It Would Make a Grown Man Cry But Then ….

Wednesday was not a good day. OK, the sun was shining and on the face of it everything was fine, but one by one, the hours brought a deterioration to my mood.

First up was the verdict on my debroussailleuse machine (heavy duty strimmer or bushcutter to you and me) which I’d put into the repair shop. I’d left it out in the rain (stupid, stupid boy) and expected it just needed a bit of know how and mechanical TLC to get it going. No such luck – it needed a new engine and the guy explained that by the time he’d ordered all the spare parts and added his time, the bill would be well over €400! He suggested, given that it was now 4-5 years old that I’d be better off buying a new one – between €600 and €700. Ouch! That’ll teach me.

Having driven home from the garden centre in a state of shock, I was met by J demanding my credit card – the washing machine warranty people had decided that it was uneconomical for the Hoover to be repaired and offered her €250 to drop her claim. Well – within nanoseconds, J was on the internet ordering a brand new washing machine – cost unknown to me at this time but I’m waiting for the amount to appear on my credit card any hour now.

To think that all that is wrong with the washing machine is a part about the size of – well I’m trying to think of something that small – something the size of the ‘o’ in the word ‘of’ you’ve just read. But because it’s part of the circuit board, that’s it. A completely good, working washing machine knackered because of something that small – it’s beyond belief!

I think I’m going to write to Hoover and ask that they send me a new circuit board and suggest they re-look at their design but of course during the months of negotiations no clothes will be washed hence the panic to order a new one.

So – it’s not even mid-day and I’m down over €1,000. Then my PC, which had been acting up but had then ‘fixed itself’, went all funny again. The screen flickered a couple of times and then died a long lingering death with pixels disappearing one by one.

Kitty came home at 5pm and demanded to know when I’m going to replace her laptop which has a fatal hardware error. You can just imagine the answer. Then Guy appeared with a Blackberry Storm (a handheld device like an iPhone) and said – ‘oh by the way – you agreed to give Tan €80 for his. You’d better go over and pay him.’

I had hit he bottle by this time when Kitty came in with the post. One electricity bill for €380, Guy’s scooter insurance renewal for €280, the house insurance renewal for €530 and to cheer myself up, I looked at the stock market which was down another 100 points.

So sitting in my little office thinking the world had turned against me, I accessed Facebook and saw that my friend, Lynn, was worried about her husband, my mate, Brian. Brian has now been laid up (literally)in hospital for the last 15 weeks, trussed up like a spit-roasted chicken on a barbeque, unable to move and he faces another 6 months of rehabilitation to get him back to fitness.

I called her to give her someone to talk to and although near to tears she held it together. Good girl.

Then the news came through about the shootings in Cumbria. Innocent people killed whilst wandering around a village or fixing a fence.

Taken together, these two things made me realize I’ve got absolutely nothing to complain about. Get on with your life Thomas and stop feeling sorry for yourself and I’m posting a picture of my mate Brian to remind myself that no matter how rotten you feel, there’s always somebody in a worse position than you.

It’s Visitor Time

The sun has arrived (at last) and although it’s only warm enough to mimic an early summer’s day in England, it has brought the visitors flooding over.

Debi, who is a perpetual traveler, or so it seems (she says she does 5 days consultancy a month !) arrived on Sunday evening and immediately must have thought she’d arrived in your typical ex-pat, decadent community. It was French Mother’s Day and Tan and Angie were having one of their twelve hour barbeques. I’d had to pace myself in the afternoon so that I could drive down to Cagnes station to pick Debi up but when we arrived back it was quite apparent that sometime during my absence, the champagne had been broken out and the bottles were being opened faster than we could put them in the bottle bin!

Several hours later and after seemingly hours of dancing and group hugs and a bit of the hokey-cokey, I ended up in J’s clothes (I mean we swapped clothes)which I have to say were rather tight on me and despite what my ‘friends’ said, I quite liked the frilly pink sleeveless blouse I had on!

It was obviously a raucous event as I’m covered in bruises and whilst I’m sure these must have come from the rather violent Ceroc dancing we were doing, it might also because I won’t give J back her pink, frilly blouse!

