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 are 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.

Bang!

The city of Valletta is named after the Grand Master John Parisot de Vallette, of the Order of St John. He played an important part in building the city, and is revered for, against all odds, seeing off an invasion by turkish forces, of which only about one third made it back home alive.   Would that our current leaders had a similarly robust approach to dealing with invaders.

A tradition is that a cannon was fired every midday as a time-keeping excercise for the town and surroundings.   The arrival of an important piece of news was also announced by firing a cannon.   Today, a cannon is fired every midday and at 4 PM, except Sundays, as a tourist attraction.

The officer primed two cannons and fired one, the second, I guess, acting as a backup.

Fat woman

The National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta is well worth a visit, even if you're not especially into the subject.   It appears that the Maltese have lived in interesting times, ever since the first humans set foot on the islands.   Populations have come and gone since ancient times, leaving behind only some of their artifacts, many with no obvious reason for their disappearance.

This fat woman is a little sculpture, maybe 15cm long, on display there.   The bench she is sleeping on appears to be sagging under her weight.   She is topless, and wearing a pleated skirt.   Since fabrics decay over time, little carvings such as this are the reason we have some idea of what the people might have worn.

Does she have some kind of neck scarf?   I didn't notice that before.

Valletta

We are just back from a short holiday in Malta.   Anita found us a nice hotel in the centre of Valletta, the capital city.   It was unusual to find myself on a warm foreign holiday where everyone speaks English (no need to mentally rehearse every conversation), they drive of the left and they take euros.   It was busy, even in this off-season.

The first day it rained continuously, so we went to visit the Grand Master's Palace, the seat of much political evolution in past centuries.   There's not much point in my trying to summarise its history here, but let me  tell you that the armoury is amazing.  I have visited Scottish castles and the Scots know a thing or two about armour and have some impressive displays, but I've seen nothing like this.

Incidentally it was in this building that I found two uses of English that are a bit out of the ordinary.  One of the displays had a notice that talked about the use of weaponry to "offend" the enemy.  I know we talk about offensive weapons but I've never seen the verb in that context.   They also spoke of mortar cannon being made by bronze founders.   They worked in a foundry of course, but again, a use of English I had not seen before.

Boiling frogs

I read that the UK government is thinking of creating an energy rating for houses.   This is to encourage people to take measures to reduce their energy consumption, "for the planet",  (and install heat pumps).   The french government has such a scheme that has been in place for a few years now.

Every house that is put up for sale in France must have an energy rating A (good) to G (bad).   If you have an electric heat pump, this results in a better energy rating than you would get otherwise, regardless of how well or badly your house is insulated.   (Unless the heat pump is reversible so it cools the house down in Summer, when it doesn't get you any credit.) 

More recent legislation means that if you are a landlord, it is now illegal for you to rent out a dwelling that has an energy rating of G.   And from early this year, if you are selling a house with an energy rating of E or worse, not only do you have to pay for the energy rating study itself, but you also have to pay for a deeper and more expensive study to determine what work would be needed to be done (and how much it would cost) to make the energy rating "acceptable".   This of course is used as a stick to beat the vendor down on price.

(For some reason the government doesn't care if you cook with electricity or not)

Of course heat pumps are a Very Good Thing, and people should be discouraged from using any other kind of heating.   So gas boilers, that used to have VAT at 5.5%, and then more recently 10%, and as of yesterday, 20%, are being made more expensive so that heat pumps are more financially attractive.   An item on the main news on Monday pointed out that despite their higher initial cost, heat pumps, with government subsidies, can offer a payback period of only 15 years, (this is at current electricity prices that aren't going to increase, are they?) so they are in fact a real bargain.

I'm sure that this is all about saving the planet, and nothing at all to do with the fact that individual households can be denied electricity at the click of a mouse.

Cars of course are big consumers of energy and the government in France has a bonus/malus system in place - a subsidy on the price of a small new car, and a tax on the price of a big one.  In its original form it was very successful and cost the government a fortune.  Yesterday the definition of the size of a big car was reduced so the most popular mid-sized car in France now costs more than €1,000 more new than it otherwise would.

Cars also have a rating on the level of pollution they create, a "crit'air" rating (1 good, 5 bad).   Cities such as Paris, Marseille, and others, with more to come, prohibit cars with a crit'air rating 4 or 5 from entering the city.

How's the water temperature these days?