A New Home in an Old Village

Najac is a very old village with loads of history attached to it. Situated in the Aveyron department of France, in the Midi-Pyrennees region, it's roughly 95 miles north west of Toulouse the regional capital. I've been coming here for the last 20 years, since my youngest son, Nat, settled here by accident. He's very happily installed right in the centre of the village with his wife Magali and their 5 children ranging in age from 18 to 3.
I have fancied for a long time I would end up here and, finally, having found the right house at the right price, here I am.
We are situated just below the west end of the church, the quiet end of the village (our house is not in this photo). The Duke of Anjou forced the villagers of the 13th Century to build the church either to prove they were not Cathar heretics or because they were. The war against the Cathars had laid waste to a large part of what is now south west France.

Higher up the hill a castle was built, more work for the villagers, this time commanded to do it by the English whose land in south west France reached to here in the period of the Hundred Years War. The villagers later captured the castle only for the English to recapture it and then be turfed out finally a few years later.

Now this is the entrance to our house which is narrow but consists of 4 storeys and is quite deep. This is our garage and wood store. We got a delivery of logs just as we were moving in and have moved a lot of them to be stacked neatly along the wall, a job we still have to finish. You can also see a washing machine and a dish washer we still need to move indoors along with some other items. Above the garage is a balcony which is accessed from our living room.

 We live in the Rue de la Pause, probably a much needed pause climbing up the hill from the river and the railway. It goes all round the bottom of the church and here on the left we see the multi-storied building for the priests and their guests, now turned into flats.

 If we turn right and go up back on ourselves we walk between that building and the side of the actual church. If we had gone straight on we would have ended up joining the rue de la gare which goes from the main village down to the river and the station where there are half a dozen trains daily south to Toulouse and north to Figeac and Brive.

 These are the steps going up to the main door of the church.

 And here we see the whole of the west facade of the church.

 Looking down through the public garden in front of the church we can see the roof of of house and a window of the top floor bedroom with its ensuite bathroom......this is for AirBnB guests mainly.

 Looking out across the Aveyron Valley we can see the hillsides opposite still hidden by the morning mist which is a local feature particularly in autumn.

 Here is the view of the church from the small public square opposite our house.

 And here is a view of the north side of the church with its not very tall tower and houses creeping up the hillside going round the castle.

 Here is a sign for the many tourists that visit Najac, letting them know to go back the way they have come to find the castle and the village.

 Here is another view of the church tower.

 And a cross set in the garden in front of the church.

 Here is our road nameplate in French and in Occitan which was the language here until the mid 19th century and is still spoken out in the country and is seeing a resurgence.

 Taken from the sloping public square we can see our house, narrow but deep. The three windows in the middle are in my room and the bottom one is over the balcony.

 This is the view directly across to the hill behind our house.

 And this is the view downwards where we can see the river and the few buildings next to it.

 This is a picture of the small public square. There are more cars than normal as it it school holidays and most of the houses in our street are holiday homes, only occupied during some of the holidays. The ones further down the street are mainly owned by Brits but also by one Belgian family.

 This is a shot of our living room and kitchen. It's not finished yet and the other rooms we won't be showing you yet as they are still filled with boxes and bin bags of our possessions. One thing we have found out is that the fireplace is really efficient providing heat round the whole house.

My lovely, fairly new German Shepherd, Leo.

 Then of course, I had to show you the castle. This shot is from the centre of the village, in front of my son's house.

And then, just so you have the whole picture, this is a shot taken from the top of the hill opposite which shows the main village, then the castle, then the church and our little neighbourhood. All this is on a ridge round which on three sides flows the Aveyron river deep down in its gorge.

The chateau you can see by itself in the woods upper left was built in the late 18th century and is now owned by a British company which lets it out as a gite to people who have loads of money. My daughter-in-law oversees changeovers between guests.

So in a way it's no surprise that there are an awful lot of Brits with homes here, keeping up the tradition started in the 12th century.

Sorry, no posts but I'm moving house.

Just a quick word to those who read my posts, to excuse myself for not having written anything recently. The reason, of course, is that I am moving house and have been very busy with this process. If you follow me on FaceBook you will have read about this and so will perhaps have guessed why no blog posts.

