It’s Tuesday morning; we’ve got people coming to dinner tonight and my back, though improving, isn’t as free as I’d hoped it would be by now. So I send Nick and Kieran to do the shopping while I start cleaning up, in half hour stints, with half hour rests in between.

Once the shopping’s done and lunch is over, the lads decide to install the kitchen part of the VMC, which involves swathing the sink, the cooker and the dishwasher in dust sheets to protect them from flying debris and moving the things that normally live there to every other surface in the kitchen. To my query as to how long this will take, I receive the standard reply; “Oh, not long”; this can mean anything from 10 minutes to a week, I really don’t know why I bother asking the question any more!

3o’clock; I still can’t get anywhere near the sink end of the kitchen, there’s barely an inch of work surface anywhere and anyway, everything is covered in a generous layer of brick dust and rubble, not to mention the crunchiness of the floor. I’m beginning to panic slightly as we know one couple a little, but have only met the other couple briefly once, and their daughter not at all, so I’d like the place to be as good as it can be and for the meal to be OK.

But by 4o’clock the work is finished; we set to, wiping and polishing, hoovering and mopping. We prepare prunes wrapped in Bayonne ham (which takes longer than it should when I discover that the prunes aren’t stoned!), cherry tomatoes, basil and feta on cocktail sticks and other bits for the aperitifs without which no meal is complete here. I make a salade composé as a starter and prepare fillets of merlan, rolled up, to be served on a bed of home made ratatouille and topped with home made tapenade. We’ll serve it with rice and French beans picked from the garden, followed by salade and cheese and a Tropézienne, a light sponge with a filling of crème patissière, bought, I have to confess, from the supermarket as I didn’t think my back was up to any more cooking. Just as well, really, as I wouldn’t have had time anyway!

Fortunately, our guests arrive a little late, as we finish setting the table; Philippa is, apart from Nick and I, the only other English member of the cycling club; Dav, her partner, is one of the top stained glass window makers currently working, and has offered me some of his old, painted glass offcuts to use in my own, rather amateur windows. Alain is another keen cyclist and his wife Corinne owns a clothes shop in a nearby town. Their teenage daughter completes the group; she and her mother are enchanted by Hugo, the star of the evening.

We take aperos in the garden, where the temperature has dropped enough to be pleasant to sit out, then move inside for the rest of the meal and a discussion about the Raide Pyreneen (a cycle ride from one end of the Pyrenees to the other, over 27 cols), planned for September.

In the middle of the evening the phone rings; I’m overjoyed; it’s Joel, our builder, who I’ve been trying to contact for weeks. He’s not left the country after all, and is coming round to see us next week. The icing on the cake of a very pleasant evening.