The supermarket Decameron

Sometimes modern life catches up with the Middle Ages. Yesterday, in the local superette, the better half was in search of decent toothpaste. Most of the tubes on offer were massive, with lurid claims for what they did for your teeth, gums, sex life etc., but all she wanted was toothpaste. Finally one caught her eye, right at the floor level of the display. It was one she had used before, and had liked. It was called Vademecum and claimed to be full of beneficial plant extracts.

On bringing it home, I read the ingredients: guess what, the principal active ingredient was sage. Takes you right back to the novella of Simona and Pasquino in the Decameron... Just hope that this particular preparation does not produce the same end result (convulsions, skin blackening, ventral swelling and rapid demise).

White goods and turquoise supertub

Today Darty delivered the white goods. Bringing the microwave up the old staircase was probably OK, but heaving and straining to get a fridge, a washing machine and a dishwasher up the same gradient wasn't going to be fun.

I kept out of the way, a male thing, as I felt embarrassed not to be helping too, so it was the better half who witnessed the apoplectic necks and bulging eyeballs as two quite modestly proportioned delivery men heaved the white goods up to their final levels. As with the removal men last week, the moments of maximum effort were accompanied by short wheezy puffs of breath which I had last heard in the delivery room of the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, as the kids were being born.

The better half celebrated having working white goods by cleaning chairs with turpentine and nourishing the wood with linseed oil. It brought back memories of Caillebotte! I carried on with putting continental plugs on electrical items: a slow business, lots of screwing but no pleasure...

Still, the house is beginning to look like a house. On leaving this evening, everybody was doing the passeggiata, so we joined them. Why were they heading for the millionaires' section of the port, where the really big yachts are moored? It turns out they were inspecting the latest arrival, of quite exceptionally ugly opulence, a Jeddah registered supertub by the name of 'Kingdom'. Even the boot-topping, normally that lovely red lead hue, was a vile colour, an electric turquoise with a greenish tinge. I don't think its owners were doing the passeggiata, though.

Boilerhouse Scam

We knew when we bought the house that the boiler was 'vétuste', and we were duly prepared for the cost and inconvenience of replacing it. Today we had the central heating plumber to have a look. After lighting pieces of kitchen towel and waving them near the boiler, and then going up on the roof and staring down the chimney (definitely not something I enjoyed watching), he came to his Solomonic if still hydraulic judgment.

Not only was the boiler irredeemably antiquated, but it had been installed without proper flues, and in a position in the house which was actually illegal. That explains, I think, two apparently unrelated phenomena: excessive condensation below the boiler, and a sooty deposit on the ceiling above. There was an elevated risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, or of a visit from the regulatory authorities - which was more to be feared?

The plumber hummed and ha'd (as plumbers do: for those who need a clue, read the story Malavita, about the mafia in Normandy, by Tonino Benacquista), offered various solutions each more devastating and uncertain in outcome than the last, and then agreed that an immersion heater and electric radiators were probably the solution.

This means ripping out the old boiler, and also the present radiators, and then installing electric radiators and the appropriate wiring - wherever that can pass, over my newly decorated and immaculate walls. Ironic comment from the better half, on the way home this evening: "At least we hadn't painted the old radiators before having them ripped out."

On an excessively positive note, on unpacking our UK compact disc player, we rediscovered our recording of Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, feared lost, which played to our enchanted ears, in a perfect acoustic, up in the attic.

Topping out and bottoming in

In the olden days, when workmen finished building a house, there was a ceremony on the roof, called topping out. The builders, dressed in their Sunday best, would partake of an ale or two, and possibly a pork pie. Well, we had a moment like that yesterday, but I would rather call it bottoming in.

The toilet in our house is up a couple of steps. I think it must originally have been the stair into the loft. The previous owners decided that this out of the way spot was a perfect location for a secret fantasy world. They installed a toilet seat, made of perspex, which had incorporated into it a seaside medley: a starfish, pebbles, seaweed, a bit of froth, and even barnacles. It made you pretty wary of sitting down on it.

