England
Again
The carers
looking after my mother are calling me Rain Man, because of the
weather I appear to bring to England when I come. The last time it
rained all week. This time I came for a fortnight to try to get my
mother eating properly and so increase her strength and there were, I
believe, two days on which it didn't rain. Maybe I should wait for a
drought before I go over again, then I would be more welcome.
On my
return I had lunch with Daniel and his neighbour, Douglas, an
Englishman over to spend a week in his holiday home. Douglas is a
construction engineer involved in several water projects and reckons
there is really no water shortage in the UK. According to him, the
broken pipes are being fixed, slowly but surely, and the real problem
is a lack of dams/reservoirs. The problem there is planning
permission, which takes years. I mentioned to him my idea of a third
water system and he said that that is now a requirement for new
eco-buildings and the water companies are apparently offering free
water butts to anyone who cares to claim one.
While in
England I couldn't avoid the Queen's jubilee celebrations and have to
admit I was pleasantly surprised. I had anticipated jingoistic
“glories of the past” events and, whilst there was a great deal
of flag-waving, the atmosphere did not seem jingoistic at all. The
over-all impression I got was of people letting their hair down and
having fun in an entirely unobjectionable way; and certainly, the
flotilla of boats on the Thames was a sight to remember.
Whilst
staying with my mother I got down to some more work on the website.
On my previous visit Carl and I had cracked the multi-language
problem as far as getting separate pages of text in different
languages was concerned but it seems that that doesn't work for photo
captions. So it's back to the documentation to sort that one out. I
had played with the idea of ditching Word Express and creating pages
myself in HTML and CSS, which I can do quite easily. I probably need
only half-a-dozen different page formats, but Carl pointed out that
every page would then have to be updated individually and manually,
which runs counter to my goal of a site that can be maintained by
people with essentially no IT knowledge, so I've decided to persist
with Word Express. The problem is that a template can become unduly
restrictive unless you know the software very well and I've no great
interest in becoming a Word Express specialist. However, it seems I
must try harder.
Anyway,
I'm now back to the and of heat, sunshine and watering very day.
Steve and Jo did a valiant job of keeping everything going while I
was away but I can see that there is some dead-heading and clearing
up at the back to do. In the sun, that won't be a problem.
I've also
sorted out my wine for the summer. At this time of the year I'm
usually out of rosé
and white wine as I don't drink rosé
in the winter and drink white only occasionally at any time. Lunch
at Steve and Jo's decided the rosé
issue; they had found a meaty rosé
from Rieu Frais, the vineyard in St Jalle that makes good but
expensive Viognier. So I shall buy that. And lunch with Daniel
solved the white issue; he'd found a sauvignon blanc of uncertain
origin stocked at the village store and it was very good, so I'll buy
that. I'm getting my red this year from the Puy du Maupas vineyard.
I'm very
pleased that Steve and Jo's vegetable garden, for which I've been a
kind of occasional consultant (they've done all the hard work), is
looking really good at the moment. In previous years some crops
(tomatoes, courgettes, beans, peppers and aubergines) have done quite
well but other crops have failed. And the tomatoes weren't very good
last year. Over the winter they put in a lot of work (and manure) on
the soil and it has definitely paid dividends. Salad, cauliflower
and spinach crops are flourishing as well as the other crops so
here's looking forward to a bumper harvest.
