Things I'd Not Planned on Doing ...

By now, world + dog probably knows that we've had a once-in-a-century flooding event: one of those Rumsfelds. You know, as in "shit happens". We got off very lightly - thank gods we didn't buy one of those picturesque houses on the banks of the canal du Midi, nor in Trèbes (where there is not only the canal, but also the river Aude), nor in Lagrasse, through which the Orbieu runs (only under normal circumstances, it runs well below street level). Truth to tell, the only problem we had was the verandah being awash in the morning, and when it all cleared up and the blue sky came back in the afternoon, we discovered why.

The verandah was roofed by a twisted evil genius - or a complete idiot, take your pick, although I'm going with the latter option - and so there's a sort of sheltered gully in it, with its own gutter, which goes into its own downpipe which then spews water all over the terrace. When it works. What we found was that the gutter, and the downpipe, were completely blocked with a few decades-worth of dried cat-shit, and the water had to go somewhere. Dripping into the verandah, as it happens, as a vaguely extremely unappetising turd soup.

So cleaning that out turned out to be our afternoon's job, and let me just say that I'd much rather not have had to do it.

The vines, of course, have very soggy feet, and around here - where the transport infrastructure is pretty much third-world quality anyway - some roads now have places where they're covered with other bits of road, where slabs of tarmac have been undermined and then come free and bobbed happily around for a bit. At least they'll now have to do something about those potholes which is perhaps just a little more sophisticated than chucking the odd shovel-full of hot-mix into them from the flatbed of the municipal truck (every once in a while, when they find a bit of spare petty cash down the back of the mayoral sofa, they splurge on a tub of tar and a cubic metre of gravel), but this being the south I'm not going to hold my breath.

In other news, it is once more time to drag the hi-viz jackets out of the wardrobe and dust off the doggy bells, for the hunting season has opened - with, of course, a bang. You can tell this not only from the occasional sharp report up in the pinède or in the vines, but also from the odd dazed pheasant wandering about the village, with what passes for its mind preoccupied with major existential questions like "what the hell am I doing here?". It would probably be better off pondering "how long am I going to be here?", but there you go, I guess that prioritisation has never been a forté of the bird brain.

(Just as an aside, there's a "fake news" site over here that I look at from time to time: one of their later articles reported on the joy of the various hunting associations on discovering that the competent ministry had significantly raised the quotas on hikers and trail bikers.)

Hunting season also means it's Autumn, and with that come the gentle breezes (gusting up to 50 kph, today) which make it quite a hard slog walking into the wind. And when you're walking with it at your back it's not so good either, as it blows straight up the dogs' bums and up to what they are pleased to call their brains, making them even more bubble-headed than usual.

José, the menuisier from Montbrun, came past a while back to drop off two large wardrobes that were surplus to requirements, and now that the borer has been put to the sword one of them is in the verandah by the front door, ostensibly for stashing coats. But it is capacious enough to conceal a multitude of gins, so Margo ever-so-gently suggested that it would be a Good Idea if I sorted through the (large) box of boots that came down with us on our epic voyage five years ago, and has been sitting out there ever since.

Quite frankly, I don't know why we bothered. Bringing them, that is. Probably because they were sitting at the front door in Saint-Pierre, and towards the end of the proceedings, when it became evident that there was not nearly enough time to sort things properly, it was a case of "fling it all into bags or boxes, load it into the lorry, and we'll sort it out at the other end".

Which has, finally, been done. Of eight pairs of boots - some dating back to the Bronze Age - seven are now in black plastic bags to go out on the street for the next time the mayor's idiot nephew comes past with the truck to do "les encombrants", and one pair is in the wardrobe, waiting for me to attack it with a brush and the vacuum cleaner.

Which I shall do with some trepidation, for over the years they have become full of dog hair and dust and godnose what else, and I rather expect that at the toe end there will be a highly-developed civilisation of fluff which I shall have to wipe out.

I has news! Not, unfortunately, good news. It would appear that our bar is to close at the end of the year, which is a complete embuggerment. OK, it wasn't entirely unexpected, but still ... the thing is, Lionel gets all a-flustered as soon as more than four people come in wanting food, and when he's busy chatting with a mate you could die of thirst before getting served at the counter. The best part, it seems, of running a bar is when you get to pop out and sit down for a fag, with no-one importuning you for service: otherwise, it's too much like hard work.

Still, it's hardly a spur of the moment decision, I would think, so I have to ask myself why they invested in a fancy kebab grill and a huge - and doubtless hugely expensive - sound system only recently. Makes no sense to me, but then it's not really my problem, I guess. I mean, apart from the fact that we will, once again, be barless. Which is not good.

Oh well, we shall just have to fend for ourselves again, I suppose, hoping all the while that the mairie doesn't take an age to find a replacement - preferably one that's competent, and doesn't mind working.

Whatever, we are currently "enjoying" a cold front that seems to have come direct from Scandinavia. From 22° about a week ago it's plummeted to 6° today: the sky is grey, dull and dismal, there is sporadic spiteful rain, and the wind is gusting enthusiastically. Also, thanks to the end of daylight saving, it is dark and gloomy around 18h, which is emphatically not nice.

Still, it could be worse. I had occasion to drag myself away from the fire and brave the weather to go help Nicole out, as she had not Internet: the phrase "computer-illiterate" was invented for her. So I reset the router, and then re-entered the WiFi key into her iThing, which had decided, for some reason, to forget it. And don't get me on to the subject of why the bloody things can't use WPS for key exchange ...

And then she had gmail working on the tablet but not on the laptop because somewhere along the line she - or, more probably, her daughter - had changed the password: you can't actually see the password on the iThing because it's protected by TouchID, which didn't seem to want to work, so I couldn't put the right password into the laptop (also, frikking Edge seems to have saved every password for every site except that for gmail), and if I reset the password via the laptop (because Google won't allow you to reuse an old password) I would have had to edit the password on the tablet and as that's protected I couldn't do that either ...

I do not know why complete strangers come up to me in the street to tell me that Apple gear is so simple to use, I really don't. I now have a brief answer for them, but I fear it may be impolite.

Anyways, the point was (originally) that we are having only light breezes compared to Corsica, where gale-force winds have kept the ferries in port. So think of us, will you?