… to the shops in Montlucon today – first time in ages. And I spent a pile of money too, which is not at all like me, of course.
Mind you, it was an effort to get out of bed which was hardly surprising seeing as it was absolutely taters outside. And scraping the ice off Caliburn’s windscreen didn’t improve things either. But in Montlucon I did the usual round of the usual shops.
Just for a change, LIDL turned up nothing exciting apart from a big box of clementines (yes, it’s nearly Christmas) but everywhere else did me proud. At Noz, the cheapo shop, I bought a full set of the Piorot Series I DVDs and also some of the home-made fizzy lemonade that they have. Three bottles of that, for me over the Christmas / New Year festivity period, and not only that, the bottles with the drink inside are those with the wired stoppers and cost less than just the bottle alone at IKEA.
In Brico Depot, I bought 24 planks of shuttering board – €3:95 a plank and three joined together widthways makes a decent 50cm shelf 3 metres long. I can crack on and build my shelving now, once the rain restarts. But it didn’t restart today – we had another one of these glorious Alpine winter days.
Before leaving Montlucon I went to the Centre Aqualudique, which is the posh way of saying “swimming baths”. It was cold in there, but not as cold as it would have been at Neris les Bains, and I made history by not only forgetting to take my clean undies with me but also my soap and shampoo. Something of a wash-out, if you pardon the expression.
This evening I froze to death on the terraces (well, terrace) at Marcillat as the home side’s 1st XI took on Varennes in a squalid bottom-of-the-table match.
Two worse attacks I have never ever seen in my life. Varennes never even tested the Marcillat keeper once during the entire match and while Marcillat had plenty of opportunities, they couldn’t hit the nether regions of a bovine animal with a stringed musical instrument. They could still be playing when the winter break is over in February and the score would still be 0-0.
That is – except for a very dubious penalty and a woeful calamity of a mix-up between the Varennes n°3 and his goalkeeper. And tule n°1 of any defence is and always has been “when making a backpass to the keeper, always send it wide of the posts”.
Are you reading this, Varennes n°3?
But it was a niggly, argumentative match – a typical foot-of-the-table affair, and when the referee finally did have enough and brandished the first yellow cards, I would have had half the teams in the dressing room a long while previous to that.
