Normality

Rather than the ruinous autoroute, we opted, for our return to Toulouse, for the murderous N113 as was.  It's actually not an unpleasant road, though with numerous small towns to pass through, the journey takes about twice as long.  The countryside at this time of year is quite pretty in places, and there are some quite long views to be had here and there.  We persuaded the vehicle up to a viewpoint just south of Toulouse to find that the scrub has been allowed to grow up far enough to obscure the views...

We'd made sandwiches, so stationed ourselves at the end of the runway for lunch.  Lots of traffic in and out: notable among them a re-engined A320 doing taxi runs, a military A400 transport and some Brazilian business jets.  We trekked clockwise round the airport on a tour of inspection of the ATR and Airbus works, pronouncing them satisfactory, then tanked up and gratefully turned in the horrid vehicle.  With a couple of hours to spare and a view over the field from the excellent café-restaurant, we settled down comfortably with free wifie and a half-litre of Bergerac blanc, which helped us to face with relative equanimity the joys of boarding our Easyjet bus.  Said apparatus got us back to Gatwick with some delay, added to by the absence of ground crew when we landed.  Easyjet is too tight to pay for a jetway, so we'd a quarter of an hour's delay while they wheeled out some rickety stairs and eventually stabilised them, then had a couple of flights of stairs to climb in the South terminal satellite, followed by a lengthy trek to the high-tech automatic (ergo slower) passport checks. 

What a pleasure it was to drive home in a competent vehicle.  Egg2 is not exactly in the first flush of youth, but goes, steers and stops as a decent vehicle should.  Suitable feedback served on the car hire consolidator.

Thanks to Celia's and Andy's ministrations, the garden was in pretty good shape when we got home.  The beans are looking a bit sad, but I guess that's what you get when you start them too early.  The spuds, on the other hand, are growing like mad, and we'd to go and buy more compost to earth them up in their containers.  It goes without saying that, having gone out for a tenner's worth of compost, we returned with said compost, plants, seeds and a bill for £36.  Oh well.

The day after we returned was polling day, so the art class couldn't meet at its usual venue, which serves as a polling station.  We met here at Forges-l'Evêque instead, as is our wont when thwarted by the democratic process.  My lovely colleagues brought oodles of goodies, and we're still working our way through them.

We've done a fair bit of weeding.  It's one of those processes where one thing leads to another: I cut the grass.  Martyn did the edges.  We then broke our backs hauling out the weeds from the edges of the borders.  The composting bin is once again only just within the power of the hydraulic gear on the dustcart, so we shall once again be keeping our heads down when they collect on Thursday week.

The oriental poppies are budding like mad, so we're looking forward to their exuberant display within a week or so.  A lot of half-hardy fuchsias have over-wintered successfully in the ground, and those we over-wintered in the cold frame are sprouting like mad.  Cuttings tomorrow, I think.  The epimediums I divided last summer are doing well in their new locations, and one of the recent cistus cuttings has begun to flower (unlike its parents, which I hacked back hard a few weeks ago). 

I can of course make no comment on the outcome of the election; still less on the latest appointments to the MoJ.  No.  None at all.