Last gardening of 2010

…unless I prune the roses in the front tomorrow. The snow has gone again, thank goodness, and it’s mild, so I’ve done a bit of tidying in the beds next to the terrace at the back of the house. The penstemons were looking very bedraggled, having been weighed down with six inches of snow twice in the past month. I’ve given them an interim haircut, and hope that’ll let them over-winter slightly more safely than if I’d left them with branches lying along the earth and grass. I’ve pruned a few of the roses as well, and cut down some annuals. It hasn’t been exclusively a story of destruction (though I’m the first to admit that such tends to be my gardening trademark – I like a bit of slash and burn!). I’ve potted up some more cuttings from Jane’s New Guinea busy lizzies, and taken a few more cuttings. With luck and a following breeze, we ought to have over a dozen little plants in the spring: the donor plants are starting to look tired.

I felt a bit better on Christmas morning, so we set off to spend the day with Margaret and John in Hampshire. Part-way round the M25, when I started coughing and sneezing again, it struck me that this wasn’t altogether wise. Still, we had a lovely day with them, eating way too much, as tradition requires. I do hope I haven’t given them my cold.

We were just about ready to eat again three days later, when we had a nice evening with Celia and Andy here. Perhaps bruschette, lamb shanks with 6-root mash, cold pudding, hot pudding and a cheeseboard were a bit on the ambitious side, but again an enjoyable time in great company.

We have been down to the Costa Geriatrica this morning to make a purchase before the tax goes up. The goods should arrive in a week or two’s time, and I’ll tell you all about it then.

Slush, mist and sniffles

Hadn't realised we have quite so much traffic through the garden.

We did the Father Christmas bit yesterday, which involved a murky, slushy drive over to the nearby unitary authority. Soon after we left, my cold really started to blossom, and I hope I haven't passed it on to my sisters-in-law. The driving conditions weren't bad, in fact: as ever, the worst bit is getting out of the drive and down the hill to a somewhat clearer road. Had enough of the snow. It may go now.

...and more snow

We have the beginnings of a thaw today, but not enough to do a proper job, I fear. We slithered out for a few essentials yesterday - wine and a Christmas tree. The roads were not as clear as I'd expected, so we'd to take it a bit easy. As we turned into our road on the way home, we'd to hang around while a chap in a VW Touran got into some interesting angles while trying to find a bit of traction. I'm starting to feel less guilty about having bought a 4wd. It just ambles serenely on in the snow and slush. You can break traction, but you need to be pretty heavy on the throttle to get the wheels spinning. I think it has some electronic idiot-proofing that can be switched off for the Clarksons of this world who think it's clever to send their tyres up in smoke. (Oh, I'm glad I'm an old fart!)

The birds are starting to be a bit more interested in the feeders. There was a magnificent nuthatch at the peanuts yesterday - and an opportunistic blackbird on the ground beneath picking off the spillage.

Hibernate? Emigrate? Vegetate?

A' yon snaw gies me the boak. I suppose it has a certain attractive novelty value for the first moments of sunshine after a fresh fall (of snow, I mean, not of elderly creaking body). We'd a little snow shower last night, but not enough to stop me getting out to the framer's to collect the latest three daubs. There were some alarming looking frozen puddles at the edge of the road, though. Martyn beat me to the 4-wheel drive this morning, and it looks like that was just as well, since he has a 20-mile drive home from the county town this afternoon. I didn't see a temperature higher than -1.5° while I was out just now, and it has been snowing again for the past hour or so. The big wet flakes have now given way to skiers' snow - dry, powdery stuff. Ugh. Good job I stocked up yesterday in anticipation.


I seem to be doing a lot of snarling at the moment - sorry, people! The garden provides little inspiration at the moment, and the indoor plants are struggling a bit. Art class has been cancelled for three weeks, so there won't be any more this year. Still, we had a visit from a wren in the garden a couple of days ago, which gladdened the heart not a little, and the steady flow of Christmas greetings is a delight.

9 December

Interesting times. Students in masks saying they’ll have to deal in drugs to fund their studies. Rentacrowd posters all over the place. Police abused and attacked as agents of a repressive government – and, I fear, living up to the stereotype in some instances. Parts of it are reminiscent of the late Callaghan and early Thatcher years. I guess it’s to be expected when we have a totally un-mandated government at the helm (though ‘at the helm’ is perhaps optimistic). If the BBC were reporting events in Britain over the last few days in some banana republic or other, I think they might be predicting a military coup or, at best, early elections.

Odd to reflect that, in 1968 (annus mirabilis), with my mother teaching and my father on a bank clerk’s pension, I went up with enough of a grant to pay not only for my tuition, but also for my board and lodgings, leaving the parents and me to find books and beer money. And I began work with a small positive balance from savings from supplementary benefit payments! I clearly underestimated what it was costing the parents to feed and house me while I was unemployed, and failed to contribute. If you’re reading this, old ‘uns: sorry! Had we been looking at £9000/yr tuition fees, plus living costs, I would sure as hell not have gone to university, unless I’d learned to flip an awful lot of burgers.

It is cold. It is going to get colder again. There was more powder snow here yesterday. Still, my trip to London yesterday was, by and large, warm and comfortable, and the sun shone on us for a while today. An art class colleague came round at lunch time for soup and Christmas card layout and printing: their computer has gone tits-up, so they are having to make do with cards based on my template. A pleasure to do, though: the artwork is delightful.

Cabin fever

There's a good foot of snow in front of the garage door, so your obedient servant has not ventured out further than the tumble drier since gratefully returning home after Tuesday morning's eventful shopping trip. It snowed non-stop for 72 hours (I think - I have slept at intervals along the way - and the build-up of snow is the worst I have seen in these parts. A few intrepid types are venturing out in their cars (count me as distinctly trepid, thank you), including a dame in a flip top Peugeot who drove past earlier with the roof down to accommodate the Christmas tree. Odd combination: open roof and snow chains.

Annual ramblings

Another year of pension: phew! It was frozen this year because of some smoke and mirrors in the RPI. The scheme moves to a more government-friendly index next year, so I must assume that the pension is static, unlike inflation.

What can one say about the new coalition government? Nothing very complimentary, I fear, but then the same was true of the previous Tory-lite regime. The difference is that the coalition has no mandate, since deals between what I’ve heard described as power-hungry individuals (I make no comment) have trashed manifesto promises. It’s hardly surprising, then, to see rioting in the streets. I hate the aches and pains of advancing years, but I’m glad I’m not starting out in education or work now.

Martyn is very busy at work, again because of absences of colleagues. The college is planning how to cut spending, and there might be compensations. It’s a similar story in the Courts service. Because of shortages of legal advisors, two of our nine courtrooms are now ‘dark’. My sittings usually total somewhere in the 50s, but this year so far I think I’m heading for little more than the minimum 26. Each time I sit it feels like the first time, and I’m hardly building my chairmanship skills. (It doesn’t help that my last three sittings were as a winger.) Since youth court business is very slow, I’ve taken the hint and stood down from the yoof panel. I was sitting rarely, I didn’t like the work and others were clamouring for more sittings. So the decision was pretty easy. The cuts mean more work for the union, though, and as I’m now Deputy Chairman of the Kent Branch, what I’ve lost in magisterial expenses I reckon I’m more than gaining in Magistrates’ Association miles.

This was the year I hit 60, so we had a nice gathering in the garden on the nearest Sunday. This was a major piece of luck, since the forecast had been poor. But as ever at parties, you never get a chance to stop and chat with people. Still, it was lovely to get even a fleeting moment with valued friends, and to see them making new friends. The tidal wave of good wishes around the date was quite moving.
On the day itself, I was down at the station early in the morning to get my old geezer discount card – though I don’t think I’ve broken even yet! I was very cross that my bus pass didn’t turn up promptly on the day, though. As a rather snotty council official explained none too patiently, the entitlement is moving back in time with the female state pension age, hence the wait of over three months: I’ve only used it twice so far.

We hope 2011 will treat you kindly, and that the clouds on the horizon will prove to have silver linings for us all.
Martyn & David

Home
We began the year with the chaos of building work – we’d decided to get the shower room refitted. The set-up we inherited wasted an awful lot of space, and the wash basin and shower enclosure were both designed for much smaller people than us. It was also beige to the point of depressing. The work was OK, but the workers real champions, getting here from the south coast every day but one in terrible conditions. In the summer, we had the boiler replaced and the heating system updated, which (the bill aside) was entirely painless – we pushed off to France, leaving the eponymous Mr Waterman with the key.


The garden has been a little disappointing. I suppose that’s a fair reward for the lack of goodness in the soil: we’ll top dress with some good stuff in the spring and hope for better things. Still, there were some successes: the echinaceas started flowering this year, and we had a 33% increase in our Bramley crop: up from 3 to 4.

Wheels
We bit the bullet and replaced Egg1 this year. At five years old, it was starting to get electrical faults. It was in most ways a better car than Egg2 – livelier and much less thirsty. Anyway, its replacement, a VW Tiguan, is turning out OK, even if its general air of refinement is let down by rather agricultural noises when it’s slugging at low revs. As ever, I feel soiled from dealings with the motor trade.
A rented C3 Picasso was an odd mixture – quite lively, but uncomfortable because of the cheap sloppy seats and jerky on/off brakes. It was hard to place accurately on the road, and if one could feel anything through the steering wheel, one was hallucinating.