The offending artwork was removed to the large bin at the end of the road. As it rattled into the bin, an elderly gentleman of North African appearance sidled up, smiled at me, lifted the lid of the bin, and took out the trophy. He placed it, like an oval portrait, against the wall and contemplated beauty, pure beauty, in a timeless ecstasy. I'm sure he was thinking of that Crocean concept of perfect correspondence between intuition and expression. I certainly was...

On orders from the better half, a plain seat (white) was bought, and yesterday it was ceremonially fixed to the toilet bowl. Ceremony consisted of swearing, because the instructions omitted to mention that the fixing screws were specifically left and right, though they looked identical. It took a number of test runs before a satisfactory and operative throne was achieved.

We bottomed in with a glass of rose and some excellent formaggio pepato.

There will be blood

Yesterday evening, I returned more tired than I have ever been in this saga. I had been applying (on hands and knees) a mixture of linseed oil, turpentine and siccative to the floor tiles. In theory, 24 hours later, the resultant film of oxydised linseed oil can be buffed to a really nice patina. The physical toil can be deduced from a reading of Caillebotte's painting of floor scrapers.

Here was the rub: yesterday afternoon, the better half got a telephone call from the removal men, who had been hammering down the motorway from Rouen. Instead of delivering our furniture late afternoon, they would bring it at eight o'clock sharp in the morning. Nothing for it but to go in before daybreak and see what could be done with the floors, which I had left like the Metropolitan Police skidpan training centre.

Well, under the cruel glare of naked lightbulbs, the floor this morning looked like that scene from There Will Be Blood, when, at the bottom of the pit, thick oil starts to ooze. The floor was a skating rink. Dangerous to me but lethal to removal men carrying unbalanced loads and not being able to see where they were putting their feet. Time for emergency action. Unrolling wads and wads of kitchen towel, I skated over the surface with big absorbent wads under my feet. It was a quarter to seven. At five past seven the removal men came, and the floor was still glistening and as slippery as black ice.

Basically, I had to undo all the work I had done yesterday, stripping off the oil just as the siccative was nicely starting to cure the oil to form a protective film. The result is the flooring equivalent of eczema, and the wiping had to be redone the whole time the removal was being carried out, because the tiles give back the oil applied to them, reforming the skating rink.

Now the task of re-oiling will be much more complicated, because there is furniture everywhere. That will require fresh purchases of linseed oil, etc., but also the application of a fresh coat of huile de coudes.

Intermittences

Hoofed it down to the flat, to start work on cleaning the tiles before oiling them with linseed oil (the local tradition here). As I walked, I suddenly started thinking about an old Mr Walker, a one-armed ex-lightship sailor who rented out rowing boats by the hour in Holyhead when I was little. Why did I suddenly think of him, some fifty years later?

In my haversack, alongside the ammoniac for stripping the old finish, and the linseed oil, was a plastic canister of turpentine. It had started to leak, gently but aromatically, through my haversack. The smell, which I hadn't experienced in fifty years or so (being of the white spirit and turps substitute generation myself), was that of his boatyard, where he cleaned his brushes with turpentine.

If Proust had had a Holyhead childhood, his intermittences du coeur would have been a bit more peremptory than the smell of fresh madeleines.

A Jack London moment

Yesterday was not St Valentine's but IKEA day, Toulon style. We have been looking for affordable furniture which does not commit style crimes. Not much of it about... there is a gulf between the really tasteful but unaffordable, and the still expensive but highly elaborate, culturally jealous, aesthetically challenging kitsch which everybody else seems to go for. So it was off to Toulon, on a Saturday. Only thing was, every body else had exactly the same idea.

First stop on arrival was the toilets (keep an eye on this Leitmotiv), then the self-service restaurant, where the lamb shanks got our vote, despite the deeply nostalgic availability of Swedish meatballs. After a succulent experience with cholesterol, we had quite the most revolting coffee to be had this side of Biggar. Then toilet again, followed by shop.

Won't bore you with the details: suffice to say that quite a few of the things we had come for weren't available instore, so we came out, many hours later, from the Ikean labyrinth with a strange assortment of stuff - pots and pans, a doormat, a potato peeler. Back to the toilet: ok, for once, for the better half, but this time the gents was closed.

