Some bright spark.....

Having had a somewhat dry last trip well no it wasn't too bad, the lack of water meant I had to drink beer instead, which was quite OK. 

Back on the ferry for the second trip out, another trip another issue. 

Into house, windows open - check, gas on,- check. power on..... Power on.... 

Now herein lies another saga, like many other parts of the world EDF have been ditching mechanical meters for electronic ones that can be remotly monitored. This is a good thing if you live somewhere far away. Previously we would have to arrange to be there for a meter reader or submit a photo of the meter that showed the reading plus the serial number. 

As covid bit, the letters from EDF got more and more insistent we let them install a Linky electronic meter. Not an easy thing to do when we were in Wales and the house is in Brittany!! On top of this we had been paying  estimated bills, for electricity we had used while the house was empty and the supply switched off. 

So, with us not enabling them to change the meter, someone at EDF had thrown their rattle out of the pram and turned the supply off. 

This was much simpler than the water, straight to the new mobile phones international streaming and find the helpline number. The call handler was incredibly focussed and quickly identified the issue. Apologised that he could turn the service back on instantly because of course, it was not a Linky. 

So anyway, 24h later these two techie sorts turned up in a van and switched the power back on, ripping out the old clockwork  meter and installing a linky, or so we thought. 

Doing a final reading on the old meter revealed, what a suprise that they owed us a deal of money. I told EDF I was cool with this, it would just mean our account was in credit for about forever. 

This was not of course good enough, they said they had to issue me with a cheque to be paid into the French bank account I no longer had, at that point. 

Then bills started arriving based on more estimated bills, the linky they had installed would not actually talk to their computer system! 

With sense of humour failiure approaching, I said I would send them cheques for all the future bills, drawn on my UK account.... 

Watch this space.....

Lets get things back to normal......

A regular feature of our previous life has been regular trips to our little house in Brittany. Our new household additions, the grand children have taken to this with great enthusiasm, in fact I think they would quite happily just travel back and for on the ferry for a week never mind 8 hours. There was of course the one crossing where it all cut up rough, a day crossing too. As the Armorique ploughed it's way through a substantial swell many people turned green, not so the little monsters, no, they thought the strange motion the best thing ever. 

Of course getting there is only half the game, a property you have not used for a couple of years is likely to be a bit neglected. Sure enough we arrived at this huge patch of growth which was where our house used to be. Crawling through the brush I found the front door. The locks were properly siwzed, what I needed was  a can of WD40, just like the one I had left home..... So it was off to Intermarche to get some stocks. Back to the house and a bit of persuasion, we were inside the house. Turn on the lights - all was well. Turn on the taps - nothing. 

Need to  fidn out what was going on there, for now it was time to break out the big stimmer and cord, lots of strimmer cord. Saying the place was overgrowns was a massive understatement. A whole day and all the cord we had did about 2/3 of the garden. A restocking trip to Intermarche, they didn't have the size of cord our strimmer usually takes, they did however have some serious mega heavy duty stuff, with upgraded cord it took about 20 minutes, this was not so much mowing as a massacre!! 

This just left the minor matter of water, I was on this while management did much of the strimology. I went up the Marie who gave me a phone number for the water company, which was wrong. The centre technique in the village gave me another number, another wrong number. Time to get serious, off to Intermarche and as the fount of all knowledge, the receptionist who has worked there for ever. She scrawled down a number, within minutes I had made the phone call, spoken to a very helpful person, got in the van and was on my way to the office to sort it out. 

Turns out, during covid the water company had changed, the new firm had no contact details for us and concluded the house was abandoned. The mains had been switched off, fill out all the contact and contract forms, 12 hours later the taps ran. We were in business, also in the shower for some time after all that strimming.  

So this was us post covid back into our little house in Brittany. We were happy (ish) the boys were loving it, home and time to plan our next disaster errrr holiday I mean. 

 

Back on the write side of history

This is my chance to start anew, to renew my aquaintence with blogger after a huge pause. 

Said pause being due to the contested arrival in our household of two of our granchildren, now aged 5. 

Lots has happened in the meantime, first of all there was the famous Brexshit cock up. 

I must say, way back, when  the selfservaites announces their next PM would be Scamerloon known as  Dai Cameron to his friends, I thought to myself. This was it, the selfservatives could not find any one who would make a worse prime minister. 

Someone in the tory party must have been listening and accepted the challenge, some how all the later prime ministers have suceeded in being worse than the last one. Teresa May who accidentally lost all the records on the investigation into child sex offences by parliamentarians. Borris who was: wrong man, wring place, wrong time diring the pandemic, a stunning combination of incompetence and sleaze. Liz Truss, well where would you start with that one. Now of course it's Sunak who has been great so far, a fantastic advocate for his wifes tax affairs, aka as Dr Death by the governments scientific advisors during covid. 

Where on earth will we go next. 

Life here though has not been short of the odd excitement, and I await the next with bated breath.