A corner of Lodève

A day out driving through the red desert of my blip a year ago to this lovely old town to see this summer's exhibition of paintings and prints by Louis Valtat at the Musée Fleury - à l'aube du fauvisme (at the dawn of fauvism). A fascinating and huge collection of work by this artist I hadn't heard of before. I also made some enquiries about next month's Voix de la Méditerranée festival of poetry from all around the Mediterranean, hoping to prepare for a piece I'm planning to write about it, and wondered around the town enjoying the relative peace and quiet before the high tourist season starts.

Appropriately, in this town with a large Arab population and many links with north Africa, we had lunch in La Chamelle, an Algerian café - very good kefta (lamb rissoles) with salad and yogurt sauce. Then home to find that the nice young man in the festival office has already e-mailed me the information he promised. So a very good day!

It was hopeless to attempt to straighten this, so I didn't even try.