The village baker's, the one remaining shop that stays open all year.

It became clear to me that I was struggling a bit financially, a situation not helped by Brexit and the resulting falling Pound. As my pension comes from the UK, it has been falling month by month and seems likely to remain weak. And, in spite of adding to my income by renting out my car with Drivy.com and my bedroom with AirBnB and getting some payment from a few gigs, my overdraft at the end of each month seemed to grow like Topsy.
Discussing this with an English friend, Alan, who lives a few hundred meters away, we realised that if we shared a house our overheads would go down: sharing the rent, the heating costs, the internet costs, house insurance, etc and even the food bill. On top of the finances, we were both fed up with the noise we were suffering from, me because of a huge building project on my square and him because his flat is on the High Street and near a kebab restaurant which is the main evening hang out for teenagers with their noisy mopeds.
So, the search was on in earnest, mainly using the website LeBonCoin and we looked at loads of places that were either too expensive or not what we wanted. We were looking for a place where we could work more with AirBnB as well as giving us a room each with a kitchen and living room. So we needed a place with 3 bedrooms.
Then we found the ideal place which not only had those rooms we needed but a bedroom with ensuite bathroom as well as a second bathroom for our use and two extra toilets and a laundry room and garage; the only thing missing is a garden but in fact it looks out onto a small open space where Leo my German Shepherd can hang out (there are no other dogs, very few cars and he loves people) and we have already been offered a patch down by the river where we can have a kitchen garden. The rent was just 30% more than my present flat and the state of the place is immaculate including a superb fitted kitchen. And, another saving, there is a log burning fire which directs warm air around the house and also a heat exchanger and the house has been very well insulated.

The village church which supposedly the villagers were forced to built after being suspected of being Cathar heretics.

So, all has been done paperwork-wise and we move in on Monday with friends giving help and a big van. The move including rubbish clearing and cleaning will take three days then I have a day off, hopefully time to write a post, before the Reggae and Dub festival in nearby Sauveterre along with the arrival of a couple of friends from England. I'll be translating between the festival organisers and the Jamaican musicians as well as enjoying the music and taking photos over the weekend and then spending the rest of the week showing my friends around our region. Then, when they leave, I have four days with writing time before I head off up to Edinburgh to visit my eldest son and his family and to celebrate his wife's birthday and mine. Once back from there, my life will settle down to being much quieter through the winter with more time to continue with my story of Lastwind's tour supporting Hawkwind in 2006.
What I have omitted saying is where our new house is: it is in NAJAC, one of my favourite places on the planet. And, not only that, but it is at the edge of the village, well away from where the tourists gather in summer. Any tourist who ends up in the short street where we are, down below the church and the castle, is well and truly lost. It's almost a small hamlet, set apart from the rest of the village which is up on the ridge whilst we are off the main road and down towards the river with its long and pleasant walks down the gorge. There are only a handful of round the year inhabitants, most of whom I know already and the other houses are mainly owned by Brits who come from time to time.
I won't be walking up the steep hill into the oldest part of the village but we can drive up to the village centre in minutes.

The church and balcony which is several metres up above our little street.

And, AirBnB seem to think we will do well here able to charge more because of the touristy reputation of the village and the fact that our house is neat and tidy and with an ensuite for the guests. And, the final bonus, my youngest son, his wife, and 5 of my grandchildren all live up in the main village!!
And so a new chapter of my life begins. The future is looking rosy.

NAJAC CASTLE, built by the English back in the 13th Century.

I've had a break...You May Have Noticed.

