old salut!

Born again blogging. The new Salut!

2007-04-16T15:21:00.000+02:00

We are on the move.

To find the new home for Salut!, look at the Read Me link to the right, click here or click on the word moved in the blog's title banner above.

There is much to do, but although I expected the whole operation to run in tandem for a while, the move went well and there will be no further posts here.

As I am in a good mood after a weekend trip back to Sunderland, I thought you might like to know.

And I am now in an even better mood after a weekend in which Sunderland clinched promotion. BUT the time has come to declare the move accomplished and announce that no more comments may be posted here. See you over at New Salut!........

Coming off fence, causing offence

2007-04-16T13:53:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow is the day I have decided upon. None of the 12 French presidential candidates is shaking in his or her boots, no sleep is being lost and no votes depend upon it.

But I live in France, occupy my corner of an Anglo-French family and pay my taxes here. So I have a civic duty to declare my choice.

Too close for comfort?
Picture: elgandul

Watch this space tomorrow, if you are interested in knowing for whom my inactive votes are being cast this Sunday and at the playoff on May 6.

I had one of those useful opportunities at the weekend to view the issues from the other side of the Channel. The company I kept was intelligent and lively, and everyone knew there was actually an election in progress.

But the only people mentioned by name, without my prompting, were Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Very well, someone may also have thrown a Ségolène or a Royal fleetingly into the conversation, but not with such interest or passion that I now remember the detail.

French politics rarely matter much back home, except during those intermittent crises - warfare in the past, agricultural policy now.

We are taught to regard the likes of Jacques Chirac as hate figures. The French, it is said and not only on www.****france.com, are driven by self-interest, arrogance and pride and by nothing else.

But even this is little more than a pantomime sideshow. For we are told by bonker English columnists that what this country really needs is a good walloping. And that only Sarko can administer it, with his pro reform, pro free market, pro Modèle Anglo-Saxon policies taking the role played by the martinets that once hung from hooks in French kitchens.

Those pundits probably do not know how little their views mean to him. But just as surely as Sarko has already watered down his promise to achieve "rupture" with the past and its failures, the truth is that he'll end up being very wary about doing very much at all that would suit the lovely-country-shame-about-the-people mob, the racaille of the English Right.

I did not mean to be so cruel on my confrères. If I use racaille, a contentious word that has brought Sarko much grief since he chose it to describe delinquents on suburban estates, I mean it in its broader sense of "rabble".

Most English language reporters prefer the harsher definition "scum" and may even be right (the only deciding factor, of course, being how the person on the receiving end interprets the word).

But how much interest is there generally in Britain in this political contest? Given that it's been a pretty drab campaign, I suspect that the answer reflects my exchanges when back home: Not Much.

Perhaps things will become more animated once 10 hopefuls have been cast out of the race, leaving us our top two playoff.

The tragedy is that the elimination of the also-rans is pretty certain also to entail the elimination of all the true characters of this campaign.

New neighbours

2007-04-11T21:25:00.000+02:00

Isn't it just a part of human nature to worry about the people who are about to move into your street?

Well OK, the Fort de Brégancon is a 10-minute drive away, not a few doors down the hill from us. And as you can see, it is not the kind of plcae where you just park outside and pop in for a cup of tea or glass of rosé.

But when the person who occupies it happens to be a head of state, you tend to play up the connection. Drinks on the patio here in Le Lavandou await the eventual winner, provided it's not Jean-Marie Le Pen. No guarantee, of course, that the invitation will be taken up.

Given the Fort's isolated location as the official holiday home for French presidents, les couples Sarkozy, Royal or Bayrou are not likely to drive all their neighbours wild with rowdy house-warmings or noisy, dusty building work. But we may yet bump into them if they venture into our neck of the local woods.

I know who I want to be there in the post-Chirac era. But if you want to know more about that, you will just have to keep coming back to Salut!, where I will declare my non-voting preference as we get nearer election day (April 22).

Impolitesse revisited

2007-04-09T16:02:00.000+02:00

A good debate is just taking shape over at my Guardian Comment is Free slot, where I have returned to a favoured theme of rudeness and the French. Have your say, there or here.

Marseille: easy to get lost, harder to be told to Get Lost - if you're polite

But those who have stuck with me from the Other Place, where I now languish in the sidings for archived foreign correspondents (along with, it has to be said, three valued former colleagues), will remember the impassioned discussion my thoughts on the subject aroused there.

They will also know my view that the French, by and large, get an unjustifiably bad press, accused without proper cause of being ruder than others. But then, not all the French agree with me in any case.

My occasional sparring partner Agnès Poirier thinks the French are guilty as charged. but adds that while she and her fellow Français and Françaises are rude, us Brits are hypocrites.

So when I make my case for not being beastly to the French, I am undermined by certain French people taking pride in their rudeness.

Pretty much the flip side of the debate, the subject that that got me going last time around, is the tyranny of the French insistence on a proper bonjour monsieur/madame at the start of any casual exchange.

Is it time for another discussion on that? These days, I rarely forget the need for such introductions, and I bonjoured away merrily, to good effect, a few times when I was lost in Marseille yesterday.

Mme Salut!, French but conditioned by long years spent in England, gets it wrong as often as she doesn't.

If you are far too polite to consider talking about rudeness, there is always the lure of yet another competition, over at (tonight) a somewhat jubilant Salut! Sunderland.

The core subject will be of no interest to many of you, of course, but I'd bet several of you would get the right answer to my question even without recourse to Google.

Some may even like my choice of prize - a copy of an unusual graphic novel, Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot, about which you can also read a little on that blog, and more here.

And just a few of you will take to the idea of a guest column, even though it has to be about football - note, not specifically Sunderland.

But then again.........

Not fit for public view

2007-04-06T18:32:00.001+02:00

A friend recalls the utter embarrassment she felt when, during Cambridge undergraduate days, her parents arrived to see her one weekend, dressed in matching shell suits.

Fashion statement
Picture: howietea

Although I have never met the parents, and am sure they are perfect in every other sense, it is difficult to imagine the scene without wincing.

And the scene always comes flooding into mind when I go to the supermarket in France.

Lurking around the corner of each alley, ahead of you whichever caisse you choose and all over the car park, there are men - especially men - in the French equivalent.

They are not always glossy, as I rightly or wrongly assume shell suits must be, so are probably closer to being track suits. Invariably, in recent years, the trouser bottoms will be cut short to add a hint of fashion consciousness.

But if they look like track suits, you know that their wearers - six times out of 10 - have almost certainly indulged in no sporting activity for years. There is something especially bizarre about this mode of dress when it is adopted by the elderly or obese.

Appearances may be deceptive, of course. There is, after all, a bit of pot calling kettle black going on here.

No one has ever mistaken me for a style guru. My wife once wrote to Hilary Alexander's fashion agony aunt column asking how she could transform me, from whatever kind of northern oik slob I am, into an ultra-smart and trendy Parisian.

Hilary promised a reply, or to deal with it in her column. But she clearly knew me well enough to be able to decide that I was beyond redemption and quietly forgot all about it.

Nor can I claim to be superfit.

I make an effort, playing badminton, using one of those Décathlon abdominals frames and walking a lot.

Each morning I am sent out to buy the baguette and Var Matin, an easy walk down the hill to Intermarché but a tough old slog back up.

To bypass the endless winding bends leading eventually to our house, I clamber up a steep grassy slope and then tackle the 139-step short cut. Lame dogs pass by with scornful looks and, if I have missed a couple of days, I am certain to be briefly out of breath by the time I reach the top.

It feels good later, though. As does the muscular pain the morning after I've played, say, seven or eight hard games of badminton singles.

But I promise my fellow early-morning shoppers, all the lame dogs of the Var and my badminton opponents that they will never be required to cast eyes on me in a cutaway track suit.

And the winners are....

2007-04-04T17:49:00.000+02:00

Monette has been described as a chic Parisian cat, but the truth is that while she is fairly chic, she is - or was - Parisian in the sense that de Valera was Irish or I am a Durham lad.

Monette's home for a few days
Picture: bigskyred

In other words, she was born far from the land she called her own. Not quite as far as de Valera from Ireland (New York) or Randall from the North East (Hove), but far enough for a cat.

A few days into her life as one of a litter born at a restaurant at Giverny, where the house and gardens of Monet are on public view (and well worth the drive weat of Paris), this scrap snapped at the heels of a table where two couples were rounding off their visit.

One couple fell in love with the kitten and were promptly told they could take her. Since this was a girl, she couldn't be Monet, so she became Monette.

Several readers of Salut! were able to identify her with ease. No one, I am sorry to say, came up with that 50,000 hits home page from the blog.

But then, my web man Craig McGintywas always iffy about the idea and somone else was kind enough to send me an image of the Stat Counter on my site stuck on 60,000 to show how easy it was to fiddle.

I chose not to withdraw thatvpart of the competition, since you'd have to be especially odd to sit there making the counter say 50,000 just to win a book on curries.

There was the risk, of course, because I had only to receive more than one saved image to know that one, both or all were cheating. But what the heck....

So, the witching hour having been reached, I apologise to those who sent in correct answers to the cat question and do not now see their names.

But I found a use for a pile of pristine Daily Telegraph visiting cards, wrote the names of each correct respondent on them and asked Mme Salut! - Monette being unavailable - to draw two of them.

And the winners are: Mason Norton and Steve Bushnell. Both sent charming e-mails with their correct responses.

Neither, however, supplied a postal address and should do so, once again by writing to colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr

The prizes will then be dispatched in the next few days.

Otherwise, one or both may end up going elsewhere - perhaps even to Louise, whose name went into the hat despite her lack of affection for Indian cuisine and would go into it again if a re-draw were necessary.

Competition (4): tension mounts

2007-04-04T11:06:00.000+02:00

Just one day and a bit to go, as I am reminded by the arrival of a brand new copy, albeit slightly battered in the post, of one of the prizes.

You still have between now and teatime today - 6pm French time - to e-mail the name of the ungovernable French cat, and/or a copy of the Salut! home page capturing the moment we passed 50,000 hits last week, to colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr

No disadvantage applies to anyone who is late in supplying the right answer. You could even be last and win.

If you haven't been paying attention, and wish to enter, a simple search of Salut! or a less simple one of my old Telegraph blog (since it is hidden away in the Telegraph site's sinbin) should lead to the cat's identity.

As for the picture, it is election time in France and she may or may not be making a political statement with her choice of colour, or making the natural response to much of the debate in a somewhat drab campaign.

An announcement as to prize winners will appear here as soon after that time as possible and in any event by tomorrow morning.

Wined-up boy racers get presidential champion

2007-04-03T16:39:00.001+02:00

Back from London, and those raucous late-night shrieks as the binge-drinking young take to the streets, I ran straight into Jean-Marie Le Pen's latest campaign pledges.

'Papa's no ami des chauffards '
Picture: mainblanche

You'll have gathered, I imagine, that while the Front National leader was given a surprisingly cushy ride by my former paper, he is not Salut!'s candidate of choice.

But what should we make of his attempt to capture the roadhog vote?

If I heard my France Info broadcast correctly this morning, the rabble-rousing old rogue of the far Right has been on his feet demanding a higher blood/alcohol limit for drivers.

He also wants to push up motorway speed limits from their present maximum of 130kph to 150kph and has a thing about speed cameras.

Having just checked on two reports of his actual words, uttered during a visit to a motor museum in Rheims, I think he was serious on both matters.

So just as France seems to be starting to get to grips with the appalling carnage on its roads, and bringing the death toll down, Le Pen offers a recipe for more danger, more crashes and presumably more deaths.

But why leave it at drink and speed? Why not make at least one bald tyre compulsory? Require no one to light up in namby-pamby fashion when it is dark or murky? And discourage insurance cover and the French version of the MoT test, the Controle Technique?

Naturally, Le Pen doesn't see it thay way. He wants a special tax on foreign lorries entering France, claiming that European freight hauliers' vehicles are involved in nine crashes in 10. And he argues that car drivers have come to be treated almost as presumed delinquents.

I am sure it cannot be that FN supporters of an especially evil bent reckon that most casualties of this tomfoolery would be of immigrant stock, and have urged their leader - innocent of such thoughts, of course - to encourage more accidents.

Indeed, Le Pen denies that his proposals would make the roads any less safe.

I'll say one thing in fainress: the French drink-driving limit is lower than the British one, so that Henri Paul was roughly twice ours but three times France's when he drove Princess Diana to his death.

But that's where the fairness ends. Let's hope that Le Pen's latest opinion roll rating - stuck on 13.5 per cent - is the one figure we can trust.

Competition time (3)

2007-03-30T19:28:00.000+02:00

The competition has proved a jolly enough distraction and made it a good deal easier to keep Salut! active during my week in London.

Mary Black, one of De Dannan's ladies
Picture: ca1951rr

There is still time to enter. As one of those who has already done so said to me, finding the answer to the question I set does not require a huge amount of research.

I will announce the results next week. The competition closes at 6.30pm French time on Wednesday and I will make a random selection from the correct responses received at colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr by then.

The encouraging trickle of replies reminds me of a short period at that Other Place when I offered prizes linked to my journalistic sideline of writing about folk music.

On the first occasion, I rather optimistically made the question harder than was wise for a mainstream publication: name each of the women who, up to that point, had served the Irish band De Dannan as lead singer.

I think there were only four replies. One reached me from within the newspaper office where I worked, two arrived in identical writing on postcards sent from the same town and the fourth collected the prize.

This was before the internet age, which has pretty much removed the slog from finding the right (and yes, sometimes wrong) answers to most questions.

So for my next little contest, I posed a relatively simple Fairport Convention question (which member of the original line-up was still in the band?) and the letters and cards flooded in.

Consider the hurdles. You had to buy the paper, open the section, locate the small listings item mentioning Fairport, read it, know the answer, care a jot about the prizes (four pairs of tickets for the band's annual Cropredy festival), bother to reply.

About 150 did. It seems a small number given the circulation of the paper at the time - well over a million - until you look at hoops listed above.

Simon Nicol, Fairport old lag
Picture: bruciebonus

I wish to this day that I had not been pompous enough to disqualify the wag who said he was replying only because he was sure there couldn't be three other Fairport fans among the Telegraph readership.

You'd need to do a lot worse than that to be thrown out of Salut!'s competition.

Competition time (2)

2007-03-29T14:44:00.000+02:00

For those allergic to cats............... I also propose to award a prize to the reader who is able to save and send me a copy of the home page of Salut! showing the counter on 50,000.

This should also be sent to me at colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr

I realise that a really determined individual could sit from now to 50,000 refreshing the screen until the magic number comes up. But then again, how would they know that others were not up to the same trick and might beat them to it?

The prize, returning to the theme of my painstaking search of France for a good Indian curry, is a splendid sounding book by Reza Mahammad with the self-explanatory title of Rice, Spice and all Things Nice , published by Simon and Schuster.

Another fine publication, 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi and published by Kyle Cathie, is the reward for coming up with my cat's name - and being chosen from among all the correct answers received by next Wednesday, 6pm French time.

The more alert will know that perhaps the best curry I have eaten in France was served by a friend using a recipe from the French version.

The 50,000 milestone was reached a short while ago. I will let you know if anyone succeeded in the mission set be me earlier.

Competition time (1)

2007-03-29T00:41:00.000+02:00

Can it really be so?

From the long, dark nights of fevered imagination to the contented glow of a man who has got something right.

Today, tomorrow or very soon, Salut! will reach a significant milestone: 50,000 hits.

Having just attended a seminar at the London School of Economics on how journalists can make the web pay - in short they probably can't was the message I sort of received - I know all about page impressions and uniques.

But while I readily confess to not knowing how many individuals have visited this site since its creation last October, I can also tell you that we have already passed the 50,000 mark for visits (even if that is two people making 25,000 each).

Hundreds if not thousands of people had already been here before I set up the counter that you see somewhere down the right hand column.

It often strikes me as a little hard to accept that Salut! has not attained any ranking in the only blogger chart I have come across, the Technoranki one.

I swear I even saw a couple of oddball sex sites creep in towards the bottom of that hit parade for a week or two. But no sign of Salut!, and no way of knowing - since Technoranki jealously guards the secrets of its trade - what I need to do to make my breakthrough.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that I have been given massive public support in the small, income-free corner of the web that is this site.

My hope is that it will get better still, though that is likely to necessitate a move to new accommodation quite soon, and that more people will be attracted.

But as a mark of my appreciation of your support - whether as readers or readers leaving comments - I offer a small commemorative prize.

To qualify, all you need to do is trawl through my blogging history - here and/or at the Telegraph - and tell me the name of my ungovernable (thanks, John M) French cat BY E-MAIL PLEASE TO

colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr

PLEASE DO NOT POST THE REPLY AS A COMMENT ON SALUT!
The prize - perhaps even prizes....let us see - will relate to my interests, well documented here, in food and/or France. Arbitrary rules will apply*.

* The closing date is 1800hrs French time on Wed April 3. Winner or winners will be drawn from the correct replies received by then........

Faint praise and a big birth

2007-03-27T18:23:00.000+02:00

Sarah Hague's message, ruing my departure from the Daily Telegraph and posted to one of its blogs, was reassuring in its unambiguous simplicity.

But not all praise is so straightforward.

Sifting through some of the messages I received after my DT career was brought to an abrupt end, I came across the following words that appeared on a blog called Paris Link:
"One of the weirder blogs on the Paris blogosphere has changed places....."

The writer went on to describe my (previous) blog as surreal but "refreshingly different" from sites where writers rabbit on "about toenail clippings and what's going on outside their bedroom windows".

A word of warning: if you pursue my link, you need to leapfrog the claim that I am "spam", by hitting the further link provided, if you wish to read more.

Then there was the succession of messages on a football fans' forum, after I raised a Club vs Country debate at the Guardian's Comment is Free site ahead of what I am told was a dire Israel-England match.

Just as I was smiling at one supporter's mention of my "canny article" - canny taking the North Eastern sense - a decidedly harsher verdict popped up on the screen: "Aye, but he's nee Harry Pearson, mind......"

Best of all, though, came from a former foreign editor. To one of his successors, he said: "You know, I used to think Randall was a very limited journalist. But since he's been in Paris, I feel I have discovered more about France and the French than I ever knew."

Since the man was something of a bruiser (I was hardly unaware of his earlier view) but also lives part of the year in France, I think I'd settle for those words on the tombstone.

But that's enough - unless you have examples of your own. I warned that my UK trip would restrict visits to Salut!.

And thinking of bruisers, let me close with an otherwise unrelated piece of news. This morning, a smashing former colleague, Sally Pook, brought into the world an 8lb 10oz boy.

Having done with her exertions, she then sent me a text message saying the baby was such a monster "they couldn't get him out". Well, "they" did in the end, and I want to depart from theme to wish health and happiness to Sally, Marcus and - when I last checked - nameless big boy.

No show

2007-03-25T08:42:00.000+02:00

It was not the start of a foreign trip, as today is (a visit to the UK being a foreign one if you live in France), when you would be rather foolish not to have a passport to hand.

Spanish City looking forlorn
Picture: *Huw*

It was dinner along the coast in Cavalaire* and, with the most effusive of apologies, we were turned away.

The way I look? A failure to observe a basic smart-casual dress code? Muttered threats about "this better be good at 38 euros a head"?

No, Mme Randall simply wasn't able to produce ID, and the dinner - one of those sad themed spectacles I am known to attend, this one Brazilian - happened to be taking place in a casino.

Casinos are places of no interest to me. Yes, I did the pools and yes, I still have a punt on the lottery. But not since the days of the Spanish City have I so much as bothered an amusement arcade.

So I had no idea that the law obliges anyone entering such premises in France to have official photo ID. I had mine; my wife had dressed to the nines and was carrying a skimpy little handbag with room for virtually nothing.

No amount of pleading, pointing to my wife's name in the next-of-kin bit of my passport or appeals to reason made the least difference. "Honestly, we only want to eat and watch the show," we said. "We don't want to gamble the night away."

The two jobsworths were polite but unmoved. The law's the law, they said. So we ate at one of our favourite restaurants in Le Lavandou instead.

Everyone more or less knows that you are officially obliged to carry ID in France, so this must be a cautionary tale, not a whinge. It's just that you don't expect to be asked for it when you pop out for a meal. I bet the show was rubbish anyway.

Visits to the blog may be sporadic over the next few days......

* Not Cavaliere as first mentioned, one letter different and maybe 7 or 8 miles apart....and too small to have a casino.

Minding our language*

2007-03-22T16:33:00.000+01:00

It is time I lived up to the claim in my description, in the words that appear above, of what Salut! is about when it is not about France: "much more besides".

