A Cheeky Little Claret ...

So I headed off to the bar the other night for the birthday bash: couldn't be arsed getting out the glad rags so just slipped on a caftan, which is at least extremely comfortable although not, I admit, a particularly 80's thing. Have to say the greatcoat over the top of it looked a bit out of place, but I wasn't trying to make a fashion statement, it's still only the middle of February after all, and things were getting a bit nippy north of my knees. (For reasons which will become apparent later on, I need not have worried quite so much, as it turned out ...)

The place was already starting to fill as I hove up and plonked a half-kilo of foie gras onto the bar as my little contribution to the festivities: old Neville had really outdone himself with a rather funky Elvis wig, mirror shades and tats up both arms. Quite impressive, really. And at least he wasn't being miserable.

After the second or third rosé, as things were definitely getting busy and the music got cranked up (pretty dire but less so than I'd feared, what the hell were we all smoking back in those days?) it became clear that someone with too much time on their hands and the sort of sense of humour that finds fart jokes bloody hilarious had headed off to the little shop in Carcassonne that sells farces et attrapes and bought a job-lot of particularly hairy merkins, for Lionel was wandering around with a tray of the things, distributing them to all and sundry. They were supposed to be attached with a little loop of elastic and I can tell you that it does rather cut the circulation: Albert S., smarter than I, hooked his over one ear, where it looked quite rakish.

I pulled myself away around 8:30 - the place was booming but a man - no matter how dedicated he might be - can only drink so much, and all that rosé needed a bit of company. In principle I could have eaten there but it was by reservation only and I had not reserved: also, I think that over the years I've eaten quite enough bloody tartiflette to last me a lifetime, thanks very much.

Luckily I'd had the foresight, after getting the latest batch of foie gras ready, to cut some hampe into very thin slices and put it in to marinate, chop up an onion and some garlic and steam a bit of broccoli, so the stir-fried saté beef was pretty much ready to go when I got back. Which was a Good Thing, for I shall admit that I was just a bit wobbly at that point, and being in charge of a sharp knife could have been too much to ask.

Took the two younger dogs out for their late-night walk after that (being somewhat steadier on my feet at that point), and as I'd rather expected people were still turning up and, despite the cool, spilling out onto the street, so being a glutton for punishment (and a semi-professional alcoholic) I went back, sometime before 11. Managed to slither my way in (standing room only, and it looked as though they'd tried to pack about 60 people in there before the yoof spontaneously overflowed on to the pavement) and got yet another glass of vitamins - sadly, just at the time they put on a Boney M mash-up, starting off with rah! rah! bloody Rasputin and getting worse as it went on, which meant I damned near spilt it.

Did my usual trick and squirmed from group to group, chatting of this, that, and of t'other, but after a while and another few glasses it seemed like a reasonable idea to find a wall not too far from the bar and prop it up, lest it escape. At which point, having more or less blended into the background, I took up my favourite hobby and started seriously watching people.

As spectator sports go it really is rather good, requiring no special equipment apart from the ability to be inconspicuous: my only fear is that one day, as I'm scanning the crowd, I'll spot someone in the shadows on the opposite wall, studying me. It's happened once or twice, and I find it rather unnerving.

It seems that every single self-service pump these days comes equipped with a 9" LCD display, the better to serve you untargeted and (incidentally) completely crap ads while you're filling up the car. I mean, personally, when I'm giving Sarah her 60l of finest diesel I am not actually thinking about getting the trees that don't exist in the garden that I don't have trimmed so it follows that the ad for "Languedoc Elagage" is - apart from being crap - completely pointless and totally wasted on me, but whatever: fortunately, I no longer have anything to do, even peripherally, with publicity campaigns.

The thing is that these really cheap montages with their nasty soundtracks are interspersed with ads for the media company (two guys with a camcorder and a dog in someone's garage) that is responsible. At our local Intermarché, this turns out to be one "Poop Digimedia": I am not sure why anyone thought that was a good name.

