Wanadoo you twpsyn!

So I have thought long and hard and tried my best and ... here's the best I can do to recreate the lost post! Complete with pictures ... enjoy, try not to shudder!

Brrr! It's been cold this morning (last Friday 30/12/05), bitterly cold * ... me wearing socks to bed cold! And I have spent the last 4 hours outside ... brrr! Lisa always says how wonderful it must be to spend so much time in France and it is great, I love France and ideally I'd like to live here ... but Simon and I come here in the winter i.e. at Christmas time because this is were my parents live ... I'm coming home for Christmas!

We've avoided a fair bit of bad weather this year, England (especially the part where we live) has been quite badly hit with snow and France so far has had delightful weather ... we're not in the pool but we've been out and about quite happily.

On the day before Christmas Eve, we went out with friends of my parents on what is fast becoming an annual pre-Christmas meal. Last year we went to the local hunting lodge but this year decided to go a little further afield to the village of Saint-Sauveur-la-Vallée and the bijou ("He'll only take 12!" says Ian!) restaurant of a mad Belgian and his wife!

We had a fantastic meal ~ gorgeous minestrone soup, beautifully cooked chicken in a white wine leek and mushroom sauce piled into a pastry parcel, fillet of pork with gorgeous vegetables, cheese, chocolate praline dessert and then the digestifs arrived. You know the liquers ... the drinks that help you digest your fabulous meal! No problem, you know me I can manage an eau de vie or two with the best of them! But not this time as Mr le mad Belgian had made one smallish addition to his so called limonade de Saint-Sauveur! Can you see that right there in the bottle? Will I ever trust a Belgian ever again?

Anyway, before lunch as we'd been getting ready to go out I had noticed that the water wasn't going down the plug-hole properly whilst taking a shower. On mentioning this to my father and husband I had suffered the usual tirade of abuse about long hair plugging up plug-holes and pipes! My mother had pondered the pipes being frozen due to the hoar frost / freezing fog we had been suffering and a dose of jollop (read French equivalent) had been poured down the plug-hole. The fumes nearly took my head off ... but that meant it was bound to work!!

On the 28th, when cooking water starts coming up in the bath we finally gave in and ring the local plumber who agreed after much questionning (I've learnt lots of new French vocabulary**) to come and take a look! He arrived the next morning and they (Mr le Plombier, Dad and Simon) start looking for the blocked pipe outside. An hour later they find it, cut into and send showers of water all over the garden! After 2 demi-tasses de café Mr le Plombier promises to return early next morning with his high power hose *sniggers in a teenage way*

Early the next morning he returns and discovers that the pipes under the garden are blocked with 20 years worth of cooking fat *Jo blanches and runs from the stench* because we do not have a bac à graisse ~ the fat/grease filter necessary in a household not on mains drainage in France. With instructions to call un mec with a digger to come and dig us a hole to put one in toute suite off he went ... it was his birthday after all! I rang digger-man, who said no problem he had an opening in late March!

So, Simon and Dad decided to keep digging for a little while .... I went in to thaw my brass monkeys and they kept digging and digging and the next morning, they found a slab of concrete close to the house which turned out to be, yes you guessed it ... the bac which wasn't doing it's job because it hadn't been cleaned out in the over 20 years since the house had been built!!

4 rubbish sacks full of solid fat later it's now empty, Simon nearly fell in at one point when he tried to test the depth of the sludge with a piece of bamboo and it was deeper than he thought it was going to be .... of course I didn't laugh :o) They worked their socks off clearing the muck up, there's still another section of pipe to excavate and unblock but Simon made a start (see below) so there's not too much to finish off!

So Lisa, France eh? As Mr le Plombier said laughingly to Simon ~ Bonne Vacances!

* Not Canadian bitterly cold you understand but Welsh cold .... -5°C still at lunch-time ... brrr!
** I've particularly learned that the French for a pipe you smoke is une pipe, the French for drains is la canalisation or un tuyau. The French for pipe is never pipe unless you are offering a blow-job! That one goes down there alongside my "no thanks I've had enough to eat!"