I see it is almost a month since my last blog post and I will tell you why.
It's not because I have lost interest or anything like that; it's been mainly because of some health issues which I think are now resolved. I had a bout of 'walking pneumonia' (like Hilary Clinton had supposedly). I had been feeling rather tired and lacking in physical energy, not mental energy, my brain is always running along quite fast. Then one afternoon, whilst driving to visit my son in Najac, I discovered a barrel-shaped lump in my neck, hard and about an inch long. EVERYONE TOLD ME TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE DOCTOR and so I did the next morning to be sent for blood tests and was started on a course of strong antibiotics and told to return after a few days of rest. When I did my GP told me I had had a serious infection but that the antibiotics were doing their job and that more rest was advised. So I took it easy, no choice really as I still felt whacked out. Slowly I felt better but I must admit I still feel less fit than before.
What else came out of the blood test was that my diabetes was less under control than it had been. I had got fed up of constantly pricking my fingers to test my sugar level and so had taken a break from doing so: I knew I could tell if my sugar level was too high....sweating being a good clue, and too low....feeling a bit wobbly, so I felt that was enough. But, having seen the results I am now back to a more rigid regime, testing my blood sugar at least three times a day and adjusting my insulin intake if necessary.
Now, I had been planning a driving trip down through Spain and across to Morocco for a grand tour with two or three friends (and my dog). I was to have left this weekend. But, in view of my health problems, I decided to cancel it and just go on a drive to the Southern Alps and the Piedmont in Italy. I'm now back home and settling back to my normal life. I'm rehearsing with two bands and have at least one concert coming up soon. I have a few visitors as well coming up this month and a great Reggae and Dub festival at the end of October. We still have great weather so long country walks with Leo my dog should be able to continue and, with a mate, Alan another retired Brit, looking for a house with garden to rent, partly to save some money and partly so my dog can be mainly outside which is what he prefers.
But this will also mean more time to write blog posts, at least two or three a week. My next trip away is to Edinburgh to spend a week with my other son Sam, in Edinburgh in mid-November which will no doubt give me some new material.
My next post will be about my short holiday away which finished two days ago and will contain quite a few photos of beautiful landscapes, mountains, lakes, gorges and some sea too.
Following that I will return to my story of LASTWIND's tour supporting HAWKWIND in 2006.
So, I hope my many readers will drift back and continuing reading my blog.

Supporting HAWKWIND on tour, 2006 : Part One, The Birth of LASTWIND.

Our tour poster, designed by my son Sam (Doseprod)

In January 2005, I was feeling terrible. I had pains all round my chest area and felt I was heading for a second heart attack. My doctor knew I had a really stressful, all consuming job: I was director and senior manager of Unity Bristol, an organisation which provided residential care with education for some of the most disturbed young people in the UK, particularly those of an Afro-Caribbean background. We had 75 Jamaican staff out of a total of over one hundred and just dealing with those people was hard enough, without talking about our young 'clients' who lived in ordinary houses dotted around the 'ghettos' of the inner city. Anyhow, my doctor suggested I needed some time out and, knowing I had two sons living in the South of France, told me to go away and live with them for a few months. So I did.
However, my youngest who lived just outside Najac, had three very young children so it was not so peaceful there and when I moved on to my other son, who lived in Chateauneuf du Pape, they had just had a baby so same thing there. So, on a whim, I flew out to Dominica, the small island where my partner was from staying there for a couple of months of peace then flying home to bring my partner out there because nobody had seen her for 18 years.

Where I had my tumour removed on 14th Feb 2006

Meantime, Unity Bristol had gone down the tubes because no one had been doing the job I did every Friday, chasing money we were owed and the company called in some outside people to try and sort out the lack of cashflow, at that point being owed just over half a million pounds by various Social Services. All this stressed me out even more so I returned to France and one day, by the pool, my son said did I know that I had a huge lump on my back, and I didn't. He sent me to see his doctor who sent me for an X-ray and told me I had to have the lump removed. Stupidly, and mainly because my partner could not come to France without a visa I said I would go back to the UK to have it done. This was in August 2005 and I entered hospital to have it removed in February 2006, the time it took to have all the necessary appointments for scans and biopsies which led the specialists to say I had a large tumour in the muscles of my back next to my spine, hence all the pain. They removed it, apparently the size of a flattened tennis ball. I was out of hospital quite quickly but told to stay in bed and rest for quite a long time due to the way the internal muscles had been cut. Now I'm not one for enjoying being in bed day after day particularly as I didn't get many visitors except Liz, my partner and I would have been bored to tears but for the fact that my sons, particularly Sam, got me into writing new music and putting it up on my own web site. (Liz and I also watched every ball of the Test Match series against Australia where we brought the Ashes back home - laugh as you will non-Brits.
Then, one day, completely out of the blue, I got a phone call from Dave Brock. After a short chat, sort of catching up (we hadn't spoken for twenty something years) he said he had bumped into my web site, liked my music and did I have a band so that I could come on tour supporting Hawkwind in a couple of months or so's time. Well, I was very surprised, very pleased and said 'Yes' even though I didn't really have a band as such.
I had done a recording while I was waiting to go in hospital, 3 of my tunes, one with my lyrics and two

