[I know, posted out of sequence again.]

The French have a lovely word for heatwave: canicule. It’s not just the Brits with an obsession about the weather, the French are banging on about a canicule now. Parts of France were forecast to hit 40°C yesterday which is a tad too much even for a heat-seeking tourist such as Franco. Fanjeaux was reportedly up at 37°C the day before we returned but yesterday we were at a hot but relatively comfortable 33°C. Today, we were setting out on the first stage of our journey back north to the area that had been baking in a slow meteorological oven at 40°C. A departure committee of four of the regular camping couples de Fanjeaux hugged and waved us off.

The main feature of yesterday’s 33°C was the strong, hot wind that accompanied it. Clearly, we were in a fan oven. This morning was no exception; the wind continued. Towing a caravan in a strong wind can be unpleasant at best but fortunately the wind was blowing from the east, helping us on to our first obstacle of Toulouse, about 45 minutes away. Helpful information boards across the autoroute declared “Vent violent”. No shit! With the tail wind, though, we sailed along with ease and, as we sat in the gare de péage with Francine paying the toll, the extent of our wind assistance became clear; we’d averaged 38mpg. How much!? 38mpg is unheard of towing Guillaume, nudging 30mpg is considered v. good.

Once beyond the first obstacle of Toulouse,  we turned north and the vent violent calmed. Now we began seeing further helpful information boards across the autoroute declaring “Canicule: hydratez vous”. “Pass me a beer, Francine” – just kidding. 😀

We were heading a few kilometres north of Limoges. Our interest was a former peat digging area, now a nature reserve, called Les Tourbières des Dauges. It’s an area that another dragonfly fan told me about and I was keen to try somewhere new. As usual, finding a suitable campsite was the first challenge. Passing further comforting “Canicule: hydratez vous” signs every few kilometres, we re-examined the choices in our book and opted for one at Bonnac-la-Côte that was said to be shaded. Clearly, with the prospect of sitting on the centre shelf of a moderate oven at 30-something degrees C, Anglo-Saxons were going to need some shade so we opted for that one, even though it looked expensive being a 5-star Castels site.

As we passed Limoges and approached, Primary Navigation Officer overrode Sally Satnav, who was about to send us along what looked like it might be a narrow lane and got us to the campsite in time for a slightly late lunch (baguette collected en route). This site seems to be used by our Caravan Club. I wandered into the reception area and leapt into my now practiced best French to ask for a pitch. The lady responded in French, then switched to English, complete with a sort of apology for doing so, declaring that she was English. Fair enough.

1st July is the start of high season so I suspected that prices had gone up.

“What’s the nightly rate?”, I asked.

“It’s just gone up,” she confirmed, “it’s €35 a night”. [Low season, incidentally, was, I think, €29.]

How much!?

Fortunately, my heart continued to beat. The most I can remember paying for a campsite in France prior to this was a few centimes under €20. Trust the Caravan Club to go for something expensive. We were in unknown financial territory. The shaded description would in practice have more accurately been part shaded but we found an Anglo-Saxon-friendly pitch with a couple of large trees suitably positioned relative to the passage of the sun and got Guillaume settled.

Being a 5-star campsite we’d usually avoid this like the plague ‘cos the attendant swimming pool and play area attract doting mothers with hoards of Satan’s Little Disciples. Besides, we don’t use the equally expensive restaurant and bar, either. Thus. it’s like paying for a bunch of facilities we neither want nor use. We knew it would be expensive but thought we’d treat ourselves to some convenience. The choices around our targeted nature reserve were limited.  The pitches are a decent size, though, and we are in the grounds of an old Chateau, whose photogenic appeal would be vastly improved without electric buggies and white plastic chairs adorning its façade.

There were some deer – well, three – fenced off in the grounds but the most interesting thing was this tree standing alone in the middle of a sizeable lawn. From a distance it had us thinking Horse Chestnut given the shape of the flower clusters but, of course, it was much too late for one of those to be in flower. Close up it looked quite different, both flowers and leaves. Fortunately there was a name label helpfully displayed within the curious structure of branches, the largest of which seemed to descend to the ground and then grow back upwards. It is a North American Catalpa, apparently. No, we’d never heard of it either. 🙂

For the price of this campsite I’d expect a luxurious sanitary block with gold-plated taps but in practice the sanitary block feels decidedly tired. Most of the doors are painfully low for anyone over 5’ 8” and I comprehensively brained myself on doorframes twice. Ouch! I’d also expect Wi-Fi to be inclusive but the cheeky bastards want another €6 a day, and it isn’t even all over the site. I enjoy a good joke but someone’s having a laugh.

