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.

At last I have reversed the steady rise in my handicap. I won this bottle into the bargain. Could this be the start of something big?

You will note that this, shall we say undistinguished, building, which is just across the road from us, has a rather fine roof. All due to the great storm of 97, or was it 98?
No matter, the point is that we have a roof that deserves to be similarly replaced by a generous storm insurance payout but while we wait for that deliverance we have to keep applying patches.

Two or three years ago a M. Fruchou redid some of the internal wooden structure, replaced the ridge tiles together with a number of other tiles (some are visible in the picture) and applied other bits of builder’s bluffery with the aim of improving the overall watertightness of the roof.

Last year we decided to put a double-skinned tube in the chimney. Up till then we had apparently been in danger of burning the place down and falling foul of French building law. I’m not sure which carries the greater penalty. It seemed a good idea to add a bit of waterproofing around the chimney at the same time. We called on M. Fruchou but I think he got the idea that we weren’t totally satisfied with the results of his earlier work (true but not critical). Despite declaring that he would come and size up the job he never made it. Fortuitously we came across an English builder, Dave. He did the job and assured us that despite not having put flashing round the chimney (he had a reason but I can’t recall it) we were shipshape and watertight for a good three years.

Just before I went off to the Riviera it rained a lot and I went up into the roof to see what was what.
Well the picture shows clearly what was not watertight at all. I called Dave immediately but he had left the country. I suspect a love affair gone wrong but didn’t dare ask his mum-in-law for details. M. Fruchou may not have left the country but seems to have abandoned his business. His mobile number is now someone else’s and his fixed line has been temporarily out of service every time I’ve dialled it.

We don’t count our chickens till they are hatched but the French around here are even more circumspect. They don’t count the eggs while they are still in the chicken’s arse. So I don’t want to declare success too soon but the man who put Velux windows in for us some years ago says he can fix it and what’s more that he’ll do it soon. Stay tuned to find out.

After a day of domesticity (cut the grass, do three loads of washing) I set off for Bourges. It’s only an hour and a half away but it’s the first time I’ve been.

Probably not the last because it’s very lovely. A gorgeous medieval centre with a magnificent cathedral and other buildings of note. Their most famous citizen is, or rather was in the 15th century, a chap called Jacques Coeur who made lots of boodle, much of which he lent to Charles VII. Naturally he fell out of favour and went to prison. But he left behind a jolly mansion and here’s a detail from the façade.

Of course I went to Bourges not in pursuit of historical knowledge but to play two days of golf under the auspices of the Seniors of the Four Leagues.

The municipal course on the southern fringe of the town is very pleasant. There’s a lovely lake nearby with a sailing club, a jogging track all around and an outdoor pool is not far off. You can imagine there are worse places to be bourgeois.
This was a team competition in greensome format and Jean and I represented Les Dryades. We played respectably close to our joint handicap without covering ourselves in either glory or the other stuff. It was extremely hot but we were provided with bottles of chilled water, cans of Fanta etc at regular intervals by a young man who whizzed around in a golf cart. He raised the noisiest round of applause at the prize-giving.

On the way home I got a full frontal of an advert which had bedevilled (to a tiny extent) my stay on the Riviera, thanks to my holiday companion’s professional fixation. I’m not wild about the ad but I love the product. Here’s a picture. I leave it to you to interpret the slogan and to provide a catchy English equivalent. My starter for ten is “Aniseedy – yes!” “Anisickly – no!” You must be able to do better.

This morning I made one of my periodic visits to The Scotsman site to see how the land lies north of Hadrian’s wall. There was much of interest.
I was sorry to learn that Mr MacSween of haggis fame has bashed his neeps and chappit his tatties for the last time at the uncomfortably close age of 66.

Can you believe, as Tommy Sheridan would have it, that ten members of the executive of the Scottish Socialist party have perjured themselves to portray him as a wild swinger? He’s always been a natty dresser hasn’t he, even on half pay? These things are rumoured to go hand in hand but I await the outcome of the court case to learn the truth.

Now what thrilled me was PAL. I am sympathetic to Bill Clinton, ambivalent about bull-fighting, mildly uneasy about global capitalism, saddened by Darfur, made tepid under the collar by the intransigence of the parties in the Middle East but as anyone who has followed this blog from its beginnings will know what really gets my goat is litter. Here I found an article about a public spirited lady who, aghast as I am at the litter strewn streets and open spaces of Edinburgh and who like me makes a practice of picking up litter, has, unlike me, got off her arse and started a campaign, People Against Litter, to enlist the common man and woman in the great fight. She has shamelessly borrowed slogans from Mao Tze Tung and the like and brought great clichés to bear but she is right. I commend her campaign to you and exhort you to sign up. Become a PAL today! You know it makes sense!

