In the morning, we went to the Renault and Peugeot garages to pick up our hire vehicles for the tour (two 9-seaters and one goods camion). We took lots of pictures of the existing scratches and damage. Luckily the camion was an older vehicle that had belonged to Suez as a maintenance vehicle, and so had lots of existing damage - we are unlikely to damage it any further! We then all drove across to Musiczone to pick up the hired drums and PA system.

In the afternoon, we moved all the instruments in the camion to the Gymnasium at the Uvarium for our first practice. When we got there, I shortened the lower uprights on the PVC pan-stands to match the height of each player, and they wrote their names on these pieces. Everything in the pan-stands is now interchangeable, except for these pieces which are unique to each player. We then had our first much-needed practice. To say we were not playing at our best would be an understatement! Everyone had had at least a couple of weeks off and a long flight, so it took some time to get back into the groove. The good thing was that the sound in the Gym was quite OK, and so we would be able to leave the instruments here and use the Gym for practice over the first week. It will also allow me to practice my basketball shooting during the breaks in rehearsal

Isaac and I played on the new basses for the first time. They were certainly very different to our basses back home. They were much more “buzzy” and some of the notes had very long resonance times; they seemed to ring forever. This was a problem in some tunes where we would keep coming back to that note and it was still ringing from the last time we played it. It played havoc with our timing in some tunes. We experimented with using gaffer tape on the face to dampen the sound and it seemed to help a bit. Some of the notes also had a real vibration in the rim, but Yann showed us a trick with a pair of pliers to crimp the side of the pan at the place where it was ringing, and this seemed to work well; better than our previous technique of using a hammer!

After practice, we all retired to the nearby Sunbeam Cafe for a well-earned drink. While we were there, a crowd was gathering at the war memorial in the centre of the roundabout near the Moulin Hotel. Some of us went down to investigate and found that it was a ceremony to mark the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Moissac in 1944.

That evening we had the first of many dinners at the house, followed by “chat time” in the garden.