At about 9:00 PM on a short walkabout to settle our baked salad, we spotted a dragonfly hawking about part of the campsite. I didn’t get a good look but flying at this time of evening, I can only think that it was an Western Spectre/Dusk Hawker (Boyeria irene). Maybe I’ll get a chance to investigate tomorrow evening, though the chances of it settling are very slim.

Now to try to get an expensive and very hot night’s sleep.

After trying to see how well £3200-worth of camera gear would bounce when thrown at a tarmac road surface, I’ve been back out and about a couple of times looking for Odos again, now concentrating on my grip on the camera. [A phrase concerning stable doors and horses springs to mind.]

I popped over to another valley, driving past the blackened landscape of yet another mountain fire, and on to Val d’Ebo where we had had some Odonata success a few years ago. Our part of Spain is about two years into a drought so I wasn’t sure what I’d find. What I found surprised me; there was water, just, certainly noticeably less than we’d seen here previously, but even though there was some water I found not one single critter. Curious.

I had already returned once to the Jalon river and found that one of my favourite pools there now seemed to be lifeless following my camera bouncing episode. That was quite late in teh afternoon, though, so now I wanted to check mid afternoon. I did so. The pool had shrunk noticeably in a couple of days of 30°C heat. I found nothing, nada, nichts. At camera bounce bend, where the water still looked quite reasonable, I did find a couple (not the four we saw previously) of my beloved gaudy pink Violet Dropwings (Trithemis annulata), one of which offered me a better pose than before, and the Emperor (Anax imperator) was still cruising about but I’m curious about the other spots that look as though they should have life. I’m wondering if, in many of teh locations, the water quality is too poor given the amount of evaporation that has occurred – certainly, the water surface in many cases looks unappealing – and that the critters have skipped.

It’s not just the Odos that have been suffering from a lack of water. Yesterday morning we went out shopping. [Oh no, not shopping again!?] When we returned at lunchtime, my relief at having returned soon evaporated as we discovered that Casa Libélule was suffering from a lack of water. For those that may be unaware, which is probably only Brits, that there is no cold water storage tank in continental houses, everything being fed directly from the main. So when the water is off, it’s all off and you’ve got no water at all; nothing, nada, nichts. That’s exactly what we had.

Our nearest neighbours, who had arrived a few days earlier, were out so I couldn’t aske if their water was working. I found another couple moving furniture in to one of the houses and asked them but they had not yet been connected to the water supply so that was no help in determining if we were part of a general problem or unique. I went down the hill to our friend, Jim, who declared that he did have water. Hmm, not looking good. He did suggest contacting the estate agent who might call the Town Hall to see if there was an issue.

Meanwhile, our neighbours had returned. They were also without water, I was a little relieved to hear, there being safety in numbers. Off to the normally helpful estate agent [no, still feels wrong] who was not there. Bother! I bit the bullet. I drove to the Town Hall, mustered all my courage and wandered in. “Perdon, hablo poco Espanol. La Almazara es sin agua”, I managed, startling even myself. It may have been utter nonsense but it caused a reaction. The receptionist wandered into an office and reappeared saying something which I took to mean that someone was aware of the problem and was out working on it.

Long story short. Our development spreads itself half way up a mountain and our house is at the highest level. Somewhere above it is a large communal tank which the Spanish call a deposito into which water is pumped from below in the valley. Sometimes the pump fails. Such an occurrence first causes the deposito slowly to empty as water is used. Then supply pipes to all the houses begin to empty so the higher houses feel the effect the first, though there is still water in the lower pipes so lower houses still have water for a time. “Time” can be a day or a little more.

We still had no water by the time we went to bed. Copying a more experienced resident, I filled a bucket and 5-litre contained with swimming pool water so we might flush the loos when it inevitably became necessary. I was beginning to change my opinion and favour our British cold –water-tank-in-each-house solution. The system was apparently fixed but it now took some time while the downstream pipework was first refilled before the top deposito would start filling.