Egg2, having had a 281 bus wiped along its side outside the chip shop, had to spend a week or so in dock. The bus company’s insurers provided us with an automatic Passat. With a drivetrain almost identical to the Tiguan’s, it also hinted at the nasty noise the latter makes under load at low revs. I have asked the Hauptvolkswagnerei whether they recognise this as an issue, and if so, what they’re doing about it. No reply.

Arrivals
Annie has been to see us in Langton and Lagrasse, and we had a lovely afternoon with all seven Bobbetts in Lagrasse – when they finally found us.


Another 9-couvert Lagrasse lunch, August
They came on one of the warmest days, so appreciated the coolth inside the house and in the river.

The birthday was a good excuse to get a few valued friends round, and we’ve had some smaller gatherings in Langton too. It was great to have a visit from Ria and Jan in July. Ria and I have been pen friends since we were both 12, but I’d never met Jan and Ria hadn’t met Martyn before.

Food & Drink
My father used to speak of digging one’s grave with one’s teeth. Well, mine (grave and teeth alike) will be well filled. We grew spuds and beans in containers this year: the charlottes did quite well, but the beans were disappointing.
I keep experimenting with bread recipes: we’re currently working on a batch of rolls with chopped olives, and I tried some pesto rolls a while back – luscious! Martyn’s cakes remain his speciality, though he is also gaining fans with his cherry tomato, garlic and basil bruschette. We took a couple of trays of them to Lagrasse neighbour Beverly’s 50th birthday bash. We both like cooking, so tend not to do a lot of eating out. The new owners of the Red Lion in the next village are doing a fine job, though, and it’s within walking distance.

We catered the birthday bash ourselves. You can’t expect a party here not to include the Madhur Jaffrey chickpeas, of course – an odd mix with quiche lorraine, I admit, but tradition oblige. Shame I forgot to serve the naans… Omission more than repaired by Martyn’s magnificent gateaux – effective only as part of a calorie-controlled diet, of course.

And on the drinks front, Château Aiguilloux rules in the Corbières, though for everyday use, Camplong was on better form this year. Their white is also OK, but not really a match for our favourite Picpoul de Pinet. There has been a great crop of sloes in the garden behind the scout hut where art class meets. Stand by for news of the sloe gin!

Clan
Good news: my nephew Richard and Anna are to be married next year. He beats his grandfather Smith’s record by a couple of years, sneaking in a little after his 39th birthday. Pip’s two are keeping the wedding stationers busy: Alan married this summer, and Ceri is to remarry. On Martyn’s side, the good news is that his nephew, Tim, has had a successful corneal graft, and his sight is vastly improved.

Arts
Historia has had a successful first season of Judenfrei, the story of two Jewish lawyers in Berlin in the 1930s, and starts a further run in a Hampstead theatre in January. We saw it in a City church, where the acoustic came close to ruining it. Impressive piece, though.

I went with Annie to see the Cézanne card players exhibition at the Courtauld one wet day in November. I’ve never had much time for Cézanne, but enjoyed this little show very much: his drawing of figures is a bit hit & miss, but his use of colours is terrific. It was my first visit to the Courtauld, and I’ll be back. On a first visit it’s such a surprise to come round a corner and find oneself face to face with iconic pieces like Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Renoir’s Bar at the Folies Bergères.

I keep slapping paint about, and have even gone back to watercolours a couple of times. There’s no doubt that acrylics are my thing – I lack the patience and self-discipline that you need to succeed with watercolours.


(Orbieu, autumn: watercolour.)
Whatever I attempt, it rarely succeeds if I spend more than one session on it. My last two efforts in acrylics were rather drawn out and laboured. This little piece – and it’s no more than a sketch, really – took about an hour, plus a few minutes’ fiddling a week later. I spent a messy half hour or so another day with soft pastels, and have played a little with watercolour pencils, but I find the inability to mix colours very limiting, and I’ll need practice to learn how each pigment reacts to the addition of water.

Departures
We’ve been to France a few times this year as usual, and look forward to the day when we are no longer limited by school holidays. Our Easter trip was helped by some good weather – it’s always a mixture early and late in the year, but we had good days for walking, cycling and otherwise enjoying the beautiful countryside of the Corbières, as well as days for reading, painting and model-making. Spring was very late in France as well, and the area had had heavy snowfalls that lay for days. Consequently, there was still mimosa in flower, and it was late in our stay before we could make our annual pilgrimage to see the minute daffodils and irises up on the hill. Yet curiously enough there were hundreds of flamingos on the étangs – and no shortage of mosquitos either.

I spent much of the Easter hols trying – and failing – to get Frogtel to set up the ADSL service I’d ordered on the internet. When I did reach them, the sales people told me I needed to talk to the techies, and the techies reciprocated. At one point, Martyn thought I was about to blow a gasket. None of which produced results, of course.

We came home via a few days at Annie’s house in the Gironde, arriving to find the boiler burst by the frost and the kitchen knee-deep in mouse shit. Annie’s co-owner had left food and dirty utensils in the kitchen when he left, so it was hardly surprising.

The travelling was mixed – leaving on Good Friday was a mistake. The tunnel and the French motorways were heaving with British tourists, and we’d decided on a longer than usual route to avoid bad weather. We stayed the night in a hotel in Fleurie that I used some twenty years ago: quiet and comfortable, and run by two friendly chaps, probably of our persuasion. The journey home was far better – the roads were quieter, so we made a pretty healthy average speed.

We routed via Berne for our summer trip: the laptop I’d bought in Fribourg in 1995 had become very unreliable, so I decided to get a decent machine as a birthday present to myself. We rather miscalculated the route, wrongly assuming that there was much more completed motorway through the Jura. So it was well after dark when we reached Pam and Geoff’s. Next time, we’ll grin and bear Basel.
As to computer shopping, we went to the new Media Markt in Gümligen, where ‘spricht jemand hier gerne Englisch?’ quickly resolved the language problem. Having researched at length and decided on a Sony or a Tosh, I came out with a Hewlett-Packard. The next task was to get it speaking to the world from Lagrasse. When we arrived, the router could see the ADSL service, but not the internet. A neighbour having given me the phone number for Frogtel’s anglophone help desk, I finally got a call back from a helpful young man who talked me through what had to be done to get the router correctly programmed. Now that that’s done, the service is vastly superior to what we get in the UK.


2010…

Unlike some years, the summer in Lagrasse was not too hot. We had a couple of warm days at the beginning of our stay, but for the rest of the time it was unspectacular, and cool enough for one or two bits of maintenance. And the paint was still on the door when we went back in October.
This came as a relief, since a week or so before we went south for half-term, I spent an anxious few hours watching the water level of the Orbieu rocketing up. You can watch it in real time on the internet: a gauge on the new bridge sends readings at frequent intervals to the Météo France website. When I checked it at around 6:00 am, the level had risen over four metres in less than twelve hours. When it reaches 7, the house floods, and the forecast was for further torrential rain. With a strong wind from the east and high waves on the Mediterranean, the Aude couldn’t exhaust quickly enough into the sea. Well, by around 8:00 I started to see a slight downward curve in the graph, and a more distinct curve in the reading upstream at Saint-Pierre des Champs. So we were lucky this time.

St Andrew's Day...

...ah, bitter chill it was. Hang on: that's not right. Honorable mention for whoever matches the right saint to the quote. Don't suppose one can blame one's patron saint anyway for the fact that it has been snowing all night and all day.

I headed out early for provisions, and soon appreciated having power to all four wheels. The car plodded gently uphill while others were slithering all over the place. I quickly abandoned Plan A, though: traffic on the road into town moved only when someone did a 3-point turn, as I soon did. This left me with the choice of shopping at higher altitude in the next county or trudging into the village daily in wellies until it thaws. On choosing the former, I found that the queue I'd left stretched right through the village and beyond.

I got to an uncharacteristically quiet Fortnum's easily enough, and stocked up for a siege. Only to find, when I went to load up a barrow-load of shopping, that the car didn't unlock in response to the remote control. So, with no visible keyhole on the outside of the car, I'd to ring for help. VW Assistance couldn't estimate how long it would take to get someone to me, but did reveal in the process that they worked through the RAC. I'd by then shoved my trolley back into the shop, and was starting to breakfast on milk and mini-stollen (from said trolley) when I spotted an RAC van in the filling station opposite. I squelched out across the road and grabbed him just in time, whereupon my phone rang to say that the RAC man assigned to my case was an hour and a half away in Chatham, in four inches of snow. Anyway, the excellent Shane soon got the show back on the road. My remote control was emitting no signal, but he knew (and I now know) the secret of finding the old-fashioned keyhole, so could open the car and start it the traditional way. Except for the shrieking of the alarm, which seems to have frightened the remote control back into action. It's an ill wind: Shane's next job was to have been closer to Chatham, hence an easier job for the man assigned to my breakdown, and the next job assigned to Shane was nearby, and closer to home.

Winter

Each year the idea of hibernation becomes more attractive. The temperature has not risen above zero for three days, and we're expecting flurries of snow on and off all day today. Headlines like 'Freeze Could Go On For Weeks' hardly improve the spirits. Still the skies have been generally pretty bright, which is better than the dark grey wet days of earlier in the month. We knocked off most of the Christmas shopping on Saturday in Rye, anad found a good address in the process - Fletcher's House in Lion Street, near the church: local sausages and mash, and a glass of pinot grigio per man. I suppose sitting by a blazing fire enjoying a nice meal and watching the snow falling outside should bring on an attack of festive spirit, but I'm bound to say it eluded me.

nice peaceful village

Read in the local rag that the two brothers who run the chippie in the village have gone Not Guilty to beating up the greengrocer next door. Better make sure I'm not on that trial. With interpretation from Turkish, it could be heavy going.

