It is a week, almost to the hour, since I set out on this my latest trip to Thezan les Beziers and the Dwyers.

It was another beautiful crisp morning on the day I left and the van, seen here down outside the mill, is already loaded with the new furniture items for Le Presbytere that I mentioned and also the very last boxes of the Dwyers' goods and chattels from their house in Waterford.

I had to say farewell to 'les girls'.............

..............and, for some reason, the cat decided to bid me adieu from a perch in our hot press.

As I say, the van was replete with those items that were the raison d'etre for the trip but the very last things to be loaded, along with the marmalade oranges that Martin had requested, were these quintessentially Irish foodstuffs.

In fact, Barry's tea and packets of Denny's bacon rashers and sausages have become the emblem of the departing Irish person as emigration once again bedevils Ireland's younger working population.

The tea, I have to say, was for me because, while on most matters of taste the French are way ahead of us, they do not understand tea and its importance.

But the back-bacon joints were another request from the Dwyers as they had a party planned to celebrate Ireland's saints day with traditional fare, amongst which bacon was an obvious must.

I arrived in Thezan in the late morning of Tuesday, 15 March into a house that is now ordered and decorous.

But after lunch, when we disgorged the van of its contents, this aura of order and calm was destroyed.

So, while the Dwyers spent their afternoon peering into boxes and reacquainted themselves with possessions of which they had all but forgotten, I set about installing the new furniture items as, with the Patrick's day festivities but two days away, it was plainly essential that Le Presbytere should look its, improved, best for the occasion.

I installed the furniture.
(A cherry wall rack designed to complement the cherry sideboard I made for Dwyer's of Mary Street some twenty two years ago, Martin tells me.)

................while Martin cooked and cooked and Sile decorated the space a la mode Irlandais.

And we got there.

And we guests - for that is what I become when I am not at work - were greeted with black velvets accompanied by Irish smoked salmon on brown soda bread baked by Sile.

We sat down to Irish stew, the aforementioned bacon joints glazed in mustard and honey with colcannon.

Followed by marmalade cake (there were Scots amongst us) with brown bread ice-cream, and finished with Irish coffees with a bottle of Paddy taking pride of place amongst the digestifs.

And it was a great night.

Since then it has been mostly work but one evening we went for a walk beside the Orb and spotted this tree with remarkably bright lichen.

And last night we went to the cinema to watch Lucia de Lammamoor being performed, in real time, by the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

A new, brilliant and extraordinary experience, for me anyway.

And then today was the first occasion when it has been warm enough to lunch outside.

And so it will be back to work tomorrow until Friday when Sue and our neighbour, Brede, are to join us - and possibly more family - for more fun and frolics...........