Painful to behold

Debrah has gone back to London today and I am following her tomorrow - it has been a traumatic weekend with hospital visits and tears and tooth pain and it needs to be resolved immediately.

It would have been much better if I had been able to go back with Debrah today but there were good reasons for not doing so - a check-in at Maison Juliette that I promised to do, and at short notice, it would have been difficult to find someone else to do it, and a conversation I needed to have with Brigitte about plans for 42rvh. I will find someone else for the check-out and will take Debrah straight to the dental clinic tomorrow evening when I get back to London.

The weekend had started well - we were enjoying some bonus time together after the midweek missed flight and now desperately need to get hold of the second season of the Tudors.

On Friday lunchtime we visited a chic new lunchspot in town - an extension of the excellent delicatessen, La Ferme. It had a fabulous wine tasting/dispensing machine which every home should have and an excellent policy of selling all the wines from the shop at retail price plus €10 which is significantly less than a restaurant mark-up. The food however was a bit pricey, though delicious. It was full last Friday but then they had only just opened the day before - it will be interesting to see how it does and is certainly somewhere to send guests.

Naturally on Saturday we took in the market in the morning and even though we didn't need very much it is always such a pleasure in Autumn sunshine, a welcome relief after the rain all week. There was also a new event in town this weekend - the 'Festival des Saveurs', featuring food and drink artisans from all over the region, cookery demonstrations from the top chefs in town and of course, plenty to sample and taste and indeed buy.

Later that day, we had a visit from a representative of a travel website that would really like to list us - it seems interesting and would open up a new market for us as the site is centred on Spain and has very much a Mediterranean clientele.

It was after this visit that all hell broke loose and Debrah's tooth pain finally got beyond her pain threshold, although there had been signs earlier. It was a combination of finishing the course of antibiotics and no doubt the abcess just getting worse. An evening visit to the emergency unit at the Polyclinique Montreal, the local hospital, was the only way to try and get something a bit stronger to help Debrah sleep and get through the pain until she and I get to London to deal with it.

They were very helpful at the hospital but, because there was no dentist on duty, they wouldn't prescribe any more antibiotics. We could have gone back today but two hospital visits in two days would probably have tipped Debrah over the edge and I needed to get her back to the UK as calmly as possible.

This might all sound a bit extreme but phobias are not easy to understand because they are so unique to the individual - and we all have them, even if we don't admit it or don't yet know it!

All in all, the whole weekend was a bit stressful and very tiring - and I'm not the one with toothache, so I can't begin to think how Debrah feels - hopefully tomorrow we start the process of resolving the whole painful mess.