frogs, snails and tadpole tales

I hereby renounce posting from my telephone as a pretentious waste of time and energy, not to mention download megabytes from my very expensive service provider who shall remain nameless. Let us refer to them as 'Mandarin'. I remember now that the last time I did anything exciting on the internet from my phone while in France I had to sell some of the spud's clothes on eBay to pay for my bill. This decision is of course nothing to do with the failure interesting quality of my last post.

I have also to recant slightly and take back what I may have intimated about the similarity of the south of France to, say, the M1 to Birmingham because once it stopped raining and got closer to Toulouse, it was pretty amazing. The only trouble was capturing this from within the car was a bit problematic...



Nonetheless as you can see I gave it a try.



I love roadside railings, don't you? They add a sense of safety and security to a picture which might otherwise go missing. It was, however, I assure you, beautiful.

We arrived at our destination after 6 hours in the car with a very wide awake spud who had slept for at least 4 of them and who wanted nothing more than to bounce off the walls. The Frog, however, refusing an offer to stay in a luxury villa at the vineyard where the wedding was happening decided to rent a cheap picturesque room online without offering any information such as 'my wife will be carrying a baby and wearing heels'. The walls off which the spud wanted to bounce, therefore were up two very long, very narrow, near-vertical flights of sloping spiral stairs in a tiny fourteenth century poor-house. The idea of returning home after enjoying a few too many the temptations of our hosts and carrying the spud up what amounted to a Stone Tube of Death didn't seem to worry him at all. Needless to say, we relocated because the Frog wants a quiet life is nothing but amendable to reason.

The upshot of this was that the spud was relocated so many times he couldn't remember his bed-time, his dinner-time or his twelve-times tables. So there he was at 10pm happily eating artichoke off his father's plate and discussing the merits of Baudelaire with the other Frogs. He'd have had the wine if it had been sufficiently chilled. In the end I gave up on bed-time and dinner time and spent the rest of the trip posting food into the moving letter-box of his mouth whenever I had any on a plate.

This continental style clearly works for the spud and I'm considering re-naming him the Tadpole, so clearly is he a Frog-in-Waiting. So much so in fact that when the escargots came out on day two of the wedding, he ate six of them and would have had more if I hadn't had the following conversation with the Frog.: 'He loved the first three so much that I've given him three more' 'Well don't give him any more than three or he might throw up' 'Er... I meant... er... nothing'. Did they make him sick? Bollocks they did, I reckon he'd have happily had a dozen and I wish I had a picture of his little mouth opening to suck one down so that I could revolt him with it later. One of the little things still had it's antennae up. To be honest, the fact that they were slathered in garlic may have been a deciding factor in how much he loved them but it was worth it for the shock on the faces of the English and the pride on those of the French to stand by the buffet table shovelling gastropods into a finally hungry spud.

The wedding was fantastic, I have to add and like many enjoyable things, over much too quickly.



Back in Biarritz now where inevitably it is raining. This does however give me an 'out' from the necessity of wearing a swimsuit which I'm sure is a relief to all.