… but it was rather touch and go as it as another one of those cold clammy mornings where I didn’t really feel too much like crawling out of my stinking pit.
But anyway after breakfast I had to unload Caliburn of all the wood that I had bought the other day and that’s all now in the barn. Then round to Marianne’s and then on to St Maurice.
First thing that was happening there was a meeting of the officials of the Canton of Pionsat and for the first time that I can ever recall, we had all 10 mayors present at the same time.
And not only that, we had Laurent Dumas, the canton’s delegate to the Departmental Conseil-General and also Jean-Yves Gouttebel, the President of the Conseil-General, in attendance. We were really honoured and it seems that I am once more moving in exalted circles.
The purpose of being at St Maurice was for the formal opening of a road. Not a new road, but a realignment of an existing highway that has just had a great deal of money spent on it.
Someone produced a tricolour ribbon and so we had Dumas and Gouttebel standing in the middle of the road cutting the ribbon – something that would have been quite exciting had there been a truck or something coming the other way.
Long-term followers of this rubbish know that St Maurice is famous for its exotic cars – there are a few crazy mechanics here and on one occasion they had an exhibition of their output.
One such vehicle is “La Jonquille” – claimed by its builder to be the longest car in the world, and St Maurice is where it lives.
It’s rather loosely based on a Peugeot 403 estate as you can see – well, several Peugeot 403s in fact.
Later that afternoon I went to pick up Marianne again this time for Riom for the annual meeting of journalists of La Montagne – the local newspaper. Where the meeting was to be held was only a mile or so from the big LeClerc hypermarket at Mozac and so we went an hour or so early so that I could do my next week’s shopping. No sense in missing an opportunity for that and it saves me going to St Eloy tomorrow.
Back here later it was taters upstairs and so I had the biggest fire I’ve ever had. That increased the room temperature 15°C in an hour or so and that’s some going, and it cooked my tea in record time.
So now I’m off to bed – I’m doing “minding” duties tomorrow.
Now I
