Keith & Clare Channing's web site and blog

Interesting skies this week. Not necessarily nice, but interesting nonetheless. Just before three on Wednesday afternoon, the sky looked like this. I know what you’re thinking; haven’t we seen this image before? You haven’t, but you have probably seen one very like it that was taken last August. That one, however, was taken later in the day and the near-sunset sky was a different colour. OK – confession time. We love these clear double rainbows, and that crock of gold is so close.

A few hours later, whilst we were walking the dogs, the sky seemed to us to be rather strange. It was dark, heavy, almost stormy, but with diagonal streaks of thinner, paler cloud and, just to make it really weird, a line of fluffy white clouds of the sort that one expects to see against a clear, blue sky. Of course, we didn’t have a real camera with us, so I did what I could with my phone, zooming in a bit, just to make sure that the resulting image was as cruddy as possible.

This photo doesn’t do the sky justice, but it’s the best I have.

We did enjoy some sun earlier in the week. On one afternoon, we were in shirtsleeves walking the dogs; one of only three days recently when it has been warm enough to leave the fleeces at home. During that afternoon, Clare was very excited about a butterfly she had seen in what we euphemistically refer to as the wild part of the the garden. I know, I know, but if it’s OK for me to get excited about a never-before-seen bird [link], then it’s OK for Clare to get excited about a never-before-seen butterfly. We, and others, have done some looking up, and can only seem to identify this as a Zebra Swallowtail (Protographium marcellus). That, however, is native to the eastern US and is closely associated with pawpaws, being only rarely found far from these trees (Wikipedia). Confused? We certainly are.

Monday evening, following a reboot, my PC failed to recognise any USB devices – yes, that included wireless keyboard and mouse! It is a laptop, so I was able to continue, albeit with none of the devices that are permanently connected, and using that awful built-in trackpad. I spent almost three hours on Tuesday morning searching for solutions and tried various suggestions, none of which helped at all. Finally, in desperation, I uninstalled both USB host controllers from the machine and rebooted. During boot, it reinstalled the self-same controllers, and all was OK again. Go figure, as they say.

On Wednesday, I went to see the doctor. He assumed I had wanted to talk about the latest blood test results (I didn’t) and launched into a soliloquy on the unusual nature of the error in the first test, confirmed to me that I am quite fine, sugar-wise; no sign of diabetes and asked again if I was sure that I was fasted for the test. I said that I was – both sure and fasted. I didn’t say of course I was; had I not been, the cholesterol results would have been skewed as well. I then told him why I had called. I had noticed that what I thought to be a long-standing mole on my back had suddenly become tender and almost painful. He examined me. He declared that it’s nothing and that I must have scratched it; a possibility that I can concede, although I’m not aware of having done so. Having said it was nothing, he then proceeded to attack it with liquid nitrogen to freeze it, following which he came at me with what I can only describe as a miniature cattle prod, with which he attacked it from every conceivable angle. Interestingly, the first time I said ouch, he stopped. Perhaps he was testing my threshold, or this was some kind of punishment and he needed to know that it had hurt properly. He put a plaster on it, then said something I totally failed to understand but that was probably quite important. Hey-ho.

Last week, I said that Clare’s car is almost ready. That bears repeating, if only because nothing has changed. We identified the (very small) parts that need to be sourced and did some looking. We want a single special banjo fixing bolt for each side. The best I could find was offered by a supplier in the UK that said they couldn’t supply just the bolts, we would need to buy the full brake hose with fittings. Each hose (remember we need two) costs £27.54, plus £19.99 shipping. That means a total, depending on whether the shipping is per item or not, of either £75.07 or £95.06 for two little bolts! Jan found another vendor who were prepared to sell just the banjo and bolt for £4.99 plus £2.90 shipping. Again, depending on how shipping charges are applied, that makes either £12.88 or £15.78. That, I can live with. I now just need Jan to give me the banjo bolt thread size and the hose internal diameter, then I can order the bits.

I am hoping that we can have Lizzie back to work fairly soon. I quite fancy going away for my sixty-fourth birthday and the following weekend, provided the weather holds.

You remember Ulysse, don’t you? He’s the one we don’t say too much about. It is unusual for him to do anything spectacularly bad, or spectacularly good, for that matter. He is, for the most part, a reliable, well-behaved, biddable and responsive dog. His image doesn’t appear on this blog as often, partly because he does little that is sufficiently bad, cute or downright weird to be remarkable, but partly also because he’s not as pretty as Trevor. Clare tells me I am shallow, but I think pretty matters. This week, Ulysse decided that we should have something different to write about; something not involving Trevor. I shall let Clare tell the story:

“We were doing our usual 5km walk with the dogs and were almost home, when they both decided to dart into a field of cereal crop, about a metre in height. We screamed at them to come out, but only Trevor appeared. I scanned the field and couldn’t see Ulysse, so we did our usual thing, which is to walk off and expect him to follow. That always works – if he thinks we are abandoning him, he rushes to rejoin us as quickly as he can. This time, he didn’t. I had seen nothing to suggest that he had gone very far into the field (you can normally see the crop parting and moving as they pass through it) which left me thinking that he must have had a fit.

