The château at Carrouges

We took a short break to Bagnoles de l'orne, and while there we went to visit the chateau at Carrouges.   Well worth the trip if you have the slightest interest in things historical.

The route that we took meant that we approached the gatehouse via a road that leads down to it, giving a good view of it in the context of the chateau.   The gatehouse was almost completely destroyed during world war 2 when a german ammunition truck was blown up near it and set it on fire.   Not much survived beyond the ground floor walls, the rest was rebuilt in the original style after the war.

The castle iteslf is notable for the fact that is is made almost entirely out of brick.   It was acquired by the state in 1936 when the owner couldn't pay the taxes.   Is that theft?  You decide.   Perhaps the WEF "Own nothing and be happy" has deeper roots than I thought.   In any case, enormous sums of taxpayer money are being invested in its restauration, and at least you can visit it, for a small fee. 

The chateau interior is well-presented, with well-furnished rooms and clear explanitary notices.   You can visit the grounds for free, (a UNESCO heritage site) but being the end of November, the weather was not encouraging.

I especially liked this HarryPotter style lockable chest.   I think that it could be animated to good effect for a film.   I wonder what the key looks like.

A mast year

I am reliably informed by my neighbour Bethany, that the years when nut trees produce a much larger crop of nuts than usual is called a mast year.   This year is a mast year for walnuts.

Apparently it is part of a general reproduction strategy for trees.   The pigs, squirrels and other animals that feed on the nuts establish a size of population that reliably consumes all or nearly all of the nuts available in any year.   Then a mast year comes along and there are more nuts than can possibly be consumed, and those that remain therefore have a chance to germinate and make more trees;

Certainly, there are more nuts than I can sensibly gather, shell and eat.

Sweet potatoes

Gardening is a learning process, and this year I learned a bit more about sweet potatoes.   I bought 8 plants in two varieties from the garden centre, only one variety did well.    So I will use those tubers from this year for reproduction if I can.

They spread like crazy, and cover so much ground that I had difficulty finding the original planting sites to dig up the potatoes.    So next year, mark them with stakes.   They spread so much that I couldn't get to the weeds to pull them without treading on the plant and crushing it.   Next year, make paths to separate the plants and keep the growth off the paths.

I asked Chat GPT about keeping the tubers and apparently you have to cure them, ideally at 27 - 30 degrees and 80% - 90%  humidity for a week or so.   Here they are, curing above a tub with water in, kept at 28 degrees by my aquarium heater that I use for brewing.   (When not being photgraphed they are covered by a sheet of newspaper.)

Sweet potatoes have delicate skin.  The white spots on those in the picture are where the skin got rubbed off when I dug them up.   These are vulnerable places where moisture can escape and fungus set in.   Curing helps avoid this but is not 100% guaranteed.   The best thing is to free them from the earth by hand.   Something else to try next year.   I'll also make sure that the soil is crumbly and as free of stones as I can make it.

Seasons

Getting autumnal.   Mushrooms, mists, gardening moves from harvesting towards tidying.

Battleground - melons vs sweet potatoes

I have tried to grow melons before.  The plants grew to about a foot long and produced one melon each.   I have grown a sweet potato before.   It covered about a square foot and made a potato.   I didn't really look after either of them very well.

So this year I put 4 melon plants in a 2x2 metre square and 6 sweet potato plants in about the same area alongside them.   I looked after them properly this time; they all grew like crazy and are fighting each other for space at the boundary between them.   And weeds are everywhere.

Lessons learnt:   1) Don't plant melons and sweet potatoes next to each other as they fight.   2) Make sure that they each have plenty of space if you grow them properly.   3) Make sure that you can get to the weeds without treading on the plant (plant them in longer narrow beds so you can reach over the plant without crushing it)  4) The melon" Petit Gris de Rennes" is prolific and has exquisite flavour.

The African Marigold pictured is a freebie.   A random seed from last year sprouted so I let it grow.  The sweet potato is good mannered enough to be growing around it rather than over it.

Old hobbies die hard

It could be that we will be moving house some time later this year.   With this in mind we have been reviewing those things that we might keep, and those to be discarded.   I have already given away a bucket full of plumbing bits, leftovers from projects that "might come in handy one day".   Also bits of wood that "seem a shame to just throw away".

Included in the list for evaluation are old hobbies.   I have had an interest in avation since I was a kid, that, after a stint at gliding, changed into an interest in radio controlled aircraft.   Eventually life gave me the financial resources needed to indulge this hobby, and my preference for electric power came to the fore once lithium-polymer batteries gave the power/weight ratio needed.   So a couple of days ago I took out some of my mothballed r/c kit.

