So much for my day off!

It started as usual with a phone call from Marianne at 09:45 - although I'd been up and about for quite some time by then.

So off we went to Chateau-sur-Cher and their village open day. The weather had improved today so it was a nice day outside although the music wasn't up to much - a violinist and some old guy on the vielle-a-roue and they were pretty awful - out of tune for a start, didn't know their music for a second, and playing too many wrong notes for a third. But never mind - it's what these things are all about.

There was this petanque competition in the village at 14:00 and I had somehow managed to find myself roped in to do the scoring with this weird computer program that someone had found. However, we were locked out of the village hall and so a few of us ended up picnicking outside on the grass.

It goes without saying that the petanque scoring was a shambles. It took me quite a while to work out the program but the organiser decided that he couldn't wait for me and so did the first round by hand.

When I did manage to fathom it out - it worked perfectly but because of his impatience it fouled everything up as far as the competition was concerned because it immediately paired up teams that had been competing against each other in the round that he had drawn manually. The competitors didn't 'arf complain, and the organiser had something of a moan as well.

But never mind him - if he had let me have half an hour to work it out, I'd have done it, and there would have been plenty of time for that. The competition was timed to start at 14:00 but he didn't turn up to unlock the door until 14:20, and don't forget that I'd been hanging around since 13:00. And what did foul it up was, as we worked out in the end, that he had an odd number of teams in the competition and as soon as one withdrew, that was when it worked fine.

What we did in the end was do three rounds on the computer, let the computer work out the scores and positions, and then handed the result to him to work out the positions including the other round that he did manually. We piddled off and left him to it before the kaka hit the ventilateur.

Ironically, it took him far longer to work it out than it would have done if he had given me the time at the beginning. And if he had been there at the start, it would have been sorted out much earlier than that;

And serve him right!