I saw something this evening ...

... that I have never seen before. I was at St Eloy watching Nord Combraille play Beauregard-Vendon in the league cup, and halfway through the match the home supporters started to hurl abuse at the visiting linesman. The Miners' captain ran across the field to his supporters and told them to "fermez la geule" - or "shut your gobs".

It was an exciting match too - with 10 minutes to go Beauregard were comfortably winning 3-1 but then the Miners scored a goal right out of nothing to bring it back to 3-2. Then, with the last kick of the match, they scored an equaliser from a corner. Extra-time followed, and the Miners ran rampant, winning 5-3, including as the 4th goal one of the best that I have ever seen at this level of football.

That led to me doing something that I have never done before in all the time that I've been here. By the time the match had finished, what with extra time and everything, it was 10:45 and so I wouldn't be home for another 20 minutes, far too late to cook tea, but the kebab house was still open and so I bought a large portion of chips to eat in Caliburn on the way home. No vinegar, of course, but they were pretty good chips and I'll go there again if ever I'm out late at weekend.

So what about today then? I nearly missed my shopping slot at Commentry today as well. But there was a good reason for this. Just as I was closing down to go to bed (at a comparatively early 02:30) I had a message to ring Rachel in Canada urgently. And so I did, and it turned out that at the garage in Centreville they had mislaid a box which included, inter alia, my bank card that they keep for me. It's surprising, if not amazing, that you can spend over 90 minutes talking to people whom you like, about a subject as simple as that (and it was all a false alarm anyway as they found it this morning)

The result of that was that it was gone 04:00 when I finished and then I couldn't sleep - still awake again at 05:30. and so it's just as well that the guy up the road started up his chainsaw at 11:00 otherwise I'd still be asleep now.

So what with one thing and another it was gone 14:00 when I set out for Commentry. One of the things that I needed to do was to buy even more tool handles as I'd broken one or two more during the week, and so I needed to strip out the old broken bits before I could go. I've managed to sort everything out (at a price) but the handle for the pickaxe - they didn't have a wooden handle and so he sold me a fibre one.
"This is unbreakable" he said.
"Leave that to me" I replied. "I'll see to that".

I also bought the bits I need to do some work for a client with a solar hot water system, and at LIDL they still had a couple of packets of those LED light strips and so I liberated them. Makes me wonder how many I might have liberated had I managed to make it there last week.

No swimming baths though - far too late to go there, and so I came back here and crashed out for a couple of hours.

Tomorrow I'm off to the Mont Dore - Pionsat are playing Briffons-Perpezat in the cup.

I've been spending my money once again

It's the rentrée pretty soon - yes, all the kids will be back at school in 2 weeks' time and so the shops are filled with all kinds of stuff. There's one shop, called Centrakor in Commentry that is a kind of downmarket CASA if that's at all possible, and they had something on sale that was quite phenomenal. It's a kids' workstation type of thing - a few shelves, a slide-out shelf for a keyboard, a tabletop and then a couple of shelves at eye-level (well, eye-level for a 12 year old) and the good part about it is that it is on castors. The best part about it though is the price - a mere €19:99

Here in my little attic I have a kind of tiny round coffee table with two shelves and I have the DVD player/TV on the top shelf and the computer external drives on the other. And it rattle along and bits drop off and there's no room for anything at all on it, so when I saw this workstation thing my mind went into overdrive. So now there's one in the back of Caliburn waiting to be brought up here and assembled whenever I get a moment (whenever that might be). But it's ever so impressive, easpecially at that price.

I did quite a mega-shop today in Commentry, including a proper stonemason chisel for raking out the cement from between the stones. High time I had some decent tools and equipment around here - it might make the next bit of the wall somewhat easier.

From there I went on to Neris and the swimming baths. The weather has cooled down considerably over these last few days but the had all the sides of the pool open and so it was freezing in there. I managed 24 lengths today which is something of a record these days. I came home afterwards and ... errrr ... crashed out. I'm not as young as I was.

This morning I finished off the radio scripts - it needs some alterations but I don't really have the time to do it now and I was too tired this evening. And after my worries, it weighed in at 38kb - the third longest ever.

So now it's bedtime ready for my day of rest tomorrow, when I'm going to be rushed off my feet.