An evening flowers

There is always a moment during the irksome completion of ones daily tasks in the south of France, when one  dreams of lunch, even if time constraints look like they make such an idea impossible on paper.  Such was the case yesterday when we had completed the so called “booze cruise” across the border to Italy and back by 11 30. Consider this; 36 bottles of prosecco, 12 bottles of a decent red, 2 bottles of Absolut vodka, a bottle of Havana Club rum and a 5 litre can of virgin olive oil, all for under £200, about 250 euros at todays’ Currencies Direct exchange rate.

With such success it seemed an obvious reason to celebrate, so we did, by going to lunch at Auberge de la Source at Sophia Antipolis, and, although the celebrations were somewhat muted by the attendance of Mr Clipbeard, this was offset in more than equal measure by the fact that the lovely Ashley, his wife, came too.

Amongst the very important issues discussed was a blog (not my own on this rare occasion) I had seen on Facebook called “50 sheds of grey”. This seems to me to be a development of the wonderful Monty Python sketch about Arthur “two sheds” Jackson, which if you were too young, and missed at the time is too difficult a subject to recount here. The girls amongst us became much more animated as this discussion developed, but I have to admit I did quite understand why. Grey sheds seems an unlikely subject about which to get excited, I guess I will never understand women.

So after a successful lunch, and an afternoon cap at which point I spotted the first blooms from our hibiscus, pictured today,  followed by a short siesta, it was back to work to prepare for the trek into the Stygian depths of the north of Europe, ie England at the end of the week.

Red Hibiscus

Tennis last evening was postponed due to Blind Lemon Milsted acknowledging that his forehand was almost beyond redemption and pulling out on some spurious pretext, so spurious that it was not even revealed to his partner, me. However we all know that there is a problem here, and like the supportive friends we would like to be and are not, will do the best to expose this weakness when next we see him, this morning at 11.00am sharp unless he becomes even more spurious. On the tennis court, cool (forehand)  hand Luke he is not.

Last night was a bit of a write off. It had started full of industrious intent. Our electrician had been jumping around to the commands of that nice lady decorator, fixing a few electrical problems and as he finished in early evening I thought he deserved a beer before I got down to making another load of cement. I had my old clothes on, a barrow full of sand and was bracing myself for more hard labour when I got a call from Roly and Poly, asking if they could pop round for half an hour. That’s when the trouble started. I should have known when they arrived carrying two bottles of wine, and they finally left around midnight. Had they arrived 10 minutes later, I would have had a wheelbarrow shaped lump of concrete to contend with.

One interesting footnote which I know will be of interest to the Reverend Jeff related to a discussion we had about some religious friends of Roly and Poly. At one stage I was told that they had “been to hell and back” with some issue or other. I suppose it is only the religious ones that are able to get back?

Chris France