How to keep cool

I wasn't going to pop a blog up today, then thought I would.

First of all, for all you UK people experiencing some hot weather, here are some helpful hints from down here in SW France where we are more experienced with dealing with the heat.
1) Keep your clothes on. If you don't, and you get hot, then rivers of perspiration will run down all the crevasses of your body and will make you feel jolly uncomfortable. OK, so your clothing might feel a tad on the damp side, but it is much better than being in a shower of your own making.

2) When the heat is making you feel cooked and tired, just say to yourself: at least it's not raining and it's not cold.

3) I find that jam making in the caravan kitchen is a great way to cool down. Since the task itself requires heat, then that, plus the environment of the caravan on a hot day, will inflate the air temperatures no end. Once the task is finished, when one goes outside into the heat of the day, by comparison the temperature will feel cooler. After all, one is not standing infront of a gas ring going at full pelt, stirring a large pot of sugar and fruit.
If you do not have a caravan so you can't avail yourself of this cool-down hint, then switch on your gas fire for a few minutes, roast yourself infront of it, get yourself to sweltering-temperature, then off outside into the sunshine. As I say, by comparison, you will feel automatically cooler.

4) The need to have a siesta will come upon you the more the temperatures go up. Do so. Your body is working very hard to keep you cool so it deserves a bit of time out, and would appreciate you getting off your feet so it can have a rest too.
This might be difficult if you are in an office environment however. Shutting the office door and having a five minute kip on the floor is perhaps not the best activity to be engaged in. Others might misconstrue your floor-pose, believing either that you have fainted and then try to rescucitate you, or that you have gone on strike, or that you would like some titillation. So, sorry, I am not sure how you would go about a siesta in these circumstance. Five minutes on the loo perhaps?

5) Drink plenty of water. Your body will moan at you if you don't. The first sign that it is unhappy is when you can't do number two's but feel you want. to This is because your bodily fluid is coming out through your skin and there isn't enough to sort out the plumbing system of your nether regions.

6) Don't mind if your partner doesn't want to do 'spoons' at night. This is when you tuck up with each other, one front against the other's back. It does not mean that they are going off you, just that they are too sweaty and don't want to soak you as well. If you do feel that there is a bit of a gap between you in the bed and you don't like it, you can always slide a foot across the gap, and park it up on your partners body somewhere. That will keep a contact between you. However, if your partner rolls over suddenly, you might find your foot trapped beneath their body, so be watchful with this.

7) I touched on this in a previous blog, but wearing a hat when doing tasks will sop up the moisture which will run down your face and into your eyes as you get hotter, and might cause difficulties at moments when it is important to have full vision. I suppose a headband would suffice if you haven't got a hat, but I like hats because you can play with them when talking to others.

8) Don't moan about the sun, and how hot it is. Go outside and enjoy. Sit under a tree and watch the shadows. Think about the coldest day you remember and feel blessed that it is warm and you don't have to wear thermal vests.

9) Hot weather will encourage the midges to bite. There are plenty of creams on the market to remove the itch, but putting a nice large nugget of spit on the tip of a finger and smearing it onto the bite should help, but if you simply have to itch, then here is how you do it: Put the tip of one finger onto the tip of the bite. Then use your other fingers to scratch round the bite, all the while keeping the original finger in place. This method gives you a hearty good scratch without interfering with the top of the bite which, if you do scratch the actual top, will make the entire bite worse. Scratch the surrounding environment of the bite, not the actual bite itself.

10) Abandon your car. Don't give in to the herd mentality of 'going out for a drive'. All you will do is probably end up in a traffic jam. If you feel the need to have some water to immerse yourself in, get a bowl of water and put bits of you in it. Or use the hose pipe on yourself. Or walk to the local swimming pool, lake, stream, river, or beach. It is better for your lungs and general health if you do partake of a huge intake of petrol or diesel fumes as you wait for the next car to move infront of you.

11) Ban TV. Take every opportunity to get out into the air, after all, in the UK, sun is not always in bountiful supply.

So, I hope these hints help you to also enjoy the warm days. Meanwhile, here at Labartere, no builders today, but Johnathen has been working in the half barn. I have been jam making, blogging, and doing some final editing on Psychic Virgin. Lester has been hard at work on his PC. Three more months before he finishes his present employment, he was told today. The company he is working for is folding, and being gobbled up by its parent company which is also probably going to fold. Not to worry though. He has managed to get over a year's salary from them, which has enabled us to push forward with the renovation work.

