Hairy

A bit of a desperate blip today. No idea what this plant is.

We were gutted to miss the aurora excitement last night. I just assumed there was no way it would appear this far south, but then saw loads of photos on Facebook from people in our latitude. We'll give it a go tonight, although it's likely to be less intense and may not appear at all.

This morning I shopped as the cupboards were bare, and we had TikTok pasta for lunch, followed by strawberries with the yummy crème fraîche from the producers' coop. Then, as it was so warm, we decided to sit on the bench outside the house for a few minutes. This stretched to two hours as first the neighbour's black cat, then two girls wobbling on rollerblades, then a number of other oldies joined us. 

We enjoyed a generally silly and trivial conversation, always enhanced by loose cannon V when he is in a good mood. At one point we gaped at a group of eight smartly dressed young people, all strangers, walking briskly through the square. V leapt up: "This isn't the Gare de Lyon you know!" General laughter. Later he officiously instructed the driver of a breakdown truck trying to manoeuvre around the omnipresent roadworks and narrow streets, and told some untranslatable one-liner jokes about presidents Giscard and Mitterand, with a bonus of Jean-Marie le Pen. They had everyone laughing, and merited repeating to new arrivals. Someone had been reminiscing about the days when there would be ten retraités hanging out in the square on sunny afternoons, and it wasn't like that any more. Cue cheers when M arrived with her walker, bringing our number up to ... ten (excluding the 12-year old grandson of one participant). It was all a thorough waste of time but also very amusing. Such is village life.