To my great surprise, the batteries are still good, and the "best" (that is, with all the bits in place) model I have responded correctly to the controller.   So I carefully checked it all out and took the 'plane out to the field next door. 

I should have reminded myself of one of the most basic rules of flying:  the higher up an aeroplane is, the less likely it is to hit something, since most things it might hit either are, or have one end in, the ground.    So I was still getting used to the controls when the first landing happened, that was more in the form of a cartwheel, and that took the wings off.

Liberal application of glue and tape and the model is airworthy again, and the second, third and fourth flights were more successful.   Will I take up the hobby again?  I'm keeping my options open.   I have no interest in bigger, or faster, but aerobatics is of interest, as is the skill needed to keep a glider in the air.

We shall see.

Mead - stage two

Racked off the mead into demijohns today.  Initial tasings show great promise.  (See plastic cup to the left of picture)  It should be perfect as a sweet wine for desserts or with foie gras.

Gurgle gurgle

French for mead is hydromel.   I have tried to make it before, but the homey I used was from a supermarket, and the result was not as I would like.   One of the things the locals do around here is keep bees, and so I got a decent lot of real honey from known, local sources.   Some special yeast and nutrient from a friend and it's bubbling away nicely.

Vide maison

There was a vide maison in the adjacent village last weekend, basically a car boot sale in a house.   In this case it was to empty an old shop that has been closed ever since we have been in France.   It was full of old electrics, machines and sundry items from a time when complicated things could be repaired by someone with creativity and a "can do" attitude.

I have never seen a carding comb before, and these machines look victorian in their "can do".   It was Aladdin's cave, and if you wanted old things for decorating a pub, it was a dream.

I bought a bunch of CDs and two Salmson pumps as spares for the gîte plumbing.

A big wheel

We went to spend a day at St Malo with my sister.   There's a big wheel in place at the moment, and we took a ride on it.  Great views over the city.

Brassicas: A Dead Loss

I decided to pay special attention to brassicas this year.   I laid aside a bed for them, manured it and made sure it was watered.   I didn't count on the black fly.

I got two fist-sized cabbages out of it and that's all from about 20 plants.   The rest were turned into crisps by a combination of blackfly and heat.   Even my Nasturiums were dessicated by blackfly.   I am consoled only by the fact that my neighbours have, like me, cofirmed a total write-off of cabbages, sprouts cauliflowers, etc.   And judging by these plants at the garden centre today, even the pros are having trouble.

I have recently planted a few seeds of Savoy cabbage in the hope that they will mature late in the year when the bugs have gone.

Power cuts

The electric power around here isn't all that reliable, with occasional outages, and many short drop-outs that are enough to get the UPSes to kick in and then shut off a few seconds later.  All of our most fragile electronic kit is protected with a UPS; we have three and they're not cheap.  So news of an improvement to the quality of our leccy supply is welcome.

We are warned of a scheduled power cut tomorrow, from 8h45 to 14h15, that they tell us is to improve the delivery of electricity.  Well, let's hope so.   This little lash-up is to keep the fridge-freezer running.  I have no idea how much power it takes, but I will find out tomorrow if 1.4kWh is enough to keep it going for five and a half hours.

Update:  The power cut has come and gone, timed to the advertised minute.  I took the advice from Microdave (see comments) and cooled the freezer down from its normal temperature of -18°C to -24°C and then set it back to -18°C when it was connected to the backup system.  When it is cooling, it consumes about 140 watts, so the batteries could keep it going for about a day if necessary. 

New buttons

I never regretted buying a flute that I thought was especially pretty.   A professional, hand-made flute, it had a solid silver body and the mechanism was in grey stainless steel.  I thought they went well together, and they made for a lighter flute.   It was a better instrument than I was a player, but I grew into it.

I have seen professionals on the TV playing an accordion exactly the same as mine, and I have been told that I should have no need ever to replace it.  But, being intended for pros, it doesn't have the special buttons with a roughened surface that identify the C and F keys (by feel, without having to look).  So I decided to fix this.

An outfit called "La Malle aux Accordeons" supplies buttons by mail order,  and you can get shiny gold-coloured ones that I decided would make my accordion look better.  So I bought some - 68 in all, including the 12 special ones, and fitted them.   The cat helped.

The second photo doesn't bring out the gold colour very well - the effect is better than it looks in the picture.

Neglected Leeks

I confess, I have neglected my leeks.   Last year, I carefully saved seeds from some select plants that I had allowed to flower, and this Springtime I scattered them on a square yard of soil, watered them and hoed them in.  I let Nature take its course, which is of course what it did, and soon my patch of leek seedlings was covered in weeds.