All that scolding in the comments field after my posting on the pools win that wasn't - the use of irony went down poorly with Smiley - reminded me of one of life's lesser known certainties.

but hey, if the hound gets it, who cares?
Picture: glenfinlas

If you somehow acquire a reputation as a pedant, as I did when working on the newsdesk of a newspaper that cared quite a lot about style and grammar, you should not be surprised to find that people cannot wait for you to falter.

Tim - to be a tragedy, or not to be a tragedy - and Smiley, along the lines of get a grip man, your dad did win the pools, left me with that biter bit sort of feeling I have not experienced since I sparred with belligerent contributors to my Telegraph blog.

But it is all perfectly fair sport, so far as I am concerned. How could it be otherwise when I post a reply promising to write about pendantry, as Bill spotted so sharply in his much-missed riposte (something to with suspense, I think, though this posting offers him the chance of another outing for his "best joke in a long time")?

Many of the people I have encountered over the years would be surprised to hear that anyone ever saw fit to make me a custodian of the correct use of English. The queue would be headed by all those teachers I failed to impress at school, and close behind would be the ghost of the Bishop Auckland alderman who interrupted a breathless telephone interview to exclaim: "Stop gabbling, young man."

My newsdesk job naturally went far beyond the discouragement of tabloid constructions, which have become commonplace throughout the media, and the lazy repetition of infantile reporting devices that are the stock in trade of most news agencies.

But that part of my role was justified by the strict view, taken by the man who then edited the paper, of style breaches, sloppy grammar and incorrect use of words.

Colleagues liked to mock my attempts to enforce the editor's will, not least because there were also issues of my own choosing to be raised from time to time.

If the policy had any success, it was in making reporters and specialists a little more careful about the stories they submitted. Any newspaper tends to look more grown-up when it does not simply shovel news agency copy - or copy that might have been dashed off by a news agency - into its pages, but looks to its own staff for work of a higher standard.

Only once was I given cause to regret the enthusiasm with which I approached this part of my work.

That was when the Queen's English Society invited me to be the guest speaker at its annual general meeting. Even without the ribbing of colleagues who threatened to organise a coach party and barrack every word, I would have seen that this was hardly a situation in which I could not lose.

The newspaper stickler was entering the domain of the hardcore pedant.

There was, of course, the coward's escape route. I was sorely tempted. In the end, I decided to accept the invitation and set myself the task of composing a speech with sufficient flattery of the society and its work, and modesty about my own efforts, to see me through without too much damage.

The first part was easy; I needed only to summarise the reason for the invitation, an exchange of letters in which I had accepted the QES's criticism of a particular news report.

The society's official with whom I corresponded was so accustomed to being ignored, or at best to receiving pompous replies to all such approaches, that she warmed instantly to this man who actually wrote back in agreement.

But the second component of my self-defence mechanism was trickier.

I realised that the society's members would study every word of my speech, and every aspect of its delivery, and spare no mercy in the event of the slightest slip.

So I used the following paragraph in my attempt to pre-empt any such challenge:

When I sat down to write this speech, I privately gave it the working title, 'Confessions of a Pedant'. I am not sure that I have necessarily lived up to that self-billing. I am, in my own way, a pedant, but I feel I have little to confess. I hope that my colleagues regard my interventions as helpful, not those of a bully. I do not present myself to them, and I certainly do not present myself to you, as one whose own written or spoken English is beyond reproach. Readers, fellow journalists and others have taken me to task more than once. I take full responsibility for each flattened vowel, any grammatical lapse and all flawed logic.

It didn't leave them much scope for launching a ferocious assault when it came to questions, and it is my response to critics now.

* The title eventually given (by me) to the speech to the Queen's English Society AGM at the New Cavendish Club, west London on September 27, 2003.

And the dividend forecast is.........

2007-03-21T12:05:00.000+01:00

"Don't tell anyone," said my mother in little more than a whisper as she sent us off to Sunday school. "But we may be rich."

By the time (later that day, Monday at the latest) we knew we were not rich at all, we'd told everyone, starting within minutes of that parental plea for discretion.

Dad had won the football pools, or rather he and three people from work had won shares of a full dividend. In a town like ours (Shildon, Co Durham) a pools win was guaranteed to change lives quite dramatically, split four ways or not.

The only trouble was that everyone else, and everyone else's syndicate, seemed to win that Saturday. So many draws had been played out on the football grounds of the nation that his ultimate fortune was four into 32, not four into a million.

This tragic childhood memory came back for some reason while I was watching a French quiz show called Le Mur.

Inevitably, it is an imported idea, probably from America, and it involves one contestant battling against a wall of 100 rivals, arranged in groups according to employment or interests (les Bikers, for example, les Beatles -impersonators, that is - or les Gymnastes).

There is a succession of general knowledge questions, with the correct answer given in each case among three choices. The individual player can climb towards 200,000 euros, eliminating members of the wall as he or she goes along whenever they, responding to the same question, press the wrong button.

I can imagine it would seem ghastly on American or even British TV, but it somehow works, at least for me, in French.

This is partly because its success requires a lot of people to behave inanely with football-style chanting, cheers and boos and one of the things I like about the French is that they never mind making fools of themselves provided they have fun doing so.

Even the fact that Mme Randall rather fancies the presenter, Benjamin Castaldi, grandson of a one-time French golden couple of film Simone Signoret and (adoptively) Yves Montand, fails to put me off. And when a stout ambulancewoman called Catherine won the top prize after a brilliant performance, I was as chuffed as if I'd won it myself.

I realise that even 200,000 euros - especially since, if I understand the rules correctly, half goes to a participating viewer - is not the stuff of serious wealth. Most of us would see it as a pretty tidy sum, however.

But it must have been that sharing element of the game that put me in mind of the day I thought I belonged to a pools-rich family. Dad was sharing his winnings with others, and the total jackpot was in turn being divided among thousands.

Despite this early gambling setback, I became a regular pools punter. It took me not merely years but decades to win my own first dividend on the pools.

In Le Mur fashion, you may guess where I was when I discovered the extent of my windfall:

a) Doorstepping Jeremy Thorpe in north Devon

b) Watching Sunderland Reserves, away

c) In Colditz Castle

Et la bonne réponse - after plenty of drum rolls, gasps, impertinent chanting from the wall - est la réponse C. I had been reporting on an old comrades' reunion and had just finished dictating my carefully constructed story from a phone deep inside the castle.

I'm in there somewhere
Picture: EL ALBERTO

"Never mind your story," barked Richard Savill, a friend sitting in the office back in London and in need of urgent clarification from the organiser of the newsroom pools syndicate. "Was it Vernons or Littlewoods?"

Happily it was Littlewoods, and instead of something like my dad's long-ago £32 being split 19 ways among colleagues (Vernons was cheaper to play, and accordingly meaner with its prizes), we had £5,700 between us - or £300 each.

Spend, Spend, Spend? Not quite. Enough to pay a car repair bill here, a holiday deposit there, and better than a kick in the teeth. But take it from me, it hardly changed our lives.

A sense of Libération from making ends meet

2007-03-19T14:57:00.000+01:00

Fifteen years ago, I was sent back north by my news editor to write about a certain football team.

The team had made it to the FA Cup final from what the French rightly still call the Second Division, whatever word games the football authorities play to make it sound better.

It was the players' "open day" with the press and I think my masters vaguely expected to see a story about grasping footballers demanding money for their monosyllabic thoughts and posed pictures.

Spare some loose change, guv?
Picture: sierradelta74

Nothing of the sort happened.

As we strolled around the pitch at Roker Park, no one was out of bounds (though the better players did have queues waiting to speak to them) and nearly everyone was friendly and polite.

Since this was my team, I was happy that the club and its players were behaving impeccably - and I hope that having given their time freely, they went on to make a little from follow-up exclusives with the press and broadcasters.

Only one person, so far as I know, asked for money and that was a sports journalist who felt too grand to give a few comments to a TV crew without payment.

His request, which ensured that no interview took place, surprised me.

I have always been willing to give minor bits of help to my confrères and consoeurs on the basis that I would hope for and expect the same in return. If money is offered, as it sometimes is for radio or TV slots, that is a different matter and I am not stupid enough to refuse.

But I also remember the football hack saying something about being a freelance and that they were therefore asking for his professional services and time for nothing.

That is how it is for me in my new, changed life.

A friend asked the other day if I'd be interest in writing a weekly blog posting on the French elections for the Libération website site. "Of course," I replied, "every little helps."

I have a soft spot for Libé and was delighted when it came through its recent crisis with hopes of survival higher than for some time.

But when they got round to ringing to explain the details, they added that while they wanted the contributions, they would not be paying for them.

If I had still been working as a salaried correspondent, I might well have said yes, provided I felt I had the time to do the blog justice.

Had they offered a pittance or, say, a year's subscription, I suspect the answer would still have been yes. As a freelance, chasing whatever earnings I can, I had no hestitation in turning down the idea of adding to my workload but not my income.

Perhaps the person calling me does her job for nothing. I doubt it. Perhaps the exceedingly rich people who hold the purse strings at Libé also conduct their business lives without the least desire for remuneration. I doubt that, too.

Given the paper's links to Sartre and the Paris Spring of 1968, it is not surprising that for a long time it operated a policy of paying everyone from the cleaners to the editor the same.

Later, it dropped this lofty egalitarianism and entered the harsher world of the market economy. In 2007, I would probably have settled for the cleaner's pay.

A charming lady journalist who plans to write about me in a magazine about British expats in France told me of her dismay on being told by another UK journalist that s/he would not be interviewed for free.

Her shock was clearly genuine, and I was perfectly happy when I found I had time during a visit to Paris to meet her and answer her questions. But I was just as shocked by the suggestion that a Left-of-centre, up-the-workers kind of paper should want someone to turn in a few shifts for nowt.

Polls built from straw?

2007-03-15T14:34:00.000+01:00

parisdailyphoto

Each time the temptation arises to be sniffy about opinion polls, I take care to remind myself that in a past life, I had regular dealings with pollsters.

Once a month, Anthony King, gentleman, scholar and highly entertaining company, would call at the Telegraph offices in Canary Wharf with a couple of executives from YouGov to discuss future polls.

Guests and assorted hacks alike would be offered champagne on arrival for lunch, and good wine was then served in reasonable though hardly excessive quantities throughout the convivial meal that invariably followed. Ideas would be tossed around until some firm plan evolved.

In an austere new world, a stop was soon put to the champagne and wine, of course, though I am glad to say that Britain and I had parted company by then.

The conviviality, I am sure, survived the prissy change and the lunches will doubtless have remained as businesslike and productive as before, though I am prepared to bet they are not more so.

Professor King - or better, Tony - takes a highly methodical approach to his preparation of polls, and the analysis of their findings.

Viewers will know all about that if they have tuned in on election night and seen him assessing the exit polls and early declarations from places like Sunderland South (honest - they're always first or nearly first) and Billericay.

With his photographic memory and grasp of detail, Tony is a sort of Canadian Leslie Welch of politics and psephology.

He was a great fan of YouGov, which conducts its surveys via the internet.

I was always a little less convinced by this method of monitoring public opinion; the cyber age was not at that point so firmly established as it is now and whole swathes of voters were necessarily excluded.

When I suggested a poll of British Muslim attitudes on such issues as citizenship, loyalty and terrorism in the aftermath to Sept 11 and military action in Afghanistan, the problems of creating a viable sample very nearly proved fatal to the exercise.

In the event, the YouGov findings - though based on a sample as low as it could get before the level at which Tony would have advised against going ahead - mirrored those of subsequent polls on the same subject carried out by more conventional means and with many more respondents.

Pollsters know the science of their métier, and will usually argue that it gives a very reasonable prospect of an accurate reflection of public opinion.

But in the case of my Muslim poll, I felt very strongly at the time that the most valuable part of the project was the work of two reporters of Asian background who were sent off to canvass views in towns with large Muslim populations.

One of them turned in a weighty tome running to thousands of words which I had to whittle down to a few hundred. Useful as his research was in shaping our coverage, I remember hoping that he would find a home for an uncut version of his extraordinarily detailed epic.

My doubts about polls do not end with the internet since there are other ways in which the process of choosing a sample is flawed, a view reinforced by a small article seen in Le Canard Enchainé on the train from Toulon to Paris (a visit that may explain my silence here since Monday).

If the old Chained Duck is to be believed, and often it can, French polling institutions routinely exclude 31 per cent of the French from their telephone surveys, for the simple reason that those taking part are selected from listed, fixed-line subscribers.

Yet there is an army of people out there that has no phones of any kind, makes all or virtually all its calls on mobiles or uses internet phone services such as Skype. Young voters and people on modest incomes are said to be particularly likely to fall into one of these categories.

Add to that the obvious fact that not everyone likes being bothered by cold callers - and as many as 30 per cent refuse to take part - and you begin to see the fault lines developing.

The margin of error surely gets wider if you take account of such drawbacks, and there are at least three other complications affecting the French presidential elections:
* large numbers of apparently undecided voters
* the emergence of a strong third contender (Le Pen in 2002, Bayrou this time)
* the exclusion of French citizens - 2.3 million of them - living in the Dom-Toms, overseas departments and territories.

Does it matter? Well, yes it does. I see weight to the argument that polls have an ability to shape - in other words distort - the public view, or to encourage tactical voting that might not otherwise have occurred.

It is just as well, as I said in a piece at the Guardian Comment Is Free site, that France bans opinion polls in the last week of campaigning.

But, repeating from that item what I take to be the logical follow-up question, would it not make the democratic process a shade more democratic if we were to impose a much longer ban?

We are within six weeks of the first round of the presidential elections, and François Bayrou's success as Third Way candidate is inspiring all sorts of mathematical as well as political calculation.

How much healthier it would seem if we knew there wouldn't be another poll from a week on Saturday until the real votes were cast on April 22.

All right, Jacques?

2007-03-12T15:01:00.000+01:00

Jacques Chirac was a neighbour in Paris. He remains an occasional one in the Var for the last weeks of his present job, since it has the perk of a holiday home down the road.

Though we choose not to live in each other's pockets, we have met twice - perhaps leaving the bigger impact on my memory - and I have observed him often enough to know I am not, at such times, in the presence of a monster.

My wife, in common with many French women, likes him. Her mother adored him and, I imagine, would have continued to do so had she not died before he became president.

But if you are British, and especially if you are English, Jacques Chirac is - or is meant to be - a hate figure.

This is expressed in more ways than the one chosen by a former editor of the Sun whose contribution to the entente cordiale was to dispatch a posse of Page 3 girls to the Champs Elysées, armed with a limited-issue edition of that day's paper, with Chirac depicted on the front as a worm.

Forget for a moment the inconvenient detail that, in Paris, to be likened to a worm will cause more bemusement than anything else (as my consoeur Agnès Poirier has pointed out in one of her books, Les Nouveaux Anglais, the term doesn't exist as an insult in French).

The gesture still reflected a view of the French president held pretty widely on the Sun's side of the Channel and the vulgar gimmickry of the tabloids has its equivalent in higher-minded journalistic circles.

Someone at that Other Place once inserted a word I had not used so that a piece written in the run-up to France's referendum on the EU constitution in 2005 declared that recent polls had confirmed the president's "worst fears that the electorate may use the referendum to register its disgust with him, his government and its lot in life".

I was cross at the time, not just because a colleague wishing to change copy in such a significant way should at least have the courtesy to mention his or her intentions in advance, but because the change introduced a word I considered far too harsh to describe the true nature of France's relationship with Chirac.

My own phrase had been "broader disapproval" and I might, on reflection, have chosen something stronger.

But disgust, while undoubtedly felt by an essentially partisan portion if the French electorate, was surely over the top and, in the specific case, much more accurately a reflection of what a middle-class Englishman of a certain political disposition believed.

Someone responding to one of my articles for the Guardian's Comment is Free web pages mocked Chirac's theory that it was more important to get on with governing France than satisfy media and political demands to end the guessing about his own future.

Picture: coombskj

A lot of French people I speak to would agree with that (French, I assume) person's criticism of his record in office, yet it is also commonplace to hear words of genuine admiration for the way he represents their country on the international stage.

But leave to one side his stand on Iraq and Chirac departs from the presidency having failed to make much impact on any of the important issues facing France. That puts into perpective all the attempts he has made during the dying months of his mandate to improve history's judgment on the Elysée years of his long career.

One former confidant, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, wrote in a scathing book last year that Chirac's career, which once promised a great deal, had ended up as "a personal tragedy that has become, in the end, a national tragedy".

This morning, more than one French commentator assessing last night's broadcast from the Elysée observed that here was a politician who was invariably stronger on analysis than on delivery, on words not actions.

Perhaps in the end, Chirac's failure was that no one was ever quite sure what he stood for, or whether what he stood for now was the same as what he stood for a little earlier.

He proved changeable on Europe and America, on the need to drive home reform in France; he opposed war in Iraq and loved to present himself as utterly committed to peace but was pig-headedly determined, as one of the first big decisions of his presidency, to try out his own nuclear weapons in the Pacific. He could be both a charmer, as I certainly found, and a bully (as Blair did).

If being detested by the American or English Right (or, for sure, the far Right of Le Pen) doesn't make him a bad person, Le Figaro could not help noting that he wasn't, at heart, a creature of the French Right either.

Much attention has been paid to his refusal to endorse Nicolas Sarkozy in the broadcast (he may, of course, do so later with whatever enthusiasm).

But I was left rather more intrigued by his reference to moving on from the presidency to serve France and the French in some other way. What can he possibly have in mind?

Dreaming of Barnsley and the Elysée

2007-03-10T14:53:00.000+01:00

Nothing to report today, according to page one of the newspaper in the hands of the old hack.

Not to be taken too literally........though it is my favourite lamp and I felt it had the edge on a test card.

But all my enthusiasm for blogging on a matchday Saturday is channelled elsewhere.

Normal service here will return some time on Monday, by which time - as of 8pm French time tomorrow, Sunday, to be precise - M Chirac will at last have ended his mischievous little guessing game, formally establishing himself as an imminent ex-president.

Almost French

2007-03-08T15:57:00.000+01:00

......is the title of one of the most engaging books on France, and especially on living in France, that I have come across since making my own move three years ago.

Almost French was written by Sarah Turnbull, an Australian who left Sydney with carefully considered plans to write about the change sweeping eastern Europe, but met a Frenchman and settled instead in Paris.

Her book - which Almost Everyone, or at least almost everyone to whom I loaned my copy, liked - was excellent on personal relationships, and above all on the business of getting to know the French when you're a foreigner.

It was less good when she decided she wanted to be a travel writer and rattled on at length about favoured corners of Paris. But those passages were easy to skip if you felt as I did.

Two years or more after I finished the book, the pages I remember best are those that dealt with trying to make friends.

Despite the advantage of having a French boyfriend, and ready-made introductions to his circle, she found it a nightmare.

People would give her short shrift at parties, visibly disapprove of her Oz ways and tastes (notably her capacity to drink) and generally make it plain that they were out of bounds as far as closer ties were concerned.

Even though Turnbull's French was self-evidently up to understanding straightforward conversation, she remembers listening in horror as one girl within earshot asked her boyfriend (words to the effect of): "So how's your little Australian coming along with her French?"

A couple of years or so later, the same young woman had at last become a friend. Turnbull quite bluntly asked why she and everyone else had been so horrid at first.

The answer was simple: along the lines of "we make all the friends we want at school, college, maybe very early in our careers....we have no need of any more".

I have good French friends, but these friendships were acquired via my French wife or forged outside France (perhaps requiring the French person to make an effort he/she wouldn't at home), or developed in close working environments.

Those who were particular friends of my wife when she was young put up no barriers that I recall. So in that respect, my experience differed from that of Turnbull. But I do have a clear memory of finding others of lesser acquaintance, and even some in her extended family, very hard work.

And as I have observed before, it can be difficult to make a breakthrough in more casual settings, even when common social activity brings you together.

At the badminton club I have found here in the Var, everyone is pleasant with lots of bonsoirs and à bientôts and bisous.

Between all that, though, they generally peel off to grab a court and stick in the same doubles formation all evening. I may be wrong, but I see it as another aspect of the social phenomenon noted by Turnbull.

What, in this specific example, do more seasoned residents of France advise (naturally forgetting that it's badminton; I am sure the same applies to many kinds of sports or social clubs). And have others, wherever their travels have taken them, come up against anything resembling what either of us describe?

I realise that I can hardly impose le modèle Anglo-Saxon on them, with boards, name tags and orderly, democratic rotation of players.

But how, without coming across as the arrogant expat, do I get them at least to consider the possibility that they'd get an awful lot more out of the club if they treated it, well, like a club and mixed, on court as well as off?

The logical extension of the French way is something I have already experienced (at the distinguished Racing Club de France in Paris): arriving on my own at 8pm, as a player of respectable club level standard and - I hope - of a sociable disposition, and slipping away three quarters of an hour later without the least hint of getting a game.

