The old man across the road was 90 last week. Although he's as bent as a bow and uses a stick he's constantly active. He goes up and down from dawn to dusk between his house and his garden, where he digs and plants and labours quite against his doctor's orders. He also takes an hour-long walk out of the village every morning. And as a major plus he's still got all his marbles.

We gave him a card and a bottle of champagne and I expressed the hope that we would see him celebrate his 100th birthday in due course. He hummed and hawed and shuffled uncomfortably just as my aunt used to do. She would declare that she didn't want to be 100 but when pressed couldn't or wouldn't set a time limit.

Let me put in down in black and white; I do want to be 100 and I want to be it as soon as possible while I'm still able to read the Queen's telegram.

Why should a damaged bottom tooth cause an agonising pain in the cheekbone?

I don't know.

Is there a more agonising pain in existence?

I don't want to know.

This interesting looking building, whose contents are also interesting, is the museum at the Gallo-Roman site of Argentomagus. The site itself is somewhat underwhelming compared to the likes of Pompei or Ostia. With respect to visible remains it's more like the Antonine Wall but with a bit of imagination you can see the Legion of the Ninth disappearing into the mists of the Creuse valley.

It was one of the spots covered during Alan's visit when I tried to go where I had not been before. Having cracked the business of checking museum hours before setting out we also visited Argenton's Museum of Shirtmaking and Masculine Elegance where as you can well imagine we felt thoroughly at home.

Gueret's museum was the final stop on Alan's culture packed visit. Despite its proximity it was the first time I had been inside. It's a museum very much in the old style and the natural history section in particular with its displays of stuffed animals in "typical" poses reminded me strongly of Kirkcaldy museum in the fifties.

From their plaster models of reptiles and amphibia I learnt that the creatures that had concerned me in the grass earlier in the year were not venemous vipers but harmless slowworms. The trick to identification is apparently to observe their eyebrows. If present then it's a slowworm. If absent it's a snake. Or is it the other way around?

Nature took revenge on me for that mistake a couple of days ago when a wasp stung me on the thumb as I bent down to pick up the toaster. My thumb is red, swollen and uncomfortable and to make things worse I still haven't worked out what the wasp could have been looking for in the toaster.

Les Dryades is hosting a regional competition this weekend and yesterday I was one of several members giving a hand with the running of the event.

In my case this meant semi hiding behind a bush (so as not to distract the players) on a hole where it can be troublesome to find balls at the point at which they are likely to land.

The only fun is to jump out from behind the bush and give one of these cunning signals, especially the "ball out of bounds" one.

But none of the 75 players put a ball out of bounds on that hole yesterday though many normal players do. My fellow commissaire spent dull moments ferreting around in the bushes and came away with 10 balls.

The other compensation is normally a free lunch but the club is apparently too strapped for cash at the moment. I had to make do with a coffee and a pain au chocolat on arrival and a glass of wine with my lunch.

But at least I'm not doing it today in the rain. Yesterday we had sunshine.

The French can do tacky seaside just as well as anyone else. Witness the décor of my B&B room at the weekend. I lost count of how many items bore a nautical or seaside motif but we are talking somewhere between 15 and 20.

The little circle that looks like a lifebuoy is in fact a window. You can look through it into the toilet and see what I reckon was the most tacky item (not counting any temporary occupant).

Here it is. Toilet paper manufacturers have clearly missed a trick by not being able to provide a suitably naff paper so the interior decorator has had to make do with a little floral pattern. On the other hand maybe it's an oblique reference to the Mary Rose.

All the rain this summer has allowed my
various flowers and plants to flourish. These white begonias have done particularly well. I'm also pleased with the green creeper in the picture. It started the season as a surviving smidgeon from last year deep in the interior of the pot.

My Edinburgh garden has done just as well as you can see from the picture kindly sent to me by Claire.

I hope the rain stays off for the next few days because I'm off to the seaside to play golf. Yo ho ho and a bottle of nice red wine.

To supplement the efforts of the estate agent I have converted the Barbansais site into a "House for Sale" site. I hope to link it to various sites that list French properties.

I think it looks very smart but remain to be convinced that it will attract any punters

We have at long last put the French house in the hands of an estate agent. He seems quite optimistic about selling it promptly despite the legion of other properties around here that have stood empty and unwanted for years.

