England And Back

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.