New Bricks and Pantiles

In the movie “how to murder your wife” there is a scene where Jack Lemmon has drawn a cartoon sketch of the glup glop cement mixer where his cartoon alta-ego disposed of his wife. I have been searching for a while on Google to find the written words used for Galpeter, gahloppetter or whatever – but found so many different spellings that I will have to watch the movie again to determine the right one.

This blog post was going to be about my happiness of getting my cement mixer going and mixing both mortar and concrete for the first tie this year – but I have sidetracked myself onto the dangers and superficiality of Google and the Internet in general.

I have been involved in the Internet since it was the internet, pre ARPA, pre CERN – it is a great tool, a wonderful communications service, but that is what it is – a simple tool a service to use.

I get hundreds of questions each week asking for information which is only a “scratch” from the surface of a simple Google search string – it seems people now demand instant answers and the Internet services claim to offer immediate solutions – meercats offer insurance advice, everything can be solved with a 118 call – your iPhone can find the nearest Starbucks.

This is crazy – the information given is superficial – it is very very often inaccurate – sat-nav is ridiculous in most situations, yet most people now do not bother to remember anything, it is all there on demand – but no it isn’t.

I am going to think carefully of the uses I put information technology to – it creates nothing – it stultifies the brain – I can write faster with a keyboard than with a pen, but that is about it at the moment.

After 20 years here in the South of France and spending much of the time working on old stone houses, some over 1000 years old, am I beginning to see things with ancient eyes?

Today I was asked to look at a village property and comment on the work needed. The prospective buyers had already got some advice about the work needed and wanted a second opinion.

The house is typical of the region, originally a medieval stone cottage with constant additions and alterations over the last three or four hundred years in a local Mediterranean village.

Part had been made into a pleasant holiday cottage and there was plenty of opportunity to adapt and expand with outbuildings and courtyards. I found the place charming and suggested they offer near the asking price, there not being anything structurally wrong and it was generally in good condition.

I was then shown comments from the previous inspection recommending that the facades were in need of work, main beams needed replacement and ther was a damp problem on two walls.

My comments to this were that the beams were OK for the next century, the damp was essential to stop stone walls collapsing and the water ingress had been fixed anyway – I had not even commented on the facades as they were scruffy and crumbly but would see the next couple of hundred years in without much effort.

I’m not sure that this is what the buyers wanted, but it is the way properties are managed in this part of France – the tendency is to buy a place, gut it and totally renovate it – my attitude is to leave everything alone, live in the place for a year or more and the property will demand from you what has to be done. Scruffy, but charming – or change for the sake of change – or am I missing something?

After a day of falling off motorbikes or hijacking post office vans, to hear the words from the second director “it’s a wrap” was music – off to the pub to spend as much as I had earned to get another days work, that was a long time ago – today I did a mini Christo and started wrapping our house in blue plastic – well I have removed the huge hangar doors and covered the front of half the house in blue plastic, it look terrible, so I will have to work fast to build the terrace and windows for the second ground floor apartment.

I will take a photo of this tomorrow, it is too dark now

Today was a day of plaster and paint – I find it hard to work on Internet sites or blogs if I am thinking about mixtures of jointing materials and grouting – so hence a short and aimless (nothing new) piece today.

I have always found it hard to recommend people to do building work here in the South of France – I generally do most of my own and have a few specialist tradesmen who help – about the only person I have used consistently for over 15 years is a wonderful ‘plaquiste’ (a person who fixes and coats plasterboard) – he is retired and even has painted on the side of his van ‘retired, all work refused’ (in French of course) – but he will help me for a couple of days at a time if I am stuck and need a very high quality finish to my work.

It is still bitterly cold, although the longer evenings and lighter morning are a bonus – for the first time I have seen ice on the driveway stay there all day and some lumps of snow from Monday are still evident, thank goodness for our electric blanket.

Make a little list – and nothing will be missed. I am resisting the temptation to make lists of the things I have to do and then prioritise them – my fear is the list will be endless and ever-growing list which will be counter-productive and I will fall into the slough of despond and nothing will be done.

