(or Alone I Stood)

After a long day of stripping wallpaper and on totally zero alcohol I finally (and just barely) succeeded in beating the Kiwi at Scrabble.

In fairness to him (no spear tackler he) he had shelved and conserved last nights game when it had become apparent that my over tired and emotional state of Picpoul ingestion was not going to make a fair match of it.
This was the game we continued this evening.
This was the sixth, he had won all five previous encounters.
He damn nearly won this one too.

The scores were over 700 again.

A couple of weeks ago the vines were showing little or no signs of greenery.
This week because of the rain and then the strong sun they are coming on apace.
I hope this bodes well for the vendange in September.

So as you will now have gathered I am out in France working on the presbytere.
I am not alone, with me is designer, joiner, cabinet maker and old friend Clive and another joiner/cabinet maker who, as he is a little shy, I will call the Kiwi.

This young man (he is close to half my age) seems extremely good at his job and at the end of night one he surprised me by asking if I had a scrabble game as he enjoyed the odd game.
Now I consider myself a bit of an ace in scrabble so was delighted to provide our set.

A little word about scrabble. My friend Michael Waterfield, who played every week with an aunt of his (who had been Noel Coward’s gardener) used to say that any combined score of over five hundred was considered by him and Aunt Patience to be “good”.

The first night I played with the Kiwi our score combined to over six hundred.

He won.

I challenged him to a return the second night.
This time it was neck and neck but again he won by a short head.
Our combined scores added up to just short of seven hundred.

For last night’s match I forswore from alcohol all day and could have been found betimes surreptitiously conning the dictionary.

I played well, I got one score of 80 by getting all my letters out.
My final score was 329.

The Kiwi’s score was just shy of 400.

I may need to resort to underhand tactics.

A couple of days ago I wrote about the great tiles here in the French House
most of which we think were put in in the 1920s.
I need to match these with various paints so have been photographing them.

These are in the bedroom we call the Chimney Room

The old rough ones in the attic

The Daisies in the Family Room

The Quarry tiles which are in the upstairs hall and two of the bedrooms

And on the stairs

The Terrazo’s in the Kitchen

These wonderful Trompe L’Oeils in the Hall

post script

I should have said that the tiles in the family room, the chimney room and the downstairs hall are known as encaustic tiles (carreaux de ciment) and are a bit of a collectors item. They fetch high prices when restored.
The reason I didn’t say this in the piece ? I couldn’t remember their name.

OK here is the first sneak preview of my (still unfinished) Clive Nunn Kilkenny Limestone Kitchen in Thezan.

Has anyone ever seen anything cooler?

Those of my friends who know me as a word nerd will not be surprised to find that I came across something interesting while perusing the dictionary this morning with my breakfast coffee.
In my Collins Robert my eye was caught by the word butter, immediatly followed by the expression; He looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth
I was immediatly intrigued to discover the translation;
On lui donnerait le bon Dieu sans confession
On first glance I translated this as; He could go to confession to God
which I thought was highly subtle.
Then I looked at it again and realised that it must mean ; He could be sent to God without confession which seems to me to be different from the English original which implies, I think, that even though he looks innocent he may well not be.

My niece Ann and her husband Eugene had their first child last year, a little girl Laura.

Seeing her beam here its hard to realise what a rough year she has had with a serious heart operation in the middle of it and she had to be tube fed, to gain weight leading up to the operation.

They have written tellingly about how they managed to wean Laura off the tube here

Just underneath the roof of our house in France on the front wall is painted the date 1925.
This is not the date the house was built, the records of the town refer to it becoming a presbytery in 1900 and certainly the evidence of the stones of the house put it way back many centuries before that.
The 1925 must refer to a major refurbishment which the parish must have performed on the house.
To that make over we owe all of our excellent floor tiles and also we reckon the windows and shutters.

There is also evidence of a lot of 1920s wallpaper going on the walls then.
What is even more interesting is what preceeded the 1920 wall covering.

I began to find out this morning when I started to peel off the layers of wallpaper in our largest bedroom, the one we call the Family Room.

The first covering was a fairly typical of the 1960’s flowery geometric paper.
Under neath was the striped paper of the twenties.

And underneath that emerged that papers precurser, a hand painted wall.
The bottom half was painted brown possibly to imitate wooden pannelling and then there is a decorative dado band.
It maks me wonder about the hands that painted this and when was it done.
It has a sort of Belle Epoque feel to it and I would guess it dates from the 1890s.

These are close-ups of the knockers
of the two doors I pictured yesterday

Being a little superflous to requirements here at the moment (not, mind you, at feeding time) I snuck out this afternoon for a little stroll in the village.
It was informative.

First bit of luck was that the door of the church was open so I got a chance to take a few more pictures of the interior.

A Carved Angel on the choir

The Choir stalls

A handsome Armoire which has some unknown function at the back of the church.

But there in the list of the dead of WW1 I found our own Rene Lentheric, he after whom our street was named.
I had read somewhere that he was one of the youngest casualties of the war but suddenly I was discovering that he was a Captain, not a rank given freely to a young requit.

Then as I left the church was further proof of my mistake, the same Rene’s dates on the sign on my street. Far from being a youth our Rene was 33 years old when killed. It now strikes me that maybe it was not that he was the youngest but one of the first casualties.

On the Street again gave me a chance to snap a couple of doors

And then , the answer to a question which I had voiced just a few days ago.

As we were living in the old centre of the town, next to the church, where had the original Mairie been- given that I knew that the new Mairie dated just from the 1900s.

A chance glance at the side of a building answered my question.
This was the Mairie of Thézan in the 1700s

This building I passed every morning with the bread is only around the corner from us.
Obvious once you know.