Having finished the Project Management assignments yesterday, this morning it was time to start grading the exams which had begun to arrive by email from Monash. In late morning, I stopped grading, since we had to drive down to Toulouse to pick up Jackie from the airport. Once again, the police and army security personnel were out in numbers.

It was also very clear that the Euro Cup 2016 was playing some games in town, given the number of brightly clad supporters arriving at the airport. As we entered the terminal, a horde of yellow and blue Swedish supporters were heading for their buses (they all looked like IKEA staff), while Jackie’s plane from Bristol contained lots of rowdy Welsh supporters. In the meantime, a bunch of Italian fans had arrived on other flights. I imagine the Toulouse pubs were going to get a hammering tonight.

Once we got back to Moissac, I took a break from exam-grading to make a start on fixing the iron gates at the entrance to the garden near the canal. They have been a perennial problem and either refuse to close or, once closed, refuse to open! The problem was that the two gates had little or no clearance between them. So, thinking that perhaps they had just moved slightly out of the supporting brick pillars, I tried to see if they could just be pushed back into the pillars. Having found a car-jack to be very useful in my Taggerty renovations (e.g. levering the bathtub out of the bathroom surrounds), I constructed a Rube Goldberg-type contraption using a car-jack and one of the “feet” I made for my six-bass steel drum last year, to try to force one of the gates away from the brick pillar. But all was in vain, and it steadfastly refused to budge.

So I had no option but to dig the gate hinges out of the brick pillars. I suspect that this has been a problem in the past, since there was relatively new mortar (maybe 20 years old) holding the hinges in place. This however meant that the hinges were reasonably easy to remove, only taking a couple of hours of  hammering and chiselling. In the end, I had two deeper holes in the brick pillars, ready for the hinges to be re-set tomorrow.

While I was working on the gates, I felt something touching my legs, and on looking down I realised that Meggsy (Ginger Meggs) had made another appearance. He didn’t seem to want much attention, but just wanted to hang around with whatever was going on. But, as we discovered yesterday, he did like to have a good tussle with the broom whenever I tried to sweep the debris away.

That evening, we had dinner on the Terrasse (with Jackie and Meggsy as special guests). Compared to last year, there was much more privacy with the new bricked-in walls. The only opening showed an interesting view of the canal.