I didn’t want to clamber under the rusty barbed wire and into the field to recover him, because it would have involved damaging the crop (and myself!), so I just waited for him to come round and make his way out of the field and back to us. He generally recovers in ten to fifteen minutes. When he hadn’t come back after twenty minutes, I started to think that he must have run off after all, so I set about looking for him in earnest.

About an hour later, whilst I was driving around the area looking for a dead body on the main road – you know how your mind starts to think the worst after a while – my mobile phone rang. It was Keith, who had stayed at home in case someone called to say they had found him. He called to let me know that Ulysse had just nonchalantly sauntered in through the front gate from completely the other direction!

We have no idea where he had been or what he had been doing, and whether or not he had suffered a fit. I was relieved to have him back, though, I can tell you.

He has these seizures about once a month. The vet said that we shouldn’t worry too much, although if they become frequent he will have to take some sort of medication. The fits are usually worse for us than for him; I don’t think he is aware whilst he is fitting. We just try and keep him safe whilst they are happening and let him ride out the storm. The trouble is, when he comes round he is usually confused and very wobbly on his legs. This is what makes me think that he may have stumbled off in the wrong direction.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well and we can breathe again.

Footnote – it’s a good job that Keith phoned me when he did. At the time he called, I was outside the gendarmerie on the point of telling them in my very best Franglaise that our dog is missing – now THAT would have been funny, I can tell you!”

About 107 days until our next big trip.

I have recently become quite fond of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Neither of these technologies has yet achieved real mass market penetration but for me, Windows 8 is, at the very least, a good front end for windows 7. Starting up and closing down are much faster and, although I don’t use the W8 desktop often, when I do it works very well. I mostly live in the Windows 7 environment which is very well supported. I have found no compatibility issues that have caused me any grief. I have yet to try Windows 8 RT, as installed on tablets, but should be happy to do so, given the opportunity. For my purposes, I prefer the low-end Nokia Lumia 520 Windows 8 phone to my iPhone 3GS. It should come as no surprise, then, that when I found a nice Windows 8-ish theme for WordPress, I applied it to this site, to see how it looked. I am quite pleased with the result, but comments are invited.

Three years ago, in 2010, we had snow on 5th May. This year it happened overnight 24th/25th May. Not a great deal and everything was so wet that it didn’t settle, but it did snow a week before the arrival of flaming June. Flaming June? All I can say at the moment is that it is flaming cold!

Another visitor to our bird feeders. He has been visiting for a while, but this is the first time I have managed a decent photograph of him. He is, of course, a Eurasian Jay (Garrulus glandarius), and I call him Homer.

Speaking of animals, I was somewhat taken aback to see, in the Carrefour Market store in St Eloy-les-Mines, more breed specific dog food. Four new breeds were covered; those shown below and the French Bulldog.

Trevor is now enjoying his own special food (rather than another, non-breed specific brand that just happens to have on it a picture of a dog that looks a lot like him), whilst Ulysse sticks to the small dog senior variant. What worries me about the JR specific food is that it claims to increase energy. Excuse me, Mr Ultima – Trevor does not need more energy! I told Tania about these products, but she said that as Shitsu and Tinkerbell have two dishes from which they both eat randomly, there would be little value in giving them different food.

My new passport arrived last week. I was saddened to see that the old passport was not returned with it. I keep all my old passports together, and can see all visas etc. going back to 1977, when I flew to Dubai for my first overseas job, which was also my first trip outside of Great Britain. I had been to Cornwall, Scotland and Wales and had made, in my teens, a trip across the water to Hayling Island, but no passport was needed for any of those. Stamps in this passport included Antigua, Dominica, Barbados, South Africa and USA, and it was a disappointment not to have it. The man who delivered my new passport came from a delivery service in Clermont-Ferrand. He called for directions and said he had a large vehicle. He was not joking. His truck was so large that he had to reverse the 200 metres up our chemin from the main road, knowing that he would not be able to turn to drive down. The removal wagon that delivered our furniture was smaller. A week after the new passport arrived, I had an email from the British Embassy in Paris, informing me that my supporting documentation had been collected by carriers and would be with me within a couple of days. This time, the carrier they used was 63Express, who deliver smaller parcels and use smaller vehicles. Normal application of Murphy’s Law implies that we would be out when the delivery arrived and, of course, we were. In fact, possibly at the very moment the driver turned up, we were marvelling at the availability of special Trevor nosh chez Carrefour. Happily, the delivery driver was gifted with a modicum of common sense (and a package that didn’t require a signature) and popped it into our letter box. I now have continuity of passports from 1977 to 2023. If you are wondering why it’s not 1977 to 2017, it is because in 1983, when I moved from Nigeria to Tanzania, my first passport was full, so I had to have a new one.

