{"id":1282,"date":"2007-06-03T19:07:19","date_gmt":"2007-06-03T18:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/?p=1282"},"modified":"2011-02-17T19:07:48","modified_gmt":"2011-02-17T19:07:48","slug":"362007-sunday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/362007-sunday\/","title":{"rendered":"3\/6\/2007 – Sunday"},"content":{"rendered":"

It can\u2019t be everyone that\u2019s got a pin-hole camera in their bedroom, but I have.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The shutters do their job very effectively and shut out all the light, but for the odd pin-prick that gets through.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It gives me an idea of what the weather is like outside before I push the shutters back.\u00a0\u00a0 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 \u2013 ideal for riding.<\/p>\n

I had a good-old fry-up for breakfast just in case I never ate again.\u00a0 Then I prepared for a long bike ride.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Curemonte is not far, and mainly downhill so it only took about a half-hour to get there.\u00a0 The village is officially classified as another of the most beautiful in France (down 2 places to number 47 this year \u2013 probably due to a particularly poor geranium display by Monsiuer Lefavre who lives next to the Town Hall!).<\/p>\n

I wandered through the village streets (there are only two) and was sufficiently thirsty after my ride to go and find something to drink.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t need food of course (due to the meticulous preparation), but I did need to buy some bottled water because I didn\u2019t have a suitable container when I left home.\u00a0 It was then that I realised that I\u2019d come out without any money, none at all, not a cent.\u00a0 Bugger!\u00a0 The wrong trousers!<\/p>\n

I explained my predicament to the man at the bar and asked if I could just have a glass of water.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0\u00a0 I thanked him and said I\u2019d come back as a paying customer to dine on honeydew sometime soon.<\/p>\n

However, it did give me a problem.\u00a0 I was planning to go further afield, but it was getting hotter and without water that would have been folly.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Even so, I took a different route back and took in a hill I\u2019d never ventured-up before.\u00a0 The view up there was a full-on 360 degree eye feast, so I took a few pictures and wrote a poem.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s something I haven\u2019t done for a while \u2013 the heat must be getting to me.\u00a0 It\u2019s also something that isn\u2019t on my to-do whiteboard list, so I resolved myself to put \u201cwrite a poem\u201d onto my list just so that I could cross it off and then feel like I\u2019d accomplished something.<\/p>\n

It took over an hour to get back home.\u00a0 I was so thirsty that I had a bit of an Ice Cold in Alex<\/em> moment, except that I drank a litre of water rather than lager, and I didn\u2019t have such a long and lingering look at the glass like Dirk Bogarde (?) did in the film.\u00a0 Only after that did I crack open a bottle of cold beer.\u00a0 Hmmmmm.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure if there is a technique for cherry picking but I\u2019m pretty sure I haven\u2019t mastered it.\u00a0 The tree\u2019s 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.\u00a0 I imagined the neighbours were hanging their heads in horror at such a sight of cherry-tree mismanagement, but hey I got my cherries.<\/p>\n

I think there\u2019s just under a kilo there, although some still need a bit more help with ripening.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That indeed would be a triumph \u2013 excepting for the fact that I\u2019ve never made a crumble\u00a0 before.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It can\u2019t be everyone that\u2019s got a pin-hole camera in their bedroom, but I have.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The shutters do their job very effectively and shut out all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living-in-france-2007"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1282"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1287,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions\/1287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}