Money ill-spent

The bench dinner last night was enjoyable in most ways, but that couldn't be said for the food and drink. Our tickets got us an apéro and three courses. The white wine was thin and acidic, the soup bland, tepid and served with croûtons that weren't crisp even before they were dropped in the soup too early. The main course was OK-ish - not much you can do to ruin a loin of pork, really, except to leave it to dry out, and it must be said that it was on the edge of that. Fortunately the vegetables were of the energy-saving rather than school-dinners tendency. Pudding was sickly sweet, and the wine was mediocre and over-priced. Conversation was all but impossible over the noise of 100 or so judicial delinquents. Apart from that...it was nice to see friends, but I'd rather have had them round here for a bowl of decent soup...

...such as I served up at lunch time yesterday after a meeting with the Administration in the neighbouring county town. Cuts, cuts and more cuts to come, so my colleague and I were ready for a comforting bowl of lentil soup afterwards. Pleasant drive, though, amid the last of the superb autumn colours we've had this year. Today, since we have it to ourselves, is resolutely grey and damp, so it has been a day for more heart-warming soup (spiced butternut squash, bacon and potato) and a siesta. Upon which I shall presently engage.

More concessions, more Courtauld

At Martyn's suggestion, we went to Eltham Palace on Sunday. Wow! (an interjection I'm not greatly given to using.) I was last there in the late 70s for a nice little concert in the Great Hall thereof, introduced by the miraculously plain and utterly charming Dame Flora Robson. I wasn't aware then of the extraordinary house next door, built by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld. The house, seen from outside, is very handsome, though it was raining so hard that we didn't hang around to admire it. The interior is fabulous, if your tastes run to the Art Deco, as ours do. The only other place I have seen for myself such superb ocean-liner interiors was on Court N°3 at Bow Street, now no longer operating as such. I signed us up for English Heritage membership as we left, and by signing Martyn up with me, got him in at the concessionary membership rate. Does this make him an honorary old geezer?

A less attractive aspect of passing 60 is that one is invited to take part in the bowel cancer screening exercise. The process is one that repels squeamish blokes like me, but I finally steeled myself to the task earlier this month, and have been rewarded with a normal result.

Collected Egg2 from the repairers this morning. When I arrived, I found the newly repaired door slightly damaged. I then stumped off to do the shopping, snarling that I'd be back in between half an hour and an hour. They seem to have touched it in capably, and applied and cured the clear coat. According to Mr Painter, the door had been rehung wrongly, so that it conflicted with the trailing edge of the front door, and he was as disappointed as I was to see his work thus undone. It looks as if they have done a decent job, after final adjustments, but it did mean that I've effectively lost a few hours of my precious retirement. But we appear to have got a new tyre out of the process - I'd have been happier still if the tyre they replaced had been approaching my cranial condition.

Domestic violence court yesterday. Memo to colleagues: please use your sentencing guidelines when you ask for a pre-sentence report. It is frustrating to have to give a drunken wife-beater 50 hours' unpaid work because of your PSR instructions when the custody threshold has clearly been crossed. Snarl. SNARL!!

Culture and concessions

Annie is with us this weekend, so on Thursday, when she arrived from Hull, I took a ride up to a wet and windy London to meet her at the Courtauld Institute. It currently hosts an exhibition of Cézanne's card players. Just one room, but as well as the famous card player paintings, there's also a good collection of sketches, studies and finished portraits of the workers on his family's estate who modelled for the more famous pieces. Delightful collection. Annie is a frequent visitor to the Courtauld, but it was my first time there. The feel of the places is intimate, since it's on a modest scale as art collections go. And it's strange to turn a corner in the permanent collection to find yourself facing a world famous piece like Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe or Renoir's Bar at the Folies Bergères. (Having made a major mistake with a reflection in a piece I've just put in for framing, it's nice to see that Renoir wasn't above playing fast and loose with the laws of physics.) The Courtauld also has a good collection of Degas bronzes of dancers and horses. So go if and whenever you get a chance. I certainly shall.

It's a comforting factor of advancing years that these little trips attract the odd concession or two - £3.60 off the train fare, £1.50 off the gallery entrance and free rides on the buses. (My bus pass finally arrived last weekend, to mark my 60 years, 3 months and 15 days. The age at which one qualifies for a pass is being moved back in line with movement in the female state pension age.)

what's left in the freezer?

It is raining like the days before the ark floated. Lunch: miscellaneous veggie soup, home made rolls (au choix: plain ciabatta, ditto with capers and sundry tomatoes or half-wholemeal with poppy, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, turmeric and garam masala). Dinner: Bobbett's leeky bangers with carroty mash, latter nudged along with gros-grain mustard and, if it's still useable, crème fraîche. Let it rain, I say!

a quiet week

For me anyway, though it was back to work and then some for Martyn, who has had to cover for a missing colleague, losing his usually free Wednesday daytime. His car has now gone in for repair, and he is swanning around in a rather smart VW Passat, paid for by the insurers of the bus that wiped itself along the side of Egg2. When I drove the Passat, which has much the same engine and transmission as my car, I noted a hint of the same odd noise that mine makes under load. It wasn't altogether a surprise, then, to get a call from the garage to say that they had tested another like mine and found that it makes the same noise. So it seems not be be a fault so much as a design error. I shall fire off a note to the Obervolkswagnerei and see what they have to say.

Next door's ash tree has shed all its leaves now, I think, and most of them on our back grass as usual. The other neighbour's oak has a bit more dropping to do. I tried the leaf blower/vacuum sweeper on the fallen leaves with some success, but was not unhappy to stop when the rain came on. Once the oak has done its stuff, I'll take a stroll over the grass with the lawnmower. Otherwise, the garden is starting to look rather tired. The echinaceas have all died back, though the last of their rudbeckia cousins are still showing colour. The penstemons have been a bit feeble this year: I think they are protesting at the poor soil. Must get some muck in there next spring, when I may cut them back a little less severely than I did last year. Indoors, Jane's New Guinea busy lizzies are doing well - when I remember to water them. I've taken a few cuttings and put them in water on the kitchen window ledge, and if they show signs of rooting, I'll take a lot more. I know it's only early November, but I'm already starting to ache for the spring so I can start coaxing plants and seeds into life again. True, this year's autumn colours have been unusually spectacular. But to me they just signal the end of the show and the beginning of the long dark months to come.

home

We closed the house up yesterday, then ambled north to Puylaroque for dinner with Jan and Mark and an overnight stay. Not a bad drive, though the weather was pretty poor: we'd a heavy shower as we skirted round Mazamet, and a lot of drizzle the rest of the time. We turned into the airport at Castres, thinking it might be more pleasant to sit indoors to have our sandwiches. It was closed for lunch: not exactly the most active of airports, evidently. A bit later, we took the road along the gorge of the Aveyron, and enjoyed it: it would have been less impressive without the glorious autumn colours, of course. Lovely evening with our hosts, who have been working like mad on the lower floor of their now not so little house. They have made a fifth bedroom out of a former store room, and are talking about digging a ten-metre swimming pool next year.

Toulouse airport today was pretty bearable, as such places go. The new wing is bright and airy, and rather than queuing on a horrible dark corridor for security checks, you now line up alongside what looks like one of those steel cafeteria counters where you slide your tray along, adding dishes, until you get to get to the till. Only in this case, as you shuffle along, you put the laptop in one tray, watches, keys, the phone and loose change into your jacket which goes into another, together with your belt, and then you shuffle through the metal detector. For this last step I had to wait a moment while a now-ennobled Tory ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer was sent back and forth through the arch, finally having to be rubbed down by one of the security people. I said to him as we reassembled our belongings side by side that I always expected my teeth to set off the alarm, at which he chuckled, saying, 'Oh it's my metal knee that does it: I come through here every week and it always sets it off!'. He looked pretty fit for his 78 years, but has got a little of his weight back - maybe his daughter cooks the dinner now and then.

Gatwick was quite tolerable too, if third-world shabby as usual. At least it wasn't too busy. Our car park bus was there within a minute of our reaching the bus stop, and we were into the car and away in no time: a whole lot more quickly than if we'd been in the regular long-term car park. (I'd booked so late that there was no price advantage.)

It's always a shame to come to the end of a holiday, but we love our place here, so it's a pleasure to come home again. Of which fact I shall try to remind myself as I try to clear the grass of the tons of ash leaves that have fallen on it while we were away. Stand by for snarls this coming week or so, when we are to be subjected again to the attentions of the motor trade. Martyn's car goes in for repair on Wednesday, and mine for further Nasty Noise chasing on Friday.

a day for all the senses

This must have been a particularly good year for pyracantha berries. Wherever we go we've been coming across spectacular plants, laden with thick ropes of berries. In places, a number of different varieties have been planted as hedges, with berries in colours ranging from cream to pillar box red, with yellows, oranges and pinks in between. Come to think of it, we've had berries on our pyracanthas in England this year for the first time, so it looks like it's not peculiar to the Languedoc. Yesterday was a spectacularly fine autumn day, with long views through the clear air, and fabulous autumn colours in the forests and vineyards. There is a lot of snow on the Pyrenees already, yet it was warm enough to sit in the square at Limoux for lunch (though my pizza was the first wrong 'un I've had from that café). After lunch we strolled round to take a look at the menu at the intriguingly named Grand Hotel Moderne et Pigeon. Their top offering is a nine-course endurance test at €112 per head, including wines chosen to accompany each. Our lunch cost less than €30 for the two of us, including wine, and was every bit as indigestible...

