It’s ages since the last blog – is it wrong of me to hope you’ve missed it?! You may think that now that summer has finally arrived, we’re sitting around, drinking wine and having barbecues, so nothing is getting done. Well, we have had a couple of barbecues and the lads do their fair share of wine drinking – all part of the effort to be a French as possible, you understand, but we’re still working hard too.

But I didn’t think gardening, stacking a trailer-load of firewood we were given, or even putting the first layer of insulation into the roof were terribly blog-worthy, even though they’re pretty time-consuming.

So I’ll give you a sneak preview of the big story in store next week, (fanfare plays….) well, provided Nick remembers to take a few photos, anyway.

He set off today for Mont Ventoux, aka the Giant of Provence, a solitary mountain near Carpentras, whose summit is at 1912m. It’s a legendary climb for cyclists, frequently featuring in the Tour de France and is the site of the death of Britain’s Tom Simpson during the Tour of 1967 (yeah – a pretty serious climb). The lower slopes are shaded by trees, but the top portion is completely barren, like some sort of moonscape; it’s usually bitterly cold on the top and frequently blowing a gale.

The official event is to ride up the mountain overnight, setting off at 2am on Sunday; but Nick being Nick, this isn’t enough. There are three routes to the summit; he’s going to cycle two of them during the daylight hours of Saturday, followed by the night-time ascent of the third. One would be more than enough for most cyclists; it certainly was for me when we rode it a few years ago.

Apparently there are over 500 equally deranged souls who are taking part in the event, so I hope to have some spectacular photos when Nick gets back next week. Of course, it’s not worth going all that way for a couple of days, or so the reasoning goes, so he’s staying the week. Ho-hum…