I managed to keep the weeds in check until a few weeks ago, but it was a losing battle, and the leeks became overshadowed by enormous unwanted plants.   The dry weather didn't help either, and the tips of the leek leaves were brown from drought.  Time to decide to act or just write it off and treat it as a dead loss.

I had to make space in the garden for them by digging up some of the potatoes.  It's a bit early for that, but the spuds are struggling in the heat and it's nigh on impossible to get water down to root level no matter how often I water them.  so I cleared a strip about a yard wide and 3 yards long.

All you can see of the leeks are the holes that they are hiding in, they are so small.   But I am hoping that, with the fertiliser I have put in the ground, and the water poured down the holes, they will recover.   There is another positive aspect to this approach - I uncovered some potatoes I had missed.

To the left are plastic cloches sheltering Amaryllis bulbs I have put out to benefit from the fertile soil and Summer sun.  To the right are the potatoes that I haven't dug up yet.

Internet Fibre Installation

It is a general truth that, for any complicated system, the more severely it is optimised, the less stable it is in response to perturbation.

Mayenne Fibre is, I believe, a subsidiary of Orange, and, in August of last year, according to their website, a point of access for internet via fibre was available by the road outside our house.   So we bundled into the Orange shop in Laval and after a short while came away with a Livebox suited to fibre internet and phone line, and a promise of a phone call to organise its connection to the fibre network.   Sure enough, a few days later we got a call for a connection in a couple of weeks' time, and could we please be sure to be at home then?   

The day arrived, and with a small amount of difficulty, the installers had the first leg of the 2-leg connection to the house installed in the conduit under the ground.   Problem.   Connecting it to the access point in the street revealed that there was in fact no internet signal to be had there.  So the installers took out the fibre they had already installed and went away.   Then started a 10-month delay that ended yesterday.

In between times, you would not believe the cock-ups that occurred.   The first problem (December? January?) that we noticed was that our ADSL stopped working.  When we contacted Orange they told us that someone had nicked a couple of kilometers of copper cable, and that they would fix it.   They did.   A couple of weeks later it stopped working again, and I am guessing that Orange decided that they had lost enough copper, and told us that they were not going to fix it again.   They gave us an airbox that provides a 4G wireless internet connection (but no RJ45 sockets).   I was able to get our home network configured to give us all the functionality we had before except the local file server that needs an RJ45 connection.   Our archive of photos, music files etc was offline from then until yesterday.

Somewhere along the line our voice phone also stopped working.   When we complained about this we were told that our number didn't exist, which on further investigation, was because, in response to our complaint about non-functioning ADSL, someone had simply disconnected it.    So we have spent the last several months with the landline not working and all calls diverted to Anita's mobile phone.   This isn't a totally bad thing, since we discovered that with the Orange phone app we can block the spam calls we had been getting several times a day.°

And yesterday the internet via fibre arrived.  The livebox is quite a nice bit of tech, the little touch screen seems to be high-contrast e-paper (as in Kindle readers) and the installation was a doddle.   The wifi seems powerful and I have dispensed with the mesh system I had. (I'm keeping it just in case.)  The concept of security is based on physical access to the livebox - if someone breaks into your house, change the password and verify all of your internet security because the password can be displayed via simple button push so a housebreaker can get into your network easy as pie.

Livebox, file server and phone in perfect harmony.   I haven't worked out how to change the SSID of the WiFi yet, though.

° Orange have made the smart move of crowdsourcing their anti-spam service.  If you get an incoming call, you can signal it as spam (or not) and the aggregate of these signals is sent to future recipients of calls from that number.  So if an icoming call flags up as spam you can just reject it (and also block the number if you like)

Public Performance

It was the occasion of the opening of the bistrot for the summer season.  An "open mike" session, and I took it as the first opportunity to play the accordion to an audience outside of the music school.   Not ideal - I had to stop and restart, but on the second attempt I got through the piece OK.   Note to self:  build a repertoire of easy pieces and don't try challenging ones in public.  At least until I am more familiar with the instrument and can recover from mistakes on the fly.

I had thought that the sound of the accordion would carry well outside, but even with mikes it was quite quiet.  It sounds loud enough in the house.

I also played keyboards for my next-door neighbour, who is a fabulous rock singer.   We'll do more of that.

Solar panel aside

The solar panel kit that I bought has two solar panels and is intended for use with two 12V batteries.   The system can be used in parallel at 12V or in series at 24V.   The little instruction booklet explains how to connect batteries in parallel or in series.   The diagram of the parallel one is fine, but I wouldn't follow their advice on the series connection, if I were you.

In fact, if you connect them like in the second picture, the batteries will not just be not included, they might well not be in one piece after a short while.   And watch out for boiling acid.

