shewhomust | Heading north, and further north

I wasn't planning to post about the next stop on our journey north through France. It was Angoulême, and a piece of silly self-indulgence that didn't quite come off; a familiar stop, whose main purpose was to visit the excellent shop at the CNBDI (comics museum). Only they turned out not to open until midday, and we couldn't afford to linger so long. Instead we visited a perfectly adequate bookshop in the new mall under the Champ de Mars - what have they done to the Champ de Mars? - where I found some comics, though not all I'd hoped for, and the diary which continues to give me such pleasure throughout this year (a lighthouse for every week of the year), and the briefest of strolls around town on the pretext of buying a picnic. That's when I took this photo, which

durham_rambler - the Man in Red - demands I post here.

Today's news is that we have booked the final B & B, the last jigsaw piece of our next holiday: we are now all set to spend the first half of May in the Northern Isles, in the company of two separate friends who don't LJ (but are in all other respects excellent people). We drive up to Orkney in the company of friend number one, for a couple of days based in Saint Margaret's Hope, three days on Hoy and a couple of days on Mainland. Then we put her on a plane south, and take ourselves to Shapinsay for a couple of days before catching the overnight ferry to Shetland for a book launch, and the best part of a week based in Lerwick with friend number two. And back to Aberdeen on the ferry.

When I say "all set" I mean, of course, nothing of the sort. My preparations so far amount to making all the bookings, and persuading

samarcand to give me a tutorial in the use of the mp3 player, onto which I am now loading music selected not quite at random but certainly at whim. If you're reading this,

samarcand, I'm enormously grateful for your help, and may need further tuition: how did you do that trick with capturing audio from YouTube?