Good morning from southwest France. It is a national holiday today and almost everywhere you look, there are huge pots of yellow, orange, scarlet chrysanthemums for sale or waiting to be collected outside shops. Tnis is the day people visit their dead and decorate family tombs with as many flowers as possible.
Chrysanthemums are reserved for the dead and a bouquet of these flowers must never be offered to the living in France. However, rather than being lugubrious, this huge splash of autumn colours brighten up an otherwise sombre day.
The sun is shining here, the temperature mild and the surrounding vineyards are shedding their autumn coats in parallel sad splendour.