While we were sitting in the square, an unfamiliar swept-wing shape lumbered across the sky, making turboprop noises - an A400M military transport, now officially marketed as the Grizzly. It's another of those awful aircraft development stories of numerous governments wanting subtly different things, and constantly changing their minds - most recently as to numbers, of course. A totally new engine was developed for it (unnecessarily, since there are US and Russian designs that would have needed only slight modification and a suitable licensing deal). Of course, the whole programme is years behind schedule and way over budget. Three prototypes are currently flying, and we probably saw the one currently based in Toulouse for icing tests. It will no doubt prove an excellent tool for delivering young lives to be cut short in Afghanistan, Iraq and the like.

Talking of planes, our cubic metre of chopped-up plane wood has gone down pretty fast, so we've had to resort to liberating grubbed up carignan vines from some of the many disused vineyards in the neighbourhood. The vignerons tend to pile them up in the fields until they have dried enough to burn easily - we've seen a lot of them smouldering away as we've driven round. So we justify our liberating tendencies with the argument that when we burn them, we at least send less heat into the atmosphere, and avoid using other sources of energy - give or take the odd litre of diesel to schlepp it back here! And I have to say that carignan is probably better, with notable exceptions, at heating rooms than making good wine.

Strange pattern...

It's really odd how often we arrive here on a bright still day and sit out on the roof terrace enjoying fresh air, views and vin rosé, only for the weather to change next day. For the last couple of days we've had a vicious north-west wind (known here as the Cers, the local name for the Tramontane). Our wood pile is diminishing fast, since we spend a lot of time huddled round the stove.

But the air is clear (apart from our wood smoke), and the vines are turning, making the landscape a beautiful patchwork of reds and yellows. We took a ride along to Narbonne yesterday in search of a power cable for my laptop (I'd wrongly thought there was one down here). We came home with a not inexpensive 'universal' transformer, the universality of which, unfortunately doesn't extend to such niche and obscure computer suppliers as Hewlett Packard... So back to Narbonne today, I fear. Why does the world need more than one flavour of power supply for mobile phones and laptop PCs? Come to that, why does the world need more than one pattern of inkjet printer cartridge? And don't start me on the minor controls on motor cars. (At least horn buttons seem to be migrating back to where they belong, in the middle of the steering wheel.)

[Later] Well, we swapped the non-universal transformer and a handful of notes for jeans and shirts today in Narbonne, then ambled down the coast and back over the hills. Some fabulous long views of snowy Pyrenees, and terrific autumn colours in the vineyards. I don't think I've ever seen as many pied wagtails as we did today on the way home across the Corbières. At one point we must have put up at least three dozen of them.

I still don't like the car, which, thanks to sloppy seats and excessive roll, makes the winding roads in the Corbières feel like a fairground ride. The car is small, yet I find it very difficult to place accurately on the road. Maybe it's too long since I used left-hand drive, though that oughtn't to make me so uncomfortable with this one. The engine is willing enough, but the brakes are on/off, and if you can feel anything through the steering wheel, you're hallucinating.

Village life

As usual, within a few hours of getting here, we'd bumped into and chatted with several people we know, including Nathalie, who used to live in the village and keep an eye on the house for me. She and her family moved to the Cévennes a few years ago, but come back to visit quite often. Her daughter, recently dumped by her philandering boyfriend after 13 years, was also in the party: it seems he had finally proposed marriage - two weeks before he finally walked.

We have already made major inroads into the firewood supply. The plane wood Didier brought us burns well, but I think we'll have to keep the stove stopped down a bit if a cubic metre is to last us the eight days we are here. It was actually mild enough for us to have apéritifs up on the terrace last night. The swallows, swifts and house martins appear to have left us, and I think it was starling we saw taking their place, darting around and catching flies. From up there, the view is a bit grim at the moment. The garden we look down into has been slowly pushing the retaining wall into the street, so our neighbour has the builders in to shore it up or rebuild it. Consequently, the garden is a disaster area: shame, since it used to be very pretty (see picture). The red-leaved prunus (presumably the cause of the problem) has been sawn off, and the planting scheme currently comprises cement mixers, concrete blocks and wheelbarrows. André and Huguette who live across the street from the building site will be enjoying the unaccustomed light.

Back at the Fat Wifie

It’s good to be back, but the process of getting here is a pain. Since we’re in the south for just over a week, we came by Easyjet to Toulouse, and have rented a car. The only respectable prices were for the 06:25 flight, which meant alarm clock at 03:00, depart around 04:10 for the wet, windy and winding drive to the airport, where breakfast was served by graduates of the N°93 Soviet Satellite State School of Surly Service. I suppose they were on the overnight shift, and had had a basinful of bolshy boozy Brits. The flight was then delayed by half an hour while the aeroplane was ‘deep-cleaned’ to neutralise the nasty niff that greeted the dispatcher when he opened the door. Toulouse, thank goodness, was sunny and mild, the airport lavatories were clean and un-smelly (in stark contrast with those at Gatwick), and the car rental desk clerk was friendly and helpful. But the hidden extra excess waivers are always rather annoying. Sure, you can have the published rental price. But note that if you biff the car or it’s stolen, you’re responsible for the first €1000 bzw. €1200, and if you burst a tyre or break the windscreen you aren’t covered at all. The car – a C3 Picasso in regulation hire-car metallic grey – does the job willingly enough, but handles like a sack of potatoes, not helped by a total lack of lateral support in the seats, and the interior is distinctly grubby. I imagine that, with 11’000km on the clock, it’s probably on its last rental.

That aside, quite a busy week, with a last day of wannabeak interviews on Wednesday. We’ve got 11 suitables, against a target of 10, out of 40-odd applicants. With our ‘trade union’ hats on, a couple of us went to meet our new local top cop, and found him welcoming and approachable. But as for true magisterial work, I’ve practically forgotten how to do it, so few are my sittings lately.

At Thursday’s art class I did some final fiddling with the two canvases that have been tormenting me for too long, and slapped on each a signature and a coat of varnish. I have brought my tiny water colour kit with me, and might take a ride up to Carcassonne for some water colour paper and brushes. On the other hand, I might get some tubes of acrylic primaries, since I have a few canvases here… But I might more probably just sit and read a book.

I tried out the motor mower yesterday for the first time. It cuts grass. The electric one it replaces was OK for the tiny patches of grass at Smith Towers, but the greensward of Forges-l’Evêque is far bigger, and was taking an hour and a half to cut, particularly if I’d left it more than a week. The new contraption cuts a far wider swathe through the grass, and drives itself, sort of, accompanied by that old-tech Briggs & Stratton chunter familiar to gardeners the world over. It starts easily, but is rather heavy to manoeuvre: I imagine there’s a knack that I may eventually acquire. Fortunately, it fits into a corner of the big garage.

Here at Château Smith, all seems to be in order, and the place is spotlessly clean, no thanks to me. John and Margaret left here after us in the summer, and left the place clean and polished – not to mention equipped with a fresh 10-litre box of Camplong red! Didier’s truck is outside, with a stère of firewood on it, as ordered over the phone before we came away. I’ll catch up with him later to get it unloaded and paid for, then we can try to coax the fire into life. Another neighbour has some vines and kindling for us to burn, since her chimney is lethal, and her landlord indifferent. And having put all these measures in place, we arrive to find that the temperature is mild. Mustn’t grumble.

Panic over

The early hours of Monday were a bit of a sphincter tester. With friends in the village posting facebook comments like 'anyone got Noah's phone number?', I logged in to the real time water height graphic as reported by the gizmo on the rive droite by the pont nouveau. The river started rising on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning it had risen by almost 4 metres. Parts of the Languedoc-Roussillon region had two months' rain in one day.

Eleven years ago, I was sitting in my flat in Munich with the telly droning away on a French channel in the background. When I heard the key word 'inondation' closely followed by 'Aude', I started to worry. None of my village contacts' phones were working, and it wasn't until the Monday that I could reach the gendarmes in Carcassonne to establish that there had indeed been flooding in the village. Well, after a fretful day or so, I booked a couple of flights and headed south. By the time I got there on the Wednesday, the neighbours, pompiers and army had swept out the worst of the mud, pumped out the cellar, and got someone in a neighbouring town to call me to tell me to contact my insurers. (For some reason, it had occurred to me a few days earlier to check when my insurance expired, and, on learning that the date was in the past, to call the agents to renew it.) That time it went over 7 metres.

Well, eleven years on, we still discover little pockets of mud here and there. Those of you who have ever been flooded will know that it isn't nice clean water that soaks your carpets and sofas, and sinks into the grout in the floor tiles. But we've got away with it this time, and if it hasn't recurred meanwhile, we might move the electronics upstairs next time we leave.

Sonst, not a bad week, so the grass is cut and patched, and I've scrounged even more from the garden of a friend who's about to move house. I'm going to try and over-winter her New Guinea busy lizzies, so that, if I succeed with cuttings, we should have young plants to put out next summer.

The washing machine arrived on Monday as promised. I was astonished that they'd sent one man on his own to deliver it, since it took us to our limits to hoist the old one in and out of the car when we took it to be recycled. But I suppose I have to recognise that he was less than half my age, fit and trained. Back in the mid-fifties, Dad asked for advice on what make of washing machine to go for. Reply from his contact in the trade was 'David: they a' wash claes.' This yin washes claes as weel.

Court Tuesday, interviewing yesterday followed by training on curfews, art this morning. I've had a final fiddle, I hope, with my two current canvases, so might slap on some varnish this afternoon so as to dissuade myself from further fiddling. And so to siesta.

Retired? Moi?

