Last Thursday myself and my friend Clive Nunn boarded the Oscar Wilde in Rosslare and headed south to France to lay a new floor in the dining room of Le Presbytère.

Sometimes one is fortunate in ones friends and Clive, who is a master of all things made of wood, particularly old wood, and a keen Francophile as well, was just the perfect person to lay the floor for me.
We had also decided that this would be a good moment to transport our black Kilkenny Marble table ( in fact a sort of limestone and originally designed and made by the same Clive) down to France.
I knew I was coming along as gopher and my chief responsibility would be to make sure that there were regular meals on the table at all times and a regular supply of the oak we had selected for the floor.

We had selected the oak with great care in Castorama the previous summer.
It was a lovely old honey colour with wide knotty boards and we reckoned it would be perfectly in character with the fabric of the old building it was going into.
We had been carrying on an email correspondence with one Nicolas in Castorama, had paid our deposit on the wood, called Athena, and he had emailed us just a few days before we left to assure us that our order had arrived.
After a long journey and the usual unintended detours ( I now have an intimate knowledge of the Rocade of Caen and of the Cevennes which were unexpectedly covered in snow) we arrived at Castorama in Beziers on Friday afternoon a few hours before closing.
Then followed about two incredibly frustrating hours of being sent backwards and forewords from Guillaume to Jacques (I asked one girl at one stage was this the first time they had ever sold wood) until we were at last united with our order.
There was no mistaking it, the name Dwyer printed on the label , the brand Athena written on each plank, but it was clearly the wrong colour.
Instead of the honey tones on the sample board in the shop this was silvery grey.Clive looked at it critically.
He knew that if we refused this order our entire journey would be wasted as we only had managed to fit in this window before Christmas with the greatest difficulty.
He also knew that in his other role as designer of the renovations in the house he would have to live with this wood if we accepted it.
“Its been limed” he said, “but I like it, it won’t be as rustic but it will be more elegant”
We were in business.
We loaded the van with the small mountain of wood and headed back to the Presbytère with firm intentions of depleting the Languedoc wine lake.
The following day, when we actually started studying the planks, we discovered that French solid oak flooring comes in much thinner planks than its Irish counterpart so to achieve an even floor we were going to have to line the entire area with a coating of plywood.
Off we headed to Gedimat, the builders suppliers in nearby Murveil.
After some time with a charming man there ( have you ever tried to mime the word plywood?) we discovered that the French word for plywood was contre plaqué, that he didn’t stock it, but that we might get some in M. Bricolage in Magalas.
We fairly charged to Magalas (it was now around 11 and the French get peckish at 12 for their long lunch)
In M. Bricolage the –again helpful and charming- salesman in the wood department told us that he wouldn’t have anything like that amount of contre plaqué in stock so our only chance was to head off into the centre of Beziers (a city fully the size of Limerick) and there find Panadoc who should be able to give us what we wanted.
But it was now 11.40 and Panadoc would close for the weekend at 12.00.
We charged for Beziers , very aware that without contre plaqué our job couldn’t start and we would lose Saturday and Sunday out of our precious pre-Christmas window.

By some miracle of navigation and luck we arrived at the gates of Panadoc at about two minutes to twelve and I charged in to try and persuade the now possibly ravenous and starving sales man to serve us.
I don’t think you would have to stretch your imagination too far to image the reaction I would have got in the same situation in an Irish Builders Suppliers.
The young man in charge here gave the immediate impression that we had made his day.
He couldn’t have been more helpful.
He himself came into the yard and loaded the ply into the van and then got the cashier to write my cheque for me, full of amiable curiosity of what we were going to use the wood for.
We hade been saved by the bell.
Heading back to Thezan we both realised that all of our encounters with various builders suppliers that morning had been helpful and friendly, even though in two of the occasions we plainly weren’t going to buy anything.
So much for the cold arrogant French.

The rest of the sojourn was positively mundane after that first twenty four hours.

Clive worked all the hours of the day to get the floor successfully down, he even saved sufficient time for us to do a huge shop around for wine, visiting Pinet for my Picpoul and St. Chinian for some excellent reds, before we set off for Ireland on Wednesday.

Here is the finished floor, a lovely even if incorrect colour, and the table sitting proudly in the middle.
We are getting there.