I made it back home anyway.

In fact it was all something of a disappointment. We didn't need to break into this empty house because someone knew someone who knew someone else who knew someone else who knew someone who had the keys.

The story behind this house that we went to is that it's one of these maisons de bourgeois that was built in the 1930s by one of the rich people who during the early 20th Century infested Pionsat. There are many of this type of house built in Pionsat during this period, built in the art-deco style with marble and all that kind of thing. This one is considered to be special and for a very good reason - it has 12,000 square metres of ground that are laid out as parkland, orchards and a drive that connects the property with the new Intermarche supermarket. It's been abandoned since the late 1990s and the town of Pionsat has just bought it for simply the price of the ground with the intention of demolishing it, making a new salle de fetes, a town square, a new road through the back of the town, and a handful of building plots. 

Marianne's aim was to visit the property, make a description, measure it all up and to photograph all of the important arty bits. I was roped in for the photography bit.

There's no doubt that the place is magnificent and it's a credit to its owner and designer. But it's huge, sprawling and unwieldy, totally unmodernised and in a really poor state. You can see why it's been up for sale for so long and how come the town of Pionsat has been able to buy it for a pittance. This wealth of the early 20th Century is all very well, but there is not a soul in the whole of the region these days who has enough money to restore it to the days of its glory. It makes you realise just how much these rural regions of France have fallen on hard times, and what the place must have been like in the belle epoch.

But I made an exciting discovery there. There's a ballroom there and we inspected it closely. And it's been clearly designed and built by a real and proper architect who knows his job. The acoustics and sonorisation are such that it's a totally perfect music room. It's like being in the inside of a drum with everything vibrating in perfect pitch as you move around. I've heard about places like this and so have you if you've read books such as those by PG Wodehouse, but this is the first time I've ever experienced one. It's a shame that this is going to be demolished.

In other news, I've now gone onto summer hours here. That means working on the computer from 10:00 until the battery goes flat, and then working on the house and garden until 19:00 instead of 18:00. Now that my web pages for the Trans-Labrador Highway are on line, I've started on the Newfoundland pages.