Ahoy fat boy

The clouds rolled back, the sun shone and so yesterday morning it was off to play golf with the Landlubbers at Chateau Begude, not St Donat as I suggested yesterday after watching a very satisfying return to form by England’s cricketers.

Sport is a wonderful pastime where one should not care if one wins or loses, it’s the taking part that is important, thus I shall not be revealing exactly what happened yesterday as it is unimportant and also I have forgotten the result. Suffice to say this was important for some of my opponents but I was just happy to enjoy the spring weather and take some exercise. In any event it was not a proper round of golf as we had to play the front 9 holes twice because the back 9 is undergoing massive reconstruction. In that event, had I won (and don’t forget I cannot remember) then I would not, on the basis that it was not proper 18 hole golf, have enforced the collection of the wager. Sadly it seems there may be some amongst us who fall short of the very high moral code that is my life’s benchmark.

Arriving home at around 4pm I was almost immediately bundled into a car together with several bottles of wine and my traveling cigar humidor for a late afternoon barbecue courtesy of man mountain Peachy Butterfield and voluptuous wife Suzanne. I had noticed a pall of smoke lurking just to the north of Valbonne whilst golfing, and had thought it rather dangerous for someone to be having a bonfire whilst the mistral was starting, blowing those thunder clouds away. It turns out that it was sausages. Yes Peachy was incinerating sausages (and probably every animal he could catch or run over in a ten-mile radius) and was ensuring it was all “properly cooked”. The barbecue that he was manning could have come direct from Hades.  By 6pm he had barbecued everything to a crisp, even I suspect the lettuce but having missed lunch I was ravenous so tucked in.

My picture today was stolen is shared with you today and I want you to think of it in a loving way with no malicious intent. It appeared on Peachy’s Facebook page and the suggestion is that it is he. However if you look closely enough (please avoid doing this with food nearby) you will see two things that suggest otherwise. Firstly the plate he is holding is far too small and secondly had he been consuming anything that he had barbecued there would have been copious amounts of black charcoal and ash covering the much larger plate.

Dinner aboard a yacht, Peachy style

So as I lay in bed this morning, I began to consider the day ahead. A quick trot round the Valmasque for my morning constitutional but as yet there are no plans (of which I have been made aware) for lunch so perhaps a barbecue where things are cooked rather than incinerated may transpire. I was thinking that life today is grand. The sun is shining, it is a holiday period so I shall be able to forget for a short time my responsibilities with Currencies Direct, the fridge is full of beer, the wine rack creaking with fine french produce, what could possibly go wrong? Then I remembered. The voracious locusts, sprogs 1 and 2 are back from various colleges in England to eat and drink their way through my stores see and spend some time with their loving parents. That done, after half an hour a steady stream of teenage miscreants begin arriving, seemingly none have been fed in weeks and all have an appetite for a free drink. I have not as I write this been downstairs yet, but I am expecting carnage..

Chris France