The Tarn has been battered by a wind called L'Autan for a couple days. Blows up from the Med quite often during the summer, but it's usually just a comfortable blow and this is the first time in 12 years here we've experienced such a gale (125 kph gusts reported).
Our mayor called in at lunch-time to say he'd been told that 'La Poste' couldn't get through to us because of a fallen tree (of which we had no knowledge) so he'd come up with a chain-saw and cleared the lane.
Yet another example of why life in France is so comfortable. We Brits may tease (oh OK, mock) the French for some of their habits and attitudes but their system of communes with active mayors ensures a quality of civic service that British rate-payers would welcome.
L'Autan is sometimes called 'The wind of the madmen'. Perhaps with reason seeing that yesterday a chef of a restaurant in our local town Castres rushed out of the kitchen brandishing a knife and stabbed 4 people, one poor girl fatally.

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We've been eyeing two patches of mushrooms on our land. Jos wanted to try them but I've always been wary of wild fungi since a friend, who was an experienced 'fungologist', made a puff-ball soup that kept me on the loo for several days.
Just read that a French couple died yesterday after eating wild mushrooms...