Fin de été d'Inde

The air seems a lot cooler now that it's getting dark at 7pm. Gone are our evenings playing tennis.

One of the women at tennis is going to Australia (mainly) next week for 3 1/2 months so I've given her my parents' number and she might call near New Year when they are in Sydney.

Bits and Pieces

Animal life: There was a large toad clambering around in the rockery by our car space a couple of nights ago. Also a couple of days ago a large group of sanglier (wild pigs) were hanging around in the car park behind Pat's work when I arrived to pick him up. The pack (what is the collective noun for pigs?) seemed to consist of a big mama, a couple of smaller daughters and a whole swag of piglets. As they trailed off into the pine trees we could see the last two were lame in their back legs. They were all quite dark and bristly. People here reckon their numbers have increased because there are less hunters. Certainly residents with gardens near forests regularly have them dug up. And I saw Australian "sanglier" being sold in a frozen foods shop here!

I also just remembered that on one of our walks in the Dordogne we encountered a hillside so covered with wild garlic we could smell it.

Today I cooked baked beans. It took more than 4 and a half hours. They will have to be better than the canned variety, which are hard to get here.

Rain

It is looking like we might have a whole day of rain. It feels like a refreshing change. The temperature has reduced to 24 C.

We had a very unsatisfying expedition into Italy on Sunday. After Rick regaled us with stories from their visit to Apricale restaurants we decided to try and find it and a cache at San Michele to deposit the Mini Travel Bug. Without a map we had no hope of finding Apricale in the hills above Vintimiglia. So we went to San Michele and couldn't fins the cache box. I looked for about 20 minutes under rocks and bushes but the GPS wouldn't fix. By the time we got to the next town with food (Sospel) it was too late for lunch so we drove home. The only saving grace was that I picked a handful of tasty purple figs from a tree by the road.

A couple of English soundtrack movies have been on tele recently. Am Australian effort Innocence (2000) by Paul Cox, very touching film about rekindled love with Bud Tingwell and Julia Blake. The other was Rear Window (1954), the retouched version with James Stewart and Grace Kelly. We didn't realise it was her until I mentioned it at tennis. She seemed familiar!

Not much to write home about

The news of the past week has been very depressing so I haven't felt like blogging. We talked about terrorism and the French religious symbols ban in state schools in French class. The topic generated quite a lively discussion, if in broken French.

Australia goes to the polls on October 9. Surely the Australian people can give my Dad a birthday present and get rid of Howard but it seems nothing is certain. It is nice not to have to endure weeks of posturing by him and the rest of the pollies although I do try to read current opinion on various news sources. I tend to read the ones pointing out Howard's propensity to lie and ignore the will of the Australian public. We'll do our postal votes for Howard's electorate via the embassy in Paris.

I'm currently watching the US open with German commentary (can't understand anything except "oh ja" and "breakchance"). We spent the day reading secondhand books bought from Heidi's English bookshop in Antibes yesterday. Very relaxing. The weather is a bit opressive, like a Sydney February.

Last week with Bruce we did a cache behind Grasse, at a ruined village called Castellaras. Pat broke the repair off his front incisor with a pain de camapagne sandwich on the way there so he looked like a snaggle-tooth. Bruce went for train trip to Menton and cycled all the way back on Monday while Pat organised a dental appointment for Wednesday. This meant a change to our vague plan of going away for an overnight trip to the Mercantour. Instead we took Bruce around to Barcelonette with the bike doing a hike to some alpine lakes from the Col de Cayolle on the way. He bivvied in a wood for the night while we drove back home over the Col de Bonnet. At 2802m the highest col in Europe. The road seemed to go on for ever through an increasingly barren landscape, a fitting setting for all the WW2 bunkers and buildings still littering the mountain tops. It took us two hours to drive home from the top. Early the following morning Bruce rode Pat's mountain bike over the col, arriving back at the house about 4 in the afternoon, some 170 kms later. Too exhausting by half! We went off to play tennis for a couple of hours and he was asleep, unsurprisingly, when we came back to go out to dinner. I saw him off at the airport for a flight to Munich the folowing morning.