And the good news is that I had a delightful lunch with art class colleagues, and picked apples from our hosts' groaning trees. And the new washing machine is arriving on Monday. Must remember to hang out the bunting.

So much for a day in the garden

Got off to a flying start yesterday: by ten I'd taken the bottles for recycling, taken a big quilt to the laundry, put a small quilt in the washing machine, donated various soft toys and a couple of dozen paperbacks to the local hospice shop, and bought dinner. So I was ready to don the wellies and get my new plants planted.



So back to the process of dealing with what fell out when we moved the furniture: two quilts washed and dried, and another couple of pillows into the machine. Back to routine laundry today, and in the meantime the grass has not refrained from growing. Ain't life a breeze?

Of cars, buses and lawnmowers

Not a day when we celebrate our relationship with the motor vehicle. The new car went to the garage again for further investigation of the Funny Noise it makes under load. They can’t do anything until they have listened to a car of the same specification, so it looks as if I’ll be back and forth to the VW shop for some time. They did at least have the good grace to wash the car before handing it back.

Better luck with house fettling: the carpet fitters came and went, and we’ve got the furniture back into the back bedroom, slightly re-disorganised. After all the exertion, we decided we deserved our occasional treat of fish and chips. Unfortunately, as Martyn returned to the car bearing hot fish and chips, a passer-by told him that a bus had just hit the side of the car. M duly gave chase, and collared the driver at the terminus a few hundred yards away. The scars on both vehicles were pretty obvious, so the driver didn’t contest it. So, the fish and chips were cold by the time M got home, and pretty dried up by the time he’d told his story three times to various departments and agents of his insurers.

Still, not a wholly fruitless day: our friend Jane, who hopes to move house soon, had asked me round to help myself to any plants I fancied from her garden, so I shall be planting out tomorrow: hosta, astrantia, alliums, Canterbury Bells and other bits and pieces. Good-oh. And she’s flogging me her nearly new motor mower, which she won’t need at her new place. Just hope the house deal goes through!

A good weekend

Hedge trimmed, grass cut, Saturday lunch at a favourite pub. Well, the smallest of the hedges is done, and I'll probably tackle a couple of the others, but the green wall of leylandii across the back is somewhat more daunting. With an eye to avoiding litigation, I've hacked back some branches of trees and shrubs that overhang the (unlit) footpath. Imbued with all this energy, we've made another advance in our campaign against Magnolia: there's a first coat of pale blue paint on the spare bedroom walls. Hall, stairs, landing and the bedroom remain to be tackled, however. I can't imagine why people use the wretched colour. The property-porn TV shows describe it as 'magnificent magnolia'. The version currently being sold is a rather pallid flesh colour: when our walls had it inflicted on them, it was a dirty white. Neither bears any resemblance to the colour of any living magnolia I've met, so I'll stick with my qualifier: Miserable Magnolia.

Splendid lunch at Barbara's today: salad with smoked salmon and big shrimps, followed by bangers and mash, all helped along with a Corbières from the reliable boys at the Celliers du Mont Tauch in Tuchan. Not a lovely drive to Brighton, though: a mix of ditherers and racing motorbikers taking dreadful risks. Overtaking at 90 in a 50 limit across double white lines. I suspect a percentage of them won't make old bones, and hope they don't take any innocent road users with them. Where are the police when you want them?

finies, les vacances

Slightly less clumsy in the garden, I hope. I've planted up some pots with a couple of layers of tulips each, plus some pansies on the top row for winter colour. I've slapped in a few bits and pieces from the staging - the last remaining lavatera, a gaillardia grown on from a friend's seedlings, and a couple of freebie violas we were given by an ever grateful and highly solvent local garden centre. I've spread last spring's daffodil and muscari bulbs across two hanging baskets, also with some pansies on top, so ought to be set up with colour for autumn, winter and spring.

I might get out and do a spot of hedge trimming at the front today. The ghastly leylandii have been growing like mad things, and are making manoeuvring the new, wider car a bit tricky. I'm not sure whether I'll tackle the big hedge at the back myself, but we certainly won't be bringing in the firm we've used in past years. Last year they didn't quote before doing the work, and I almost fainted when the bill arrived. Costly business, home ownership. We had to Get Someone In to unstop the kitchen gully again yesterday: second time this year. The fall on the drain is obviously not steep enough, and one quickly forgets to be careful what one sends down the sink. Tempting to seek out the architect and send him down...

Oh, and the best mixed metaphor since 'barking up a dead horse' at the AGM the other night. 'They'll find it's a poisoned chalice that comes back and bites them in the backside'. Visualise, using one side of the paper only.

Retired, eh?

My feet have scarcely touched the ground this week, and when they have, it has tended to be beneath the computer desk preparing prior to dashing off to the next meeting.

Nevertheless, I've squeezed in a token amount of gardening: a hurtle round with the mower, and planting the herbaceous plants I bought last week. At Thursday's art class I dashed off a very quick watercolour landscape of blocks of autumn colour, and had a final fiddle with the landscape (acrylics) that has been work-in-progress for four months.

The new motor is certainly no looker, but is good in other respects: thrifty, solid, refined and easy to operate, though I'm still trying to learn how to use the automatic parking contraption. It's one of those cars (a bit like the good old 405) that is easy to place on the road, even though the nose slopes away quite sharply. It lacks the darkened windows of Egg2, and the huge C-post blind spots seem less awkwardly placed, so it's easier to back into parking spaces. Just writing that is obviously tempting fate - expect anguished reports of scraped sides and dented corners.

Modern times

Gone are the days when one could draw a cheque and get goods or services without much more than flashing a guarantee card. Or maybe a phone call to the manager: ‘Jimmy, I’m getting the new car tomorrow, so there’ll be a cheque coming through for £1000’. ‘Och, that’ll be fine, David: I’ll tell the lassies. Whit are ye gettin?’ This time the garage insisted on payment by debit card, so I duly switched the funds across (from a hotel room in the Loire valley equipped with a free wifie), following up with a call to the bank’s call centre ‘you’re through to Yassir this morning, can I have your name please?’ Said I was calling to give advance notice of a big transaction on the debit card: he wasn’t interested enough to take any action – or, more likely, wasn’t empowered to do anything that wasn’t on his scripted screen – saying that the merchant’s clearing service would sort it out with the bank. Delightful Edinburgh-Indian accent, though.

Turned up at appointed hour at the car shop to do the biz. Bank insisted on speaking to me. Wanted to know two characters from my memorable word ‘maybe your mother’s maiden name?’ Well, it wasn’t that or any of the other usual suspects. Cutting a long and stressful story short, I’d to go to a branch of the bank with ID and change the by now notoriously unmemorable word. 24 hours and a further list of questions later, eg middle name, postcode and address, what accounts I held at the bank (one of them for 38 years, btw), and what direct debits I had on my personal current account, I was finally allowed to complete the business. It’s bad enough dealing with the motor trade at the best of times, and when I finally left in my shiny new car, I was feeling really quite negative about the whole experience, and wondering whether it was worth the aggro and expense. I suppose one should be grateful for all the security measures. It would be nice, though, to think that they were there to help customers rather than to satisfy the bank’s lawyers and insurers.

Fortunately, the first few hours with the car were satisfactory. It feels very robust, it doesn’t rattle, and it goes where it’s pointed – including, fortunately, into the garage: I’d thought I might first have to take off the wireless aerial. It lacks a few of the toys fitted as standard to Egg2 like the rain-sensing wipers (which I didn’t really like) and the light-sensing gear for the headlamps (which I did). It has very peculiar arrangements in lieu of a handbrake, and it’ll take time to get the hang of the park-assist gizmo, which I may learn to love. I have it only because I wouldn’t get parking sensors in the back bumper otherwise, such being VW’s rapacious extras policy. (Funny that you get so much more as standard on their subsidiary brands, SEAT and Škoda.) We’ve gone for the no-nonsense version of the Tiguan that will actually go up and down bumpy hills, so it lacks the acres of chrome and poncey spoilers of the Chelsea Tractor versions. Can’t wait to get it into the Pyrenees! I wonder what’ll become of Egg1 – the auction ring, I expect. Although it drives better and far more economically than Egg2, it has a history of puzzling (is there any other sort?) electrical faults. And it rattles.

First art class of the new term yesterday. Miss had brought in a heap of fiendish objects to draw – sea shells, twigs, rat skulls, dried seaweed – so I did as I was told, sketching a couple of pieces, and using water colours for the first time in years. Absolute shite results of course, but quite fun to do. Then as usual I rebelled and slapped a bit more acrylic on the current work in progress, and think I’ve found a way to rescue it. Otherwise, it’s the bin, or a couple of coats of gesso prior to re-using the canvas for something else.

A bit of gardening this weekend, I think: I have three unexpected purchases to plant. I took Egg2 for a wash after getting it sorted on Tuesday (the 800-bomber sound effects from the a/c turned out to have been caused by a six-inch length of masking tape in the works: I suspect it has been in there since the car left the factory, but I coughed up for half an hour’s labour with relief and without demur). The car wash boys couldn’t change a £20 note, so I’d to go into the adjacent garden centre, where I found a lovely penstemon in a colour we hadn’t already got. I was so busy enthusing about penstemons with the cashier that I’d paid for it with a credit card before I remembered that that primary reason for going in there was to get change… Back in for a birthday card, and I was on my way. Yesterday I ran the new car down over the frontier to our nearest Lidl, and found they were selling phlox plants at interesting prices. Good news, because one of our flower beds is a bit short of late summer colour, and phloxes seem to do OK in our dreadful soil. So a spot of gentle gardening in prospect to help dispel the grumpy old thoughts of the last couple of days. Usually does the trick!