A Little Solar Project

As we all know, solar panels are wonderful things, despite the fact that we have to wait about 10 years before they have given back all the energy used in making them.   Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

But I need some electricity down by my veg patch, mostly to power a watering pump, but I can use it for other things as well.   Getting a full power mains cable there would be a nightmare, so I decided to try a little solar project.   For less than €350 I got the bits for this installation that gives me just over one kWh of battery storage, plus whatever the sun is providing at the time.   I could probably just use bigger batteries for more power if I needed it.

I'm keeping the wires long since we might be selling up and I don't know where I will be installing this sytem in future.

Robinia Pseudoacacia

It must be 8 - 10 years ago I planted these trees, they were suckers from a tree at the entrance to our place, and about 3 feet high..   They have gone from "someone's planted some trees there" to "there's trees there".   This is the first year they have flowered prolifically.  Cool.

A tractor

My friend and neighbour Bryan has got himself a new* tractor.   Not brand new, in fact it could be described as ancient.   He swapped it for an old miltary-style digger that he had. 

This tractor looks like it's bomb-proof.  A noisy, single-cylinder diesel, not especially powerful but perfectly adequate for its intended use.  All the controls are cable-operated; there's no electronics anywere.   It could probably survive an EMP attack.  Here it is pulling a trailer with my rotovator on it that Bry is borrowing.

*(In french, there is no confusion in the meaning of new.  Neuf/neuve means brand new, nouveau/nouvelle means new to me.)

Climbing roses (Ena Harkness)

I told myself I'd not bother to put climbing roses against any new house we might move into.   They are a pain to maintain and they scratch.  But then.....

Exbury Gardens

It must be 35 years ago or so that we visited Exbury Gardens near Beaulieu in Hampshire.   I have only a vague memory of a pleasant garden of Rhododendrons and Azaleas, and that we had just missed the ideal  time for a  visit.   35 years makes a huge difference to a garden and they are now magnificent.

Since we have been running the gîte in France, the generous sprinkling of long weekend public holidays around now has meant that we have not been able to get away at this time of year.   This year, what with the huge increase in energy costs, rising inflation, job insecurity and higher taxes, people have a bit less money to spend on an indulgent break in our gîte, so we were free to visit.   So we organised a weekend with my sister.

It really is a fantastic garden, and I think we caught it at the perfect time of year.   It is well-signposted, with clear maps dotted around the grounds showing where you are, and where everything else is.

There is even a little steam railway that you can take to visit the more remote parts of the garden.

We closed the day off with a chinese dinner with sister and her hubby at an excellent restaurant not far from our hotel.   After which our best-laid plans went a bit agley.

I woke at 3AM on Sunday with a pain in my side that I recognised as a kidney stone.  Fortunately Anita had brought a good supply of paracetamol that dulled the pain, so with some difficulty we managed to do some shopping at the local Tesco where she got some hard-to-find-in-France groceries.   I spent the afternoon lying on my sister's couch, chaining paracetamol.  (500mg every three hours, but the pain relief only lasts 2h45, and kidney stones HURT.)   Ferry back to France overnight, collect the cat on the way home, dump the luggage, then off to the Polyclinique at Laval for urgent admission.   Yep, kidney stones.  I now have a stent to release backed-up urine, and an appointment in a month's time to get the stones out.   Such is life.  But take a look at this lake at Exbury:

Springtime

The sound of the cukcoo and the arrival of the car boot sale (vide grenier) are the first signs of Spring in the Mayenne.   A big one at Le Basouge de Chéméré this morning.   A modest but useful haul and something to do on a warm and sunny Sunday morning.

People Power

The sentencing council for England and Wales issues guidelines that are mandatory unless justice is not done by following them.    A recent guideline states that a pre-sentencing report will normally be considered necessary if, for example, the defendant is "from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community."   (Are white Christians such a minority?   Asking for a friend.)

This looks like two-tier justice to me, and to many other people.   To the extent that a duly elected representative of the people has asked the sentencing council to change its guidelines to eliminate this perception.   They have refused.     

I'm sure that if the council is moved to dismiss a request from an elected MP,  they are not going to pay any attention to me.   But if they did, I would ask them the following questions that Mr Anthony Wedgewood Benn (AKA Tony Benn) raised some time ago in the matter of the excercise of power:

1) What power do you have?
2) Where did you get it from?

3) On whose behalf do you exercise it?
4) To whom are you accountable?
5) How can we get rid of you?

Big Cruiser

It's easy to forget the size of the big cruise liners.   Those coming into Valletta are not the biggest in the world but they tower over the town.

Incidentally, the little motor boat in front of the liner in the second photo seems to be guiding the big ship out of the port.  It followed the line of wash quite precisely.