In the middle of the night nature called and I tried a tap. We had some water but at a much lower pressure than normal. It took all of the next day before normal service was restored.

How nice it is to be able to flush loos and do washing up.

I felt even more sorry for the local Odos who rely on their diminishing supplies to continue their life cycle.

Why do we call June 21st Midsummer’s Night? Officially, June 21st is the start of summer, the first night of summer, not the middle of summer. Everything from March 21st to now has been spring. I know the sun is at its zenith and it’s all down hill from here but, please, let’s get it right. This could reasonably be called Midyear’s Night but not Midsummer’s Night. Midsummer’s Night would be round about 6th August. I blame Shakespeare, personally, though I suppose accurate  titles such as Start of Summer Night’s Dream or Midyear Night’s Dream just wouldn’t have worked terribly well, would they? Or maybe the Druids are to blame with their sunrise and Stonehenge fixation. So, I’m going to call it Misnomer Night ‘cos it isn’t midsummer anything and it’s less clutzy than Start of Summer’s Night. Blasted poets!

Now that’s straightened out, there’s a little road on our development here in Spain that has been drawing me to it at night, simply because the street lights run up and over a hill – the Spanish are very fond of hills – in what I find to be an attractive manner. The trouble is, other than the hill and lights, there’s not a lot of content for a photograph. I went down with battered and bruised new camera and took a quick snap just as a trial line-up shot. Sure enough, decent looking road but where’s my content?

Enter Francine playing the role of Miss Nomer for Misnomer Night, needed to lean alluringly against the far left lamppost dressed as brightly as possible. OK, what I could do with is a really bright splash of colour like a startling red dress, or maybe yellow, but the nearest my cooperative Francine could dig out of the wardrobe was pink. It’s fine, perhaps a little softer and less brazen. Such was her dedication that she even staggered up and down the hill in heels a couple of times clutching the wine bottle and glass that I insisted on her using as props. This was because I’d chosen to use the old camera, sans dents, this time and unfortunately it didn’t seem quite as cooperative when it came to giving me what I was after. Francine helped out.

OK, camera more or less sorted, Miss Nomer back to holding up the lamppost and … snap.

It’s definitely a work in progress. I need to hone this. I had been hoping that the opposite streetlight might cast more light on Miss Nomer’s face. I think a little off-camera flash secreted just off set may have helped but I haven’t got one. We had a laugh though with a very rarely posed shot.

Oh, I should also point out that, on the road between Benissa and Teulada there are regularly what I would most politely describe as two or three working girls. My Miss Nomer is definitely NOT intended to resemble one of those. More of a party-goer, than just a goer. 😀

Spanish properties are frequently, maybe even usually, fitted with rejas over the windows. Rejas are a bit like decorative prison bars over windows but they are designed to keep low-life out rather than you in. The two readily accessible “ground floor” windows at Casa Libelule came complete with rejas already fitted. However, there is at least one other window, the kitchen window from which we escaped having famously locked ourselves in, that is technically, though not perhaps readily, accessible to a moderately determined person. Franco was moderately determined to get out and the subsequently summoned locksmith was moderately determined to get in .. and did so.

A neighbour’s version of Casa Libelule, having already been the target of a burglary, has had additional rejas fitted over their similarly positioned kitchen window. They’ve also had locking metal gates fitted over their lower balcony sliding doors, which was, we think, the actual point of entry. Our lower balcony is something over 2 metres above the ground but, given two low-life scum, one giving the other a leg up, it seems like a point of weakness. As we’ve already proved our kitchen window to be a point of weakness, we decided to get a quote for an additional set of rejas and gates for the balcony. Consequently, I found myself waiting in for Antonio to arrive at 3:30 PM to measure up for his metalwork.

Antonio Metalworker was pretty punctual – extremely punctual for a workman, especially a Spanish one. I was also happy to note that Antonio Metalworker, unlike Bozo Plumber, actually possessed a tape measure and, furthermore, appeared to know how to extend it and use it. He also made drawings upon which to note his measurements. I am hopeful, therefore, that our eventual gates will actually fit the balcony doors whereas our shower screen never stood a friggin’ chance of fitting our shower tray.

