I hate Facebook and Youtube and the whole bloody internet!! It's the Golden Memories thing you see. In between Back Then and now there was a period when there were only our memories, imperfect and bathed in a golden glow. Song lyrics were imperfectly rendered over AM radio or distorted by blisteringly loud  sound systems. Festivals, rock concerts, sweaty nights in back rooms at pubs were filtered via our... (to be continued)

A day of contrasts.

12th April - Went poking about in various Chateaux in the hope of picking up some building tips. Saw splendid example of circe 1970 IOW Festival toilet outside Thuir Hotel de Ville. Did a wee.

11th April - Hodie nos viator ut Bezier condeco nonnullus hospes quisnam erant subsisto pro nonnullus dies. coegi tergum eram valde voluptarius per sol solis.

10th April - Waylaid by two bottles of rose at lunch.

9th April - Gave up on the sewer for the time being. We are to get a holiday away from our hovel to house-sit for a neighbour. we will have to become house-trained again as they have nice things (non-dirt floors etc), proper comfy chairs (with legs!), knives and forks, more than one plate, door handles etc.

28 degrees today so of course I've been working on the sewer. Concreting yesterday, sewer today. The very impressive excavations produced a pile of rocks, some so big I had to tow them out with the Old Land Rover. These will now be the beginning of a new back wall for the garden. Tried out making and using lime wash and lime render. Great fun!

We'd returned to England during the period between the compromis and the acte final. While there we bought a trailer and spent a day filling it and the land rover with useless bits and pieces. The return trip at the end of July ended in an overnight dash from somewhere north of Caussade, via Gaillac, Puylaurens, Revel, Carcassonne and on and on till morning. We had to meet the soon-to-be-former owner with the key by noon. Amazingly we made it. We found three bottles of wine as a house-warming gift. All three and two more disappeared over the course of the afternoon/evening. It was at least thirty in the shade so we sweated it all out. Over the next few days we rattled around the place. The house part was not completely separate from the enormous barn and in fact the very well constructed toilet and shower room were in the barn itself. At night getting up to use the toilet was a Hammer Horror experience, as bats were sitting tenants and the whole place creaked as it cooled down from the days heat. We finally bought something useful - a ladder - and had a look up on the first floor. It was only accessible through a hole where the floor had collapsed. The hay and straw for the horses had been stored up there and since they'd been replaced by tractors decades ago there was no need for stairs. However there was still about a tonne of the stuff up there, plus a mummified cat. How we got all that down and out, in the summer heat, is one of those stories where you had to be there to understand the true awfulness. Since then all the floorboards have gone as well - they kept us warm through the winter blazing in the Catalan fireplace.

Summer 2010. We found our barn when we were no longer looking for a home. Over the course of the past year we had seen the insides of forty seven properties between the Black Mountains and the Pyrenees, from the Corbieres to as far west as Saint-Girons. Finally we decided to give it a rest and go to Barcelona for a long weekend to think about what to do next. We called on some friends to tell them we were going away and in passing they asked if we'd looked at a particular website. We hadn't, so we did and there it was, fresh on the site that day. The kind of property we knew we wanted was a maison vigneron or something similar. We'd been inside one in Fabrezan and were stunned by the amount of space. This one was even bigger. It had been a stables for the horses used in the vineyards and had a one up, one down at the very back. Unlike the previous Maison Vigneron, which had a solid, level concrete floor, this had an uneven, well trodden earth floor. The first floor was supported on beams as thick as tree trunks, the floorboards were worm-eaten and decaying. The accommodation at the back was basic but solid. Best of all the roof was sound. So we bought it.