Back to DIY

I was up at eight and at the garage within half an hour - Bob L'Anglais, never heard of him, seemed to be the jist of my initial attempts at conversation - so much for the tip-off and introduction.

Despite the bad start, I managed to arrange a pre-check and a CAT test for Monday - not perfect with airport runs to do but manageable with Denis' car available to use as well. I then went down to the market and up to the Peugeot cycle shop to collect my repaired bike all before getting hold of some breakfast and having a morning chat with Debrah.

My weekend guests in the Apartment had managed to pull one of the wire curtain tracks off the wall - he did tell me about it and apologise, which was better than me walking in and finding the curtain on the floor, but I still wonder what he was trying to do when he managed to pull the whole thing down. As a result my trusty scaffolding was pressed back into action, for a cameo appearance, and out came the tool box and suddenly I was transformed back into DIY/renovation mode - which was actually quite satisfying and a bit of a change from cleaning and washing and ironing. To complete the throwback, Chris and I spent an hour trying to work out what the hell my initial electrician here had done with the phasing of the power in an attempt to stop it tripping out when guests arrive and turn everything on at the same time.

Sadly, despite finding that phase 2 and phase 3 were cross-labelled and despite now fully understanding what is on each phase, there wasn't enough leeway to solve the problem and I will have to go to EDF and ask for more power - an enormously humbling French tradition that means you have to publicly request more energy usage which will probably put me on some local blacklist as a profligant English capitalist pig. I have always wondered why the French live in one room with a single lightbulb and now I know - it's all about how much wattage you give out, or in fact how much you are prepared to pay for. The French aren't prepared to pay for any as befits the national attitude to paying for anything at all, whilst we Brits obviously expect to have enough power available on demand to make the whole world come to a temporary halt when we all switch our kettles on at half time to make a cup of tea. I don't care if California is temporarily blacked out as long as my guests can dry their hair when they want to.

After failing to resolve my non-French/terribly-English power situation, we did at least manage to get my towel rail working again using the modern IT method of rebooting it. Whilst that means just turning off and then turning on the power switch for a modern PC, it actually means disassembling and re-assembling an entire appliance that was made 15 years ago, with all sorts of manual labour, allen keys, screwdrivers and South African cleverness involved - so, we took it off the wall and we took it apart and we put it back together and we put it back on the wall - and now it works, which means we are geniuses and fabulous. I don't know what we did but we are good.

After the thrill of fixing stuff, it has been back to the banality of washing and ironing and cleaning. I did see Amelie for a French lesson, which was a relief - she gives me confidence to speak the language, but I hadn't seen her for a month and had felt that my French had suffered as a result - it's all about practice you know, and with trips to London and English guests, I haven't been practising as much as I should. C'est la vie.