Having done as much as I could on the front gates, I started today on the front fence railings. This was a more straight-forward task, since each railing was essentially the same. I developed a totally manual method, of hitting the rails with a small hammer (to break largish flakes of paint away), then running the inside of the head of the hammer up and down to inside of the railing (nearer the garden) to get paint off that side, then using the edge of a flat file to scrape off the reminder of the paint, followed by a final sanding with a sanding block to get a smooth finish. Because of the noise of hitting rails with a hammer, I restricted myself to tradesman’s hours to avoid annoying the neighbours. Luckily there were some tradies working on neighbouring houses, so my noise was masked a little, except when they stopped working over the lunch break, so I also took time off for lunch. It was still a laborious process, taking about an hour for each railing. Shown below are the results of an afternoon of work (on the four rails on the left).

In the evening, Don and Laura came around for dinner on the Terrasse des Amis (where their sign is proudly displayed). This dinner was partly in repayment for their generosity in picking me up from Montauban station a couple of weeks ago, but mainly just to catch up and have a good chinwag. They brought their little dog Annie with them, and during the evening Annie and Meggsy met each other and had a bit of a stand-off. In the end. Annie chased Meggsy out of the yard, and then sat at the head of the stairs to the Terrasse keeping us safe from the terrible ginger cat.