NEWSFLASH!

Annette and Charles are pregnant – hoorah, I’m gonna be an Aunty again (or Tatie Sal – French for Aunty Sal!!!) The baby’s present name is “coffee bean” – bean because its only 5mm long and coffee because Annette and Charles have just been on holiday and in true Annette style she is now incredibly tanned. Mother and baby doing well, Father ecstatic!

The Planning Application

The Good News – we received a receipt from The Department of Planning (DDE) which indicated that if we do not receive planning consent for the swimming pool by July 6th then the response will not be negative and the same thing in relation to gite 1 by August 2nd.

The Bad News – the Mayor told us that the guy at the DDE was off sick, he had had treatment but really wasn’t very well!!! Having tried to convey this in my best French to our trusty architect, Mr. Le Glaive, he brushed it off with a tres francais shoulder shrug and an extended and ever so throaty “mais non, tous sont bien” – so, quelle sera, sera!

The Garden on the Gite Side

More waste pipes and therefore more digging to put in all the pipes to the septic tank and the grease trap:

Having done this, we made some steps:

And a small terrace outside gite 1 (all the steps and terrace will be stone clad, but are presently concrete, before you think err they’re not too nice):

Then more steps:

Then I built the walls around them, with my own hands! You’ve gotta be impressed by that I am very proud:

Whilst I was doing this, Dan whipped up a door for the old chicken keep in the bottom of the Pigeonnier gite.

Phew, with all that done, we finally felt like we are making progress, especially when we put in a water pipe and electricity cable to link up to the pool – hoorah, the first part of the pool!:

The Swimming Pool

So desperate to get started, we had a large wall of “Grand Pierre” put in place. “Grand Pierre” meaning large rocks, (before you all wondered why big Peter entered stage left) - steady…. the large rocks are for a retaining wall so that the pool doesn’t slip into the field:

In came Mr Lafon’s diggers:

But in true French style, the hoohah began. Mr. Villard became very upset, shouting and waving his stick around, screaming that we were encroaching on his boundaries, we were ruining the fields with the trucks and that we shouldn’t be doing all this. As a bit of background info, it was Mr Villard’s idea to build the wall and he introduced us to Mr Lafon! Alas, it seems that we have an up and down relationship with Mr Villard (or at least he does with us!) We see him most days – sometimes he is nice; we returned one day to find he had strimmed part of the garden for us and the next day, he decides the garden needed clearing up so he ploughed it – he had better not do that when it’s a proper garden:

(He was happy – though it was a completely pointless exercise as the diggers moved in the next week!) In fact he was so happy, the next morning when we got up, he had left us some radishes outside the door:

Now I could at this point produce an 0871 number for people to phone in if they like radishes but I am already aware that there are only 2 people on the entire globe that actually like radishes – Chris and Anna Tayton, who voluntarily grow them and then eat them!!

Back to the hoohah, we called in the mayor, who turned up within 15 mins – now that’s service, can you imagine being able to request a meeting with an UK government representative and them turn up with all the paperwork and a scale rule within 15 minutes of your phone call – it would take months and then it wouldn’t be their job!

The Mayor established the boundaries, Mr Villard left for lunch. 2 hours later Mr Villard returned shouting that the Mayor didn’t know the boundaries, he was too young (the mayor is 63!) and that Mr Villard was the only person that knew everyone’s boundaries in the entire village – we had this and worse for the 4 days that Mr Lafon’s men were here! We tried to ignore him and carried on:

Meanwhile, Dan and I got on with the steps down to the pool:

The wall was finished. The Lafon’s removed the roots from the terrace wall and we asked them to pull down the wall which was a bit crooked and dilapidated:

We were going to rebuild this wall before digging the pool but unfortunately, more rock was found:

so it was decided that the pool would have to be dug before we rebuilt the wall, as the vibratons from removing the rock could bring the wall down. I know we haven’t quite got planning consent but I was never very good with rules; so we dug the pool with a giant pneumatic chisel – very very exciting:

As soon as the pool was dug and whilst Mr Villard had his siesta, we got the local builders yard to deliver (via the fields)a load of cement and gravel:

The nice people at Chateau Pechembert loaned us their tractor mower with trolley behind it for a month (whilst they went sailing in St Tropez, like you do every June!) so that we could take gravel up and down the slope but typical, after the first load, the tractor decided to breakdown and we spent the rest of the month trying to get parts to mend it – not a great success but fun whilst it lasted:

Tomato World

What a huge success…. after the initial hiccups of “the one that died”, we have our first red tomatoes standing out amongst a sea of green.

Takings are up on the door at Tomato World, a few nice English couples visited this month and were very impressed (click here for Visitors):

Box Pots

Not going as well as hoped:

Having visited Les Jardins de Marqueysaac (gardens boasting 120 years of age) with Annette and Charles, I realized that may be my box idea would be a bit of a slow process:

Dan threatened to buy small box plants from Marqueysaac and set up in competition!

Wildlife at Gite 1

Still no snakes, thankfully, but some interesting and large insects. This is just a grasshopper but it was massive:

And then, this looks like it is from the grasshopper family:

And Toady, but he’s a bit shy:

Finally, I leave you this month with a rendition of “Bring me Sunshine” by Dan and Charles:

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