It’s easier for your dog to understand Cicero than for a poor man to deal with governments. The proverbs of O’Shaunessy Ch2 L 10-11

Si può ottenere solo sangue da un politico se si paga.
Old Scicilian saying

It is with great relief and a sense of profound joy that I can announce that we are several hundred euros poorer than we were yesterday. Thank God! Those euros are a heavy note, all those countries gathered together on the one piece of paper really weigh you down, and they’re imbued with the characteristics of each one,from the upright Germans with their ‘save for a monsoon in Berlin policy’ to the Italian ‘what’s tax?’ ethic, and all the avenues inbetween where those naughty euros can disappear into accounts less regular.

Yes, the Carte Griselda has arrived, the government has had its hand in my pocket and lightened my load – can I get an ‘allelujah’?.

But, was it hard?

Well, when it was mooted to Hercules that he might complete a few ‘tasks’ I’m sure that he wasn’t thinking that he’d be asked to mop the kitchen or maybe put up some shelves, and although I notice that God called it a day after a week and that included a day off, we are talking supreme being here.

With that in mind I think we can say that we’re not in the world of Greek myth or earth moving. Nope what we have here is the more nerve jangling world of Kafka and I suppose I should have been ready for it after the famous occasion where we needed a form to prove that we didn’t need some other form.

It may be the case that God thought that the ten rules were enough and we should all just get on with it from there but it seems that was a massive disappointment for governments, tax accountants et al.

Firstly, don’t believe the English DVLA when they tell you what the French system will accept. This is a blindingly obvious thing to say but it passed me by.

No the French will not just accept the 5c document.

Yes you can email the export office. Although we were told you could only post or fax. Fax! They obviously missed carrier pigeon and telepathy.

Second, just because you’ve sent the section 11 to the DVLA to say you’ve exported your car don’t sit back and think that the V561 is in the bag – it isn’t. The piece of paper you sent back just tells them you’ve exported your car it doesn’t say ‘and incidentally you can send me the appropriate form back i.e. V561’. To get that you have to send a different form that say (you’ve guessed I’m sure) ‘I’ve exported my car please send me a V561’.

Thirdly, proof of residence. Well if you’re in France the is NOTHING that says this is my address better than an EDF bill. De Gaulle could come back to life and want to insure his car but without the sanction of EDF he would be wasting his time.

Fourth, MOT or equivalent. Just because you’ve just had this done and it lasts for a year in the U.K. And the French equivalent actually lasts for two years, if the former is over six months old you’ll need an in country test.

Fifth, I read up and was cheerfully told I could do it at the Mairie. Nope, so off to the Sous- Prefecture to witness the quiet death of French motorists sitting and waiting – a little like how I imagined dead elves in Tolkien must await the end of the world, take a seat, take the weight off, and wait, and wait. Ah but here’s the rub, they can’t do it either – aha got you! Off to the Prefecture with you, that’s where it’s all happening this was only purgatory.

In actual a fact you can just get a vast dossier together and send it in the post, that’s what we did in the end.

Six, the dossier comes back. You will have calculated the fee incorrectly. If you didn’t –  you, sir, are some kind of genius. Calculating the fee is based on an equation (so far so good), it was probably when I got to the number of cv’s the car has that the mist really descended, that and the fact they added a tax on that was not included in the equation but they would have told us about at the prefecture if we’d have gone.

Seven, resend using their numbers and adding any other information required. Inside leg measurement is a good one to know, that and a stab at Fermat’s last theorem. Say a little prayer. A long one is better.

Eight, await cheery postman with your recorded delivery letter.

Nine, restart your car insurance negotiations. Remember you only have six months before they unilaterally decide everybody else has had time enough to get through, so crack on.

However, no one died. I got fed up and a lot older, summer turned to winter which turned to a wet and windy spring, but could it be done quicker?

Undoubtedly.

Buy a French car in the first place.
Get somebody else to deal with the whole thing and go on a cruise.
Be ‘friends’ with the right people. Although the costs of this approach could be variable.
Don’t bother with a car. This isn’t really an option in rural France, and you’ll need a trailer as well so get that sorted pronto.
So, labyrinthine is probably the best description. Any self respecting chess grandmaster will have no issues and as for the rest of us remember O’Shaunessy’s second and third law:

• The power required by the tractor is proportional to the depth of mud.
• All forms require a good deal of thinking about before you give them to somebody else.

