Closed for business

Having got the car back I belatedly drove to le Pech d'André to retrieve my photos. There were some dramatic clouds, so on the way back I did a detour to Escales, with a particular shot in mind. But when I got there, the clouds were in completely the wrong place for what I wanted. Sigh. So you get a photo of the disused wine coop instead.

Last weekend, when we were away, there was a massive and very localised hailstorm. Almost all of the vines around Escales were literally shredded -- it was impressive to see hectares of vines looking the way they do in autumn after the harvest, with a  few tattered leaves and bunches of damaged grapes quickly turning brown. And yet a few hundred metres away were vines that had been completely untouched. I also noted a couple of parked cars riddled with dents from the hailstones.

In the evening I went to a concert in Lagrasse, given by the chamber choir of Wolfson College in Cambridge; a mixture of French and English music. It included the wonderful Pie Jesu from Duruflé's Requiem, but unfortunately the soloist's voice wasn't quite up to it, so it was a pale shadow of what it should be. The 16-voice choir was very good though, singing the short pieces the way they should be sung -- with grace, subtlety and precision. The Byrd and Tallis were so good I wished they'd sung more of that and less none of the rather twee Willcocks and Rutter.