Set off on the way home, better half in the driving seat: this time instructing the GPS to avoid the motorway, because of the exorbitant tolls (nearly twelve quid for sixty miles!). So, we motored off, with the setting sun behind us, towards St Tropez, and then into the Massif des Maures. By this time, 'Lo giorno se n'andava e l’aere bruno toglieva gli animai che sono in terra dalle fatiche loro', and this was a really spectacularly mountainous road, with hairpin bends. My worries about unseen but doubtless omnipresent vertical drops just inches from the edge of the road were tempered by my growing need to pee.

Further and further into the wilderness, and with the readings on my bladder manometer going crazy, there was nowhere to stop to relieve myself. Finally, at least an hour after I had given up hope of preventing gross incontinence, the better half screeches to a halt in a layby. Out I get, see it is actually the driveway of a house, so get back in the car. A couple of metres further on, car stops again, Monsieur gets out and begins to unzip. Sphincter muscle countdown begins in earnest, when, out of the undergrowth, two big, close-set eyes and a deep-throated growl. The muzzle of an extremely large Alsatian, with bared fangs, was within a foot and a half of my flies.

I didn't wait around, didn't zip up my flies, and I dived into the car with impressively little dignity but quite extraordinary alacrity. By this time, the better half had also espied the monstrous mutt, and decided a quick get-away was in order. I confirmed her decision, even though by this time the tires were burning rubber. Turns out the place was a caravan parking lot for gypsy caravans. Bet you they had .22 calibre long rifle rounds already chambered.

We drove on, in the pitch black night, for another fifty-five minutes before finally hitting the motorway, where, illuminated by the orange glare of sodium lights and indecently exposed, I relieved myself against the concrete poubelle outside the traffic police building. Actually I had been under pressure for so long, it took quite a while before I really felt relief, or was it the wolf-dog adrenaline still pumping through my system?

Tapping the last reserves of energy

Slow running taps and slow running day. For some inexplicable reason, the two sets of identical mixer taps in the bathroom, sixty centimetres apart, behave differently. One set of taps provides a roaring, foaming abundance of water, both from the hot and cold pipes. The other set produces a parsimonious, prostate sufferer's dribble.

Today's task was to take the mixer taps apart to see if there was a blockage - either bits of damaged, detached washer, or the dreaded 'calcaire', or hard water deposit. I had done a certain amount of plumbing in Scotland, so I knew what I was in for. Or rather I thought I did. What I hadn't reckoned on was the fundamental difference of national 'philosophy' in the tap design department.

I had done some homework, of course, by consulting the endless strings of plumbing posts on the French internet. I had drawn, for use down in the flat, an exploded diagram of the commonest model of French tap-headgear.

So, after further research and consultation with René, our neighbour, I found the stopcock in the street (useful things, as the dame found yesterday in the rue Sade), turned it to off, mounted to the second storey and started work. The taps were fossilised in a calcareous exoskeleton. Vinegar and a fair bit of prodding with a screwdriver removed enough incrustations to be able to unscrew the headgear. Nothing like the diagram. These worked more like the pistons in a Bflat cornet. Still, it was fairly clear how to take them apart, clean them with vinegar, put them together again, reinsert them, run down to the stopcock in the street, rush up in case there was a flood. No flood, but an undifferentiated dribble - whether the taps were open or shut. Ah, a washer problem.

I saw no reason to be worried, because I had been to the ironmongers the day before to check that they had a wide variety of washers. So I went down again, shut off the stopcock, ran upstairs again, undid the headgear, dried it, put it in my pocket and headed off for the ironmongers, next to the tramps sunning themselves in the bus station.

Naturally, they didn't have that kind of washer. So back to the flat to figure out a way of reusing the semi-perished washers. Tried them upside down (that works sometimes). New trip to stopcock, new undifferentiated dribble. Tried a different way of sticking them onto the headgear and lo and behold, taps now worked. Not enthusiastically, but less meanly than before. I think the main problem is the diameter of the pipe, which is different for both sinks.

Plumbing may give lead poisoning, etc. but it sure keeps you cardio-vascularly fit.

What goes down must come up

I've taken to exploring different back alleys to get to the seafront. A rewarding pastime, providing one divides ocular attention between the ravishing facades of the buildings, the narrow ribbon of azure sky above, and the inevitable dogshit deposited on the cobbles precisely where feet are meant to go.