Completely off-topic, but it turns out that there are advantages to being 60. For some strange reason my presence is required in Bordeaux on Monday, but as it's a four-hour drive and I'm supposed to be there for about 9:30 I thought I might as well check the train situation. And as I'm now over 59, the return ticket, first-class, from Carcassonne to Bordeaux cost me all of 50€: even with an overnight stay on Sunday night at a nice little hotel in the centre of town it still works out cheaper than taking Sarah through, and also means that I can get up at a reasonable hour and have a decent breakfast and still be on time for the meeting.

Having turned up at Gare St-Jean mid-afternoon I then had to find my way to the hotel, which was located just around les Quinconces. Luckily, Goofle maps exists: but I am enough of a Luddite to not have spotted that I can try to persuade the damned thing to give me pedestrian directions, so it sent me all around the bloody one-way system (also, Bordeaux has all these grands boulevards which are off-limits to cars, so I had to avoid those as well: shame, as the hotel was just off one of them: cours de l'Intendance, if you feel like looking it up ...).

Having come to my senses the next day I decided to try the walking directions, and let it be said that it was fine: were it not for the fact that my phone is, of course, set up for English and the silly bitch was trying to speak Frog. So, "turn left from Boolyvar Cl-e acute accent-mon-soh on to roo Gene Jor-e grave accent-z": truth to tell, I found it easier to make her shut up and just follow the map rather than trying to decipher boulevard Clémenceau and rue Jean Jaurès.

Incidentally, Suez/Lyonnaise des Eaux Mission Control at Bordeaux has a control room worthy of NASA: a big grid of twenty-odd huge screens up on one wall, in front of an enormous horseshoe-shaped desk with twelve screens, keyboards and various rodents, and then a large glass-topped desk with an absolutely ginormous touchscreen set flush into the top, for when you feel like playing at Minority Report ...

And to one side of the desk an executive leather swivel chair, of the type in which Bond villains love to lounge, and on the chair a rather tatty cat basket, and in the basket a cheerful tortoiseshell cat who has - it seems - adopted the place. The only problem, really, is that as the place is considered vital infrastructure and is currently in DEFCON 3 the cat - who doesn't have security clearance - has to be swiped in or out as required, by someone with an access badge.

Also, I'm not entirely sure what they put the cat food down as on the operating budget.

The hotel itself was very comfortable and the staff not only competent but also friendly: however, the bathroom in my room had obviously been created by the simple expedient of sticking up a partition about 50cm from one of the walls, then heaving toilet fittings in there to see what stuck. So you had an ancient shower at one end (with the traditional half-hour wait for hot water to actually arrive), hand-basin in the middle, and then the toilet ... when you were on the toilet your knees were under the hand-basin, and to get from there to the shower you had to squeeze - naked, for there was no room in there to undress - through a 15cm gap between the partition and that ice-cold porcelain. I'd still recommend the place, just be aware that you need to be rather lithe if you're planning on taking a single room.

Also, don't eat out in Bordeaux. The choice of eateries is vast, and the wine is uniformly excellent, so you're likely to spend an hour or so just agonising over where exactly to go.

Whatever, a couple of weeks back Dr. Lignères - the local vigneron who has a sideline as the village quack (maybe that should be vice versa, but I rather think I've got his priorities right) - lured me into his office on some pretext in order to take some blood samples. Not something I really enjoy: not because of the pain or anything, it's just that I'm pretty sure that when I get called back to have the results explained at me, there shall be Words said about the fact that my blood is, in fact, about 90% ethanol. But he insisted ...

And so, a week later, a plain brown envelope turned up at the house - addressed, just because, to one "M. Trésor" Bimler - containing the results. Much to my relief they don't seem to test for the alcohol level, but everything else is resolutely normal (my cholesterol is perhaps towards the low end) and there are no signs of prostate cancer. Which is probably a Good Thing.

And finally, Nicole has taught me something new. Having set up her Livebox and TV decoder and fixed the Homeplug problem it was only natural that she should call me when her new printer failed to work ... the first two rules, under such circumstances, are to ensure that a) it's got power and b) it's plugged in. I wasted half an hour downloading new drivers and suchlike, having ignored the second rule: guilty as charged, Yeronner, but let it be said in my defence that I did not believe it possible to plug a USB type B connector in upside-down. Now I know better.