Funnily enough I came across another wild piglet just a couple of days later in Edinburgh at a National Galleries of Scotland exhibition.

This was a surprise visit and the surprise was satisfyingly complete. Fortunately no-one dropped dead at the unexpectedness of my putting in an appearance.

I went primarily to see Fiona’s production of The Island and Claire’s production of Antigone, both of which were very good, but I took in several other shows as well and enjoyed pottering about the town. It also gave me an opportunity to see Ewan's flat. It's rather splendid.

The fact that you can stumble over the most remarkable stuff is what makes the Fringe such fun for me although the cost of writing off the inevitable turkeys has increased a lot since I was there last. Casting around for a nearby show to get me out of the rain for an hour I came across The Penelopiad. This was a dramatisation of Margaret Atwood’s reworking of part of the Odysseus/Ulysses myth that she did for Canongate a few years ago. The central character is Penelope who tells us a little about her birth and early life and then of her miserable time in Ithaca waiting for Odysseus.

The production was superb. There was no programme and no-one at the venue could tell me anything about the young company who performed it but I’ve tracked them down on the web and recommend you keep my eyes open for them next year.

The high induced by the show lasted long enough to cause me to invest €2 in a second-hand copy of The Odyssey as I passed through Paris yesterday. Will it last long enough to cause me to read it though?

I have unfortunately returned with a stuffed up nose and a sore throat. But in the absence of a high temperature I don’t think it has anything to do with the swine, real and imaginary, that I have been exposed to over the past week.

I went out somewhat before nightfall to get to Gargillesse for a social outing. We had a very pleasant dinner in the garden and then went to a concert that was part of the local harp festival. A harp and violin duo played various tuneful pieces by Debussy, Ravel and suchlike. They threw in a new piece and its composer joined them to take a bow. Everyone applauded politely but I'm not convinced that anyone liked it.

On my way home a family of wild pigs crossed the road just in front of me. They trotted quickly through the darkness, one adult and what looked like a dozen youngsters. The last little piggie dithered a bit imitating a rabbit for a minute or two and then got its act together and streaked after its siblings.

It was a lovely moment.

The only sensible thing to do in this heat is to sit immobile in the shade wearing as few clothes as is decent waiting for nightfall.

A cool beverage and a book may be added to complete Omar Khayyam's recipe.

I’ve been up to my wellie tops in garden maintenance this morning. The spreading chestnut has been scratching my head when I cut the grass so some boughs had to go. There were various other trees and bushes that needed a bit of a chop so I waded in with secateurs and saws.

I tidied up the vine at the front quite successfully. It had wrapped itself around a plant in one of the upstairs window boxes and pulled the box forward so it was teetering on the edge. It was threatening to pull the phone line down as well.

But when pruning the vine at the back to prevent it from raising the roof tiles I severed what turned out to be a critical support and 90% of it came tumbling down. Now that’s no great tragedy because I don’t rely on the vine for either fruit or wine but it is nice to sit in the garden sipping chilled white surrounded by luscious black grapes. At least they look luscious but as we know all that glisters is not gold, and that counts for luscious looks too.

If luscious looks sometimes disappoint so today has Skype. To make further inroads into my credit I sent off an SMS half an hour ago but it is still sitting there “pending”. God knows what it’s waiting for but I suspect that Skype wants to confiscate my credit come what may and this is part of a dastardly plot. I shall give it another half hour and then reluctantly turn to my phone.

I thought that the long awaited day of handicap improvement had arrived when I carded 46 for the front nine on Saturday. That's my second best score ever for those nine holes. But I couldn't keep up the pace and returned a miserable 56 for the back nine leaving me stuck just where I was before I started. Today looked even worse after nine holes although I rallied and scored 48 for the back nine.

If only these two halves could have been played in the same competition.

But I enjoyed both rounds despite my inability to play well consistently and despite the heat. When I got into my car at ten to six this afternoon to leave the golf club the thermometer registered the outside temperature at 40.5 degrees centigrade. Admittedly the car was standing in full sun but even when I got home and parked in the shade it was showing 33.5. Compare that with 13 degrees and raining reported for central Scotland the other day and you have the answer to the question often asked of me - why do you come here in the summer.

I don’t nearly often enough share French political or cultural developments with my readers but an item on the news this morning caught my attention. Actually two items caught my attention. One was the promotion of Andy Murray to number two in the world tennis rankings. Hats off to the young man.

