It can’t be everyone that’s got a pin-hole camera in their bedroom, but I have. I noticed it the other day but today it was particularly clear. The image of the sun was projected through the shutters and beamed onto my mosquito net. The shutters do their job very effectively and shut out all the light, but for the odd pin-prick that gets through. When the sun is in the right place and there are clouds about you can clearly see an upside-down image of them passing by. It gives me an idea of what the weather is like outside before I push the shutters back. Today, I deduced from the image, it was going to be a particularly warm sunny day, with clouds in the distance and a slight breeze – ideal for riding.
I had a good-old fry-up for breakfast just in case I never ate again. Then I prepared for a long bike ride. I didn’t want to get caught out like yesterday, so I made myself a packed-lunch, pumped-up the tyres on my bike, triangulated my position on the map, and then headed off for Curemonte.
Curemonte is not far, and mainly downhill so it only took about a half-hour to get there. The village is officially classified as another of the most beautiful in France (down 2 places to number 47 this year – probably due to a particularly poor geranium display by Monsiuer Lefavre who lives next to the Town Hall!).
I wandered through the village streets (there are only two) and was sufficiently thirsty after my ride to go and find something to drink. I didn’t need food of course (due to the meticulous preparation), but I did need to buy some bottled water because I didn’t have a suitable container when I left home. It was then that I realised that I’d come out without any money, none at all, not a cent. Bugger! The wrong trousers!
I explained my predicament to the man at the bar and asked if I could just have a glass of water. He wasn’t too impressed but did give me a glass of chilled water of an obscure vintage, and at that moment it tasted better than the milk of paradise. I thanked him and said I’d come back as a paying customer to dine on honeydew sometime soon.
However, it did give me a problem. I was planning to go further afield, but it was getting hotter and without water that would have been folly. And I was facing a mostly uphill ride on the way back, so I re-triangulated my thoughts and decided to get back home while I still had something inside me to sweat off.
Even so, I took a different route back and took in a hill I’d never ventured-up before. The view up there was a full-on 360 degree eye feast, so I took a few pictures and wrote a poem. That’s something I haven’t done for a while – the heat must be getting to me. It’s also something that isn’t on my to-do whiteboard list, so I resolved myself to put “write a poem” onto my list just so that I could cross it off and then feel like I’d accomplished something.
It took over an hour to get back home. I was so thirsty that I had a bit of an Ice Cold in Alex moment, except that I drank a litre of water rather than lager, and I didn’t have such a long and lingering look at the glass like Dirk Bogarde (?) did in the film. Only after that did I crack open a bottle of cold beer. Hmmmmm.
I sat in deckchair in the garden for a half-hour or so and noticed that the birds had pretty much taken all the cherries off the cherry tree. I was hoping to harvest them later in the week, but they were clearly not going to last that long, so I got the ladder out and had a go at harvesting them. I’m not sure if there is a technique for cherry picking but I’m pretty sure I haven’t mastered it. The tree’s not really strong enough to climb or get to the high branches with a ladder, and since all the best cherries were at the top I was forced to fetch my extendable tree-lopper that I bought over from England for just such an occasion. I imagined the neighbours were hanging their heads in horror at such a sight of cherry-tree mismanagement, but hey I got my cherries.
I think there’s just under a kilo there, although some still need a bit more help with ripening. I intend to have a go at making a cherry crumble with them, and might even be adventurous enough to try and include some of the walnuts in there as well. That indeed would be a triumph – excepting for the fact that I’ve never made a crumble before.
