Hoopoe bird in the garden, wikipedia has a good description of this species here.

We are trying to plant tomatoes between each downpour of rain, terrible winds too. Chilli plants are ready to plant too. The only problem is that we are underwater most of the time and blown away into interglactia by the wind.

Leaving Grasse (view from window above), I drove my Hertz BMW 4 wheel drive armoured assault vehicule past Marseilles and up into les Cévennes to visit La Bambouseraie, an incredible bamboo park and forest.
Beautiful part of France.

Paris is windy, the plane very bumpy coming in to Orly.
I finally sent the annual toothpaste e-mail and got this photo in reply. It simply said “Torture on a Mediterranean Island October 2006”.
I hope I get the toothpaste as I am in serious “get healthy” mode at the moment starting with getting my teeth fixed. Other aspects of this dramatic u-turn in my lifestyle include: only eat chinese or japanese food, drink green tea, eat slowly and have more sex.
I have only used this salty German toothpaste for the last few decades so all my German friends and ex-friends get regular demands for the stuff which is exported no-where and apparently unavailable on the internet (or maybe my non-existent German is the problem, Mein Gott in Himmel).
The photo says a lot to me actually. The ex-friend is question is still having his breakfast alone every morning and therefore, most probably, going to bed alone every night. Plus he wants to show off that he can afford luxury Mediterranean island holidays in October. This is all he deserves really but that is another story involving screwing my sister and getting her arrested. The toothpaste is really the only redeeming factor about him. Poor fish.

Cannes and Marseilles this week which explains the lack of posts, it’s not that I’m getting lazy, more that our business and civilisation has become so complicated there is no time for recreation nor relaxation.

The trade fair was actually quite fun for a change (“been there, done that”), because loyal friends and human communication is always better than the fucking internet. However the bullshit threshold descends as we get older, I just cannot tolerate idiots in the way I used to be able to do. Sadly this bloody business has a very high proportion of imbeciles.

Marseilles is a nice city, photo taken from the car with my mobile phone just to prove I was there, this is a church just near the old port.

Of course I missed the exit off the autoroute, had a very undercooked and unpleasant pizza, ruined a shirt and tie by splashing greasy pizza topping on it (the waiter actually said “I think you’ll need to by a new shirt, sir”) and generally got tired by driving 500kms in the day. This was all forgotten upon arrival back home, I cooked a wonderful Roghan Josh for our guests (recipe to appear here soon, maybe) and everyone was happy.

Next entry back to bio-dynamic wine growing then on to France…..

Coming out of Venice railway station is like arriving on a movie set, apart from modern dress, motor boats and mobile phones nothing has changed much. Pasolini’s Il Decameron and other films spring to mind.

I expect the Denis from the past to spring out of a dark alleyway, even Casanova or worse the little red riding hood from Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.

We took Vaporetto n°13 to St Erasmus, home of the wine of the Venetian Doges. Like so many things our “civilisation” has taught us to forget, taste has become standarised, a banal sameness wherever you go. We no longer know how to care for our planet. But here it is different, wine growing techniques dating from before the dark ages, combined with a little modern technology and a lot of passion, produce wine that is very special.

Magick and guardians ever present, the co-incidences almost every hour of the day no longer astonish me, our current project for a TV series on geobiology and the architecture of sacred places of worship suddenly takes on a new, broader angle. What the stone masons and carpenters were doing in the churches, the farmers were doing in the fields: the result, whether it be a church, a house, a vegetable or a fruit, is in harmony with the environment and the universe beyond.

Paris this week which explains lack of posts, people are very stressed and I’m just not used to it anymore. I can’t understand how (not why) I lived here for so long in my previous life!!

The Jardin des Plantes is beautiful at this time of year and they have two baby pandas in the zoo.

Of course I came across a Vietnamese “canteen” which served the most incredible “Bo Bun”: vermicelle noodles, cucumber, carrots, slices of marinated beef and sliced “nem” spring rolls, it’s a meal in itself and for just a few Euros.