Tension

This could be an entry in my tendril series. Unusually I decided to go out and redo some photos that I took yesterday and wasn't happy with -- this was one of them. The other is my spare blip for today. I couldn't choose, but my blip assistant preferred this one (he said the other was n'importe quoi), and gave me the title.

Yesterday evening we were invited to the presentation of the new season at our local arts centre. Living in a rural area as we do, we're really lucky that it's only 5 minutes down the road. It was the very definition of a bunfight. The auditorium was full to bursting for the speeches and the presentation, including short video extracts of some of the events, and then everyone headed for the tents outside to fill up on free wine and lovely little nibbles, most in the form of little buns filled with duck pâté, goat's cheese and honey, or chicken and salad. Amazingly, after an hour the staff were still bringing out trays of food and urging people to eat them -- my experience of this type of event is that the food's all gone in the first 15 minutes. But the newly enlarged Communauté de Communes obviously has a generous bunfight budget.

After that there was a performance by a lone clown based on the Book of Genesis which we didn't like very much, apart from the ending, which was spectacular. I'm not a fan of clowns at the best of times, and the performance was made worse by the woman directly behind me uttering affected laughs every few minutes while her embarrassed teenager hissed "Maman!". Still, the rest of the programme looks very tempting, so we will buy ourselves a subscription. We also learned that the local jazz festival in November is going to feature both Jacky Terrasson and Richard Galliano this year. Swoon!

This evening I made the duck in red wine dish we had at Vétou's, and the result was very convincing though I say so myself. The sourdough focaccia we had with aperos less so -- it tasted great but had a soggy bottom.