Well, today, the reward was that of a bystander. I had just started to leave the Place Nationale to go into the narrow rue Sade (full of interesting shops including a horse butchers and a ravioli maker). A very elegant lady of about forty, replete with fur coat, expensive shoes and even more expensive coiffure, was striding in the same direction, about twenty metres in front of me. Rue Sade is frequently blocked for repairs, so I wasn't overly concerned by the black, and none-too-clean, high pressure hose snaking towards the rue. I was, after all, primarily alert to the dogshit dimension.

The posh dame's shoes clicked purposefully into the rue Sade: suddenly a whoosh, and a geyser of brownish liquid spurted up from the roadbed and rose to roof height. A plume of merde-tinted spume trailed from this fountain, carried by the wind. The dame was, in one fell swoop, trapped, petrified and spraypainted. A perfect example of Ardengo Soffici's simultaneità! A workman in protective overalls rushed to switch some valve off. Had I known then what I knew later, the word here would not have been 'valve' but 'stopcock'...

I didn't wait to listen to the dialogue, which risked exponentially increasing my command of azuréen diatribe, and, anyway, I selfishly wanted to get to the Marché Provençal. On my detour back to the Place Nationale, I followed that snaking high pressure hose. It was connected to a truck with a large tank and a powerful pump, working full blast. That was the cause, then, but what was the effect? On the side of the tank, written in jolly letters, along with a helpful picture for the illiterate, was the sign: Les Vidangeurs du Golfe - Assainissements, Fosses Septiques, Ramonage des Egouts. That's why the lady was now a tramp.

Some totally unconnected observations.

Last night, coming home shattered after a day at the plasterface (well actually paint-roller face, but with roller at the end of a two metre pole, and seven steps up a step-ladder), I passed to buy some food at the local Intermarché (something like Morrison's). As I was queuing up for the check-out, nervous as always that they want to check all your bags for shoplifting, the manager, a shaven-haired hulk with a speech defect, loomed over me. Having watched previous altercations, albeit as a witness, I was not looking forward to what was going to happen next. Instead, surprise...

I knew from the better half that the local winos and tramps stocked up on bevvy at the Intermarché, but I didn't know how they did it, being pretty grungy, and their dogs even more so. Well, I've discovered how: it is the ideal combination of social disapproval and commercial opportunity, a bit like drugs costing more just because they are illegal.

The winos were formally refused entry, despite brandishing what looked like legal tender. Mr shaven-head made a show of refusing them entry, then took their money, went to the booze aisle, checked out the product of choice (not my choice of poison), and then gave it them whilst trousering the change.

The second observation concerns the after effects of our blacksmith having expertly removed the Greek colonnade (and the underlying tiles). Today, he came again with his son and put some replacement tiles in. The job was really well done, but as a piece of parting advice, he suggested rinsing the floor with hydrochloric acid. Just keep the windows open and hey presto, a very clean tiled floor. Well, I looked up hydrochloric acid. Does well cleaned lungs, skin, eyes, nostrils, etc. Pretty toxic, and not, for me at least, the cleaner of choice.

Why Historia Destructionis?

I've spent the day, whilst painting, which is a very contemplative activity, wondering why I called the last blog (about the removal of the balustrade) Historia Destructionis...? It wasn't some juvenile show-off thing, wanting to demonstrate my Latinity: after all, I've lived off my Latin for decades, usually in the most boring way imaginable. There must have been another reason. I think I have found it, and it is Freudian association rather than cultural demonstration.

The Historia Destructionis Troiae was a thirteenth century Latin translation of the medieval French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Ste Maure. The translator into Latin was a fine poet, a Sicilian called Guido delle Colonne. The clue lies in his last name. My part in the downfall of the balustrade was knocking out the columns, and Guido's name means just that....

Historia Destructionis....

Sauveur is come, yea, even with his Onlie Begotten Son! Today was the day when the blacksmith came to remove the dreaded 'Belgian' Greek restaurant balustrade, or rather its stumps. They may not have looked like much, but these stumps were anchored with construction grade steel reinforcement bars into the cement flooring. How much of the floor, and the neighbours' ceiling, would they destroy as they were removed?