Bank Holiday Monday

No rain yet, oddly enough, but it's cool, with a sharp breeze out of the north. After the last week or so of hot weather in the Languedoc, it came as a bit of a shock to find Calais wet and windswept yesterday. A shame therefore that our hopes of getting away early (we got there soon after 2:00 pm) were dashed. Maybe we've been lucky in previous years: I guess one shouldn't count on jumping queues at a Bank holiday weekend that coincides with the grande rentrée. That aside, the journey was really not too bad, and the cooler weather was handy in view of our dodgy air-conditioner fan.

To our surprise, the A75 is still not complete: we'd to come down to single file over an unfinished section south of Lodève, and as the stretch south of the Pas d'Escalette was already pretty busy, it made for pretty slow going. Still, by the time we reached our overnight stop in Blois, the average speed wasn't far short of 60 mph (during actual driving time - a fair bit less when you take account of the occasional pause-pipi). We'd advance notice that the motorway was pretty clogged around Vierzon, so we took a bit of a detour through the very pretty Loire valley countryside, looking briefly from a distance at my favourite little Château of Cheverny. Visitor numbers have plainly grown since I was last there forty-four years ago: the village looks pretty and well looked after, despite having to make provision for huge visitor car parks. Before we left Blois, we took a ride round the centre to see the château through the car windows. Like Cheverny, the place looks much more cared for than it did in 1966.

Martyn found an excellent minor road that took us pretty well in a straight line to Le Mans, give or take the occasional zigzag down into a river valley and up the other side. Advance warning of bouchons on the A16 after Boulogne seemed to be false alarms so far as we could see, but it used up some of what turned out to be our copious free time. A thing that has struck us all over France is the effort communities are putting into their floral displays. Lagrasse is a bit of an exception, I fear, though the baker has put out some very pretty tubs of bedding plants - probably to stop people parking across his frontage. In Calais, the square in front of the Town Hall looks somewhat incongruously cheerful, with tall bedding plants cheerfully masking Rodin's evocative statue depicting the sufferings of the Bourgeois de Calais. But since the Town Hall tower is shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulins, a bit of distraction is welcome, I guess.

We've left John and Margaret in charge at Château Smith following a really enjoyable week with them. Apart from the day in Sète and a trip into Carcassonne for a tour of the citadel followed by lunch, we did a whole lot of not very much, which is as good a way to spend a holiday in good company as I can think of. The bug screens John and I put up have pretty well cured the problem of flies in the house. One design flaw, however: when we were at a very late stage of stapling the screen to the window aperture, Martyn emerged from a small place that encourages peaceful contemplation of the problems of the world and said: 'what happens when you come to close the shutters?'. Temporary solution, then: one corner of the screen is held back with a lightly-affixed staple that will have to be removed and replaced every time we open the shutters. So much for the combined design skills of a Chartered Engineer and a Master of Arts. BA Hons Business to the rescue.

All seems well back at Forges-l'Evêque, thanks to Celia's ministrations to the garden and the eponymous Mr Waterman's work on the central heating (which we needed last night!). I shall get out and do some hay-making later. Or maybe tomorrow. Two days' travelling followed by a trip to the supermarket take it out of an old geezer, you know!

Fifteen seconds of fame, maybe...

We went to the joutes along at Sète yesterday, since it's a lot of fun, and Margaret and John hadn't been there before. Yesterday's jousting was the championship of the lourds, and as the name implies there were some pretty big splashes when they hit the water. Parking was a swine of a job, though, and the town's mediocre restaurants were struggling to cope with demand. For the uninitiated, the joute consists of teams of blokes rowing big heavy ten-oar boats at each other along the canal, with jousters armed with shields and lances standing on a raised platform at the blunt end, each trying to project his opponent into the water. Of course, what the crowd wants to see is both of them going in, and the cheer that goes up when this happens is something to be experienced.

I love it. It's the second time we've been, and this ancient spectacle (18th century, I was told), about the origins of which I'd love to know more, is great fun. We don't have it in the UK - the water's too cold! Such was more or less the text of my national TV interview on the subject. Don't know if it was screened: afraid to say we haven't got French TV here in France...

Somewhat more mundane pursuits today: we went in search of double-walled planters with water reservoirs, like wot M&J had when they lived in Guérande (Loire Atlantique). The lady at Les Jardins de Jean knew the product, but said they were out of business now. Thence to the routine food shopping, and to Brico d'Oc to get some bits and pieces. The brackets fastening our clothes rail to the shelf in the wardrobe fell to bits yesterday morning. Surprisingly enough, I found the self-same brackets in the shop, so for once I had a DIY job for which I had the right spare parts, the right tools and pre-drilled pilot holes. And I could see why the old brackets had failed, so stand a chance of having a longer lasting solution. We also got some fly screen netting to hang over the small window in the living room. Handy to have an engineer on the premises - he had the project planned and implemented in short order, and we have designs on the bigger window for tomorrow. Or maybe Thursday. Or maybe next time we're down...

douce France...

The peculiar noise from the fan in Egg 2's air conditioning did not respond as one might have hoped to a thump on the dashboard this morning while we were in Carcassonne. If allowed to spool up to max, it sounds like a Dakota taking off. The Carcassonne Egg-fettlers have moved, so I'd to try ringing them when we got home. 'Impossible avant la semaine du 30 août', when we shall, if it be the will of Egg 2, be back in England. Tries Narbonne. 'We're on holiday: please call again on Monday'. Thanks to the wonders of email, it is now booked into our UK chaps on 31 Aug. I love France. I adore France! But when I have to interact with Frogtel or the motor trade, please stand by with intravenous vin rosé.

A bearable existence

We went to the market yesterday, returning with a basket of veggies from Isabelle and her rather gorgeous son (whom Kate saw first...), fruit from some Occitan or Catalan speakers, various little brown paper bags from the glorious smelling spice stall, but not much cheese! Madame Donnay, supplier of ewes' milk cheese to the discerning, had none on view save a bit of fromage blanc. The colourful Jean-Baptiste was stationed at his usual pitch by the contraceptive vending machine, and has supplied us with eggs and goats' milk cheese. En route we replenished supplies of essential fluids: red, white, rosé, diesel and propane.

Today we've been a bit more energetic, and legged it up to the Roc de la Cagalière, from which the brave can get 360° panoramas. At one point on the walk Martyn spotted a deer in the woods, and we met a lot of butterflies: at one point we had a sort of escort of a dozen or so small ones, some pale blue, some reddish brown. The Cagalière is probably the best of our local walks. The first bit is quite strenuous, rising through a steep lotissement known hereabouts as Beverly Hills, and doesn't really let up much until you reach the viewpoint. After that it's a very civilised little walk, including a 'parcours botanique' set up by our local nature guru, Patrick, from the Office National des Forêts. (His much-deserved promotion means we shall be losing him, and I hope the good citizens of Foix, to which he's transferring, appreciate their good fortune.) The steep descent into the village makes one feel quite virtuous, knowing that one scrambled up it earlier. And the panaché in the Café de la Promenade didn't touch the sides.

to the hills

It being a fine clear day, we took to the hills. Initially to take our favourite view of the high Corbières and Pyrenees from above Arques, and then, on impulse, to enjoy the views from the col at Pailhères. In between, we tried a road over the Col du Pradel, finding a 'route barrée' sign at the summit. Helpful, we thought. Well, when we got to the col, the dreadlocked and dentally-impaired chap who had passed us on the way up was losing a bit of weight by the roadside, and came to ask us if we knew anything about the supposed closure. Establishing that we were close neighbours, he from the Pas de Calais and we from the other end of the tunnel, we entered into a pact to try it and see. The road seemed to have disappeared at one point, so the cows were treating it as an extension of their territory. Further down, there were some eroded edges that I wouldn't want to have met after dark and after dinner. That aside, nae bather, and a breathtaking road we shall drive again. We parted company with our old hippy friend at the foot of the hill with a couple of hoots on the horn, and headed off up to Pailhères. Amazing. We couldn't quite see the sea, but we could certainly see as far as the valley of the Garonne.

...and back again

It was nice to see how the garden has been behaving in our absence, largely thanks to Celia and Andy, who have been dropping in to do some watering. We ate our runner bean crop at one sitting, and ditto this year's 4 apples. What producer wouldn't rejoice in a 33% year-on-year increase in the apple crop? But a big disappointment on arriving home was the absence of a bus pass. It seems (not that the toon cooncil told me unprompted) that my birthday falls two weeks too late for me to have a bus pass at 60: my application won't be processed until November, as part of a process of aligning bus pass entitlement to the changing female retirement age. Poor show, what! And of course when we left yesterday, before the sparrow had felt the mildest abdominal twinge, my senior rail pass was ineffective. So it's still a case of all the penalties of age with none of the benefits.

It seems that the new car is in the UK. Whether I take delivery will depend on the extent to which the dealer stops quibbling over the trade-in value of Egg 1. I have drawn a line in the sand, and the outcome could be that we cancel the order and spend a few hundred quid to get Egg 1 back into top condition, rather than spending thousands on a new car. I think I've said before that all dealings with motor car salesmen leave me feeling rather soiled.

The ride back was altogether easier than last Saturday's experience, even if the weather was less lovely than on the way north. It was almost as much of a struggle to get out of Montpellier as it was to get in, so if ever we do the journey home by train again, we'll try to do it from Narbonne.

