After some twenty years Connor has left the USA. He's been mulling the idea over for a while but it seems that from decision to action took about 48 hours. He gave away or abandoned 99.9% of his belongings, drove Ewan's car down to Houston and got on the plane.

Nobody looked beyond page 1 of his passport or asked after that pretty little green form they staple to it when you enter.

By a truly amazing coincidence he chose to arrive at Gatwick on the very morning that his mum was catching a flight from Gatwick to Edinburgh. They met there, she flew north and he got a lift home from André (who has not been able to go to Edinburgh after all).

I'm expecting Connor out here shortly and we'll travel back to UK together in late September.

I took another step further into the digital age this week. I was listening to a programme being presented by Arièle Butaux, someone I think of as the Sean Rafferty of France Musique. Like him she has a lovely voice, gathers an eclectic mixture of music and musicians and chats with them in a relaxed and lively style.

I particularly enjoyed one piece and had a look for the CD on the web. I found it easily enough at around 18 euros plus postage but I also found it downloadable at 99 cents a track or 9.99 for the complete album.

Given our dial-up connection here downloading the album was a non-starter so I picked one track (the one I had heard on the radio). According to the licence rules I can make 7 CD copies and 5 MP3 player copies for my 99 cents.

It took about an hour to get the 4 minutes 33 seconds of music but I have it and I've transferred it to CD. Admittedly the CD won't play on David's machine but I have hopes that a younger machine might cope.

With broadband I can't see a better way of buying a CD. Who needs sleeve notes?

The album by the way is Bach to Beirut by Trio Rhéa. Here's an extract.

My Spanish friends left for home on Saturday having thoroughly enjoyed the Creuse. They took with them a large collection of long stout sticks gathered on various walks. The area is awash with walks; through woods, along river valleys, up and down slopes of various degrees of steepness. They did several from a guide that I have and I went along on a couple.

The sticks were not, as you might have thought, an obsession of Diego junior’s but were gathered by Chus to support her tomato plants at home since sticks are as rare as hens’ teeth in the plains around Valladolid.

One place we started a walk from was the village of Masgot where the houses and walls are decorated with little granite sculptures like these. The man who did them is long gone but the village does a thriving trade in stone-carving holidays on the back of his little hobby.

I had the opportunity to learn a little more about Diego junior’s little hobbies one day. He regaled me with a description of his various collections. He’s got fossils and beetles and feathers and other oddments from the natural world all catalogued and stored at home. One particular joy is his collection of the bones of small mammals. Well, you might say, kids collect all sorts of weird items. True, but it gets weirder.

He collects these by unravelling the balls of hair and bone that form in the stomachs of tawny owls when they have had a good nosh of mice and shrews and suchlike. The undigested matter is balled up and vomited forth for Diego to get his hands on. The balls are soaked and painstakingly taken apart with tweezers and a pointed instrument and the bones cleaned up. It seems that the hairy gunge that held them prisoner is not very collectable.

One last and tangible souvenir of their visit is this portrait. Notwithstanding the fact that one of the party, Antonio, is an artist the portrait is the work of the little collector.

The roof repair man turned up on one of the days I was away. A day or so later it rained heavily and no water came through. Relief all round.

So now it’s back to golf and gardening, or to be more accurate golf and grass cutting with the occasional episode of trimming the more exuberant growths that threaten to take the place over.

Here’s the latest in this year’s short line of golf prizes – a magnificent champagne bucket. Now that I own one I can’t understand how I have managed for so long without. I see it coming into its own at those intimate little supper parties after the opera where my etchings are on view to selected lady guests. Such sophistication must surely overcome all reserve.

Saturday was transhumance day from old gîte to new via lunch at Barbansais. We lost only one vehicle en route but thanks to cellular technology the loss was not permanent. My friends are now 50 miles nearer home but still in that bastion of bucolic beauty, the Creuse.

An interesting contrast between the two gîtes: the first one was part of the farm or smallholding where the owner’s parents spent their lives. The lounge had been the cowshed and the place was chock a block with family mementoes and the sort of ancient objects that figure in “antiquarian markets” throughout Europe. It still seemed like a home.

The second was also a former farm building in a group that we might call a steading, but restored for the tourist trade. A very good quality restoration, comfortable and well equipped and done what’s more by a man who thirty years ago studied English in Edinburgh. Despite such a glowing provenance it lacked the character of the other.

Using only a screwdriver and the combined brainpower of two medical researchers the shutter was painstakingly reset on its roller mechanism and the deposit saved. Let’s hope that the grandchildren who arrived with the gîte owner aren’t afflicted with the same passion for button pushing as Diego junior.

I excused myself from a visit to the medieval fair at Crozant. It promised to be good fun but the siren sound of titanium against whatever golf balls are made of nowadays was too powerful. Is it still willow against leather on the village greens of Olde Englande I wonder? Or have the cricketer’s tools taken on new colours to match his kit?

I did go with my chums down to the Massif Central. We went first to Vulcania. For Edinburgh readers that’s similar to Dynamic Earth but a touch bigger as you may guess from the plan. You really need a whole day to see all the multi-media installations, watch the various films and enjoy the exhibits. You need a further day or two to digest all the information. But life is short so after an hour or two we pressed on to see some real-life volcanoes, That’s what the area is made of. Unfortunately they are not all spouting smoke and flames so it’s a bit tame in that respect. The countryside is lovely though and we joined another million or two holidaymakers set on reaching the summit of the Puy de Dôme.

