As you see I’ve not been keeping to my resolution of blog maintenance at all. I almost erupted into print one recent Tuesday in celebration of a very good golf score but it was so quickly followed by a disastrous performance in competition that I had to bite my keyboard to stop a logorrhoea of despair splashing out into cyberspace.

To vent my frustration I attacked the weeds around the fosse septique. Despite the reforming zeal of Brussels, mains drainage is yet to arrive in these parts. So we have a system of loosely buried tanks through which household waste waters seep to appear miraculously cleansed at some far end from whence they disappear to merge into the surrounding ecosystem.

I once did battle with a similar system in south-west Scotland. It filled up and refused to accept any more waste. When local forces were rallied to effect a rescue we discovered that the man who had laid the pipes decades before had only just passed on. Unaccountably he had failed to commit his design to paper. Much digging about with JCBs over a period of days was needed before normal service was resumed. Most of us managed the interruption in service discreetly enough and the youngest in the party, not then toilet trained, was entirely oblivious. But my mother-in-law had to be ferried periodically to a convenient local village. We learnt later that the Six Day War had been going on the while but somehow our six days have always been more memorable.

To disguise the concrete outcrops of the waste system we planted cotoneasters a few years ago and envisaged them spreading rapidly and smothering everything around. In practice the soil there seems to be more suited to the nutritional needs of weeds. Last year Sally dressed the cotoneasters and other plants in plastic survival suits before drenching the area with a junior member of the Agent Orange family. The weeds fell over almost instantly and turned a satisfactory shade of brown but this seems to have been but a subterfuge. This Spring they, or their mutated cousins, are back in force and have had to be ripped out of the ground. I know they will regroup so am keeping watch.

This morning such excitement. Not much happens in this village and I seldom am aware of what little does happen since our house is at the entrance and I never have to pass through the village to get to anywhere I want to go. So when a Swiss registered minibus stopped at the door and a dozen or more people poured out chattering animatedly I abandoned my conversation with the postman about the Cambodian junk mail he had just delivered to concentrate on them.