Sitting happily at home catching up with paperwork I got an urgent call from my neighbor Andrew. Apparently a lorry had arrived from Estonia with no notice containing our timber cladding of charred and oiled larch. Worse still, he had no machine to offload it. I rang Florent without success so jumped in the car and raced to site.

No english or French. Not even Estonian as he had come from Lithuania so we were only able to exchange a few words in Russian.

Happily Philippe came to help and rather than send him off to return tomorrow we offloaded it manually. 240 lengths of timber.

Between the three of us it was done in under an hour but no one could get into or out of the village while he was there.