Update and small triumph

Some weeks of silence on the blog. Not a cause for preoccupation, rather I have been busy, alongside the other Copains des Pointus, brandishing screwdriver, hammer and paintbrush, readying the Caribe for its summer sorties. The work is hard, but it's good fun, because the conversation is lively and I am learning a lot about woodworking.

The lifeboat front has been fairly quiet. Not much in the way of shouts, and quite a bit of ordinary housekeeping, including counting the grubby coins from the collecting boxes (think two kilos of tiddlers, and imagine how long it takes to calculate its very modest value). Still, it is in a good cause.

The treatment at Mougins is more than half way through. I'm beginning to have the side-effects they warned me about, but altogether it is pretty bearable. I'm looking forward to not having to do the daily drive, when it is all over.

A small triumph over the weekend. I have been hand-feeding a male turtle-dove, who greedily zaps my palm in search of grains of rice. Meanwhile, his missus, much thinner, just sat and watched enviously, a metre away. Well, Saturday morning, before lifeboat practice, missus waddled up shyly and began to peck at my hand alongside her mate. I now have the two of them feeding - a blur of heads bobbing up and down. The rice levels go down fantastically fast, but it is really cute to watch. Photo courtesy of the BH.

Sunbed

Really nice weather today, so the BH decided it would be great if we could take the ferry over from the old port of Cannes to Sainte Marguerite. Cannes was in turmoil: the entire port area is being dug up, perhaps for drains. Still, we got to the car-park, bought our ferry tickets, and took a stroll whilst waiting for the boarding time. As now happens increasingly frequently, we met somebody we knew from Antibes, so the wait was enlivened by good conversation.

The ferry across was alarmingly overcrowded on the upper deck. Don't blame the passengers, who all wanted the sunshine and the view, but I thought it was a bit lax of the crew.

Once on the island, the crowds dispersed, mostly to find picnic spots and to open bottles of chilled rosé (a good idea we somehow omitted to have).

We ate our own spartan picnic (rice crackers and cottage cheese, followed by a banana)° on a metre-thick matress of dried poseidonia grass, as level as a bed, and wonderfully soft and clean. The BH took a picture of me, dozing in the sunshine. I was in exactly the same position as in the linear accelerator at Mougins, but this time the energy sensually caressing me and warming up my molecules came from an already generous sun.

In the car, on the way back, threading through the traffic chaos of Cannes, we began to feel the first tingling of sunburn: it's still only March, dammit.

°The BH heroically stuck to my dietary constraints.

Yellow Jersey

Going to get fried by the x-ray machine at Mougins has become routine. The process is very slick, and no time is wasted. But during the minute or so whilst the cross-hairs of the lasers are being lined up on my abdomen, the 'manipulateurs' keep chatting, probably to calm down nervous patients.

After a while, you get to know them, in a superficial way. Given that they are dealing with fairly intimate parts of your body (their first act to to pull down your underpants), the chat sometimes takes on a slightly intimist twist.

Last time, for instance, the lady in charge, who had been shunting me around on the slab in what could only be described as a burly fashion, started pinching my thighs and said, dreamily: "Monsieur, vous avez les jambes d'un cycliste". I found it hard to stay still in the machine after that. Was it a compliment?