FIBRE IS COMING !!

Just like in the UK, there isn't much going on in France during January so it's a good time to catch up jobs and tackle paperwork.

It's time for us to apply for a "carte de séjour" (CDS) which is a residency permit.  This involves spending ages uploading documents onto a French government website.  We thought it would be a miracle if it went smoothly and we were right!

The problem probably has a lot to do with our dodgy internet.  At the moment we are using 4G as that's somewhat better than the ADSL we had until last summer, but it's not always reliable and we frequently get "timed out".  

Fibre is coming though.  The wires for it have run past our house since September 2022 but ended in a large reel of cable parked at the end of the road!  There is a website we can look at which tells us how soon we can hope to be connected and we have moved up the scale a bit from "no chance" (red) through to "we're working on it" (orange).  

At a meeting in the village hall last November we were told that even the most outlying farms (meaning people like us) should have the service by the end of January.  True, the reel of cable has disappeared but we have yet to move from orange to "you can apply for it" (yellow).  Looking at the website we are frustratingly surrounded by farms and hamlets that are already yellow or even green - which means they are actually using it!  There are still two weeks left of this month but I'm not holding my breath!

Another job we are tackling is having the chimneys swept (called ramonage cheminée).  It is a requirement of house insurance so last November we called on a local firm to do the two wood burners.  When the man turned up he declared he couldn't do the stove in the kitchen because you can't access the chimney part from inside.  You have to go up on the roof.  He dealt with the living room fire but offered no solution to getting the kitchen one done.

Someone recommended a different firm of plumbers so I went into their office a month ago and explained about the kitchen stove.  I wafted the instruction book (which is in French) at the very helpful lady on the desk and stressed that the chimney had to be cleaned from above, i.e. from the roof.  She reassured me that it was no problem and an appointment was made for the ramonage and also servicing of our gas boiler at the same time.

We were once again up early but when the van rolled into the drive with no ladders on the roof I knew we were in trouble.  There were two occupants; a young man to do the boiler and an older man in sooty clothes to do the wood burner.  He declared he was unable to do it as he didn't have insurance for working on the roof.

We didn't argue with him as our French isn't good enough to have the kind of conversation that begins with "but we told the office you would need to go on the roof!"

His solution was to take a photo of the stove and show it to the boss who might think of a way of modifying the smoke pipe to enable access from inside.  He would then send us an estimate (devis) for the work.  Hmmmm........it will be a miracle if that ever happens!

Once the plumbers had left we were able to light the fires and turn on the heating.  It was well below freezing and our little electric heaters had not made much headway in warming the house.  I took Hugo for his morning walk while Nick settled down once more in front of his laptop for another session of "beat the clock" on our CDS application!