I don't know if you can conceive of the joy of arriving late in the evening at ones holiday home and not having to hack ones way through the jungle in order to get to the outside lavvy. Carrying a bucket of water. In the dark. Perhaps it's something you have to have done yourself. We arrived late in the evening, to find that we had indoor plumbing. (The outdoor facility had been fixed as well, for anyone who felt moved to use it, and now had a proper English syphonic tank.) We gazed in wonder at the porcelain throne, and then looked a little further to the large cylinder which in due course would hold hot water, so we could bath or shower without having to boil kettles. So it was connected via a trailing flex to the socket in the bathroom - who cared? The whole experience of going on holiday had changed. No longer would we be content with just being there, away from our ordinary every-day existence, enjoying the simple life. Actually our ordinary every-day life had come a lot closer to our French experience since we'd first bought the place. We had both achieved early retirement, so doing as we pleased had become the norm. We had also moved from our modern house in a large village in Wiltshire to a stone cottage in Wales which bore distinct resemblances to our stone cottage in France. Including the impossibility of getting a mobile phone signal. But that's a story for another time. The work was nowhere near finished, of course, and the next thing, we decided, was the tiling round the bath. We got directions for two places in Caen where tiles were to be had, and set off. "You can't miss it," we were told. We missed it. We stopped at the back door of a warehouse on the zone d'entreprise and asked for directions. They tried to explain how to get to the first place, but after driving around in circles we gave up on that one. We headed to the second, which indeed you couldn't miss, as you can see it from the peripherique or ring road. And it wasn't one of those places that you can see, but in a Kafka-esque world can never reach. We found it, and went round the tile section. I don't know, whenever I'm looking for a particular thing,. it always seems to have just gone out of fashion. I wanted a nice light aquamarine sort of colour. There was white. There was bright red. There were mirror tiles,. and ones that looked like beach pebbles, and boring beige ones. Finally we settled on one which wasn't quite what we wanted, but by then our feet were hurting and we'd very nearly come to blows. As is apparently common in French DIY stores, there were hardly any in stock. Could we order them? Naturally. We gave all the details, paid up. When will they be in? In a fortnight. We shall be back in Wales by then, but we can probably get Brian the Builder to pick them up. Look, the invoice actually says a week, so maybe we'll be lucky. So a week later we take the forty-five-minute drive to Caen to see if the tiles have arrived. Except that we get almost to the junction and find the back of an enormous traffic jam. Articulated lorries have parked up on the hard shoulder. I fancy the drivers are off playing boules in the field alongside, or enjoying a prolonged lunch break in the restaurant the other side of the dual carriageway. The other side of the dual carriageway that is surprisingly quiet and traffic-free. We inch our way through the slalom of parked lorries to the junction with the peripherique and find, not the major pile-up we had feared, but a pile of, well, manure basically. And old tyres It seems that the French farmers have chosen that day to demonstrate against low farm prices. "Angry Peasants!" proclaim the placards on the tractors that are blocking the peripherique and the roundabout. They are blocking the exit from the roundabout back to where we have come from, as well, so we can't even turn around and go home. We must plough on, through the centre of Caen, a place we avoid usually by going round the ring-road. All I can say is thank goodness that when I bought the satnav I made sure it had European maps included. We join the back of another traffic jam of cars avoiding the peripherique. We go past some more roundabouts blocked by tractors and old tyres (but luckily no more manure) and ignoring instructions to "turn around where possible" we inch through the centre of Caen and eventually approach the DIY store from behind. The tiles, of course, have not arrived.