Here’s Eduardo contemplating the ascent.
A number of the party decided that the coffee stop by the car park was far enough up the mountain, others came part way. Eduardo, Lele (with her back to you in the photo) and I climbed on until I was overtaken with the need to sprawl in the sunshine and admire the countryside leaving them to conquer the peak.

Today has been a day of little miracles.

Miracle number one was a beautiful birdie at the fifth involving a magnificent nine iron shot over the top of a twenty metre high oak tree landing one metre from the pin.

Miracle number two was a classic birdie at the sixteenth where a 170 metre tee shot over the water to the edge of the green at flag level was followed by a five metre putt straight into the hole.

Miracle number three was finding another gîte available for my Spanish chums to spend a second week in the Creuse. It’s 50 kilometres nearer Spain as well which will help when they set out for home.

This angelic looking little Spanish chap enjoying his gazpacho is Diego junior. He’s a bright, lively eleven year old who is currently reading Lord of the Rings in English. He has a bit of an excuse for such precocity having spent part of his short life in the USA but it’s not an easy read.

He also enjoys more active pursuits like making bows and arrows and playing with the large electrically operated shutter that covers securely the big window opening out onto the terrace of the gîte.

I blame the owners really. It reminds me of Ludovica’s bottom (see The Caucasian Chalk Circle Methuen Student Edition page 71 et seq.). If you put that sort of temptation in front of a red-blooded eleven year old something’s bound to happen isn’t it? In industry they call it destructive testing.

Efforts are underway to shift that shutter out of its fully open and stuck state but a pound to a penny says getting the deposit back is not a racing certainty.

Anybody who knows Spain (Spaniards say) knows that things shut down for hours at lunchtime but maybe they (Spaniards on holiday say) don’t know that in rural France the same system prevails, only it happens two hours earlier. So on Monday we set off for Aubusson with warnings from me that if the supermarket petrol station at Gouzon didn’t have a card operated pump there might be nothing to do but have a forced one hour lunch stop 15 minutes after starting out.

It does have a card operated pump so no problem, except the pump refused Diego’s Visa card which he maintained he had used successfully throughout the wide, wide world without incident until arriving in France. (The day before a supermarket had obliged him to pay cash).

Eduardo’s card was received with the same disdain so we had to fill the two motors with my humble but FRENCH bank card. It’s irritating little things like that that make foreign travel such fun isn’t it? I’ve since remembered getting hot under the collar at not being able to recharge a Spanish mobile phone with my otherwise universally accepted HBOS Visa and must remember to point this out to Diego.

We arrived in Aubusson well after lunch-time (French lunch-time that is) and were peckish. We weren’t foolish enough to look for lunch but throughout the length of the high street only three sandwiches were available. For a party of seven without JC on hand this seemed insufficient. Some establishments were closed for the day. They often are on Mondays. Some were closed for their holidays. Well why not? Just because I run a café or a restaurant doesn’t mean I can’t take my holidays in August just like everyone else. Tourists? Here? Hungry? Tant pis.

Saved by a bakery where we sat down to quiches of various sorts, spicy sausage bridies, all washed down with beer and followed by ice-cream cones in exotic flavours and coffee served with smiles all round. It’s heart-warming little things like that that make foreign travel such fun isn’t it?

The tapestry museum would have been an anti climax after that, had I gone in, but I’ve seen it several times before. Others were not drawn to the product of the loom either. Here they are. The one flat on his back with the strain of being on holiday in France is Diego.

He perked up later and successfully used his card to buy provisions in a Champion supermarket and transformed those provisions into a champion dinner. I especially enjoyed something he did with cauliflower and vinegar. There must have been something else in it don’t you think?

My Spanish friends arrived about 11pm on Saturday bearing a gift of wine disproportionate to the efforts I’d made on their behalf. But it would have been rude to refuse, wouldn’t it? If I’m disciplined enough to spin it out some trickles of Ribera del Duero may make it to Edinburgh with me.

I’d been keeping dinner hot, and true to Spanish type they found the lateness of the hour no impediment to enjoying a good nosh. Not even the eleven year old. Made of weaker matter I had eaten my own several hours earlier.

I’d taken the precaution of collecting the key to the gîte earlier in the day so when we got there around 12.30 there was only the pitch black country night to contend with. Surpassing myself in terms of foresight I even had a torch handy which made putting the right key in the right hole a dawdle.

I got to bed about 2 and have seized on the late night as the obvious reason for a failure to repeat the previous Sunday’s handicap improving round. If golf were a game of nine holes I’d have done very well but alas you have keep up the same standard to the bitter end.

So Tommy is not a swinger and my roof repair man hasn't turned up yet. Life is full of little disappointments.

I had a couple of visitors for a night or two this week. Fiona, whose flat in Vence was the base for my Riviera holiday and her friend Pat.

Since Pat is an artist I took them to Fresselines and Crozant. Monet spent time in Fresselines and did various impressionist landscape paintings in the area. A number of artists followed both his style and his footsteps to form what is variously called the Creuse School or the Crozant School. There is still considerable artistic activity in the area, little galleries, exhibitions etc. Most of what we saw this week belonged to the Daub School as I do myself. But at least I refrain from exhibiting. Some were not bad though.

We went out for dinner to some forsaken spot in the bundu where Pat, whose treat it was, was amazed to find that a four course dinner for three with wine and coffee could be had for less than forty euros. It is amazing but welcome.

Tomorrow I'm expecting six and a half Spaniards. If ever the Creuse is full it's in August so it was very much to my surprise that I found a gîte capable of holding them. It's near Boussac which is not too far from me. I may have to cram them in here for a night or two when they leave it though.