Things I have learnt today: That keeping in the saddle can be quite hard work, but it one does feel like one is going to take a tumble, just pick up the phone and have a girly chat with one's daughter or one's friends. This will help one keep astride the pony which is one's life.

Things that happen in the rain

I get wet, that's what happens. The forecasted storms did not happen overnight, probably because we had taken the precaution of disconnecting the Live Box, which is our Internet connection, after the disaster which befell Robin in Prechac whose Live Box became blown up and therefore broken forever when a thunderbolt crashed into his hedge and exploded like the biggest of firework displays resulting in him having to get another Live Box which doesn't work properly because they never do for ages after they are purchased because this is France and the way of it here. So Live Box disconnected, storm never happened, so not much rain. "Could have done with a bit more rain" I said to Lester as I headed on out for Boolie's pee and poo trip.

Now for some reason I went the long way. Down past Sara's, turn left, then eventually left again through the maize and corn fields to come back on ourselves. At the furthest point out, and not conveniently at Sara's so I could pop in for a coffee and keep dry, the heavens decided to open the tap and down came the rain. For a while a handy oak tree gave me shelter, but then the rain paused, so I stopped pausing and me and Bools walked on. No shelter for a few yards. The pause in the rain was a tease. We were both soaked by the time we reached the next shelter, this time an ash tree which did not have the thick canopy of the oak, so it was a waste of time to linger any longer because the drips coming down through the leaves were bigger than the raindrops falling from the sky.

My shirt was soaked. I couldn't get any wetter. So I scurried on. And then I began to feel the rain upon my skin, and you know what! It was exhilerating. Rivulets of water began running under my shirt, but I was sort of doing a jog-walk so wasn't cold. Down the rain came. And as it did I had the most curious sensation of well-being.

Now why was that? Am I losing my mental marbles? I will leave the answer to that question in your hands!

And so home again. Rain now stopped. Guess what! Builders were here. With a digger and a lorry and other vehicles, and all was go, go, go!

For a couple of hours.

Then the rain came down, this time accompanied by the thunder storm which wasn't a very vigorous storm in comparison to others we have survived, but nevertheless we thought it prudent to switch off the PC's and Live Box just so we wouldn't get fried by lightning strikes and thunderbolts. Just in case. Better to be safe than sorry.

A roar of a lorry. We looked askance at each other. Now who was that, we thought. Outside we went. And parked up on our grass was a huge lorry which was not the same lorry as was parked up on the back field yesterday but which belonged to men shoring up Claudine of the Chambre d'Hote's river bank which the Adour keeps eating away at and which she is endeavouring to put a stop to because she doesn't want her donkeys, sheep, ducks and chickens floating off down the river someday soon. No, this was a different lorry.

Lester does a sort of yelp. "It's the poutres".

Crikey they look huge. Huge enough to sink the lorry they are sitting on if the rain keeps on raining. Huge and heavy enough to push it into the ground to make new ruts to join the zillions of other ruts that Lester / Head Gardener has to deal with each time he takes his lawn mower out for an outing and which I have been trying to fill with offerings of soil left over from my digging up of the front garden. Huge, heavy and montrous enough to bog down the lorry as what happened in January to one lorry which gouged such a huge hole as it was revved up to get out of the mud that it sank up to its axles and had to be pulled out by a tractor.

Things I have learnt today: That walking in the rain is a fun thing to do, very enervating for the soul. That it is not necessary to eat all of the just-picked cherries, that Angel Jim brought round this morning from his fruit trees, in one hit as the repercussions to one's digestive system will be stunning to say the least an hour or so after the gorge. That one more series of ruts doesn't really matter, because they will all get filled in eventually. That I ought to try to remember that when HG changes the gas bottle for the caravan cooker that the temperature will be fiercer and so to pay attention to the clock and not to get too involved with writing the blog, although the singed bits on top of the cake can always be scraped off or covered with icing sugar if one had any that is, well I haven't so a scrape it is.

And may I introduce you to the poutres. Nine of them. And they are the beams which go into the house to hold it all together and will give us the structure for the downstairs ceilings, and the upstairs flooring.

And here is a photo left over from yesterday, which is the half barn floor with its spaghetti loops of hose which are hopefully going to have the electrical cables threaded through them when we can afford to have the electrics done.