So back to muddling through the day and doing the bleeding obvious again – this morning one water heater seems not to be heating, hopefully this is just the circuit breaker, I will know in a few hours. As with central heating systems and water softeners, I have multiple units so switching from one to another is simple, but if the salt runs low in all the softeners, elements fuse in all the heaters and we run out of oil, gas and wood simultaneously because I believe I resilience and back-ups then I am worse off than having one unit only and fixing that one.

Alert orange again today, so no school for Jack as the buses are not running although the sun is shining and there is not a scrap of snow – it is bloody cold though and there is ice on the top of the pool cover.

The aim of this blog is not to diarise my thoughts, but to shift me blooming arse and get into a blogging pattern – the temptation is to ramble on about events – like the garbage truck has just passed, great refuse collection in France – three times a week, friendly people and very polite and helpful – We get two general collections and one ‘yellow” bin collection for paper and tins etc – no dramatic sorting and as much as we need to put out. There is also a monthly collection of big junk like fridges and old beds if we leave them out – all in our council taxes which are about half what they are in the UK I understand.

My priority is to think of ways of earning some cash and,to put these thoughts into action and actually make some cash – everything is changing, both me the global situation, so I don’t think experience and established ways of doing business are necessarily highly relevant – times is hard – I guess the trick is to keep looking and not think too much ) the nugget of gold could be revealed with the next chop of the pick-axe – so keep hacking away, keep moving andyou will get soemwhere, or die of starvation and exhaustion

Shit – I just hit the diary category on the blog for reference – oh well…..

Again I always wanted to start with that line – it was snowing last night, which for march in the South of France sort of counts as dark and stormy I guess.

My thoughts of writing an anonymous blog here were confounded as I seem to have syndicated this one at FrUk all over the place – still I doubt anyone reads it so it can still be a discipline for me to get writing – stiffen the fingers and summon up the mood – sort of thing.

Snow from my WIndow in March

Clio Miranda an Jack are still here this morning, jack has no Lycee today as it is an “alert orange” which means the college bus will not dare trip out in 3 cm of snow – Mimi will be going back to Paris tomorrow and Clio is supposed to be getting the 11am train to Carcassonne.

Our dogs are total wimps, one is supposed to be part Husky, but one look at the snow and a paw into the white stuff and straight back to their baskets and in front of the log fire – central heating full on – only a few days of oil in the tank – I had hoped not to have to buy any ’till the summer – still we can couple up the gas boiler and I am planning a wood fueled furnace so as to have a triple system with two independent circuits for the house.

I am in two minds about making lists of actions I need to do – especially as I will have to be in “writing” mode to do it – not builder mode – this means that writing will likely take priority – but the truth I suspect is that there is so much to do that any list will be frightening – so I will proceed as usual doing the bleeding obvious – but I will try to discipline myself to sharing the day between writing and building – blogging and networking first – then today to unload a 22 ton truck with materials (in the snow), the delivery is due at 2pm, but I suspect most building sites are closed today so it could come this morning when I am supposed to be taking Clio to the station (in the snow).

I have the French translations for some advertising material – Clio does this, she is translating voice overs for television and films – it is what she has been training for and she is very very good – English to French is perfect, French to English sometimes needs someone from Essex to bring it into the current idiom it seems as her English is set in the 1990′s and is akin to Shakespeare or even Chaucer for British teenagers.

I have the nagging thought that there is something in the Internet I am missing, just around the corner, just out of sight, which will change things dramatically – I was in a gold mine once and the thought that the next pick or shovel to reveal untold wealth was always there, despite the millions of tons of rock that has already been moved – just one millimeter below any part of miles of tunnels could reveal the mother lode, the Internet is like that, compulsive and addictive.

I do have some application/software ideas which see to be radical and commercial – I also have some people keen to work with me on them – I just seem to be overwhelmed with work and do not allocate the time to structure the projects – perhaps this blog will help guide me to that path.

Log fire in the Living room in Villa Roquette

Yes – I always wanted to start a narrative with – yes – but a stream of consciousness this not not planned to be, nor is it a – confession – neither a – ‘Tis – or simply a – s – - but hopefully a sort of record of why I am here.