Sonic, who recorded with me, went to school with Banksy
and told me I knew him under another name.

with lyrics by Sonic, a Bristol DJ and MC. This was organised by the keen Richard Nowell and his Feel The Quality record label. The musicians for this had been a guy from the popular Bristol dub band, DUB FROM ATLANTIS (my memory for names is bad and getting worse) on bass, Latch Mangat (who played bass in the third version of Lastwind) on guitar, Laurence de Loes sang my lyrics (and was part of Lastwind version 2) and Rob, famously having toured the world with Roni Size, on drums.(He was also famously married to the daughter of John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin fame.)
I started with these people and Rob agreed to play drums and Latch, bass, and I was thinking of an excellent guitarist friend from France. I had enough songs ready for a forty minute set and we organised a first couple of rehearsals. So far so good.
Of course, Dave needed the name of the band for publicity purposes and I had one waiting around; Lastwind. About 4 years earlier I had been introduced to a Jalal Nurinda, a black American from New York who had been in the original rap group, the LAST POETS. I didn't know of them at the time but his significance was made clear to me when a group of us, including him, went to see PUBLIC ENEMY at a largish venue in Bristol. They got him up on stage and introduced him as the Godfather of Rap, quite something. Anyhow, he was preparing a new album and needed some music and

Jalal Nurinda

samples and we started working together on several tracks in the bungalow in my garden in Bristol, my hideaway and studio, and, knowing I had played with Hawkwind, he came up with the name Lastwind from using the first and last parts of our previous two group's names. He went to France to visit a girlfriend and was refused permission to return to the USA because he had overstayed the time given on his visa. A TV company put on a concert for him years later, 2014 to be precise, where he was to perform live the original album. To give an idea of his importance to that genre a music, GEORGE CLINTON was among the musicians who turned up to play for him. I was invited but I was crossing the channel on my way to France the day it took place. Jalal is now living in a State-run old peoples' home in Atlanta.

TO BE CONTINUED : HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A BAND REALLY QUICKLY.

Happy Birthday Captain Dave Brock.

I'm a bit late because I've had a very busy week but I wanted to say Happy Birthday to Dave on his 75th birthday and say many congratulations on still keeping going all these years.

I remember seeing Dave and Chris in the dressing room after a gig in Bristol in about 2007 and Dave looked shattered as he dried himself off. I said it was a great gig and he seemed satisfied but replied."I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this".

And yet,  he and the band show no signs of stopping and in certain ways are going from strength to strength, as the very successful Hawkeasters have shown, particularly since being held in Seaton where the hall has been renamed after BROCK. I lived opposite that hall for a couple of years and I remember all the concerns and the opposition to the first suggestion of Hawkeaster happening in Seaton. Both Dave and I had long term connections with the town because both our respective parents had moved there for retirement.

I first met Dave in 1975, so 41 years ago....is that possible? We toured supporting Hawkwind with ARK that year, which was a big deal for us.

I know that lots of people like me, who have played for Hawkwind or been involved with Hawkwind over the years, have made public their gripes and groans about Dave and the way he has led the band and dealt with issues within the band and been rather stingy about money matters and I know Dave has considered me at times to be one of the ungrateful people who would have achieved nothing without him. I think this is mainly based on the fact that I am friends with the member of Hawklords and also Nik Turner who had played with my last British group, LASTWIND.

Anyhow, partly to clear up any misunderstanding, my present to Dave is some big thankyous because my life just would not have been the same without the input from Dave. 

So this is a big thank you to Dave for the following things :

*   Inviting Ark to support Hawkwind,

Harvey, Martin and me meet up for the first time in years.

