Deep joy, then, to have the usual trouble- (& virtually traffic-) free journey on the French motorways. [Remind me to explain why I love toll roads sometime!] Having made the bed, and put the food in the fridge, we got to bed at 4.30 (third time lucky getting the hire car to lock without the alarm going off 10 minute later!).
Thankfully, our first appointment wasn't till 3pm, so we stayed in bed till 11.45 (up in time for the Angelus!). A quick trip to the 'Champion' to get food & wine (and champagne, naturellement!) & rapidly consuming some bread & cheese and then we went to the house. [Thank you M. & Mme. Bouzenard for your wonderful gîte; staying in an unfurnished, and indeed unfinished, house is not fun when it's been as low as 6½°C there!]
We were picking up stray walnuts when M. Boyer ("Mr Efficient") arrived. I know that the French and English are very different, but it's often brought home to me how different after an absence... I was expecting a chap to detail (possibly with more minutiae than a mere mortal could stand?) what was OK; what was borderline; what was bad; how it could be fixed/whether it needed ripping out & starting from scratch. Also prepared for a disucssion of costs; timetables; schedules of works...
What I had forgotten was that Adam Smith was right: England is "a nation of shopkeepers"; that's one of the reasons why thousands of hardworking immigrants from the Asian sub-continent have integrated so well, and is probably reflected in our collective eBay usage!
It's true, we think in terms of buying & selling or service providing/usage (buying & selling by any other name!) - it's highly skilled commerce - even when I write a (rare) letter of complaint, I tend to focus on how the company can better serve their customer [and how kind I am in helping them achieve that - can I have a refund? ;-) ].Conversely, the French are a nation of philosophers. I think that was rammed home today when “Mr Efficient” spent the first hour “conceptualising” (I’m sure I’ve got the right word!) outside, before even setting foot in the place. I swung (wildly) between liking his approach, being alienated & totally seeing the sense of what he was saying. Of course your use of a building (we tend to garden/be out of doors & come in to crash/hoover aperitifs; office workers may be away from their homes for a long time & want to spend their evenings looking at the garden) matters much more than whether the builder’s done a good job. I was expecting the mechanics to figure more highly, but hey-ho!; he was so much more Zen than I was expecting.
W.T.S.
Was on wagon; now off. Someone said something like “When you are happy, you don’t need champagne, it’s when you are down that you should drink it” [Wish I could remember who; I could Google it & get the quote right.]
As I said to “Mr Efficient”, half of me is sad the work is done so badly (he gave the building works 4/10, I reckoned 3, and the plumbing/electrics 2/10) & the other half is happy I wasn’t imagining it! At least I’m a good judge of quality…
There are times when a girl (particularly) misses her dad… :-(
Oh, I forgot to describe him: Brown stripy velvet jacket (“looks like carpet”, according to him indoors), red/maroon stripy shirt, brown trousers, brown boots. I liked it (very much, actually), but I know plenty of people (not all of them in the Biblical sense!) in the property business (game?) who might look down on brown (not to mention velvet!). Tant pis!
The good news is:
I was absolutely right (it’s always nice to have that confirmed, isn’t it?!)
The bad news is:I was absolutely right – the work’s substandard & needs re-doing…
Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people who get pleasure out of saying “I told you so!”…
Previously: had an email from “Mr Efficient”, with, amongst other things, a 17-point plan of action!
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