July 08

(1594 words)

Apart from the chap who said he was a builder but turned out to be a con man, we like all our builders. There’s the woodman and the Macedonian, and Craig, in love with a dark eyed part Spanish part French woman. There’s Pierced Jimmy, descended from the Cathares, and a silent Frenchman whose wife brings him on a scooter and stays all day, watching and waiting.

Then there’s Lurch, who we've trusted with the final rendering of the gite we’re much too lovingly restoring.

The Lurcher has a dark haired woman tattooed above his wrist. "she told me that she always wanted to be on my arm, so that night I got a tattoo, and now she is", he's already knocked through the windows on our gite, and now we're finishing the outside. At last. We’re more than three months behind now, one of them due to waiting for the permission to do the work, one due to the con man and one of them partly due to Lurch. Because although he works hard long days in the scorching summer heat, regularly putting in weekends, he then blows his brownie points by not turning up for days on end. We know now that if he's not here, red eyed and shaking, at eight in the morning, he won't be coming. But he does a great job, and we like him, and now that he’s actually started the render he has a team working with him and so he’s here on the button every day.

Lurch and I are having lots of discussions about colour. We’ve already had lots of discussions about colour. It’s important, because, obviously, it’s on the front of the building. Apart from whether we like it, we’re bang in the middle of the village, by the famous bridge, so the marie have to like it too.

So Lurch and I have talked over what we want, for three months now. Right at the beginning, we showed him the restaurant opposite and said, we want it to be like that. It has to be like this because the Architects at Batiments de France and the Marie have told us (or not actually told us, but not actually told us that we can’t, which is the way it works in France) it is the colour they want. Lurch has told me, reassured me, again and again, that it’s no problem, that he has done it lots of times before and he wil give me exactly the colour and texture as the restaurant opposite.

So, it’s all fine until the day before work begins, when I say, as arranged, shall we go and pick up the colour? Lurch looks startled, then worried and shaky, takes a long drag on his roll up, and says 'I’ve got cement drying, and I can’t'. It's the hottest day of the year so far. Cement won't so much dry fast as incinerate.

'OK', I say, taking a deep, already slightly bothered, breath, 'I'll go, what should I get, how much should I get?" . I know now never to expect anything to be simple in France, if you do, you’re in for a tough time. Lurch looks worried and shaky all over again, and explains a bit. My heart sinks. I know that I will go to the builders merchants he suggests, and I will ask them, in (very) bad French for what I think we want, and they probably won’t understand me, and even if they do, if they don’t have what we need, I will be stuffed, because they will give me directions,very helpfully but very fast, to where I need to go, which I won’t be able to understand. especially given that I probably wouldn't have understood even in English because directions just aren't my strong point.

In the end we decide that Pierced Jimmy should come with me, and we trek off with the dog in the blistering heat, windows down, fans blasting. We drive down loping roads to the first merchants. They don’t have it, and they direct us to the next one, another 10 km away. There, we buy several plastic bottles of powdered colour, none of them quite right, but the sales person explains that we need ‘une melange’ - a mix of all of it to get what we want - so we're hopeful it’ll be fine.

When we get back, I explain that although none of the colours are actually right, the colour is to be a melange. 'That’s rubbish' says BF, straight at my exhausted face, 'where have you been, how can we possibly get the right colour from that?' 'Well we’ll just have to see', I say, 'we’ll know when the team arrive tomorrow and they put it on a whole face of the house, then we’ll know if it’s right or not'.

Of course any fool can see that we should do a patch test first, and I suggest it to Lurch but he says no, we can’t do that, it will all be fine, that’s what I use. Ok I say, being any old fool.