I Get Out ...

If you take a look at the satellite view of these here parts, you'll see that the montagne d'Alaric is a great long outcrop (mostly limestone, which is why there was a four à chaux here, to turn the stuff into chalk) that stretches from Carcassonne to Moux, where it abruptly ends. Well, not quite, for the massif itself stops dead, but stretching out some four km to the east are two rocky ridges - and in the northern one there is a natural cutting that takes you through, rather than up and over - about 1 km apart, and between them is the plaine de l'Alaric.

This is mostly occupied by vines, olive trees and rabbits - and hunters, in season - but that is not the point. The thing is, if you leave Moux and go through the cutting you can just keep walking south across the top of the plain until you get to the southern ridge, where you have to start doing a bit of work as it climbs. After a while the tarmac disappears and if you carry on through the open stands of pine and low shrubs and rosemary and stuff, with the sun filtering through the leaves, you eventually get to a crossroads: east towards Fabrézan, west back up into the Alaric to join up with the GR77, or south for another four or five km going (mostly) downhill to Camplong.

I had no wish to add another couple of hours to my walk, nor to ring home from Camplong and ask Margo to come pick me up, so I turned around and went back the way I'd come. Even so, my calf muscles gently reminded me the next day that I'd done it. Getting soft; I really should get out more often.

Through the usual channels I learn of yet another IoT sex toy - the proudly Made In Germany "Vibratissimo Panty Buster", if you really want to know, but damned if I can work out what their target demographic is with a name like that (also, I do not want to know what would come out if I put the company name "Amor Gummiwaren" through Goofle Translate*) - which, as they rather nicely put it, "failed even basic penetration testing". Cue sniggering, and Benny Hill theme music. More explicitly, the backend database was wide open and the thing could be remotely controlled via Bluetooth or the innatübz: the manufacturer contended that the possibility of such non-consensual tickling was a feature, not a bug. So be careful, people.

Also, I have done my good deed for the year: unpaid tech support for a neighbour having problems sending with gmail. Tracked that one down to bloody Avast AV and twepped the thing, but you can see why the less computer-literate would be completely lost. Of course it was the free version, said it needed to be updated but the licence had expired, would I like to buy the Standard version at only 14€ or the Pro at €25? Then you spot the teeny button that says "No, I'm a cheapskate" and click on that and up comes the download screen offering the choice of the Standard or Pro versions ... life's too short, I just uninstalled it.

But even at that, the uninstall asks you plaintively if you're really sure you want to do this, and when you reply that "Yes, I really, really want to get rid of this useless piece of shit" it refuses to go any further until you say why ... I absolutely hate software like that, and I feel no guilt whatsoever at sending it into the bit-bucket and flushing it down the crapper.

This will come back to bite me on the bum, I know, because when she has problems using the iPad that her daughter cruelly gave her for Christmas the first stop for advice will be me.

I sometimes get a bit OCD about things, I know - look on it as a procrastination-enabler because I actually do have better things to occupy my time than get obsessed about accented characters no longer displaying correctly in Arial. So having been annoyed about that for about the past month, and being kind of busy with other things today, I had no choice really but to put everything else to one side and get to the bottom of it. At first I vaguely suspected it was some weirdness in Firefox and I was already getting pretty pissed off with that, due to the latest update having set bloody Bing as my search engine without so much as a by-your-leave - and even less pardonable, from my point of view, set the startup preferences to "go directly to Bing" rather than "display my tabs from the last session".

Which really, really annoyed me, as there were two tabs with information it'd taken me half a day of exotic search queries to find and that I hadn't bothered to bookmark. Nor, two days later, could I remember exactly which queries had come up with paydirt ... so I was a) back to square one in my search to find out how to preload a 32 or 64-bit version of a runtime library depending on the executable type, and b) half looking for an excuse to switch to Chrome, or Opera, or anything ... but it turned out not to be that.

Eventually, spelunking around in the font files and the registry, I realise that I must have installed some PoS software on or about January 17, because that's when the Arial font file got replaced with one called "homol.ttf". I have no recollection of that at this time. Only took most of the morning to track that one down, and I'm supposed to know about things like that.

Well, I managed to make a bit of room in the freezer by the simple expedient of removing the 5kg leg of sanglier that's been sitting there for a while, and sticking it into salt. Should be ripe in ten days or so, then I can brush it off, slather it liberally with lard and cracked black pepper, and hang it up in the garage to dry. If nothing goes wrong - like mildew, blight or leprosy - should be good to eat around mid-June. Be warned.

