A day at Toulouse

So the meeting of the Commission Exécutive Sud-Ouest was at Toulouse from 16:00 till 19:00. Toulouse is a 2 1/2 hour train journey and you have to get to and from the station at both ends, which meant I left the house at about 10 and got back just after midnight.

On the train I chatted with a charming elderly French lady who was reading a spy book in English. We got to know each other pretty well on the journey. She does the catechism for the young children "They give me half-an-hour ! What can you do in half-an-hour ?" I mentioned that in some of our seminaries now students are told that 15 minutes is the most you can expect people to listen for. "It's a catastrophe !" I agreed.

The meeting went OK and was pretty similar to things I've known in Wales.

Two scares. Firstly a missing student email from Catrin's school. That caused a nasty moment, till we contacted her and found that she had got mixed up with her timetable and missed one of her lessons. Then during the meeting, casually, "of course, after the death of Stuart Olyott..." "What?" I realised that it is another Stuart who died, an Englishman but with a French name...

I didn't have a packed lunch with me so it was a day of healthy eating. Lunch at Macdonalds. Supper at Quicks. (Well I did look for something else, but the station café at Toulouse is a Quicks burger bar.)

I stared at the menu. "Everything is horse ?"

"Oh no, that's in England !"






I preferred the Macdonalds offering to Quicks, but the apple juice was nice. I had a little wait at Bordeaux for the next bus, so I took some photos of the lighting.

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