When he was writing down the particulars he said that this little room, of which we are very proud, was so small that it would be illegal to call it a bedroom. I do hope that it is nonetheless legal to sleep in it otherwise we have criminalised several visitors.

I made use of a brief encounter with a TV set yesterday to watch some Olympic action. I was pleased to see that although not technically represented Scotland did well in the women´s 100 metres where Fraser, Simpson and Stewart took gold, silver and bronze in Jamaican colours and a Ms Ferguson-Mackensie featured further behind.

England or Team GB to give it its proper title took 6th place thanks to Jeanette Kwakye.

I have not taken up hunting. This is a golf trophy. It was not awarded for prowess at the game but is mine by virtue of my luck in the prize draw held after the competition I played in yesterday.

I’ve had a run of ill luck in raffles and the like since I won a bottle of whisky circa 1960. This prize confirms that the run continues.

My neighbour has been incensed this summer by the chopping down of woodland that has taken place around the village. I can't say I'm keen on it myself.

This is no harvesting of managed forest but more the wholesale destruction of natural woods leaving the land looking wasted.
It seems that if you own a tract of woodland you can do what you like with it and my neighbour maintains that greedy landowners are cashing in on a shortage of timber.
Could this be the Creuse's contribution to the rape of natural resources throughout the world brought about by the rise and rise of the Chinese economy?

If there is a silver lining to this cloud it is that on approaching from the bourg you now get quite a nice view of the village.

Is it reasonable to suppose that one of Josette's hens squeezed its business end into this hole in the wall above the woodpile and laid an egg?

I’ve seen a couple of vehicles with British registrations pass my door recently so when I answered a knock this afternoon to a pleasant looking man and woman I was all smiles when the lady enquired in an obviously English accent “Etes-vous anglais?”

I assumed they must be one of the two sets of British people who have bought properties in Barbansais in the last twelve months or so. As is my wont I made a good-humoured admission to being British but not English. (Will they never learn those Sassenachs?)

You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather when I learnt that they were English Jehovah’s Witnesses who, having retired to the neighbouring hamlet of Bazanges, are intent on spreading their faith about a bit.

To be fair they were very pleasant. We chatted for a while and they made a half-hearted effort or two to get me worried about the end of the world. I brushed those off. They didn’t insist on supplying me with copies of the Watchtower before they moved on, presumably in pursuit of the owners of the British registered vehicles aforementioned, so I really have no cause to complain.

All the same the sooner this house is sold the easier I will rest in my bed.

Saturday was a day for celebrating anniversaries. Ewan was 42 and somewhere in the jungles of Brazil. Mick Jagger was 65 and no doubt someplace equally exotic, or certainly expensive.

The Association Sportive du Golf des Dryades was 20 and had a party.

Here are some of the early birds gathering for an aperitif beside the putting green. You’ll note that it’s an aerial view. It was taken from the room I’d decided it would be sensible to take for the night in view of the promised dancing and drinking till dawn.

There was a fine dinner of six courses whose plat de résistance was “Canette aux deux cuissons”. You may wonder at what a twice cooked duckling tastes like but that is too literal a translation. It means a slice or two of breast and a wee thigh.

Some of the company awaiting their nosh.

After dinner there was a cabaret on a stage that I had until then not known the hotel possessed. The entertainment was provided by a chap called François Constantin with a couple of fellow musicians. He’s a percussionist (and singer) of no mean repute and enjoys (or suffers) the distinction of being the son of Jean Constantin who wrote lyrics for Edith Piaf and the music for Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups.

You’ll be thinking he must be at a low point in his career to be banging his bongos in an obscure golf club in the middle of nowhere. But you’d be wrong. He was giving us freely of his time and talent because he’s the second cousin and good chum of our president Bernard, seen below announcing the show.
After that there was indeed dancing and drinking but I can’t swear it went on till dawn because I retired around two to get some beauty sleep before Sunday’s competition.

As all good Bible scholars know "there is a time and a season for all things".

Here and now it is big beetle season. I come across them lumbering over the floor or quite frequently lying on their backs waving their many legs piteously in a dance of death.