Serious question

2007-03-06T15:55:00.000+01:00

Just when I was thinking two carnivals in a week would suffice for a lifetime, a third came long. And a fourth beckons.

Menton is a fine resort situated just after Monaco ends, going east along the Riviera, but before Italy starts.

Why the words - "shall we go to the La Fête du Citron ?" - even occurred to me, let alone escaped from my lips, I cannot tell.

One answer could be that it gave an excuse for another trip along the coast by rail, this time straying eastwards beyond Nice.

I mustn't prattle on about the joys of taking a train journey on the French Riviera; just do it if you find yourself in the area.

Nor should I attempt to describe La Fête du Citron at undue length. It's not so different from the carnivals of mimosas or whatever, and even the colour wouldn't change much if it were not for the similar abundance of oranges.

So getting back to the subject I identified in my headline, what exactly is the point of polenta?

It was served with stewed beef as part of an agreeable enough meal at Le Majestic, a brasserie located between the station at Menton and the ticket office where they charged you 14 euros a head to proceed to the promenade and find somewhere to stand and watch the parade.

For the last daytime procession of the carnival, Le Majestic was taking no chances and offered a single set menu - the beef, preceded by an excellent rough pate with, fittingly, lemon tart to finish and a little jug of wine thrown in - for 21 euros.

The ambiance was jolly, helped along by two bibulous couples on a coach trip from Sancerre - "what name do you give your husband's private parts?" one of the messieurs asked at one point.

Looks more interesting than ours
Picture: Nofolete
But no one could quite work out why the beef had to be accompanied by polenta, except that we were so close to Italy.

It just seemed to be slab of nothing, edible but desperately uninteresting and devoid of taste unless you smothered it in the sauce from the meat.

That blogging standby Wikipedia describes it thus:
Many new recipes have given new life to an item which is, in essence, a fairly bland and common food, invigorating it with various cheeses or tomato sauces.

But giving something that has no taste "new life" by adding cheese or tomato is surely like making the phone book sound great by getting a wonderful singer to warble extracts from J or K. Or have I missed something?

The last of my carnivals is this Sunday and the good news is that it's in Le Lavandou. I'll eat at home.

Playground news

2007-03-02T18:01:00.000+01:00

It had to happen, I suppose, the care in the community issue that has arisen in the comments field. So now, the playground whistle must blow.

Colin Berry adopts perplexing positions from time to time, notably with his contemptuous but unexplained critique of one of the No Offence items, but he has supported as well as criticised me in the past. It is up to me to be big enough to accept the latter as I appreciate the former, and I do.

And on the question of what can be allowed and what cannot, leaving aside the odd accusation that my response so far was lacking in consideration, he is absolutely right.

From now, and until further notice, no comments will be accepted here from people who are not registered, or decline to be so.

This has nothing to do with the issues canvassed in the No Offence series.

If criminal and civil sanctions exist to punish incitement, threatening conduct and so on, an amateur blogger has to take account of that.

It is plain that I cannot rely 100 per cent on those contributing to Salut! to act as civilised adults, or even to say who they are.

All sorts of questionable behaviour may be at play here, but they are not welcome in my playground. At least the new policy will, or should if I understand correctly how these things work, ensure that people are to some extent accountable for their actions.

Piaf: mômentous moineau

2007-03-01T12:26:00.000+01:00

Even someone with my minority tastes in music can see that a failure to be moved by Edith Piaf should be treated as evidence of a heart of stone.

Picture: idealterna

La Môme, a sketchy but endearing film of her life, has been out for a couple of weeks in France and is doing great business.

A first attempt to see it, in the cinematic backwater of La Londes-les-Maures, ended in disappointment. If we were among no more than five customers watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto a month earlier, we couldn't get anywhere a seat for La Môme despite arriving half an hour before it started.

So to neighbouring Hyères yesterday.

Bookings by phone or internet are not allowed and it's a pain to drive all the way there and back without being sure, so we took the sad senior citizen option and turned up in good time for the 4.45pm screening at the Olbia.

A man some way to my right snored gently, and I couldn't help noticing that a young woman, who arrived in a short skirt and sat nearby, left at the end wearing jeans.

But whatever drove him to his slumber, and her to seize an opportunity to change, I was hooked from the opening sequence showing Piaf as a grubby Parisian street urchin.

The plot darted this way and that through a life of glorious tragedy, her downfall predetermined by lifelong attachment to the bottle and eventually addiction to drugs.

La Vie En Rose
Picture: lichtundschatten

I am sure it must barely have scraped at the surface, and the zig-zagging chronology was liable to induce dizziness.

For the purposes of the soundtrack, the voice was not always that of Piaf, but of Jil Aigrot.

In the end, however, I was convinced that the right artistic decisions had been taken and that Olivier Dahan had made a film of enormous merit with Marion Cotillard, utterly compelling in the title role, capturing Piaf's insecurity and awkwardness as well as the defiant spirit.

It probably won't get beyond the art house circuit in Britain or America. But what marvellous respite it offers from the French presidential elections, even if not everyone agrees with me and Gigi is destined to walk out in disgust at the early demise of her beloved Gérard Depardieu.

Coup de Tête pour Nice en fête

2007-02-27T10:34:00.000+01:00

Get the idea?
Picture: cjwooduk

We hate Man United. Well I don't as it happens, but this isn't really a football posting so I'll come back to that in a minute.

Where I should start is not at the Nice carnival either, but on the Corniche, which I have just been able to enjoy for the first time since I saw Edward Fox whizzing round its perilous cliffside bends in The Day of the Jackal.

That was a long time ago and I have naturally travelled along the same coastline, from Cannes to Nice, many times since. But enjoyment of the spellbinding scenery is, on the whole, impaired when you have to take care not to drive into the sea.

So I insisted on leaving the car at Saint Raphaël and continuing to Nice by train.

Rail is easily my preferred means of transport and I know there are several spectacular train journeys in the world. But this was a real treat, from the exhilaration of racing along parallel to the Mediterranean shore to the pleasure of trundling through cuttings ablaze with mimosas.

One carnival goes rather a long way for my tastes, and I had been in Bormes-les-Mimosas only a week earlier when Bernadette Chirac opened the corso there.

But the current Nice festival does boast a number of outstanding floats representing the efforts of people from each quarter of the city, and was well worth half a day. We also found an excellent stop for lunch, the Indian lounge, run by a family from Pondichéry and now added to my short list of good French Indian restaurants.

When the procession got under way, the giant caricatures of Chirac (and Bernadette), Ségo and Sarko and the other presidential contenders were especially impressive.

And then there was Zinedine Zidane. Which brings me back to Manchester United.

That statement of hatred in my opening line is also the opening line of a refrain heard, with varying force depending on which club's supporters you are listening to, at most English football grounds.

In France, just now, they hate Man Utd, too. The French naturally prefer Arsenal in any case, given the stronger links that make them seem almost part of Ligue 1. But in normal circumstances, they also respect Man Utd for the mighty club that it is.

The new antipathy follows last week's match against Lille. Everyone by now has a view of the events involving Man Utd fans and French police, and also of Giggs's quickly taken free kick that won the game; there has been comment here as elsewhere.

But limiting myself to the free kick controversy and Lille's petulant walk-off, I couldn't help feeling, as I watched the Zidane character in the Nice carnival parade, that double standards were at play in the French reaction. Man Utd's sense of fair play has been put in question and the referee has been pilloried.

Yet all Giggs did, apparently without breaking any rule of the game, was to make the most of an advantage awarded because of some unfair play by Lille.

Why on earth should a free kick on the edge of the penalty area be delayed to the convenience of the offending team?

Even if that view is open to debate, surely we can at least agree that no verbal provocation justified Zidane's actions in the World Cup final, much as some have charitably expressed understanding of them.

Yet in Nice here was further evidence that far from being a matter of personal disgrace that also tarnished the image of an admirable French national side, Zidane's show of yobbish aggression can be seen as a source of pride.

The carnival caricature had the great man's head thrusting forward as it had towards the chest of Italy's Marco Materrazzi last July.

And the city authorities treated the crowds to repeated bursts over the sound system of that cuddly French hit, Dance of the Headbutt, glorifying the footballer's moment of madness. Without wishing to rain on the carnival, I cannot help thinking that this sends out a depressingly wrong message to youngsters who idolise great sportsmen.

Sign language

2007-02-26T18:42:00.001+01:00

Will this sign in the disabled parking spaces at the Champion supermarket in Le Lavandou be respected than the one way markings in the Intermarché car park less than a mile away?
As for the invitation to go and get drowned, I am reliably informed that this is not official council policy. They're just taking a while to erase the graffiti.

Meanwhile, let's not be too hard on the civic leaders of Menton, along the coast next to Italy, for supposing that dogs could read.

Over the top? C'est la totale

2007-02-23T13:53:00.000+01:00

News reports in France sometimes recount allegations, usually but not always from outside, that the French are "champions" at this (taking time off, consumption of pills, being prone to complain) or mauvaises élèves at that (learning languages, courtesy on the road and so on).

Enough to make anyone mad?
Picture: So Cal Metro

You don't need to be excessively francophile to doubt the accuracy of the claims in the first place.

But can I raise another possible contender? Are people of other countries as given to hyperbole, in everyday conversation, as the French?

When I first arrived in Paris as a new resident back in July 2004, I described my wife's way of combining comprehensive knowledge of English swearwords with a total failure to moderate their use according to strength of curse each situation warranted.

This is not just to do with the occasional domestic dispute that would arise in any household a chic, vivacious and tidy-minded Frenchwoman shares with a dishevelled, football-supporting folkie.

It is simply the case that whenever she swears in English, she starts pretty high up the range.

Her sister is one of the most mild-mannered people I know, but was a nightmare to be with when she first started driving, berating just about every other road user with a non-stop flow of shouts and insults from the inside of her Citroën 2CV.

I suppose encounters on the road don't count so much, and I am certainly not sure that French road rage is worse than the British version.

But I have witnessed countless examples of the phenomenon, from the fonctionnaire's utter exasperation at the omission of some piddling detail from a form to the platform attendant's unrestrained abuse aimed at some late-arriving passenger.

A slight nip in the air and it's inevitably "freezing". A minor lapse in manners at the table and papa launches into a tirade, with or without accompanying claques, as if a line of cocaine had tumbled from his child's pocket.

On today's lunchtime news, a little girl on a school ski-ing holiday was interviewed as she lay in bed while her friends enjoyed the snow.

She seemed a long way from death's door, but complained of stomach ache, headache and nausea before adding gravely: "C'est la totale."

Her phrase enriched my knowledge of French - a function, I suppose, of not having children living at home to keep me in touch with their everyday use of the language.

But was her reaction to minor ailments just another isolated instance, no more characteristic of the French than the stiff upper lip is of the English? Or does experience lead others to believe the French are les champions of exaggeration?

Driving a Renaud to London

2007-02-21T14:36:00.000+01:00

However many records and concert tickets Renaud shifts in his native country, he is never likely to be mobbed in Oxford Steet.

Picture: buzfoto

The guarantee that he can go about his daily business unhindered when in London has a lot to do with his decision, which Richard of Orléans will think makes him positively certifiable, to plan his future there.

We have talked quite a bit here, and in that Other Place, about the two-way flow of people between France and the UK.

Truly reliable figures seem elusive, but I think there are supposed to be around 500,000 Britons with homes in France - which many undoubtedly use for only part of the year - and perhaps 300,000 French people resident on the other side of the Channel.

Renaud's explanation, in a Paris Match interview, for deciding to move to London involves a list of qualities that some of my readers will consider as unrecognisable as he is to the average London cabbie.

"It is true that Romane (his wife and mother of their baby son Malone) adore London," he began, uncontroversially enough. "Romane, above all since she is an artiste, finds the attention of people in the street hard to take - their curiosity and fanaticism, and the amateur paparazzi with their mobile phones. Ten times more peaceful in London."

Avert your eyes, Richard. Our hero goes on to describe his love for the capital, the good citizenship of its people, their humour, the pubs.

"I love English football, English rock, English culture, English literature, the galleries, exhibitions, architecture. You don't see cops on the streets of London. Why? Because there is more civisme and more brotherliness than in Paris!"

And no, Renaud is not thinking - Johnny Hallyday style - of a more agreeable tax regime.

As a good socialist - and not even what the French like to call a caviar socialist - he insists that the more tax he pays, the happier he is, and that France's wealth tax, the ISF, is to him a gesture of solidarity.

He and Romane plan to devote most of their time, when not working, to living in London, maybe eight months a year.

They already own a small house there - "not a mansion, not a palace, honest!" - and want Malone to grow up bilingual, attending school in London (by which they may, of course, mean the Lycée Français in the Little France manor of South Ken rather than a bog standard comprehensive).

Adopting his most Ségo-like posture, Renaud adds: "I will go on paying my taxes in France even if I regret that they go on building aircraft carriers instead of crèche, schools....."

Who was it, apart from me now and again, that said French pop music doesn't travel?

Ségo: it's tough being a woman

2007-02-20T11:21:00.000+01:00

However you look at it, Ségolène Royal's television audience - a peak of just under 10.6 million viewers, an average of 8.9 million - proves she is a remarkable draw.

Picture: François Lafite

The average was comfortably higher than the ratings for her rival Nicolas Sarkozy's similar broadcast, itself described as a record for a political programme in France, two weeks ago.

Many people will have tuned in expecting, a lot of them hoping, to see Ségo stumble and fall. But she will take huge comfort from the figures, believing the massive penetration will help her rise above media, opposition and even Left Bank intellectual disdain.

Some will remember mention here of her steeliness and ambition being seen as faults, whereas in a man they'd be hailed as virtues.

This notion surfaced again the other day when she reacted sharply to questions about the abrupt resignation, allegedly over funding of her programme, of an economic adviser.

It was certainly an eyebrow-raising moment, and poor PR, but the writer of one column I saw couldn't resist adding that she was too quick to reveal herself as hard. Sarko seems to get off much more lightly when he makes ill-considered ripostes.

Last night, she argued that running for the presidency was harder for a woman, that no man would have had his competence questioned as constantly as has happened to her.

It was a long programme but I felt Royal did reasonably well after a ponderous start (not her fault; the first questioner was allowed to ramble for ever).

She made the right noises (for the left, so to speak) on youth unemployment, pensions, small businesses and the disabled. And she refused to be wrong-footed by questions about the Parti Socialiste "elephants", not least what role if any she would hand as President Royal to her partner François Hollande, the general secretary.

The moment when she walked over to console a wheelchair-bound man, in tears as he described living with MS, could have been embarrassing but wasn't. It looked a genuine gesture, but I suspect it will also have done her no harm.

I found her a little less assured on the presidency itself - "I think I am ready" hardly had the ring of confidence - and on that thorny issue of how she will pay for her programme. But Sarko has unanswered questions in that area, too.

François Bayrou, the centrist candidate who has been steadily improving his showing in the polls, is an interesting sideshow. I simply do not believe the poll that found he would beat either Ségo or Sarko if he made it through to the second round, but he is capable of inflicting damage, especially on her.

Royal's best bet, provided she can finally sort out her unimpressive campaign team, is that those 10.59 million viewers - isn't that 10,589,000 more than are canvassed in the average poll? - liked not only what they saw, which is usually the case, but what they heard, too.

Pride, prejudice and the press

2007-02-19T14:48:00.000+01:00

Reading about the life and times of Maurice Papon, the Vichy collaborator who signed French Jews' death warrants, I felt the glow of distantly reflected pride.

Where Papon's deportees ended up
Picture: Danielzolli

Here, and over at Roy Greenslade's Guardian blog, there has lately been talk of how ritualistic prejudice againt the press leads to grotesque libel awards that (should) bring shame to the countries and courts in which they are made.

Not everyone agrees with me or the similar, though hardly identical, views expressed by my fellow blogger.

But turning to Papon, let us start with the proposition that his exposure as a war criminal was no bad thing.

That will not seem too controversial a point to most of those who stray into Salut!.

But how did that exposure come about, given that Papon proceeded from being the second most senior French official in wartime Bordeaux to a very prominent post-war career in public life (though that career was scarcely without disgrace)?

It came about because the press (newspapers) did what it is - they are - best at.

In May 1981, France's satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchainé, revealed documents establishing Papon's culpability in the deportation of nearly 1,700 Jews from Bordeaux to the Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris between 1942 and 1944.

Many of these unfortunates went from Drancy to Auschwitz. Very, very few came home. As the Allied victory neared, Papon saw what was coming and switched sides, reinventing himself as a Resistance informer and later collecting an honour from General de Gaulle for his pains.

Ultimately, he was jailed for 10 years for crimes against humanity. He fled to Switzerland but was returned to serve all of three years of his sentence.

As a self-confessed liberal on penal issues, I have no real complaint about his release in 2002 on health grounds. But Papon goes to his grave having never found the courage or humility to admit to his wrongdoing.

He insisted to the end that he was the blameless victim, as (with variations to the theme) is so often the case among those who dislike how they portrayed in newspapers, of "unprecedented media pillorying made up of lies, insults and infamy".

Great stuff, Le Canard Enchainé! I have said the French press is more decent but also more dull than the British variety, but here it managed to be both immensely decent and a long way from dull.

And so it is on the other side of the Channel. The press, from ruthless proprietors to individual journalists, makes plenty of mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are serious and, much more rarely, they have serious consequences.

But often, the press is punished disproportionately for its mistakes; the rich, powerful and merely fortunate would be horrified at how low I'd cap libel awards, while insisting on due - OK, French-style - prominence for apologies or corrections.

And almost always, the press attracts far less praise than it deserves when it acts in its own loftier traditions.

Leave aside the unmasking of war criminals or the spotlights trained on government and corporate injustices.

For every unfairly criticised politician, pop star and supermodel, there are scores of ordinary people who have been assisted, by local and national newspapers alike, towards some semblance of fair treatment in their David vs Goliath battles with gas boards, insurance companies, banks and other private or public bodies.

Unfashionable, especially on a blog, and probably unnecessary since I no longer have a newspaper job, but true.

Pottering about in the Guardian

2007-02-16T19:04:00.000+01:00

First a few words of reassurance. My appearances elsewhere in cyberspace do not mean that Salut!'s days are numbered, or not yet at any rate. Especially since I now see that my advertising earnings have crept up to an average of 17 cents a day.

Picture: Si1very

But regulars around these parts may be interested to learn that I have found one or two other journalistic outlets to satisfy myself that, all that "garden leave" now over, there is indeed life beyond the Telegraph.

The First Post, a newsy site which already appears to be a home for other former colleagues, has already run a few articles.

There have been two or three on the presidential elections, naturally, but also one apiece on the French smoking ban and a couple of villas that Saddam Hussein's regime bought in the south of France with money that, arguably, could have been better spent in Iraq.

As of tonight, I am also a contributor to CommentIsFree, a talkative and animated corner of the Guardian's website. Ségolène's continuing struggles preoccupied me today, but my hope is to broaden the range of topics much as I try to do here. That link now seems to work.

At my leaving party - sorry, one of my leaving parties, this one in the Cheshire Cheese pub off Fleet Street - I began by condemning my former employers for their cruel and vindictive decision to give me more time to spend with Sunderland football club.

Those with my best interests at heart will be relieved to hear that I have found something more thoughtful than Salut!'s football offshoot to help occupy my time.

Fine mess

2007-02-15T19:04:00.000+01:00

Freedom of the press and all that - a great subject, and all the traffic coming this way in recent days implies that others think the same. One to return to, but perhaps it's time to move on.

Salut! goes Munch
thanks Gigi

Heavy, dark skies greeted me as I flew into Stansted the other afternoon. It felt three or four hours later than it was, and you got very wet walking from aircraft to terminal building.

If the south of France needed something to make it seem more attractive, that Essex welcome would have done the trick.

The welcome was to become bleaker. Awaiting me in London - one of my daughters had collected a stack of mail sent to our old home since the Post Office redirection time limit expired - were three letters from bailiffs.

A parking fine I never knew a thing about had naturally gone unpaid. The bailiffs were making bailiff-like threatening noises about what was likely to happen as a consequence.

You sense it means trouble
Picture: Alex Segre

Worse, these letters began in August, 2006 and ended in October. In that time, a parking fine that may have been - and this is a guess - £30 or £40 had turned itself into a debt of £235.

And the figure was still growing. When I was finally able to speak to the bailiffs next morning, I was informed that the sum outstanding now stood at just under £320.

What happens next is unclear. I have lodged an appeal on the grounds that no ticket was left on my car windscreen on the day back in February last year when, in a grim part of Birmingham, I had parked while attending Birmingham City vs Sunderland. I also had no idea I was illegally parked, but that is another issue.

A good case could be made out for penalising someone daft enough to spend good money travelling from France to spend an afternoon in the West Midlands, endure the worst food he can remember eating in a decade and then watch his hopeless, relegation-bound team produce a typically inept performance.

