We're in

Cold, but sunny.

There's a friend who calls me in spates, this week was a spate, so on Thursday evening the phone rang, I thought it was him, I picked it up and waited.

Nothing.

I waited some more.

Still nothing.

"Âllo ?"

"Just ringing to say that your application for membership of the International Club of Bordeaux has been approved."

Just in time for us to go to the reading group in a café in the middle of town. (See, this café thing is not just us.)

This month it was "The Stranger's Child" by Alan Hollinghurst. I enjoyed parts of the book, some parts were quite funny. It reconciled me a bit to Ian McEwan. I went off Ian McEwan when his books started to resemble, to me, propaganda on various moral issues of the day - Amsterdam was the most blatant, for me, but Saturday was the same really, and after that I gave up for a while. Anyway perhaps that's what some literature has to be about. Propaganda for one or other view on moral issues.

Warm wraps on the chairs of the café 

We're a varied group of people : Russian, French (in an international kind of way), American, English Public School, Pat and I, and it's interesting watching people take positions, defend them, cede them, negotiate, all in a friendly and warm atmosphere.

And we're members !

As we talked a group of chaps came through in orange woolly hats. Aha ! The Frankfurters !

"Hi!", said one.
"Who won?"
"We did!"
"So ! Happy Frankfurters!"
"Yes"

Outside the cinema in Pessac

Then off to ... another café to meet up with a French friend who's very active in feeding the homeless. He also decides to feed me from time to time in the associative café where lunch is 4€ for main course, dessert, wine and coffee. He's protestant and feels he owes me eternal gratitude because I buried his mother.

Afterwards he tried to get me to go for another coffee somewhere but I had a list of emails to answer as long as your arm, so I had to get home. So instead we walked through the city a little, he showed me the shop Ding Fring where they sell off end of line clothes very cheaply, and I showed him Books and Coffee where I have to meet up with some folk very soon....

On the tram we found ourselves in a group of people with black and white scarves.

"Attend, il y a un truc. Vous êtes qui ?"
"Nous sommes de Francfort"
"And your English is better than your French?"
"Yes"

"So why the black and white scarves and why the orange yesterday ?"
"Black and white are our colours, but have you seen the film a Clockwork Orange?"
"But it's very violent!"
"So are we!" said one grinning, moustached German, looking as violent as a hamster.

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