White rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits

Nobody seems to know just how the superstition (for it is superstition rather than tradition) started - nor, even, just what should be said or when.  Some say the words should be "black rabbits", others that white rabbits are for March only with just rabbits for other months.  But the concensus seems to be that the words must be the first words one utters on the first day of the month to ward off bad luck.  Me, I'm never sufficiently conscious on any day to know what the date is or to think of uttering a strange incantation.

I wonder if schoolboys still say, like we did in my younger days, "A pinch and a punch for the first of the month and no returns of any kind".  It was important to remember the embargo on returns or one was likely to receive "a punch and a kick for being so quick".

So here we are on 1st September - two-thirds of the way through the year.  Already!  Being the first Saturday of the month, Brighton Lions are holding their book fair at Lions Dene.  I was on the duty rota for setting up and clearing away but cried off as we had planned to be travelling south today, through Picardy and Normandy to the Pays de la Loire and our getaway cottage.  That was the plan until a week or so ago when I accepted what the Old Bat had already decided: the journey would be too uncomfortable.  All plans went on hold for a few weeks in the hope that this bout of arthritis will have cleared by then.  So I cn go to the book fair after all and try to find some suitable reading material for when we do manage to cross the Channel.

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Somewhat newer than yesterday's bridge, this railway viaduct is also in the Ardeche.  I knew we had to cross this valley and when I first saw the bridge my heart sank.  I don't much like heights of that nature.  Then I realised it was a now disused railway, presumably built in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.  We drove underneath it and that was bad enough!