It was flyable early on today, but we had a job to do first… fix the satellite dish that was blown out of alignment in the storms of Monday. I’m not TV fan, and have resisted having the damn thing in the house, but Geoff’s very partial to watching the news. The only channel we could get after the storm was BBC News 24, but it turns out that Geoff is partial to more than just news, so it had to be fixed and that meant going on the roof. After our last little roof adventure, we approached this with some trepidation.

We live in a three story house, with a staggered roof that is 9m high on the street side. On the other side is a 10m drop onto the balcony and under that is a 100m cliff, so a long, long fall if you slip. When we had the house restored, the builders had to replace the roof and hated working here. I didn’t blame them.

Getting onto our roof, which has a big overhang, means climbing onto our little old lady neighbour’s roof and then stepping across. We were trying to sneak up there quietly, so she wouldn’t come out and complain. She’s a lovely lady, or at least we think she is, because generally we don’t have a clue what she’s saying. She’s from Andalucia, and apart from speaking Spanish with the equivalent of a Geordie accent, she also mumbles. My strategy for years has been to smile and nod and I am sure I’ve managed to offend her many times by making the wrong facial expression in response to some tragic story she’s been telling me at length. To be fair, we’re not the only ones… my parents also can’t understand her and neither can our other neighbours and they’re Catalans.

So we’re trying to quietly assemble a 8.5m ladder (no mean feat even when you don’t mind making noise), when our other neighbour pokes his head out of the window to see what’s going on. Since the road outside our house slopes, we had to find a way of stabilising the ladder, but alas, we had a clearout last week and threw all the old off-cuts of wood away. Our neighbour saw this as a challenge and mobilised the neighbourhood to get the right thickness of wedge for the job. Despite health and safety being a little known concept here, he insisted on checking it all out with a spirit level and helping me hold the ladder. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely and would have stood there holding the ladder for hours if I hadn’t said that Geoff would be up there for a while.

The roof was still slippy from the dew, so Geoff was nervous and I could hear that in his voice from on the radio. He was initially just going to go up to do a temporary fix, but once there realised that, with a few tools, he could probably fix it permanently. Unfortunately, he hadn’t taken any tools with him, so we had to find a way to get a rope up to him without me having to climb the ladder. So off to the neighbour again, who climbed up to his attic and threw the rope across to Geoff and then he lowered it for me to fill rucksacks with spanners, etc. By this time the old lady next door had cottoned on that there was something interesting going on and I was a captive audience, since I couldn’t move far away, with Geoff being on the roof. Trouble was, I normally get about 10% of what she says, but without her teeth in, I get 0%. So I had two neighbours giving me advice/fretting about their roof in one ear and Geoff shouting instructions to me in the other. Arrgghh.

He fixed the alignment and then I heard the fateful message: “I’ve tightened everything, but that’s broken the u-bolt fixing the pole to the wall. You’ll have to go to Olot to get another while I wait, otherwise it will fall over and break the other fixing”. Two separate trips to Olot, lots of hauling up and down and endless unintelligible ear-bending later, Geoff was safely back on the ground! So much for sneaking up the roof.

Geoff had spent nearly three hours stuck on the roof and by this time it was too late to go flying as the wind had picked up. So a reward lunch in Besalu and then some more work. Front is going through tonight, so with any luck it will be nice tomorrow and the correfoc is on.

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