Debi left last night and before the beds in the guest room got cold, two rather attractive young ladies moved in. Sarah, the step-daughter of a friend of mine and J’s (although I’ve never met Sarah – or Saz as her friend seems to call her) and her friend Becky (Becks).

Now Guy’s tongue nearly hit the floor when these two girls arrived. Blonde, gorgeous, bubbly and full of stories of their ‘Inter-railing’ round Europe (Spain and France so far), he sat there, hanging on every word, pouring them glasses of Sangria and generally being a puppy-dog.

For my part, I kept my mouth shut so my tongue did not fall out of place. Anyway – my gorgeous blonde wife would have killed me had it done so!

More Crashes

It was ironic that on the day Apple overtook Microsoft as the world’s ‘biggest’ technology company, the PCs in our house decided to go on strike in sympathy. They’re all Windows PCs of course!

First, my luxurious HP Pavillion Entertainment PC in glossy piano black, bought in New York only two years ago started going all funny. It wouldn’t recognize its own speakers so it became a silent PC, but strangely if I plug some speakers into the USB port, it blasts away quite happily. Apparently a well-known Vista problem but so far Microsoft have not come up with a solution! Occasionally, just occasionally, the speakers start working without any warning which can be quite disconcerting and embarrassing depending on who is in the room and what I’m listening to. So frustrating!

And then my screen decided that it liked the designer Paul Smith so much that it made my monitor all stripy. The colours were absolutely stunning and it was uncanny how closely the screen resembled one of his designs (see picture – this is a Paul Smith image) but as for seeing my spreadsheets and reading the Daily Telegraph on-line, no chance!

Again, if I switched the PC completely off and prayed to the big technology god in the sky (Bill Gates ??), my normal screen would return but only for an hour or so and then the stripes would come back. And yet when I plug a separate monitor into my PC, it works fine! So frustrating and yet another known problem with HP laptops!

And then, as if they’d been listening to me, HP decided to send through some software updates. These loaded …….. and then my PC crashed! There was nothing for it but to return my PC to a version of its software which had been copied several days ago. It took about 2 hours but when switched on, Paul Smith had gone. My speakers still don’t work, ooops, wait a minute, they’re working again, oh not they’re not - but who cares – I can read The Telegraph again.

So I was happy, but then Kitty’s PC came up with one of those errors (can’t locate Kernel.dll) with a message on the screen which positively screams – don’t even bother trying to fix this!

And so for the last few nights Guy and I have tried to repair Kitty’s blood red Dell Inspiron. We’ve had to clear all her drives of the thousands of pictures she’s taken (and no – kids don’t even think of backing up to a memory stick) and all the other software on the PC to try and reload a version of Windows. So far it’s not worked. Looks like I’ll have to take a trip down to Antibes where Wolfgang, an ex-PC engineer repairs what Guy and I cannot.

And then just as I’m thinking that at least my PC is working, the screen goes all wonky again but the speakers start working!

So – good for Apple. I’ve never had one (apart from my iPhone and an iPod) but I bet they don’t cause as much grief as PCs and that Windows rubbish!

Italian Stallion Hits Italian Alfa

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had to take my car door apart in order to locate a rattle which was the result of a poor repair job by a garage who ‘fixed’ my car after a bit of a prang. As I spent hours taking bit after bit off the door, I couldn’t help but think of the guy who caused the problem in the first place – Antonio, our builder, whom we called the Italian Stallion.

I was returning from the MOT testing station in my Alfa. It had failed! The previous week I had taken the passenger door apart because the electric window mechanism had failed and when I had refitted it, I had forgotten to attach the door opening cable. Apparently, whilst a non-opening window is not an MOT failure, a non-opening door is.

I drove home. This was the first time, I can recall, when a car of mine had failed an MOT (Controle Technique in France) and it had failed on such a stupid mistake of my own making. Never mind, I knew what the issue was – it could be fixed and re-tested in a couple of days.

I drove back up the hill to the house and the rain was absolutely lashing down. I turned into my drive and spotted the builder’s car parked in its usual place. I assumed Antonio would be in the car as that’s where he usually went when it was too wet to work on the house.

I sped up the lane and just as I passed Antonio’s Audi, there was a sickening crunch and the car stopped. I knew almost immediately what had happened but I got out of the car just to confirm it.

