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.