… in fact, I’ve already crashed out once this evening . . . and so I won’t have the tine to upload any of the maybe 20 photos that I took today.

This morning I was awake at 10:00 and by 10:10 I was out of the house and away. At 10:15 I was round at Marianne’s in Pionsat and we went off to St Hilaire pres Pionsat for the fete touristique that was being held there.

That was probably the most interesting of the ones that we have done so far. There was a group of local musicians and a team of local folk dancers and they put on quite a show, the dancers dragging people up out of the crowd and teaching them the moves.

After the fete touristique had finished Marianne took me across the village to see where the old chateau used to be.

It was formerly quite big and quite well-known, and its demolition was rather a controversial matter. Marianne, who merely mentioned the fact in her book Le Canton de Pionsat, was the subject of some … errr … criticism and adverse remarks despite the way that she phrased her remarks. Had I written the book I would have expressed things differently.

We went for quite a walk around the village in the lovely weather, and discovered quite a few exciting things about the place.

This looks as if it might be a spring, and it emerges in the side of one of the houses in the village. If it is, I’m not quite sure about what looks as if it might be a waste pipe from a sink draining into it. That doesn’t sound like a good idea.

There were lots of other things to see here too. This looks very much like a millpond to me and as we looked around, we saw what might have been an old mill-race. this leads me to believe that at one time there might have been a mill here in the village – not that that would be anything of a surprise.

I also saw an old Peugeot van – either a D3A or a D4A – in someone’s garden but it was surrounded by all kinds of stuff and I couldn’t have a clear shot at it with the Nikon D5000.

This afternoon I went off to the brocante at Marcillat en Combraille. The Combrailles is the brocante capital of the world and the brocante season is now in full swing. I’ll be going to plenty more of these throughout the summer.

But today was good, and for three reasons too.

1. I met Karl and Lou from Lapeyrouse. We had a wander around together and then went for a coffee and a good chat. It’s nice to meet good friends.
2. I met a guy who does roof cleaning and facade cleaning on big buildings. We got talking about his cherry picker and it extends to – would you believe – 100 metres in height. And he hires it out too! Yes, no more clambering up ladders and scaffolding for me if I’m installing a wind turbine on someone else’s property. I’m going to do the job in comfort. In fact, thinking on, a cherry-picker might be a useful addition to the fleet.
3. I made a few good finds. The 12-volt to 7.5 volt adaptor was fine for 50 cents, but the small tripod for €4:00 was excellent. I have a really decent heavy duty tripod that lives in Caliburn and that comes in extremely useful, but it’s far too big to tote around on my travels. This new one folds up to about half the size and so it will fit comfortably into my suitcase of backpack if I’m going for a wander around.
   Star of the show though is a 12-volt motor rated at 50 amps. That’s 600 watts or so and that’s a lot of 12-volt power. I have a bench-saw without a motor and this motor will run that a treat. I can also convert an old washing machine to 12-volt with a motor like this – it will run a twin-tub no problem. And the motor was only €2:00 as well. That was a find!

And so after crashing out I had tea and I’ve been listening to music. I bought a pile of CDs for my birthday – they are all good but some of them are magnificent.
I don’t need to say anything about Liege And Lief by Fairport Convention. It’s the best folk-rock album ever, and I bought it to replace an old worn-out tape recording. That’s another album that has not been off my playlist for 35 years, and the “additional track” of Sandy Denny singing “Sir Patrick Spens” has to be worth the price of the album alone.
Made In Japan by Deep Purple is another outstanding album. It’s one that impressed me back in the mid 70s when it first came out but the thing that got me was why I never ever owned a copy of it. It’s hard to imagine that it’s taken me 35 years to get my hands on a copy of it. That’s a long time.
The third, though, is something else. The subject of the group “Colosseum” came up in a conversation a whle ago and I was obliged to admit that I had never heard anything by them. I’m one of these people who think that there’s no place for saxophones in a rock band, and I never really rated Chris Farlowe’s singing all that much. But there was a copy of Colosseum Live for sale on the internet at a reasonable price and so I took the plunge. And I’m astonished! I can’t believe just how good this album is. It’s a proper jazz/blues album featuring jazz/blues played just how it ought to be played – nice long jamming tracks which – just for a change – are tuneful and meaningful and contribute to the whole. Chris Farlowe’s singing still grates on me but it actually fits in with the music, and his life performance and stage ad-libbing are just superb. “Take me Back to Lost Angeles” has taken my breath away. I can’t believe that I’ve waited so long to get to grips with this group and this album.

In other news, my other friend Marianne from Brussels has had her first novel published. When I get the ISBN I can publish a link to it. What with Rhys’s High-Speed Photography book, Liz about to start work on the Memoirs of Strawberry Moose and the first Marianne’s book on Pionsat as mentioned above, I’m in danger of being left behind by my friends.

I need to get my Trans Labrador Highway book up and running PDQ.