Friday 31 October 2008

28 October 2008 Tuesday - moving tale

No wonder it seemed like a long day yesterday. I got up when my phone alarm went off and I had not put it back an hour on Sunday…..
Not a good night’s sleep again due to the smell of the paint and the rain hammering on the roof just above my head non-stop all night.
I start tackling the bedroom skirting boards and door frames around 11am as the rain eases and the light levels raise slightly.
By noon it is hammering down again.
At around 1pm the white van arrives and the bee man, Daveed (French pronunciation) and a mate start bringing up bits of furniture and cardboard boxes. Unfortunately I was still in the middle of painting so I am unable to provide you with an inventory of his personal effects. Rain is now hammering down again.
Will David be a noisy tenant? Will he leave the house at 5.30am like his predecessors? We will see.

I finally finish painting and clean up the equipment, leaving the dragging back into place of furniture and the vacuum cleaning til later. I wonder how many posts out there in Blogland have the words vacuum cleaning in them today?

Today is day one of my chicken stew. I chop up the contents of my pot au feu packet of vegetables (4 carrots, 2 onions, 1 leek, 1 Satsuma sized purple and white thing that is maybe some kind of turnip, a leaf on a thin green stalk which is listed as celery, 1 chicken stock cube in 500 ml of boiling water, black pepper, 2 chicken breasts. This fills my biggest saucepan to the top, but it looks a little on the dry side, so I add some red wine. Saucepan lid on and start cooking on 5, reducing to 3 once it has got up a head of steam. Cook until you cannot be bothered waiting any longer. Then eat with chunks of French bread.
Actually I still have 3 chicken breasts left so this could last 5 days, as I add in mushrooms, potatoes, peppers etc to bulk it out!
Perhaps I should write my own French cookery book. “L’un pot per week, cuik beuk” All I need is a list of 5 or 6 different meats to ring the changes. Vegetarians can just leave out the meat and the stock cube, and add in more veg.
It is getting colder in the evenings, so rather than sit in my scarf and hat, I switch on one of the electric “radiators” in the living room. This is one of five left in the apartment that were probably not exactly cutting edge technology when they were new about 8 years ago.
I also roll down the automatic window shutters and draw the curtains.
The good news is that these measures raise the temperature by one and a half degrees!

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