Anniversaries were in the air this week. My blog is four years old today. When I started it, I barely knew what a blog was, let alone how to set one up. Thanks to WordPress and a lot of practice, I am slightly more competent than at the start. Now, 369 posts later, the fount of French things to write about still hasn’t dried up. Mel at FranceSays kindly conferred a Liebster Award on my blog, which I will follow up in a later post. Today, I’ll focus on the other anniversary celebrated this week.

Every time I visit Albi, I wonder why we don’t go more often. It’s an attractive historic town, the shops and restaurants are good and there’s plenty to do. I have never been greatly fond of the massive red-brick cathedral, but it’s exemplary in its own way. However, we live over an hour’s drive away and, as I’ve so often remarked, once you settle down in a place you have to make a big effort to get out of the daily grind and do the tourist trail.

So I was glad the opportunity to visit Albi again arose this week, thanks to friend Pauline’s birthday. An international group of ‘girls’ (three Brits, two French and two Dutch) met up at Albi to paint the town red. First up was lunch at Chez Oscar, a friendly restaurant in a typical Albi townhouse in the medieval centre. They have retained the original layout of the house, so you eat in small, intimate rooms, decorated in a flamboyant style. I did feel a bit sorry for the handful of other diners who had to share the room we ate in. But they took it in good part.

Lunch was good and a reasonable price. One of the others had baked a cake, which she handed to the waiter and it emerged from the kitchen later, decorated with a small firework. Ginette whispered to me, ‘I would never have dared to bring a cake to a restaurant and ask them to serve it!’ However, the waiters didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they couldn’t have been nicer and offered to take photos of us. We got pretty rowdy – and that was just on one glass of wine each.

The highlight of the day, though, was a visit to a new museum over the river, which was in full spate after the recent rain. L’académie des miniatures et des petits goûters displays the lifetime’s work of a lady called Annie Jaurès. She made miniature houses (not dolls’ houses) at a scale of 1/7^th life size, based on childhood memories.

She furnished them with tiny furniture and items, many of which she made herself. Before we went in, I really thought this wouldn’t be my tasse de thé, but actually it was fascinating. The museum owners saved the miniatures from obscurity in their attic. Mme Jaurès, in her modesty, can’t imagine anyone being interested.

The exhibits depict different rooms in a Parisian townhouse and a hunting lodge in the Sologne from the late 19^th/early 20^th century. A separate room upstairs has scenes from a school, a restaurant and a brothel, among others. There are no people (probably just as well in the case of the brothel).

The detail is fantastic, down to the tiny glasses and cutlery and miniature avocado in the dining room and the batterie de cuisine in the kitchen – complete with miniscule mouse on the floor. Mme Jaurès travelled to England and Holland to find some of the items, since it’s not a speciality in France.

Edited 2021: Unfortunately, it seems that this quirky museum is closed permanently. Nothing stays the same forever.

Chez Oscar, 8 rue Roquelaure, 81000 Albi, tel: 05 67 67 42 96

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