Grey day with a fair amount of wind about. My friend Paul’s been here the last few days and the weather hasn’t been particularly hot or bright. Forecast is for dull changeable weather over the next few days as well, so I don’t think we’ll be going swimming in the Dordogne for the moment.
On Thursday I went to Brive to meet Paul at the station. The train was 2 hours late. So I found myself with pretty much the whole afternoon to do something in Brive. I took the bike so it was easy getting around. First I went and sought out some junk shops and salvage places to see if I could get a window frame to match my others. I found an excellent second-hand shop that will probably fit the bill (although I didn’t find the right size window). It had lots of gems of furniture and salvage in there and I’ll definitely be going back at some stage.
As luck would have it, I then found a bar that had free internet access so I spent the best part of an hour and ten minutes doing emaily things. I would have spent longer but my laptop battery runs out after an hour and ten minutes. Good value internetting though 2 beers for 4 euros and broadband internet – that’s cheaper than the rip-off blokey in my local town, who doesn’t even throw in any refreshments.
After trawling round another junkshop and some other shops I went to pick Paul up. By now it was 7 o’clock and as we both hadn’t eaten we decided to eat in town. It should have been quicker eating there rather than driving the 40 minutes home and then cooking for 40 minutes, but we spent the best part of 40 minutes trying to find somewhere suitable to eat, and then a good 40 minutes waiting for the food, so in the end not a good decision. Drove home in an immense thunderstorm just to make Paul feel welcome.
Since Thursday, we’ve cunningly had a Friday and a Saturday agenda to fill. The days were squeezed in between the Thursday and the Sunday – again so as not to overtly confuse my Engleesh guest. We started with gusto on Friday by doing a pub-crawl of Beaulieu – this might not be a surprise to some – but it wasn’t planned it just happened because we got caught in the rain after shopping. And I say pub crawl, but there are only 4 proper bars in Beaulieu, so we went and sat in each of them one after the other. It also involved playing a few games of pool, but Paul seemed to go off that game when I kept winning and so he suggested table football. I’m not so good at that (even Ilka beats me 10-nil at that) so I used my RSI and tennis elbow excuse to quell his enthusiasm for further games once the slaughter had begun.
The weather was better on Saturday so we did some tourism. We started by touristing over to Autoire where I wanted to find the waterfall. We parked in the village and walked-up to it following the river. It was a difficult path in areas, particularly for Paul because he was wearing sandals …. oh yeah and he’s overweight and underfit! But the waterfall at the end of it was magnificent, and well worth the mini trek.
We had a light liquid lunch and then headed for a local cave tour. At 2 o’clock there was only one other person waiting to go into the cave, but their was a pensioner purporting to be a guide willing to take us down there anyway. It was only a small cave and the tour was only 40 minutes, but there were some fantastic mites and tites in all their stalac glory. All in all a very interesting cave visit, even though our guide only spoke French in a school masterly fashion and kept reeling off loads of facts & figures. Repeat after me; stalactites grow at the rate of 1 to 2 centimetres every 100 years.
Came home via the supermarket and then continued our marathon petanque game which we had started earlier, now helped by a weed-free driveway. I’m not going to tell you who won, it would be immodest and anyway I had the home advantage. Paul’s forfeit was to cook which was all very lovely for me (the sous-chef) and after eating a lovely meal (made successful by the quality of the potato peeling I think) we went into town to discover Saturday nightlife.
The nightlife was a heavy-metal band that played all sorts of covers, but the locals seemed to be enjoying themselves bopping around with Gaye Abandon in the packed bar. (insert joke here!)
And although we didn’t bop, we enjoyed ourselves all the same.
Got home and I felt sufficiently enthused to pick-up the guitar and try a few riffs of my own. Paul, being an ace guitarist, couldn’t allow me too much of this indulgence though, and I think my version of Smoke on The Water tipped him over the edge. He was kind enough to critique my attempts though, but I’m far too modest to record them here. Instead he showed me the basics of guitar technique, so that should I ever be compelled to pick the instrument up again in public there shouldn’t be any diplomatic incidents.
