Culture Vulture - dig it.

Yesterday, Friday 24th, was very busy. We started off by popping in to the Notaire who is in the process of organising the exchange of the bit of land we own the other side of our neighbours house for their bit of land which is the other side of our house.
We then went for our weekly french lesson with a very nice english lady. She is very thorough and knowledgable; she also teaches english to french students and french to french youngsters!

Following the lesson, we went off on our search for a mini-digger. We feel that we have enough work here to justify buying our own equipment. We are proposing to move a lot of earth (and rocks) in the courtyard, around the barn, in and around the pigsty, as well as creating miles of paths in the gardens before we start creating all of the beds. (Phew!) We went to a depot we found on the internet where they do up and resell mini-diggers. We eventually found them ( they had moved to a new address) and they were in the middle of celebrating the move to a new site and building, supplying food and drinks to new and old customers! A very nice bloke who owned the business showed us his stock. He wasn't wearing a Camel overcoat, only a black one! We are looking at about 12,000 euros (including the french version of vat which is levied at 19.5%). However, a deal can be done! They will deliver for free, we could hire it for say 3 days to see if it is OK, and maybe if we pay a bit in readies so as to reduce the amount of vat we have to pay?........ but not too much! We will follow up a new machine we saw on ebay which seemed to be offered new, delivered, tax included, for only 9,000 euro, but that seems far too cheap by the prices we have seen in our searches.

After some shopping and the mini-digger search we had to rush back home, grab some food before we went off to Cahors to see Rene. Then.... we went to a concert at the School of Music, which didn't start till 9 o'clock. It was a very 'interesting' start to our pursuit of a fuller social life following the years of being consumed by our business. The concert was Jazz Improvisations and was introduced as being free jazz, and it was very free!!! A lady playing the double bass and a man on the trumpet. They were both brilliant musicians but what they played was very avant-guard; the 'noises' they were making had similarities to some experimental electronic music. I was a bit worried as, whilst I am quite happy to accommodate this type of 'new' music I didn't think Sue would like it. I don't think we can say she liked it, but watching the performers at the same time as listening to the music meant that it could be appreciated as a performance rather that just taking it as a piece of music. Certainly more culture to be followed up!!!!