Mik from LA

I agree fluffy Leader price mix was the best. What I do is mix the dried yeast in 275mm of warm water (don't use levure chemique instead of levure de boulanger as I did) then put 500gm of flour on top. I put it in the bread maker and use the dough setting. When the dough is ready knock it back and roughly shape it on an oven tray, cover with oiled cling film and leave it to raise for a couple of hours. Then put it in a COLD conventional oven and set it at 210 deg for 45 mins. Perfect bread every time. By putting it in a cold oven it gives an extra rising to the bread before cooking.

Leader Price still do the bread mix. For some reason you now have to add your own dried yeast but it works fine.

Just for amusement I have a photo of my neighbour's log splitter. The hydraulic ram is taken from the landing gear of a Caravel jet plane which for some bizarre reason happened to be in the yard of a local scrap merchant. [IMG]http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/mikornisey/logsplitter.jpg[/IMG]

I seem to remember when we killed a pig there were two sizes of intestine. The small intestine for chipolata type sausages and the large intestine for the usual sausage size. If you had spent any time cleaning them by hand you would appreciate their price. I assume it is normally done by machine. The most interesting part is finding the right flavouring. Experiment with pepper, sage and mace and then use your imagination. Regarding smokers, I use our normal barbeque which has a lid. Simply put a metal tin of wood shavings over the heat beside the food. It smokes a whole chicken perfectly.

My neighbour breeds rabbits. She eats just about everything except foie de lapin which she passes on to us. Sauteed gently in butter with garlic and parsley until only just cooked they are delicious.

That is a very interesting question. I live on one of the ridges radiating from the central area somewhere South of Lanemazan. I did a bit of hunting and came up with this .... The syn-tectonic deep-marine Ainsa fans (Eocene of the Ainsa basin, Spanish Pyrenees) were confined by lateral thrust ramps and influenced by intra-basinal growth anticlines. Mass transport complexes (MTCs) constitute a major component of the stratigraphy and represent an integral part of the evolution and depositional style of the deep-marine clastics. Using an integrated study of outcrop data from sedimentary logs and mapping, with core data from eight wells and micropalaeontological and palynomorph analyses, we demonstrate the lateral step-wise migration of sandy channelized submarine fans, as a foreland-propagating clastic wedge on a time-scale of hundreds of thousands of years. The deep-marine expression of the inferred tectonic pulses began with the large-scale basin-slope collapse as sediment slides and debris flows that formed much of the seafloor topography for each fan and contributed to their lateral confinement. The uppermost slope and any shelf-edge, including the narrow shelf, then collapsed, redepositing unconsolidated sands and gravels into deep water. This is overlain by an interval of mainly channelized and amalgamated sandy deposits, passing up into several tens of metres of less confined, non-amalgamated, medium- and thin-bedded, finer grained sands and marls. These deposits represent the phase of most active fan growth, initially by erosional channel development, sediment bypass and backfill (in several cycles), giving way to non-channelized, finer grained sandy deposition, interpreted as a response to the flushing out of the coarser clastics from the coastal and near coastal fluvial systems. During this latter stage in active fan growth and when sediment accumulation rates probably remained high, the degraded submarine slope was regraded and healed by finer grained depositional events. The high amount of woody material and the high non-marine palynomorph signal in these sandy deposits suggest direct river input as both turbidity currents and hyperpycnal flows for the silty marls. In the upper few metres, a thinning-and-fining-upward sequence shows a return to background marl deposition, representing fan abandonment. Many sequences are overlain by intraformational sediment slides that attest to the increasing seafloor gradients associated with the regrading and healing stage in slope development. These organized, predictable vertical sedimentary sequences provide a testable generic model for submarine fan development where fan growth is strongly influenced by tectonic processes. .......... and then I lost the will to live!

You can make your raised bed walls from car tyres as I have done. They are free, require no treatment, are very strong and last forever. The tyres are placed on top of each other horizontally in pile of two or three depending on wall thickness and height desired. The beds thus formed are filled in the normal way, as are the insides of the tyres. I keep the tyres for perennials such as strawberries and herbs.. The only downside is they are not pretty to look at (but then neither was my original plot) but once stuff starts growing it does not look too bad.

[quote user="powerdesal"]but don't leave your engine running when you get out.[/quote] Good idea. Some months ago, near Toulouse, there was a sign telling you to switch off your cruise control before going through the peage. I hate to think what incident prompted that warning!

The clue is in your header. You used French and logic in the same sentence

First, sorry for the formatting in the earlier post. I was in a hurry to go down the dechetterie for some free compost and had transport waiting. [quote user="Gardian"]Mik ............... Derrrr.  I think that the penny has dropped as to how to apply your terrifying formula! If I've got a scale plan, then I simply lay a piece of scaled & marked out transparent paper over the plan that I've got & read off the coordinates.  Those are my x & y values. Yes?  [/quote] Yes that's all there is to it, but the accuracy of the coords will depend on the plan. The formulae is not really as daunting as that. But I can calculate it for you if you prefer. It would be best to ask the geometre for the coordinates. If your plot has four simple corners you could simply measure the length. of each side and one diagonal and calculate the area from simple trigonometry.(two triangles) I do not remember the earlier post you refer to but the inference seems to be that you need the area to resolve a boundary dispute. This is not the normal way to do it unless a sub-division has been created transferring a specific number of sqr metres of land. The area is normally calculated after the boundary has been defined.

If your land is bounded by straight sides you can compute the area as follow without any error. i.e. it is a rigorous solution. Find the coordinates of each borne defining your land. For example, you have a plot of land with five vertices (x1,y1), (x2,y2),(x3,y3),(x4,y4) and (x5,y5), The area A would be calculated thus:- A = (1/2) X ( (x1*y2+ x2*y3+x3y4+ x4*y5+ x5*y1)-(x2*y1+x3*y2 + x4y3+x5*y4+x1*y5) ) This works with any number of sides. The error occurs in the accuracy of the coordinates and the straightness of the sides. Remember an error of 2 metres in your side measurement will give you an error of 4 sqr metres in your area calculation. The coordinates may be measured a number of ways. The cadastral office may give them to you if you ask for them. They do have a record of them as they are used to produce the cadastral plans. They will be in a system called Lamberts Conical Orthomorphic and seem very large. Don't worry about any of this. Just drop the significant digits. You can measure the coordinates by GPS. This is the easiest and most reliable way. You can scale the coordinates from a plan. This is the most error prone way. You say you have a 1:250 plan. This is very large scale and not a normal cadastral size. Where did it come from? If you find this difficult you can email me the coordinates and I will do the calculation for you. I used to do lots of these calculations when I were a lad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2AcJSkUw6M

[quote user="Martin963"] How is it that we've moved to this lamentable state of affairs where organisations can start taking the dosh BEFORE the customer is availed of all the services?   In the "old days" there were mechanisms to transmit the customer's satisfaction that all was properly installed and working BEFORE any payments were taken.... [/quote] SFR took my money and gave me NO service. They sent me three emails asking me to complete a customer satisfaction survey. Each time I tried it crashed. (probably anticipated what I was going to say)

This is an interesting story of why the wall came down. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/30/AR2009103001846.html

Yes but don't tell everybody else ....

Stay philosophical. If I get mad at them, the only person to suffer is me. Good luck Nick. I'm sure you will be ok. Keep us posted