Got back last night from a super holiday at the coast. Claire took full advantage of my newly acquired digital camera so I've got lots of lovely pictures to share with my loyal readers. Here's a view of Nice as a taster while I decide how best to set things up.

And here's one I took in the garden when I got home. The animal was
much closer to me when I first saw him but by the time I had gone into the house and got my camera he had moved off a bit.

I drove down to the Riviera on Friday. It is a long and fairly tedious drive and the roads were busier than I had expected but it is a good place to be for a little holiday. I am staying in Vence but came down to Nice this morning on a reconnaissance trip. I am picking a friend up at the staion tomorrow morning and although I have been to Nice quite often I wanted to be sure I could find the station.

I am now relaxing on the Promenade des Anglais. Life can be tough.

A few weeks ago my postman in a state of some excitement asked me if I had seen the previous day's paper. It seemed his picture was on page 5. Naturally I hurried off to a wee shop in the search of a copy and indeed they had one left. I suspect they always do. I wanted to share the picture with you because he has featured a few times in this blog and now thanks to my new toy, a digital camera, I can do so.
I expected an individual portrait recording some heroic chess exploit or postal honour, but it was a crowd scene. Admittedly he stands out because it's a small crowd. They are demonstrating in defence of the public services but as the caption points out, that particular Saturday evening they had competition in the shape of the world cup and a French rugby final.
Discussing it later I had to correct his impression that workers in the UK eat in soup kitchens and that there is no minimum wage. He accepted that but it proved impossible to budge him from the view that it is somehow unnatural or immoral to sell stamps and bread in the same shop.
[Acknowledgements to La Montagne for the picture].

I played golf very badly on Sunday in a competition and by chance this morning found that Andy Murray's remarks after his defeat yesterday fitted the case with only a few minor changes. Here's what he said with my replacement words in red.

"It was 10 times worse than I played on Thursday. I just struggled, it's hard to explain. I didn't feel good all round. I tried to get myself going on the back nine but I came up with a bad short game......which is normally what I do best and, when you are missing so many shots, it's difficult to win."

At least in my case no crowd of supporters went home disappointed.

The big news this morning is that I have been asked to play in The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht in Edinburgh in November. I haven't been on the stage for a few years so I'm looking forward to it eagerly.

Happy days are here again thought I on Thursday after breaking 100 for the first time in months. This was my reconnaissance round at Le Petit Chêne. Unfortunately when pitted against my fellow seniors the following day I missed a few putts, put balls in the water and generally messed up. Still it’s a beautiful course and I had a lovely time.

I’d set off on Wednesday for a leisurely drive to Poitiers. Now that’s an important place as anyone who’s read a guide book or taken a cursory interest in the Plantagenets, or the Arab non-conquest of Europe will know. It’s also famous for Futurscope, a multi-media theme park that I’ve left for a future visit.

On Wednesday though the poitevins (as langtonian is to Kirkcaldy so poitevin is to Poitiers) were thronging the streets for the first day of the summer sales. All shops start their sale on the same day and finish on the same day. The dates vary a bit according to region, like the school holidays, but there is no margin for individual initiative. Unless that is you choose to go out of business or relocate in which case you are allowed to have your own little sale then.

Now instead of trying to entice customers into their shops the shopkeepers had taken their stock, lock stock and barrel into the street. Every shop had a manned stall of goodies on the pavement. So the already narrow alleyways of the medieval town were extra squeezed. Then there was the actual outdoor market. Commerce rules OK.

Being a medieval town it’s got a crop of historic buildings, some of which I entered, most of which I just gazed at and strolled on till tired feet called for rest. Being a warm sunny continental day I chose a shady café terrace for a rest.

Later I went on to Niort where I spent the night. I thought Niort was lovely. It’s smaller than Poitiers but has lots of the same attributes. There’s a superb looking keep (thanks to Henry II), pleasant riverside walks, a magnificent covered market etc. I wandered uphill through what your guide book would no doubt call a warren of winding alleys to a twin spired church.

One of the things that annoys me about churches is that they often have a magnificent façade with a large imposing door flanked by smaller if no less imposing doors all of which are kept tight shut and you have to squeeze through some tiny side door. Well the Eglise de Saint André has seen the light and it streams through a beautiful stained glass window, floods the body of the kirk and rushes out of the wide open western door to meet the visitor as he crests the hill.

