from patisserie row

It'd be ridiculous to have had wireless internet in one's holiday home for two weeks without making a single 'I am in the south of France, liveblogging by the pool' post (well, the wireless is pretty weak by the pool, actually), and yet what's finally driven me to post is the desire to whine. I've been doing comedy sneezing ever since we went canyoning today, and now it's settled into a proper cold and I'm posting boringly from bed.

Canyoning, though! We did this a couple of years ago on our adventure holiday in the Roja valley, and it was kind of fun to get back in the Neoprene. When we were driving upriver I felt on the verge of the vapours, which is much less fetching in a wetsuit than in a corset, but once we hit the water (cold enough that we tried to keep our unprotected hands over the surface as much as possible) I was fine. We swam, scrambled over rocks, leapt from ledges and slipped down waterfalls all the way downstream. And now I have a cold, but it was worth it.

It was also the most exercise I've had in weeks, apart from walking from the house to the pool, swimming a little, and walking from the car to the patisserie. It's been a good vacation. The minute I get home on Sunday, though, it's going to be the library and the gym, and listening to digibooks (little ipod-type things with just one audiobook on them), and writing an audience review for Vicky's play, and generally being useful for about four days before I go to Sweden and dissipate some more.

As for leaving Malory Towers, it was neither anticlimactic nor the reverse, really. The staff members who weren't leaving sang specially written songs to those who were. We went to the scariest-looking of the local nightclubs and discovered it wasn't that scary. I filled two suitcases with my stuff and gave away the rest, had a final coffee at the only Starbucks in town (where I'd attained "your usual?" status two days earlier, annoyingly), and got on a plane for Nice. Since then I've barely thought about it (though I keep having dramatic dreams about resident tutoring, so I think my subconscious is working something out).