Pictures of, not from, the Tour Saint-Jacques

Here we are on Monday morning. Schools all over France open their doors to pupils today. And the weather is supposed to be "torrid" — that's the term the weather woman, Valérie Maurice, used a few minutes ago on Télé-Matin. Here in our region, le Centre-Val de Loire, temperatures in the north are supposed to be about 30C (86F) and in the south they'll hit 34C (about 93F). Saint-Aignan is smack in the centre of the région Centre. I doubt that many French schools, if any, are equipped with air-conditioning.

For a while now, I've been posting photos I took from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques in the center of Paris 10 years ago. Here are a few pictures of the tower itself. It was built at the beginning of the 16th century as the "new" bell tower for a 12th-century church that was torn down after the French Revolution, two centuries ago.

As always, you can enlarge these photos on your computer or tablet screen to see more detail. The Tour Saint-Jacques is about 175 feet tall. That's 300 steps to climb, with no elevator.

On another subject, we made another nine jars of tomato paste over the weekend, using tomatoes from our 2023 vegetable garden. That makes 14 jars in all — a total of three U.S. quarts (five British pints — nearly three liters). We put it up in hermetically sealed jars that we'll keep in our downstairs cellier pantry and use over the course of the winter.

P.S. A grape harvester just went by, followed by a tractor pulling a trailer. The 2023 grape harvest has started in the Loire Valley.