For an atheist I visit a lot of churches and particularly enjoyed recently a first communion mass in the austere black stone cathedral of Clermont Ferrand. I’m indebted to the Rough Guide for the knowledge that the Michelin tyre empire centred there owes it’s genesis to our Mr Macintosh the raincoat man. Apparently a niece of his married a Clermont Ferrand entrepreneur ( a pre Michelin chap) and brought to the marriage, inter alia, some good ideas of what to do with rubber.

One of the fixtures of the golfing calendar at Les Dryades is a competition sponsored by the Chateau de Poinsouze, an upmarket caravan park popular with British and Dutch tourists. A number of happy campers come along with their clubs and join the regulars. The day culminates in an invitation to all participants to dinner at the chateau. For one reason or another I haven’t made it to the dinner in previous years. This year there was no reason why I shouldn’t go and since I happened to be playing with the son of the sponsor there was an extra incentive.

I’m very glad I did. Al fresco dining bowled me over when I made my first trip to the continent way back. I was used to Sunday school picnics in local parks, sandy sandwiches on the shores of Fife and chewing damper (a peculiarly indigestible mixture of flour and water) around boy scout campfires in Highland glens. These undeniably outdoor eating experiences had not prepared me for filling the afternoon with a leisurely lunch, a proper lunch, at a table, a proper table, in a sunny garden on the shores of Lake Geneva where apricots could be plucked from the branches above one’s head. A lunch at which our hosts, prelates of some persuasion or other, made sure that the wine flowed freely even in this impressionable sixteen year old’s direction.

No prelates at the chateau but buckets of wine and a very fine meal in a beautiful courtyard setting. I count myself as a local so once the preliminary socialising was over I left the Brits to their own devices and sat down with the French. At my table was Philipe. He’s a baker and pattissier and supplied the yummy fruit tart pudding. From time to time his wife minds the shop on a Sunday morning while he and his daughters play golf. There was Lucien, the dentist, and his wife Claudine who teaches maths. One of the topics of conversation was that worldwide dinner party favourite – the difference between men and women. According to Claudine boys tend to geometry whereas girls favour analysis and this illustrates some fundamental difference or other. It was generally agreed that women have no trouble understanding men but not vice versa. Lucien told a long but quite amusing joke in support of that thesis. Fortunately I understood the punch line. Claude, an insurance man and the organiser of our competitions harangued me about adding some Scottish flavour to a future competition but when I tried to pin down what he wanted a few days later it seemed that his idea had disappeared with the last of the evening’s wine. There was Kévin, our hefty young golf pro who tells a story well and delights in recounting the wonders and oddities of his golfing experiences including a trip to Scotland. Then Jacques, a retired oil something or other and his wife Claudine. She took up golf because she was fed up being a golf widow and turned out to a slightly better player than him. She’s not currently playing because she’s undergoing chemotherapy. I don’t know what particular cancer she has. From her behaviour in social situations you wouldn’t dream there was a cloud in her sky. Jean, my particular golfing buddy was there. He’s a retired digital imaging fundi. He spent some time in Beith in his teens improving his English and has been a Scotophile ever since. He can manage a quite convincing “haw jimmy”. Hugues, the lad I had played with in the competition and his mum Claudine joined us intermittently. Could this be a record for the number of Claudines at one dinner table? She enjoined me to speak only English whenever I have occasion to play with Hugues, a request I will act on only when feeling particularly unselfish. I’m sure there were others because it was a big table but that damned wine seems to have dimmed my memory. Maybe Pierre and his fourth wife?

Roches, the commune within which I’m summering, boasts fewer than two hundred entries in the phone book. Amongst them incidentally are a Jean and a Christian whose Scottish surnames suggest that some of the soldiers stationed hereabouts during the Hundred Years War made non military conquests, and honest women of them to boot.
Despite its numbers it can muster a sizeable brass band (not all Rocheois, they recruit elsewhere) which struts its stuff on festive occasions. Amongst the most festive is the Pentecost Fair celebrated last weekend. It’s a three day extravaganza that according to one of my neighbours attracted hundreds from a’ the airts in her youth. Today no doubt a pale imitation but still a draw for the locals.
The “bourg” (tiny eponymous town that’s commune HQ) hangs out its bunting, plants decorations made of coloured tissue paper (trees, butterflies, bees and the like), flies the tricolour from the Mairie, scrubs out the Salle des Fêtes and the public toilets and has a ball. There is literally a ball, and a fireworks display and a race and a parade of decorated floats not to mention dodgems, several roundabouts, shooting galleries, a beer tent and a selection of second hand junk stalls.

