209.

20th November 2013. This has been a wet month so far in the Pays Basque.. The Nive has had more than its fair share of lumber floating down it during the past weeks. Last Saturday I was out in the club's beautiful Filippi wooden shell VIII and we had to be pretty nimble in avoiding some of the larger pieces as it would have been all too easy to have damaged the thin skinned VIII. There was a whole tree stuck against the river bank higher up the river that will present a problem (as it's too big to pass under the bridges in town) as it slowly makes its way downstream.   
It's difficult in words (for me) to capture the appeal of rowing on the river on a calm summer's evening. This image explains it better than I ever could: 

Something reminded me the other day of this haunting song by Enya (to be honest I was clearing the garage out of a few centuries-worth of muck and bullets and it came up on the radio). Try here if YouTube has blocked the video.

I found myself humming it all day as I cleared spiders webs from the garage walls and swept up plaster dust, old rusty bolts and other delights. There was an assortment of ancient brackets and other ironmongery bolted to the walls - connected to the tale our neighbor told us that one previous owner of the house was a butcher (who used the garage for slaughtering pigs). These fittings were attached with massively over-engineered fixings that hadn't been touched for years and which were mostly rusted up. Fortunately I have a good set of sockets and a ratchet that made removing all the fittings easier than it might otherwise have been.
Rule of Life #17: If you have 12 rusty nuts to unscrew that have been untouched since the Spanish Civil War, 11 will unscrew easily. That's all I'm sayin'!    
If you can't play the above clip, here's a good rendition of the song in question (but not by Enya)