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.
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