For a couple of floors in a hotel lift this morning I was in the company of a young American lady.  She enquired about my health - as ye do.  I replied that it was excellent - as ye do.  She then said "You smell great."

Fresh from the shower though I was I suspect that it was not my manly odour but the fragrance left by a previous passenger that had excited her nostrils.

But you never know.

It's not every prison that has an 18 hole golf course in its grounds but I've just spent three days in one.  Mind you it took them 137 years from when the reformatory was built to create the course, but way back in 1848 the inmates were kept fit by labour in the fields.  Now the young people serving time there are in fact employed by the hotel/holiday centre that the reformatory has become.

This touching little memorial to the bad boys and girls who were locked up there is at the end of an imposing entrance alley of trees behind which stand the wardens' houses where we had rooms.

The text reads " To the memory of the children imprisoned in St. Hilaire and deprived of their childhood, and to those who fought for the establishment of proper legal protection for young people."

The reform agenda centred on teaching agricultural trades and the place is awash with barns and farm buidings, most in a state of dilapidation.  I was particularly struck by the pig sheds but I forgot to take a picture.

Instead here are a few that I did take.

The entrance alley

Wardens' accommodation

Inmates' quarters

The modern welcome sign

My saxophone practice has suffered this week.  I dropped the mouthpiece at the weekend and the tiled floor took a chip out of it.  It's only a small chip but the result is that the reed is off the rails and much of the air that should be going down the tube is going down the tubes.

But I'm off tomorrow for three days golfing near the Loire (let's hope the rain stops) and am then away again for a few days so should have a new mouthpiece in place by the time I'm free to resume serenading the neighbours.

Fortunately the rain did not continue into Thursday and spoil the Fête Nationale.  We celebrated with a team competition in Chapman format (I shan't bother to explain that, suffice to say that it combines the talents of two players).


My partner and I scooped the prestigious third prize. Thanks I like to think to a prodigious 7 iron shot of mine.  Because of the lack of rain over recent months many of the ponds on our course are waterless seas of mud.  My partner put his drive straight into one of them where it nestled comfortably on the muddy surface leaving me the task of recovery.  As I sank slowly into the mud I whacked the ball 120 metres out of the pond, over a few trees and onto the green where we sank it for par.

That was not my only contribution , who could forget my delightful birdie chip, again with my trusty 7 iron, but truth be told my partner was the mainstay of the team.  Tomorrow I'm on my own.

I was injudicious enough to comment in an email yesterday on the warm dry summer we were having here.  In the evening it started to rain and it hasn't stopped since.

With a hint of pink as the paint manufacturers describe some of their off whites is about the extent to which I was tickled in the town hall on Saturday night.

The first play featured the devil suffering from depression because there was so little evil in the world.  She (for it was an all female troupe) summoned three minions who each proposed a course of action.  In the end the devil decided to saddle the world with thinkers.  Since the author is by trade a philosopher I guess this was his little joke, no doubt received with appreciative chortles in intellectual circles.  This audience appreciated it as well but more noisily. 

 

The piece undoubtedly had potential but the production was a bit stolid.  The three minions were dressed identically which I suppose is reasonable but they each stood stock still and delivered their radically different suggestions in the same somewhat wooden way. That was boring.  The devil laughed falsely a lot of the time which was also boring.

The second play, called Inventions for Two Voices, was a string of little playlets or long sketches that had nothing in common except – you’ve guessed it.

The potential was better realised here but not consistently.  One of them, interestingly presented in shadow play behind a white sheet, would have been much better had it not been for the fact that one character was a prisoner on all fours chained like a dog, with the result that no-one behind the front row saw more of her than the occasional bobbing up head as she thrust forward against her restraints.

Two hairdressers manipulating their clients’ heads as they discussed the suicide attempt(s) of mutual friends was a good laugh and I caught the punch line explaining that the result of their wrapping themselves in stripped cable and sticking the ends in a socket was only to blow the fuses.

Unfortunately despite the best efforts of the actress in another piece to allow wildly enthusiastic applause to die down before she delivered her exit line I missed it.  The applause showed that the audience favoured what we might call a very broad style of acting.  The style fitted the sketch though.  It involved a flippers, snorkel and facemask wearing couple, the male half identified by the actress wearing a pair of Speedos and adopting a manly posture, who have agreed to dive simultaneously into the water on a given signal.  They never do of course and wobble precariously as in a silent movie while they find a new excuse for not diving each time.  They stagger about on their flippers and come to blows etc etc.  All good clean fun.  But I’ll have to buy the script to get that punchline. 

At last a point shaved off my handicap and a bottle of champagne gained to boot.  Not only champagne but a jar of foie gras and several of gelatinous fluids containing various bits of duck anatomy.  These will make delightful tit bits for those enjoying my Red Army choir DVD at Christmas.

These trophies were won at Aubazine, a lovely little spot in Corrèze where I've played a few times in the past.  We had excellent weather and lots of jollity including, for half a dozen of those spending the night on site, a post dinner hack around their nine hole pitch and puttish course where I put down a marker for the following day's competition by scoring nothing but pars till light stopped play.

Play stopped before the light vanished at Trent Bridge on Wednesday.  I had the Radio 4 ball by ball commentary on throughout although I only sat and listened attentively in bursts.  But as England swept vigorously to victory in the evening I found myself unwilling to leave the game to attend one of the infrequent entertainments going on in Châtelus that I'd had in my diary for a couple of weeks.  I musn't be distracted tonight though but make the 21.00 double bill curtain up.  I don't know either of the plays being performed and hope to be tickled pink.
 

The American professor who blogged about seagulls and refuse sacks in Edinburgh's New Town has had a European adventure.

My regular email from the Cameo tells me that not only am I missing Senna for the second time but I won't see Life in a Day either.  I've got a little bit of personal interest in that one since the cameraman on A Lifetime uploaded some footage of its filming as part of his day.  I'd love to see whether any of that has survived the distillation of the 4500 hours submitted down to the 95 minutes being screened.  Though I won't be surprised if it's been bumped in favour of the animal slaughter the Cameo warns us that the film contains.

The director of Similar Lily, one of the student films I worked on a month or two back, had some distillation done for him when someone stole the camera with the last day's footage in it.  Despite what must have seemed at the time to be an artistic bodyblow the remaining footage has been edited into a coherent and entertaining short film that you can watch here provided you have or are willing to open a Facebook account.