The chickens have escaped!

Our toilet is out of action at the moment, as our septic tank (fosse septique) is blocked. This isn’t the first time, either - it got blocked in the summer and I had to dig halfway to Australia to find the opening so we could have a poke around to see what was happening. It seems that either our tank has been poorly installed or it simply isn’t big enough for a family of four.

So, it appears we have a bit of a problem; and one might assume that I’ll be outside turning the front lawn into a mud bath later on today (the tank is conveniently sited just in front of our B&B!). BUT!.. I would like to take this opportunity to install a compost toilet - we have already used one in the past and know it works, we have installed one in the B&B AND I’ve calculated that a compost loo would save around 30,000 litres of water a year, whilst creating fabulous compost for our future coppice and woodland. It seems the perfect solution to me, easy to make and easy to run…

The only problem is Ian. Ian likes a normal loo - compost toilets are all very well occasionally but he just can’t quite bring himself to have one permanently installed in his home (and there’s no space to have both, allowing people to chose)! To me it seems obvious to put one in, but I have mentioned it in the past and always get an unfavourable response!

So, where do you come in? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think -

• Compost loo or ‘normal’ toilet ?

• Bountiful compost or 30,000 litres of drinking water flushed down the toilet every year (apparently flushing the loo accounts for around 40% of domestic water consumption)?

If you’re planning on spending large sums of money on dubious therapies, don’t. I really mean it. Forget what it says in those celeb magazines, (“I spent two days in a hole in the ground, and now I feel great”), and listen to me. If you feel frustrated, angry, depressed, lethargic, overweight or underpaid, I have the therapy you need. It’s called “knocking down walls”, and I am its guru. It’s a money-back, guaranteed way to feel better about the world.

I’ve been smashing down this ridiculous ‘dry lining’ wall in the bathroom that some idiot had previously told himself was a good idea. Here’s a pic of my stunning luxury bathroom (you want one too, don’t you!). Picking up a large hammer and bashing down these things the French laughingly call “briques” is the most satisfying thing I’ve done since… the last time I bashed a wall down.

So, go on, bash down a wall! And if you don’t have any walls, go and bash a friend’s wall down. If you have no friends, join a volunteer organisation like Wwoof and they’ll give you a whole list of people who need walls bashing down.

With all the money you’ve saved on not getting pointless, happy-clappy therapies, you’ll be able to pay a man to come round and rebuild your walls!

We never learn! Ian went into the bathroom to “tidy up the walls ready for painting” and came out 5 hours later covered in dust and cuts having taken down half a tonne of rubble!

Having renovated our last house over a 3 year period and almost died in the process, we promised ourselves that we wouldn’t fall into the same trap here – no bashing down walls, no grand designs, no more insanity! But after a year and a half of living here, noticing the little things that aren’t quite right, spotting where some idiot has bodged something in a way you never would… ideas start creeping in about ‘just doing this wall here’, ‘maybe replace some tiles there’. It’s a terrible sickness caught by all people who buy crumbly old houses in rural France!

So, back to the poor husband… Whilst chipping off some of the cement that some idiot had previously slopped on the wall (you NEVER use cement on a limestone wall, it’s complete overkill) Ian accidentally knocked out a stone and realised that there was in fact a void inside the wall. He knocked out another stone and called me in to have a look. I immediately realised that we were looking at the working end of an old bread oven (the fireplace is on the other side of the wall) that had been blocked up sometime in the past. So poor Ian had to spend hours patiently knocking out the rest of the stones!

Now we have a bathroom that needs a whole lot more work than it did previously; every time someone picks up a tool to try and ‘fix’ something, we just end up making weeks’ and weeks’ more work for ourselves! I’ve now rendered the wall and re-pointed the bricks in the oven and given them their first coat of limewash. Ian will be putting in a wooden shelf at the bottom and the whole wall will painted with limewash… eventually!!

Looked out the window this morning and thought I saw the cat lying dead on the lawn. What a shock! When I walked over I realised it was actually a dead rabbit, clearly another one fallen prey to myxomatosis.

I am now in the uncomfortable position of feeling really sorry for the suffering these animals must go through as they succumb to the disease, whilst knowing that this will drastically cut the population and save me a great deal of the bunny-stress I suffered from this year - I may even manage to get some vegetables growing!!