I stood there in monsoon rain looking at my wrecked Alfa and then I looked at Antonio’s wrecked Audi. He had kicked his door open just at the exact moment I was passing and his door had amazingly stuck in a tiny gap between my door and the front wing and had basically ripped the side off of both cars. Had his door missed that tiny gap, the damage would have been minimal but it hadn’t and the damage was considerable.

Both Antonio and I stood there in the lashing rain, not quite believing what had just happened and then the shouting started. I’m not quite sure what he was saying but it was probably along the lines of ‘ you stupid ***** - look at my car – it’s your fault’. I responded by saying in English (not a word of which he understood) that he was a stupid Italian opening his door like that’, etc etc etc.

Then I realized – he was my builder. I was totally reliant on him to finish my house and I decided in a nanosecond to become a bit more conciliatory. I suggested he try and fit his door back on and we sort it out in the morning when we’d both calmed down.

Overnight I discussed it with J and came to the conclusion that it was better not to upset Antonio and that if it came to it, I’d just pay to have his car fixed, no matter the cost.

Next morning and Antonio appeared with his son whom we’d never met. I was just about to offer to pay the repair bill for the Audi when his son said, ‘you know he’s always doing this – he has to change his insurance company at least once a year because he’s always crashing the car. I’ve told him that it was his fault so you won’t have any problems with your insurance company’.

Solved! Antonio’s insurance company paid for everything. His car was back on the road within two weeks – but it took them 5 months to source a new door for my Alfa and do you know what? They replaced my electric window and reattached the door opening cable – and it passed its MOT!

And another thing on insurance. J’s renewal quote came in last week – up 30% from €360 to €460 a year. No explanation – nothing! I called, kicked up a stink, did some quotes on the internet (all in French !!) and hey presto, within a couple of days they’d changed the premium to €282. Bloody robbers!

Mick Jagger Is All Wrinkly

I came back from a pizza night at Tan and Angie’s on Saturday night, actually it was Sunday morning and decided that I couldn’t sleep, so switched on the TV and the series, ‘The Band’ was on BBC2. It featured Queen.

Now I was a Queen convert. I’d started on the Beatles when my parents, having invested in one of those new fangled record players, bought a record titled ‘Love me Do’, which I have to say I did not like. But several years later on a school trip to Bruges (Belgium) I remember sitting in a café with my mates, eagerly waiting for the release of their latest record, Strawberry Fields (Forever), and when it was played, I recall thinking it was just the best record I’d ever heard.

Later on I ‘progressed’ to Simon and Garfunkel and then the Rolling Stones and finally Queen, when I recognized that Freddie Mercury, despite his rather ‘exotic’ private life, was just the best front man ever to sing in a band.

But then I moved on to probably the best band ever – Fleetwood Mac. I still play Rumours at full blast in the house and the car.

But back to Saturday night/Sunday morning. Following ‘The Band’, the film of ‘the Stones in Exile’ was shown which was quite timely, because the re-mixed, re-release of their original 1972 album called ‘Exile on Main St’ has just made number one in the album charts.

Years ago, the Stones had left the UK when tax rates reached 98% and had decamped to the South of France renting Villa Nellcote in Villefranche sur Mer (pictured). It was originally planned to be just a tax bolt-hole but of course the biggest band in the world at that time couldn’t sit still, so Villa Nellcote became an ad-hoc recording studio where copious amounts of drugs and women resulted in what many critics called a ‘waste of rock and roll talent’ when the resulting LP was released.

The film showed the Stones in all their decadent glory – smoking dope, drinking Jack Daniels, welcoming hordes of women into the villa, sleeping for 24 hours at a time and trying to find their chef to cook for them when he had gone off to Marseille to get more drugs!

Eventually, the music industry recognized that Exile on Main Street was a classic and its re- release may prove to be a bigger hit than the original.

My own claim to fame in this context is that a friend of J’s who used to visit us in Tourrettes once gave me a rather funky t-shirt when either J or myself had done her a favour. It was so outlandish that I could only wear it when nobody could see me and when I admitted this to her later, she said that the design was Mick Jagger’s favourite. She then said that she was a rather in-demand masseuse to the stars in St Tropez but she always refused to provide Mick Jagger with that service because she could not stand handling his incredibly wrinkly body!