The other was the news that the fashion for emphasising and exposing the breasts has run its course. Apparently the girls of the present generation are more modest than their mothers. Nor do they see burning their bras and their boobs as a mark of liberation. I don’t suppose one runs much risk of burning one’s boobs at 13 degrees so perhaps it will be a while till this fashion change reaches Scotland.

Now clearly if there is a change in fashion there has to be a change from A to B. B in this case according to the commentators (all of them supremely well qualified in one way or another to divine such shifts) is an emphasis on the buttocks and even a revelation thereof.

I shall keep a watchful eye.

I like to think that I'm up for new experiences but I've never been happy with flavoured crisps nor can I see any need to destroy muesli by making it crunchy or by adding chocolate chips.

Now it looks as though plain pastis is under assault. I didn't buy this bottle. I had it thrust upon me as a result of there being prizes even for poor players last weekend. It was very wise of the manufacturer to include in the package a rubber lemon that can be squeezed to control the stress caused by this mucking about with something that is perfect as it is.

Not far from here there is an area that for tourist purposes calls itself The Country of the Three Lakes. It’s on my where to take visitors list but otherwise it’s not someplace that I go. However I was drawn to the lakeside beach at Jouillat the other evening. It’s a pleasant spot with a few holiday cottages, supervised bathing facilities for the kiddies, mini-golf, tennis courts, a bit of restrained pedalo activity, and a little bar/restaurant.

The bar in past years promoted itself as a nightclub and would advertise wild sounding midnight discos. I’ve never thought that could appeal too much to the families who holiday there and couldn’t imagine that many Creuse clubbers made the cross-country drive. So I wasn’t surprised to see their advertising this year targeting a different audience with the entertainment starting at the much more respectable hour of 7pm.

I went along to hear some jazz. I bumped into a friend there and we had a couple of beers and listened to an accordion and guitar duo who were in fact billed as a trio. Unfortunately I didn’t have my saxophone with me to make up the deficit. But even though the thirteen lessons of A New Tune A Day for Alto Saxophone that I have worked through so far contain When The Saints Go Marching In in various keys I fear I may not be quite ready to jam.

This bright little chap is Reddy Kilowatt who appeared on the bills sent out by the East African Power and Lighting Company when I worked for them many moons ago.

Why is he appearing here? Well that's a mildly tortuous tale that I will do my best to keep brief.

I was looking into a company that had offered to pay the Grads for the privilege of placing adverts on their site when I came across a posting in an on-line discussion about the company by a certain Red E. Kilowatt. Now I know that Americans often have funny names but I wasn't fooled for a minute. This is clearly a pseudonym.

So I diverted my enquiries and discovered that Reddy is in fact an American invention, or at least has a long and glorious history in the American electricity industry. Indeed he has a website devoted to him where fans ensure his memory does not die.

There is no mention on that site of his African safari, nor of his venture into the east, since I am sure that China Power and Light in Hongkong also used him. In due course I may get around to rectifying those omissions but we are talking long term here.

Now Red's post also introduced me to a use of the term sockpuppet that was new to me although according to Wikipedia it's been around since 1993. I suppose I should say that I've always called a sock puppet a glove puppet even if it was made with a sock so the word was more or less new to me even in its original meaning but that's somewhat by the by and is probably a manifestation of the US-British linguistic divide.

The OED recognises a figurative use of the term as a person whose actions are controlled by another; a minion, citing a reference in 2000 and Merriam-Webster steps into cyberspace with their definition: a false online identity used for deceptive purposes.

But for the full-blown up to date horror of the term as applied to the actions of the company whose bona fides I was looking into we must turn to Wikipedia:

In current usage, the perception of the term has been extended beyond second identities of people who already post in a forum to include other uses of misleading online identities. For example, a NY Times article claims that "sock-puppeting" is defined as "the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company."

The key difference between a sockpuppet and a regular pseudonym ...(like Red's)..... is the pretense that the puppet is a third party who is not affiliated with the puppeteer.

This is not the objective of the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. They are not out to deceive, they just want to make you laugh. I'm sure they could extend their appeal to China, Africa and the US of A by adding a Reddy Kilowatt glove, sorry sock puppet to their cast.