But I still reckon the cost of that day out, now racing past £500 (taking the cost of match tickets and travel into account) unless the appeal melts hearts, was steep.

And the burden is unlikely to be offset by the revenue Salut! enjoys from the Google click-and-earn ads (I think the income currently averages 11 US cents a day). Thanks for the bright ideas on how to illustrate this post - and to Alex Segre, a professional photographer, for allowing me to use his work.

No offence (4)

2007-02-13T18:18:00.000+01:00

Confirmation has appeared here over the past two days, if I needed it, that lots of people do not really believe in free speech.

Why trouble the courts?
Picture: mcdowell

Richard of Orléans will forgive the thought that he would not be everyone's choice to lecture on the importance of expressing opinions without the least hint of rudeness.

No, I have not seen the Irish News article in full. I gave the flavour of it, as best I could from perusal of news reports (using sources I regard as usually dependable), and made it clear that the review contained further criticisms.

I do not even know if the article can be viewed on any news databases, given that it led to a libel action and newspaper librarians tend to get jumpy in such circumstances. Added point: you can read more about this in Roy Greenslade's blog at the Guardian Media website.

But my argument did not rest on the precise nature of the criticism. I was more concerned with the principle.

Take away a critic's right to criticise and you may as well empty whole shelves of public libraries, forbid serious discussion of any artistic, sporting or other human endeavour and ban Simon Cowell from the air. Well, maybe the last reference wasn't my strongest point.

The blogosphere seems, at first thought, an odd place for people to be applauding ferocious penalties for those who express views they find unpalatable.

But when you study some of the more obscene libel awards made particularly but not always by juries, it is not so surprising after all.

Since Britain, I am pleased to say, is still a newspaper reading country, many of the jurors taking part in the exercise are likely themselves to be avid consumers of the press.

Bill Taylor refers to critics on major Canadian papers (this is an amended reference; see my comment) making repeat visits before a stridently critical restaurant view appears and this seems eminently sensible and fair.

The fact that it would still not be enough for some, more concerned with clipping the wings of journalists, rather supports the opening lines of this post.

No offence (3)

2007-02-12T08:27:00.000+01:00

On a chilly evening in Le Lavandou, we dined alone at L'Auberge Provençale. There were no other customers, the empty tables making a mockery of the owners’ efforts to create a bright, welcoming ambiance.

Voltaire: Ulster needs you
Picture: Jaime2k6.

The meal – we both chose from a set menu, with rougets as starter followed by magret de canard – was simple but excellent, with a pleasant bottle of Provençal red, from the Domaine de l'Angueiroun just three miles away, to accompany it.

Every attempt was made to make us feel comfortable; the first question when we booked was whether we’d like to sit by the log fire. The bill – 79 euros, which also included a bottle of Evian and a shared dessert – was reasonable enough to send us away satisfied that we'd had value for money.

The owners would be pleased with the above words. If this blog were widely read in Le Lavandou, they might even print them out and stick them on the wall, though it would mar the decor.

But what if our experience of L'Auberge Provençale hadn’t seemed so good? What if the mullet had tasted rubbery and the duck slices been so hard you could have bounced them on the table, unconcerned about the risk of knocking over the wine bottle, so awful were its contents?

Would I be as entitled to say as much, in a newspaper or magazine or on line, as I clearly was to report more favourably?

Does anyone seriously believe the answer to that question is other than Yes?

Sadly, a jury of good men (and women) and true in Northern Ireland saw things a little differently. They have just awarded £25,000 in damages, plus m’learned friends’ costs, against the Irish News after a restaurateur complained that a review was defamatory, damaging and hurtful.

The Irish News, in my experience, is a decent daily paper. It is traditionally read by Ulster's nationalist population but is unrecognisable from the days when death notices for terrorists would be enclosed within thick black borders and few Protestants would think of buying a copy.

Its food critic, Caroline Workman, sounds as if she is something of an authority in her field, having had some training in London restaurants and edited the Bridgestone restaurant guide.

She described her visit with friends to the west Belfast pizzeria as "hugely disappointing". The pate did not have much flavour, the flesh of her squid was a grey, translucent colour and her cola drink tasted unchilled, watery and flat.

There was plenty more she did not like about the meal and her rating, one mark out of five, was said to translate as "Stay at home".

The restaurateur considered the review a "hatchet job" and warmly greeted the jury's verdict as evidence that justice had been done.

On the face of it, the verdict is no such thing.

For all I know, there may be no finer place to eat in Ulster than this pizzeria, whatever the reviewer felt.

Nor do I especially blame people for taking advantage of libel laws that are loaded so heavily against the press. Declaring what others might see as an interest, I should add that another Ulster jury did once award damages against my then employers over an article I had written.

The story is told so as to demonstrate that the human desire to censor is not restricted to Muslims who resort to French law in the hope of punishing a magazine for publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

That case should never have been allowed inside a courtroom. At least it now stands a good chance of being thrown out, after the prosecutor argued for the dismissal of criminal charges.

But what conclusion should we draw from the case of the pizzeria and the scathing food critic?

If we accept that Ms Workman is telling the truth when she says the review represented her honest opinion, the logic of the outcome is plain: only a dishonest opinion or none at all would have been acceptable in the eyes of Northern Irish justice. And that seems unacceptable in any part of the world that regards itself as a democracy.

No offence (2)

2007-02-09T11:25:00.000+01:00

The response to my posting about the Mohammed cartoons, and the preposterous trial their publication prompted in Paris, has been a disappointment.

Islam will dominate
Picture (and caption): El Marco.

This is not to say that I mind a serious topic being hijacked in the comments section for a spot of backbiting between feuding readers.

You do not actually have to wade through much of that to find some perfectly sensible and thought-provoking opinions and assertions posted here over the past 18/24 hours.

It just seems a little incomplete to have no one writing in to challenge my basic proposition: namely, that Muslims (and Roman Catholics, and Protestants and so on) have no right to demand the suppression of words and images about them or Islam (or other groups of believers, or their faiths) unless criminal incitement is involved.

The advantage of blogging for the Telegraph was that a big newspaper site was always likely to attract readers of all types.

Salut! has highly respectable levels of readership - well over 700 visits yesterday alone - and it boasts comment statistics most Telegraph bloggers can but dream of.

But it would benefit from some diversification among the ranks of readers willing to step forward, identified or otherwise, to let off steam.

With comments in response to No offence nudging 50 as I write, the nearest we have had to a Muslim point of view opposing my argument was the following, signed by an anonymous contributor:

As the comments seem to be a private conversation, (I) am a little wary of pointing out that the reason Muslims are offended by the cartoons, is not that they are terrorists, but that Islam proscribes pictorial representations of Mohammed, Xtianity on the other hand is full of icons, false or otherwise.

That comment could have been posted by a Muslim, though my guess is that it was not.

The obvious reply, incidentally, is that Muslims are fully entitled to expect one another to observe the rules of their faith, whether on pictorial representation of Mohammed or anything else.

They are not entitled to require others, outside their faith, to do likewise. That is where the trouble tends to start; many, many Muslims - and whoever said France has four or five million is almost certainly underestimating the true figure - do see Islam as so superior that it will one day rule the world whether the world likes it or not.

And that view is by no means restricted to extremists.

As for the quality of debate inspired by my blog, that is a matter I am perfectly happy to leave to you. My policy on censorship was established very early.

Only when a comment gives me serious cause for legal or other concerns will I step in. It has happened on perhaps three or four occasions, once or twice when I put on my media lawyer's hat, and otherwise when remarks about my former employers - and believe me, my own powers of self-restraint have been sorely tested - went too far.

* And for those who missed my update, the prosecutor in the Paris trial made the commonsense decision to urge the court to dismiss the charges.

No offence

2007-02-08T16:35:00.000+01:00

It is always a pleasure to talk to the listeners of BBC Radio Ulster, as I did yesterday, not least because during long years of covering the Troubles, I grew very fond of the city in which it is based.

The station called last night, wanting some thoughts on the case of the Muslim organisations that have taken the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to court for re-running the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that caused such offence when they appeared in a Danish publication.

I have no strong views on Charlie Hebdo, which I see rarely but have found by turns funny (which is fine), irreverent (ditto) and tasteless (see the view on free speech attributed to Voltaire).

There is no doubt that many decent Muslims will have been appalled to see - or, rather more likely, to learn second or third or fourth hand about - the cartoons.

One showed Mohammed perched on a cloud turning suicide bombers away from paradise with the words: "Stop, stop. We are running out of virgins."

But I am not sure how this insults any Muslims except terrorist Muslims.

If, as has been shown, some fanatics are motivated, at least in part, by the belief that dozens of virgins await them once they have blown themselves and others to smithereens, there is no reason on earth why that belief should not be ridiculed.

The French Muslim Council, and the Paris Grand Mosque, both involved directly or indirectly in the current case, are right to ask for Islam to be respected, but wrong to suppose that it should be given automatic legal protection from disrespect.

If real criminal offences are committed - incitement to murder Muslims, for example, or to burn down their mosques - then the law has ample remedies. Words and cartoons mocking Islamist psychopaths who turn to terrorism are not in the same category and should not be liable to legal sanction.

Philippe Val, Charlie Hebdo's editor, argued that the cartoons did not amount to an attack on Islam but addressed "the ideas defended by certain men who legitimise violence in the name of Islam". What is so wrong in that?

Nothing, I am belatedly pleased to add, according to the prosecution, which asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that Charlie Hebdo was not attacking Islam but terrorists who claimed to act in its name or the name of Mohammed.

After talking to Radio Ulster, I thought back to a superb Belfast satirical ensemble, the Hole in the Wall Gang, whose humour was aimed at just about everyone who made Northern Ireland what it then was.

Green or orange, or some shade in between, politicians and pundits and - yes - churchmen were all considered legitimate targets. But isn't that the point? They were legitimate targets of prose and stage routines, not the bombs and bullets that were also a feature of everyday Ulster life and death.

I am sure plenty of Roman Catholic and Protestant figures were outraged by the revue; a few, doubtless, would have liked it silenced. That is human nature; remember that line in Stoppard's Night and Day: "I'm all in favour of the free press. It's the bloody papers I can't stand."

But the Hole in the Wall Gang played on. If memory serves, they eventually found themselves mocked by others.

The court hearing the cartoons case in Paris will announce on March 15 whether it is following the prosecution's recommendation that the charges should be thrown out.

But a lot has already been made in coverage of the hearing of Nicolas Sarkozy's letter of support of Charlie Hebdo.

Though he was often enough on the receiving end of the magazine's wit, he saw such publications as acceptable if not essential components of France's commitment to freedom of expression and a secular public policy. An excess of caricature, he said, was better than an absence of it.

Other politicians followed his example today, giving evidence on the magazine's behalf.

But I liked most of all the contribution of the very first witness.

This is what he had to say:

"I urge Muslims to adapt to Europe and not the other way around."

So which ranting Man of the People had Charlie Hebdo imported from a wicked Anglo-Saxon tabloid? Alternatively, who was the appalling French racist responsible for such provocative testimony.

Step forward one of the heroes of yesterday's proceedings, a philosopher from the Paris University. His name is Abdel Wahhab Meddeb and the defence rests.

No outdoor smoke without ire

2007-02-07T14:22:00.001+01:00

Stand by for a news flash from Paris's Had to Happen department.

Someone may be watching you
Picture: Meteorry.

Few can have failed to notice that smokers, faced with fines if they light up at work, are forming sad little huddles at the entrances to workplaces.

It is not completely new, of course - the same sight, involving smaller numbers, could be encountered even before the recent law took effect
as more and more offices imposed their own bans.

What is fresh, however, is the stern warning from the Mairie de Paris that anyone stubbing out a cigarette on the pavement faces a whacking 183 euro fine.

That is rather steeper than the penalty for defying the smoking ban and the same price you'd pay if caught allowing your dog to do its business on le trottoir.

Was there ever a better reason for the street, in the noble traditions of France, to make itself heard?

French workers hooked on the weed must instantly mobilise to fight for outdoor ashtrays.

When Irish eyes smiled for Ségolène

2007-02-05T14:05:00.001+01:00

Picture: politiquecafe.

She struggles to impress in her campaign to become France's first woman president. But Ségolène Royal will at least have seen one recent article that was not calculated to leave her in a steaming rage or cringing with embarrassment.

Rare among the thousands of words written and uttered about Ségo in the past fortnight or more, these were unequivocally positive - telling of her pleasant nature, intelligence and humour.

Paris Match told the story of the young Ségolène as au pair girl, back in 1971 when she was a beautiful, vivacious teenager needing a bit of English practice.

Ségo was not parked in a leafy suburban town in Surrey, or at the London town house of the sort of people who drive Chelsea tractors and have children called Gideon and Arabella. She was sent to Dublin.

What she made of any Guinness or rebel songs she encountered is not known, so far as I am aware. But she did leave a deep and favourable impact on the Irish family whose lives she briefly shared.

Ségolène, or Marie-Ségolène as she was still known as a girl of not quite 18, followed in the footsteps of another French au pair, Armelle, who had evidently been made a sterner stuff.

The change of home help produced a change of atmosphere that was enough for the freckled Roche children - Graziella, John and Peter - to think Mary Poppins had replaced Mademoiselle Cruella.

That may be well unfair on Armelle, though I do recall the surliness of one or two French girls who stayed with us when my daughters were small.

Marie-Ségolène, in any event, was a breath of fresh air for the Roche kids and their large gang of friends, baking everyone cakes, drawing with Graziella or taking her to pony riding lessons and chasing butterflies.

Young Peter remembers her dark blue Bermuda shorts. He was only five but perhaps already had an eye for the feminine charms that have, for no good reason if we are honest, done Ségo little harm in her rise to prominence.

There was also a swattish side to the au pair. The observant Peter retains a vision of Ségo writing copiously in an exercise book, one page after another, as the children watched television.

A meal-time photograph of au pair and young charges accompanies the Paris match report. "She may have been brought up severely," the children's mother, Renate, tells the magazine in a reference to the austere, disciplined regime of Colonel Jacques Royal's household. "But just look at the picture of peace around the table - that sums up her sojourn with us."

I started by giving Paris Match the credit. But let me end by being fair to the man who really brought this interesting little episode of Ségo's life to wider attention.

John Lichfield, the excellent and convivial Paris correspondent of The Independent, heard about the Irish connection from a Dublin lawyer, Sheena Beale.

Sheena met and befriended Ségolène when both were on holiday in Normandy as 16-year-olds. She was out of the country when her French pal arrived as an au pair but put her in touch with friends and relatives.

John then discovered that the Roche children's late father had been best man at the wedding of his own parents-in-law, themselves Dubliners.

Sheena described her Marie-Ségolène as a "strikingly beautiful girl with long, dark hair - I thought she looked like Sophia Loren". The French girl was "great fun to be with but very focused, very determined...I never imagined that she would go into politics but it doesn't surprise me that she has gone so far."

Unlike Paris Match, John found that Renate Roche - now remarried and called Webster - had no recollection of the future presidential candidate among several French au pairs.

Whatever the magazine's envoyé special did to jog her memory for his report entitled Une Baby-sitter nommèe Marie-Ségolène, it's a reasonable bet that Renate will be taking a more personal interest in the progress of the battle for the Elysée.

Wrong Salut! The Red and White one is elsewhere

2007-02-02T16:45:00.000+01:00

When I launched Salut! Sunderland, I promised football-loathing readers of this blog that I would try to keep this site free of matters concerning The (occasionally) Beautiful Game.

Picture: El Viaje

But I need to alert any Sunderland fans who have strayed here thinking they were reaching an SAFC-related blog that they have been misdirected by my confrères at A Love Supreme, who kindly agreed to post a link from their site.

While I try to resolve that bit of false signposting, Sunderland supporters should feel very welcome here but go to www.salutsunderland.typepad.com if they want to complete the cyber journey they first started.

Gremlins update

2007-02-02T09:18:00.002+01:00

Judging from the countless messages sent to the Blogger (ie Blogspot) help line, Salut! must have been among thousands of web logs suffering yesterday from those old bX-vjhbsj blues.

That is what the error was called and it appeared on the screen when people tried to visit certain blogs or, once there, post and view comments.

A technical note, intended to assist those whose blogs were affected, helpfully advised "hitting Refresh in the browser" to "workaround the problem".

"Workaround" one of those non-words invented with the aim of incensing English speakers.

But in any case, the idea that blog readers get out so little that they will sit there hitting the "refresh" key over and over again until they can read my thoughts on the French smoking ban is mildly absurd.

If I correctly understand the next phrase - "unfortunately pushing out the new build involved a few minutes outage" - it becomes clear that Salut! was unavailable at all for some time (and, I think, rather more than "a few minutes").

It is also evident, from a quick check on the clever site that counts and analyses visits to my blog, in almost Orwellian Big Brother fashion, that the effect here was seriously to reduce yesterday's numbers.

All now seems to have been resolved. Thank you for your patience, and welcome back.

Unidentified gremlins hit Blogger

2007-02-01T16:03:00.002+01:00

Readers of Salut! and, come to that, a million other blogs may be experiencing problems.

blogging fog
Picture: nj dodge.

Bloggers - that is to say, people with blogs on Blogspot - are repeatedly getting "error" messages when they try to view their sites, look at comments or make changes.

No one at Blogger seems to have responded in any meaningful way so far, so I have no idea how long this will persist.

If anyone reading Salut! has been trying to post comments and simply cannot connect, please feel free to send them to me at colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr, specifying how you want to be identified (name, nickname, initials, anon etc and where you want the comment to appear.

As soon as I am able, I will then post the comment on your behalf.

The fag end of France's smoking culture

2007-02-01T13:47:00.001+01:00

Does the big stick work when trying to stamp out smoking?

Picture:_Pyro_.

Well, it didn't at school, where being caught guaranteed a caning. And I am not sure £48 fines will be any more effective in France now that the ban on smoking in many public places has taken effect.

The French are notoriously unruly in their approach to rules, regulations and conventions of which they do not approve.

The health minister may sound confident that the new law will be largely observed, but with legions of young people among 10 million or more French smokers, the early days and weeks may be a severe test.

If I am right to think of the French as almost professionally rebellious - they do love to claim to have been there at the birth of revolution - there will be lots of instances of defiance of the law.

Smoking is still seen as sexy and cool by lots of the French, and especially young people. And as any ex-smokers out there will readily agree, giving up once the habit has taken hold is genuinely hard.

Boys' choir practice at St John's Church in Shildon, Co Durham. That's where I first took up the weed.

I have guilty memories of covering my father's packet of Players untipped with a newspaper or comic, and easing a cigarette out without him seeing.

Threats of dire punishment at school did nothing to deter. Later, when I was smoking far, far too many cigarettes a day for my meagre pay to support, early morning coughing fits also failed to put me off.

By the time I eventually stopped, I was was nearly 30 and smoking at least one cigarette a day for each year of my life. I'd go to Belfast to cover the Troubles, rising early and staying up late in bars where lighting up seemed almost obligatory, and consumption would rocket.

After a fortnight of that, I'd return to England run down, and perhaps suffering from a chest infection that would make smoking positively unpleasant and painful. Still I would persevere.

It was on such a return that I finally found the will to stop smoking.

I was so poorly that I really could not smoke at all without severe discomfort. Within 10 days, I had recovered but knew I would never have a better chance to give up.

Once I felt really better, I rewarded myself with a packet of 10 - but I sensibly threw them away almost immediately and haven't smoked since.

Everyone who stops finds it gets easier as times goes by. The first weeks are obviously the worst but if you smoke heavily now and then succeed in giving up, you will probably - like me - always think of yourself as a smoker who doesn't smoke rather than a non-smoker.

In a recurring dream, I have taken it up again, reached 20 or so a day in no time and refuse to call a halt because I have persuaded myself I can stop any time I want.

If any smokers find that discouraging, they shouldn't. In real life, I am never tempted. But how to stop and stay stopped is not where I began these reflections on the French ban.

And when I think back, there is a ray of light for those wondering how on earth than can ever comply with the new restrictions.

Even at the height of my smoking career, I was able mentally to switch off as a user if I found myself in a court or some other environment where it was simply banned - however quickly I'd reach for the fags on getting outside again.

Smoking areas - upstairs on a bus, for example, or one carriage on the Tube - were usually so vile that they offered no proper relief and I routinely avoided them.

In time, I suspect, and perhaps before the ban extends next year to bars and restaurants, French smokers who cannot overcome the addiction may acquire another habit: knowing when and where it is just not allowed.

The passing mystery of a famous kiss

2007-01-29T17:18:00.001+01:00

Look at this photograph, and let's discuss images in the media, I told French journalism students at one of the occasional lessons I give at a college near the Louvre.