I spotted one in action yesterday climbing up the outside wall and snapped it. I happened to have a wineglass handy and put it in shot to give you an idea of the creature's size.

I sat back in my chair and watched it climb. Some stretches it attacked vertically, elsewhere it traversed to find a better route. It coped with over-hangs and jagged outcrops until, when about 5 metres up it opened its carapace and flew whirringly and noisily down to the grass 20 metres away.

Two questions arose in my mind. If it can fly why did it bother climbing up? If it wanted to get to that spot in the grass why didn't it just walk? It's got enough legs after all.

I think the answers may be that it hasn't the power to take off from the ground so it's really a glider rather than a flyer and secondly that walking can be dangerous, especially in my garden where there are snakes about. (They haven't all been exterminated by the mower).

In pursuit of my scheme to replace the Grads webmaster with my own good self I have been learning the rudiments of a programming language called PHP.

It’s over 40 years now since I spent part of a university vacation being introduced to computer programming at Tube Investments in Aldridge, a suburb of Walsall, (I was as surprised as you to discover that Walsall has suburbs).

Those were the days when undergraduates were courted by British industry with expenses paid this, that and the other!

Working in SPS on the IBM 1401 I met for the first time GOTO (known as Branch in that language), an instruction that over the ensuing years I met time and time again in its various guises, and grew to appreciate highly, perhaps even to love. There is no swamp in the programming world that you can’t leap out of with a snappy GOTO to a well chosen label.

From KDF9 Usercode and Fortran in the 60s through COBOL, Plan and PL/1 in the 70’s to Excel Macros in the 90’s, occasionally brushing up against IBM Assembler and other now extinct languages I have seen the wonderful work done by GOTO.

But all that time the computer scientists and programming theorists have been scheming to do away with it in pursuit of the philosopher’s stone of the perfectly provable program. What do they offer in its place but CASE constructs, FOR loops, DO WHILE and DO UNTIL, and that most tortuous of techniques the nested IF.

In life as in binary; when you play Monopoly and land on a square that says “Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200.” You are left in no doubt. The situation is clear and unambiguous.

Or gyrating round the dance floor with a partner whose presence makes the juices rise causing you to shout in her ear above the DJ’s decibels “Do you fancy coming back to my place for a S***?” To be met with the response “Go to F***” settles the matter there and then.

Should instead the answer run along the lines of “If I decide you’re the sort of chap I fancy then if your wallet’s as big as your ego and if your pad’s not far away or else if it’s in a smart part of town then if my chum’s got a lumber or has a headache then if you can swear you’re disease free I might, or else I might not” you are likely to have felt the enthusiasm drain away and not be sure where you stand. And in addition you’ve wasted time that could have been spent trying your chat up line elsewhere.

That’s PHP; no GOTO, no labels, no escape. Getting it to work is very iffy.

Refreshments arriving in time to stave off heat exhaustion after a morning spent scrambling round the Val de L'Indre course.

This was the third of four competitions I played in this week and definitely the most successful. It was a team event run by the Senior Golfers of the Four Leagues and Jean and I came 7th equal (net Stableford - puzzled non golfers may ignore this note) out of 62 two man teams playing five strokes better than the handicap of 13 we were given.

The following day was a greensome format instead of a scramble (same advice to puzzled non golfers) and we were storming towards a similar result until the 10th when for reasons unknown the wheels came off. We shanked into the woods, missed 30 cm putts and failed to make it to the podium.

There is always a draw after the prizes have been given out and until now those players already rewarded for their prowess on the course were ineligible. However where there is a generous sponsor involved the chap who wins 3 golf balls or a bottle of wine in the competition may feel a little disgruntled if he is barred from a lucky dip that offers a weekend for two in a smart hotel.

So Roland, the SG4L president, has come up with a smart solution. Prizewinners take part in the draw and if drawn can choose either to keep what they have already won or swop it for the draw prize.

The very first time this system came into use was for the scramble and we had an invidious decision to make. Turn in our boxes of 15 balls in favour of a bottle of champagne each or stick.

Not without hesitation we stuck.

I've been doing a bit more translation work for the RIDS this week, a press release and newsletter.