I went over to Bonnat this morning to do some shopping and passed several beautiful fields of sunflowers. I just had to go back in the afternoon to take some pictures.
And I was extremely taken with this wild flower planting on a patch of wasteland at the entrance to the town.

I have nursed an ambition to play Creon ever since I first saw Antigone with the Ghanaian poet Joe de Graff in the role. So I was disappointed that when a production did come around that I might have auditioned for, it was scheduled for when I would be away. Mind you I’ve never looked as regal as Joe de Graff and time has marched on to the extent that I suspect directors would be more likely to see me as a candidate for Tiresias or Chorus, blethering on about fate and kingship rather than for the king himself.

In any event I spent time yesterday sending emails to people publicising this production in which I am not. Here for non-recipients of my email is the flyer for the show.

The details may be a little indistinct because of the image size. Here they are:
Venue: Quaker Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace (Venue 40)
Dates and Time: 17 to 22 August at 8.15pm (1h 20m)
Prices: £8 (£6)
For more information visit www.egtg.co.uk or the show's site and you can buy tickets here.

Another show in which I am not but with which I have connections was also the subject of my email traffic yesterday. It's closely connected to Antigone because part of the action concerns two prisoners rehearsing scenes from that play. By Athol Fugard, the South African playwright, The Island was inspired by Robben Island the prison in which Nelson Mandela spent so many years and is illuminated by his experience and his humanity.

This production though uses white actors and shows how the play transcends its origins to speak out against dictatorships and political incarceration everywhere.

It comes to Edinburgh at the suggestion of Sir Derek Jacobi who presented the production with the Irving trophy for the Best One-act Production at the National Drama Festivals Association All Winners Festival in 2008.

Venue: The Space On The Mile @ The Radisson (Venue 39)
Dates and Time: 7 to 22 August at 8.15pm (1h 10m)
Prices: M T W £5 (£3.50) T F S £7.50 (£5)

For more information and for tickets visit The Space or you can buy tickets here.

I chose a book from Amazon UK the other day and when I went to check out you can imagine my surprise on finding that there were already three books in my basket. Three very good novels by Naguib Mafouz that I would unhesitatingly recommend but which I had not selected. According to the system they had been added on April 9th 2009.

Now unusually I know exactly where I was then and can swear unimaginably dreadful oaths that I did not use a computer that day rendering one of their explanations void. I contacted them you see and got a bland email in return suggesting two possibilities.

One that I had been on the site and failed to close down allowing someone to sneak in and order the books, or two that a family member or friend was aware of my password and had used it. Neither of these explanations is at all credible and in any case surely if someone were that keen to get those books they'd have completed the transaction.

It also seems a far-fetched idea that someone would try to steal a few books in this way. If they did break into an account it would be much more likely that they were after a big ticket item or were trying to get hold of a credit card number with which to steal better things, like cash.

Now nothing was in fact purchased and Amazon point out that credit card numbers are not actually held on the site so I can see that accessing my account for that purpose wouldn't get you very far.

My more prosaic answer, which I offered to Amazon but which they ignored, was an IT processing malfunction. I've seen a few even more bizarre in my time.

But what about the paranormal? I was after all on The Amazon on the 9th of April.

Sunday dawned overcast and cool so I decided that it was not a day for lakeside fun and played golf. My game was poor to middling as usual with just enough good shots to make me think that it’s not yet time to retire defeated. I was particularly pleased to finish the tricky 18^th with an excellent greenside bunker escape and a deadeye dick putt. The pro happened to be watching and my exploit was greeted with a round of applause, but Kevin somehow manages to get a strong hint of sarcasm into his applause.

Before heading off to the golf course I checked my email and found a missive from Skype telling me that to prevent them from gobbling up my credit I must make use of their services pronto. I’m not sure why I ever established this credit because I never use it except to prevent it from being forfeited. Usually I send myself a one word SMS which is hardly much better than just letting them have the money.

But this time I spent 0.0552 pence on an SMS to a friend whose web silence had been troubling me. I need to send another 16,000 or so such texts to use up my credit so it’s a bit unfortunate that she’s broken that silence already.

Despite the fact that it takes me no longer to get to Guéret from here than it does to get to Filmhouse from Dicksonfield, lethargy and wine with dinner frequently combine to prevent me from enjoying such nocturnal delights as it offers.