This year there was a novelty. Amongst my postman’s many passions is chess. He set up a stall with half a dozen boards with the aim of playing all comers simultaneously. When I turned up after lunch he was reading disconsolately alone. It seems that the honest burghers of Roches having first been disabused of their assumption that he was selling chess sets had by and large declined to pit their skills against his. Naturally he counted on me and eventually persuaded a member of the Espérance to make a third thus formally creating a simultaneity. Espérance is what they call the band – surely a connection there with our Band of Hope of yesteryear – musical historians please advise.

As a sideline he was inviting signatures to an anti GM crops petition. I was unwise enough to say that I wasn’t altogether sure that I was against them. There followed a storm of facts and figures which reminded me of nothing so much as the anti nuclear diatribe he drilled into me when we met at a film show some weeks ago. But I held fast, politely, and didn’t sign. I even offered a couple of points in their favour; swept aside by his relentless stream but still.

Of course he beat us, but then I’ve been beaten by an eight year child so it was no real challenge. He beat me several other times in the course of the afternoon but that was the only simultaneous contest since the horn player was soon called to duty. At least I learnt the Spanish names of the pieces and I suppose a bit of speaking in tongues was appropriate for the season.

I regained my amour propre by bursting a couple of balloons with my deadeye shooting skills to carry triumphantly home a little soft toy. I’ve placed it beside the little soft toy that David won the last time we went shooting at Pentecost.

A friend complained that there were no pictures on this blog so I thought I would try to have at least part of one.

Since my swissophilia extends to a knowledge of their car registration system I was able to open a conversation by asking how things were in the Valais. Apparently all is well and not much has changed in the mountains above Sion since I slept in a barn there in the fifties. Strangely enough these people, or at least the older ones in the party, were here in the fifties, living and working in this village. The bulk of them lived in the house opposite, now being renovated (slowly) for eventual occupation by Alain who has a sawmill here and runs a carpentry workshop in Chatelus. They took various photos of themselves with the house in the background and set off to have a look around the village.

I discovered that one lady had lodged in our house. I was intrigued by the idea of finding out what the place was like fifty odd years ago so I invited her in. Had the positions been reversed I’d have jumped at it but she said maybe after the walk, and then after the walk the minibus slipped away unseen.

As you see I’ve not been keeping to my resolution of blog maintenance at all. I almost erupted into print one recent Tuesday in celebration of a very good golf score but it was so quickly followed by a disastrous performance in competition that I had to bite my keyboard to stop a logorrhoea of despair splashing out into cyberspace.

To vent my frustration I attacked the weeds around the fosse septique. Despite the reforming zeal of Brussels, mains drainage is yet to arrive in these parts. So we have a system of loosely buried tanks through which household waste waters seep to appear miraculously cleansed at some far end from whence they disappear to merge into the surrounding ecosystem.

I once did battle with a similar system in south-west Scotland. It filled up and refused to accept any more waste. When local forces were rallied to effect a rescue we discovered that the man who had laid the pipes decades before had only just passed on. Unaccountably he had failed to commit his design to paper. Much digging about with JCBs over a period of days was needed before normal service was resumed. Most of us managed the interruption in service discreetly enough and the youngest in the party, not then toilet trained, was entirely oblivious. But my mother-in-law had to be ferried periodically to a convenient local village. We learnt later that the Six Day War had been going on the while but somehow our six days have always been more memorable.

To disguise the concrete outcrops of the waste system we planted cotoneasters a few years ago and envisaged them spreading rapidly and smothering everything around. In practice the soil there seems to be more suited to the nutritional needs of weeds. Last year Sally dressed the cotoneasters and other plants in plastic survival suits before drenching the area with a junior member of the Agent Orange family. The weeds fell over almost instantly and turned a satisfactory shade of brown but this seems to have been but a subterfuge. This Spring they, or their mutated cousins, are back in force and have had to be ripped out of the ground. I know they will regroup so am keeping watch.

This morning such excitement. Not much happens in this village and I seldom am aware of what little does happen since our house is at the entrance and I never have to pass through the village to get to anywhere I want to go. So when a Swiss registered minibus stopped at the door and a dozen or more people poured out chattering animatedly I abandoned my conversation with the postman about the Cambodian junk mail he had just delivered to concentrate on them.

Having started this blog I thought I might turn it into a little record of my summer in France. Not that it will rival A Year In Provence but it might keep me and my few readers amused. I’ve occasionally tried to keep holiday diaries, never managing to sustain the effort to the end of the trip. Reading them months or years later has been fun and made me regret that I hadn’t persevered.

