Being eco-friendly

Glyn helped me take the large furniture out of the other house this morning, so that Josh could soak up his last few rays before we took him to the airport at lunchtime. In the meantime, Pierre the Poolman arrived to instal an automatic refill system for the pool. I'm quite good at remembering to turn the water off when I top up the pool but from time to time I forget, and it floods. In our ecologically sensitive times this is a huge waste of a precious resource, never mind the fact that it hurts my pocket to watch the water drain away. So with a mixture of caring for the environment but, more importantly, caring for my pocket, Pierre is installing an automatic top-up system. Alex Hampshire, eco-warrior.

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Out for dinner tonight to Chris and Delphine. Chris is confident that he has finally sold his house (fingers crossed for him) so it's celebration time. Except that we didn't read the email properly and had eaten before we arrived. Bum. Anyway, I managed to stuff a bit more food into my face (it's a good job that Jan doesn't feed me properly) and a pleasant evening was had by all, especially when Chris opened his Laphroaig.
On the subject of selling houses, I've been surprised at the length of time that it takes to complete this task in France. This could of course be a symptom of where we live (in the sticks), or the properties that we were selling, but it has taken both of us over two years to sell houses. I can rationalise the reasons but it still takes a bit of getting used to when we are accustomed to a much faster process in the UK.