We are still in Faugères waiting for the builders to finish our house. They are trying really hard, I don’t know what the French for Blue Arsed Flies is-Mouches aux Culs Bleus?- but they are giving a fairly good imitation of the same in their efforts to finish the house, or at any rate to have it habitable for La Toute Irlande which we have threatened arrives on Sunday.
I think that we have now come to a compromise.
They are going to have their part of the ground floor and the first floor ready, basically the kitchen / living room and downstairs loo and four bedrooms with bathrooms, by Wednesday .Ready means the building work is done, the electrics will be in situ, the showers and loos will flow and flush.
The décor will be either half stripped wallpaper, cracked plaster, drunken cornices or brand new plasterboard and (in the bathrooms) tiling.
They will come back after the builders holidays in September and do the attic and generally finish off the job.
From Sunday of next week La Toute Irlande really does arrive.
We expect about 24 friends and relations to visit us in the next six weeks.
They will be installed in various parts of the house.
Our job, as soon a s the workers go, will be to remove the centimetres of layers of dust which now coat everything.
We are already pricing industrial vacuum cleaners.

The consoling thing is that we like all the work they have done so far.
The bathrooms do look a little tighter than expected but they are pristine and crisply tiled.
They builders and the plumbers have proved themselves adept at replacing tiles that they have damaged by clever substitution and even at replacing and reusing stuff like sinks and doors that they had previously discarded.

We now think the lowest moments, those when they seemed to be destroying our beautiful presbytery before our eyes, are now passed and now the place is starting to look better.
We are very likely wrong.