Reports of my demise have been much exaggerated...

What I am trying to say in my title is that I have not blogged for ages, and I thought I had better try to bring my faithful fan up to date. I publish above photographic proof of my excuse for the lapse of time, the visit of Alyson and Kerri our daughter and grand-daughter respectively, which left little time for a reflective blog. Admittedly they left on Saturday, but once out of the habit it is hard to re-start. There.  Excuse over...what happened during the visit?
   Well, apart from a pleasant stay and a chance to get up-to-date with Kerri, who I have not seen for ages, one of the highlights of their stay was a trip to le Puy du Fou. This, for anyone who doesn`t know it, is a theme park a couple of hours to the north of us and is one of our favorite visits. Its theme is broadly speaking the conflicts and life in the Vendée in earlier centuries, and it has a fine re-enactment of a Viking attack in the First Century and an English raid somewhat later, foiled by Joan of Arc and by magic...The enormous granite keep which starts to turn around and a fort wall that disappears into the ground literally made my mouth fall open when I first saw them! The English raiders used to be portrayed with mouths drooling blood but they seem to have toned that down a bit... There is also a HUGE theatre whose stage fills with water through which the horses splash impressively, a full-size Roman arena in which Christians are apparently thrown to the tigers   and other shows to numerous to describe. If you haven`t been, do go, you won`t be disappointed.

  Kim`s favorite is the Bal des oiseaux phantomes, a huge display of hawks, vultures and other birds, flying free very close to the spectators.The park has its own Falconry School and several dozen birds are involved in the display, including hawks, vultures and a Secretary Bird, which eats snakes,
 and even storks . A skein of geese have even been trained to form up on a micro-light.

For the finale, a swarm of hawks descend from a balloon tethered overhead. It`s all rather  impressive.

  However, I would like to finish this blog by telling you of a scientific discovery which was NOT envisaged by the Park. Alyson`s eye was caught by a Poitou donkey grazing in an enclosure bounded by wooden railings. She went over to talk to it and stretched her hand over the fence to stroke its neck. She didn`t notice that the top rail of the fence was backed up by a thin wire, stretched between glass insulators... As her arm drooped down a bit, she received a belt from the electric fence which made her leap back, clutching her arm. But the electricity had a strange side-effect, never before remarked upon by scientists-- the bodice of her dress fell down around her waist, displaying her charms to the world, which luckily was confined to Kerri. Isn`t that  strange? Kerri found it so I am sure and giggled for some time... Al complained about the lack of warning notices, though there was a small one, in French, of course, a little way away.
   We had a lovely day apart from this incident. We had borrowed a wheel-chair for Al, as although she normally gets around well with her crutches, would find a whole day on her feet very tiring. We were pretty tired ourselves hauling it around, up hill and down dale but luckily didn`t let it run away, though the hills were steep in places. The park is very good at allowing disabled access and we had front-row seats at all attractions, thanks to Al! We got home exhausted and rather sunburnt at about ten-thirty and were not sorry to see our beds!

    Bye for now, I will try to keep up the impetus now I`ve started!