Notwithstanding its infamy as the headquarters of France's collaborationist government during WWII Vichy is a town well worth a visit. It was a fashionable spa during the Belle Epoque and the splendid parks and buildings of that era are beautiful. You can also still wallow in mud and sip sulphurous water if that's what lights your candle.

My recent visit was to meet up with my fellow golfers from the four leagues at the Sporting Club de Vichy whose English welcome page could do with a touch of teacher's red pencil. The effort of writing that page in English seems to have exhausted the webmaster since the rest of the site is in French. Perhaps that's just as well.

Thanks to their own or their partners' illnesses my clubmates intending to go cried off but I rendezvoused with Ernest, a genial and sociable Swiss, for a practice round the day before the competition and we wandered around the town a bit in the evening and enjoyed a good dinner at "L'Escargot qui tète" meaning "The Snail that suckles". Well for all I know they do.

Amazingly Ernest and the waitress found that they had a mutual passion in hunting. I say amazingly but that's probably because my statistical frame of reference for waitresses who hunt is UK biased and based on occasional accidental exposures to episodes of The Archers that included references to hunting.

He had I think hoped to find another mutual passion when he opened conversation with "Je ne suis pas drageur mais je vous trouve très.........." but he confided to me later that Viagra does not agree with him (something to do with being diabetic) so the result of that hunt might have been a disappointment to his quarry had he run her to ground.

The competition was fun but not crowned with as much success as the following Sunday's in which my laurels were gained for being the least bad third division player to have taken part in both rounds of the AGF competition. The laurels in this case being a magnum of jolly good plonk from their Bordeaux vineyards.