Saturday senses: Taste

... is not evident here in my opinion. These massive planters delimiting the mud track leading to a local wine domaine, which was bought a couple of years ago by a Swiss banker and his wife, are not appropriate at all in my opinion. And the plastic chain is hardly in keeping either. Still, with wines starting at nearly 30 euros a bottle, they probably aren't interested in my custom :)

As you can see, the weather is still bad. We kept an eye on the forecast all day because we had tickets to see Didier Lockwood in Conilhac. They were expensive enough that we didn't want to waste them, so our only concession was to go the long way round along the main road, rather than cutting across country as we normally do. It was raining hard, but nothing really spectacular.

The first half was the Gaël Horellou Quartet. I wasn't too keen at first; they were excellent musicians but too loud, too samey, the drummer too insistent (the woman next to me actually had her hands over her ears during one particularly excessive mad drummer sequence). But then the saxophone and piano did a syncopated duet that was just awesome and deserving of a standing ovation.

Didier Lockwood was, well, Didier Lockwood. I've never heard anyone else play a violin quite like that. He started with a fairly classic Stéphane Grapelli piece, but then moved into more free jazz. His speciality is playing something and then feeding it back as accompaniment so he ends up with several versions of himself playing. If you don't like trancey music you probably wouldn't enjoy it. This time as well as a conventional violin he had an entirely digital one which could make some very strange sounds.

When we left at midnight, it wasn't raining as hard as it had when we arrived. The journey was fine, until we got to within a few kilometres of home. As we came out of Fabrezan, we were hit by a wall of water. The wipers at the fastest possible speed made no impression on it. The road was under about 5 cm of water, not because the ditches were full but because of the sheer volume of water hitting it. If we hadn't been so close to home, I honestly would have given up and waited it out, but as it was we crept cautiously along the familiar road, keeping to the middle. It seemed to take an age before I glimpsed the reflective posts marking the allée des platanes. Gratefully I turned in and was very surprised to meet four cars coming out of the village. I hope they weren't going far, because really you had to be crazy to be out in this. We treated the ten-metre journey from the car to the front door like a military operation, arming ourselves with head torches before venturing out of the car and charging across the lake the square had become. Safe and sound :)