It has continued to rain almost relentlessly since I last posted but we are not quite under water yet. This is not me in the Creuse but Ewan in the sea off the Maldives during his recent holiday there.

Tuesday afternoon turned out fine though and although I didn't quite break 100 I played my best round of the year so far.

Other than that the week has been domestic. I gave the barn a bit of a Spring clean and I got a plumber in to fix a persistent leak. That was not without its annoyances given that he didn't turn up for the first rendezvous. Had to go to a funeral apparently. Could be, but isn't that the adult version of "the cat ate my homework, miss".

A friend is going to do a bit of plastering for us and I did some preparatory work to fill in a rather large gap with plasterboard. As usual what looks like a rectangle turns out to be a complicated polygon so you spend ages shaving little bits off the plasterboard here and there to make it fit. The gap was so deep that I had to put in two layers of board so all in all I spent the best part of half a day at what at first sight would seem to be a half hour job.

I got another new tyre. That's not a new requirement but the final tidying up of the incident of 6th May. Why did it take so long? I refer you to "the cat ate my homework,miss".

In my capacity as Barbansais accountant Sally sent me some bank statements recently and I noticed that one of the local taxes (paid by DD in December) was substantially higher that it had been the year before. I had a vague memory of a plan to collect TV licence charges along with local taxes but we couldn't find the bill to verify this. So yesterday I set off in pursuit of the truth.

The truth was that we hadn't got the bill because they'd cocked up the change of address I gave them last year. It's an interesting debating point whether the fact that they hadn't changed the address on the other local tax bill counts as a cock-up or not.

Anyway it was indeed the case that we'd been charged for a TV licence so I've been in touch with the relevant authority. They were happy to accept my verbal assurance on the phone that we don't have a TV so the 2007 bill will omit it but I've had to write a letter to reclaim our 116 euros for 2006.

Maybe that will pay for the water that has leaked away.