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.