I'll tell you about it later but it's only polite to wait till it's published even given the undoubtedly small number of nautical journalists who are regular readers of this blog.

In view of my crappy connection I delivered the stuff to Patrick on CD this morning and on the way back came through Bonnat where the supermarket carpark was full of people enjoying a festival of local produce. Naturally I stopped to enjoy it with them.

As usual I had broken my rule about never going out without a camera so I can't offer a snap of the beast roasting on a spit, nor of the trailer parked alongside containing a rather sad looking Charolais who was surely not going to be slaughtered on the spot to replace the roaster when it had been consumed. I had several chunks washed down with some nice plonk. That's not exactly local produce but compromise is often necessary. At least it's sold locally.

I had some tasty Creuse chicken as well. Their stand featured a series of photographs of the production process, serious looking employees handling birds at various phases of their life after death. There were in fact two series of photographs depicting two different ways of preparing the bird for consumption. Both started with a snap of "anaesthetising" the bird which in itself would make weaker stomachs than mine think vegetarian.

Less controversially we also had cheese and several breads.

Entertainment was provided by the Entente Musicale of Bonnat Bussière-Dunoise. This brass band played at a standard I thought just a cut above my local band, L'Espérance de Roches. The players were all decked out in loud Hawaiian shirts and the alto saxophonist had an instrument with a shiny green body that I think would just suit me.

I managed to avoid the Tour yesterday but it took me longer than anticipated so I was half an hour late for lunch. The others had waited a wee while but had got through their first course.

As a matter of interest, for my twelve euros I had: a starter of cold meats and various vegetables; stuffed breast of veal with gratin potatoes; a delicious homemade millefeuille bursting with crème anglaise; coffee and as much red wine as I felt could safely be drunk before the two mile drive to the golf course, not forgetting lots of crusty bread to soak up the various sauces.

After the golf I went to the pictures. On the way I followed part of the Tour route and took some photographs of the decorations that people put together to celebrate the event. All wasted on the riders, who batter along with heads down offering as little resistance to the air as possible.

A few weeks ago listening to the BBC in the middle of night, as I often do, I heard an item about the Edinburgh Film Festival. A critic was giving his opinion about how the new date for the festival might affect its positioning in the hierarchy of film festivals and what personality it might henceforth adopt. Might it for instance strut its stuff as the Sundance of Europe? Would it attract anything other than a locally based audience? All that sort of thing.

Towards the end of the interview he was asked if he had seen anything special. The only film he talked about was The Lemon Trees. I made a mental note and lo and behold it pitched up this week in the Cinéma Moderne in Aigurande.

Readers with good memories will recall I went to that cinema one wet Sunday afternoon last year and was refused admittance because in the absence of any audience prior to my slightly late arrival the chap had just locked up.

This time the 8.30 show, for which I arrived at 8, attracted an audience of six. It seems that none of the hundreds who had flocked to Aigurande earlier in the day to marvel at the spectacle of the departure of the sixth stage of the 2008 Tour de France had lingered on much beyond teatime.

They could have seen an interesting film. I wouldn’t say it was unmissable but it’s a fascinating look at the Arab – Israeli situation. The story tells of a Palestinian widow whose lemon orchard which she inherited from her father and to which she is emotionally attached (not to speak of her economic dependence on it) abuts the residence of the new Israeli minister of defence. He or at least his security advisors want it chopped down in case of “terrorist” infiltration. She takes him to law.

I won’t spoil it by saying any more. Catch it if you can.

The Tour de France is coming my way today. The cyclists themselves flash past like a dose of salts but they are preceded by what they call the caravan, an endless chain of publicity vehicles that clogs up the road for an hour before the first rider appears. After the riders come various support vehicles to prolong the affair.

I have a pre-golf lunch appointment but my normal route will be blocked. According to the signs that have been up for weeks it’s closed from 10.00 to 15.00. That seems a bit excessive. To follow the obvious alternative back roads means crossing the race route at Chatelus and I’ll only be able to do that if I do it before the caravan gets there.

That would mean arriving an hour early for lunch so I’ve been scouring the map to look for a western outflanking route. I can see a series of winding tracks around Aigurande that should do the job – provided they exist on the ground and that I don’t get lost.

Fingers crossed.