You guessed it, we didn’t go to Nice on Sunday. Well, I must admit that it turned out to be one of those days to curl up and hibernate with cup loads of piping hot chocolate. Cold, overcast and blustery is how I can best describe it and I felt sorry for all those people dressed up in decorative frocks attending the parades; they must have frozen to death.

So we went yesterday afternoon instead and although there were no parades, I did take a photo of "Le Roi du Carnival" parked in Jardin Albert I. This year the king was Jacques Chirac dressed up as a rugby player holding a rugby ball in one hand and a beer can in the other. His "statue" measured a stupendous 14 metres high while his head, a whoping 5 metres (plus an extra 2 metres if you count his crown) weighed 800kg.  When "on parade" he is driven out on an enormous motorized "shar" (tank) weighing around 10 tonnes. To get some idea of the size of Monsieur Chirac, look very carefully at the enlarged photo; you should see part of an arm and a hand at the bottom of the photo. It belongs to one of the carnival’s cleaner-uppers who was busy scraping off the coloured "silly string" (or "webbing fluid" if you were Spiderman) sprewn from hundreds of aerosol cans.

As we drove along the Promenade des Anglais I was amazed to see how incredibly turquoise the mediterranean sea was. Sadly, by the time we’d park the car, took some photos of Jacques Chirac and made our way to the beach, the colour had changed to grey and the magic had gone. All was not lost however, for as we approached I couldn’t resist taking a quick photo of an intrepid gentleman scouring the beach for coins and what have you with his metal detector.

For those of you wondering how sandy Nice’s beach is: it isn’t. It’s pebbly and very pebbly at that. Walking along it is difficult, even Freddy found it heavy going  as the layer of pebbles is very deep and move and slide with each footstep. I’ve always much admired the bravery of the swimmers who, after a wonderful refreshing dip in the sea, are faced with the daunting task of negotiating these wretched things barefoot - made worse in the heat of summer when they are scorching hot (in truth I’ve seen some swimmers wear plastic slipon shoes for protection but not many).

On a different note, I thought I should follow up about the snow-capped mountains (Maritime Alps) that I photographed and spoke about in an earlier blog. Much to my surprise the snow has nearly all gone and the mountain tops are quite bare. I refuse to put this down to global warming (a label that seems [to me anyway] to be touted for everything that goes wrong in this world recently) but rather Mother Earth’s natural and periodic cycle of life (ex. our wild violets are especially abundant and gorgeous this year).

Lastly, for those of you who have asked, I’m hoping that Nigel will soon write up a blog to tell you all about our computer installation and setup. In fact, we’re expecting three further arrivals to join our happy group of digital mayhem: Sony Jim and Pinky & Perky. More I shall not reveal for the moment; suffice to say that yes, we do give names to our computers and mine is called My Little Pony!