I said to O’Shaunessy the other day ‘ there’s a wild life you’ve got there O’Shaunessy’ he nodded and sat back with the pint, ‘Oui, mais les bougres vont manger les pommes de terre.

I nodded, O’Shaunessy is known hereabouts for the sage comment.

‘Aye, and the late nights can be a curse’ I said.

Bird watching is a really great past time. Watching them flitting this way and that, hanging upside down from a bag of nuts carefully suspended from the wisteria or standing still in the garden, St Francis like as some bird of prey hovers over you. We’ve become addicts, with the nest boxes of wood and ceramic, the nuts and the bird bath. Bits of grain stuck together with fat and hanging by ropes.

We especially like to sit in the kitchen with a huge bird identification book and watch and what a good thing we have, because it’s only by doing so that we’ve discovered at least two totally new species, just here in the garden.
The first is a grey job with some brown on it. Habit: picking up broken nuts from the floor and lots of skipping around. Song: Churry churry cheep cheep. I’ve christened it: Cinereo avis Clarkii after the half of the family.
As for the other, it’s a soaring bird of prey with some white on the tail of a brownish body, again nothing in the book so must be really rare, probably only around our garden. How we’re not inundated by twitchers I can’t imagine, anyway I’ve gone for the noble name:Utentes avis, quod sit brunneo.
So I ask you why all the dashing around over different continents and through jungles laden with big spiders and wolves and large toothed badgers when you can sit down with a nice cuppa and slice of toast and they all just rock up. Easy really.
We’ve not been to The Oasis yet. We’ve heard it, or at least we think we have. The sounds drift over on a summers evening mingling with the gentle chug of tractor on clay and we’ve been tempted to venture out but we’ve stuck with the shimmy around the kitchen and a glass of mothers ruin instead. Still it’s nice to nearly hear some of the older classics: The Byrds, Mott the hopple, Bernard Michlethwaite and his hot five and such like. Those were the days when we could dance till dawn, ah the memories.

O’Shaunessy usualy leave around eleven and true to form I’m looking at the back of his head now.

The doors open and he’s away, he’s your man that O’Shaunessy.

Choose a colour from grey to that luminous pink that you daren’t admit you really like, choose wheels , choose plastic, choose metal – that unsustainable stuff we’ve been digging up for years and refining with all that energy you suddenly don’t want to pay for, choose gardening, choose tools in a bewildering range for an obscure purpose, choose bees- why wouldn’t you, choose none leaking wellies and a big coat, choose expensive Japanese denim because you can, choose your wheelbarrow.
Here at Le Maison Blanche avec le abre walnut we’ve got three wheelbarrows. 
Mr Metal – this lone wolf is our oldest surviving ‘barra. Gritty he’s à get up and go kinda barra, arthritic – well yes. Rusty and with a dickie wheel he’s game to the last and only today reported in for the move of compost and stone and yesterday manure filled was seen limping around the garden attached to a similarly limping person.
Then there’s the twins, not identical but arriving together to an apartment with no garden these were particularly useful.
These two, purple and yellow one two wheeled the other a single. They’re more your pop wheelbarrow. The young upstarts to the cockney geezer. Plastic jobs these two and mine is already looking like the awkward one, dubious axel, burnt lip, cracked bottom.

I don’t know the collective noun for wheelbarrows or even if ones been invented, perhaps a ‘weeding’ will do it. 
I’m sure you are old good gardeners out their and put your tools away everyday after cleaning them off under at tap and oiling any wooden handles against splitting and early arthritis but I’m afraid we’re abit shoddy here at Le Maison Blanche avec le abre walnut. Whisper it amongst your friends but ours stay out all night. Not only that but left where we did our last jobs , abandoned! 

We did wonder whether it might be like toy story out in the garden on a night? The moment our backs are turned the various tools are having a party and reviewing our general poor behaviour vis à vis the correct storage of equipment. 
But that’s just the gin talking. 

Chin,chin.🍸

I wonder whether Burt Lancaster, as the waves lapped over his feet and with Deborah Kerry’s lips clamped to his mouth, felt just a trifle cold? 

I know that it sounds improbable, but as you get older even the most enticing scenarios can be burst in upon by the natural elements. It’s to be sure that he felt wet – from the waves! Blimey you can’t say anything?

