Impromptu

The piano festival in Lagrasse is back, after being cancelled last year. Normally the Saturday afternoon is "piano à volonté" with young piano students and their teacher playing short pieces. I always enjoy this, as some of the pianists are very young and very talented. And this is what was advertised for this afternoon, but something must have gone wrong, because instead of the young pianists we got festival director Bobby Mitchell playing one short piece, and James Kreiling (blip) playing a Schubert Impromptu. And that was it. If we'd been five minutes later arriving, we'd have missed it.

Since we were there, and it was 35C, we went down to the ice cream place by the river and bought ice creams. See extra for a river scene. After our ice cream we called in at the new Kina Karo shop, which turned out to be run by a guy who was a neighbour when we had our office in Lézignan. So he gave us a sample to taste, and we of course bought a bottle. This was once a very traditional aperitif round here; you could buy sachets of the herbs and mix it at home. Aurélien  bought the patent recently and is now allied with the marketing might of Cyril Codina. We'll be clinking glasses of it shortly.