I was tempted to go down on Saturday to experience some electro-pyjama music, a genre that the summer festival brochure tells me is between disco-funky and rock Play-mobil. Given that the electro-pyjama was the warm-up to a concert by Big Sophie you can gauge the extent of my temptation.

Last night however I kept the wine under lock and key and went to a great concert of Duke Ellington and Count Basie standards by this big band.

I thought they were brilliant. I kept my eyes on the alto sax players but I couldn’t uncover their secret. It was very well presented although one peculiarity was that the numbers were introduced (with a lot of interesting information) not by the conductor but by one of the trombonists. He's the left-most one in the picture and instead of just leaning forward to his own mike he clambered past his fellow trombonists each time to get to the lectern that you can see downstage on the right. Approximately 100% of the names of tunes, players and composers that he had to pronounce were of course American and his English pronunciation was often amusing and sometimes incomprehensible. The one I liked best was when he said Sara Vogan for Sarah Vaughan as though she were a German relative of Terry's.

In the picture below you can see the band being congratulated at the end by the Mayor of Guéret. He’s not the man with the pony-tail.

You can catch their singer Anne Ratsimba on Myspace. She’s worth listening to and watching her sing is no hardship either.

Further delights in this festival are a musical bar crawl tomorrow, neatly dignified as a barathon, from early evening to the wee sma hours with a lunchtime prologue, and a day of open air fun around the lake on Sunday.

I’m tempted even to lay Sunday’s golf aside but maybe it will rain.

Over the last fifty years or so my appreciation of cricket has moved slowly from disdain to delight and nowadays I am if not an avid then at least an enthusiastic albeit occasional listener to Radio 4’s ball by ball coverage. That treat is available to me even here in the depths of rural France thanks to long wave. I had listened to some of the test match commentary during Australia’s first innings and yesterday on returning from the golf course I was glued to my set as England wrestled a draw from the jaws of defeat. It was extraordinary how that draw carried all the impact of a glorious victory.

It was a lot more captivating than the play that closed the Chatelus festival later in the evening. I wouldn’t say it was bad. The three teenagers who performed The Socks by Pierre-Yves Millot put a lot of effort into it and produced some very good moments. At one point when we had been introduced only to the first two characters one of them used an imaginary fishing line to pull the third character out of the front row and on to the stage. It was very much a coup de theatre and played with convincing physicality by the lad on the imaginary hook. But by and large the cast were not in the play but on the stage – look at me, I’m acting! That’s the director’s fault since left to their own devices teenagers (and others) if not shy and retiring will almost inevitably perform thus. Also like many absurdist pieces the play had a problem trying to find a resolution to the situation it had set up making the evening (blessedly short) unsatisfying.

On Saturday there was a book fair. It was not made up of a set of second-hand book stalls (though there was one) but featured local authors and little publishing houses flogging their wares plus a paper-making demonstration by a guy who has recreated ancient wooden presses and employs antediluvian methods to produce echt-medieval paper sheets. Twee? Who? Lui?

I decided not to invest €16 in a re-telling of the 40 murders that have taken place in the Creuse since the year dot or €12 in a tale of growing up in a village that the author assured me would not be found on the map but was surprise, surprise not unlike one she knew well as a child. Instead I gave €1 to a good cause and got two tatty paperbacks in return. Mean? Who? Me?

Châtelus Malvaleix is not a very big place but this week it has mustered all its forces to mount an arts festival. There’s an exhibition of painting and sculpture, a couple of plays, some musical events, a book fair, an artisan market and bizarrely to my mind a country walk.

I’ve seen the first of the two plays and despite the warm appreciation of the public I was not too impressed. It was about people wandering around an art gallery commenting on the works on display – quite appropriate for the occasion - but for a cast of nine to impersonate convincingly several dozen gallery visitors and staff is not easy however many changes of costume they affect. It had its moments though and if it hadn’t been twenty minutes late in starting I might have regarded their efforts more charitably.

I know only one other work by Jean-Michel Ribes and it too involves people wandering around a gallery commenting on the exhibits. It’s definitely not the same play so he must surely be working out some hang-up from a misspent youth.

