Sitcom

Stupidly I had suggested that the TV crew should arrive before seven, to take advantage of the morning light, the mist on the water, and the chill of the almost pre-dawn sun. To achieve that, they had to leave Saarbrucken just after five, which as it turned out was about the same time we had to start our day.

"We just want you to do what you would normally do" Barbara instructed over her first coffee.

"So I shall go back to bed until the temperature is in double figures shall I? See you round nine then?"

How can one get on with the serious business of doing nothing when one has barely been in bed long enough to warm it?

But we put on a brave face anyway. We could hear Jacques and Maggie sniggering through the curtains as Mr P added copious additional greyness to the morning mist, but apparently it made great television and the cameras rolled regardless.

We bought baguettes and were given cherries, and docked and left a dozen times which is not at all what we normally do,but we were assured it would look quite normal in the final cut. As the day warmed our cultural differences began to polarise; Australians seeking broad hats and shade, TV crew suggesting that was not at all what we would normally do and perhaps we would prefer to remain hatless in the sun as Europeans would expect.

We scaled Rechicourt without incident, which on past form is not particularly normal either, and the Captain served quiche (Lorraine of course) to anything that moved and by the time the day was over we'd all had a rollicking good time and were even looking forward to our next meeting.

We had barely finished our farewells from the top of Rechicour when it happened. The darkness of the curse struck again. It was nothing insurmountable for someone who wasn't three day's walk from a hardware store, but without that luxury, making a temporary repair to a jammed hotwater tap does take a certain amount of ingenuity. Eventually the flow of scalding water was halted.

Bodgy repairs at the top of Rechicourt are exactly what we normally do, but by then they had been long gone.