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So, where were we? Oh yes, camping out once again in our house in France. Half a roof by then, no plumbing, no heating, one tap, and a toilet you had to flush with buckets of water. Well, it wasn't too bad really, and the weather was reasonable. When I say no heating, we did have an assortment of portable heating devices, ranging from an old oil-filled electric radiator with a cloth-covered flex to a gas heater which used expensive cubes of gas at the rate of one every other day if you ran it full blast. Electric kettle for hot water, and there was even gas in the bottle out the back for the cooker, after all that time. There was also a small leak in the incoming water pipe. On the other side of the water meter, which made it their problem, not ours. We wrote a message on the "we called to read your meter" card, and you have never seen a French official body move so quickly. They, in the shape of a small Gauloise-smoking Frenchman, were on our doorstep the morning after the first day they could possibly have received our card. The old stopcock was out and replaced before you could say "Zut alors!" The real purpose of our visit though (apart from the bread, cheese, and wine) was to look at plumbing supplies. We toured the DIY store with John the plumber, looking at toilets, baths, and basins. No, we did not need a fancy bath or basin, though we did want a vanity unit with a cupboard underneath to put the spare toilet rolls. We were happy to have a shower over the bath. Would the pressure be adequate for a shower? No problem, and luckily no need to put a header tank in the little bedroom upstairs. The immersion heater in its tank could go in the glory hole - you remember the glory hole? Rough floor, even rougher walls, pine lambris ceiling? All gone now, and what were we going to do about that? Brian the bulder was consulted: it would take a lot of plaster, but everything could be levelled up. Tiles for the floor? Of course. There was a small possibility that the bath might have to be put on a platform, to give enough of a slope to the drain. I rather fancied a bath on a dais, I must say, but it turned out that we didn't need it. So no throne for me. Brian got some samples of tiles, which were just what we wanted, and said he'd sort them out. We went home feeling almost cheerful. The project was moving forward, and we were really looking forward to having indoor facilities after fifteen years. Then Brian phoned. There were no tiles to be had - what he'd thought were more of the same were another design completely, put at random on the shelves where our tiles should have been. We bought some in England and took them over on the next trip. Have you ever thought about the weight of enough tiles to do the floor of a bathroom and toilet, even one of such an odd shape? We hadn't, either. The back end of the car was almost dragging on the ground when we boarded the ferry for the next trip. We were stopped, yet again, by Security before we could get on the ferry, and asked to open up, please, and had we packed the car ourselves? And could we open the bonnet please? It turned out we couldn't open the bonnet; the catch had broken some time since we'd last had it up. You may have realised already that the old man is not one to be fiddling about under the bonnet of our car. Much embarrassment all round, as my husband jiggled and pulled. In the end the nice lady let us off, or got fed up, or something. I suppose we looked honest enough. I have to say that the port authorites and Customs have always been very nice to us, in their own way. I particularly remember the time when my husband inadvertently tried to travel on my daughter's passport. There is of course a certain resemblance, but unfortunately the moustache rather gives him away. (That's his moustache, of course.) Did he have a photo driving licence which would serve to identify him? We had lived at our then address for so long and had never had occasion to renew his licence, so no. In the end he travelled on his official identity card, which he was not supposed to take out of the country but always forgot to remove from his wallet. Don't tell anybody. That of course was many years ago now, and no doubt things are a lot stricter these days. As evidenced by the port security inspecting our car's contents nearly every time we travel, even though we look so innocent and law-abiding. And finding that the reason the car was dragging its backside was a few packages of floor tiles, and not any of the prohibited items it might have been. Have a nice day, they said. Off you go. Off we went. So, it's over for another year, or at least until Camp NaNo. I made the fifty thousand words and a bit, and now I have yet another unedited manuscript. "So, what's it all about?" Well, the novel is a sequel to the one I wrote in 2013, which was provisionally titled "Village Without Men". This one is to be called "The Treachery of Friends". "Yes, but what's it about?" It's about a man and a woman who fall in love, and the problems they face before they get their Happy Ever After. "Boring!" It's also about smugglers, spies, revolutionaries, and how to feed a village full of women, children and old men in the Year Without A Summer. "Never heard of it." In 1815 the volcano of Tambura exploded and sent a cloud of debris up into the atmosphere. It caused the weather to change over the whole globe. Crops failed, people starved, there were riots, governments feared revolution. Nobody knew then what had caused it, which made it worse. "A bit like that Icelandic volcano, then." Yes, but much worse. And then there's the thing about the hero and what he did ... no, I'm not going to tell you about that. "Spoilsport. When can I read it?" Ah, now, there are some other manuscripts in the queue first. But soon, I hope. At least I've found a picture to use as a cover. That's a step forward, isn't it? I seem to have been going through a bad patch recently with electrical and electronic appliances. This is not a particularly new thing. I used to be known to the IT Support people at work as the Kiss of Death.
