CHAPTER 11 A Waking Fountain

Due to a time critical project at work, combined with a lack of volunteers, there was no spring renovation trip to Frasquenet in 1992.

During May and June I started to turn my thoughts to what my summer French holiday project should be. The wall enclosed, patch of concrete at the back of the house, which I considered to be simply a backyard, was sometimes kindly referred to as ‘The courtyard’ by visiting friends and relatives.

Naturally I would have preferred to possess a courtyard rather than a mere yard and checking my dictionary I discovered that they were technically correct, given the definition provided ‘Courtyard – a space without a roof but enclosed by walls’.

Disappointingly the dictionary went on to add "esp. forming part of a castle, large house, hotel etc.". Regardless of the kind words of friends and the definition in the dictionary, to me a courtyard needed to have a rustic feel to it, to have a flag stone floor rather than a concrete slab, and should possess a feature such as fountain, preferably in it's centre.

So my first vision was to lay flagstones on top of the concrete and put a nice old sandstone fountain in the middle. At this stage I need to explain that the floor of the courtyard was also the roof of the rear part of the garage. I had never been quite sure what held this in place, since the few very rusty iron beams, which appeared to have been put in place for the purpose, did not look capable of holding any significant weight. From a cursory visual inspection it was impossible to tell how far the concrete slab penetrated into the sandstone side walls. To put it bluntly I had little confidence that the weight of the flagstones and the fountain of my dreams, would not cause the whole lot to collapse into the garage below.

As usual I modified my vision, forgot about the flagstones and settled on simply having a wall fountain, where at least some of the weight would be borne by the wall rather than just the floor. At this stage I had little idea as to what this wall fountain would look like.

Our local High Street in North West London had an interesting general store, which sold all kinds of things not generally found in the other shops. The merchandise was mainly aimed at the price conscious customer and items ranged from screwdrivers and hammers to things such as cooking utensils, pots, vases and children's toys.

At the rear of this shop was a rather nice backroom, which comprised a section which specialised in picture framing, ready framed reproductions of well known masters, and artificial flowers and plants. I had never been a great fan of artificial foliage, but the quality was much better than a decade before, when most artificial greenery had consisted only of brightly coloured shiny plastic. Now with the use of fabric for leaves and petals, and matt spray paints to add a bloom to berries and fruits, you sometimes actually had to touch these plants to know that they were not real.

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