Hurrah for live footie

After threatening all sorts of nonsense weather-wise for this weekend (according to all the forecasts), it turned out to be a lovely start to November and a good market day.

The 1st November is a national holiday in France (all saints or 'toussaint') and so the market wasn't as big as usual with several stallholders obviously taking the day off and many of the bars and cafes were also closed and a lot of the shops closed early too.

Despite all that we still managed an exciting market day. Today we went large on unusual and, in some cases, exotic fruit. We bought quinces and pomegranates and prickly pear and from a producer from Salleles d'Aude, near Narbonne, we bought feijoa, a brazilian cousin of the guava, and fuyu, a relative of the 'kaki' (persimmon, in English). Our plan is to make a very different but exotic fruit salad for dessert tomorrow with our vegan guest in mind.

We also bought a selection of the most fabulous wild mushrooms picked from the hills surrounding the Aude valley and had some of them this evening in a cream sauce with fillet steak and sauté potatoes and a rocket and watercress salad - it was absolutely delicious and all washed down with one of our favourite wines, La Falaise from Chateau de la Negly - if you can find it you should buy it.

The baby theme of the week continued during lunch at Saillan, where it was warm enough to sit outside and enjoy the sun. David's daughter and her husband and 6 month old grandchild were over for the weekend (came on the same flight as our guests from East Midlands apparently and stood behind them in the checkout queue!) and bizarrely David's ex, Anne, and his son Stefan, were also there - too many generations and ages to keep up with. Nonetheless, it was a very pleasant hour sat in the open air chatting about life.

Phil, the son-in-law, was bemoaning the fact that there was nowhere to watch Sky TV (the new Irish bar is probably still two weeks away from opening according to Patrick, whom we bumped into earlier).

Lo and behold, when I got home there was a message from Mr Sieff in London with a link to online live tv channels including live premiership football. How happy was I that I could watch some live football - in fact live football that most people in the UK can't watch (unless they have discovered this link, that is, or paid for subscription tv).

So I tested it out this afternoon and watched the Man U v Hull match and then sent the link to David so that Phil could watch Derby tomorrow and I will certainly be watching Bolton trying to extricate themselves from the bottom of the Premier League, without any hope that it will happen, sadly.

In between all that I repaired a window in the stairwell. On our way out to the market this morning Debrah noticed that one of the window panes in the window outside our internal front door was hanging on by a thread (the old putty had cracked and fallen out on three sides). So I lifted the glass out and cleaned up both the pane of glass and the window frame and siliconed it back in place - tomorrow I will put some new putty around it.

It's just as well Debrah spotted it because it could have been disastrous if it had fallen out. It is also another example of a job that will cost the owners next to nothing but which could have cost us all a couple of hundred euros under the old managing agents because they would have got a specialist glazier to do the job.

A couple of years ago I wouldn't really have known how to fix it, but now I knew immediately what needed to be done. I am proud of that - not just the knowledge, but also the confidence to just deal with it.

It is yet one more example of how this whole enterprise, renovation and business building, has been so very good for me.