Antonio had no English. Combined with my extremely rudimentary Spanish – I was able to use one of the numbers I know, catorce [14, I hope], when getting into a date discussion [at least, I think it was a date discussion] – we seemed to part with some sort of agreement. Whether we both parted with a similar agreement remains to be seen.

I was now able to go out to play in the sunshine. I was still keen to try and snag the Violet Dropwings (Trithemis annulata) that I’d been after when I so deftly threw my camera ensemble to the floor a couple of days ago. Apart from anything else, I wanted to see if it really did still work. Francine and I set off for the fateful road I chosen to throw the camera down onto.

We wandered along the road beside what Jalón amusingly refers to as a river – most of the time this river does not actual flow but is a meagre collection of standing pools. It’s more of a natural storm drain for the mountains at the head of the valley, really. Anyway, we did find our quarry and I’m delighted to report that, not only did my battered and bruised camera work, but it  performed no further somersaults onto the hard surface intended more for feet and car tyres than for expensive precision equipment. Not only did we find our delightfully gaudy pink Violet Dropwings but a Blue Emperor also cooperated by hanging up in a few reeds across one of the remaining pools of water. Here they are. Aren’t nature’s colours wonderful?

Now, if I can just work out the Spanish, I may approach the Ayuntamiento [Town Hall] to see if they might consider covering all Jalon’s roads, footpaths and tracks in some form of protective foam covering.

I have always disliked neck straps on cameras. Modern neoprene straps are better but stuff swinging round my neck is essentially uncomfortable. i don ‘t even like a modest pair of binoculars doing pendulum impressions around my neck, never mind a camera body weighing in at 750g. Add to that a long lens making the whole ensemble weight 2kgs or more and a neckstrap is out of the question for me. I did used to use a wrist strap with more modest lenses attached but a couple of kilos hanging off ones wrist isn’t an appealing prospect either. Since, when hunting wildlife I habitually use a monopod, my preferred transport approach is to sling the monopod with camera and lens attached over my shoulder. I’ve been doing this quite successfully for 4-5 years.

Today my approach failed. Actually, not knowing exactly what happened, perhaps my concentration ran out. Whatever the cause, as we were wandering along a road near Jalón to go in search of dragonflies and particularly one of my gaudy favourites, the delightfully pink-coloured male Violet Dropwings (Trithemis annulata), my hand somehow contrived to part company with the monopod over my shoulder. The complete assembly: almost brand new EOS 7D mk2 (£1600) complete with 1.4X extender (£400) and Canon 300mm F4 prime L-series lens (£1200), fell off my shoulder (a height of about 5 ft) onto the road surface beneath. Arghhh!! Most definitely, an “oh shit” moment.

The first obvious problem I spotted was that the lens hood, perhaps mercifully extended, was now more oval than circular in shape. A little judicious squeezing managed to return it to its more familiar and useful circular shape.

I turned my attention to my beloved camera. The camera still switched on but, as I looked closer, I spotted the point of impact on the lower left rear corner, just near the delete button. Scratches were the least of the trouble; a couple of the camera body’s sections were not now quite the shape they should be and didn’t exactly meet precisely. I looked through the eyepiece and tried a shot. It didn’t focus, the viewfinder information telling me I was in manual focus when, in fact, the lens was switched to auto. The shutter fired … very slowly. An error message saying, “Err01 – communication error” was now about all I could get out of £3200-worth of dropped equipment. Further attempts resulted in the same error message.

We continued our short wander with a gloomy cloud hanging over my head. As you might imagine, this did not make for a relaxing time spotting dragonflies. We did eventually find our quarry, plus a couple of Epaulet Skimmers (Orthetrum chrysostigma) but I had no way of recording them.

Back chez Casa, I tried a few more tests swapping components between the damaged mk2 and my older 7D mk1, which I’d left here intentionally to avoid carrying hefty equipment on future flying visits. Amazingly, these tests seem to show that the camera still works, though I’ve yet to try all functions. The lens, including stabilizer, also seems to work properly. It’s the extender, when mounted in between them, that screws things up and is very definitely broken – it has a slight but disturbing sideways movement that should not be there.

