France.

It's wet - torrential thunderstorms and so on, such that the lights keep flickering - so I'm taking the opportunity to write this instead, while trying to get the CD player beside me to play more or less anything that isn't Dido or Jacko. I was aiming for a Kings CD I saw they had the other day, but that turned out to be entirely Christmassy, so I dug out one of those 'Classic' compilation things. Well. Don't try and get the train all the way from St Albans to somewhere approaching Geneva on the same day. It's an error. It does bring home to you the fact that the French Alps are A Very Long Way, but having driven over them a fair few times for holidays of one sort or another, I don't need that bringing home to me. The scenery is great, and the chalet/hotel place we're staying is gorgeous. Slightly random selection of other guests, but that's the way of these things. It's an adventure type place - the area is lousy with VTT (velo touts-terrains (probably got agreements wrong...sorry), or mountain biking, to you and me) centres and places to jump off mountains with curtain over your head. I've done a fair amount of walking with the parents, such that now my knees are well and truly ouch, and have also been canyoning and rafting. I wasn't sure the canyoning would have been really up my street, and it nearly wasn't - I'm not good at heights, and it basically involves sliding, climbing, abseiling and jumping down a very cold waterfall at the bottom of a gorge. I love the water and the messing about in streams bit, but am really not very keen on the jumping bit unless I know exactly where I'm going and it's not too far down. Least I didn't have to much in the way of bridges or much hanging on the end of a rope that I wasn't in control of. I only froze properly once, and ended up grabbing a rope I really shouldn't have grabbed because I now have beautiful rope burn all across my left hand. Bah.

The food's good, too - the chef in the chalet is awesome, but the area has things like a cheese that melts so perfectly you just need it on its own to make a cheese sauce. They use it to make a thing called Tartiflette, which is fried potatoes, onions and bacon, made into a gratin with the cheese, called reblochon. I reckon it could be adapted pretty easily with red pepper pieces instead of the bacon. A slightly more authentic replacement would be capers, but I don't recall really liking them, so pepper will do.

Despite the fact that it's raining now, the weather's been great. We were walking yesterday, and it was clear enough to see Mont Blanc, which is pretty rare from here. We're more or less on the Swiss border, at a place called Morzine, just south of Geneva. The clarity had its downside though, in that it was HOT yesterday, and I had a killer headache when I came home. Bah. I have a bit of a tan though, which is always something. It's pretty uneven, but a few weeks in Cornwall should sort it out I suppose. Meh.

I suppose I ought to start job hunting when I get back, but it's not really going to be practical. I'll have two weeks, then perhaps some time in Edinburgh, though that's now looking pretty unlikely, then a month in Cornwall. It's hardly a suitable set of locations for possible job interviews in London, really, though I can at a pinch drop things in either of those locations and go home to be interviewed on any day apart from the actual run at the Minack. I'm not all that sure how long it'll take for things like that to process - from application to interview to starting a job, so I don't quite know when the best time to start doing this is, if I want to start work at about the beginning of September. I still haven't got the energy for it...spending chunks of every day in a complete funk about everything at all, where the best option is just to hide under the duvet and hope it's not there when I wake up. It's not that I'm scared of doing a job, or even getting one, just that I really don't see the point in anything. Meh.