The cooler weather means it's time to put the pool to bed for the year. Last week the pump started to make that 'two plates of metal grinding together' noise. Yesterday the pump man came and replaced it. This morning the water level in the pool is low - a sign that there's a leak ? The hose pipes are unravelled and the water level topped up. Sophie is my companion on this unexciting task. She finds the unreeling of the hose and the sound of the water flowing into the pool to be riveting. She keeps on getting under my feet so is 'encouraged' into the house.
Bob emerges and gives his sister a morning kiss. This morning, as every morning, Sophie objects and lets out a ' hollering '. Villagers aiming to sleep in on a Sunday morning are by now, presumably, wide awake.
'The Font' has finished the course with the astrophysicists in Pasadena. The sixteen year old Chinese girls with three doctorates apiece will be carrying on with their quest for an electro-magnetic fourth dimension.
This week Angus and the PONs will have to fend for themselves for two nights while 'The Font' heads off to sign up for a new course. We go to the local frozen food store and lay in some Naans and microwaveable curries. Consideration is given to duck breast but this seems a culinary adventure too far.
This mornings croissant an 8.3/10. Light, flaky but ever so slightly stale. A batch made an hour ago. The angelic duo each get given an end. This is a cause for tail thumping happiness.
Sophie may have sussed out from the sound of packing that she's going to be left in a household with Angus as the chef in charge.
5:58 am. A slight change to our routine. Instead of being woken by a cold wet nose pressed into his right ear , Angus is instead woken by a shaggy tail beating against his face. Bob has found a slipper on the floor and has turned around to check it out. Angus is up quickly.
Decidedly cool this morning. Cool weather = turbocharged PONs. The pre-dawn hurtle round the garden undertaken at super fast speed.
Angus and the angelic duo arrive at the bakers. The bakery staff clearly aren't early birds. This mornings croissant decidedly lacklustre. 6/10 - the dough unfluffy. The PONs think this score is miserly and would give it an 11/10 , if asked. Bobs tail is still wagging. Sophie drinks noisily from the bowl of water that the baker has provided.
Unappealing green things with brown marks at the front of the greengrocers display. They are examined, briefly.
The last of the melons. Can the year have raced by that quickly ?
Back at home 'The Font' is up and about and reading the Swedish papers and magazines brought back from London. That time of year when we start saving the papers as kindling for the fire.
Just another quiet Saturday with two enthusiastic and increasingly shaggy companions,
Hats off to anyone who can salute with one hand and hold a Labrador with the other : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwAhpeJWlCE
PS The dogs look as though they're having a whale of a time. Some are wearing shoes.
Cloudy and very windy. From the cranes outside the hotel window it's evident that Brexit is not ( yet ) slowing the London construction market.
Dog owners and American tourists coming to terms with jet lag are early risers . Buckingham Palace already attracting crowds at seven in the morning.
The City is quieter. The Guildhall almost deserted. Most folks are already behind their desks or in morning meetings.
Ten minutes early for a seven thirty meeting with men in dark suits. The dining room will be on the top floor and have wonderful views that no one will look at. The American men will toy with a pretzel and drink unimaginably strong coffee by the gallon. Angus will have sausages and bacon and ( as a sop to his cholesterol ) one egg over hard. City churches are always open early. While waiting I pop into one. Destroyed in the 1940 blitz and re-opened ( or should that be re-consecrated ? ) in 1958. Completely empty at this hour of the morning. My only companions four carved angels with fluttering wings on top of a wooden screen.
How can you mispronounce Nevada or Oregon ?
Four more angels with flamboyant wings , this time cast in brass, on top of an altar. If there was anyone around I'd ask what the high wings signify - but there isn't. I'll remember it as the church with the fancy angels. The brass angels have swords, the wooden ones don't. They must have been recreated from pre-war photos.
The young Jamaican guard on the train to Heathrow checks my ticket and yawns. ' Long shift ? ' I ask more out of politeness than interest. '' Another eleven hours to go " he replies. I'm incredulous. Seems he works a 12 hour shift, three days a week, to pay his way through college. ' I can't believe how lucky I am to have a job like this ' he adds. I think he's being facetious. He's not. Something uplifting about the lack of complaint and the enthusiasm for life.
An accident on the motorway home. What usually takes fifty minutes takes two and a half hours. One of those 'awful' moments when you have to avert your eyes. Back at The Rickety Old Farmhouse the PONs are delighted to have found their flock. There is a full ten minutes of unconstrained, joyful, mayhem.
Toe tapping music. Played on Radio Nostalgie this morning : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyZAJQgrXKk
Not all golfers have the same outlook on life : https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/golfing-legend-renee-powell-opens-student-hall-in-her-name/
Gales in London. The last flight is cancelled due to high winds at Heathrow. Nothing unusual about the anonymous airport hotel room apart from the floors which are made not of wood but of faux plastic wood. They're strangely cold and bare feet stick to them. Why would you have plastic looking wood rather than the genuine article ?
