… for my day off!

It started as usual with my wake-up call from Marianne at 09:45 – although just for a change, I’d been up and about for quite some time by then

In our rolling programme of village open days – a different village each Sunday – today is the turn of Chateau sur Cher. We’d been here before a couple of weeks ago for the village walk, you may remember.

I picked up Marianne and off we went in the glorious sunshine. The weather had improved today so it was a nice day outside. Other people had clearly noticed too because we were favoured with quite a substantial crowd, and that’s always very pleasant.

We had two of the Troubadours de Pingrole providing the music. One on the violin and the other on the vielle à roue. But I was absolutely convinced that they were playing out of tune and I’m not sure why. They certainly didn’t seem to know their music either.

But so what? You can’t pick and choose your musicians around here, as I have said before. And the crowd enjoyed it anyway so I don’t suppose it really matters.

And early on a Sunday morning too, so what do you expect? The bars haven’t been closed long!

There was a concours de petanque organised for the afternoon starting at 14:00 and I somehow found myself roped in to help with the scoring – not that I know anything about petanque.

I always remember many years ago with Nerina driving through rural France and seeing a sign for petanque. No idea what it was so I asked her to look in the dictionary. “Can’t find it” she replied. “But never mind. It’s probably something with a peturret”.

Anyway, back to the plot.

We found that we had been locked out of the village hall. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? And no idea where the guy in charge was either.

So in the end, we all ended up having a picnic on the lawn outside the church while we waited. It was all very convivial.

14:20 he turned up to open the door which, for a competition due to start at 14:00, isn’t very good at all. Dozens of people all hanging about, all of them very disappointed to say the least.

And so it goes without saying that the petanque scoring was a shambles, even though we had the very gracious assistance of Strawberry Moose.

It took me a good few minutes to work out the program, but the organiser decided that he couldn’t wait (I can’t see why – he’d kept us waiting long enough) for me and so did the first round by hand.

All of a sudden, the program clicked into place. And when I discovered the reason why, I could have hit the organiser with a stick. He had entered an odd number of teams into the competition and as soon as one withdrew, it all began to work perfectly fine with no problems at all.

But because of his impatience it fouled everything up as far as the competition was concerned. For a start, it immediately paired up teams that had been competing against each other in the round that he had drawn manually.

The competitors didn’t ‘arf complain, and the organiser had something of a moan as well. But I exacted my revenge. What we did in the end was do three rounds on the computer, let the computer work out the scores and positions for those three, and then handed the result to him to work out the final positions including the other round that he did manually.

But we piddled off and left him to it before the kaka hit the ventilateur.

As an aside to this, later Marianne telephoned me. Apparently it had taken him an age to work out the scoring – far longer to work it out than it would have done if he had given me the time to organise myself at the beginning.

And far longer than my original suggestion which was to scrap the first round scored manually and have an additional, fifth round played, so that we would have had four rounds scored on the computer.

And had he been there at the start, it would have been sorted out much earlier than that too

So serve him right!