Wish I Was There.

The jig-saw puzzle I'm labouring over at present shows a little hill-town in the Dordogne, with a castle at the top and a wildflower meadow in the foreground- with big red poppies and other flowers I can't name in yellow and purple and blue.

It's a real bitch to do- all that random patterning- but that only means I get to spend more time brooding over it- which is nice.

There's a piece in the paper this morning about all the Brits who are flooding into the Dordogne because of Brexit. Apparently that's a thing- and they're transforming the local economy. The French themselves aren't particularly enamoured of their countryside; they think provincial life is stultifying; just read anything by Balzac that isn't set in Paris. Another thing that's been in the news is that they've been killing off their birds by killing off their insects by spraying their prairies with poison- and up until now they've hardly noticed. But then they never had a Wordsworth, or a Clare or a Hardy- or a Shakespeare, come to think of it- whose verse is simply stuffed with wildflowers and songbirds.