Bringing down the barriers....Part 1

 My stay in Nowhere-in-France was, on the whole, uneventful, as I reported previously. Despite the cold, our little house had stood firm against the elements and (more importantly) so had the pipework, despite some obviously frozen pipes which refused to allow cold water to reach the upstairs bathroom for the first couple of days. Unfortunately, however, not everything had stood firm…

Arriving just before dusk on day one, my primary concern was to light fires and stuff. As I could see my breath indoors, this seemed like a plan. The neighbours had invited me over for dinner. In fact, they’d even offered me a bed for the night, should I have felt that sleeping in sub-zero temperatures in a house where the heating had only just been reinstated was too much. They reckoned without my girl-guide levels of preparation and my newly acquired bargain electric blanket. I was, dear reader, prepared to tough it out. Once I’d wrestled the electric blanket and its eight miles of attachment cord onto the bed, over and around the mattress and anchored it firm, I was already feeling a LOT warmer. Time to venture out and around the perimeter of our tiny French estate. (Don’t get excited. I can reach the perimeter in any direction in about five brisk strides). 

Before I could start my perimeter-striding, however, there was a knock on the door, and a rather sheepish-looking neighbour waiting on the threshold. We did the French kissy-kissy thing and exchanged greetings, and then my neighbour said “Have you seen your wall?”. I had, in the sense that it surrounds our house and garden, and thus is quite hard to miss, but as I hadn’t yet done my perimeter tour, I had to confess that whilst I could vouch for the wall being where I’d last left it, I hadn’t “seen” it in any more detailed manner.

“Well..” he went on “I had a bit of an accident yesterday. We didn’t think it was worth telling you by e-mail as you were about to arrive, but come and have a look”. He led me to the wall, where I saw that what I’d taken for a dirty mark on my way indoors was, in fact, a large and very visible crack. The closer we got, the more spectacular it looked. Once we were standing outside in the road and examining the damage, it was clear that the top section of the wall was almost entirely detached from the bottom along about 8 metres of its length.

“I was reversing the tractor with the bowser on the back, and trying not to let it slide on the ice” said my neighbour “And I thought I’d just hit the kerb. I don’t usually bring the bowser over, but with the cold, I was bringing everything closer to the house.” He went on to explain that he thought he’d just clipped the tiles on top of the wall, but on closer inspection he realised that he had come perilously close to demolishing the wall entirely! I felt quite sorry for him, but we agreed that things could have been worse, he and his tractor had survived unscathed, and the wall could be fixed. As his brother-in-law is a builder, and we both share the same insurance company, he promised to deal with the insurance and get a quote for the repairs, and I know that all will be well.

I attach for your delectation and delight a few snaps…