Andrew went home yesterday having seen a fair bit of the Creuse and a little bit of Indre but not in terribly good weather alas.

We went to a few places new to me including Crocq, a fine medieval village that sports these towers amongst other attractions. From the top I couldn’t quite make out some of the places marked on their panorama – London, Milan and Barcelona for instance – despite having been lent binoculars (without a vast deposit), but my vision is not 20/20.

The lady who took my money, lent me the binoculars and opened up the little museum (small but crammed with material) told me that the “q” in Crocq is silent. Her demonstration led me to believe that the preceding “c” is also silent, but then my hearing is not much closer to 20/20 than my vision.

Nothing wrong with my hindsight however which tells me that I should have checked up on the Chateauroux Musée de la Résistance listed in my 2001 edition of the Indre yellow pages before setting off to visit it. It seems that some time in the interim resistance has crumbled. This would not have been a death blow to the excursion had it not been that the three other museums still extant in the town are closed on Mondays and that happened to be the day of our visit. In Aubusson on the other hand the museum closes on Tuesdays. Guess which day we went there.

Quite apart from the museums’ days off it was apparent just how compressed the tourist season is here. The vast majority of what you might term attractions are tight shut from November to Easter, very partially open either side of July and August and only in those two months truly visitable most days, though closed at lunchtime.

Lunchtime was the most consistently reliable aspect of the week and demonstrated France’s major culinary accomplishment - the provision of decent weekday lunches at a reasonable price.

They also do a nice line in pinning the tail on the donkey. Have you ever seen a smarter set-up than this? I took the picture at a fête in Chatelus-Malvaleix, just up the road.