There was some heavy booted scrabbling going on the other afternoon in the noman's land bounded by the cellar roof space, main bedroom and kitchen wall.

I responded by making wild hunter noises and beating the wall with a broom until the intruder was silenced.  This morning I reckon I saw the culprit in the shape of a red squirrel gambolling happily in the back garden.  He hasn't come back indoors again so far but as the local saying has it - you don't count the cowpats till the end of the fair - so I remain vigilant.

Poisoned chalices come in many forms.  They are not always recognizable as such.  Here is one in the form of a golf trophy which has been consigned to my care for a year as a result of my fine round yesterday in an annual invitational competition at Les Dryades.

The poison comes from the fact that the winner has not only to organise the following year's competition but host the twenty odd competitors afterwards.

Last night we had a very pleasant drinks and snacks evening in a lovely garden setting at last year's winner's fine home.

Barbansais's field like lawns can't compare, my catering facilities are limited and I'm short of about fifteen garden chairs.  Maybe I'll be saved by a sale.

The even more annoying thing about this win is that if it had been one of our normal FFG competitions I'd have knocked a couple of digits off my handicap.

Amongst the cheap DVDs that I’ve bought recently was a movie featuring Javier Bardem and Victoria Abril.  They are the reason I bought it but I suppose even good actors can’t redeem utter rubbish.
  

I was saved from watching the entire film by the fact that the DVD itself was rubbish and froze after an hour to the accompaniment of an endless whirling and whining.

But thank God it did because not only were my cinematic sensitivities saved but when I turned on the radio I caught the most wonderful double piano concert by these two guys:

It was recorded at Marciac a few weeks ago.  Next year I must give up golf for a week and go listen to the music.   

Yesterday was dry and warm, a perfect day to cut the grass.  I wish I had done it.  Continuous rain overnight which lingers even now and is forecast to hang about for a few days means that by the time it dries out sufficiently to cut it will have grown another three inches.

I added three bottles of wine to my small collection of golf prizes yesterday and knocked half a point off my handicap.  I'm now back to where I was at the beginning of the 2010 season.

Three competitions left to undo the losses of the four previous seasons.

It's coming up to the third anniversary of putting our French house on the market so we are celebrating by knocking fifteen grand off the price.

Now, provided you steer clear of agents and come directly to us, this lovely residence can be yours for a measly 100,000 euros.  That's around 90,000 pounds at current exchange rates.

Form an orderly queue.

It’s been a busy golfing week so far with four days on the trot.  I’m having a rest day before taking up the clubs again tomorrow.

I was a bit surprised to be asked for 18 euros instead of the usual 8 to take part in Sunday’s competition and the explanation when it came wasn’t universally popular.  The extra ten bucks were going to the French Golf Federation to help finance the 2018 Ryder Cup (which is being played in France) and there will be a small supplement on the annual dues each registered player pays the FFG over the next few years to the same end.

It’s the mega billionaire status of the guys who play in the Ryder Cup teams that caused a few grumbles I suppose but I have some sympathy with the FFG.  Putting the event together must cost a bob or two and although they will no doubt get good crowds the interest in golf here is not of the same order as it is in the States or in the UK and Ireland.

Even the players make a contribution if my belief that they don’t get paid to take part is correct.  Mind you they get showered with clothes and equipment and I daresay my annual income wouldn’t make much of a dent in either team’s fully expensed travel bill so the sacrifice is limited.  

Ten of us went for a golfing day out at La Jonchère yesterday.  It’s a course I really enjoy playing and it’s no further away from me than Les Dryades but being a member there I don’t go to La Jonchère very often.  Usually we have lunch in the nearby town of Gouzon but since January an English couple have been running a restaurant at the course so after nine holes we ate there in lazy sunshine and played a wine assisted back nine in the afternoon. 

Sporting activity didn’t end there because we went to Pierre’s in Gueret afterwards and played pétanque for a couple of hours and then wound up with a barbecue that went on till ten thirty or so and over which the peccadilloes of the French political establishment were scurrilously examined. 

I’m glad to report that I hit both my balls and my boules with a fair degree of success.

The reign of the rectal thermometer is over, in France at least, and you are not asked to sit up in your hospital bed and clutch a thermometer firmly in your armpit or under your tongue. Technology moves on.  Now they poke a little gadget into your ear and when it beeps they read off the temperature.  What double entendre could Carry On Doctor possibly get out of that I wonder?