I'm not taking the blame for the two reconditioned dishwashers that have ceased working recently. I mean, how long do you expect reconditioned things to last? And to be honest, this second one just refuses to pump the water out at the end of the cycle, and while the wet-and-dry vacuum cleaner still functions, we can get by. And I don't go near that. The first one, well that could have been the visiting mouse chewing through a cable, which I understand they are in the habit of doing. And the washing machine that only lasted a year or so, and the central heating boiler that has been in only five years when they should be good for about twenty, well I suspect that neither was a very good design. At least that was the gist of what the boiler man said when he came to repair the boiler for the third time in a month, although he used completely different words to describe it. The laptop too, when I looked up its original purchase, was four years old, which I understand is about average, so it wasn't really surprising that it was getting a bit senile. Then the steamer wasn't cooking things in the time it should have been. That's lasted three years, but I never liked it. Not to worry, we do have a spare, thanks to the old man's love of auctions, and specifically those job lots of small items in boxes where you can't actually see what's at the bottom. To tell the truth I'm not sure exactly what he's got up in the attic these days, although it's pretty safe to say that it doesn't include a dishwasher or washing machine. The next thing to go was my iPod. Now I use it for a very specific purpose, which is to keep me sane while I am at the gym putting in miles on the treadmill or rowing machine. It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I am not a great lover of exercise. I go because I have to if I intend to get as much benefit as possible from my final salary pension scheme. My attention span whilst working out is limited already to ten minutes at a time on each piece of apparatus, or roughly four Songs Of The Sixties on my iPod, before I have to change round. So I can't say that the iPod has had a huge amount of use over the seven years I've owned it. It was a bit of a surprise, to be honest, when my computer accused it of being corrupted. I suspected the man in the dirty mac who's been hanging round - no, wait, that's my husband. Now this morning the trip switch went in the middle of consulting the mighty Facebook, and we tracked the fault down eventually to the coffee maker. Another essential piece of equipment for a writer, especially since I can't drink the instant stuff. But see above - he had a spare. Sanity is preserved, and I did notice, eventually, that he'd forgotten to turn the fridge and freezer back on after he'd tried all the electrical items in the kitchen to see which one was causing the problem. But this afternoon my replacement iPod arrived, all packed up in a nice shiny box, with a set of strange shaped ear buds. It was even charged up. I put some music on it. Goodness, it does hold a lot more than the old one. Plugged in aforementioned strange ear buds. Nothing, in spite of the display counting down the time the song lasted. Tried them plugged into the computer. Music. Tried the computer speakers in the iPod. Nothing. Tried resetting the iPod (you know, if in doubt turn it off and then on again). Nothing. I haven't even got to use the thing and it's broken already. This time I refuse to take responsibility. Well, not exactly no inspiration. But it's just gone in a different direction for the moment. And hello to all of you who have been dropping in recently, and sorry there's been nothing new on here. But ... November. In case you hadn't realised, and why should you, November is NaNoWriMo. Which stands for National Novel Writing Month. The aim of which, obviously, is to write a novel in a month. At least, to write the first draft of a novel in a month. Fifty thousand words' worth of it, though people do crazy things and write a hundred thousand, or do their fifty thousand in one day, or do nothing for three weeks then pile all the words in during the last week. Or day. Me, I like to start strong and build up a head for those days when you feel too ill, or your daughter calls you in for an emergency, or you have to go shopping because there's no food in the house. Which usually means I finish around the twentieth of the month, give or take. So I'm over forty eight thousand words now, and the end is nigh. Just thought you'd like to know. This week I have been beset with happenings that have brought out my inner Grumpy Old Woman.
