Happy birthday Alex

No cake, no candles, no schnitzel - but will a boat do?

He ponders the question...

Today, a summery Saturday in Zurich, we have shaken hands on the purchase of Enki, the HR48 hardtop which we saw in Port Napoleon at the beginning of our search. We've inspected an array of lovely boats at the both ends of the Mediterranean and in the UK over the past three weeks, but Enki is still the One, it seems.

She's where we left her in France, of course, but her owner, Christophe, is back at his drawing board in his hometown of Zurich. So here we are. There's a bit of tricky stuff to navigate before we can say definitively that she is ours, and the marine survey, we hope, will be the least of it. Buying an ex-VAT boat in France was never going to be our simplest option from a red-tape perspective, especially with 14 July and the big summer shutdown bearing down on us. But here we are, as I say. Nothing you can do about love.

Anything to give the man pleasure.

Happy birthday, Alex.

(actually, he did get a cake  - thanks Christophe and Jeanette)

PS if he missed out on the wrapped gift, I didn't. I've been looking in second hand bookshops for the third volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries for months now. It's out of print. Yes, I know, I could have found it on-line, but where's the fun in that? Yesterday, before we tackled Gatwick and Easy Jet again, we were in Lewes, a small town in Sussex near to where Virginia and Leonard Woolf spent their summers.  Lewes is deadset historic, but we didn't get to Anne of Cleves house. We went straight for the second-hand bookshops, and in the third one, called Bow Windows, there it was - a complete first edition set of the diaries.

 "It's only a winch handle," Alex said, as I squirmed at the price of the set.  No, it's three, or maybe four winch handles, actually. I don't really need to own books. Never have. I'm happy borrowing. But there they were, ripe for the plucking.

Anything to give the woman pleasure.

The Ouse river, near Lewes

Looking towards Rodmell from the Ouse river

Lewes honeypot