*   Inviting me and my mates Harvey and Martin to be part of Sonic Assassins, which has led to           many friendships and much musical recognition,

*   Asking me to join Hawkwind for the 78 American tour, inviting me for my first ever Sauna in the City Squire Hotel, NYC, Taking me to see the first Star Wars film and Close Encounters in fantastic NYC cinemas, Taking me to the Indoor Gardens, Tropical, Desert, European and Nordic, in Milwaukee and various other outings throughout the tour and, a big one, getting to eat with David Bowie, a longtime hero of mine.

*   Asking my band, Lastwind, to support Hawkwind on the 2006 British tour, which gave this new band some credibility, led to a record deal with Flicknife and the making of many new friends including people like Don Falcone, Jerry Richards.....

LAST WIND supporting HAWKWIND 2006

Then as a result of all this, the possibility of getting 'guest tickets' to so many different shows over the years, e.g. U2, Pink Floyd, Eurythmics, UB40, BAD, respect from musicians I met such as Caravan, Motorhead, Massive Attack and Topper Headon of the Clash.

Finally, after the Hawkwind US tour, giving me the courage to move to France and start a different life.

I could go on. My life has been totally changed for the better due to my involvement with Dave and the opportunities he gave me.

So, many, many thanks Dave. Long may you continue to pilot the good ship HAWKWIND.

Touring With HAWKWIND. Post 13 (unlucky?). POSTSCRIPT

So, what happened after the tour. All sorts of things, some straightaway, some later.

When I got home, the Yamaha keyboard was already there. I was surprised as I had made no commitment to stay with Hawkwind, if anything the contrary. I went to see Harvey Bainbridge for a meal with my family. Our two families got on well together. He had had no news of what was happening at the time which made me think the Sonic Assassins idea was dead in the water.

I got my old job back, teaching difficult kids, but resigned again within a month, I'd had enough of it.

My wife had found me very changed when I eventually returned home and said later that it took three months for me to become recognisable again. She had had lots of visits while I was away from people who wanted to know how the tour was going and people who just wanted to say they knew us, were friends with us, when they weren't really. But, she took it all in her stride, even when she caught a dose of crabs off me. We began to talk about moving to France: we had always said we wanted to bring our sons up bi-culturally.

The Yamaha CS80, the first commercial polyphonic synth.

One day, out of the blue, some Hawkweed roadies came round to collect the Yamaha so I guessed something was happening band-wise. I had not heard from Dave or Bob. I had only received a communication from the 'office' asking if I knew anything about a Ford Stationwagon which had been rented to the band in California and which had run up a huge bill, being left late at LAX airport (not me guv'.).

We bought an ex-WaterBoard van and got it ready for the trip to France installing a cooker and a mezzanine type shelf for our mattress, and a bowl and a water container and other items for daily living. We sold our furniture, borrowed a load of library books we would never return, got a few items on HP we would never pay for and with my music gear, our two boys aged 7 and 3, our dog, Arwen, and our cat, Frodo, set off to catch the ferry at Poole, stopping in Honition for a last meal with my mum and dad. We were off.

Setting off in our old self-made camper van.

We headed first to the home of Sylaine Cand, on the Atlantic coast just north of Royan where we had been invited to stay. Her boyfriend, David Bennett, was also there and her big family made us very welcome and we stayed there a couple of weeks, mainly getting our children used to French food which was very different. Our friends were heading east to do fruit picking and we followed them, a two day journey to Les Hautes Alpes where we picked first quinces and then apples through the summer and then, by ourselves, found a house to rent in a small village in the Drome department.

Just as money was running out, through some British musicians I had met in Nyons, our local town, I was asked to be part of a group recording an album demo for a would-be Tom Petty called Roger Spano. He had inherited a load of money and wanted to spend it on this project. A guy I had already met, called Fred Stephenson, was on drums, a weird French guy whose name I can't remember was on bass and this Spanish/French guy called Jeannot Garcia was on guitar. I was paid the equivalent of 70 pounds a week to be involved in this project and was lent a fancy Italian Alfa-Romeo sports car to get to this guy's home studio. (Not bad when you consider I was on 60 pounds a week with Hawkweed.) It got us through the next three months splendidly. Then, with the demo finished Roger and Fred set off to Paris and London to try and get a 'deal'.

