Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious . . .

. . . summer. We bloomin' well 'ope. Beware l'hiver: Winter dans ce petit coin de la belle France, like Henry IV, tends to come in two parts; though if global-warming has its way, it may start to come like Henry VI, in three.

It's fairly normal to have a break in the winter around here in early February. This leads recently-arrived and naive English persons to believe that winter is over and that's it's time for shorts already.

No sooner have they imagined this than it's blow winds and crack your cheeks (well, if you will wear shorts) and March gives you a good 'iding; a prolonged part two of meteorological vileness, even into the darling floods of May.

Actually I thought this pic was going to be a bit of con. It was taken by my old schoolmate and photo correspondent David Moore, during the outstandingly heatless weekend of February 13/14 but took longer than expected to arrive due to murky obscurities (technical).

I loved this delicious filigree of ice and snow in the at-any-time spectacular Gorges de Galamus and was just scraping the bottom of the barrel for an excuse to use the pic, when girlfriend Claire rang up to report that there had been snow on the neighbouring Col de Saint Louis on her way home and that yet more of the tedious white stuff was forecast for Perpignan tomorrow. Sometimes you can win 'em all . . .

You never know from one minute to another what we're going to get next. At lunchtime we at last basked again on the sun-drenched and limpid terrasse du Cafédefa, at tea-time it was persistenting down with great dampness and tomorrow, who knows, maybe White Hell III, the director's cut?

Talking of our beloved café, alert readers may have vaguely noticed that Fa itself hasn't had much of a mention in recent despatches. This is probably because the café has been shut for repairs to both building and proprietor, thus depriving me of news and gossip. Marie, l'adorable chef, has had to recover from hospital treatment while Dave the Underdog (formerly known as barman) took the opportunity to wreak the Revenge of the Killer Piano.

Departure of the piarnofor-te, as Max Wall would have put it, offered Dave such an inviting expanse of virgin wallpaper that he couldn't resist banging a brand-new doorway through it into the old bar on the other side, a room long concealed in the dim mists of, well, dim mist really; though evidently poised for a triumphant comeback.

However the village trundles on in its accustomed cycle of ducks, old, young and roasted; the daily mantra of bread runs, school runs and men from the mairie doing things with lorries, strimmers and instruments of destruction.

Just to remind us that we are indeed a pulsing and vibrant community, hotly seething beneath the vigorous shadow of our legendary Tour Visigoth, one of the village sweet young things held her 18th birthday bash on Saturday.

The ponderous thud of techno beat against the doughty shutters of 5 Boulevard de La Pinouse, reducing them to metaphorical splinters, just as girlfriend Claire and I were thinking of going to sleep, ha-ha.

I have often admitted in this very tome that I am not averse to making a bloody racket, which I ingeniously attempt to pass off as music. Now is the moment to admit that I am a total bloody hypocrite when it comes to putting up with other people's racket.

It's not so much the noise but that techno is such crap dance music. What possible rhythmic pleasure could there be in bonk, bonk, bonk with not so much as a thirteigh, fourteigh? Bugger, I am officially old, I have finally admitted it: They don't write tunes like they used to . . .