Lunch

It was S's birthday today, so what better excuse to go out for lunch? We decided to try a new-to-us restaurant, on top of a cliff next to the lighthouse at Leucate. The building may not look that attractive but it has all-glass walls giving you a view over the sea in all directions (see extra photo). As you can see from the blip, it has pretensions to greatness (and a Michelin star). All the food looked beautiful, but if you are going to present food looking like this, the flavours have to be amazing too, and they were a bit hit and miss. For example, this is hot-smoked trout, but it was so smoky that it tasted like kippers, while the lone mussel tasted of nothing at all. But the spiral of potato was lovely, as was my favourite course of a little log of goat's cheese wrapped around marinated onions, with peas in their pods and individual salad shoots arranged tastefully around it.  We enjoyed it, but next time I spend this much on lunch, I'll go to Putelat in Carcassonne. And in terms of value for money, the delicious tapas we had at Lo Tiratap on Thursday evening before the cinema were way ahead and less than half the price.

After lunch we went for a very short walk along the cliff. Leucate is the windiest part of the Mediterranean coast, and it was a particularly windy day, so windy that no-one was kite-surfing. Then we stopped off in Leucate village to look at an exhibition of photos by a friend at Le Clos de Ninon. It would have been rude not to have a pot of tea while we were there, so we did. I do like this place; it's a bookshop and cafe, with comfy chairs and sofas dotted about. I could spend hours there reading and sipping tea, and people evidently do (see extra photo).

As of yesterday I am the not-so-proud owner of an iPhone. I didn't particularly want one, but we finally decided that we had to have one in order to see our websites the way our well-off clients do. So this is my first iPhone blip. I think there are some features I need to figure out, because almost all the photos I took at lunchtime were horribly poor quality despite the good lighting conditions. This is the best of a bad lot. I had three cameras with me today -- a record -- so the extras are taken with the Olympus and the Nikon respectively.