Now I just have to clean out the fridge: there's about two kilos of foie gras cru in there waiting for some attention. I think I shall do two of the little suckers au torchon, and the last I shall put into a terrine and produce a mi-cuit so that Margo can eat it. And in other really exciting news (if porcelain cooking gear makes you go weak at the knees), my gratin dishes should be turning up in a couple of days. I know, I have gratin dishes - not exactly coming out my ears, but enough for any reasonable person - but they are not the right gratin dishes.

For, many many years ago back in NooZild I bought a large white oval porcelain gratin dish and we were very happy together for a while, but then on one of our moves it disappeared and I thought no more of it - until, a few weeks ago when I was up in Paris and Ian brought it out. For we had left it with them, when we left for our two years OE in France, some thirty-one years ago. And for some reason, I got obsessed with getting it back.

Fairly obviously I wasn't going to rip it from Marie's cold dead fingers (for one thing, she's probably meaner than I am in a fight) so I did the obvious thing and asked of the great Google. Now it turns out that Apilco still make that exact model: but I cannot recommend that you go looking for it on their website, for it is absolutely shite, and every single link I clicked on came up with a 404 error. Google gave me links to some of their catalogues (sadly, not the one for the particular line I was looking for) but you could not get there from the site itself. Go figure.

Also, they have an online store, or "boutique" as they so charmingly put it. That too, I discovered, does not work. I am not surprised. (Cynicism means you're never disappointed - and, in my experience, rarely pleasantly surprised.) But I found a couple of sites that not only advertise themselves as having Apilco porcelain for sale, but also have an actual working store, so I went to the first of these and found exactly the one I was looking for (lacking 35 years of burnt-on filth patina, but you can't ask for too much) and because breakages will happen, I ordered two.

I should probably not be allowed on the innatübz unsupervised, because then I looked at the second site and they had a smaller model, and if I had two they would be ideal for making and serving coquilles St-Jacques for two people, so I ordered those as well, and they also had big enamelled cast-iron gratin dishes at half price and it would have been criminal not to take advantage of that so I ordered two of them for good measure, and then I came to my senses and stopped.

You see why Amazon is eating everyone's lunch. After the cooking ware splurge I also had occasion to buy a new keyboard, due to a highly technical incident involving white wine spewing out of my nostrils all over the old one, and I headed off to the rueducommerce website to see if they still stocked the Microsoft Natural keyboards. They do, and for the low, low price of €48, so I stuck one in my shopping cart and headed for the metaphorical checkout: where I learnt to my dismay that I'd either have to pay €6 extra for shipping, or they'd generously let me pick it up in a couple of days - for no extra charge - at the nearest Carrefour. Unfortunately, as far as they were concerned that would be the one at Port La Nouvelle, an 80km round trip from here ...

Amazon had it at exactly the same price, for free delivery to the door the next working day. Guess who I chose.

Whatever, all good things come to an end and our itinerant bar Chez Réné is no exception. Magali and Lionel will be opening the doors on Monday, so last Friday was our final session: a large crowd of us gathered and ate a bit, and drank somewhat more than usual and almost certainly more than absolutely necessary (and yes, I did feel a bit embarrassed taking all the empties down to the recycling yesterday moaning), and we dragged it out till around 1am in a general ambiance of jollity and self-congratulation at having kept it going for almost a year.

And you know, I really think we deserve to feel a bit smug about it. From saying casually to Rick and Mary one day "see you oop t'bar Friday?" and having that snowball, when the real bar shut down, to managing to keep a group of friends, French and English, together: we've not done too shabbily.

But anyway, tonight is bar night at Montbrun and it's François' birthday - a youthful 58 - so I better go knock up a chocolate cowpat cake for thirty, that being our contribution to the festivities. Also, I have yet another three foie gras that are even now soaking in milk, and which I need to salt and pepper and leave to macerate for a bit in Rivesaltes before poaching them tomorrow. Mind how you go, now.

PS: the €20 menu at La Petite Auberge at Tournissan is more than honourable: excellent foie gras, a lovely-looking risotto with mushrooms and bacon, magret de canard ... Le Tournedos, at Lézignan, is great if your tastes run to grillades - they've an open fire in the dining room just for that - but if you want a cassoulet be aware that theirs is the "original" recipe, with no tomatoes. So just beans, duck, and bits of pig. The servings are copious - we waddled out with a huge doggy-bag - but sad to say the profiteroles au chocolat were strictly industrial. I couldn't finish them either, but they did not end up in the bag.

* I cracked. The answer, for what it's worth, is "Cupid Rubber Goods".