Sits and thinks (again!) - Monday - 3rd August - Lagarde

There are days when, despite the ever present tendency to whinge when the temperature reaches thirty-seven degrees for much of the day or the clouds of flies that descend upon us for reasons best known to them, that the show must go on.

Perhaps inspired by the team at the port buzzing like the flies as they raced to get eighteen boats prepared for charter this morning, we too kept going, varnishing, sorting, washing, sweating and occasionally perhaps sitting and thinking for a bit from time to time and then as the cool of the evening descended,  thinking for a bit more.

While staring into the calm of the empty harbour, we found a new imponderable:-  How is it, that a small team of cleaners and technicians can service and prepare eighteen boats taking them from a state of shabby just returned from hire, to pristine in just one morning, while we work for days, weeks  even on one boat which wasn’t all that shabby to begin with, and yet our work is never done?

Flowers that bloom, tra la. - Sunday - 2nd August - Lagarde

There’s a reason that advertisements for sanitary products feature flowers and clear mountain streams.  The reality of boating life is that there are never any flowers in a clogged toilet  or a shower waste filter, just body fats and goo and a mat of curly hairs.  The memories of maintaining those devices never fade either, which is why they are rarely spoken of and even more rarely discussed in print.

But there always comes a time when someone cries “Enough!”, which happened a week or two ago when we discovered a pump designed to pump hair and grunge without the need for a filter and presumably therefore without the need to suffer of cleaning it every few days.  Said pump arrived yesterday, and that part of today that wasn’t put aside for varnishing was spent on the five minute job that installing it would entail.   In the absence of paid help, and with the dimensions of the installer, even when folded into four and inverted, being exactly twice and sometimes thrice that of the space which is available surrounding the pump and it’s associated fittings, nothing about the task implied good times ahead.    

The aches should disappear in a day or two, the bleeding has almost stopped on the top of his head, and with just a little luck the shower outlet, now without filter, will never need maintenance again, or at least not unless there is a “chap” around to see to it.

Short and curlies- Saturday - 1st August - Lagarde

For some years, I am afraid to admit, and I suppose I should apologise to those who have been confined within it, that the forward cabin and facilities have been in a state of not-quite complete.   To be fair to the one who could quite rightly be accused of procrastination, scraping the old stain from the timber trims is a thankless, painful task, requiring a certain degree of patience and a small gulp of masochism.  Therefore it is both logical and understandable that many other tasks have found themselves higher up the list of things to do in the intervening period.

Sadly for one of us, a beaut new version of an old-fangled scraper appeared as if by magic in a hardware store the other day, and the task suddenly found itself back at the head of the list.  Happily though, said scraper made much quicker work of the job, and by long before dinner time the (by now quite old) brand new can of varnish was cracked open and the first coat was on.

One doesn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict what will be happening around here for a day or two. 

The Homecoming - Friday - 31st July - Crévic to Lagarde

It’s not as though the temperature was any different from any other day first thing in the morning, it was a pleasant sub-twenty as we sat with our coffee, but the sun had a pronounced bite, the light from it beaming a bright white that swept away the colour from everything it touched, the sky a cloudless but luminescent silver.

One very quickly gleaned the impression that the weather was once again going to be unerringly and perhaps disappointingly in keeping with the forecast.   

Normally the morning mist conjures cooling images, but there was none of that today, the vapour rising from where the shard of sunlight as it glanced the surface of the water made it look for all the world as though the canal was about to come on to the boil.  We thought of staying in our little shady spot for the day, but then the thought of that other little shady spot reserved for us under Maggie’s grape vine, the one with cold drinks and ice cubes and dogs that would make a fuss of us when we arrived, took control and once again by days end we were home in Lagarde.

Very much at home.

Before the whole town closes -Thursday - 30th July - Nancy to Crévic

Yesterday’s adventure at the telecommunications shops left us badly in need of a holiday or at least a vanilla slice, and there didn’t seem to be any reason why, with half the town already closed for annual leave and what was left thinking about it, we shouldn’t do both.

So like all the sensible businesses in town, we packed up our metaphoric beach umbrella and tootled off in search of shade and a place to try out the new fangled internet gadget.   Shade, thankfully we found in abundance in Crévic, quite close to the village in fact, but since the village isn’t big enough to support commercial enterprise of any kind, we shouldn’t have been surprised that we seemed to be on the very edge of mobile phone reception so our new modem remains largely untested.

Or perhaps the internet is on holidays too.

Problems Nouveau - Wednesday 29th July - Nancy

Today, one way or another we were going to resolve our Internet problems.  Having discovered that our Service Provider had changed some deeply technical aspect of its “service” which was impacting seriously our prehistoric modem, the simplest solution would be to replace it.   The lack of internet access meant that there was no digital solution available, so our only alternative was to use the old analogue method, and go to the shop.  Our Internet Service Provider is one of the largest in France, part of a huge world-wide conglomerate with at least three outlets in Nancy, so we were confident that it would be no simple thing to walk into a store, hand over some money and walk away with the product that we wanted.      

The first store was closed, for reasons not explained but possibly related to the bullet holes that riddled the shop window.  At the next, a smiling helpful person told us that despite having the object of our desire in front of her in a glass case, nothing was possible but she would talk to someone on the phone for half an hour in case something changed in the meantime.   Sadly nothing changed, and she thought that perhaps the people in the store around the corner could help.   

The third store, if appearances were anything to go by, was busy.   We took a number, noting that we were ninth in line and that the two assistants were deeply ensconced in customer service.  Eventually, as is the way of these things, a lovely young lady took us under her wing, took our money, gave us the new modem and four sheaves of paperwork and we hope our internet problems may well be a thing of the past.    

I can’t imagine when the Art Nouveau movement was in full swing in Nancy, that the building foreman would have been told that he couldn’t have his doors because Wood Carver v2.0 wasn’t compatible with Blacksmith v7.0 so he’d have to revert to Draftsman v3.2 and start again, but perhaps those were simpler times.

Without Illumination - Tuesday - 28th July - Champigneulles to Nancy

We only ever go to Nancy for the lights.  Well we also like the people in the port, and the buildings, and the layout of the town, and the shops are mostly nice, and the parks, and the markets and we could go on forever about how pleasant the place is, but it’s the light and sound performance each summer evening in Stanislas Square that is a highlight of our visit.

Of all the attractions in France it is the one that can be relied upon, rain hail or shine, every evening from July to September, at eleven PM, as soon as it’s dark the show goes on.

And here we were in Place Stanislas, our one night stay in Nancy planned for that very purpose, to find it under renovation.   Every building in the square has scaffold being erected, and it will soon no doubt be covered in a swathe of green or perhaps building printed plastic, not at all conducive to receiving projected images.  The show did not go on.

“Perhaps next year when the work is finished.”