If you could get a real close up could you see goosebumps? And a second after the take, was Kerr spitting out salt water and running for a towel and a hot cup of tea – bet she was. 
It’s easy to imagine that living in the south of France that you spend all day, every day, sipping cocktails by the azure pool as the sun toasts you to a lovely mahogany colour suitable for the occasional rub over with pledge polish. It’s true that for a good few months of the year I do have the distinct smell of lavender about me, but today listeners we are talking ‘life not film’, as Deborah said as she took up her Bovril.
Welcome to Dr Prosaic’s book of compost.
As a family we have moved over to the Dowding method. This does not involve large scale bombing of the garden from twenty thousand feet but the building up of several inches of compost over the current ground surface. I’m not sure which method is easier – the first could be messy and to be sure could even spread the weeds around, on the other hand it would complete the remodelling of the field more quickly. Obviously I jest, it’s the more smelly second method but at least it has the advantage of no digging ( so does the first – you cry) and it’s a little more socially reasponsible. 

So that’s Charles not the Air chielf of bomber command to which we are referring.
But we’ll still be having the Bovril, after all eternity is along time and the sea even with Burt Lancaster in it is chilly! 

We have been desperate for poo.   Not desperate for a poo.   Desperate for horse poo, well rotted preferably.  We paid 80 euros for 10 hefty bags of well rotted stuff but it is expensive and we need about 100 times that much if we are to cover what needs covering in 4 inches of poo/compost (see earlier) which, as disciples of Charles Dowding and his ‘no dig’ method, is what we are aiming to do.

In a fit of genius (sorry to sound immodest but it was pretty clever of me) I put a post on a Facebook group for second hand stuff in Aquitaine, asking if there was anyone nearby who had horse manure.   Normally I bloody hate Facebook, and that Aquitaine group is nearly (but not quite) as annoying as the ‘gardening in France’ group which mostly consists of people asking unutterably gormless questions (“Is it time to plant my hollyhock seeds?”)  – have they never read a book or used google, these people?  Aaaaaanyway.  My enquiry on Facebook led to three or four people pretty local to us all popping up and saying they had plenty.   The closest was about 20 minutes away so we arranged to go see him today.

The instructions were to follow a certain road to the end.  We found the road and went nearly to the end of it but bottled out first time with all the ‘beware of the dog’ signs and no indication of human habitation.   We turned around and had another go and ended up in the same place, so ‘gulp’ got out of the car and (hoping not to get bitten by a mad dog) went in search of the proprieter.   Who soon appeared and was a very nice man.  Turns out he takes traumatized or difficult former racehorses and rehabilitates them – wonderful thing to do.    Anyway he led us to the pile of horseshit, gave us a fork and left us to it.

Hard work forking it into a trailer, then hard work the other end forking it into barrows and trailing round the garden mulching the beds and plants, but on we go.  Knackered.  But happy as pigs in shit.

So we got back from Barbados well rested and very happy that we had had a break from the garden, and looking forward to getting going again.   It did us a power of good.  At the same time we realized that we had in fact run out of money and pending us winning the Euromillions or (more likely) Deb getting a contract, all of the work we want to do is going to be down to us alone.

On that note, we found the (hitherto mystical) source of free compost, at a depot in the middle of nowhere about 15 minutes away.  We have got the hang of it now but the first few times we were discovering what to do – which is – 

drive yourself and your remorque onto the weigh bridge, and memorise what you weigh.  

Drive off the weigh bridge and down to the office where Madame will give you a ticket.  

Write your name and address on it and how much you weigh (the car that is not you personally) and then drive down to where there are mountain ranges of compost in various stages of decomposition, steaming away in huge concrete bays.  

There will be a man in an enormous digger truck who is taking great shovel loads of the stuff and dropping it all from a great height – presumably to mix it – or taking great shovel loads and moving it from one concrete bay to another.  They drive around very fast in those huge diggers it’s like being in the land of the giants. 

  Anyway one of you has to be wearing a high vis jacket (that is not me) and that person nips out and takes the cover off the remorque.   Without a word being said, the man in the huge digger truck will zoom off and pick up a load of compost that is deemed ‘ready’ and zoom over to where you are cowering slightly in the car and dump the whole load in one huge dust raising thunk into your remorque.   The person in the high vis jacket then dusts himself down, spades up the bits that have not landed directly in the remorque and then puts the cover back on.    Back to the weigh bridge, enter the number you now weigh and post the ticket into the letter box that is screwed into the side of weigh bridge. 

