No smoke, no fire, but big butch firemen everywhere

I hear that yesterday's fire devasted 250,000 hectares, which translates to 2,500 million square metres, or 2,500 square kilometres, or 965 square miles, or 2,520,000 Japanese tanns, or 424,950 Roman gerediums (I don't care who reads this rubbish, no more conversions - Ed.) The whole area is still crawling with big butch pompiers in very large, heavy weight, fire fighting vehicles, and many roads have been blocked to prevent rubber neckers (which includes me!) getting in the way. Jan has a 'thing' about firemen, which I'm not sure is entirely healthy, but as she has a bad leg, I let her indulge her fantasy.

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We are having two families for lunch tomorrow, as a farewell party for Harold and Elizabeth, who are moving to Agen about 4 hours west. Peter and Carol buy a 10 litre box of rosé for the party which, for ease of serving, I decided to decant into bottles. I nip out to get half a dozen new clean bottles but amazingly can't find any for sale. I even cheekily called into the cave cooperative in Sommieres who have, at a rough guess, 10,000 new bottles stacked on pallets outside. I had to giggle when I was told that they didn't have any. Following all leads, Intermarché, our supermarket of choice, had some cheap, Spanish (would you believe), white wine at 1.09 euros a bottle, and having been prepared to spend up to 1 euro for an empty bottle I decided to buy it and throw away the wine when I got home. That's when my problems started. Nobody would let me throw it away and 'they' decided to start working their way through it instead. Far be it for me to suggest that some people should start to seek treatment around here, but they did all realise that I wanted 6 empty bottles by morning. However at only 11% abv, they'll find more alcohol in a bottle of milk, so nobody should suffer too much. Watch this space.