pipes all over the kitchen walls look like that irritating ‘pipes’ screensaver pattern on Windows. Which are which? Which are in use and which redundant? Even Paul the plumber’s not sure.

And last weekend we found curtains and stuck them up in every available orofice in the house to compensate for our currently less-than-adequate heating. The old solutions are often the best

Sill, it’s not all work. November 5th is to celebrate: Barack Obama’s victory in the States, Elinor’s birthday - the first time in her life that I’ve not been reminded of it by the run up to Bonfire Night (but I remembered anyway), and the need to get away from all the muck in the house meant we went to the cinema last night, and saw ‘Entre les Murs’, a sort of high school version of ‘Être et Avoir’, with rural Auvergne traded for a troubled inner-city Paris. When it comes to a cinema near you (and as it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, it will)- see it. The film initially seems like a documentary, with the teacher interacting with his sassy, loquacious real-life students at his multi-cultural school. No straightforward narrative, but problems develop: though no heros emerge at the end, it’s a thought provoking and engaging film, with the students as the real stars of the screen.

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Photos

That's the space left by that old pig's head boiler....
...and now to be cleared up and filled with tiles. Can you beleieve we found an unused box of matching ones in the atelier?

Grim kitchen door
See the thickness! Admire the colour! It'll be patched and painted though by this time tomorrow

Not all of our doors are grim though
Upstairs, I love the elegant bolts and handles on the bedroom doors

Sitting in the atelier for a pause café
....with the pansies for company. Still lots of work to do outside though, so don't look too hard.