Baby Chou

The crane erector arrived first thing and spent most of the day oiling pulleys and cables and fixing the wiring. A repair had been carried out by the previous owner which resulted in a fault in the overload cut-out system so that instead of being able to bring the load back in, it went further out - which could have resulted in the crane toppling over! It's now up - and it's very high (17m to be precise). BB has come up with an idea for recouping the huge cost of having it transported here, towed down by M. Bouger and then erected - "le bungee" - offering bungee jumping!  Mmmm. I wonder if our house insurance covers that?

The MOT man arrives on 3 September and then, all being well, work will commence.

Mini-B arrived at 7 o'clock this morning in his van and started to unload two goats - a mother and her kid, he told me. I rushed out in my nightie and wellies and was leading the goats across the road to the garden when a truck-load of workmen passed, hooting and gesticulating wildly. I thought they were friends of Mini-B's until he informed me that the back of my nightie was tucked into my pants! I tied the goats up near the rose bushes and we went inside for a coup de blanc.

Later in the morning when I went to check on them I discovered that they'd practically stripped my rose bushes bare so I tied them up under the ash tree and went to google "how to milk a goat". The "Teddington Cheese Wire" recommends as follows:

"When milking the goat you can easily disturb the hair on its belly, so the hair under the udder should be clipped and brushed to remove hair and dirt. Just before milking, when your goat is tied up and happily eating, her udder and hind quarters need to be wiped down with a damp sponge and a small amount of udder cream should be put on the teats and hands. It may be a good idea to practice the milking technique with the finger of an old rubber glove with a pin-hole in the tip."

BB went off in search of clippers, udder cream and an old rubber glove, and returned, resourceful as ever, with my Babyliss lady shaver, a jar of vaseline and a préservatif. Whilst I was sitting on the front-door step practising squirting milk out of the prophylactic, a couple of pesky Jehovah's Witnesses went past on their bicycles and were so busy staring at me that they missed the turn and rolled into the ditch.

On the way up to the Sunday Club this morning we passed two of Mini-B's three tractors lying abandoned (i.e. broken down) in separate fields, mid hay-making. The cut hay that hasn't been rolled up is lying rotting on the ground after the rain and the rolled-up bales look like burst mattresses.

M. Norbert the lumberjack was there today. His son has just come out of a coma after a serious head trauma. He was winching some wood with Norbert when the steel cable (capable of holding 20 tonnes) which had been passed around a tree stump to use as a pulley, slipped and - like a bow string - smacked him on the back of the head.  Luckily he was bending down at the time otherwise the cable would have taken his head off. He's now in a rehabilitation unit and appears to be making a full recovery.

I never realised the countryside was such a dangerous place. If people aren't chopping their limbs off with circular saws or chain saws, they're meeting untimely deaths. Last year a guy we knew was killed in an avalanche here, another was killed when he drove his quad bike into a telegraph pole and the husband of Poire's new wife was killed in a hunting accident. A year before that, Mini-B's uncle was electrocuted when he climbed an aluminium ladder in a thunder storm to replace the chimney cap which had blown off and the brother of the previous owner of our mill died after eating a tin of sardines - granted, they were 25 years past their sell-by date.

Nobody seems to die peacefully in their sleep. Which is a bit worrying given the enormity of our building project.

Nainbo was on at me again to take Rosalea and has suggested that I try a goat as a mate, so I am going to borrow one of Mini-B's to see how I get on. I may even try my hand at making goats' cheese.

With the hitch professionally welded back together and back in place, M. Bouger returned this evening to move the crane the last few feet into position.

To give you an idea of the constraints - the road is eight feet wide with a steep embankment on one side and a slope down to the river on the other; the crane is just under eight feet wide and 32 feet long and the platform is at a 90 degree angle to the road.

The crane's front wheel had sunk about a foot into the gravel platform but without even revving the engine, M. Bouger pulled it out and then, in a show of tractor gymnastics worthy of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, pushed it back into place. The tractor wheels just seemed to have lives of their own. When M. Bouger asked if he could leave the machine here over-night (BB said he could leave it here for as long as he liked - with the keys), he reversed it up the embankment at a 45 degree angle while the ten of us stood there gawping.

So, the good news is that the crane is finally in place. The bad news is that, to his list of toys of three motorbikes (including one 30-year old Laverda 500 which has never been ridden because it won't start), one mountain bike (brand-new and ridden twice), one pair of snow shoes (brand-new and never used), six pairs of skis (a new pair each season), one rusty old crane (never used) and one Ural sidecar (on order but will no doubt be ridden twice), BB wants to add a tractor. I've said we can discuss tractors when the house is finished - which at this rate will probably be in ten years time!