And all the world was yellow

And if that title isn't a quote from a song, well, it darned well should be!

As we moved further south into the Pays de la Loire so we saw more and more cowslips in the verges, masses and masses of them in some places.  Further north, fairly close to Calais, there were still primroses in bloom, but down in the Loire they had finished.

The last couple of years we have seen fields of sunflowers in the lanes around La Prévière but this year things were different.  Still yellow, but different.  There must be a subsidy available to farmers on rape oil this year as there is acre upon acre of the bright yellow plant in the fields.

Our standard routine on these wineracking trips is to stop at a supermarket on the way down to buy the essentials for the week - coffee, milk, butter and so on - and then, on the way home, do the big shop, have a meal at the nearby Buffalo Grill and then get the train for England.  This last time, however, the routine needed to be abandoned.  We realised, when we arranged the dates of our trip, that we would be returning on May Day, a bank holiday in France.  Our big shop would have to be done earlier in the week as all shops are shut on bank holidays.  But unfortunately, it was not until the Old Bat and I were washing up the breakfast things on the day of our return to England that we remembered.  So that was the end of the wineracking.

~~~~~

I lied yesterday when I said that I was back to blogging in real time.  This is being written on Thursday and will be scheduled for Friday as I will do the supermarket shop on Friday (that is either tomorrow or today depending on your point of view) while the OB is in the diving bell as we will then be going on to the funeral of the friend who died last week.  Then I will be fetching the dog from kennels etc etc.

~~~~~

I wrote - a long time ago it seems now - about winning the shove ha'penny competition and Suldog left a comment asking what shove ha'penny is.  Sorry to be so late answering, Jim, but here goes.

This is a traditional British pub game and is played on a wooden board divided into horizontal "beds", each bed being slightly wider than the old halfpenny coin.  A coin is placed at the near end of the board, slightly over-lapping the edge, and is propelled by striking it with the ball of the thumb (or other part of the hand as desired) so that it slides up the board with the aim of coming to rest cleanly in a bed.  As we play it, the players take turns to score as highly as possible over a set time, say 10 or 15 minutes.