  Then you pootle off back round the narrow lanes with a laden remorque.    Spend several hours trying to back the bloody thing into the garden 

Xand then the joy of spading and barrowing it round the garden where your dog will find it irrestible and will dig it all back up again moving it from where you want it and spreading it in a thin layer where you don’t.

Still.  It’s free and good stuff.  So we are exploiting it ruthlessly.

To get to the beach’s toilet block with its outdoor ‘hose me down’ showers requires a slow trudge through the sand, past the two rows of deckchairs that lay behind yours that David had laid out neatly in the early hours that have now been shattered and swayed with the course of the sun or those that have remained untaken stand reseloutly pointing forward and awaiting tenancy.Past the dreadlock rasta, crocheted bonnet holding all but a few of those long locks to his head and past the low broken concrete plinth with its assemblage of yesterday’s bottles,cups and other beach momentos.

The locals sit on the chairs under the palms behind the lifeguards post, curled up with their phones or they’re standing around the improvised table, doms in hand, eyes glued to the run as they wait their turn – then hand up and crack the dominoe down – make the table ring with the sound of the heaviest dominoes in the world.

David’s there, limp on a sunbed in the shade, in his loose fit T and baggy shorts, talkin’ playin’ watchin’ .

Getting past the beach bars up the small step that’s now all but disappeared under the sand gives you a jolt when you find you’re on hard ground again then just follow the little path round and over the runoff ditch to the block.

‘Wash the sand of your feet’ is the first instruction, many fail this one, caught short in the heat and the infusion of beer, rum, coconut cocktails served in the shell and delivered to you, it can come as a surprise that pissing is still something that no one else can do on your behalf such that your time in the sun is maximised.

So we have left Ruch behind and come to Barbados for two weeks.  This is ‘our’ beach. 

Leaving Ruch means leaving behind Ceds with the lovely Janet and Phil (from Oregon, USA). So far he has rolled pretty much every day in something so disgusting he has had to be washed three times, chewed through Phil’s shoelace, stolen Phil’s glasses and fallen out with their dog, Piper.   Temporarily for the latter.
He seems very happy though.

It’s both a wonderful break from the garden and the physical exhaustion of the work we have been doing and, contrarily, has given head space for planning and a renewed sense of excitement.

Thus it was that I sat on the beach ordering seeds of chillis, tomatoes, courgettes, squash, runner beans, sweet corn, celery, carrots (on a tape, can’t wait to try) and aubergines.  I love January and February in the garden – sowing and planning. Those are the elements of gardening I enjoy more than any other

There was a hard frost last night, it silvered and made more beautiful everything in the garden while it was still in effect.    Then as the sun warmed, the ice melted and in some cases what was beautifully frosted became wet, blackened, rotten.   But for the couple of hours when there is light but no warmth it is wonderful.

Misremembering a path or exactly where you are in relation to the same can have consequences! In the past it has led to great explorers finding amazing things that weren’t lost, scientific breakthrough that has been apart of the world for millennia or like me this morning, coming to the realisation that the hill I’d just come down was an unnecessary addition to the walk and would have to be climbed at some point to get back to the coffee and warm kitchen! I may have mentioned this almost straight away but I’m not sure Debs really cottoned on to how that was going to affect her morning – which was badly.

‘We can take some positives’ I said as we yomped along, ‘this is the farthest you’ve come far a long time. Look at the wonderful view and how far you’ve come darling’.
‘You can really see the iron work on that derelict glass house now, can’t you’

None of this really met with the vociferous wonder and happiness that I’d hoped my comments would bring forth. There was a check of the iWatch for distance and time and some muted comments, eventually that died down to no comment and a march toward home followed by ‘ill not be making soup I can’t be arsed’.

Now, it’s not often that as I’m sitting in the kitchen I get a text from Debs in the bedroom, today is an exception. I am asked if the toasted sandwiches previously mentioned are on the go. ‘No’ says I ‘but they could be’. Suffice to say that I’m logging off now to make the toasties, and there you have it – consequences.

Ttfn