Some years ago the local authority in Toul began an experiment on the town’s ramparts. Some bright spark had decided that for the cost of a few signs proclaiming that they had been declared a nature zone encouraging a bio-diverse range of plant species, they would never have to mow the grassy banks again. Thus far the experiment seems to be working famously in a rugged wilderness kind of way and it’s curious to see that sheep have now been introduced to variously trample, eat or ignore bits of vegetation and perhaps to introduce flies and dung beetles adding still more biodiversity to the experiment.
We had a little more bio added to the diversity in our own troupe this morning. Ele decided that despite waking with no symptoms of his lingering malady, it was time for her Australian friend to visit a French doctor. There is no argument that can be won when Ele decides something, and in due course we arrived, one of us with an ear just a little reddened from being dragged by it, to a nearby surgery, where the lovely doctor checked all vital signs and a few non vital ones and declared all to be in order. “Perhaps we must assume it is a veerooce,” she declared to the relief of her reluctant patient.
So it came to pass that in the still of the late evening our ecosystem had had expanded to include a boatload of Australians (some heavily jetlagged), some Germans and an unidentified veerooce singing Irish folk songs in an ancient French city.
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