BOTHER!

When we return, I need a trip to canon’s service centre at Elstree to get one of my lenses serviced. I may try to see if they can refurbish and check the 7D mk2 as well.

Oh, and a friend at UK DRagonflies blamed the mishap on the Violent Dropthings. Very good, I needed a laugh!

[Yes, I know, another one out of sequence.]

Just after we left Spain on our previous visit, we had just had our misplaced shower screen refitted, complete with an extra component to make it actually line up with the shower tray. Now there’s a radical idea, making the shower screen sit on top of the shower tray instead of falling short by an inch and a half [~4 cms}. While the silicon sealant was curing, we’d been using the upstairs shower over the bath.

Here we were back in Spain and keen to have showers in our own shower room. We both showered and dried ourselves off. We hung the towels out on the balcony to dry in the sunny late afternoon air. I returned to the shower room where I was dismayed to notice a small amount of water at one corner of the outside of the shower tray. As I was looking, I was even more dismayed to notice a larger and much more disturbing pool of water at the opposite outside corner of the shower tray. Bugger! Clearly there was still a problem.

I spent a partly sleepless night considering what might be wrong. Since the shower screens were now correctly positioned, I began to fear a leak from the shower tray waste. In the morning, I set about a test; I began pouring 2-litre jugs of water down the shower waste. After four such jugs of water, no further water appeared where I had noticed them. Head scratching time again. I put the shower head on the floor of the shower and turned on with the screen doors closed. I noticed no problem at first but then Francine, now an onlooker, spotted water tracking along the shower tray below and outside of the shower screen.

Time to get prostrate on the floor. I peered under the aluminium and could just about make out at least one gap in the silicon sealant beneath the aluminium. For f**k’s sake, Mr. Bozo Plumber couldn’t even seal a shower screen correctly with it in the correct position. Actually, he’d done it all wrong anyway. Accepted practice is to position the aluminium and assemble the screen first, then seal around the outside edge of the screen where it meets the shower tray. It looked as if this sealant had been put down first then the aluminium of the screen positioned on top of it. How are you supposed to know you’ve put enough sealant down when you can’t see it? Either that, or he’d attempted to seal the inside and failed.

The bill for misfitting the screens twice was still outstanding. I could have withheld payment and got the idiot back for a third attempt. However, by now I didn’t trust him to be able to find his own arse with both hands, so I set about sealing the screen correctly myself and paid the outstanding bill whilst making my feelings known.

For pity’s sake, if you want a job done correctly, do it yourself. We can finally have our showers without turning our shower room into a swimming pool.

It’s smack on 500mls/800kms to Jalón from Fanjeaux. About 480mls/770kms of that would be on autoroutes/autopistas so we reckoned it would be about an 8-hour drive. Francine set her alarm for 6:30 AM so we could be on the road at least by 8:00 AM. That should give us an arrival time of about 4:00 PM leaving time to shop for our evening meal.

You know what it’s often like with an alarm set. Come 4:00 AM we were both awake, waiting for the alarm and thinking we wouldn’t get back to sleep again. The night was over. “We could always just get up and hit the road”, I risked suggesting. Francine seemed up for it. Packing up Guillaume and securing him for 2-week stay tout seul is inevitably a somewhat noisy business – stowing the water container, disconnecting the electricity, etc. – but we had no neighbours to disturb; the only other unit on site last night was on the far side of the campsite out of earshot, unless we got really noisy. So, decision made, we carefully packed up and drove gently out of the campsite at about 6:50 AM.

Jocund day, as Shakespeare would have had it, was breaking directly in front of us as we headed east on the French autoroute towards the dawn and the Mediterranean coast of France, before turning right and south towards Spain and its autopista. [Note to self: I really must look up jocund one day to find out just what a jocund day is.] Cruise control set to 75mph/120kph (good for both French and Spanish limits), pausing only at the occasional toll booth, service areas for an occasional pee break and a single fuel stop, the 500mls passed as we guessed in 8 hours. Pulling out to pass the odd small cluster of trucks with their cruise controls set to 56mph/90kph was about as difficult as it got. What a delight driving on these roads is, even if you do have to pay the tolls. A similar length journey in the UK would give one pause. We parked in Jalon for lunch at 2:00 PM before announcing our unscheduled arrival to our friends, who welcomed us warmly.

