Hardly a holy-day

Just back from a villa holiday at Aniane, half an hour west of Montpellier.  That’s in France. Often the temperature reached 38.5 deg C and, since the telly received UK programmes, we congratulated ourselves on a fortnight away from our desolate homeland.

When we weren’t engaging in Schadenfreude we behaved like Jane Austen characters. Mrs LdP painted:

LdP himself wrote a 4000-word short story with a horticultural theme:

We linked up our MP3 player to the hi-fi and listened to Elly Ameling singing Exsultate Jubilate among other things:

Grandchild Zach, now a veritable merman, monopolised the pool:

The villa cost an arm and leg but was fitted with every luxury (eg, two fridges and a separate freezer). Thus we never drank tepid rosé:

Occasionally we got into the car (which felt like the corrugated iron shed in which they incarcerated Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai) and took shortish drives that sought to be improving. This village, alas, lacked a suitable restaurant and so we didn’t stay:

Bouzigues, on the Mediterranean coast, was more promising which was just as well since Zach claimed to have lost the will to live (or walk) as a result of extreme hunger:

LdP kicked off lunch with six oysters eaten looking out over the oyster beds where they’d lately resided:

Then ordered a daurade (sea bream) which was so fresh it could reasonably be described as presque vivant. Granted this encomium the restaurateur merely shrugged his shoulders.

We did nothing that could possibly be described as worthwhile or that bettered our lot. In retrospect the days probably passed in continuous hedonism except that nobody had the energy to use such words. We returned yesterday feeling pleasingly guilty about what we’d done.