Say "cheese"

Have some cheese. We went to the outdoor market in Saint-Aignan yesterday morning and stood in line at the cheese vendor's stand to get some nice fromages for lunch.

Cheeses from the market

Clockwise from the top, these are:

1. tomme de Savoie (in the Alps)
   
2. camembert de Normandie
   
3. chèvre de Mareuil-sur-Cher (near Saint-Aignan)
   
4. ossau iraty du pays Basque (SW France)
   
5. pur brebis de Corse (Corsica)
   

It's a kind of Tour de France of cheeses, and all of them are delicious. Nos. 1 and 2 are made from cow's milk. No. 3 is made from goat's milk. Nos. 4 and 5 are ewe's milk cheeses.

In the afternoon we took a drive up through the Sologne to Chambord, stopping along the way in the village called Fontaines-en-Sologne to look around in the church there. A lot of the pews in the church have little plaques, reserving them, I guess from the people who usually occupy them. I liked this one:

Plaque on a pew in a church in Sologne

I bet a lot of people would like to have that name.

News on France Inter radio this morning: President Sarkozy's approval rating as fallen to 36%, the lowest score for a French president since the 1950s, when de Gaulle came in and set up the Fifth Republic. Nicolas Sarkozy has been in office less than a year, and the least you can say is that he hasn't gotten off to a strong start.