Jeannot suggested that we could now do our own demo using Roger's equipment. We found another English drummer called Bill who was very good when not drunk or out of it on smack and Jeannot brought in an engineer called Michel Pradelle. We recorded a demo, half of my songs and half of Jeannot's, which we felt was much better than the other one we had worked on, and we set off to Paris and London too, with Bill the drummer who needed to get back to England for some reason.

In Paris, Warner-Fillipacci really liked one of my songs and wanted us to go off and write a few more in that ilk. Unfortunately it was the song we liked the least so we didn't follow it up and moved on to London where we got a meeting with Virgin, sharing the waiting room with a hyped-up Johnny Lydon who was trying to get a deal for PIL. Simon, the A&R guy at Virgin told us that we were not what they wanted at the moment, we were not post-punk enough. But I got a very nice letter from George Martin at Air saying I sounded like Johnny Rotten singing a Beatles number, high praise indeed.

When in Paris, I had found the new Hawklords album in a record store so I went round to the 'office' to ask Doug Smith why I had no writing credits on Death Trap and Free Fall and was told that Dave hadn't mentioned the part I had played even thought Steve Swindles, the new keyboard player, had slavishly copied my parts which were essential parts of the songs.

Me with my sons and our dogs in the farmyard. Happy days!

We then met up with Fred and Roger who had had no luck with the original demo and had a couple of nights on the town before I drove with Jeannot down to Devon to see my parents and then sell my van. We hitch-hiked back home and Michel, through his mum, found a farm where the band could live and rehearse. A lovely place but Simone chucked Jeannot and Michel out after a few weeks because a) she was fed up of doing all the household tasks with no help and b) Jeannot was getting weird, thought people were after him and bought a rifle which could fire a bullet over a kilometre and would blast off blindly from the front garden. I drove them both to Toulouse where they wanted to start again and saw them rarely after. Jeannot went on to write a huge hit for the French band Gold and earn himself a load of money, creating one of the largest studies in Toulouse.

We lived quite happily in that farmhouse for 6 years, probably some of the happiest days of that marriage and I formed the first of several groups, called Exiles with Fred the first drummer, playing my original tunes. We lived in France until 1990 when we returned to the UK and during those French years I always had a band on the go, the best was a short-lived affair playing with the Topper Headon Band, ex-drummer of the Clash, alongside the well-known guitarist Henry McCullough (played tag Woodstock with Jo Cocker and later played for Wings) who sadly died earlier this year. This band was suddenly over when Topper was sent to prison in the UK for supplying some smack to a young lad who died.

With my 2nd partner, Liz.

Other items I could add into the postscript are :

- I did keep asking for some royalties, especially when the Sonic Assassins album suddenly appeared and where, on top of playing credits, I still felt I had co-written Free Fall and Death Trap and that all the band should have been credited with Over the Top which was a live jam.

- I did manage to get on the guest list, sometimes AAA or VIP, for loads of gigs in France due to the Hawkweed connection, particularly memorable being Eurthymics with Mick Jones' new group Big Audio Dynamite, U2 with The Pretenders, UB40 and BAD again, David Bowie's Glass Spider tour and Pink Floyd live in Montpelier.

- Alistair Merry who was on the cover of Hawklords album and was involved in a legal struggle with the band, came to stay with us in France where he has remained, now living in Avignon.

- When Bob Calvert died, the article in Melody Maker had a picture of him cuddling the cat we had given to him.

- For years I suffered from a bad rash around my genitals and worried if I had picked up something nasty in California. But it turned out to be one of the symptoms of diabetes which I was found to be suffering from.

- I did eventually get some royalties, a sum of 40 pounds.

- I stayed in contact with Harvey Bainbridge and saw him whenever we visited England, watching him age at a really fast rate.

- My wife and I parted company in 1999 and, fairly quickly, I followed up my liking of very dark women and had a 9 year relationship with a lady from Dominica (not the republic!) which was fun,

- In 2006, out of the blue, Dave Brock phoned me to ask if I wanted to be the support band at Hawkweed's up and coming tour.