Recaptured by: ginieland.

Of course Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville, also known - see my exchange with Richard of Orléans below - as The Kiss at City Hall or just The Kiss, is to do with art, not news photography.

But it seemed a good, familiar and topical place to start. Topical because my class had all been to the current exhibition of Robert Doisneau photos of Paris, staged appropriately enough in the City Hall.

So have 215,000 other people, I was told by City Hall today. Since entry is free, we can safely assume the total will top 250,000 before the doors close on February 17.

My students knew all about the kiss itself having been posed, though by a real-life courting couple. I suppose that stopped being a secret several years ago.

But what about the passers-by, I asked? Tell me especially what you think of the stern-faced man who walks past the embracing couple with other matters apparently on his mind.

All the students agreed he was French, almost stereotypically so with his beret. One thought his appearance, and the timing of Doisneau's picture (1950), evoked the Resistance.

Ah, I said, having hoped for just such a response, but he was Irish. An auctioneer and devout Roman Catholic named Jack Costello, passing through Paris on his first trip out of Ireland, a motorbike pilgrimage to Rome.

How, my students wanted to know, could I be so sure? I then told them of a Dubliner, Pat Cody, who had phoned out of the blue after an article of mine appeared in The Daily Telegraph about the female half of the kissing couple, Françoise Bornet, auctioning off her original print.

Pat explained that the passer-by was his father-in-law. It seemed convincing enough; I checked on the internet and there it was, not once but several times.

An academic from Lincoln University, an Italian website and so on. All talking about the Irishman's walk-on role. Pat mentioned that the Irish Times had also written it up (I have since seen that article, and heard of other references on radio and TV).

I did nothing much about this at the time, beyond passing it on to London colleagues in case they wanted the Irish correspondent to follow it up (they didn't) and, later, mentioning it in my blog.

That drew a response from a photography buff in America who was intrigued to have more light shed on his knowledge of this classic item of photography.

On leaving the Telegraph - my employment, coincidentally, legally ends today - I decided to resurrect the subject.

The current exhibition in Paris gave me the excuse, though The Kiss is actually displayed very discreetly as if considered one of Doisneau's lesser works.

I drove over to Grasse to meet one of Jack Costello's sons, John, who was visiting the south of France. He put me back in touch with his sister, Colette, Pat Cody's wife, whose number I no longer had. This is her, with proud dad Jack, on her wedding day 15 years after The Kiss.

And then I got the Kiss of Death from City Hall. They gave me numbers for Doisneau's two daughters, between them acting as commissaires for the exhibition. To say they were easy to contact would be an exaggeration, but one of them, Francine Deroudille, did tell me with absolute certainty that there was, after all, no Irish connection.

For Jack Costello, read Gérard Petit, a Montreal lawyer who, according to Francine, who had made contact with her father in 1989. The two men later met. Petit knew, and Doisneau confirmed, that he was that passer-by.

Early checks of newspaper clippings drew a blank. But thanks to Bill Taylor, I discovered that Petit's role was reported by a French-language Quebec newspaper. He had been alerted by a neighbour who was a firm fan of Doisneau's work and, in particular, this photograph.

Again with Bill's help, I was able to communciate by email with Carole Turbide, who now lives in what was Petit's home and who also knew a little of the story. She loved the thought that "perhaps a little of Doisneau's soul lives on in this flat".

Where the story had led was not quite where I had first expected, though my account of it was evidently given a very prominent show in yesterday's Irish editions of the Sunday Times, the first piece I have written for another newspaper - as opposed to websites such as The First Post - since leaving the DT.

I must admit that I rather liked the idea of an untravelled, unsophisticated Irishman caught by chance in such a striking (if contrived) portrayal of human emotion. He would, as Colette told me, had been mortified had he actually noticed them behaving like that in front of him.

So I am happy to report that Colette, and her brother John, prefer to hang on to the family history and insist that the man in the beret and specs was their dad.

Jack Costello himself never knew a thing about it. The Kiss did not become an international success until it was marketed as a poster after his death.

But neither Gérard Petit nor Robert Doisneau is any longer around to contradict his children's fond belief.

Taking leave of critical senses

2007-01-24T12:37:00.001+01:00

Lovers of French cinema come clean, and to my rescue.

Picture: Daryl Van Horne.

Who hasn't quite enjoyed a film in the language of Molière while thinking that if this were in English, it would be dismissed as pornography or trash, or both?

Gérard Depardieu, not to everyone's taste though I find him a likeable mixture of vulgarity and rough-diamond charm, has been in at least a couple of movies fitting one or other description. So has Béatrice Dalle.

The thought occurred as I was smarting from a friend's reaction of utter horror at my admission that I had quite enjoyed The Holiday, the lightweight story of two women - played by Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz - who swap homes on either side of the Atlantic for a fortnight.

Not even a defensive aside - "I know it's fluffy but watching it in French I really liked it (even if I haven't much time for Diaz or Jude Law" - did me any good. As far as my friend was concerned, I might as well have told her I had decided that line dancing was cool.

Back came the reply: "I can't believe you liked it. I thought it was terrible....."

Terrible, and just to rub it in, "apart, of course, from Jude Law who looked absolutely divine".

I have not read any reviews in what the French like to call the Anglo-Saxon press, and almost certainly won't now, so have no idea if anyone, anywhere, watching in English, came away smiling.

Perhaps someone can come up with an even more distressing example of a film that grew in stature, or seemed to, just because of the language.

There is no similar excuse for having also enjoyed Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, since everyone sees it with subtitles from the Mayan dialect.

But at least here I am in authoritative company. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who must know what he's talking about since he is my elder daughter's favourite critic and she works in film, overcame real personal resistance to give it a four-star review.

"If people have got it in for Mel Gibson," he wrote, "he has only himself to blame. His behaviour has been repulsive. Everyone is prejudiced against his films. I am prejudiced against his films. So the sentence following this is going to take me quite some time to write, because between every keystroke, there will be a three-minute pause while I clench my fists up to my temples and emit a long growl of resentment and rage.
"Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is pathologically brilliant. It is bizarre, stomach-turningly violent and frequently inspired."

The Graun's recommendations, sadly, appear to carry little weight in these parts.

The version we saw, with French subtitles, proved no Sunday afternoon draw at Le Forum, a cinema tucked away in a small shopping centre just along the coast at La Londes-les-Maures.

The man who took our money - only five euros each - also acted as usher and projectionist. He'd have served the ice creams and popcorns, too, had there been any.

As we entered the surprisingly large salle, he detected our surprise at the row after row of empty seats. "Oui," he said with resignation, "vous êtes quatre."

A little pessimistically, he'd reckoned without a late rush. By the time the film started (only a few moments later since Le Forum doesn't mess about with trailers and ads), we had grown to five.

Abbé Pierre: uncommonly great, uncommonly honest

2007-01-22T14:03:00.000+01:00

You had your Queen Mother, we had Abbé Pierre.

A remarkable priest and what he meant to France were summed up in those nine words. They came in response to my expression of mild surprise
that France 2 had devoted almost the whole of its lunchtime news to his death, aged 94.

Photograph: Abbé Pierre Foundation

There was a significant difference between the Queen Mother and Abbé Pierre. Whereas she was known universally, his was hardly a household name outside France.

At home, though, this friend to the poor, indefatigable battler for the under-privileged was a true saint in the minds of people who shared his concerns and liked his rebellious spirit, but could not hope to match his commitment.

That is why we were treated to reams of old footage with snapshot glimpses of a great man's life, reverential tributes from a succession of studio guests and clips of today's words of praise from everyone who matters or hopes to matter in France.

Chirac, of course; he is actually very impressive in such circumstances, and spoke of France losing "an immense figure, a conscience, and incarnation of good". Then Ségo, Sarko and the lesser presidential candidates.

As someone from France 2 put it, Abbé Pierre's appeal transcended real and supposed barriers; he was adored and admired by young and old, men and women, rich and poor, Left and Right.

In today's small hours, he knew he was dying, beaten by bronchitis, but had no fear of death, we discovered from one of the speakers. A niece, and an executive of the worldwide Emmaus charity network that he created, sat with him and prayed until he breathed his last at 5.25am.

By midday, they were talking of burying him among the greats at the Panthéon, of giving his name to the law on rights for the homeless about to go before the French parliament.

In fact, he had already expressed a clear desire to be laid to rest among colleagues from his 1954 campaign for the poor and unsheltered, during a ferociously cold winter. That will take his bones to Esteville in Normandy, where he lived for most of the 1990s at an Emmaus retirement home.

As for laws in his name, I doubt if he could have cared less. His foundation was not prepared to go beyond giving the legislation a oui mais, seeing it only as a useful start.

But the thing that struck me most about Abbé Pierre during the last two years of his life was that he remained one of his country's most popular citizens even though - perhaps because - he was big enough to own up to human weakness.

Towards the end of 2005, he admitted in a book that he had more than once broken his vow of chastity as a Roman Catholic priest.

Looking at the old television and newsreel film of a good-looking young man - if priests can be swashbuckling, he was - it was not hard to see that temptation would have crossed his path.

There had, he said, been "passing relations" with women, though he had not felt able to commit himself to anything more lasting: "I was very young when I dedicated my life to God and other people.

"I made my vow of chastity, but that did nothing to remove the strength of desire, to which I have succumbed in passing fashion......I could not allow sexual desire to take root. I therefore have known such desire, and on rare occasions satisfied it, but in reality this satisfaction has been a real source of dissatisfaction because I felt I was not being true.

"To be properly satisfying, sexual desire had to express itself in a loving, tender and trusting relationship. That was not open to me because of my chosen life."

I do not know how this went down in the Vatican.

But to their credit, it seems to have mattered not a jot to the French. Only a few months after making these comments, he was voted the third greatest Frenchman of all time, behind only de Gaulle and Pasteur.

Turmoil in the Royal household

2007-01-19T13:50:00.001+01:00

The best thing that Ségolène Royal can say about this week is that she chose a good week to have a bad week.

Good, in the sense that the days following the installation of Nicolas Sarkozy as her chief rival were always going to belong to him, barring some public relations debacle.

Bad, in the sense that exactly such a PR nightmare has beset the Parti Socialiste camp.

Picture: e-diote.

Mme Royal did manage to turn to her eventual advantage one tax issue - her own eligibility for France's notorious wealth tax, with a tendency to hit people who are not wealthy at all that Richard of Orléans has used this blog to explain well.

She gave figures, spoke of transparency and made it look as if disreputable people from Sarko's centre-Right UMP party had been engaged in dirty tricks about her private affairs in an attempt to smear her.

Actually, she used that word racaille that got Sarko into trouble at the start of the 2005 French riots.

The BBC went for the harshest definitions - thugs, scum, filth - which rather overlooked the fact that the word can also mean rabble and is commonly used as such by parents to children and children to other children.

All that matters, of course, is how the target of the term takes it and I am not sure if that is yet recorded.

All in all, Ségo might have emerged smiling from a potentially damaging episode had it not been for three others.

First she had been called upon to slap down her partner, François Hollande, general secretary of the party and routinely portrayed by cartoonists as the henpecked man indoors, when he came out with some contentious thoughts on income tax.

Conservatives seized on the dispute with glee, claiming that the socialist mask had been allowed to slip.

Then Le Monde printed unwelcome details of a party summit behind closed doors at which a defensive Ségo had to justify her low-key, let's appeal to the grass roots sort of campaigning style.

A member had deliberately telephoned a reporter and left the call connected throughout the exchanges.

Worst of all, Ségo has now taken the extraordinary step, for a candidate entering a presidential campaign that appears neck-and-neck, of suspending her spokesman Arnaud Montebourg, a familar face at a time when she needs as many as possible batting for her.

His crime? To say on television: "Ségolène Royal has only one flaw. It's her partner."

M Montebourg says it was a joke. His famously bossy boss said he had been given a well-deserved yellow card, sin-binned for a month. Either way - sense of humour breakdown or poor choice of close aide - the outcome reflects badly on her.

At least, as I began by suggesting, she has packed all these troubles into the same uncomfortable spell.

But she needs a good, swift recovery. How she performs during the rest of these early stages of the campaign may yet prove significant for the many voters whose minds are there to be changed.

Blogjammed and boxed in

2007-01-18T18:51:00.001+01:00

Forgive me for being unable to involve myself in any of today's fascinating banter across recent postings.

Photograph: Daniel W..

Apart from being surrounded by an ever-growing blogjam, if that is an appropriate word to coin, I am chin deep in cartons.

All those boxes of belongings arrived today from Paris, mostly - but with infuriating exceptions - in the unbroken state in which they left.

Normal service may be resumed soon.

But intriguing as I have found the Toby Harnden blog wars - and Bill Taylor's sparring partner Colin Berry deserves credit for getting stuck in where we might have expected a few thoughts from Roy Greenslade - I am resisting an inclination to enter that particular fray.

May I humbly suggest, however, that Colin B takes the sound advice implied by Sarah Hague's comment to him about his own blogging skirmishes?

Salut! ducks punches, spreads wings

2007-01-17T12:09:00.001+01:00

Fear not: they're posing, too
Photographs: Mitamada.

It is pretty much known that if a school fight breaks out in the comments field, my preference is to let the antagonists get on with it.

Sometimes it gets too hot even for my liking and I intervene.

Sometimes, someone makes such a contentious point - and I am not especially referring to all those made by Judge Jeffreys wannabes on a certain Franco-Canadian case - that I am tempted to respond.

But if it is just, say, the routine fisticuffs of Bill Taylor vs Colin Berry, they are big enough to get on with it. I am not sure if it draws people in or drives them away, but it seems harmless enough from here.

Whether or not the recent Anonymous of Links fame is Richard of Orléans, I should point out that I have not specifically banned anyone from my blogroll.

Not getting round to adding someone is a different thing altogether. When I do link, it is because I think the blog/site is relevant or interesting, not because I necessarily like or agree with what I find there.

In Richard's case, there is obviously severe wind-up at play in much of what he has to say.

He clearly prefers France to Britain. The wind-up comes in the attempt to convince us that he looks more fondly on Nazi Germany than on Britain and would cheerfully have faced, at the end of the Second World War, either a Resistance bullet or British gallows.

But I am happy to add his blog to my links, just as I have chosen today to add a completely new site, Salut! Sunderland.

Where Salut! Sunderland may be bound is at this stage anyone's guess.

I just thought it would be helpful to my many football-phobic readers to be assured that Salut! itself will henceforth adopt a (generally) football-free disposition.

Conveniently, I will also tend to agree with the views expressed there by the blogger.

As for alphabetical order, I think that may have to wait. But I am grateful to whoever started clicking away at the ads after my aside the other day.

Just as I was allowing myself to think that this must be good for another dollar-and-a-half on its way, I checked. And the actual figure was 96 cents. At last they're American ones and not Canadian.

The socialist guru among Sarko's new best friends

2007-01-15T14:42:00.001+01:00

French socialists were choking on their coffee and croissants this morning as they took in the small print of Nicolas Sarkozy's speech at the Porte de Versailles shindig launching him as the centre-Right presidential candidate.

Image: lfone.

If the trouble with French streets is that too many of them are named after Jean Jaurès, as a character remarked in the 1970s Gérard Depardieu film Maitresse, the trouble with Jaurès is that his admirers now apparently include Sarko.

François Hollande, general secretary of the Parti Socialiste and the father of Ségolène Royal's children, thinks the old lefty must be rattling round in the grave to which an assassin consigned him on the eve of France's entry into the First World War.

Hollande did not need to complete his own indignant riposte: "Pauvres Jaurès! If only he had known that one day his name would be cited at a conference of the French Right......."

I dread to think what some of those Right-wing tubthumpers who champion Sarko so enthusiatically would make of his soft spot for Jaurès.

This, after all, was the man who helped create the party of Hollande and Ségo, founded what became France's Communist paper L'Humanité and opposed the Great War (it was his pacifistic objections to the conflict that got him killed).

But let us not forget Margaret Thatcher on the steps of 10 Downing Street, marking her arrival as Prime Minister by adopting the words of St Francis of Assisi.

"Where there is discord, may we bring harmony," she declared. "Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope."

Others were to assess quite harshly how much harmony, truth, faith and hope Maggie and her ministers brought, for example, to east Durham and South Wales.

Hollande may regard Sarko as having misappropriated the heritage of a French socialist hero. The Left-of-centre Libération took a slightly kinder view.

"Can a man who invokes Jaurès, Hugo, Mandel and Zola be wholly bad?" the paper asked. "Can a man who wants an irreproachable democracy be accused of rampant Le Pen-ism? Is a man who talks at length about the rights of the badly housed and the welfare of others be described as ultra-liberal?"

While conceding that there was much of the "well-known Sarkozy cynicism" in all this, the Libé editorialist was gracious enough to conclude that for all that could be said to Sarko's detriment, he had produced an impressive performance.

Over to you Ségo.

Nathalie Gettliffe to be freed

2007-01-12T17:07:00.000+01:00

Since I am one of the few English journalists to take any interest in the Nathalie Gettliffe case - for which I offer no apology - I should briefly note the news that she is finally to be freed tomorrow.

A French court has agreed to her provisional liberty, effectively parole, without requiring her to complete the six further months of imprisonment to which she remained liable when sentenced in Canada last month. She had pleaded guilty to abducting two of her own children in a bitter custody battle.

This second bit of commonsense in a sad and tangled saga (the first being a French court's gesture in granting her some freedom during the festive period) is to be welcomed.

Ironically, had Gettliffe not chosen to be repatriated just before Christmas, she would by now already be free, according to my understanding of procedures in British Columbia.

But is there any provision in Canadian penal practice for the sort of Christmas leave for which she qualified in France?

If not, she was probably better off being with the other half of her family then, even though it meant having to spend another few days in prison pending today's decision.

Of course, we have not heard the end of this affair. But I will stick to my earlier decision and comment only when, as now, there are significant developments.

This blog is not a news agency, as I have said before, and I have not been required to write news articles for anyone about an affair that was deemed a little too foreign for British readers.

That is the main reason why I have felt perfectly at liberty to express an opinion, intolerable as this may have seemed to some.

Elysée election: early result

2007-01-10T17:50:00.000+01:00

And the new president of France is Ségolène Royal.

Photograph by: PS Clichy sous Bois.

Don't just listen to me. Ségo's election in May, it seems, is the logical extension of claims by Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-Right Front National, that he will again make it through to the final round of the race - to face her in the deciding poll.

You would have to take a very dim view of the French to believe that given such a choice, more than a small minority of them would vote for Le Pen.

He naturally takes a different view. And there is some evidence that the opinion polls, which currently give his party only 15-17 per cent of popular support, consistently under-estimate his electoral pull.

But can Le Pen really hope to split the centre-Right vote to such an extent that Nicolas Sarkozy is eliminated in the first round as the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin was in 2002?

As a foreign observer of French politics who identified the presidential potential of Mme Royal some time before most, I am naturally pleased to see my instincts being vindicated.

She has a lead in the national polls, at least on first round voting intentions, and so far seems capable of making light of perceived weaknesses and gaffes.

With her radical - and, says the centre-Right, unworkable - ideas for helping the SDFs (France's great army of homeless people who have been turned into an early election issue), she has even begun to sound a little more Left wing.

This will satisfy some of the doubters in her own Parti Socialiste, who worried about her penchant for New Labour tactics with a French accent, appealing to middle France voters just as Tony Blair once offered olive branches to middle England.

And she has also managed to sound a little more Chiracien, with her echoes during her visit to China of his mantra that the world needs counterbalances to American superpower dominance. This, in turn, will please parts of la France profonde that still approve of the kind of France Jacques Chirac represents, if not of the man himself.

I loved that quote spotted by one of my readers, Richard of Orléans, to the effect that it was a big mistake to think of her as nice but unintelligent when she was in reality highly intelligent but not very nice.

But it won't harm her; in the end, I suspect a lot of French people sympathise with her riposte that what critics see as faults in her - her steeliness and ambition -would be considered virtues in a man.

If I am determined to rule out Le Pen's chances of bringing everlasting shame to France by reaching the Elysée, I am not wavering in my belief that M Sarkozy remains a massive obstacle to Mme Royal (and, of course, to M Le Pen's unappealing prediction).

Sarko will be formally installed as the UMP candidate this weekend and we will then see his campaign enter a much more urgent phase.

He is more than a match for Mme Royal in political debate, though his own female supporters have already urged him to avoid being seen as macho and sexist in his clashes with her.

When he talks about immigration and crime, and backs his words with firm action, he clearly impresses large numbers of voters and speaks their language.

Across the south of France from Marseilles to the Italian border, a new poll suggests, he is way ahead of both the socialists and Le Pen.

Questions have been asked this week about his dual role, candidate and minister (not forgetting that as well as being interior minister, the equivalent of the British Home Secretary, he is No 2 to Dominique de Villepin in government).

