Thursday 22nd July.
The tour is back! So there’s no prizes for guessing where we are from midday to 5pm. The living room - with its huge fireplace ( hard to believe its ever needed) is cool with the shutters closed but we have also bought an electric fan which we’ll leave in the house. Remarkably the seering heat has gone since A&E arrived and it’s quite bearable.
We load the coffee table with charcuteries and bread and cheese and potato chips and there is beer and Rose wine and cider. And there we sit, gob smacked at the skill of the riders. How can one possibly go up the Tourmalet mountain and still have the energy for tactics and sprints…..? It’s beyond comprehension but somehow Schleck and Contador manage it? On drugs? The general consensus seems to be that our Cadell Evans is one of the few who DOESN”T use drugs….but he’s riding in agony with a broken elbow and is not in contention this year. Even Lance Armstrong, 38, is riding like a demon. It truly is a punishing sport.
I make a spectacular salad nicoise for dinner - it looks so good we take pictures of it! How silly! I’m drinking far too much wine for someone with Diabetes - so I start cutting it with mineral water, which is ridiculously cheap here. After dinner we watch the awesome sunset. The little disused chapel on the farm ( probably built for the farm labourers hundreds of years ago) stand out in full relief against the hills and the crimson streaked sky. The bed still squeaks, the flies still divebomb - and now the mozzies ( tiny, silent, deadly) begin their stealth mission. But I manage to sleep anyway.
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