The heat was about to increase. Although the skies has done their frequent clearing trick as we crossed the Pyrenees, just south of Barcelona we ran into heavy black skies. torrential downpours followed swiftly. There were occasional breaks of lighter grey but essentially the weather was dreadful all the way down to about 30mls/50kms above Jalón. The stormy skies were moving south towards us. As we were remembering how to drive our Spanish house and preparing for a reunion meal with our friends in the evening lightening flashed and rumbles of thunder began. Then we noticed flames and plumes of smoke rising from the hillside across the valley from us, directly behind our friends’ house. A lightening strike must’ve set the scrub aflame on the hillside.

We called our friends who in turn tried calling the authorities but contact had already been made. Shortly, a couple of fire trucks headed along the valley to the blaze, not that trucks would be able to do much near the top of a mountain. Maybe this was a precautionary move in case the fire crawled down the hillside to habitation? Then a helicopter flew by and appeared to investigate the situation from above. It settled briefly, we think to drop off some fire fighters on the ground, took off again, now with a bucket slung beneath it, flew back up the valley and shortly returned with a load of water which it dumped on a chosen part of the fire.

As I was thinking that this looked like being a long job, one ‘copter bucket at a time, two yellow fixed wing aircraft appeared on the scene and joined in the fight. They appeared to be able to carry a heavier water load. Water bombing continued for a while after I could see no more flames glowing. What they didn’t want was a re-ignition. I know this type of flying is very hazardous and watching the professionalism was fascinating and educational.

Whilst a warm welcome was good to receive, I thought setting fire to the hillside was going a bit far, though. 🙂

OK, we’ve been here at Fanjeaux on the sheep farm for 11 days. Our original plan was stay here 18 days catching up with friends, not only campsite owners Luc and Nadine but also other regular camping visitors. However, the other regular camping visitors have not materialized. Instead, they all seem to have decided en masse to visit in July when we’ll be heading back north.  Could it be that someone warned them we’d be here in June? 😀

Whatever, our first 6 days or so here were bathed in glorious sunshine and warmth/heat, depending upon your personal calorific scale. This week, however, has seen a downturn in the weather and the uncomfortable truth is that we’ve been here so often and for such periods of time that without our camping companions it’s all turned a bit samey. So, we took the decision to travel to Spain a week earlier than originally planned and have two weeks there instead of just one, leaving Guillaume in France in the hands of our camping hosts.

This week, though the weather has been less than settled, the three orages [storms] we’ve experienced have very thoughtfully been overnight. Now, I don’t really mind overnight rain; in fact, I find the thrumming/hammering of rain on Guillaume’s roof quite soothing in a cossetting kind of way. Yesterday (Thursday), which was actually quite pleasant, even if very windy, we told Nadine that we’d be heading for Spain on Saturday. That left today (Friday) for all our packing and securing of Guillaume – things such as taking down his awning.

Wouldn’t you just know it? This morning we woke to gentle rain, rain that was very English in nature. Very English in nature not only in the fact that it was less than a tropical downpour, more irritation rain than anything, but also in the way that it went on … and on … and on. We visited Limoux market in the morning and the dripping continued. We called into Bram for tonight’s supplies and still it dripped. Why today of all days? If it wanted to rain in the daytime, almost any other of our first 18 days in France would’ve been OK but today was the worst timing possible. I’d got about 12 square metres of saturated awning material to fold up and stow away, for Darwin’s sake! Today, I really could’ve done without the persistent dripping.

It did actually stop in the early afternoon and, though no blazing southern French sun emerged to dry the awning properly, it did seem to more or less dry off once the dripping had ceased, at least well enough to roll it loosely and stuff it in Guillaume’s shower tray for the duration of his abandonment.

It is my experience that meteorological events have an unerring sense of timing when it comes to screwing one up.

“You wanna pack up? I’m gonna rain.”

