22 Sept 2008 Monday – Bankers

We are hanging out the second lot of washing in the morning sunshine when the builders arrive. They have an electric cement mixer in the van to mix up the special floor compound that they will be laying on top of a polythene sheet in the bathroom. It is a mixture of polystyrene balls, some sort of fibre and cement type stuff. It is very light we are told.
Vehicles need to be rearranged so that they can do their mixing, then it is all go. Buckets of gloop start making their way up to the 2nd floor and are then spread onto the bathroom floor. By about 11am the job is done. It will take 2 days for the gloop to dry, so they will be back on Wednesday morning to lay a level, skim coat on top of the dry surface.
We have something to eat then walk into town and pay a visit to my bank. Luckily my account manager is able to see us, and we get a number of things sorted out. S opens a current account, I take out my top up medical insurance (Approx £78 per month) which will bridge most of the gap between what the state will pay for if I am ill, and the real cost. I still have not received my final tax square for my car windscreen, so I have another temporary one printed off. I also need to transfer more money into my current account to cover the forthcoming building account payments.
By the time we get home, it is 3.30pm and I put out the weekend’s green waste for collection early tomorrow morning.
I have an email from the lawyer’s office. My studio tenants on the first floor are leaving on the 22 October, so I will need to find more tenants.
Rent money has at last been vired into my current account. Hooray!
Tonight is the choral societies AGM. I have been told to come along. I will not be able to vote, but there will be a drink afterwards….. On the night I received my first petit bissou greeting. The French love to talk and the meeting went on and on. I understood some of it though. When it finally finished, the big plastic pop bottles containing an orange liquid were opened and cake and nibbles appeared. You could choose between orange from bottles marked sans alcol or the unmarked bottles which might contain alcohol, they couldn’t possibly say. I chose the unmarked orange and had two plastic cups full as any investigative journalist worth his salt would have done. It might have been vodka?