Scorpion on the wall

 Well, it makes a change from fiddler on the roof.

There is a "scrapyard challenge" once a year, that two of our neighbours participate in.   The idea is to weld a piece of artwork together from various bits of scrap metal.   This year they decided to make a scorpion.   And on "heritage day" (journée de patrimoine) the one of the team who is a "cordiste" (steeplejack) decided that the scorpion would look good on the wall of the local church tower.  Well why not?

I have to tell you that the ugly wheels on the scorpion did come off, but I don't have a picture.

He had a good audience too, since the heritage day tradition in the throbbing metropolis of St Pierre sur Erve is to fire up the communal bread oven and invite people to bring their pizzas, bread, pies etc., and have a communal cook-together and meal.  Preceded by a piss-up in the local bistrot, of course, and washed down with plenty of wine.  It was a good evening.

Quiet walk

 

Girls and boys come out to play,

The moon doth shine as bright as day

Baked beans

Anita makes a wicked baked bean recipe.   The beans are home-grown borlotti beans, the rest of the ingredients are commercial.

Proceed as follows:

Take about 500g dried beans, soak them in water for 24 hours, add salt, then boil them for an hour and a half.   Drain the beans, keeping the water.

Put half the beans in an ovenproof casserole, (that has a lid), add half a chopped onion, between 100 and 200 grams of chopped thick streaky bacon pieces (lardons),  put the rest of the beans in the pot and then add the other half of the chopped onion and another layer of bacon pieces. 

Make the sauce in a small saucepan by combining 4 fluid ounces ketchup, 2-3 tablespoons of dark treacle, 50g brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon mustard powder (or 1 teaspoon of wholegrain French mustard) and 1 tablespoon worcester sauce, ground black pepper to taste.  Stir, warm until all combined.  Pour over the beans in the casserole, the add the cooking water to cover the beans, cover with the lid and bake at 160°C for 90 minutes, then for another 30 minutes uncovered.

Yum!

Wildlife

My hopes for a career as a BBC wildlife photographer are on hold.  But meanwhile, here's a fish in the Erve, as seen on a walk the other day.  You might need to enlarge the pic, but it really is there.

Amazon marketplace - a bad experience (Update)

UPDATE 3  Money recieved into bank account.   This is the best I can reasonably expect.   TTC   (all taxes included) price quoted, TTC price paid.   Case closed.

UPDATE 2 V-KING got in touch and proposed a refund of the extra tax if I sent them a reciept.  I got one from the postman after a couple of days, and sent it to them along with a copy of the packet's label to prove it came from England.  This is done, and they have promised a refund.  This is probably as good a result as could be hoped.   But in future I might think about ordering off Amazon UK and getting the book sent to my sister.  £6.17 vs €15 is not an insignifcant price difference.

UPDATE: I got an unexpected phone call from Amazon customer service this lunchtime.  I explained what had happened and I was promised an email from the vendor, to arrive by Wednesday next week.  If I'm not satisfied I'm invited to claim a full refund under the Amazon A-Z guarantee.   This sounds like a company trying to do the best it can in response to a customer complaint.   I will keep you posted.

ORIGINAL POST:
I have just had to pay 11 euro customs duty/tax on a book that cost slightly less that €15, that I bought on Amazon Marketplace.   I'm a bit sore about that.

The thing is, I have been surprised before by duty payable on things I have bought on Amazon, so this time I checked things out, and I thought I had made the right decision.  There was, at the time I ordered, and still is, I believe, no way that I could tell from amazon.fr where exactly the item was shipping from, so I checked the details of the supplier, and V-KING, who were noted as the supplier and shipper, had an address in France.  I made the mistake of imagining that this would mean that the item would ship from France.  Wrong.   And that the TTC (toutes taxes comprises) price quoted included everything I would have to pay.

I got Amazon to phone me.  That aspect of their customer service is good, and I got a call within a few seconds of having requested one.   After a careful explanation, I was promised an email, that, when I got it, explained, in essence, that their website is continually evolving in order to try new things to improve the customer experience, and thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Out of curiosity I went on amazon.co.uk, to see if it has the same problem.   No.   This item is available from different suppliers, and it is clearly stated, for each supplier, where the item will ship from.   I was interested to note that the book as sold by V-KING is claimed to ship from France.   Not when I ordered it, it didn't.

Also, the book on .uk was priced from £6.17   So I'm even more sore.

Making weights

This is about keeping a stack of wood dry in Winter.   You stack the wood up in a row, about 4 feet deep and 5 feet high, and as long as you like.   You cover it with a long tarpaulin, and the challenge is to make sure that the tarp stays on the wood and keeps it dry, during whatever storms and rains the weather might throw at it, and however much wood you take away to burn.

The tarp is wider than the stack of wood, so it has skirts that hang down on both sides.   We started by putting rocks on top of the tarp, but unless they are very heavy, the wind has no trouble lifting the skirts and flicking the rocks off.  There is another difficulty, in that when wood is removed from the heap, the tarp no longer fits snugly, so rain gets in unless you continually adjust things to take into account the wood you have removed.

I am trying a new solution, that is tying weights to the edges of the tarp to keep the skirts from lifting up, and to this end, I am making concrete weights.   After trying various techniques I have settled on what I think is an effective method.  For gîte customers, we sometimes buy fruit salad that comes in a plastic pot that is just the right size.   I make two opposite cuts in the sides from top to bottom.   This makes it possible to separate the pot from the concrete once it has set.  I use sticky tape to hold the two sides of the pot together while I fill it with concrete that I mix with water in the pot.  For the handle I bend iron rebar using a plumbing pipe bender, and I push the U-shaped bar into the concrete and let it set.

I use elastic cord and hooks to attach the weight to the tarp.  This gives flexibility in the arrangement of the wood, and the cord can be easily detatched to give access to the wood at any point.   We'll see if this cunning plan survives the Winter.   The Winter that is, apparently, coming.

Red sky at night, shepherds take fright

 Red sunset and red light in the garden, just before last night's thunder storms.