My laptop, I have to admit, is at least four years old, which I'm told is pretty old as laptops go. So it's really no surprise that it's starting to drool down its cardigan and tell everybody that things aren't what they used to be. And I do have a spare, being a belt and braces sort: a notebook small enough to carry round without stretching my arms down to my knees. Admittedly it did run on Windows 8, but never mind, I get the free upgrade to Windows 10. No problem. It has deleted half of my files during the upgrade,, but I'm sure I can reconstruct them. And we've just changed our bank. Bank X was always very fair with us, we had no complaints, but Bank Y made us an offer we couldn't refuse. No hard feelings. What could possibly go wrong? The first thing was that the transfer was due to go ahead on the same day that we were due to pay our credit card bill. Quite a large one, in fact, as it included the new kitchen units we had bought for our French house. (I'll get back to the convoluted story of the French house next time.) I did try to change the date online; living in the GWBA* you thank heaven on bended knees every day for the internet. Sadly, my name had to be taken off the joint account for technical reasons, so I no longer had access to it on line. Not to worry, we could go into the bank the next working day and sort it out. Except that the account had gone into changeover purdah by then. Nothing could be altered, but if we went in on the day of the changeover they could confirm that the payment had actually been made. Problem sorted, and indeed when we checked up, everything was fine. So we came back home, and a day or so later I thought I would go online and check out our balances on line. We were already registered with Bank Y for internet banking, there should be no problem. Except that by this time I am using backup laptop, all set up in my library/office with external keyboard, speakers and a tangle of peripheral USB devices. And Bank Y doesn't recognise backup laptop and decides I am an evil hacker trying to get access to our accounts. I must tell them my mother's cat's maiden name, do I recognise this picture, and enter random letters and numbers from security numbers and passwords. I get right through to the last part, and Bank Y's computer doesn't recognise the numbers I enter. I try again. The numbers are incorrect. If I try too many times my accounts will be frozen in deepest Antarctica, never to be accessed again. I am too scared to try again. Oh well, I didn't really need to look at our bank balance. I'm sure everything is just fine. I go off to my daughter's, to wait for a grocery delivery between the hours of twelve and one. It doesn't come. On phoning the store, I am told that, in spite of delivering to daughter every week for the last year, the man couldn't find the house. He has been phoning the number on our account. We are not answering. Because we are at my daughter's waiting for a non-arriving grocery delivery. Did he not try the other numbers? In spite of the shop refusing to accept my order unless I gave them two other alternative numbers, they do not have any alternative numbers. Would the hours of four to five be acceptable. Well, it will have to be, won't it? The groceries finally arrive. All has been worked out. They give me a bunch of flowers as apology. But that very evening Rod the Electrician phones from France. Everything is coming along swimmingly, well apart from the fact that they gave him the wrong size cupboard door, they have no more cupboard doors the right size, he's taken a set of drawers instead, but the top drawer won't work because it clashes with the sink ... But not to worry, everything is fine, and could he have some money sent directly to his French bank account because he's meeting his bank manager on Tuesday. Today is Thursday. I go to the computer - yes I even have internet banking with French Bank. "Click here to set up new recipient". I click. "We have to have your mobile phone number before we will do anything whatsoever". I search for my mobile phone because that is the one number I can never remember. Back at the computer: "Enter mobile phone number in the box". Except that there isn't a box. I click everywhere on the page without finding any spot to enter the number. I give up with French Bank. Now I could use our new main bank account with Bank Y, in fact that is what I would prefer to do. Except that Bank Y doesn't believe I am who I say I am, remember? So I go back to Bank X. We still have a couple of accounts with them, and by combining the balances I can just about make the amount Rod the Electrician needs. The money will not go until the next working day, of course, but providing I've got all the numbers names and etceteras right, and the pigeon carrying the message isn't blown off course over the weekend, the money may just about get there in time. I hope. I was going to post this blog on my Blogger website. But when I tried to log in, Blogger decided I was not who I said I was, because I wasn't on the computer it was used to. Here we go again. * Great Welsh Bugger All The more observant of you may have noticed something missing in the picture I posted with last week's blog. Like, a roof. We had a long conversation with Brian the Builder and his mate John the Plumber about what needed to be done with our French house. In brief, everything. Drains, heating, water, inside lavvy, bath and shower, kitchen, outside lavvy (because it's always good to have a spare, and we were tired of hauling buckets of water out with us). And the ceiling upstairs was showing some interesting water stains. Not to worry, said Brian, he would take a look and see if he could patch it up enough to last through the winter. Which he did. Leaving the two of them to it, we went back home to Wales for the winter, in the knowledge that things were moving on. M le Maire was happy