Getting stuck in.

One of our main concerns before we moved was to ensure that we joined in with the local community and integrated with the French speaking part of it.  We needn't have worried, the French speaking community have almost insisted on welcoming us and getting us integrate with village affairs.

Competitive Wife has already been roped into a variety of local events and meetings, in two weeks she has sat on the committee for opening a new community library, helped make the local goats cheese tarts called "Torteaux" and baked them in the community oven and at time of writing is at her French class in the local town followed by lunch with the French class at a Creperie called "Le Marmite" (I think it's a big cooking pot roughly the same shape as the jars of savoury spread, must be a connection there).  Last week she also went (with a friend who visited from the UK) to a soiree Tartines, which we came to realise can only be described as a toast topping festival!   I’m working on her to write an account of "soiree Tartines" for my blog but true to her name she won't let me have it unless it's better written than my entries! (Not altogether difficult one would have thought).

For my own part I'm getting into French society through the medium of DIY and vegetables.  We have started receiving vegetables from a variety of sources, in exchange for anything from furniture to cup cakes.  Green garlic are particularly plentiful at the moment, we've received about 30 of them so far and are running out of things to put them in.  Along with those, in the last week, we have had 4 lettuces and a bag full of what Local service calls spinach but which looks alarmingly like doc leaves, nice in an omelette though.  On the DIY front I'm pushing the limits of what I can do on a daily basis, I've replaced windows with cut glass and putty, wired the barn with lights and set up/aligned a satellite dish all for the first time ever.  The window and TV work fine so 2 out of 3 isn't too bad.  I'm afraid I'll have to call 40 cat man to help with the electrics but he will then need to have a drink with me afterwards and he does smell of cat wee and doesn't say anything while he's having his drink leaving me floundering around to make conversation in basic French!

Well, onwards and upwards and let there be light next time I write.

Electric eccentric!

The standard for electrical installation in France is have armoured conduit threaded with individual wires for positive, neutral and occasionally earth. This is all good and well until one of two problems occurs.

Firstly where several connections have been made you can have upwards of 10 individual wires running through a single conduit. This makes making changes to the system very difficult because (even when correctly coloured) 4 blue wires will look exactly the same at either end.

Secondly it seems to encourage the amateur, have a go, electrician to, well... have a go! This time you can guarantee that no wire remains the same colour on its way into or out of a junction box. Wiring up a light with yellow and green wire for the positive gives you a distinctly uneasy feeling and becomes a journey into the unknown.