Nice ritual this morning: if we can, we go each year for a walk with Kate and John over the Fesses de Charlemagne to pick lavender and blue thistles. We came home with a well-filled back-pack, which I shall now go and distribute round the house.

Another day, another country.

Loooong day yesterday. The drive to Montpellier was OK for a summer Saturday, though we were glad we weren’t heading the other way: from where we joined the motorway near Béziers, the traffic on the other side was at a crawl for miles and miles on end. Then when we saw a warning of ‘ralentissement’ ahead on our side, we took off to pick up what we used to know and love as the N113. That proved to be slow as well, since the villages along the way are a mass of traffic lights, and we weren’t the only ones to decamp from the motorway. Montpellier is a mass of road works and diversions: the city is extending its admirable tram network, and the consequent traffic chaos is a wonder to observe.

The TGV ride to Lille was fine, despite backward-facing seats – there’s something faintly surreal about hurtling backwards at 300 kph, sipping chilled rosé! At one point, Martyn discovered that although our (lower) deck was quite full, there was only one person in the upper deck, so we promoted ourselves, and enjoyed fine views of the countryside, seeing where we were going, rather than where we’d been. I had forgotten how lovely the landscape is for the hour or so north of Lyon – beautiful rolling terrain, well wooded with pretty villages and mixed farming, including a lot of fine charolais beef on the hoof. We were about 10 minutes late into Lille, the same margin as when we left Montpellier five and a bit hours earlier. The train had obviously clawed back a bit of time, but we were held up for a while outside Marne-la-Vallée-Chessy (escaped Bambis and Baloos from the adjacent Disneyland, perhaps?). We had an hour or so to kill in Lille. Fine city, but the area around the railway station of any large city is rarely the most refined, and I fear Lille is no exception. The adjacent shopping mall is somewhere we wanted out of quickly, and the new station itself is grubby, noisy and unwelcoming. Had the UK signed up for the Schengen Accords, the experience would be better. But the need to queue up for two lots of passport checks and baggage security erodes the margin that the train enjoys over the aeroplane. Once on the busy Eurostar, civilisation reigned, however briefly. Friendly, helpful staff and an efficient hurtle to London. The journey home was the worst part – no Northern Line trains at King’s Cross, so we’d to walk miles underground and change trains, arriving just in time to see the Hastings train pull out of Charing Cross. The clickety-clack local train home was a hell of a come-down after high-speed travel, as was the surround of inane chatter and mobile phone conversations from giggly girlies on their drunken way home. So I was firmly in grumpy-old-git mode by the time we got home.

A glance at the garden shows the fruits of a bench colleague’s labour: she has been doing some watering while we’ve been out and about, and it all looks pretty good – except for the long grass, to which I shall apply myself a bit later. Once I’ve worked through the mountain of mail.

Beverly's party +1

Delightful bash last night, a few days before Beverly hits a decade fewer than I celebrated last month. She celebrated in style at a local chai. Jazz, dancing, some nibbles, vast amounts of wine. It could just have done with being 5° warmer.

Back to earth with a thud this morning: the first coat of thinned paint left the front door looking even worse. Fortunately, a second coat looks more promising, so a third tomorrow should do the trick.

Maintenance

The front door at Château Smith wasn't exactly improved by the 1999 floods, and the coat of paint I slapped on it five years ago has not really stood the test of time. I made a start yesterday on burning off the paint, but on discovering a bit more rot at the foot of the door, decided that another palliative coat is probably the best approach. I've done a bit of digging out and filling with putty and polyfilla, and have been over the good paint with the ponceuse, taking a bit of sandpaper on a block to the bevelled edges of the tongue-and groove. It's not only the door, of course: the door itself takes up half the width of a big vault, all of it filled with woodwork. I guess it would be worse if it spent its life exposed to the Mediterranean sun, but it's not as if the north abstains from throwing weather at it either. We'll get the excellent Mr Sedki to come in and replace it in a few years' time. Meanwhile, another half-ton of polyfilla should get us through the winter. We'll save the re-sealing of the roof terrace until Part 2, I think.

Rain!

After a nice lunch Chez Hervé in Sallèles yesterday, we spent a pleasant hour recovering gently by the canal, watching the occasional duck or Noddy boat float by. The duck looked faintly disgruntled, perhaps because I'd devoured a substantial amount of a relative at Hervé's table a little earlier. From there we ambled gently down to where the Canal de la Jonction, a branch of the Canal du Midi, joins the Aude, and watched a Noddy boat struggling to navigate into the canal from the river. Thence to the sea, over the Massif de la Clape, and into the clouds. Not a day for paddling, in our book, but I guess it was better from the point of view of the hordes on the beach than staying in the waterfront dwellings thereabouts. We got home shortly before the thunderstorms began. Good news: the piss-streaked post-festival streets have been well washed down. Bad news: some rainwater was coming in under the roof terrace door and dripping down into the stairwell. We already have a couple of maintenance projects on our list for this visit, but are trying our best to ignore the fact.

It seems to be a good year for oleanders. I've had to prune one by the front door, and our two newish plants are in flower, though straggling a bit. Up by that essential element of French village life, the Caserne des Sapeurs-Pompiers, the hedge they planted around the time the new fire station was built is well settled, bushed out and flowering vigorously. Our mint is doing pretty well, but our only other culinary achievement is a pot of basil, bought this morning at Carrefour...

August again, already, yet!

Martyn's celebrated baby plum tomato bruschettas found another appreciative audience yesterday. Old friends Immy and Jon and their five daughters have been camping along at Vias Plage, so came here for lunch, laundry and a swim in the river. They are heading for Spain this morning so I hope that, as I write at 08:30, they are well on their way. France goes on holiday in August, and in consequence the main roads are chokka throughout the first and last weekends, as well as around the 15 August holiday. I remember returning from somewhere close to the border on the first Sunday in August a few years ago, and the traffic was at a standstill as far north as Narbonne. With tens of thousands of cars full of tired parents and hot, cross bairns, there are minor shunts and breakdowns everywhere, and a few more serious pile-ups. If we go out today, we'll stay clear of any roads beginning with A or N - and following the baffling and utterly wasteful reclassification of the old routes nationales - a lot of the bigger D roads as well.

Pension day, I hope?

Phew - solvent again. I read recently that the collapse of the BT Pension Fund would leave pensioners with a minimum of 57% of current income. Well, as long as it hangs on until I'm of an age to be saving from my state pension, let's make hay while the sun shines. The new car should arrive in September, the new boiler should be in and working by the time we return to the UK, and I'd little compunction this morning in spending a few days' pension on some decent red wine.

Château Aiguilloux is always a rewarding visit (though usually for them more than for us in crude monetary terms). Madame Lemarié speaks with passion and humour about their wines, and they reliably make silk purses out of sows' ears through judicious combinations of ancient carignan with syrah, grenache and mourvèdre: syrah and carignan only for their best stuff. I've been buying from them at intervals for some years, and tend to leave a few of their bottles to mature here for a year or two. We opened one on Wednesday, and it was pretty damn' good. Meanwhile, we have stocked up with everyday stuff from Camplong. The rosé seems fine - better than last year's; the white is 'correcte', and we'll see how the red is when we finish the box of château newsagent.

Back in contact with the world

After numerous calls to Frogtel, we are back in internet contact. On arrival, we couldn't even use dial-up, and it took two days of calls, most of which resulted in 'go away, we're busy' to get them to make an appointment for a techy to call us on day 3. Service is a bit intermittent, but when it's working, it is hugely better than our BT service to the edge of a provincial town in the south-east of England. Here we are in a remote village of 600 souls in the Corbières. Go figure.

John's birthday

Happy 63rd, Mr Engineer Smith!

It was only when we got here on Sunday that we realised why we’d originally planned to arrive on Monday. The pop festival was in full swing for its last night. Each year, there are three nights of over-amplified ‘music’ in the market square, running from about 9:00 pm until 3:00 am. For the first year or two it was held on the football pitch, but when the association that runs it ran out of money and couldn’t afford to rent a marquee, the municipality stepped in and offered them the use of the Halle in the centre of the village. Well, as it turned out, we were so tired when we got here that I crashed out on the sofa, not waking until 01:30, and Martyn fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. We left the bedroom shutters and windows closed, and had the fan running. So the noise of the festival didn’t keep us awake for long.

The journey here was long but without problems. We were at the end of the tunnel an hour before we needed to be, so asked to be allocated a place on an only-just-earlier shuttle. As it turned out, they had miscalculated its capacity, so we finished up on the one we’d originally booked, only seven minutes later. And as we’d been bumped from the earlier one, we were boarded as a priority, and were the third car off the upper deck at Coquelles.

We took a little detour en route to collect some wine for Pam and Geoff in a village near Eper-nay. Since we were heading for Berne, we aimed for the border crossing above Porrentruy, looking to take the A16 from there to Biel/Bienne. Mistake: it hasn’t been finished yet, and it took close on three hours to get from there to Berne, the journey including some interesting manoeuvres round Biel on account of roadworks and very poor signposting. Still, the good news was that Swiss customs weren’t interested in us: I’d stopped and got out to buy a vignette, which seems to have been enough of a diversion from the fact that we were carrying something like nine times the duty-free import allowance of wine! Reminds me of the time Pam, Geoff and I were cut up by a dame in a Fiat Uno just before the border at Chiasso. The border police pulled her over and waved us through. We clanked by with 96 bottles of wine on board. Switzerland is highly protective of its domestic wine industry. It produces some decent stuff, and notably the Oeil de Perdrix pinot noir rosé that P&G have given me as a birthday present. Like most countries, though, it also produces some pretty ordinary wines, the difference being that it is priced at the level of rather more competent bottles from across the borders. Hence the two-bottle duty-free limit, I suppose.