that we would be connected to the main drains at long last; he had been writing to us for a while urging us to get it sorted out, to which we had to reply that as we had not been to the house for five years, we had put nothing at all down the drains for some time, but we would sort it out when we could. So, sorted. Then in January we got an email from our next door neighbour (the English one) with a picture of our house. With no roof. Brian the Builder had thought that, as the weather had been quite nice for a bit and the forecast was good, he would make a start on it. So he had removed the entire roof down to the trusses. The weather changed. The roof had luckily had the waterproof lining thing put on it by then (I'm not very technical when it comes to roofing) so at least the rain did not come pouring through. But for a while we were the only house in the village with a bright blue roof. Other things were being removed as well. All the old heating system, the shower and basin, the water supply itself. We went over at Easter and were happy to find that John the Plumber had at least made a temporary connection for the tap in the kitchen sink, which was now our only source of water. We stood in a plastic bowl and poured water over ourselves. It was like camping in our own house. And the electrics. John the Plumber had once upon a time done electrics as well, but he had become fed up with the French bureaucracy, which had gone from complete laisser-faire ("You have bare wires sticking out of the wall? That's OK!") to pernickety in the extreme. He would not be able to do our rewiring, the one job that we had put at the top of our list. Remember you mustn't touch that switch! But he knew someone else who did electricity. Unfortunately the someone else could not start on our house until next September. Still, at least the drains had been done. In my experience French properties come in two basic types: those with no land, and those with too much land. Ours is the second. We had, on roughly three quarters of an acre:
Obviously this creates a problem for people who are only intermittent residents. As I said in a previous blog, one tends to arrive late at night off the ferry to find the path to the lavvy overgrown with ankle-biting brambles and perennial sweet peas (pretty colour, no scent). Any thoughts of planting vegetables or fruit trees were killed when we realised we were very unlikely to be in the country when the harvest was ready. Our next door neighbour, the French one, did however have a horse, and a goat, so when he asked for permission to pasture the animals on the field, we accepted without hesitation. So the field is generally not too bad, and we get to see peaceful grazing animals from time to time. The neighbour is also unnecessarily grateful, and keeps embarrassing us with his effusions. (We are, after all, British.) Remains the last bit of ground with garage. We did flirt with keeping the car there. Unorthodox perhaps. But the road is very narrow, and it takes someone with exceptional parking skills to get a car into the garage with less than fifteen minutes' backing and forwarding. You are then left with the walk back to the house. With the shopping. We prefer to park outside the front door. Then on our recent reappearance in France, we were told by M le Maire that complaints had been made about the overgrown brambly state of the end plot. We must do something about it! The following day our English neighbour arrived at the door towing a youngish French person. This is Gregory, who lives in the house opposite our garage. He would like to buy your end bit of garden to make a football pitch for his sons to play on, being as his house, though large and comfortable, lacks sufficient garden space. I accepted with alacrity. My husband was less eager, until he went up the road and actually looked at the state of the land and realized he would be the one who would have to clear it. We agreed to make the sale and exchanged email addresses. Back at home, I searched through the documents I had filed away all those years previously. I found, miraculously, the statement of local taxes for the property. I found the purchase contract for the house and land, but no deeds. I wrote to the notaire who had dealt with the sale. No reply, even with the prospect of charging us for drawing up documents. We cancelled our trip back for consultation with Gregory's notaire. (In France it is legal, and cheaper, for both parties to use the same notaire, as he is held to be impartial in the affair.) I read through the documents again, and on page seven I eventually spotted a paragraph which, translated, amounted to "We haven't got any deeds. If you want deeds, you will have to have them drawn up yourself," said no doubt with a Gallic shrug. So we gave a Gallic shrug ourselves, arranged to meet with the notaire, and set the sale in motion. Not having deeds didn't seem to make a lot of difference. We proved we were who we said we were. Several times over. Hands were shaken all around. The brambles are now somebody else's problem, which is a bit of a bargain, even though I suspect we let the land go at a knockdown price. The neighbours are happy. The husband is happy. Next door is happy because we haven't sold the field. I dare say the horse and goat are happy too. So there we were, back in France after five years' absence, with a bit of money saved up. Less than twenty four hours after our arrival there came a knock at our door. It was M le Maire, and his wife who spoke some English. In fact I speak French, having studied it to degree level, but the English by and large are not known for their linguistic prowess, and he had made provision. Good morning, welcome to our lovely commune. You must connect up your house to our new main drainage system, and there have been complaints about the brambles in the end portion of your land, so could you