I learnt of this advance thanks to being in hospital in Clermont Ferrand for a coronarographie.  I don’t actually know what that’s called in English but it’s where they put you to sleep and pump some nasty stuff through your heart so that they can see your coronary arteries as in seeing the safety pin your two year old swallowed on an x-ray.

I’ve often scoffed at the fact that if you are a registered player of any competitive sport in France you have to present a medical certificate once a year stating that there are no contra-indications to your taking part.  I once asked my doctor in Edinburgh to do it and she was very dismissive of the whole idea.

But now I’m scoffing my words and maybe she’ll have a re-think for at least it means there’s a chance something amiss will be noticed before you fall down dead in the street.  When I saw a doctor here on my arrival in June he told me that my heart was not producing a nice regular thump, thump, thump but was sticking in extra beats here and there.  Now anyone who has danced with me knows that my sense of rhythm is a bit dodgy.  I can put up with that even if it’s a bit hard on my partners but wasn’t keen to let my heart get its time signatures mixed up so I waltzed off to see a friend who happens to be a cardiologist.

He gave me an ECG and an echo sounding thing (I thought that was just for finding U-boats and fish), put me on some pills for a month and checked out how I performed in vigorous rides on an exercise bike during which my blood pressure leapt up off the scale.  I’m not given to exercise bikes in real life so you wouldn’t think it would matter but he felt we might be looking at the need for surgery.

So he rang the hospital and they said can he come in tomorrow and off I went in a taxi (normal practice) on the road and the miles to Clermont.

It turns out that all but one of my coronary arteries are ok and the one that is irregular (their terminology) doesn’t need the scalpel.  Sighs of relief all round but I am doomed to daily pills for some time to come, hopefully into a ripe and active old age like Yusef Lateef (91 next birthday).

As I went to bed at midnight on Monday night Yusef was walking on stage at the Marciac Jazz Festival to perform his set. Now there’s a role model for me.  And Happy Birthday to another old man, Fidel Castro 85 today.

   

 

This jolly map of hotspots shows the admirable work done by a consortium of local authorities to set up a network  of access points throughout this area to provide free wireless access for both residenst and visitors so none of us wandering around with our laptops, netbooks or smartphones should be out of touch with the wider world at any time.

Alas fine words as they say butter no parsnips.  I have tried this out a number of times in the four localities closest to my domicile.  In three of these I have been unable to detect the network.  In the fourth I have confirmed that it is there and even on one occasion seen a welcome screen, but able to connect I have not been.

So it's byte my lip and back to dial up.

I was in Aigurande on Saturday morning having a new silencer fitted to my car.  It was an important day for the town for other reasons as well.  This was the day of their big brocante and vide grenier, or car boot sale to us, when numerous streets were given over the buying and selling of junk.  Unfortunately it was a washout as you can see from the picture.  For most of the time most of the goods were covered by plastic sheeting.  Only the beer stand and the chip stall were doing any business and not much at that.

I can understand why you would want to get rid of junk but who wants to buy a box of corks or a couple of chamber pots, and believe me those were bits of high class junk I thought were worthy of a picture. But brocantes are amazingly popular.  There's a booklet you can buy that lists them all.  It's a nice yellow colour reminding me of the Scotland's Gardens scheme booklet that list all the garden open days throughout the year.

Back home the rain eased off a bit in the afternoon so perhaps it did so there as well and let the chineurs begin to chiner.  You see there are even special words for junk browsers and junk browsing.

I'm just back from shopping at Carrefour.  One of the things I've always disliked there is that you have to weigh your own fruit and veg and stick a price ticket on them.  I still dislike it but I must admit I'm impressed by the technology they've put in place this year.

The weighing machine works out what you've put on the scales.  I suppose there must be a wee camera in there focused on the weighing platform.  You place your whatever it is, more often than not in a plastic bag, on the platform.  On the screen appear pictures of one or more items that it thinks you are weighing.  You touch the right one and it prints out a price ticket.

If it doesn't come up with the right item, which in my experience is very rare, you can scroll through pictures of fruit and veg to find it or if all else fails there's an alphabetic search.

I don't suppose these machines are cheap.  Maybe that's why their loyalty card gives you next to nothing.  Often it's a chit entitling you to a miniscule reduction on something provided you spend X amount of dosh on a given day.  Today my card gave me a reduction of 5 cents on one of the 37 items in my trolley and added 5 cents to my loyalty account, which is now groaning under the weight of a grand total of 76 cents.