Monday, July 8, 2013

The long, wet road home

So a slow drive back from Spain, so hot (27 C), so sunny, towards La Chaise. A farewell picnic at the Porta Catalana, the last pit stop before the Franco-Spanish border. For once no roadworks round Perpignan! Weather still hot and sunny. We knew we were heading towards wet and disagreable weather and, indeed, the rain started as soon as we left Montauban, direction Brive. It was weird rain, perfectly acceptable for April, less so for July. Fortunately that particular stretch of autoroute is not very heavily frequented. By the time we got on to the Brive – Bordeaux autoroute the temperatures had dropped to around 18C. Never mind, we were going home.

The first thing that greeted our gladdened eyes, because it is next the front gate, was the billy goat orchid in all its glory, 112cm high  -

                        and in full flower, full odour.



 Then we lifted our eyes to the roof, the new roof that the poor roof tiler had started early May and had expected to finish in under three weeks....but the weather wished otherwise. He completed the job the day of our return, the first week of July.

 Not, I may say, without having a good look at the other roofs of La Chaise and making disparaging remarks in best hair-dresser fashion, plus fixing one or two things of which he disapproved.

Oh, the joys of a new roof! We can face the summer storms with tranquillity once again. We shall not have to find part-time, ex-roofers to come and re-jig slipping tiles, or put buckets under the worst of the leaks, see the walls getting sodden, the mould growing on the plasterboard ceilings and the curtains. Why did we wait so long?

I shall look at his final bill on Monday – Mondays are bill paying days – and see what disparity there is between his original estimate and the final bill. It will be difficult to quarrel with it for he has also done odd tiling jobs which he said needed doing, ones that could be done in the pouring rain. Also I have a great deal of sympathy for him for he does not have what the Americans call 'a slash' (as in 'model/actress'). Our pool man, for example, is /chauffage for the winter. There are wonderful ways the French state has created for adapting the tax system to this way of working – which are too complicated, too clever for any normal person to understand.

How can someone (with no /) whose work is so subject to weather variables be able to estimate, profitably, for the various jobs on offer? I had asked three different roof tilers for estimates and all were within a ball park of each other, so I felt safe choosing the one who lived nearest, came best recommended. The answer lies in careful choice of legal and fiscal framework within which to work – and a slash.

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