Here I am in Bordeaux. Now that it’s done, I can finally thank Matt for lending me his apartment while he’s busy doing things for the world more important than what I’ll ever do for a neighborhood. (I was that close to be stuck having to go to a hotel, though, because I had a false address. Well, actually, his name is on the building’s speakerphone, so if I had had nobody to phone I’d have reviewed all the doors in the street and finally found it — thanks hence to Fabrice and Pierre for sparing me the effort of trying my keys on every door on the street with eleventy kilos of luggage on my shoulders).

There’s a three-and-a-half-page blog post in my notepad, that I wrote along that horrendous train trip that led me — but inj a totally excusable way, you’d understand if you’d been there — to brutally and painfully murder a sixteen-year-old girl who was telling me of her July vacation. ut I can’t be bothered to type it, so I’ll probably never publish it (I could scan it once I’m back in Smallville, but you couldn’t ever manage to read it — which could make a fun contest, actually).