After my not so good night in Blois I made my way back to Tavers on a swish train similar to the double decker on which I’d arrived the week before, only this time it was one storey and with fewer carriages. It was the Nantes to Paris express, a hot Friday afternoon and standing room only. Every carriage was rammed full of people and luggage heading for home or away.

I stood in the thinnest part of the corridor by the toilet wall, sandwiched between a man who ate two whole packets of fig rolls during the 20 minute journey, and three teenage girls sitting on suitcases. They texted each other all the way, giggling in their private bubble and never speaking, except for the occasional ‘arrête ça!’, when the laughter got too much. Cramped and hot as it was it felt good to be heading back to Jim and Brigitte’s and not to my coffin modelled tent.

Eyeing up the new wall the next morning, and the crumbling terrace beside it, and since I was back, Jim and I decided to dig it up, relay it and finish the job. So over the next few days we did, in between some lovely walks along the river and the fields around their village, and a boozy Sunday BBQ in the shade of towering trees.

There’s farm land all around Tavers, as far as the eye can see. A hundred or so years ago much of it was vineyards.

It’s easy to mistake the bucolic scenes surrounding the village now for some timeless legacy of ages past, but things are very different in the fields now. Much of the land is in the clutches of agribusiness and, where vines once thrived, thousands of hectares are now given over to the growth of maize and other animal feeds. They’re thirsty crops and vast quantities of water’s pumped from the Loire, into which the pesticides on which they depend eventually leach.

There’s another lurking danger, just visible on the horizon in the picture below. It’s of a rare, smaller plot of land on which hay’s drying in the summer sun and in the far distance sit two nuclear reactors and their cooling chimneys.

For nearly thirty years nuclear power’s been the largest source of electricity in France, where there are fifty-six reactors countrywide. In 2018 the nuclear share of electricity production was just shy of 72%, the highest in the world.

A few days ago the local prefecture, Loir-et-Cher, sent out a text alert headlined ‘FR ALERT – EXERCISE – EXERCISE – EXERCISE’ declaring that an exercise was underway at the Saint-Laurent-Des-Eaux nuclear power plant, just a few miles down the road. It was a smaller scale version of a similar test alert undertaken recently in Blighty which I read the other day has so far cost £25m. The French one was a bit odd because I got the alert but Jim & Brigitte didn’t. We’ve agreed that if I get news of a reactor blowing when I’m back home I’ll give them a ring to let them know.

Anyway, wall and terrace completed, and tent packed up for good, I arrived in the lovely city of Tours this afternoon. I’m staying for a couple of days in a cheapo hotel I can stand up in and I’ll be off exploring tomorrow. That’s the Pont Wilson below, built in 1765.

And just because that’s what the internet’s for, here’s my dinner this evening, a crêpe végétarienne, washed down with an ice cold beer on the Rue de Châteauneuf. It’s Tuesday, a school night, and it’s buzzing.