It isn’t very often I go into a large Brico (hardware store) and order five water closets, two shower bases, and four sinks. But on Monday, the plumber cometh and so it had to be done. Until the end of next week, therefore, I am left with one loo that doesn’t flush properly and currently sits in an open hall where under-the-stairs used to be, in full sight of the front door. Discretion is thus something of a problem when defaecating.

But that’s enough detail on that one: the really interesting thing is that to one side of my now very public lavatory, the plaster has been hacked off, and one can see that this is where the original fire was. The end room of my place here looks old, but it’s fake; the wall next to the loo (now in the vestibule) was the original outside wall when the house was a hunting lodge. On first being shown the old burn marks on the wall, I thought a guest’s dangerously inflammable fart after too much old Armagnac might have been lit up by the faulty electrics. But no, the outline of the old fire surround was clearly visible – as was the fire hole itself. So, the vestibule I’m turning into a kitchen was almost certainly a kitchen in the original hunting lodge….none of your Agas or Neffs in those days. I know it’s pathetic, but the idea of the function of this room being returned in 2014 to that of 1760 is very pleasing.

Anyway, after today’s bad start, I reflected a little on the week so far, during which much lawnmowing, making stuff from old wood, burning wood, and burning skin have been at various times involved. We’re having a hot spell at the minute, and yet – it being only April – after just a few minutes in the shade one feels underdressed. The smells, however are unforgettable at this time of year: I can wander past the Wisteria and catch a subtle whiff there, but the hawthorn blossom’s scent is like the bouquet that comes belting off the best Hallgarten hock. The lack of a crisp, flowery and gently chilled glass to follow is disappointing, but then temptation is a terrible thing and we mustn’t have too much of it; or at least, I mustn’t – otherwise I’d be horizontally senseless around the clock. Hock around the Clock, in fact, ba-boom.

Another wheelbarrow came back into service last Monday, thanks to the endless pile of old electrical wires flung into the garden by the builders. The wheelbarrow is plastic, and thus not amenable to my usual tactic of brutally applied hammer-heads to nails: but wires pushed through carelessly drilled holes work a treat.

On Wednesday, the farmers that surround me began the now easily recognisable process of zooming about like the possessed with reapers, turners and balers on the fields laid to grass. This can only mean one thing: they know it’s going to rain within four days. I have long held the view that your fermier francais gets a weather forecast from some kind of secret ecole d’administration Meta-Meteo source hidden deep beneath the Auvergne. Nobody else gets these forecasts except the farming community, and they are never wrong. Sure enough, it is now forecast to rain tomorrow. I blame the Easter Bank Holiday in England myself, but that’s another debate for another time.

Today however, I got some grass areas down to the short cut without chucking clippings everywhere. This involves putting onto the mower an attachment called le mulcher in France, a term that is spookily close to the American verb to mulch, but is of course a French word dating back to the 100 Years War, allegedly: rather like le Weekend and Le MacDo and L’Aircon.

It is at this point that I feel able to impart to you an amazing tip about how to bake potatoes on a totally illegal garden fire. You may think this the random thought of an old git who’s been at the giggling glug again, but bear with me o ye of little faith.

I’m sure that, like me, you loved Guy Fawkes nights when your Dad put potatoes onto the bonfire, and they came out looking like something closely exposed to a thermo-nuclear blast. Well, this is how to avoid that outcome. First of all, start your fire….having earlier (thoughtfully) cut some longer grass without le mulcher. Onto this fire you should chuck as many dangerous objects as possible – old opened paint pots, long half-life reactor rods, old magazines soaked in petrol, that sort of thing – and then top the whole thing off with bits of old asbestos-reinforced planking that are unusable on account of being thickly daubed in lead-based paint. (ECOLOGISTS AND HSE WORKERS: THIS IS A JOKE).

Allow the conflagration to die down and then, as its glow is humming away nicely, chuck all your green and slightly damp grass clippings onto the site. This will cause much smoke, then less smoke. Do not be discouraged: keep on heaving on the clippings. Eventually, the whole will turn black. At this point, carefully take a garden rake and lift one outer edge of the site. Into the quiet inferno, pop your silver-foil covered spuds, and then go off to do something else. This is a process known to women as multi-tasking. It is something which, according to them, men cannot do….like shopping, or having a cold without referring to it as a respiratory tract infection (bourgeois) or flu (working class).

Ninety minutes later – having marked the point of entry clearly – you will lift its lid to discover perfectly baked potatoes.

Another thing you’ll discover, as age weathers you, is that a certain silliness sets in. So it was that, engaged in chucking grass clippings from my newly repaired wheelbarrow into the illegal garden fire, I stumbled upon the largest and most brilliantly green-and-yellow coloured caterpillar I’d ever seen ascending the wheelbarrow’s end wall.

I dashed back to the house, grabbed my trusty camera-phone, and pelted back to the fire. But the unique caterpillar was nothing more than an electric wire I’d used to repair the wheelbarrow three days previously.

As I write, the sun has just gone below the horizon, leaving in its wake the usual melange of colours that only nutters like Turner ever came within a country mile of capturing. So I will leave you on this Easter Eve with a word to ponder, and the word is atrophy.

I was discussing the word with a much-trusted friend the other day, and it reminded me that a few years ago I did seriously consider trying my hand at StandUp. At the time, several South London pubs were offering to let amateurs stand up and make fools of themselves along that dimension, and so I set to writing some material.

One gag I wrote involved a situation where several Millwall FC football hooligans, having been found guilty of affray, were ordered by the Magistrate to attend corrective seminars. At the first of these – designed to improve their grasp of English and profound sense of social alienation – a lecturer said to the assembled class, “Right, I want you to put these words into a sentence to show you understand how to use them.”

The first word he chose was atrophy. And of the thirty Millwall fans present, eleven wrote, ‘We ain’t won atrophy in thirty years and we don’t f**kin’ care’.

Enjoy Easter Day tomorrow which – according to the Daily Mash – commemorates the day when our Saviour died so we could have another two days off.

Earlier at The Slog: The baseball bats of AOL Capone