The only reading material a French comic book about the battle of Tarawa. How odd is that ?
A five thirty bus to the terminal for the first flight. On the aircraft a couple from Austin. She's wheeled on and he fusses as the airport staff help her into the seat. Broad blue hat with red piping and matching pashmina. Hands stretched out straight on her knees. There's an old fashioned Grace Kelly look to her. After takeoff she leans across the aisle and talks to me with that American openness to strangers that's alien to their British cousins. An indecorous cancer. They've been travelling the pilgrim route to Santiago for two months. Something they'd always promised they would do. Their children said it was mad. He wheeled her all the way apart from the mountainous stretch where they hired a car. They'd stop at churches and if she couldn't climb the steps, he'd run in, video the interior and then they'd sit outside and look at the pictures on his i-Pad. '' Now we're proficient in Spanish and we made it to Santiago ! ". There were traumas getting replacement tyres for her chair when the old ones wore out. '' Don't get me started on the brake linings ". The kindness of strangers helped overcome all obstacles. Now heading home for what she calls 'another journey'. He rubs her knuckles with the tip of his thumb in that way long married couples do and whispers " Shoosh ! Don't say that ".
The most amazing stories can be found in the seat across the aisle.
At the train station a passenger with a dog. Interesting psychology. In the minute, maybe 90 seconds I'm there buying a ticket a man comes and tickles the dogs head, two girls stoop down to say hello and an old lady tells the owner how fine his companion is. Urban society slows and gives way to an older rhythm.
English bakeries have very different displays to their French counterparts.
Late in the evening after talking to men in dark suits I pass this new Rolls Royce parked outside the London hotel. The colour scheme perhaps not to everyones taste.
A record of some of those 'little' things too unimportant for a diary .
Morning walk time. We're passed by three farmers in little white vans, the young 'garagiste' in his souped up Citroen, the farmer in the Toyota Land Cruiser ( with the manic Westie leaping from front seat to back window ) and this morning not one but two combine harvesters. I wave. Bob looks. Sophie is down in the donkey field hunting for badger poo so doesn't notice.
The sunflower harvest is starting. After that it's the hazelnuts and then the village slips into hibernatory mode.
With two enthusiastic Polish Lowland Sheepdogs in the house ...
.... there is absolutely zero chance that we will miss the sunrise.
Some things beat lying in bed. This mornings deep red colours an indication that a sand cloud is being brought in from the Sahara.
By seven thirty it's almost full daylight. For the PONs , who've been on the go since six, it's the start of the best day ever.
We spend Sunday morning at the open day for the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the local market town. Founded in July 1776 by a group of knowledgeable locals and still going strong. Ever since they've managed to publish a quarterly magazine without a single interruption despite revolution, wars and occupation.
An amiable older gentleman, who turns out to be the President, gives us a tour of this Aladdin's cave of mysteries. He is quite happy, indeed eager, to let us leaf through the original notebooks containing the first lectures . A wonderful display of original First World War posters is propped, haphazardly, against a wall.
On the staircase an enormous and particularly hideous 19th century painting showing the excommunicated German Emperor Henry 4th pleading for forgiveness in front of the Pope in 1077. Generations of school children will have been taught this is what happens to naughty boys and girls who stray too far from the church. The Emperor was made to wait in his bare feet in the snow and in the picture is looking decidedly chastened. He never forgot, nor forgave. One of the seminal moments in European history. None of us can determine who the stern looking woman next to the Pope might be. Not a picture I'd want to have above the mantelpiece.
Notebooks from the 1780's showing excavations made by a visitor from Paris - a savant theatrical impresario - who could see something and then draw it exactly from memory. The Roman remains he excavated and recorded are all now lost.
The academy building is an old medieval convent that belonged to the Ursulines. There were no less than 26 convents in the town at the time of the revolution. After the terror it was vacant and they bought it for a song. At some stage the building was divided and the neighbouring tenant became the El Dorado night club. Quite an exotic venue for an agricultural town. From the fallen concrete on the El Dorado's portico I assume it's long closed.
While 'The Font' chats to the 'senior' gentleman Angus talks to an enthusiastic lady who is writing a book on the subject of 'The role of women in the study of apricot and plum diseases in the late 18th century '. As a special treat Angus is shown a variety of scientific instruments and the notes made by a long series of worthy farmers wives.
How marvellous that such calmness, eccentricity and passion co-exist in equal measure.
On our way back to the car we pass a 19th century building . Down below an uninteresting front to the Prune store. Above a mass of architectural detail which could be Moorish or Gothic but seems undecided as to what it wants to be.
Who knew the Norwegian national anthem was the same as the British ? Here's God Save the King sung in that increasingly fashionable Benjamin Britten version I never know when to stand up for . The Swedish King and Queen look bemused : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jK-0AEFPbo
Some people got this Novichok joke. Others didn't. The comments are twitter humour at its best : https://twitter.com/richardosman/status/1040261999555497985
