Gloria be

Lunch with the Howes, Simon and the lovely Sarah, the saviours of Chateau Gloria was the usual excellent ribald affair. I took this picture of the warm up proceedings but that was just the start.

Gloria in excelsis

After lunch an astonishing thing happened. The cheese had been served and then renowned couch potato Peachy Butterfield returned from the toilet carrying a selection of tennis rackets. One would have thought that the thrashing he had received on the tennis court on Wednesday, combined with the damage inflicted on his corpulent frame as a result of having to run (perhaps that is an overstatement) around for an hour may have put him off sport of any kind for life but no, it appears to have kindled his enthusiasm. That or red wine induced bravado came to the fore.

He had spotted the private tennis court of our hosts on an earlier tour of the gardens of this house built by F1 legend Emerson Fittipaldi and to my surprise the entire luncheon party, already stoked up nicely on Verve Cliquot champagne, Chablis and the aforementioned Gloria took to the tennis court for a number of rather alcoholically challenged games of tennis.

Peachy did remove his sunglasses for one point, to reveal an unsuntanned line above the ear which he said was his blood pressure monitor line, and another luncheon guest local estate agent Cubby Woolf was a revelation playing some excellent tennis in his Gucci loafers which until then I had though was some king if northern bread, something like Hovis.

I think it was he who began the discussion about hookers. It seems that a little way along the Var towards St Tropez and especially around Lac St Cassien one often sees scantily clad young ladies sitting in chairs on the roadside touting for business. Cubby claims yesterday on a trip down in this direction for reasons that were never fully explained, certainly to my satisfaction, to have seen an elderly gentleman emerging from the bushes with his Zimmer frame. My suggestion that he was probably just answering the call of nature was not an opinion shared by anyone else present.

As coffee was served it was the token Frenchman amongst us, Robert Angeli who exclaimed that the French Presidential race was about to reach a conclusion and so the party gathered around the TV set to witness the confirmation of election of M. Hollande as the next French President.

This piece of history was greeted with some despair by all of those present except me. My enthusiasm for his election was in no way based on any political considerations, merely on the extra business that will be generated in the coming months for Currencies Direct as people with Euros flee the single currency as soon as they see the damage his policies may wreak on the Eurozone. I predict the doomed euro experiment is about to enter the final phase of its ultimate demise.

Alas today is Monday and despite invoking my age, my bad back, my shrapnel wound, the French election and any other excuse I could muster today I have to work. Not the higher intellectual work for which I am admirably suited, no, physical hard work. That nice lady decorator turned garden designer has a broad vision of gravelling areas of our garden which had hitherto been able to be dealt with by Terrance the Tractor and his grass mowing capabilities. Her building of a wall now precludes a great swath of grass from being accessible to Terrances’s special abilities. Gravel has been designated and sadly I have been designated the graveller despite a lot of grovelling.

Chris France