Introductions

It's time to introduce you two local characters: Marie who runs the restaurant just down the road, and Noël, her chef there. Between them they prepare lunches and evening meals for the tourists who visit the caves and the river valley, and they also cater for the numerous private parties who book the restaurant for family events, birthdays, etc.

We shall be running some week-long cookery classes with them later this year, designed to introduce English family cooks to some of the traditional French delicacies of the region. We plan to be tasting wines, cooking complete meals using ingredients like local creams, cheeses, cider and stronger apple-based drinks, and visiting local food producers such as the chocolate factory and wild boar farm.

Should be a fun week. We are working out some adverts for the UK press at the moment. Watch this space!





Marie runs the restaurant














Noël is her chef














The restaurant

Good computer day, bad computer day

I use a PC quite a lot, it runs Windows XP as most do, and being in France and having to type emails etc in French, I have a French keyboard. For reasons I won't bore you with, I decided to put a password on my system. Typed it in, retyped it, all is well until I come to reboot when the machine doesn't recognise my password, and I can't get in.

Two hours of stress later, I discover that at some point in the process, it assumes you have an English keyboard, so the characters I was entering were not what is written on the keys. So I get an English keyboard to crib, enter the permuted password, and off we go. I have changed the password so that it is now the same for English keyboards as French ones. But this is sloppy programming. Fire the miscreant for wasting my time!

On the other hand, I installed the Open Source operating system Ubuntu on my little netbook the other day, and it has performed astonishingle well, especially considering that it is free. I installed the operating system, then Skype, Wine and Spotify without a problem. It really is nice to find some software where you just have to follow the instructions and it does what it should.

Spotify is a (legal) internet-based music player, so now I have the netbook plugged into my stereo on a semi-permanent basis. It looks cool and sounds good, too.