Sense and Sensibility: La Marseillaise

We call this progress.

If you enlarge the photo, you'll see that Enki is wearing her new name on the bow (Christoph's tarot emblem stays for the moment - I want to know more). Her name, port and official number are on the stern too, but I'm withholding that photo till we've re-done the letters, which are a tad crooked. The wind doesn't help when you're standing on a ladder with water, transfers and a blank canvas.

We've now received a copy of her Australian registration papers, scanned and emailed from Canberra, and that was enough to call Christoph back down to Port Napoleon. We pick him up from the Arles station in a couple of hours. Tomorrow morning we all go to see the French customs agent who will, we understand, sign off Christoph and shepherd us through the French customs process. The less said the better at this stage. The champagne is still in the fridge. Perhaps we'll get to open it tomorrow night. Perhaps.

Alex is like a pig in shit. He has more mobility, and needs no encouragement to root around in lockers, lazarettes and of course, the engine room. Right now he's beaming. He's found the source of a leak identified by the marine surveyor in the generator. A hose clamp had rotted through; a fitting on the coolant reservoir was loose - "obviously sucking air and pissing out coolant". Imagine that!

Yesterday we ventured into a different kind of cavern, the Carrefour shopping centre at Port du Bouc, one of a string of huge seaports between here and Marseilles. We came out with a small espresso machine and pots, Tefal pots to be precise, the finest sort we could buy with detachable handles. Call that a strike for Tefal, which is a big sponsor of the French Film Festival in Sydney. We absorbed the Tefal message through our pores as we waited for the main feature, more times than we can bear to remember.

The new pots and frying pans stack brilliantly. I have a new pressure cooker too, the sort which (as the ad says) you can open and close with one hand. How did I ever live without it? Most of our galley equipment, plus ropes and anchors and lifejackets etc etc, will come in a box from Australia - that's the plan, anyway. But it was fun to get into the aisles and pick out a few appliances. Because Enki has a generator and, when Alex has finished with her, will have a large inverter, we'll be able to plug in a toaster or an espresso machine - or even an iron, for that matter - when the fancy takes us. This level of comfort comes with a bigger boat, but then again, we'll be slaves to the production of power even more than we ever were on Kukka.

On Friday, we had a play day in Marseilles. My treat. We arrived at about 11.30 am. The sky was cloudless, the heat and glare intense and the traffic grinding around the Vieux Port particularly clogged. Perhaps it always is, but I learned from the Saturday paper that at exactly that hour, a notorious gangster, known variously as The Cobra, Joel the Turk, and, more mysteriously M. Pierre, was shot three times, twice in the head and once in the neck as he sat down at his local cafe and opened up his computer. He died on the way to hospital. We must have heard the sirens. Surely.

The Vieux Port, Marseilles

Marseilles is a city with form. I love it. We need to run now - there's a Provencal jousting tournament we want to find in Port St Louis du Rhone before we pick up Christoph from the train station. So please make do with happy snaps. You've heard enough about our eating and shopping and passion for museums by now, I think.