By “here” I don’t simply mean the reasoning behind my existence on earth and any philosophical ballshit, but why I am writing this in the first place. I am writing this because I think I need to organise myself better, there is a great deal I have to do and, it seems, not a lot of time to do it in, nor is there much money (any money actually) to do it with.

By using this blog www.fruk.eu it is a simply personal narrative, I don’t think this blog is networked or syndicated anywhere so no one is likely to read it – not even me – it is the simple act of writing, hopefully daily, that will help me plan.

Perish the though this is a diary, although I do need to itemise the activities I have to do an those actions I have performed – first to set the scene.

Location – we live in a large 19th century “Maison de Maitre” in Montblanc, a village in Languedoc in the South of France about 12 kilometers from the Mediterranean. I am typing on a Macbook, with a separate keyboard raised and angled at 45 degrees and viewing a separate screen which is slightly above head height. I work this way because I damaged my back a couple of years ago and I can sit comfortably in a ‘top of the range’ Ikea office chair with no pain. I am in a first floor room, opposite our bedroom, which is full of books and assorted junk, we call it the “book room” although there are books everywhere in the house.

It is March 7th 2010, bright and sunny, but cold – this has been a very cold winter, we had guest for a couple of months and had central heating on until two weeks ago, luxury, but after 2000 liters of oil, (the last delivery we have not paid for yet) I have a small electric fire next to me. I shall probably type until some of my fingers go white with the cold and I cannot feel them, this happens at a temperature at, or below, 7 degrees – there is a name for the syndrome but I forgot it.

So, to planning – I can only really do one thing at a time, my life at present is divided between building work and marketing work through the Internet.

The building is all to do with developing our home into a commercially viable set of rental units and the marketing work is to get clients to rent these units for short term or vacation rentals. I have been doing this almost constantly now for the past 20 years, ever since we first came to France.

I shall try typing with mittens – nice word “mittens” – how did such a word derive from gloves with no ends to the fingers – first I need to find some mittens.

To plan my time I suppose I should be making lists – but I shan’t – I may develop this, but for now I shall do the bleeding obvious. It is simple really, as long as I am doing something, and that this something is associated with either finishing the house or selling the rentals – I should be moving forwards. Sounds about right, but there is a flaw in this logic, I have been doing this for several years and we are very poor.

So this writing on this blog is a break from the pattern, an attempt to make new struture to shift us into profit.

My reasoning is that we are, I believe, very close to a successful plan/pattern/formula/whatever and I am missing something, not-seeing the catalyst which will enable the reaction to work. As I can only relate to either building work in France on my own properties, or on the Internet – somewhere in these two areas is the missing ingredient, probably in the Internet, so hence this blog entry, my attempt to focus thoughts into areas which may help find the activity to achieve oir goals.

Enough rambling for now – I just plugged in a heated towel rail for our shower room, my hands are freezing up (at 7 degrees I assume) and I hope to get a newsletter created and several “published” blog posts done today – also Miranda is down from Paris, Clio is coming over by train and will need picking up and Jack is home – so all the French part of my family is here today – Tony an Natalia are in France at his ski chalet in Montalbert so that leaves Belle, Jasmine, Tanya and Tyler in the UK – still 50 percent in France is good.

The sky is bright blue now, it is midday, it will be warmer in the garden than her at the desk, these old stone houses are too good for insulation – I will take a quick snap from the window – I can see the window needs cleaning – the Cedars of Lebanon in the front garden look great.

I just found this page French Swear Words online – the guide to pronunciation is not very accurate, but this may take into account a regional dialect – the comments correct most of the simple errors – but it is a useful article.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Profanity.svg/75px-Profanity.svg.png

Alexandra, my daughter, helps me a lot with translations. I am impressed with the letters she has composed for me. However she has a secret weapon there is a website www.Conso.net which gives help and one of their services is a set of standard letter templates for all manner of things.

Interestingly I also picked up a reference to this site on my Facebook pages today and found links to this site posted on other blogs and websites.