Up in the hills near Grasse at the moment, cooking for an English family and their visitors. It’s great to be away from the noise and crowds of St Tropez, a town I would NEVER visit voluntarily. In fact, you should only go there if you have more money than sense – and, being a reader of these pages, I know you’re not such a person.

I do miss being at home in Avignon, though, and I miss Delphine very much; only seeing each other for a day or two every couple of weeks get real old, real soon. That’s why I won’t be returning to the Alps again this winter, either – that and the fact that I now earn about four times as much as the top chalet chefs get paid.

On a technological note, I would like to say just how very happy I am with my (now not so) new MacBook Pro Apple laptop; works faultlessly, connects to the nearest WiFi network without a murmer, turns on when I open the lid and shuts down when I close it, and plays DVDs and other films downloaded to the hard disc beautifully clearly on the excellent 17″ screen. If you’re in the market for a new laptop, or even a desktop, look at the Mac offerings first. My current clients have a new Dell laptop and I’ve spent several afternoons trying to sort out Vista on it. Vista may have lots more security built in – although the only evidence I see is that, like the Mac, it asks if you really want to install/uninstall stuff – but otherwise it really does look like Windows XP with a facelift. And, of course, the obligatory moving of a few buttons and changing of a few labels just for the sake of it – but then I got that when I moved to the Mac platform anyway.

Hardware-wise, though, the Apple beats the Dell into a cocked hat, but then it did cost me 50% more than the Inspiron. But then I have three times the memory, twice the hard-disc space, a much bigger widescreen-format screen and a lighter, thinner package. Worth the money, I think.

And I’ve installed the Parallels Desktop software which allows me to run Windows XP – not that I’ve bothered, mind you. It’s installed, but I just don’t find the need to fire it up.

On a more interesting subject, I’ve been enjoying a little Indian and Thai cookery here, making Indian-marinated chicken salads and Thai fish cakes; French people aren’t that fascinated by ‘foreign’ cookery. But then all decent cookery is ‘foreign’ if you’re English, isn’t it?