Chris has gone home; we hope he enjoyed his stay and learnt a lot while he was here. Maddy and Dom have also been and gone; we had a lovely few days with them, including a day in the hills, cycling up the col de Hourquette d’Ancizan. Since they left, the weather’s got even hotter; the weathermen seem to think the worst is now over, with temperatures peaking at 40ºC yesterday; not a good day for us to go to Condom, where we scuttled from one patch of shade to the next, trying to find some respite from the ferocity of the sun. Today’s 35ºC nearly had me reaching for a cardigan!

So now it’s back to work. Kieran has to re-register his motorbike over here; he has spent many weeks sorting out the paperwork and getting a certificate of conformity, so we headed off to Auch today, armed with every bit of paperwork anyone could possibly ask for and quite a lot of other stuff, just in case, in the hope of completing the task. But as is so often the case, it wasn’t that straightforward; what he’s got is only a partial certificate of conformity, due to the age of the bike, which has to be inspected again to complete the certificate. I phoned the various places to arrange this; to speed things up he can take the paperwork to Tarbes on Monday and meet with the technician, but when I asked if the technician could  inspect the bike there and then, the suggestion was met with horror – no, it takes three to four weeks for this! So we’re on tenterhooks now, as he has booked to go back to England in 3 weeks time.

We were more successful in our other task in Auch; that of getting Kieran a social security number and registering him as an auto-entrepreneur, so that he has some health cover, since it now looks likely that he’ll be staying longer than originally anticipated. The poor woman in the RSI office must dread idiots like us turning up, with very limited knowledge of how the system works, or even of the vocabulary used! However, she explained everything (I’m not claiming to have understood it all, but that’s not her fault!) and even gave us a space in her office to fill in the forms in situ, so we could ask about what we couldn’t understand on the forms. Two hours later – Kieran now officially exists here 🙂 English people we meet so often complain about the rudeness and unhelpfulness of French civil servants; I hope I’m not tempting fate, but we’ve met with nothing but courtesy and helpfulness up to now.