We took a couple of days off to visit a friend in Tours. T&M kindly agreed to look after the hens, rabbits, and cat whilst we were away.
As expected, we didn’t sleep much. The friend lives opposite the cathedral in the town centre. There are lots of pubs, bars and clubs in the area, which means from midnight onwards there are drunks arguing or fighting in the street, people walking home talking loudly, and ambulances arriving at the nearby hospital with sirens wailing. Then at around 5 a.m. the street-sweeping vehicles start their waltz; brushes cleaning the gutters like the hems of twirling dresses. This is followed by the dustbin men starting their rounds, and then the general population starts to emerge, blinking, yawning, and calling out its morning greetings for the start of a new day. Now that we live in the peace and quiet of the countryside, we’ve come to realise we can never go back to living in a town.
Mind you, we saw a spectacular 14th-of-July fireworks display on the banks of the Loire river, which lasted for a solid 25 minutes.