Just back after spending a few - or should that be phew? – days in la belle France. Didn’t drive down this year, but took the plane. I know - planting my carbon footprints all over the earth below - but taking the car would have done the same at ground level. There is the train of course, but the difference in price is enough to blur the conscience. Booking ahead we got a ridiculously low price from Ryanair, especially as we managed to avoid the baggage hold and its surcharge by cramming all we needed in a bag measuring marginally more than a large sliced loaf and a medium sized rucksack no larger than a medium sized rucksack. And we did hire a car when we arrived, but a small one that didn’t appear to use any petrol at all for the first 50 kilometres and not a lot more after that, so that helped to ease the carbon guilt a little.

Unfortunately, taking to the skies also meant that we couldn’t drop in to see old chums on the way down south as on previous visits, at least not without the aid of a parachute, but there’s always next year. The weather was very warm verging on hot, hot, hot, but the locals weren’t that happy with the summer so far, apparently not as tres, tres chaud as it should be for the time of year. The grass in our host’s garden did look distinctly green and not burnt ochre as expected and was magically carpeted with blooming wild flowers. The rivers were flowing at more than a trickle and the figs growing outside the front door were still green and a long way off ripe. But we weren’t complaining after our hit and miss summer as we pootled down empty country roads past fields of nodding sunflowers.

As with the last two years we stayed with our next-door neighbours here in the UK, who are lucky enough to own a second home about half way between Nimes and Montpellier. The house is on the edge of a small medieval village with a large garden to the rear where Neil is happy to keep alive the peasant tradition, taking great pride in growing vegetables for the table. Ruth paints most days, working towards enough canvasses to stage an exhibition sometime soon.

We met several other Francophiles at various social occasions, one couple living in an ancient town house that they’ve been lovingly restoring, but thankfully with imagination, with regard for its tradition and history without being shackled by the chains of the past. Nothing about the place was precise: there were no straight lines; right angles didn’t and never have existed; no surface was flat; no floor was level; each door was a different size, ranging from the height and width to admit giants to the size of Alice half way to her final height after she obeyed the command to ‘drink me’. Internal windows appeared arbitrarily in walls and were carved into the stone treads of staircases. An ancient shallow sink was set into an alcove half way along a hallway. We ate an evening meal on the roof terrace overlooking surrounding ancient tiles bleached by the sun and chimney stacks crooked from the centuries, from behind one of which a curious cat appeared, to fleetingly stare, wide-eyed, at our feasting below. Drawn to the window by the sound of foreign conversation, two children waved their neighbourly greetings through blue shutters from the next street. As the light faded and the day’s heat cooled, bats hurtled around above our heads, twisting and turning in pursuit of their insect prey.

Last evening, now back at home, the bats were out in my garden, harvesting the flying ants that had emerged during the day, brought out, at last, by the warmth of our own English summer. Better make the most of it, batmen and batwomen, while it lasts.