But he can be expected to stand down soon as France No 1 Cop - that's how the press likes to describe the interior minister - to concentrate on getting into the Elysée.

De Villepin has said he will not give his formal support to Sarko, but this is no surprise. Usually, of course, they don't even seem to belong to the same party, let alone work together in the top two Cabinet roles.

Since de Villepin notoriously is not even an elected politican, the absence of an endorsement from him will inflict little or no damage on the Sarko campaign. Nor will there be much fall-out from President Chirac's constant put-downs of his interior minister's more robust approach to solving France's problems.

But what of M Chirac's own immediate plans? Until quite recently, he was widely seen as an elderly man going through the motions of seeing out his final months of presidency, moreover a presidency judged by most to have been an abject failure.

In his New Year messages, however, he has taken to making what sound very much like declarations of intent for a further five-year mandate. His stance on the war in Iraq has increasingly been lauded as a rare success of his time as head of state.

Surely the very idea of him standing for a third term of office remains preposterous.

Maybe. But it has been treated by some commentators and political reporters in recent weeks as if well within the bounds of possibility.

The UMP, broadly, doesn't want him, nor does the public. But can we yet be sure? Le Figaro suggested the other day that he was talking up his programme of action for France's future as if he saw himself as the man to put it into effect.

M Chirac's wife, Bernadette, enjoyed causing a bit of mischief a month or two back by suggesting that her husband might yet put himself forward again.

And she did little to discourage the speculation when she stonewalled such questions while appearing on peak time television a couple of nights ago.

If, against all logic, he does stand, what banner will he choose? Since Sarko will be the official UMP choice, we could be looking at a One Nation One People contender offering, essentially, more of the same at just the time when France arguably needs something quite different.

Mme Chi-Chi can't or won't say. After insisting, implausibly, that such matters are simply not discussed between husband and wife, she added that Jacques would not even inform her of his decision until the eve of his eventual announcement.

What if he said he was going for it? Could such a step be sufficiently divisive of conservative voters to make the first part of M Le Pen's analysis come true?

Ruffled feathers

2007-01-09T14:43:00.000+01:00

Apologies for absence from here, and more especially for my absence from the New Year voeux.

Photograph: Harry Halibut.

Sorry to Jacques Chirac, of course, since I fear I won't be in Paris for his annual drinks-for-the-press gathering on Thursday, but also - and no less sincerely - to Gil Bernardi, the mayor of Le Lavandou.

Poor old Gil may already have been feeling left out of things. I see in Var Matin that none of the presidential candidates has sought his blessing, French law decreeing that no one can stand without having secured 500 signatures from around the country.

Then, on the very evening he throws open the salle d'honneur of the town hall to every Thomas, Richard et Henri in town, it must have been especially hard to be snubbed by one of his most recent permanent residents.

But it wasn't a snub at all. I had simply found a better offer: an evening's badminton.

How sad it that? You live in one of the world's most beautiful countries. You abandon its magnificent capital but beach up in one of its lovelier regions.

And all you can think to do, when the mayor invites you to sup with him and hear of his plans, is to whack a shuttlecock around a sports hall.

Guilty.

There are mitigating factors, however. Working from home - or, more accurately, living at work - is no aid to keeping fit. It seemed in Paris that I was either darting from one end of the country to another, or (rather more often) merely darting across the corridor from bedroom to work station. It wasn't a bad commute.

In Le Lavandou, things have already changed. Mme Randall has imposed a sensible regime of less wine, less bread, more salad and lots of steps. Steps?

Yes, foolishly enough, we live on the top of a hill. To go anywhere, there is a winding road, and there are steps. Joëlle has decided that I/we should take the steps, which are beyond the old BMW's powers to negotiate.

Yesterday, going for the baguette bien cuite, I counted them down and then counted them up, and there are 136 of the things. Some of them may well be shown here once I overcome one of those technical problems of mine and manage to upload some new photos to an unfamiliar and unwelcoming computer.

That sort of exercise is all very well and good provided, in stick and carrot terms, there is also the promise of a ball to chase and kick or, in my case, the feathers of some poor goose to tempt my racket.

The mayor was just unlucky to have chosen to present his voeux at the same time as, I discovered, you could play badminton at a sports centre on the outskirts of his town.

No disrespect, Gil, but also no contest and I trust you appreciate how enthusiastically I took advantage of local facilities.

French badminton clubs are probably much the same as French anything else clubs, that is to say not clubs at all. Are the French just too single-minded for clubs?

Certainly, I retain unfond memories of my experiences at the prestigious Racing Club de France in Paris, where people arrived with their own friends/playing partners, their own shuttles and their own resolve to nab a court from which they would not budge all night.

No hint of the sensible British system of pegs and boards and shaking things around to make sure everyone plays and little cliques don't simply stick together.

Ming, mentioned in my posting about hits and misses from Paris, was my saviour, introducing me to a much friendlier club which had begun life as an out-of-hours social amenity for post office employees but probably has few members these days who even buy stamps.

Even there, if Ming wasn't present to prove I knew someone, it could be tough to break into ready-made foursomes.

Photograph: trevor.

But I think I will take to badminton in Le Lavandou. For a slightly selfish reason.

Southern France has taken longer than the rest of the country to cotton on to the joys of this wonderful sport, with the result that a basic club-standard basher like me can look half decent among those who have taken it up.

And on my first night, there was therefore no shortage of people wanting to play with me.

Paris: hits and misses, and a miss to miss

2007-01-03T11:09:00.000+01:00

This blog is no longer the preserve of a Parisian, so perhaps it is too early to be too dogmatic about what to look back on with a smile and what to be glad to see the back of.

But here goes anyway:

Picture: JammyCat.

What I'll miss:

* The sheer man-made beauty of both banks of the Seine

* The Métro. Parisians complain, of course, but it almost always worked for me

* Eurostar within easy reach

* Being able to get Indian food delivered to the door (even the Parisian version is better than nothing)

* Rebecca. Who is Rebecca Schofield? Bill Taylor asked the question when I used Rebecca's computer to make an e-mail response to his photo website.
She is, or was, my assistant. As an Englishwoman living in Paris (with a rural bolt hole), and as wife, mother, go-getter and unrivalled collector of friends, she knows just about everything about living in France

* And Rebecca will miss being reminded of Robin, the young work experience visitor who wrote in his subsequent school project of her dynamism and her ability to keep her desk tidy "amidst general disorder". He also lopped 15 years off our ages

* That view. I tried my best to give the impression of being blasé, but you cannot keep a straight face for long while feigning indifference to a panorama that begins with the Louvre, takes in the Tuileries with the Musée d'Orsay, twin spires of Ste Clotilde and the Assemblée Nationale as backdrop before arriving at the Eiffel Tower via Invalides and the Champs Elysées. Breathtaking

* Keeping relatively fit by fast-walking circuits of the Tuileries

* Parisian jazz

* Lifts to Parisian badminton clubs from Ming Lam, my friend from the Auberge des Gourmets Chinese restaurant.

* Being able to walk to functions at the Elysée, Quai d'Orsay or British Embassy. In fact, being able to walk to most places in the city centre

* Easy access to live English football whether or not you secretly have one of those Sky cards at home

And what I won't:

* The price of everything from mushroom omelette and chips to an unremarkable baguette in the 1st arrondissement

* The army of beggars. Paris seems to have more than most cities and a large proportion seems genuine, distinguishing them from the shift working professionals I have seen in action from Lyons to London. If the current wave of protests in support of France's SDFs - sans domicile fixe - inspires effective, humane action, it has my blessing

* Having to count a few extra seconds as drivers whizz by after pedestrian crossing lights turn green, and even then venturing out warily

* The feeling at the height of summer that there is no escape from the clammy heat

* Clanking old lifts that spot heavy bags a kilometre off and render themselves en panne

* And yes, there has to be more. But for once, I have run out of negative thoughts.....for now.

Zizou: the ifs and butts

2007-01-02T11:01:00.000+01:00

It does not take much insight into the English way of seeing and doing things to imagine the repercussions had one of our World Cup squad ended his career in Zinedine Zidane fashion.

Picture: Kaptain Kobold.

An English Zidane would have been torn to pieces by press and public, hounded from pillar to post and left feeling he alone had cost his country victory.

In time, he would have been able to shrug off Most Hated Public Figure status. But he would never have been allowed completely to forget the moment of shaming stupidity.

And he most certainly would not, less than six months after the event, have been named his country's most popular personality in a respectable opinion poll.

But that is what has happened in France. Zidane's act of violence, butting the oafish Italian Marco Materazzi under some verbal provocation, has not so much been forgotten as ignored or understood or even applauded by the French public.

Zidane was one of my two favourite footballers of his time, another Frenchman - Thierry Henry - being the other. But my admiration for his consummate skill did not lead me to overlook his appalling disciplinary record - 13 red cards, more than a few of them for behaving as a lout.

On the morning after the last dismissal of Zidane's career contributed greatly to the wrong team winning the 2006 World Cup, the French sports daily L'Equipe gave front page prominence to a stern, headmasterly piece asking how he would explain his coup de tête to millions of youngsters who looked to him as a role model.

That is about as long as Zizou's humiliation lasted.

Later the same day, President Chirac cleverly sensed and exploited what was quickly becoming the public mood, and welcomed the French squad back to Paris as returning heroes and making light of Zidane's disgrace.

Before long, a jolly pop record glorifying the assault on Materazzi was all over the radio and in the charts.

An interview in which Zidane explained himself - a bit, and with regret but not apology - was to become the most-viewed Canal+ programme of the year. And someone in Italy began marketing sweatshirts showing two figures simulating the incident.

So which approach is right? I tend to agree with those who feel the British are far too quick to build 'em up and bring 'em down.

David Beckham did not deserve the abuse he received for the petulance that brought him a red card in France 98. Football is a game of passion and a player should not be consigned to eternal shame for a sudden loss of control.

But nor does Zizou deserve to be hailed the people's hero so soon after setting such an appalling example.

The French who voted for him acted like those parents from hell whose idea of supporting little Darren and Jason in a school match is to jump up and down on the touchline urging children to replicate the excesses of millionaire superstars they see on the telly.

Small town blues, lucky red smalls

2006-12-31T17:38:00.000+01:00

Tastier baguettes for under 50p, sunshine instead of freezing fog and a view with room taking the place of a room with a view.

One of the things I liked even less about living in the heart of Paris than the high cost of everyday purchases was that in common with most others sharing the experience, I had no outside space.

Of course the Tuileries were opposite, the Luxembourg gardens and other parks were within easy reach and Paris lives up to its City of Light image in splendid fashion.

But there is something about being able to go outside and still be at home.

A terrace, as we have here in the Var, is one great asset - and it was almost warm enough to eat lunch on it today. A modest garden, like the one we left behind in London, is another.

In Paris, even a small balcony would have sufficed provided we could have sat outside on it.

If the terrace here, with its uninterrupted view across the hills, is something for which to be mightily grateful, small town life may take some getting used to.

I spent all but the earliest three months of my first 23 years in Shildon, County Durham (being born in Hove is naturally a source of both shame and constant impudent reminders from friends).

Then I had short spells elsewhere in Durham - Darlington, Hobson (though not by choice, I used to say) and Newton Aycliffe - before moving to London. And for the past 30-odd years, it's been the big city: Bristol, another stay in London and finally Paris.

Wandering around Le Lavandou today, I was impressed as ever by the palm trees, the lovely bay and the sea air.

But lots of bars, shops and restaurants had congés annuels signs up. Tonight's fireworks display drew a fair-sized crowd to the promenade, but it still did not truly feel like a place that was "lively all year round", as my wife was assured the last time she had her hair done here.

Time - and the occasional reference on Salut! - will doubtless tell.

But I should add that things did look up a little on the marina, where a poster for the Equateur nightspot promised a hip réveillon. Customers were offered two bits of advice: book early and wear red underwear "for good luck".

It wasn't until I switched on the news an hour or so later that I discovered that the second part of the advice - red knickers for New Year's Eve fortune - was a recent tradition originating in Italy.

If, in the coming days, anyone comes across a beaming Bill Taylor - Salut! regulars will know he is spending tonight in Rome - they may be able to guess what he packed before leaving Toronto.

Bonne année to all.

Gone today, Hyères tomorrow

2006-12-28T12:33:00.001+01:00

Salut! is on the move.

Surrounded by cartons stuffed with millions of folk CDs, football fanzines and books on everything from the French revolution to the history of badminton, we bid farewell to Paris.

Specifically, it is adieu to the rue de Rivoli, our grand if not very homely home for the past two-and-a-half years. Part of the magnificent view from the living room is captured inexpertly here (where's Bill when you need him?).

Tomorrow, we will pass the busy little Mediterranean town of Hyères - which really has nothing much to do with this except that I couldn't resist the title - on the final approach to Le Lavandou and a new life there.

There is little time between filling in insurance forms and supervising the removal of our belongings to say much more, and there is also little need.

But what will I tell my neighbour Jacques Chirac? Despite our ups and downs, the president has gamely invited me back to the Elysée for the New Year's drinks reception he throws for journalists each January.

This, we can safely assume, will be his last such voeux, and it looks as if I shall be among absentees.

And the loss of presidential office will mean that the Chiracs will also no longer be our neighbours in the Var, since their holiday home at, the Fort de Brégançon, goes with the job. But somehow I feel our paths will cross again.

I'll be back here soon enough once we've settled in, with reflections on what I will and will not miss about Paris. In the meantime, I will lift France in Flashes near the top of the blog in case the more recent additions inspire further comment.

France in flashes.....9

2006-12-28T12:30:00.001+01:00

Soon I will be leaving Paris, but not France. Two-and-a-half years in the City of Light is not much of a milestone but it's the longest I've lived anywhere outside London since the 1980s.

Thanks to this Parisian phase of my life, and indeed to living in France generally,
I am able to start listing - in no special order - a few of the things I now know.

It is a work in progress; the number in the headline will change each time I have a flash of inspiration and want to add something and - as now - I may bring it to the top of the blog.

New thoughts will always appear first in the list but the earlier comments from readers are at the original posting.....feel free to find inconsistencies with what I wrote in 2003.

************** WHAT I KNOW NOW **************

* Paris may not, despite a former colleague's insistence, be the City of a Thousand Bad Restaurants. But I am up to double figures and truly believe London now has a distinct edge on quality, variety and service - though not always value.

* Provincial France is still streets ahead for eating out. But my search for a good Indian restaurant seemed doomed to failure until I stumbled the other night upon Le Royal Shah Jahan at Enghien Les Bains, where 95 (Val d'Oise) meets bad old neuf-trois (Seine St Denis). Easily the best I've had in France. It was our friends' fallback idea after their first choice, at Argenteuil, turned out to be full.

* The French press is more decent - and more dull - than its British counterpart. One (French) theory, heard again today, holds that the country has just two seriously good daily papers: L'Equipe for sports lovers and Mon Quotidien (plus stablemates) for kids.

* Anyone who voluntarily leaves a proper job in France, even a job he or she loathes, is considered mad unless there is something immediate fixed up.

* From the millionaire to the man on the Boulevard Masséna tram, French people know how to appreciate good food. The mountainous plateau de fruits de mer served to my table yesterday could have been ordered at either end of that spectrum (and indeed was, though I'm not saying which).

* And at both ends, they know how tipping is done at the restaurant in France: sparingly or not at all, and without hint of self-consciousness.

* People who insist you should never dine in or near railway stations don't know Paris. Two of my best eating experiences have been at the Brasserie Terminus Nord directly opposite Gare du Nord and, complete with fabulous arty decor, Le Train Bleu inside the Gare de Lyon.

** Châtelet is probably the grimmest of Métro stations unless you are going through without stopping, but if you do have to change, alight or board there, it also has the best buskers on the system.

* When a Parisian receptionist welcomes you with the question: "Is someone behind you?", this is not because she assumes such a nice person would surely have friends queuing up to accompany you. It's her way of telling you to close what you thought was an automatic door, and sharpish.

* Charles de Gaulle airport is not, repeat NOT, the least user-friendly place in the world to fly to or from. Not quite. But getting to terminal three offers a strong challenge to that view.

* Toulon, the nearest town of any size to where I'll be living come January - at least in the short term - has been placed bottom or second bottom in league tables for economic activity, employment, culture and heaven knows what else. Have I made a dreadful mistake? The eastern city of Nancy, which I have never visited, came top in one of these palmarès des villes.

* Policemen on roller skates and - when deployed as traffic cops - bicycles will always look like something out of a French farce.

* Marks & Spencer should be ordered to re-open its Paris store. Don't take my word for it; ask a native Parisian.

* The French are not the worst drivers in Europe and probably not even the second or third worst.

* It is therapeutic to swear in English at psychopathic drivers who try to mow you down on green at pedestrian crossings. But this is not advisable if you happen to be having a mobile phone conversation with a charming American lady at the same time.

* If you want to find out something from a French ministry, make friends with a French official in London. Exposure to le modèle Anglo-Saxon will have given him a hint of urgency.

* Power walking or gentle jogging in the Tuileries is not recommended for those liable to feel like physical wrecks in the presence of superfit Parisian sapeurs pompiers.

* Arriving on time, for dinner, drinks or similar, is a serious gaffe. Getting there early is positively insulting and destined to bring social exclusion.

* Gard du Nord handles people more efficiently than Waterloo. And no one there will try to serve you wine in a cardboard cup.

* Anna Perry was right. The Champs Elysées may look pretty when lit up for Christmas - see above for photographic support, however amateurish, for that claim - but feels ugly and naff most of the time and, at the bottom end, menacing late at night.

* Brits who want to live in France, but stick to English-speaking ghettos and recoil in horror from any idea of integration, bring disgrace on their country and should go home.

* French reality and game shows are even worse than those on British TV. And French television generally is dire.

* Leaving Paris on a TGV feels much better than coming back.

* Coming back to Paris on Eurostar feels much better than leaving.

Here's an explanation I prepared earlier

Yule blog

2006-12-25T19:40:00.000+01:00

Christmas Day just isn't the same in France.

Not my view necessarily but that of the French person I know best, the woman I am married to.

"We all go back to work on the 26th so it's more like our Boxing Day," she commented as we drove back through fairly heavy traffic from Le Mans to Paris.

And it is true that Christmas Eve, the time for le réveillon, feels much more, well, Christmassy. Lots of shops were open in Le Mans and Paris today, some of them the sort of shops that might be in trouble if they thought of opening on a Sunday.

But let me forget all that for a moment and welcome my great nieces Manon and Clara into the world.

Well, they've been here for three weeks now but yesterday, deep into La Sarthe where they live with their parents, Christophe and Karline, we had our first meeting.

It made more of an impact on me than on them, but they did put up very sportingly with camera flashes and being hoisted out of their cots to be cooed over.

The twins so far have no known views on the French presidential elections, or even the Nathalie Gettliffe case, but they join me in wishing a very happy Christmas - and an even better Boxing Day - to anyone who may be up and about in the blogosphere tonight.

Christmas lesson in school catering

2006-12-23T08:47:00.000+01:00

Nothing would have been too good for the working classes (of the Notre-Dame de la Providence school)

School dinners were a fairly grim business in my day.

From lumpy mashed potato and even lumpier snagger - a vile turnip purée - to watery gravy and stringy meat, the fare had little to redeem it, save for the occasional chocolate or ginger pud.

Of school Christmas lunch, I have only the vaguest memory. I realise that turkey must have played its part but cannot even remember that.

In a new spirit of being kind to Canada (now that we have Bill Taylor's admission that its justice system is based on "deals"), I should share the joke he cracked when I told him a few years ago I was going to Cape Breton (Nova Scotia, not the one in France).

I look back fondly on a visit to a beautiful part of the world blessed with ample supplies of crustaceans but also beset with more than its fair share of economic woe.

"The children are so poor they have to go to school with lobster sandwiches," the sage of Toronto gravely informed me.

But if disgusting school food is a character-forming part of growing up, the pupils of Notre-Dame de la Providence school in Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, will turn out to be a spineless lot.

They didn't quite dine on seafood from the Marché St Honoré in the 1st arrondissement (above). But just look at the Christmas bouffe that was served up.

Menu de Noël
Maternelles & Général
Jeudi 21 décembre

Foie gras
Saumon
Jambon de pays

Magret de canard
Filet de dorade royale

Pommes smile
Poêlée de légumes

Brie

Clémentine
Bûche de Noël glacée
Chocolats de Noël

Bon appétit...

The friend whose son was offered that feast tells me he was "gobsmacked" (I preferred "his eyes nearly popped out" but they should be his words) when he saw the choices for each course.

"My school meal at Christmas was gruel plus an extra hunk of bread as a treat," he said sadly. "But that's English public schools for you."