With immeasurable patience, Pam and Geoff greeted us warmly and with a fine moussaka: an astute choice of dish for guests with an unpredictable arrival time. And since Geoff’s 2CV is in for repairs (its starter motor having failed to disengage a few days earlier), there was shelter for the car as well.

Next morning we headed for the new MediaMarkt shop at Muri to get a new laptop PC. The Acer machine I bought in Fribourg 5 years ago has been getting a bit tired of late, and has now stopped loading Windows. I’ve probably dripped on ad nauseam about my preference for the Swiss keyboard layout, but for the few readers who have been spared the ordeal, here I go again. I first met it when I went to work in Switzerland in 1997. I then asked the IT manager to get me a QWERTY keyboard, and he refused point-blank, saying that the only choice I had was between a desktop and a laptop (though I did later manage to blag a docking station laptop out of him!). Unlike the abominable AZERTY keyboard I was forced to use briefly in France and Belgium, I soon got used to the Swiss layout, appreciating the ease of access it provides to French, German and Portuguese accented characters. So, gentle reader, I am tapping away at a nice little HP laptop. I’d gone in looking for a Tosh or a Sony, but the HP offered the best mix of specification and price.

On Saturday night we spent a delightful evening as the guests of Heidi and Chandroo in Wabern, a short walk from Pam and Geoff’s. I’ve known Chandroo since 1974, when his then wife was a colleague at the Lausanne Congress. Geoff was a translator at the same event, unlike me as a member of the permanent UPU staff. It’s good how that crowd has kept in touch over the years, augmented by those who were at the net Congress five years later in Rio de Janeiro – where I met Pam and Barbara.

On Sunday it was Part 2 of our self-herding to summer pastures. The motorway from Berne to Geneva is a mess of roadworks at the moment, hence very slow going, but at least the roads were quiet. After Geneva (where French customs didn’t stop us to ask for VAT on the new computer), the new stretch of tunnel speeds the journey greatly. We proceeded to slow it down by taking a wrong turning in Chambéry, but it was at least a scenic short-cut across the Chartreuse. We changed over when we stopped to fill the tank at Valence, so I got the grotty stretch of A7 down the Rhône valley. It is always busy, and varied constantly from stop/crawl to the restricted 110 km/h. For much of the way, I just stayed in the first lane, where there tends to be more room between cars, and where you cover the ground pretty well as fast as those who keep switching lanes.

A glance at the clock tells me that it’s almost time to get on the horn to the telephone company about our internet service here. Having had endless trouble trying to get sense out of them at Easter and subsequently, finally writing to cancel our ADSL subscription, we arrived to find three bills totalling some €72. The ADSL light is showing on the router, but there is no internet service – hardly surprising since some part of Frogtel no doubt counts me as a defaulter. If you read this before mid-August, it’ll mean that the issue has been resolved...

Threescore years and counting...

I received today the ditty below from dear friends wot I've known for well over Hälfte des Lebens:

Have you heard the news then,
About oor Dave and six times ten?
This adept of the cyber pen
Who describes the conjugal “but and ben”,
Flowers, and visits from Jenny Wren?
This loyal friend chock full of gen [at least she didn't say 'gin': Ed]
Who presides over courts crime-ridden
And never fails to help when bidden?
What can one wish this pearl among men
On the occasion of his six times ten?
Much love, health, wealth – and what else, hen?
Keep a calm sooch and “reste toujours zen”!

Quite moving, and as someone once said of the public reading of a McGonogall poem, there wasn't a dry lip in the house. One more glass and I could get quite sentimental over the snowstorm of kind wishes I've had over the last few days.

First call today was the local railway station, to buy my old geezers' train fare discount card. I was cross, to say the least, that my bus pass had not arrived in time for me to go there free. Ah, well. We came home with a heap of shopping, so the last half-mile would have been a pain. It certainly was after a copious lunch a bit later at the local boozer: we have had a good snooze apiece this afternoon.

We had a wee pairty here on Sunday, with a very small group of friends. Wish we could have cast the net wider, but small parties are already bad enough for socialising - certainly from the host's point of view. We'll invite the alternate 'A' list for my 70th! The weather smiled on us, so everyone was out in the garden, where we'd set out little nests of folding chairs, benches etc.

My birthday present from Annie was a trip to the Henry Moore exhibition (emphasis for the benefit of N Americans who wrongly omit the last three letters) at the Tate. Fanbleedin'tastic. Annie, Vic and I went together to an exhibition of H Moore bronzes in the early 90s at the Bagatelle gardens next to the Bois de Boulogne, so it was something of a sentimental journey for us both. I hadn't registered the fact that he was a distinguished war artist, and produced some superb drawings of coal mining and of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz in the Underground. Neither had I realised how many different media he sculpted in: many kinds of stone, plaster, several woods, lead, bronze, plaster, string!! It was illuminating to see his earlier sculptures, which mixed flat, rectilinear facial features with flowing organic shapes. Over time, the earlier tight little mouths gradually disappeared from his work, and the sculpture moved from the representational through the cubist to the flowing style and the abstract forms that everyone knows from his later work. In the last piece in the exhibition, the face was simply sawn off flat. Need to read up, I think.

Second cultural visit to the smoke in a few days. When we met Annie at KX we went straight to Tower Hill for a quick bite followed by Kate's current play, Judenfrei. Excellent piece - her best to date, we think. Now in performance at the Henley Fringe Festival. See it if you can.

What else? It has been a lovely few days of being thoroughly spoiled by dear ones. Including the garden, which has given us a good crop of charlottes. The runner beans are setting, the echinaceas are finally coming into flower, and this year's seedlings are either coming into flower, given away or on the point of being planted - and several combinations of the above. Guests on Sunday brought plants with 'David' in their botanical names, so we have been studying the weedpatch to identify good spots to plant them in. We just about have the garden the way we want it, and these extra perennials are just what we needed. Wot wiv that and all the good wishes expressed in person, in cards and in e-mail and Facebook messages, it's a joy to know what good friends we have. So it's time for that maudlin other glass.

Of ships and stipes and spices

Responding to the prospect of our entertaining a crowd here on Sunday, the weather has taken a turn for the worse, with strong winds and heavy showers. Still, the forecast is good. Preparation for the gathering continue apace: the place smells like a Bombay bazaar after yesterday’s efforts – huge amounts of onion and garlic have been fried and spiced and gingered up. Today I’ll have a crack at making some naans, plus the pastry for the more European stuff.
On Tuesday, we took ourselves off to France for the day, using Norfolk Lines for the first time, from Dover to Dunkirk. It’s a longish crossing, so OK for a relaxing day trip, less so if you’re looking to cover a lot of distance in the least time: the tunnel is pretty well the only solution if that’s the priority. We ambled along the coast to De Panne, where neither of us had been before – it looks really pleasant, with tree-lined roads into the town, and some rather fancy flats at the seafront. The bad news, however, is that diesel is no longer cheap in Belgium: more expensive than in France now, and barely cheaper than the UK. So, with a view to cash flow rather than modest savings, we deferred filling up!
We stocked up on other essential fuels in the vast Auchan near the ferry port, finding everything we wanted without difficulty, then clanked merrily home. The ships were probably the best we’ve travelled on, with the possible exception in my case of the Princess Marguerite, a lovely old Clyde-built steam turbine vessel that used to ply in comfortable silence between Seattle and Victoria. It’s a great shame from the point of view of passenger comfort that steam turbines are such a rarity these days: the constant hammering of a vast diesel lump is quite unpleasant. But the architecture of the ship’s passenger lounges was excellent: floor to ceiling windows, two storeys tall (and I’m sure there is a whole set of different vocabulary for those of the naval architect persuasion), provide a really good environment. And built by Samsung in Korea. You can imagine my rant on the subject of British shipbuilding yourselves, so I'll spare you the job of reading it.

How better to spend a Sunday afternoon...

...than having lunch with a group of good friends, fabulously catered by one of them, and putting the world to rights afterwards over cups of tea in the garden. (And I have my eye on her yellow penstemon and a fine variegated hosta.) There was enough in flower in our garden for us to take a little posy of flowers with us. We're still waiting for the summer stuff, though one of this year's achilleas is starting into creamy yellow flower, and a rudbeckia is showing colour - amazing, since it has survived our unusually severe winter in a container.

Martyn spent some time rejigging the waterfall to the pond, which had been losing water. Unfortunately, nothing much seems to have changed, but the hot weather must had led to a bit of evaporation. The new batch of fish seem to have settled in: I was out semi-sleepwalking yesterday around 4:30, and most of them were up, hoovering the surface of the water. Some of our tadpoles have made it as far as turning into tiny frogs - and the blackbirds seem to find them just as tempting.

Meanwhile, back in the study, my laptop has developed a serious dose of the vapours: it will no longer start Windows. It seems to have taken exception at the news of its imminent retirement, and gorn orf in a huff. Excuse the anthropomorphism: computers do seem sometimes to have an almost human cussedness, don't they? Tiresome, since I have a meeting to minute on Wednesday, and I am unfortunately past the stage when my old hands can comfortably minute a couple of hours' worth in longhand. Or not with any real likelihood of my being able to read them afterwards! Fortunately, I can borrow one of the laptops I got for the Magistrates' Association, since its present custodian will also be at the meeting.

Both the pond and the garden need a couple of days of steady rain. Preferably spread pro rata over a corresponding number of nights, between midnight and 6:00 am, please.