Not too shabby

Swiftly seizing the opportunity to post a blip after 72 hours with no internet and no phone, apart from a brief window of a few hours on Wednesday. Someone with a JCB managed to take out thousands of internet and mobile users by the simple expedient of dumping a load of gravel on some exposed cables in Narbonne. Why it took so long to fix I don't know ... and the fix may not last (posting this backblip on Friday morning).

So for the last few days we've had to get our news the old-fashioned way: by waiting for the 8 o'clock news on TV. Remember when you only got news once or twice a day? Perhaps it was just as well we couldn't spend hours following the collapse of American democracy on Twitter. But we couldn't stream films either. Instead, we read. After reading 37 books in the whole of last year, I've read three and a half in the first week of this one.

Also baked bread, as you can see. The freezer was so full of it I haven't baked sourdough for weeks, but I don't seem to have lost my touch. Anyway, this is the only photo I have for the past four days. Returning from the market on Wednesday, we saw a deer running across the freshly sown field of wheat on the outskirts of Fabrezan (I have never seen a deer here before), and not one but two honey buzzards sitting in trees by the side of the road. This is when I grabbed my Sony compact, which I haven't used for a week, from my bag and discovered that it has inexplicably died :(