Var humbug? Not likely. Joyeux Noël à tous

2006-12-21T10:57:00.000+01:00

Over the coming days, I may need to beg a large degree of patience and understanding from Salut!'s faithful followers and casual visitors.

It is not that the blog's management has decided to give me Christmas off in recognition of the long, unpaid hours of labour since the blog's launch in October. Nor is it awarding an end-of-year bonus for all that willingness to embrace new ways, new technology.

The plea of poverty is not quite the whole story in any case. In truth, I am excitedly awaiting my first payment for your clicks on targeted advertisements. There is reason to believe that the figure may well stretch beyond cents into dollars (though in low single figures).

But leave aside Christmas, arrival of daughters, family visit to Le Mans and even - on the box tomorrow - Crystal Palace vs my beloved under-achievers Sunderland.

There is the imminent move to consider.

This time next week, we shall be hitting the road in our elderly, sans clim' BMW and exchanging the famous room with a view over the Tuileries for a home from which you can see, beyond the rooftops of other houses, for miles across the hills of the Var.

Monette, accustomed to a swish, mollycoddled life as a Parisian chat d'intérieur, will have to learn about the outside world. And about other cats. We'll have to see how the geraniums get on without polluted Parisian air.

Before the removal men arrive, there are a million cardboard boxes still to fill with CDs, books, files, clothes and whatever. A mail redirection form to fill in. Change of address cards to send; "no, sir, we don't sell them, they're found uniquement à la Poste," I was told in a stationery shop though la Poste insisted they'd stopped stocking them ages ago.

If I get the chance, I will blog, but it would be unwise to make too many promises. For now, then, allow me simply to wish all my readers, supporters and critics alike, a fine festive season.

In particular, I hope that Nathalie Gettliffe is able to derive some enjoyment from her short spell of freedom, granted smartish - and rightly, of course - very soon after her repatriation to France.

She has to return to prison after Christmas, pending legal moves to obtain a more permanent release.

But as one who does not consider that French justice always works as it should, I am delighted to applaud the judge who reached the sort of compassionate decision that seemed beyond the thinking of Canadian counterparts.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of scope for comment in recent postings and the responses received so far, so don't ignore croissants, culottes, Diana and the forever growing France in Flashes.

Meanwhile, Salut! has notched up two notable new achievements this week: the total hits passed 20,000 and profile visits 1,500. That, in two-and-a-half months, isn't bad for a blog described here recently as dying the death.

Salut! salutes Asian royalty

2006-12-20T11:05:00.000+01:00

Just when I had decided that my famous search for a good Indian restaurant in France was a fool's mission, I chanced upon this unexpected gem.

There is a mention in my updated France in Flashes posting - up to version number 8 now with new additions, though these did not quite justify lifting the file to the top of the blog again.

Le Royal Shah Jahan is out in the Parisian suburbs at Enghien-les-Bains, where the intermittently pleasant Val d'Oise meets the often very unpleasant Seine-St-Denis. The well known Enghien lake is just along the road.

It took an age time to find anywhere to park, but everything about
the restaurant itself was right.

My old standby, chicken tandoori, was by a long shot the tastiest I have come across in France. All that was missing was the sizzling onion, but I have given up expecting that here.

My wife and her friend from childhood have both lived in England, so asked for their vindaloos to be hotter than the Pakistani-owned restaurant would normally serve to squeamish French customers. Both expressed delight with the results.

Peter, the friend's British husband, who has lived in Paris far longer than he hasn't, was slightly less impressed with his chicken tikka masala. Maybe that is a dish best sampled only in the place where it was invented - Britain.

But even he was content when the waiter produced some Indian lager, which may be not be that much better than the usual Kronenbergs and Heinekens, lager essentially being lager, but somehow always seem so.

Curiously enough, we dined there only because our friends' first choice was full. Since we're very much in countdown mode now - leaving Paris between Christmas and New Year - there is no time to try the restaurant Peter and his wife had intended to take us, Le Diplomat in Argenteuil.

I already know nothing better awaits me in the Var. So the Le Royal Shah Jahan can take comfort that its new crown, from Salut!, is safe for now.

And the winner is......

2006-12-19T16:55:00.000+01:00

Q: What kind of baker has his own press attaché? A: One who makes the best croissant in Paris.

And who says Pierre Hermé's croissants are tops? The team of six judges assembled by Le Figaro's midweek magazine Scope to munch its way through 64 of them.

All the competing croissants were bought on the same morning across the capital and then judged according to appearance, smell, flavour, price and even the welcome received by those doing the round of bakers and - let me be fairer to M Hermé - pâtisseries.

Actually replicating Le Figaro's operation presented obstacles. At any rate, it did when it came to Salut! second guessing the judges by paying its own visit to the winner's shop.

Scope helpfully gave M Hermé's address as 72 rue de Bonaparte, which threads through the Latin Quarter to St Sulpice and beyond.

Maybe Salut! was having a bad day. It cannot, of course, hope to have a bad hair day.

But look for yourselves. Would it not be entirely possible to see no 72 from the other side of the street and conclude that the magazine must have made a mistake?

For here is a shop that sells croissants and cakes but has a façade that looks rather more like that of an upmarket jeweller. It took a return trip to confirm that those small windows contained not necklaces and bracelets in 18 carat gold but M Hermé's less durable creations.

I hate to quarrel with a winner. But questions really need to be asked about an item associated throughout the world with breakfast but not sold before 10am.

In fact, even 10am proved a variable sort of opening time.

The door was not unlocked until four minutes had gone by after the sounding of the bell atop the nearby 6th arrondissement town hall.

If M Hermé feels this was a trivial delay, he may be interested to learn that by then, half the queue - OK, two people - had also gone by. They didn't even look back.

Once inside the shop, however, you found that service came with a broad smile. My four croissants, costing 1.20 euros each, were packed by the pretty, cheerful assistant as carefully as if she were wrapping delicate porcelain.

But it took another 10 minutes to pay. Pretty, cheerful assistant was not interested in receiving payment; a colleague at the till was in charge of that. Inconveniently for me, she was also in charge of taking Christmas orders.

The town hall bell for a quarter past rang out soon after I left the shop. It seemed a long time to have spent making such a small purchase in an uncrowded shop.

Had Mr Hermé been present, and willing to interrupt his labours for a couple of minutes, I would have asked what was the secret of his success, why he opened so late and whether I was right long ago to think croissants absolutely had to be served hot.

But he was not present. "Pas ce matin," the assistant replied. Oui, mais plus tard? Non.

Thinking it would then be a simple matter of arranging a quick telephone interview, I outlined my mission. "I'll give you a number for his attaché de presse," came the response.

The questions, therefore, will have to wait. Salut! cannot afford airs and graces but also has no wish to start negotiating on small print for an interview with a croissant-maker. Next, he'll be wanting copy control or banning any reference to flakiness and crumbs.

In any case, we can surely rely on Scope sufficiently to trust the thoughts attributed to him after the results were pronounced. The great croissant, M Hermé confided, needed a dry and crunchy texture. The buttery taste had to betray a perfect balance between salt and sugar.

When M Hermé wandered off into "I hear the cry of the croissant....it's alive, the soul of its creator" territory, I felt it was time just to get on with eating the wretched thing.

So, just after 11am and in the knowledge I would soon be meeting friends for lunch, I had my late breakfast.

It was good, very good, and I was content to eat it cold.

But I would have had more difficulty thsn the judges in finding it so much better than all the rest. Or in relegating last year's winner - Julien, located on the rue St Honoré - to seventh place, or last year's third placed contender (a Paul branch on the rue de Seine, not far from M Hermé) as low as 24th. Unless, of course, Paul served the undercover buyer a 2005 croissant.

Diana: not the last word

2006-12-18T08:56:00.000+01:00

Picture: Paul Cooper

The cover of Private Eye after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales showed crowds milling outside Buckingham Palace at the start of an astonishing week in the history of relationships between the Royal Family, the people and the press.

Beneath the headline Media to Blame, the quote bubbles brilliantly captured the public mood in all its hypocritical glory.

"The papers are a disgrace," declared one person.

"Yes, I couldn't get one anywhere," agreed another while a third offered reassurance: "Borrow mine. It's got a picture of the car."

No one from paparazzi to Prince Philip came out of the affair particularly well, as we are reminded by Stephen Frears's outstanding film The Queen, with its string of superb character readings from Mark Bazeley's Alastair Campbell to the incomparable Helen Mirren's monarch.

Royalty was left looking cold and unfeeling, media obsession with the image of Diana was seen to have assumed grotesque proportions and there were aspects of the mass outpouring of grief that seemed more than a little disturbing.

As for the accident itself, that is all it ever was.

Despite the preposterous conspiracy theories, three people died in the underpass at the Pont de l'Alma because the driver was way over two limits - drink and speed.

Yet nothing in Lord Stevens's report on the affair will stop Mohamed Fayed, aided and abetted by his chums at the Daily Express, from banging on about an Establishment plot to murder a princess rather than risk her marrying a Muslim.

There has yet to be an intelligent explanation of how even the most skilled of secret agents could orchestrate each circumstance of a car crash of the sort that happened in Paris in August 1997.

No one has ever described how these murky operatives were able to ensure that one, two or three people would die in the sort of collision from which more fortunate occupants might emerge alive (especially if, unlike Diana and her friend, Fayed's son Dodi, they were wearing seatbelts). And if they could not ensure the outcome, what exactly would have the purpose of the enterprise?

But as I have remarked before, the blinding stupidity of the murder-in-the-tunnel theory has not discouraged plenty of ostensibly normal people from believing the unbelievable. And nor will it do so in future.

Yes, I realise that the obvious time for these thoughts was the end of last week, when I was busy on other things in London. A late contribution to the debate was inspired by calls from two friends who, because they had to plough through the 832 pages of Lord Stevens's report, alerted me to my own passing mention.

Back in 1997, I remained in London for a week or two covering the repercussions there. Then I was asked to go to Paris to research a substantial account of what was known, and what was being said, about the accident.

The piece appeared at huge length in the Telegraph's Weekend section and prompted a protest from Michael Cole, the BBC royal correspondent who had become Fayed's publicity director.

Had the Press Complaints Commission upheld Cole's complaint, the logic would have been that an article head City of Rumour, dealing exhaustively with whatever details and claims had emerged about the accident, should somehow avoid mentioning anything deemed hurtful (however much in the public domain it already was).

The two rumours in question were that the princess was pregnant with Dodi's child and that traces of cocaine had been detected in the crashed Mercedes. Rumours, remember, and both well publicised before I portrayed them as part of the "wilder speculation" surrounding the accident.

Fortunately, the PCC seems to have had no difficulty in understanding what Cole could not: namely that it was perfectly proper to make passing reference to such matters. Furthermore, it was perhaps obvious to the more careful reader that I had not swallowed either proposition.

So in 1997, it was "scurrilous" according to Fayed's man, Cole, to suggest (or even to report that others had suggested) that Diana was pregnant, and not a scrap of evidence existed to support such a "damaging" allegation.

Getting on for 10 years later, what do we find when we turn to the Express, the paper that has enthusiastically followed the Mohamed Fayed line? A reminder that the Harrods owner, so loyally served by Cole, believed she was pregnant and that her body was embalmed in order to cover up the fact.

Minutes after the car carrying Diana turned right out of this street, rue Cambon, she lay dying in the wreckage at the Pont de l'Alma

Cole, who only this summer justified his complaint against me by saying it was "cruel and wrong to speculate about those so recently dead", is now quoted as saying Diana, on the last occasion he saw her, was "bubbling over like there was a little secret inside her that was making her happy".

The complaint to the PCC was thrown out. I await Cole's belated apology, but with breath unbated.

After accusing me of being cruel and wrong, he is too busy telling us that the Stevens report - which Diana's own sons believe should bring an end to conjecture - will not be the last word.

France in flashes.....8

2006-12-15T18:19:00.001+01:00

Marine Le Pen and the pink culottes

2006-12-13T13:56:00.000+01:00

The National Front is a Nazi front. So the counter-demonstrators always chanted when I was reporting on its marches, and I am quite sure they held similar sentiments about Jean-Marie Le Pen’s French equivalent, the Front National.

But is Le Pen’s daughter Marine trying to force the party to change Nazi front to Nicer front?

Among a set of new posters she launched for the party’s 2007 presidential election campaign was one showing a young woman of obvious Arab origin in Le Pen supporting mode.

“Ils ont tout cassé,” the girl says, thumb down as she echoes the FN’s contemptuous judgment on the mainstream French Left and Right: roughly speaking, they’ve failed you, the French, on all the issues that matter.

She does not leave it there. The pose finds her alongside four keynote symbols of your nicer Front National – nationality, integration, social mobility, secularism.

And, horror of horrors, she is wearing not a modest headscarf and sensible all-over clothing but low-slung jeans, showing bare midriff and – clearly enough to give the FN’s old codgers heart failure - the top of her pink knickers, or culotte rose as the French press helpfully puts it.

The girl’s deeper thoughts on immigration are so far unrecorded, at least to my knowledge. Le Pen himself certainly hasn't changed; he was getting agitated again on the subject only the other day, accusing the French government of lying about the true scale of immigration from the Third World.

But then I am currently in London and the French press may for once have set about doing what the British papers would already have done in similar circumstances and unearthed our lepéniste maghrébine.

Le Figaro's coy account of the affair quotes a prominent FN official with a name splendidly evocative of both militarism and Germany, Martial Bild, as acknowledging that the mode of dress may be “too much” - uttered in English for effect – for some.

But Marine Le Pen, the FN's vice-president and strategic director of its Elysée campaign, insisted that no one was challenging the principles behind the poster campaign. The only reservations, she said, concerned the visible thong.

“Some French people of immigrant origin are aware of the failure (of Left and Right) and a lot of those are turning to Jean-Marie Le Pen for answers,” she added.

Even old lags, I suppose, should be allowed a chance of rehabilitation.

But while Martine Le Pen and Martial Bild congratulate their party for moving forward in a positive way and doing what would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, I have one nagging spoilsport thought.

If the Front National is no longer to be an odious party of racism and other base human instincts, what is it for at all?

Last tangos in Paris

2006-12-11T12:03:00.001+01:00

Picture: Paul Cooper

With the ticking of the clock growing louder, it seemed a good idea to make a last visit, at least as temporary Parisians, to one of our favourite jazz clubs.

The paradox of Paris jazz is that while people who know about these things say standards of musicianship and presentation have never been higher, musicians and club owners moan that times are hard*.

Consider the glorious history of jazz in this city and you realise that the first part of that proposition is praise indeed.

But the music is caught in a vicious circle. It can be difficult to get into certain clubs on certain nights but this is partly because the number of venues has been steadily shrinking.

Tourists with plenty of spending power still clamour for tables, but natives on average French incomes find the cost prohibitive.

Drinks and, when served, food set you back a small fortune, the band is still playing by the time public transport is shutting down, parking is a nightmare and cabs are elusive as well as dear.

First choice Saturday was l'Arbuci, a famous joint along the rue de Buci. The telephone conversation went something like this:

"Hello, do you have music tonight?"

- but of course, sir.

"What kind of jazz is it this evening?"

- a trio.

"Would they be modern jazz? Traditional?........"

- traditional, sir.

"Very good. Can I book a table please?"

- Sorry, sir, but we're full.

An utterly French exchange.

Le Bilboquet was a perfectly acceptable as second best. Tucked away in a street off the Boulevard St Germain, opposite one of those "secret sauce" steak restaurants where people actually queue outside in the cold, boasts a rich heritage; Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Miles Davis all played there.

It has been a frequent source of pleasure during my Parisian adventure. On Saturday, the club was again heaving, with what looked like a French office party taking over more than half the tables and foreign visitors most of the rest.

When I say prices are steep, I am not exaggerating. You leave with the feeling that you have not so much pushed the boat out as mustered the entire flaming fleet.

The food was excellent but simple. In ordinary circumstances, you might quarrel with 35 euros as the price of a pair of modest starters: girolle mushrooms cooked in garlic and tomato mozzarella. The grilled tuna, a dependable main course, was as succulent as ever, as it rather should be at 30 euros a head.

By the time you've added drinks, even from the bottom end of the range on offer, you can see which way the bill for two is going.

But you've also heard some great music - Le Bilboquet is a mecca for fans of rollicking boogie woogie, though Saturday's fare was the Brazilian chanteuse Catia Werneck, more sophisticated if less fun.

The club has the band to pay as well as the cost of running the restaurant and bar, and the entertainment is built into the menu prices.

Yes, it hurts to pay quite so much for an evening out, even when service is superb and the ambiance perfect, but this is an expensive part of an expensive town. All in all, in other words, you are not ripped off.

Walk a short way along the boulevard, order a small Leffe beer and menthe a l'eau at Le Mabillon, and you'll get little change out of 15 euros.

And the only distraction there yesterday, if you don't count the bawling of fractious twins and equally fractious parents, was that old Parisian standby: a game of Spot the Waiter, with long gaps between each sighting.

* An easy search of the Telegraph website will turn up the original version of this article. For a reason unknown to me, direct links from Salut! to the Telegraph do not always work.

Pardon the French

2006-12-08T12:04:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I back the right horses.

This year's Carpette Anglaise awards, more barbed bouquets than trophies and given to those considered to have done the gravest disservice to the French language, have gone where Salut! suggested they would.

For the main English Doormat prize, step forward the body of august French dignitaries that is France's Conseil Constitutionnel, or constitutional council.

The council's crime, in the eyes of the French language purists who make up l'Académie de la Carpette Anglaise, involved "numerous" breaches of Article 2 of the French constitution, which declares that the language of the Republic of France is indeed French.

Faut-il conseiller le Conseil?

Specifically this year, the council dismayed the judges by endorsing a London protocol agreement on patents that allows text in English or German to have legal effect in France.

This was one of the two co-defendants I tipped for victory. It would have more fun had the judges opted for my other choice - Philippe Baudillon, France 2's director general, for screening programmes called Top of the Pops and Dancing Show - but the Academy is made of more sombre stuff.

For the international prize, I am pleased to reveal the winner as my clear favourite Ernest-Antoine Seillière, president of the European Business Confederation (UNICE,) for delivering a Brussels speech in English.

This minor affront to the la Francophonie became a cause célèbre only because of Jacques Chirac's contrived tantrum, leading a silly little walk-out as M Seillière began his address.

Marc Favre d'Echallens, secretary of the Carpette Anglaise body representing four associations that defend French, brought me news of the results along with a reminder of the criteria.

In particular, to win the main prize, some member of the "French elite" must distinguish himself (or herself or itself) with great efforts to promote the domination of Anglo-American to the detriment of French.

I have yet to see a reaction from the recipients of these 2006 civic dishonours.

But nor have I seen much evidence that the French in general are about to drop anglicised words and expressions from everyday conversation or writings.

Perhaps ça ne roule pas cool after all.

Decadent distractions

2006-12-06T13:17:00.000+01:00

As culinary experiences go, it had the edge on fish and chips eaten out of paper wrapping, and not even newspaper, while walking from Shepherd's Bush to football at Loftus Road.

Photograph: ParisDailyPhoto (Eric Tenin)

Exactly one week on, just as fans had jostled for position in the fish shop queue on the Uxbridge Road, sharp-elbowed Parisian ladies in cocktail dresses were making their presence felt at the Hotel Lutetia in the grander St Germain des Prés.

But who's to blame them? They'd sat or stood loyally through the 40th annual Prix Culinaire International Pierre Taittinger awards ceremony.

Those able to squeeze into the small hall where the announcements were made had warmly applauded Charly de Wijs, the Dutch winner of this year's prize. The rest nattered a little noisily in an adjoining room.

Trophies presented, it was now time for the serious business of the evening, a sumptuous buffet in the Salon Président of this palatial hotel on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and Rue de Sèvres.

I always feel slightly uncomfortable in the Lutetia. It's the thought that within these walls people were tortured by German agents during the occupation of Paris.

Last night's feeding frenzy deepened that discomfort, though not quite enough to ruin the appetite.

Guests surrounded each serving table, two or three lines deep at the most popular ones, presenting a formidable obstacle to satisfying that appetite.

Fortified by a glass of bubbly, I persevered. It was worth the effort.

The president of the judging panel, Jacques Pourcel, celebrated co-owner with his twin brother of the Jardin des Sens in Montpellier, was lurking close to the first table entering the salon, and this seemed as good a recommendation as you could expect.

With his fellow judges, a well fed looking line-up, M Pourcel had spent part of the day in the kitchens of the Ecole Ferrandi for the deciding round of what Taittinger calls its gastronomic Nobel.

The seven finalists were each asked to prepare a whole turbot cooked with two sauces, one of which had to be Champagne-based. Francophone foodies should consult the fuller description* below.

