33 and rising.

The heatwave has hit along with the blood moon and the arrival of the first Ukranians in town.  

We made the  moulin into a dropping depot and it's now full of beds and towels and sheets and shoes and all the kind of things people have in their kitchens that they don't know what to do with.  
Aude came by with bundles of her cast off bed sheets made of a linen the like of which my body has never slipped between.

People have kept asking what they can give and so I began thinking what I'd need to keep me going if I'd wound up here out of a war zone with a couple of children in tow.
In no particular order: a bike, a pillow, a pair of flip flops, tealights, a towel, books, washing up liquid, a bar of soap, contact lense cleaner, lemons and a bottle of gin.

Cilliberti, the headmaster, has furnished the empty, soulless logements de fonction with Empire sideboards, 1970's coffee tables, ikea desk units, formica chairs and a mismatch of glasses and plates. 

He's created a communal allotment in front of the building with tomato plants twisting through the mesh of  up-cycled sport field fences.  I liked the idea and he said I could help myself to as much fence as I wanted but Nico said he'd rather die than have to watch his tomatoes growing up the types of clôture  that had imprisoned him on sports fields all his working life. 

Dolores rocked up squished into jodhpurs and smelling a bit rank.  The Ukranians have been living in her chateau for 3 months now and she railed away about their lack of knowing how to put a kettle on or change a tire because they've always had servants. 

Cilliberti made us one of his special coffees and Dolores indulged in all her favourite tirades against fascists, men and in favour of women and Catalan separatists.  She then offered me a lit fag at which point Cilliberti shovelled us both out of his office and onto the naughty step amongst the weeds.

We puffed away for a few minutes while I listened to her telling me that Mother's Day was created by Pétain (in France) and Franco (in Spain) as a means of encouraging women to continue procreating so their progeny could become little soldiers in the fascist male scheme of things.

She stubbed her fag out on the sole of her shoe and reminded me that she was a marquise.