Back from Dallas to discover in my e-mailbox a repository of photographs from my old pal Dave Mackie, who now lives in Bradford, Yorkshire, for his sins. It was at the tumbledown farm he was renting in the Dordogne, in the southwest of France, that I spent the glorious summer of 1989, the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, which was celebrated in song and dance and wine and more wine. All that's 21 years gone now, and the hirsute would-be bard contemplating the sunflowers is a great deal stouter, and grayer, and doesn't cut quite the dash his '89 incarnation hoped he would. But all in all he's not done too badly.

We'll have a little photo album of the Summer of '89 up here, soon.