The jazz concert yesterday was more enjoyable. A piano and trumpet duo who played mostly standards pre-dating Miles Davis. The trumpeter sang as well but his voice was a bit thin and under-powered for my taste although he gave a very nice version of Besame Mucho. At the end we were asked to give a special round of applause for the Creuse’s one and only piano tuner without whom even those lacking perfect pitch might have been plagued by the odd bum note.

Below is a collage of some of the art works. I would not pay €100 or so for the mysterious fluffy things nor €750 for the pretty enough picture of horses but what do I know about art?


On the other hand I was very happy to pay €3 for a tray of sixteen peaches this afternoon despite knowing nothing about fruit growing.

The weather in Aubazine was splendid, the setting delightful, the accommodation and food good, the golf fun. But too many golfers are so obsessive about the bloody game that you could spit, or at least let your eyes glaze over and think about something else.

I looked up a relative who lives thereby and relaxed on his settee with a couple of beers in front of a transmission of Andy Murray's quarter-final match since Peter like most British residents has access to BBC TV. I think that may be bordering on the technically illegal because of all those complicated territorial rights issues and large payments for sporting events that bedevil the airwaves but it's so widespread that it's almost as though a right of way were being established.

Peter is not what you would call a close relative. He's my sister-in-law's sister's husband's brother. Now some languages probably have a snappier word for that just as Arabic for instance doesn't need to say my uncle on my mother's side and my uncle on my father's side since they've got separate words عمّ and خآل.

As far as I know I don't have any American relatives for whom even less snappy expressions would have to be used but in case I do, and for any unrelated American readers here's wishing you A Happy Fourth Of July.

There are only a few days left for you to get ready to head off to Kinross to follow Robert The Bruce’s heart into battle under the auspices of a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

I am myself preparing to head for Aubazine next week to play golf under the auspices of what I like to think is a slightly less weird organisation, The Senior Golfers of the Four Leagues. But I suppose that like beauty weirdness is all in the eye of the beholder. Some might think for example that there was a touch of weirdness about doing a little quiet research into the custom of kissing hands, which is what I was doing when I came across the SCA.

Some people came to look at the house the other day. They spent all of ten minutes looking round, asked me no questions and not many more of the estate agent's man who was with them. So I don't think they were bowled over.

Perhaps a modern property like this friend's house in La Châtre where I had dinner last night would be more to their taste. I last saw it when it was a shell and it's fascinating to see the finished article. It's quite a contrast to the standard issue new-build bungalows that spring up around here, not to mention old stone shacks like ours or what is soon to be Ewan's Georgian flat.

Over a few rainy days last week I found myself reading Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.

When I read the description on page 9 of penny loaves being distributed by the bereaved to the village on the day of a funeral I said wisely to my anthropologically knowledgeable self that yes I had come across this custom somewhere before. Then reading on page 16 of how George Pontifex had recast in modern idiom the advertising blurb for a religious book I wondered quite how that had the ring of familiarity. On reaching page 35 where Mr Allaby advises his five unmarried daughters that they should play at cards to decide which one of them should throw her cap at Theobald I had a strong suspicion that I must have read the book before.

For the life of me although I greeted each scene with warm familiarity as it appeared, I could not foretell what was going to happen, apart from having a vague presentiment that a prayer meeting would play a role. The prayer meeting duly took place on page 180 so there was no longer any room for doubt. I had read the book before.

This set me wondering what might be the minimum number of books that in the present state of my memory would provide me with an endlessly fresh reading experience if I were to read them repeatedly one after another. And further, at what point in time will my memory function be so reduced that one book will do?

There are tens of thousands of English speakers living in France so it’s not surprising that several publications exist to serve their needs. I picked up “Creuse News” the other day, never having seen it before.

It contained the usual mix of stories extolling the French way of life, stories complaining about the French way of life, articles on how to do x or y when living in France and lots of ads.

Most of the ads were unsurprising – builders, electricians, teachers of French, restaurants, installers of British TV, social events etc. But some did catch my eye: the Corner Shop providing all our favourite products (not yet run by an ethnic minority I noted); the English mobile hairdresser and nail technician; the traditional Scottish piper available for all special occasions; and to cap it all there was Bill aka Monsieur Fromage who takes coals to Newcastle in the form of British cheese to French markets.

“Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays où il existe 258 variétés de fromage?” said General de Gaulle. He must now be turning in his grave at the thought of the British making the country even more difficult to govern. Yet more so at the thought of Churchill having the last laugh.