Advance holiday preparations

Lazy day today - no rambles around Wales, no, today we have started remote preparations for our trip to France next weekend. I managed to persuade Keith that 2 polo shirts and a pair of chinos was not really an adequate wardrobe for a fortnight away, so off we went to Matalan. We hit a problem straight away as he insists that he needs a pocket in any shirt he wears so that he has somewhere to put his glasses. Well we did manage to find some polo shirts with pockets - straight out of the 70's! (You can't win'em all!)

Back home, the air has been punctuated by the sounds of bluetooth connections being made and broken as Keith works at setting up the GPS on his PDA to include the map of France. Technical afficionados please click here. In the meantime, I have been making mental lists of things to do, things to take and things not to forget. Keith thinks this passion for list-making is hilarious. I'm sure he's never made a list in his life. Also, I have been musing on the fact that my knowledge of colloquial French will now be 35 years out of date. I spent many months in France during my teens and was quite fluent in French but the language will have changed enormously since the late 60's, just as English has. (Who goes around saying things are 'fab' any more!) That led to thoughts of all the technological changes in the world since my visits in those days. (O.K. just get the sniggers and ageist comments out of the way right now!) The last time I was in France, there were no calculators, no mobile phones and no PC's; therefore no internet or emailing AND ....and here it gets REALLY serious....no blogging!!! Not only that, but there were no CD's, no videos, certainly no DVD's and no digital cameras or camcorders. My early photos taken in France were black and white. We didn't even have cassettes - all my music was on LP's, EP's or singles.
Younger readers look here to see what an LP looked like.
Still as long as the wine is still as good and the weather is better than here, I think we'll survive. (But we're taking my laptop, the PDA, the mobile phones, the GPS, the digital camera and the camcorder!)