Just watch what happens to the wind speed and direction when you plan to start towing a caravan all the way back up France towards an appointment with a channel ferry. 😉

There are several reasons that I’ve been falling out of love with eating out in restaurants. Years ago, the chief reason was probably having to put up with some git puffing foul cigarette smoke into the air at a nearby table. Quite why anyone would consider it good value to pay through the nose for food whilst at the same time killing their nose’s senses of smell and their mouth’s sense of taste with smoke is quite beyond me but I certainly didn’t appreciate their forcing me to do it and it ruins any financial outlay. Mercifully, in a more enlightened modern world, this reason has in some cases disappeared though Spain still suffers from it.

Alternatively, somebody might still turn up with poorly controlled children. English children are notoriously poorly behaved in my admittedly Victorian view and generally quite noisy in restaurants. I see no point paying £50-£100 on a meal for two only to have the ambience utterly ruined by Satan’s Little Disciples running riot. Once again, a complete waste of money. The French, bless them, seem much better at controlling the fruits of their loins. In fact, pretty much everyone seems better than the British at controlling their offspring. [possible exception: America.] Freedom of expression is complete nonsense and has been taken much too far. freedom of anything should always be tempered by respect others. End of sermon!

Our neighbour chez nous is also a near-neighbour in Spain and is very fond of eating a menu del día in Spain for lunch. Typically, this might be, say, 15€ for three courses, including wine. Nominally that represents exceptional value. It is, of course, usually pretty straightforward food that could easily be done at home for even less but my main problem with this approach is that, frankly, we don’t want that much food at lunchtime. I’d much rather have a simple bocadillo [sandwich] at lunchtime.

Evenings would be better for a few courses but, quite apart from the fact that I have to stay sober enough to drive, I frequently come away from a restaurant feeling a little disappointed; disappointed by the fact that I’ve just spent a fair wedge of the folding stuff on food that I could’ve prepared for myself, in a fashion suited to myself, at a time that suited myself and accompanied by wine quantities that suited myself with no need to drive. We have, on occasion, found ourselves waiting in a busy restaurant in the evening almost interminably for the bill when we just wanted to pay and get back to Guillaume to collapse.

So, that’s lunchtimes and evenings dispensed with, then. 🙂

Fear not, there are exceptions to my general restaurant exclusion rule. One exception might occur when the food might be sufficiently complex for me to want to leave it to someone else, though I don’t mind a fair amount of complexity. The more likely exception these days occurs as a result of the unavailability of some ingredient that simply makes it impossible to do at home. It was this exception that led us off to Gruissan  today. Whilst I prefer not to spend 15€ on a menu del dia 3-course lunch three or four times a week, I positively jump at the chance to lash out wads of cash, in this case 70€ , on a wonderful French plateau de fruits de mer. I love seafood and it is simply almost impossible to get raw seafood fresh enough to attempt any semblance of such thing in England. Here is food that you positively must play with, much to your mother’s disgust. They are great fun and today we set off to Gruissan on the Mediterranean coast to get one.

We know the seafood shack at Gruissan from a previous visit; no airs and graces, just shared trestle tables that get loaded with spankingly fresh seafood. Our plateau consisted of a crab [cooked – don’t panic], raw oysters, raw mussels, cooked prawns and cooked whelks, all washed down with a decent bottle of white wine. Incidentally, many years ago I accidentally tried eating a live whelk and, trust me, they are much better cooked. For those not keen on any raw food, there are other cooked options, such as fish baked in a salt crust. Here is one. 😀

Ah, now the salt – yes! The colour of the water surrounding the metal fish above is, in fact, pink. Your eyes do not deceive you and I haven’t been messing with the colour balance. The pink colouration is entirely natural. This wonderful seafood shack overlooks a salt pan at Gruissan. As the intensity of the salt increases with the evaporation of the water, the remaining solution turns pink. Curious but photographically very interesting. I cannot remember quite why we used to use the phrase “sky blue pink” when I was young and I certainly never thought I’d be able to use it literally but here, I can. Again, other than using a polarizing filter to intensify the colour a little, this is entirely natural.

Francine snagged a picture of a huge mound of salt, together with a couple of folks very considerately standing by it to show the scale, that had been harvested. I’m assuming the rusty looking tractor, with what appears to be metal rear wheels, has something to do with the process but don’t quote me.

Incidentally, as we were there taking pictures after our wonderful plateau de fruits de mer, one of the guys at the restaurant came out and emptied a pan load of used salt back into the water. Great recycling!