Many châteaux are little more than museums, many are cold, damp and forbidding but not Château Amboise. In winter, when frost is on the ground and giant logs are crackling in the giant fireplace you feel you could move in, pull up a chair and be quite at home.

Many visitors to Château Amboise miss seeing a wonderful model of the frigate La Belle Poule (The Beautiful Hen) built in Cherbourg in 1834. This is a real shame as the story of why it is there is enthralling.

We recently visited the nearby Grand Caves Saint Roch, the largest troglodyte in the region. This is our second visit to a wine cave, only nine hundred and ninety eight to go. Well, this is the Val de Loire, France’s third largest wine region with, if anyone is counting, four thousand vineyards, a thousand of which welcome visitors.

This is the first in an ongoing series where I will be explaining how I achieved some of my personal favourite images. I will talk through the equipment, setup, software and processes I go through in obtaining my original vision.

There’s always something going on in Amboise, especially this year with the town commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo, its most famous resident, but there was an extra frisson this evening. The town opened a brand new art gallery. Well, the building is not new, it has a fascinating history, but the gallery is.

Billed as ‘chairs’ these wonderful, Heath-Robinson type creations cleverly cobbled together from what looks like recycled bits of iron, wood and stones on the île d'or are anything but. Reminiscent of Sandy Calder mobiles they are sculptures, works of art. This is, for want of a better term, an Interactive Installation. The huge self-activated pendulums are Patrice Douchet’s homage to his friend, the artist Jean-Marie Guérin who created the ‘chairs’ in 1998.

Merci M. Grossetête and merci Amboise Mairie for a stimulating, life enhancing afternoon. The celebrated French artist Olivier Grossetête famous for his huge, ephemeral, transient cardboard and gaffer tape installations was in town. His works are not for elitist galleries they are for the people who live in the places where they are made.

8 May, La Fête de la Victoire, a national holiday in France, marks the anniversary of the day Charles de Gaulle announced the end of World War II on 8 May 1945. Weeks after Hitler committed suicide, Germany unconditionally surrendered. A German delegation arrived at the HQ of British Field Marshal Montgomery near Hamburg in Germany on 4 May.