We got invited to visit Jean-Paul, our stonemason, and his girlfriend Huguette. The live in what was once a fairly ordinary concrete house on the edge of a small town near here, but which JP has entirely covered with salvaged stone, perfectly shaped and pointed. They ply us with wine and coffee and rather too much sweet stuff, but the best bit it JP's loft, which covers the whole house and is, very tidily, full of his stuff, including a set of toy models: a little house, a yellow crane, a very fine die-cast Manitou (like a JCB), and a fork-lift. On the day of his sixtieth birthday and so of his retirement, when he would have given up the full-sized versions of these things, he said, he came downstairs to find these laid out on the kitchen table for him. There was also a figure of a man in working clothes with a shovel, which, I pointed out, was somewhat out-of-scale and too large for the toy vehicles and plant. Well it's only an imitation, he said.
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Laying the fire before we went out, so it only needed a fire-lighter and a match when we came home. The chimney needs sweeping, but an advantage of this windy weather is it's drawing better than usual. (Which doesn't make up for the hammering the south-west of England is taking, I know.)
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Part of young Eve's bird alphabet, which arrived today by e-mail for the Soup. The girl is seriously gifted.
3 comments:
:-)
Did someone tell you it was die-cast or did you have the word all ready and polished for the occasion? No need to say yea or nay; we're all entitled to secrets which make us look good in front of a critical audience. Of one in this case.
I for instance can reveal that I visited the Manitou factory at Ancenis, asked a question which floored the techno-guy (now totally forgotten), then left while I was on a high. Manitou loves the suffix - scopic, which melds well with the prefix Manu- but less so with the prefix Bugi-. This you will glad to hear is all I have to say on the subject
Thanks chaps.
RR, good to see you. I would happily hear more about the legendary Manitou. There is a picture somewhere from long ago pre-digital days of me in the shovel of JP's Manitou at chimney height, I'm minded to dig it out and scan it now. Tom had a pair of workboots once which had the Manitout logo as printed into the sole. In fact they were a bit rubbish and didn't last long, but they looked the business.
Die-cast, don't quite know where I got that from, I just seem to remember that the really good quality replica toy cars were always trumpeted as being 'die cast' and this model did indeed look like one such!
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