France Fri 13th

St.Etienne-de-la-Cite

 

Perigueux is a city of thirty thousand people and a goodly percentage of them always seem to be out and about in the town. The good thing about this is that the traffic through the centre is oftn slow, which gives me time to take a pic or two. I took this pic of the old church, which was built in 1246 on the site of a Roman temple dedicated to Mars, as we skimmed by, and thought there may be a wedding in progress. Or maybe not. There are always tourists...

We reached the mill about 4.30 on Tuesday and since then we've done a lot of weeding house painting and hacking at the rampant undergrowth - not your average holiday, but we, sad souls that we are, enjoy it. I'm sitting in front of the window above the old mill stream, and admiring the luxuriant laurels, hazelnut and pine trees that completely enclose the view. Three dragon-flies, each a different colour, flit from leaf to leaf in the sunshine and occasionally a small bird darts in and out again. We've already seen a squirrel running along the fence outside the bedroom window, and a tiny wren found me fascinating as we peered at each other through the bathroom window. Then there are the lizards, though they're not really in evidence yet. They only creep out when the sun's shining, and so far, although the temperature is hovering about 20 degrees C, the sun and cloud keep swapping places.

We've done a "big shop" ie enough to keep us going for a few days and so now we can relax. Bill is painting - not the house this time, but an oil painting, and I'm torn between reading and doing some writing. The trouble is that our hosts are avid readers and always leave oodles of new and intersting books to read. The big Sunday supplements are here, too, and some of those are worth perusing. The other thing is that we haven't quite sorted the e-mail problem Between BT and Yahoo, I've been in limbo and doing anything on the old laptop I brought with me is a pain.I'm also very conscious of the fact that it is Friday 13th July!  I could do it longhand, of course. Now wouldn't that be intersting?

Dodging the rain

We drove to Perigueux today. We parked on the Quay de l'Isle beside the river, right below the Cathedral St Front. We'd barely got twenty yards along the Cours Fenelon before it began to rain, so we ducked under the shelter of a garage forecourt until the dark clouds passed over.

From there we went up the Rue des Farges in the old town and up to the cathedral. The building is full of domes and minarets, and inside it was very dim. Lots of people wandering around taking photographs, which to me always seems not the right thing to do. Outside, the streets were still wet and grey looking.
From there we walked through the old streets and the indoor market which was closing down (and it was only just after twelve o'clock) and onto the more modern Bd Michel Montaigne where we bough a Poulet Complet baguette and ate it sitting on the open square where the new underground car park has gone in in the last couple of years.

Rain clouds threatened once more - its been doing this for the past two or three days - so we moved on. As luck would have it, we struck a narrow alley down to the river, walked tghrough a car park and looked straight up at the cathedral with a blue sky behind it . Wonderful. Ten minutes later it was raining again.
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