Tails From Provence

GET INTO THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT #1

This started off as something simple I was going to do on my personal Facebook page, but it’s grown arms and legs and is now going to be a daily blog post for fourteen days. Today’s video is specially for Liz Stout. Check out her blog – she has two lovely horses (they’re a bit fierier than my two lovely horses!), a very cool job (she’s a biologist), she’s into hiking, skiing, all things outdoors-y and she’s a climber.

Thanks to my sis-in-law Ant Wren for pointing me at this video.

Tags: christmas video

French Drains

Thirty years ago, if you said “French drain” to me, I would proceed to describe a large trench, filled with rocks, which gathered water from the drainage channels in our arena and directed it to a huge soakpit (I know all about arena building in a wet climate and what not to do, by the way).

Photo from Wikipedia. Click on image for full article on this type of French drain.

Nowadays, if you say “French drain” to me, I’m likely to go off on a rant about the odour which emanates from the typical French bathroom. The problem is that French plumbers connect greywater wastepipes to blackwater wastepipes, so that when the greywater pipes are dry, there is nothing to stop the noxious gases from the village sewerage line or the septic tank from rising back up the pipe into the house. This isn’t a problem with sinks, dishwashers and washing machines, because they usually have a U-bend which blocks the gases, but, for some reason, shower plugholes over here are not equipped with a U-bend.

It lurks beneath the shower… the Evil French Drain Monster

In the house we rented last year, the landlady mentioned in passing that there was a slight smell which arose from the downstairs en-suite occasionally, if the toilet was flushed. “But it’s nothing, really,” she added brightly, “and to get rid of it you just chuck half a bucket of water into the shower.”

Nothing really??? It was vile – a stomach-churning blend of sewage and rotting vegetation, and it stank whether the toilet was flushed or not. Chucking half a bucket of water down the drain did nothing to temper it. We kept the window open 24/7 and found that keeping a small bowl over the shower plug-hole helped matters somewhat, but that odour was a large part of the reason we chose the upstairs bedroom in that particular house.

When we came to view the house we’re living in now, one of the first things I noticed was that there was no French drain smell, a big PLUS as far as I was concerned. Unfortunately, once we moved in, we realised that the landlord must have had every door and window in the house open for hours before our inspection. The stench was disgusting. It seemed to seep into every room in the house. Go out for a walk and you’d literally find yourself retching when you walked back in the front door again.

We tried our bowl trick. No go. The shower is floored with natural stone tiles with an uneven finish and the bowl couldn’t sit level on the floor all the way around. We sought advice from a builder friend and were given the “chuck half a bucket of water into the shower” story again. Sorry folks, but this does NOT work.

Our bathroom is equipped with a skylight and we had to keep it open for ventilation around the clock, unless it was raining. This was fine until a few weeks ago, when temperatures started to drop below freezing by night, making the morning shower a very unpleasant (and hasty) experience indeed.

And then my genius husband was inspired. The problem is now solved 100%. We can keep the skylight closed and even heat the bathroom, now that the warmth won’t go straight out through the skylight.

The solution? One of these :

half filled with water thus :

and placed over the shower plughole so :

Et voilá. I’d offer a money-back guarantee, only this doesn’t cost anything.

Do you think we can patent it?

Tags: French drain smell

Early Christmas

The LSH and I spent the weekend in London with our daughters for an early family Christmas. The ED is going skiing with her boyfriend over the holiday period and the YD will be working, so for the first time ever, our family is spending Christmas apart.

We arrived at Stanstead late on Thursday, stayed in a hotel at the airport and met the YD off her plane from Cork. Much to her surprise – she hadn’t realised we’d be there! Good job we didn’t miss her, that would have been a bad start to the weekend, especially since she had no credit on her phone and couldn’t receive calls! We had breakfast in the hotel (it was included in the room rate, we had to eat it!) and I have to say it was the best hotel-buffet-breakfast I’ve ever seen. The Radisson Blu at Stanstead – they had just about anything you could possibly want for brekkie, from a Full English to fruit and yoghurt and everything in between.

After that, we went out to the ED’s house in Stamford Hill (yup, she lives in the Hasidic Jewish area) and we all went for Second Breakfast/Brunch. This was in a Turkish café in Stoke Newington. The food was very different – for example, I had two poached eggs in yoghurt with garlic and paprika. Tasty, but not typical breakfast food – or lunch food, for that matter.

Full and ready for anything, we made our way into town. On a red bus. We sat at the front, like tourists. Well, I guess we were tourists.

Yay! We’re at the front of the bus!

Yes, we’re having as much fun as you guys.

Over the course of the weekend, we shopped. And we shopped. And we shopped some more. We did posh expensive shops and we did the markets.

Trying on silly hats in a posh expensive shop

I’m a pretty lousy shopper, usually, but I got into the swing of it and came home with some fancy thermal gear from Uniqlo (my new favourite shop) and a new leather bag.

We had fun browsing around Camden market. The part I like best is the Stables Market. It’s built on the site of a vast stabling complex, which at one stage housed over 400 horses – barge horses and dray horses. To commemorate this heritage, there are lifesize horse statues scattered all over the place.

Some of them are even bigger than lifesize!

I think this guy had a cold. There was something coming out of his nose, anyway.

We didn’t buy anything there, though – I found it all began to look the same after a while, although two items did stand out…

This made me think of Rara Saur, whose blog I dip into regularly :

It’s not the right colour, but it’s definitely a RAWR

and this made me think of my friend Jane :

Yes, Jane, a Friesan print dress, just for you.

On Friday evening, we ate in an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane. The food was ok, but the restaurant was crammed (there were two very large tables of Christmas revellers) and the staff were pretty stressed out. It’s not nice to be a guest in a place where the atmosphere is so tense. On Saturday night, we ate in a Thai restaurant in Stoke Newington which was much better all round – nicer food and happier staff! Then on Sunday, we had our Pseudo-Christmas dinner in the Hawksmoor near Spitalfield Market (after trawling through the Flower Market on Columbia Rd and a craft market tucked into a big warehouse). The staff were OTT cheerful, but they were a good laugh and the food was excellent.

We had Great Intentions before the weekend, of course. We thought we’d go to a movie, or a show, or one or two museums and we’d absolutely, definitely go ice-skating. We managed to get to a photographic exhibition at the National History Museum and we stopped in on the opening of a furniture design shop which is run by one of Aideen’s friends and we had a tour of the furniture workshop where her boyfriend works, but apart from that, we shopped. And we ate. And we slept. And, in a strange reversal of roles, we followed our confident and self-assured Eldest Daughter as she made her way unerringly around this big city she now calls home, hopping on and off public transport as we went. That was weird.

It was a lovely weekend with our girls. It just didn’t feel like Christmas. It was very strange (and sad) saying goodbye and I suspect we are all going to miss each other like crazy on Christmas day.