LASTWIND supporting HAWKWIND, autumn 2006.

A Change of Subject......Dogs, Death and Amazing Luck.

Regular readers of my blog will have noticed that I suddenly went quiet. I was going to write the Postscript to my Hawkwind tour stories and then silence. Those of you who follow me on FaceBook will know why: my faithful dog, Eddy, was suddenly no more.

Eddy, an Akita/German Shepherd cross had been my sole companion for the last 2 and a half years and a companion to both me and my mother for a couple of years before that. I got him from an animal sanctuary who took him when the RSPCA who had had him for a year was going to have to put him down due to their rules. He had been with Ferne Animal Sanctuary for 14 months, their longest guest, because they were having difficulty finding a suitable home for him.
He had been found wandering the streets of Swansea in Wales and the Police, after a lot of trouble, had captured him. He was a dominant alpha male, top dog in the sanctuary, and could be aggressive to male humans whom he didn't trust, having obviously been badly treated.

I passed the test and managed to show I was capable of controlling this large dog and so he became mine. And there followed a difficult month while I made it clear that I was the alpha male in  my house. He remained very aggressive towards other dogs and wary of certain people in the streets so I walked him out in the country as much as I could. But he did get into trouble with the police for biting a couple of people, one of whom admitted he was hitting him with a big stick at the time and one who was a member of a group who came suddenly through a gate and surrounded Eddy, frightening him.
We left for France before the court case came up and I gathered there was a warrant out for my arrest for not turning up.
We had a great 8 months living in my Winnebago camper van before moving into an apartment here in the South West of France in a small medieval town. We did have a bit more trouble but, as he got older, he got less aggressive and would accept most people willingly and even some dogs. However, this summer, what I took to be him getting old and not putting up with the heat well, turned out to be that he had inoperable prostrate cancer which was spreading through his urinary tract. When I discovered this, I had to have him put to sleep to stop him suffering any more.

That night was horrible and it was clear I was missing him terribly already. .Although he had some problems, with me he was adorable and a fantastic companion. Although I decided I would try living without a dog for a few months, the next day I checked out the local dog refuges and adverts on the internet for a suitable replacement but there was nothing really for me. Then, I called in at my butcher's to buy some meat for the next few days and told them about the death of Eddy and they asked me if I was looking for a dog. Next thing I knew, I was swapping phone numbers and email addresses with the cashier whose sister was looking for a home for her pure race German Shepherd.
And that evening I received a photo and fell in love.
My father had a series of pure German Shepherds and I had had a cross but I had always wanted a real German Shepherd, they were my dream dog. But they cost a lot!! My dad had paid 700 pounds for his last one! I couldn't afford that! So to be offered one and a young one, 13 months old, and trained and for free was a dream. The owner even drove down from where she lived, 4 and a half hours drive away, to see if we two could get on: I had him for a day's trial. Well, me and Leo, hit it off from the start both at home and out in the country where he needs to go to use up his energy. What a gift!! The lady was obviously sad to lose him but she couldn't keep him and I found out it was because she was going to have to go to court because Leo had been caught chasing sheep, some of them dying because he had chased them into a lake. And it was quite likely that, besides a large fine, she would be forbidden to have a dog for a few years, a typical punishment here.

So, now I have Leo. He is friendly to all, growls at other dogs who come too close but that's all, and needs a lot of exercise, probably 3 good walks a day. That's good for me and my health and I have a new companion. This afternoon, with my friend Alan who lives down the road, we're going to take Leo to a place he already loves here, a couple of miles south of the town and where a dam was built to divide the river in two and where Leo loves playing in the water, chasing sticks and soaking his owner when he comes out and has a good shake. and we'll be taking some photos and videos of the action for Facebook tomorrow.

 I have read that retired people who live alone tend to live longer if they have a dog, several years longer. Well I think in my case, every little bit helps. The companionship, the exercise..........
So, quite an emotional week for me, hence no writing. But, I'm back and in the next few days the POSTSCRIPT of the TOURING WITH HAWKWIND series will become available, with some puzzles solved and some results presented.
So watch out for that.