Sundays are great as it is egg window day. Get a thick bit of nice bread, cut a hole in the middle (best done by pushing a cup or something round into it on a hard surface so you get a perfectly round hole), lightly fry one side in a frying pan with a little olive oil, flip it over and break an egg in the hole, sprinkle a little salt and pepper on the egg and flip the whole thing over again after a short while to seal the other side of the egg. The trick is in the timing so that the egg is cooked, the bread is nicely browned and the yoke is still runny.

After breakfast we went in search of Francoise, the blind lady who gave us a load of old slates last year for the main barn roof. We had never met her or spoken to her before but Clive had told us that she was in the village for the weekend. We found her and chatted for about half an hour, gathering history and information about the barn and her family. We came away delighted and energised by our meeting and very privileged.

Then off to the barn again. Though it was foggy in Salau it turned out to be an inversion and by the time we climbed up to the barn we were above it all which gave very eerie scenes `of what seemed to be a sea of swirling, boiling cloud filling the valley below us.

 

Without ballast there is little we can do with the outbuilding so we turned our hands to other things. One idea that we want to play with is the idea of creating a solar hot box. Essentially a wooden box full of rocks with a glass sheet over the top, situated below a building. When the sun shines it heats the rocks in the box and you duct warmed up air into the building. So that’s what we did. I will write up a more detailed description later along with how successful or not it is in the eco friendly side of the blog. Ekke and Cecile called by to inspect the composting toilet and general progress. Ekke is a water treatment engineer and so the workings of the toilet were fascinating. He kept asking questions which we knew not the answers just saying “it should be in the manual but we have not read it yet”.

Lastly we started sorting out the slate left over from before in preparation for roofing the outhouse. Plan is to take the truck and trailer into St Girons to pick up ballast first thing tomorrow and crack on with the walls and roof.

Left the barn to a fantastic rainbow.