Sauveur came, with only begotten, not at the hour of fourteen o'clock, as covenanted, but at a time more consonant with a proper blacksmith's digestion. The toolbag was disquieting, a bit like going to a hospital appointment for wart removal and seeing a bloody Black and Decker and a metal cutting circular saw on the doctor's desk. Bloody big mason's hammers, serious cold chisels, safety goggles, an electric percussion drill. These guys meant serious business, possibly termination with serious prejudice, and this was directed at my poor little house, already decorated by yours truly.

I carried on painting in the room above, treading warily over the newspapers covering the most spectacular accident to date, namely the catastrophic spillage, first over me, and then over all the floor, of two and a half kilos of white emulsion paint. I was wearing overalls, but both overalls and normal clothes, plus shoes, were fit for the bin bag.

The thumps from the mason's hammers felt like earthquakes. Indeed, they confirmed a 'trouvaille' of the evening before: when moving a piece of furniture in the attic, I found a picture-frame, minus picture. The back of the frame was carefully inscribed - "Tremblement de terre, Antibes, le 25 février 2001, force 4,9, chute du cadre".

When the father and son had finished, I went downstairs, expecting Beirut or Gaza, Tsahal workmanship. What I actually found was a neat "absence" of said Greek restaurant balustrade, coupled with a subtle snow effect, the whole flat was dusted with pulverised plaster. Our new hoover was put to the test, as was our mop. Despite living in what looks like the equivalent of a mandible after student dentist tooth extraction (wisdom teeth, anyone?), the promise of a nice ironwork railing seems that much closer.

DIY Blues

Today was a day for getting a lot done. Somehow, there is a higher order of DIY where there are days which seem to make things worse, and days where things get finished. Today was a day when some things, at least, got finished. Applied the third coat of supposedly one-coat emulsion to the ex-blue bedroom, and did the ceiling. It's all operating-theatre white now (who knows, maybe such places aren't really white), and waiting for dark furniture to attenuate the glare. The worst job was dealing with the narrow channel between the skirting tiles (equivalent of skirting board) and the walls. The only way to get the gunge in the interstices white was to drop loaded paintbrushes-full into the crack next to the wall, with consequent spillage onto the tiles themselves.

Today was payback day, for this short-cut, so out with a craft knife, and lying on my side (boy, are tiled floors hard and unforgiving) an endless scraping job, all round the room. Then another scraping job, when I discovered that the grey grouting between the tiles was regarded as a plus, and needed clearing, with scalpel precision, of the excess of white emulsion.

Still, that's another room done. Now for the upstairs, including dealing with an old leak, next to the Velux window. Spent the last hour of work tonight trying to unblock the Velux mechanism, and then using a cold chisel and mason's hammer to get rid of the water-compromised plaster where the leak was. Stuck a bit of kitchen towel overnight, to see whether the present incessant rain is actually getting in to the house, or whether the humidity is old, but trapped by treacherously applied textured paint, liberally applied by the vendor.

Smells like teenage two-stroke

Coming back from the flat this evening, all covered with paint and plaster, I stopped at the zebra crossing at the top of Boulevard Albert 1er. Waiting for the green man (a bit like waiting for Godot in this car-besotted land) has become a moment of reflection after hearing that a little old lady was run over by a bus on this very spot last week. The manifest unfairness of the lights sequence tempts all pedestrians to jump the lights - but as we now know, this can be dangerous.

Clearly the accident was in other people's minds, too. Several families shouted at their youngsters not to cross the road with the red man: I suspect this new order countermanded previous, universal practice amongst families, because the kids were vociferous in their labelling of parents and carers as stupid gits. This being France, though, the kids were brought to heel pretty smartish. Several ended up whimpering (expertly applied 'taloches', perhaps?).

On the rue Aristide Briand, however, the hierarchy was brutally reversed. Teenagers were on their way back home to the estates, two up on scooters. There must have been about a dozen scooters, revving away like a crowd of diminutive James Deans. Our red man was now their green light, and off they went with a sound like amplified chainsaws (there are illegal kits here, much in demand, to make the puny engines of scooters sound like Kawasakis). In a sequence worthy of a ballet, as if by some higher command, they rose at one to a wheelie and dodged cars into the distance...

Are the two situations connected?