please arrange for them to be cleared. He was quite pleasant about it, and offered to let us have information on people who could carry out the work, and take a look at their quotations to make sure they weren't overcharging us. Please come to see him at the mairie as soon as we had more information. Now when we had purchased the house it was alleged by the estate agent to be tout a l'egout or mains drainage. Our English neighbours however were of the opinion that there was a septic tank out in the garden which had to be emptied out periodically. In fact both were true. What we worked out was this: at some time in the past the Council had come around and installed storm drains which emptied into the river downhill from us. Local residents took advantage of this occasion by slipping the workmen a few hundred francs to join their houses up to the storm drain. Our house itself was thus joined to the drains. However the little sentry box in the garden was still served by a septic tank. As it turned out though the septic tank leaked, so the contents were recycled into the garden. The lilac jungle (it's too big to be called a bush) enjoyed that greatly, and there was no requirement for emptying. But now the Council had a sparkling new system, whereby all the household water was taken by the main drain, pumped uphill and passed through a reed bed which purified it to drinking water standard (our daughter and son-in-law have a reed bed system, and this is no exaggeration). Perhaps the commune gets some sort of reward or kudos for having all their houses on this system; in any case, the mayor was very keen on having the last hang-outs brought into line. We consulted our English neighbours. Yes, they had been connected. If we liked they could get in touch with their friend who had done their installation and get him to come out and talk to us. We liked. Yes, their friend said, he could do our work, no problem. He also did general building and decorating. Did he do plumbing and electrical work? No, but he knew a man who did. How about the roof? Yes, he could take a look. The roof had a couple of minor leaks - we could see from the ceiling where it was stained. He looked at it, and said that he could do a bit of emergency work to make it weatherproof for the winter, but it needed reroofing. Did we want slates to match the front of the roof or tiles to match the back of the house? Slates are nice, but tiles are cheaper. So we took his quote up to M le maire, who approved it. Slates or tiles? Well, they preferred slate, but would not object if we had tile. Let the work commence. Fast forward fifteen years. Life happens. Births, deaths, marriages. Job changes. Retirement. We bought a house in Wales, and that needed renovation. The house in France got left out all this time. Plans to retire over there changed. Grandchildren arrived, we were needed. Finally we had a bit of money saved up and could do something about the house. We hadn't been to the house for quite a while, but it was all right, I'd checked on Google Earth and it was still standing. Actually when we got there finally, it wasn't too bad. It had in the French fashion shutters on the doors and windows, and we'd left them closed up. There was a bit of dust, and some of the packets of food in the cupboard were a bit the worse for wear - we had expected to be coming back in a month or two's time. Our cans of baked beans exploded when we opened them, but other than that we were fine. The thing was that even before we'd left the place, it had been a bit basic. We'd never managed to get the central heating going. In fact the boiler was so old the instructions were in Egyptian heiroglyphics. The little gas water heater gave out after the first couple of years, so we had to boild kettlefuls of water, pour them into a bowl and use a jug to pour warm water over ourselves in the shower. But the final straw was the outside toilet, or karsi in familiar parlance. The karsi was actually a normal-looking affair at first glance: however instead of a water tank, it had some strange sort of cylinder affair, which seemed to work on the mains water pressure. The water in that part of Normandy is actually fairly soft, but over the years a certain amount of limescale does build up, and it did so in the pipe taking water out to the karsi. The pressure dropped, and the flush stopped working. We were reduced to carrying buckets of water out with us. We built up muscles.Of course, after a long time of no visits, the first problem when arriving was not actually carrying out the buckets of water, it was getting through the jungle of brambles and perennial sweet peas to the sentry box in the first place. We habitually arrive late in the evening, in the dark. On the first recent return we had difficulty even getting the back door open for the ivy that had grown over it; then we had to get through the gauntlet of vegetation. It grabs you round the ankles, trips you up, but after a drive down from the ferry you have no choice. Anyway, you get used to the middle-of-the-night stagger out through the undergrowth, in the rain, half asleep. You don't actually like it, but you do get used to it. Then the shower started to leak from under the porcelain shower tray. And the light switch for the shower room? Well, my husband used to keep a rubber glove nearby for when he needed to switch the light on. Apparently there used to be a factory just up the road. When it was demolished there was a certain amount of recycling of odds and ends. At one time nearly every house in the village had one of those switches fitted somewhere in it. And every one was live. |
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Doreen lives in the empty bit in the middle of Wales, where since her retirement she has taken up writing. She says it's better than working any day. Archives
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