Salut!

My French bolthole: a very old farm with heaps of charm (4)

Emma Lee-Potter is always welcome at Salut!, but the latest instalment in her story of turning a ramshackle French farmhouse into a dream home could not have been better timed, as I attempt to bat myself back into life here (a cricketing analogy familiar to all Frenchmen) ...

The sun is out, the sky is blue – and yippee, my tumbledown farm in the south of France now has a septic tank. It’s best not to dwell on how the previous owners managed without one.

With the credit crunch casting gloom far and wide and the pound sinking like a stone, I’ve mostly succeeded in putting the derelict farmhouse I bought two years ago in the Drôme out of my mind. Its dodgy roof, water-drenched walls and garden littered with old scrap are the stuff of nightmares.

Priceless, prizeless

No prizes, for once, for guessing where I spent part of the weekend.

The visit to this lovely spot was preceded by an endurance test 40 miles or so to the north.

But that ended happily, too.

Party piece

For those few regulars around these parts - correction: for Dumdad - asking about photos from my leaving party in the UAE, I have posted a random selection at the overspill site.

Go there at your own risk.

Three women

Maya, of course, makes it easier to acclimatise to Europe once again. Abu Dhabi is missed - in ways I will, one day soon, get round to writing about - but two trips to France, one of them introducing the gem pictured above to foreign travel, have made re-entry a lot more agreeable than it might have been.

So this is a brief tale of three women who have dominated life since our return from the Middle East 12 days ago.