Carl, your letter turned up:
In skilled hands this is a great tool.
-A 20 litre bucket of paint that has been sat around for weeks only takes a minute or two to whisk back into uniform creaminess. And it’s fun to do.
Pull it out of the bucket still spinning though and this happens:
Not sure how easy it is to see on the photo but the two gaps in the perfectly spattered paint circle were where my legs had been. I would have taken a picture but the camera was inside and, well, I was dripping with paint.
Hose pipes are great tools too.
Spent Friday on the bedroom walls. Scraped this pile of sand from them. - I didn’t like the textured walls but the spiders were having a field day as it seemed to be a perfect base for their work. Sorry boys you’re out.
On two of the walls the textured paint was on top of two layers of paper that needed stripping. Scrape, squirt with water, wait, squirt again, scrape, repeat, for a few hours then clean up. Pretty dull stuff but the sticky bits of brown, peeled off wallpaper came back to me later.
Another job I’ve been putting off is more grouting for the bathroom tiles. White grout on smooth white tiles (see kitchen) is easy. Black grout on rough textured tiles is hard, boring and slow. Then cruising the home baking isle (I know! see below for more culinery stuff) for one Euro fifty cents I spotted this:
Genius or madness? - you decide. And while you’re deciding I’ll tell you how it went. This, for a first pass is good by my standards:
Not too much gloop on the tiles, plenty in the gap. Then as the mix started to go off, I squeezed the bag a bit hard, it split, and, well you see what I'm saying about skilled hands:
Time saved applying grout - 15 minutes, time spent cleaning up and repainting wall, 15 minutes.
If you are still undecided, I’m calling it ‘an idea who’s time has not quite fully approached’. Fortunately I’ve run out of grout so can’t do anymore without a trip back to 3MMM.
High up on the long list of “Difficult things for an Englishman to understand about the French” comes bacon. - I’ll come back to that.
Another thing high on that list is the three pin plug:
We’re not far away across the Channel, you could nip over on a day trip, examine how to do electrical sockets and the plugs to go in them, nip back and run off something similar. Instead they’ve come up with a bizarre system that - when you can get the plug to go in, because they really don’t want to, allows you to swap live and neutral at will. I know it mostly doesn’t matter which way they go but still. Some plugs have an earth hole, some have two, some have none. Each plugging something in event involves failing to get it to go in, turning it round and staring in disbelief at the arrangement of pins and holes, then trying again. And they’re made from rubbish plastic and the sockets cost a fortune. Anyway, rant over, bacon.
Actually, no, -rant back on again. They have pork products coming out of their ears. Row upon row of sausages in the supermarkets and no lack of creative food imagination. - (Down the road in Tusson the only shop in the village is solely devoted to edible duck bits.)
So why no proper bacon? - Again; day return ferry ticket, samples from Dover’s Tesco, experiment or two. Easy.
So how to get your bacon hit is a challenge and I’ve now been out here for about seven weeks so it’s getting serious.
They sell bacon bits which are okay but won’t carry a bun on their own. They need a more supportive vehicle if they’re to deliver and my choice is the Tarteflette. No TV, no radio, no fire since stove out of action due to hearth building, Jo’s old copies of Grazia and Heat both read from cover to cover (I now know how to get an A-List body like Dakota or Bella, but won’t be trying for one) I’ve turned to cooking for entertainment and quite proudly knocked this out:
Tasted okay too.
Peeling the potatos left me with a pile of brown, sticky flakes to throw away. Just like stripped wallpaper.