Sunday 20 July - Le Piglet due to go, rain, house photos, drinks and scrabble

Sunday morning was a bit cooler after the storm, which just skirted around Moissac, but the blue sky gave the promise of better things to come. So we went up to the Sunday Market and bumped into Peter and Amanda and their new guest Ash, just as they were sitting down to a coffee at the Compostelle Cafe. We had a good chat about the past 24 hour’s events, and then Peter and Ash decided to walk up the hill to the statue and lookout, while Amanda decided to get back to the boat to prepare for their departure for Toulouse that afternoon.

We had no sooner given up our table to another lady, when we spied Nico and Miya and Massa, with two Japanese friends and their carpenter friend who is helping Nico with the house. So we found another table and sat down for another round of drinks. Just as we were finishing up, a few spots of rain fell, and then the sky fell. We raced for the indoor market building and got inside just before the rest of the crowd. While we were standing there, we decided to buy some fish and wine for dinner (every cloud has a silver lining!).

In the afternoon, Rita and I went up to the house to take some photos while none of the workers were around. While there still looks like a lot to be done in the next 4 weeks, each day is now bringing significant changes, so we remain hopeful of most of it being completed in time to provide a habitable home for the band by mid-August.

When we got back to port, we saw that Le Piglet had not left, as planned, because of the weather. So we yelled across the canal and asked them to drinks on board Kanumbra. There we learned that Ash had been at a conference in The Hague, where she had discussed her research on speech therapy. Naturally, Rita also got talking to her about brain plasticity and music therapy. After finishing all the nibbles on Kanumbra, we went across to Le Piglet to continue the evening and ended up playing Scrabble, much to the delight of the eventual winner Amanda.

As usual, Peter had been at work/play, combining snippets of information about Rita’s karate class and her battles with the spiders on the barge.