The seven locks

The drive to Castelnaudary was stressful because we picked up a couple of nuns on the side of the road who took an age getting into the car. (these girls are never stressed.  They happily consider the lilies and wait for god to provide - which he does, usually via me in the form of a chauffeur.) 
They were young and pretty as usual and have the good fortune to live in a community they share with young, good looking monks..  I drove them up to their monastery  and they asked me for my name which is comforting because I know I'm in somebody's prayers this evening.

The second most least stressed person in the world is Sarah.  We drove on ruminating on the life choices of nuns, how long we can avoid Lizzie and Bobby going into a home, the bollix of Brexit, why all our children are going to end up in Ireland, whether it's a reasonable idea for me to go ahead with my plan to put Bobby in a small aircraft so he has one last time in the sky, all of which we failed to find answers to.  Then she asked, very calmly, how far we were from the train station, which made me panic because we were still in the middle of nowhere and had to get beyond the Seven Sister's bends and up over the col, then through Fendeille where there was bound to be a convoy of tractors, then , and so on. 

We navigated the Sister's in record time, left the tractors behind in our dusty wake and got to the station on a wing and a prayer.

I parked up beyond le grand basin and let Bernie out at the cut above the seven locks.  Riquet was an engineering genius to be sure.  The seven locks get you (if you're on a barge) down from the plateau and on the way to Montpellier and the Mediterranean, except not today because the canal was almost dry.   I through stones on to the mud banks from the path and Bernie's white bits gradually turned black.

I mused on the biblical 7 and how it kept cropping up today.