But here I am already three weeks into my stay and nothing noted down. A quick review is called for. After six months of being barred and bolted you can never be sure what state the house will be in. All was well, unlike last year. No pipes burst as I turned the water on. The new fridge withstood the impact of the first stream of electrons in contrast to its predecessor and no dead rodents were to be seen. There was one little body, a bird that had somehow got in but failed to find a way out. That was quickly removed, furniture uncovered and shoved about a bit, bed linen found, wood stove fired up, a quick hoover and it’s gardening time. Four cuts so far but it is hard to keep the grass down when it’s being watered and warmed generously by mother nature. The moles have not left town and previous lashings of herbicide seem to have only encouraged the weeds in the lawn and everywhere else. It’s a case of pulling them up again and again. I’ve trimmed the vine to the bone and held back the ivy’s assault on our tiled roof.

After that the priority is to bow before French public health legislation and get a doctor to certify that there are no indications that would suggest that I am not fit to play golf. This law is almost universally mocked but you have to comply. It covers all competitive physical sports, even petanque but maybe not tiddlywinks or chess. I must ask the postman. He’s a chess fanatic. They tell me my blood pressure is a bit high but I’ll probably survive the summer so it’s off to Limoges for the first competition of the season. It’s organised by The Senior Golfers of the Four Leagues, a splendid club that offers us half a dozen outings between April and October throughout four regions; Limouson, Centre, Poitou-Charente and Auvergne. My chum Jean and I usually go the day before for an exploratory round, stay in a little hotel and share a bottle of red over dinner and then hack our way through the competition. Just as at my home club, Les Dryades, the competitions are well supplied with prizes so you don’t have to be a star to go home with something in your hand. There is also usually a draw for left over prizes and that’s how I came home from Limoges with a tee shirt and a little porcelain dish. You’re never far from porcelain in Limoges.

There was another SG4L competition last week near Orleans. Since I’d never been in Orleans, always having whizzed past by train or car en route to somewhere else I thought I’d go up a day early and be a tourist. It took me 50 years of whizzing past Berwick on Tweed before I visited it. I didn’t want that to become the norm.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was committed to giving a friend a lift back to this area and that I had volunteered to help out with a regional golf event at the weekend I’d still be there today. Because Orleans was in full Joan of Arc celebration mode. There were all sorts of processions and medieval tournaments and concerts and what not to celebrate the relief of the siege on 8th May 1429. There’s a heavy Scottish element to this year’s festival, not only because 8000 of the 30000 Scots who went to France to help chase out the English lost their lives fighting on Joan’s team but also to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the twinning of Orleans with Dundee. The Tayside police pipe band are there in force and some chaps called the Ardblair Highlanders are doing what seemed to be a mini Highland Games. There was a very good exhibition on about the Auld Alliance presided over by a French gentleman splendidly got up in a dress kilt and jacket.

There are a couple of spots near here called respectively Ecosse Lavoir and Ecosse Chateau. According to the postman (he’s a bit of a historian) they were so named for the Scots who were quartered there at some point in the Hundred Years War. The mirror image of Petty France in Edinburgh.

Orleans is also very proud of a certain Charles Péguy. He was a writer and political thinker of the Belle Epoque, a friend of Zola and such like world figures. Perhaps it’s because he died leading his men over the top in the 14-18 war that he failed to be detected by my radar. Anyway I dutifully went round the exhibition in the centre dedicated to studying his work and expressed my satisfaction when asked by the curator. I must ask the postman about him.

He was born and spent his childhood in Chile; the postman that is not Charles Péguy and he likes to practise his Spanish. He’s probably disappointed that David and Sally have decided to stay on in Málaga but he makes do with me. I bumped into him at a film the other week and he regaled me in Spanish with his views on nuclear power. He was just back from a big anti nuclear demo in Cherbourg. At least he didn’t expound while the film was showing. I met him once before at a concert of Georges Brassens songs. While we were listening to one song he’d be whispering the words of another one in my ear. You’ll have gathered he’s a Georges Brassens fan. When he learnt I was off to Orleans he told me he was off there soon himself to support an anti GM group who are to appear in court charged with cutting down GM crops. You’d have to go far to beat the lot of a rural postman in France.

The lot of the summer visitor is not too bad either. I was sitting in the lounge about 8.30 on Sunday’s peaceful morning looking through the French window over the garden, down the field at the damp and misty forest beyond when a deer bounded across the lawn past the window, paused at the hedge to sniff out danger and vanished. Rural idyll in spades.