In a first for us, after seven years living here, we went to a restaurant followed by the movies on Thursday evening, together with Julie and Liz. There is a small cinema in Evaux-les-Bains, just over 20Kms (25-30 minutes) from us, that was showing The Quartet in Version Originale. That means it is sub-titled, not dubbed. It is a very enjoyable film, although some of the sub-titling failed to convey the humour that was evident in the dialogue. For example, when a very prim and proper, matronly character says, “I am about to say something quite rude now,” followed by a suitably long pause then, “f*** off!”, vas-y ! best translated as go away, doesn’t do it justice. Some of the French patrons were looking at us somewhat askance when we were laughing at things that just didn’t seem funny to them. A great evening, though, and one that is likely to be repeated.

Clare’s car is close to completion now. Unfortunately, when we sent the callipers back for exchange credit, we included a couple of special small fittings that are needed to rebuild the braking system. This time, it was not my fault. We are now trying to source these pieces. We have  everything we need to complete the repairs to Lizzie’s exhaust and, provided Rob has the time and is able to help us (that is, of course, help us in the children’s sense of do it for us), we may have Lizzie back on stream quite soon.

About 114 days until our next big trip.

It started so promisingly, too!

Looks lovely, doesn’t it?

It hasn’t looked like that for a good few days since. That blue area above the green stuff? Grey! The green stuff? More of a soggy hue, if such a thing exists.

The forecast?

Let us be positive. One can surely salvage something from most situations. The weather has kept us indoors, and we are able to get on with things that are normally difficult to keep up to date at this time of the year. Clare has been pressing on with some of her craft things, and I have been able to devote more time to my indoor pursuits. For the Proofreading and Copy Editing course, which I hope will result in a saleable capability, I have created a dedicated corner of the study. I recently completed and submitted my first assignment, and am awaiting the outcome.

This is a part of the study in which I shall be spending more time over the coming months.

Gale, my boss at the Hawk Conservancy Trust, has moved on to work with another charity. A replacement will be appointed, although whether the range of activities covered by her successor will be identical to what she has been doing for the past five years has yet to be defined. In the meantime, her many functions have been spread around a small group of which I am, from a geographical standpoint, a somewhat disconnected part. We developed a good working relationship during her tenure, and I shall miss that. I wish her well in her new position and hope that her new employers will soon know what kind of prize fish they have landed.

Meanwhile, the Trust is involved in a major conservation initiative which Chris Packham will launch on Springwatch next week. I shall say nothing more until it has been announced publicly on the telly box.

I thought the images I captured last week of our visiting Woodpecker and Nuthatch were almost up to scratch. I have, however, been thoroughly disabused of that notion by a batch of images that Clare took yesterday using the same camera. I present them here for your delectation and for the lowering of my self-opinion.

Click on the image for a larger version and marvel, as I did, at their quality. I am suitably chastened.

I reported the sighting of the Night Heron to the local branch of Birdlife International, giving full details of time and place, as well as the image I had captured. They responded this week as follows (in translation, of course):

The Night Heron is mostly only present around large rivers: the Allier and Loire. It is very rare in your part of the Combrailles. One could think it is a passage bird, but that date would be very late. Perhaps there is a nesting couple (or more?) in the area. If you can locate a nest site there, that would be a major first.

I did look, but couldn’t see a suitable nest, and haven’t seen anything of the bird since. Most likely he was a late migrant (I’m saying he, because he is, according to my book, in mature male plumage). It was an interesting encounter, and another sighting would be nice. However, I am not a twitcher, and I shall not become over-excited about it.

Clare’s car is closer to being back on the road. Just one more small piece to be sourced and we should be there. I am not taking odds on the difficulty of obtaining that part!

We also have most of what we need to deal with Lizzie’s exhaust. The centre box came from Silencieux.eu; no one on line offered the rear box. We tried the breakers, but without success. We tried the factors, but without success. We went to the Renault agency in Montluçon. They were able to supply the rear box. It was about twice the price I was expecting but, if that is the only source, the price is probably reasonable. They were unable to supply the pipe that runs between the boxes. It isn’t made any more. I imagine that the silencer is common to a number of models, but the connecting pipe would possibly be specific to the rear wheel drive, short wheelbase, 1.6l petrol variant of the particular configuration of Renault Trafic.

Lizzie will be thirty years old on 15th September.

About 121 days until our next big trip.