In any event, Pourcel looked and sounded the kind of man who knew a thing or too about la bouffe, so I hovered close by. He was sampling the duck foie gras creation** of last year's winner, Jérôme Ryon, from the Carcassonne restaurant La Barbacane, and it turned out to be as delicious as anything else on offer around the room.

Before making my retreat - the place was probably too crowded with people I didn't know to enjoy for long - I had muscled my way through to the agneau d'Oc cooked with garlic, watched huge plates of oysters being rushed through by waiters to replenish depeleted stocks and grabbed a slice of Tomme de Savoie from a cheese display that also had Cantin, Beaufort, Chêne and Pigouille.

In a city packed with beggars, it is difficult not to feel a pang of guilt when taking part in such a feast, even if you do leave early. But then, they're unlikely to ask me back again next year.

* Each finalist was asked to prepare: Turbot presenté entier, farci de homard et nappé avec trois garnitures libres, 2 sauces (dont une sauce Champagne et un libre) et une tarte au citron meringuée.

** Full description of M Ryon's contribution to the buffet: Foie gras de canard cuit au naturel, "chouchou" et marmelade d'orange sur une brioche tiède.

End of the road?

2006-12-05T10:05:00.000+01:00

There will be relief among many of my readers that this, barring some unforeseen development or need to reply, is intended as my last word on the Nathalie Gettliffe affair.

From the responses since I first raised the subject, it is clear that some agree the issue was worth airing, a few feel indignation that an outsider should express an opinion on any aspect of Canadian justice and at least one wants me to pipe down and Gett a Liffe.

Reports of the case, on both sides of the Atlantic, have sometimes been confused and confusing. Today, there is a fresh gloss on the 16-month sentence passed on Monday and initially reported as leaving Gettliffe with six months to serve for the abduction of the two children she had with her ex-husband, Scott Grant.

It could be little as four months, we now learn, if she behaves herself in jail, or two if she succeeds in a bid for parole.

All of which reinforces my view that a sentence providing for her immediate release would have been the appropriate one, preferably but not necessarily by means of a suspended term. It is a struggle to think of a rational reason for making her spend this many, that many more weeks inside.

Nathalie Gettliffe is no saint, nor even a model mother whose actions can easily be excused, even if no account of the hearing I have seen describes precisely why she acted as she did.

Nor does she deserve mercy solely because she has already paid heavily for her misdeeds. It is simply my case that there is not a single decent cause to be served by her continued imprisonment.

The interests of deterrence and retribution have been amply met by the detention of an intelligent but misguided woman of previous good character for eight months and throughout a difficult pregnancy.

Being made to give birth while a prisoner, wherever delivery actually takes place, would surely be a pretty stiff punishment for any woman.

But I am even more concerned about the impact on her children, all four of them.

Madam Justice Marvyn Keonigsberg said Gettliffe's vilification of her former husband was one of the most seriously troubling aspects of the case, causing him and their children "immeasurable, perhaps irretrievable harm".

In what way incarcerating her for another two, four or six months can possibly help heal that damage, and make the children happier and more settled with their father, is not clear.

Judge Koenigsberg faced, as she acknowledged and I recognised, a tough task in deciding the right sentence.

I respect her conclusions that Gettliffe deserved severe punishment for encouraging the children to hate their father and "brainwashing" them into believing him to be a brute who belonged to a religious cult.

The view that a more compassionate decision could have been reached is no less respectable.

While I hoped to avoid further comment, some of the reactions justifies this added thought. Certain aspects of the case - and in particular the about-turn made by Gettliffe in its closing stages - frankly baffle me.

Taken at face value, the outcome can be seen - as Le Figaro noted when summing up opinion in France, where she would almost certainly not have been jailed - as "harsh but not scandalous".

Despite criticism from a small number of readers, my very own tricoteuses, the fact is that I repeatedly distanced myself from the extravagant claims of some of Gettliffe's supporters. I expressed no view on her guilt or innocence or on Grant's religious activities, but reported what was being said on both sides, with much more restraint than I have seen elsewhere, including here.

However, I stand squarely by my reasons for raising the matter in the first place. I never believed the world would be a better or safer place because Nathalie Gettliffe was in prison, and still don't.

And I do believe that a mature and civilised democracy should find better ways - does possess better ways - of dealing with a pregnant woman, unconvicted but facing trial, than throwing her in jail.

Nathalie Gettliffe stays in jail

2006-12-04T19:57:00.000+01:00

Nathalie Gettliffe was sentenced tonight to a term that means she will spend a further six months in jail.

The sentence was 16 months. I know little more about a decision that naturally disappoints me and confounds those confident Canadian voices that spoke of a likely release.

In particular, I do not know how the sentence squares with the "credit" scheme for time spent in custody awaiting trial.

It appears that the judge made allowance for only part of the time served. She (the judge) did not, however, go as far as urged by the prosecution, which wanted a sentence that would have kept Gettliffe incarcerated - with or without baby son - for a further 14 months

Gettliffe's continued detention, wrong as I keep saying she was to abduct two of her children in a bitter matrimonial/custody dispute, seems to me to be of value to no one. And least of all does it appear to serve the interests of the children the courts repeatedly said were their main concern.

When I do know more, I will have more to say, though I may wish to wait for more information about the sentencing hearing.

Oh, and the flagship 8pm news programme of France's private TF1 channel was only 15 or 20 minutes behind me with the news.

Adieu to the rue de Rivoli

2006-12-04T15:30:00.000+01:00

Only three weeks to go so we invited the concierge and his wife to our farewell to Paris party. They couldn't make it, though the crown princess who will one day rule as Queen Victoria came instead.

But that's being extravagant with the truth.

The lovely Princess Victoria of Sweden was indeed in our building on the rue de Rivoli, the Daily Telegraph office-cum-apartment that has been our home, shared with a procession of colleagues from London, for two-and-a-half years.

But the nearest she came to attending my shindig was when she bowled over to my wife at the bottom of the lift shaft, assuming her to be part of the Parisian Swedish Circle's welcoming party.

We'd agreed to take it in turns to make sure guests to each function were ushered to the right one.

As it happens, and despite the fact that we were able to secure the presence of not only two ambassadors but the charming and witty Petite Anglaise (leading me to speculate that this must surely outrank one Scandinavian princess), it was not too difficult to make the distinction.

None of those attending our party wore formal evening dress. And, as a mark of the leaner times upon which their hosts had fallen, our guests were mostly carrying bottles or titbits of food, or both.

"Il y a un petit problème," the concierge had said when I asked him to join us and our friends and colleagues for Saturday's modest soirée to mark the end of two eras - mine as a Telegraph journalist and the Telegraph's (rather longer) presence in two of Paris's most chic arrondissements, the 1st and the 8th.

The Swedes had their royal reception, the concierge added in worried tones, and the strict security measures included the stipulation No Press.

Luckily, our neighbours saw the funny side of one minor snag: the majority of our people were indeed likely to be press. In the end, the building somehow accommodated all their guests and all of ours. The sifting process at the lift worked a treat.

To the horror of one or two French friends, we'd promised only a "light buffet" and the more sensible guests dined out before arriving. But the light buffet stretched an awful long way and I fear I shall be eating the remains - cheese, crisps and charcuterie - until we leave for the Var immediately after Christmas.

Living at the office has been a far from ideal arrangement.

But when you peer out from the living room, directly opposite the Tuileries, you get as good a view as you'll find in most parts of Paris.

It runs from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower and takes in all the landmarks in between, and we have been fortunate - despite those benign invasions of our privacy from London - to experience it.

Successive Telegraph correspondents, dating from before the Second World War, have had similar luck, being based in a series of imposing offices in the 1st and 8th arrondissements. Soon, for us, it is to be adieu to the rue de Rivoli, au revoir to Paris.

Among regrets, one sticks out. Why didn't I put more pressure on the mayor of the 14th arrondissement to order the demolition of the Tour Montparnasse, the one ghastly blot on the landscape as seen from our room with a view*.

* Captured here, in photos two and three, by one Bill Taylor, who may have a flawed outlook on penal matters but knows a bit about photography. The first is mine and the last, a family snap taken by me on Tour de France finale day, shows how thin you'd need to be to dine on the balcony.

Lines of disservice

2006-12-04T10:12:00.000+01:00

Imagine the Paris Métro has closed an important section of line one between La Défense and Château de Vincennes. Other parts of the Métro, including the link to Orly airport, are disrupted, too.

Two things would not be happening. No member of staff would be anywhere near a platform to explain to frustrated would-be travellers what was going on, or advise them what to do next.

And no announcement would be made informing people that a good service was operating on all lines.

London does it differently. When I was back there a few days ago, part of the vital Piccadilly Line service to Heathrow was suspended. There were no District Line trains from Acton Town to Ealing Broadway. Another line, from memory the Circle, was experiencing its own problems.

None of which was enough to discourage the cheery London voice from informing passengers, as you have already guessed, that a good service was operating on all lines.

At least London Underground could not be blamed for the grim onward journey to Luton Airport.

The signs said my train was on time, but a verbal announcement warned passengers needing to travel beyond Luton that they would have to take a replacement bus service. Then the phrase "on time" assumed new meaning as the number of minutes to arrival began to rise rather than fall.

When the train eventually turned up, it managed only a short distance before shuddering to the first of three or four stops between stations. Each halt lasted several minutes. Even when the train started to move again, that movement was painfully slow.

Every so often, a muffled voice would appear from a speaker on the roof of the carriage. The word "problem" could be discerned, but little else.

Finally we reached St Albans. There the train stopped, seemingly for good. Loud, clear public address announcements informed people that nothing was moving southbound.

By the time anyone could be persuaded to add some information for those of us stuck on the northbound train - information that turned out to be no more encouraging - passengers were beginning to scuttle off towards the taxi rank.

The usual suspicion in such circumstances is that your train will suddenly depart just as you climb the stairs and spot a queue a mile long for cabs. There seemed little such risk this time, and within a few minutes I was sharing a taxi with a Scot and a German also with flights to catch.

A couple from Waterford (is there anywhere planes don't go to these days?) pooled resources with a Swiss girl. Two builders from County Tyrone were already on their way, having opted much sooner to flee the train.

The German, perhaps dreaming of a return to a more efficient world after five years in England, was pessimistic about our chances. But he knew the area well and gave useful running commentary on our progress towards Luton. The Scot, most at risk of missing departure, thrust two Scottish fivers into the German's hands, promised (correctly) that they were legal tender and talked of making a sprint for his flight the moment we reached the airport.

In the event, I think we all caught our planes, having added £31 between us to the cost of getting from London to Luton. In my case, the RER and Métro then got me back into central Paris in no time.

There is no particular moral to just one more example of transport misery. The French railway worker's fondness for his strike, or mouvement social, has ensured a few hairy races against time from Châtelet to Charles de Gaulle. And if the Métro seems more reliable than the Tube, that may be because it is a smaller, more compact system.

But I was left with little sympathy for the Livingstone/Delanoë approach to getting around and out of capital cities.

Ban cars by all means, chaps, but not before you can assure travellers of a first class public transport network that actually works.
* Picture courtesy of Paul Cooper

Nathalie Gettliffe sentencing (updated)

2006-12-01T17:14:00.000+01:00

Anyone interested in the Nathalie Gettliffe case should know that prosecutors in British Columbia have asked for a two-year jail term when sentence is passed this evening (Monday).

Moreover, they do not feel that her entire time in jail awaiting trial should qualify under the Canadian "credit" system which allows actual sentences to be reduced by up to double the pre-trial custody period.

If Madam Justice Marvyn Koenigsberg follows the prosecution demand, in other words, Gettliffe will still have to serve 14 months before being released.

Some readers will remember that the woman involved in that appalling sex crime in another Canadian province qualified for instant freedom under the same "credit" scheme. Her two years spent in custody was allowed to count double against her four-year sentence.

The actions of Gettliffe, in removing her two children from Canada to France in defiance of a court order, were wrong and punishable.

But they pale into insignificance when set aside the other woman's role in the abduction and gross sexual abuse of two girls, aged 12 and 13.

Chalk and cheese, cries Bill Taylor from Toronto. But why on earth should we not draw attention to such a glaring inconsistency as the further imprisonment sought for Gettliffe immediately after someone guilty of somewhat more evil acts elsewhere in Canada has received compassion and leniency?

Different jurisdiction? Cobblers. Same country.

I may need to gett-a-liffe, as Anon cleverly puts it in the comments below. But Canadian justice, I repeat, has not covered itself in glory in the Gettliffe affair.

To deny a pregnant mother bail pending trial was bad enough. To refuse her these "credits" for part of her time behind bars (the couple of months between arrest and the children's return to Canada and their father's custody) begins to sound, if not vindictive, draconian.

Nathalie Gettliffe's defence has argued for a sentence that would ensure her immediate or early release.

No one at all appears to have canvassed what I believe would be the appropriate and merciful outcome, a suspended sentence.

This would surely take account of the interests of everyone, especially all four children (the two at the centre of the case, and two more by her present companion).

It would also make proper allowance for the harsh punishment Gettliffe has already brought upon herself over the past eight months. And it would acknowledge the extremes to which acrimonious parental battles over child custody can drive one partner or both.

I do not suggest that Judge Koenigsberg has anything but a difficult task to perform, as she herself has admitted. But if I may add to the mitigation already offered to the court, no decent interest would be served by making Gettliffe serve another day in jail.

Once she has been sentenced, I will naturally discuss the case further as soon as I can.

But Salut! am not a news agency and anyone who cannot wait, and is not following the matter in the French or Canadian media, should check the usual internet news sources.

The way to treat a lady

2006-11-30T14:43:00.000+01:00

Even as Nicolas Sarkozy formally announces what everyone has known for years - that he intends to stand for the French presidency - an eye-catching trip by Ségolène Royal to the Middle East threatens to steal his thunder.

Sarko undeniably represents a formidable obstacle to Mme Royal's hopes of becoming the first female president.

But just how formidable is becoming increasingly tricky to gauge as the Ségo phenomenon continues to achieve the improbable - making French politics interesting outside France in what is still a non-election year.

International attention packs little electoral muscle, of course. Yet even that works both ways; a lot of the overseas support for Sarko tends to come from the sort of conservatives from whom millions of French voters would run a kilometre or two.

At home, Sarko plainly has work to do, and an illuminating vox pop in Le Figaro offers a little advice on how he should treat a lady when that lady stands between him and the Elysée.

The paper canvassed the views of several prominent females from the party and the responses revealed hints of anxiety that M Sarkozy's tendency to shoot first and reflect later may cost him votes.

"Nicolas must take care not to be aggressive, but to tackle her ideas and not the person," warned Isabelle Debré, a UMP senator. "The slightest gesture could be raise charges of misogyny."

Arlette Franco, from the western Pyrénées, wanted to see more of a side to Sarko that we generally encounter only when he is having one of his marital reconciliations.

"He needs to offer reassurance, to show himself to be warm, human and interested in social questions as well as security," she said.

Another Arlette - Grosskost, from Haut-Rhin - suggested that Sarko should surround himself with more women, lighten his hard-line image and acknowledge that Mme Royal's appeal by-passed political logic.

And a Parisian MP, Martine Aurillac, went so far as to offer the sort of counsel even France's macho hommes politiques would consider patronising: "Don't launch into discussions that are too technical, statistical, complicated."

Her theme was taken up by Valérie Pécresse, spokesman for the centre-Right UMP party of which Sarko is president. Confronting a female opponent, she said, was to be engaged not in a classic clash of forces but in a clash of conviction.

"You have to address the people in very simple terms," she said, while adding loyally that Sarko understood this parfaitement.

The subtext of all this is clear enough. Sarko may be capable
of tearing Ségo apart in contentious debate, but should weigh up whether it would actually do him much good?

We know Mme Royal has so far shown little substance to go with the lashings of style, a point of view that surfaced in France long before it became a British media cliché.

It has done her little damage in the polls. One of my own human barometers of middle France opinion, a middle-aged, mid-management bank employee (and typical UMP voter) living in the provinces, summed it up quite neatly.

"You say we don't know what she stands for, that she is woolly on the main issues," he said. "I think that's part of what the French like about her. There's less to be scared of."

Sarko profits this week from a flurry of attention surrounding his announcement. But unless Ségo commits some appalling gaffe in Lebanon, Israel or the Palestinian territories, she stands a good chance of bagging at least equal airtime and headlines for the right reasons.

Adding a thought after the event, it is even possible to say that when the gaffe came - failing to slap down a Hizbollah attempt to equate Israel with the Nazis - she and her supporters performed some smart wriggling.

We should all stand by, I'd guess, for a little more evidence of Ségo steel in the coming weeks and months, and for the odd sign of a mellower Sarko.

He may have taken heed of those female colleagues already. The famous promise of "rupture" - implying a complete break with failed policies of France's recent past, however this might enrage surly unions and those desperate to cling to outdated privilege - has already been watered down.

Now, he says, it will be a "peaceful rupture".

Le vice franglais

2006-11-27T12:45:00.000+01:00

In the 25 intervening years, Jack Lang has probably forgotten the letter from an indignant French woman that dropped on his or, more likely, an underling's desk.

He was François Mitterrand's culture minister. She wanted to know how, with the French language under such pressure from Anglo-American influences, state-owned TV could allow a newscaster to report smooth traffic flow one big holiday weekend while seated in front of the slogan ça roule cool.

These days, with the threat to la francophonie greater still, the phrase would be sure to bring a nomination for le Prix de la Carpette anglaise, the "English Doormat" awarded each year since 1999 to the person or organisation deemed to have delivered the year's most grievous insult to French.

The admirably Canute-like souls who run the contest have just announced the short list for this year's Carpette.

Up for the 2006 prix d'idignité civique are:

* France's national research agency, ANR, for launching an appeal for ideas to which responses must be in English

* Jean-Marc Ayrault, the mayor of Nantes and president of socialist deputés in the French parliament, for launching a public transport system called Busway and an on-line service Mail in Nantes

* Philippe Baudillon, France 2's director general, for allowing programmes called Top of the Pops and Dancing Show to be screened

* Christian Brodhag, inter-ministerial delegate for development, for publishing a report on coal in English

* Henri de Castries, head of the Axa group, for declaring French to be a disadvantage in a competitive world.

* France's Constitutional Council for accepting as constitutionally sound the notion that text in English or German should be admissible under French law

M Baudillon or the Constitutional Council would seem good bets, though it is not difficult to imagine the sheer anguish any of these offences against the purity of French language will have caused.

There is a special international prize, too. The ex-minister and co-founder of Médecins sans frontières Bernard Kouchner is in the running for saying in his book Two or Three Things I know About Us - (oops, I meant Deux ou Trois Choses Je Sais de Nous) - that English is the future of la francophonie.

So are "the European institutions in their entirety" for daring to choose "Together Since 1957" as the slogan to mark the golden anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.

Ernest-Antoine Seillière, president of the European Business Confederation (UNICE), is my favourite, but perhaps only because his crime - beginning a Brussels speech, as he fully intended to go on, in English - prompted a stage-managed and slightly absurd walk-out by President Chirac.

May the best homme or cultural hommelette win.

But it's probably safe to make a couple of assumptions.

Le vainqueur won't turn up to collect his prize. And there is no risk of the owners of Café Rouge or Prêt à Manger, or anyone who has ever wished a friend bon appétit or boasted about his pied-à-terre, being shortlisted in tit-for-tat English awards.

One last thing. My wife's horror at ça roule cool did provoke a reply from Mr Lang's ministry. They took a couple of months to get round to writing and did little more than rattle off platitudes about the importance M Lang naturally attached to supporting his native tongue.

Le vice français

2006-11-24T23:21:00.000+01:00

Off to Britain again for most of the next five days but will do my best to keep in touch with Salut!.

With more time, I would have talked about the Paris St Germain fan shot dead by a black police officer in Paris in disturbances after a PSG defeat by Tel Aviv.

All I know is what I have read and heard, and this includes references to the officer trying to protect a Jew being attacked by PSG fans.

PSG is a club with a dreadful hooliganism problem - almost turning one of our (English) vices, now under control if not quite conquered, into le vice français - and sometimes seems locked in a neanderthal age. You don't like us and we don't care, as the Millwall yobs like to put it, and if they cannot find Jews, blacks or rival supporters to fight, they fight among themselves.

Or I might have brought you news of how young French people view the presidential race: essentially no way Sarko, maybe Ségo.

But all this must wait until I have more time to spend with my computer. That will come and soon. Bon weekend.

Coming out as a Colin

2006-11-22T10:43:00.000+01:00

It looks as if Salut! is about to breeze past another milestone. Having clocked up 1,000 profile views by yesterday, it seems certain that the number of visits will reach five figures some time today.

The truth is that we have already passed the 10,000 mark. Salut! had been in operation and attracting lots of readers for two-and-a-half weeks before I installed the counter.

Thanks for your interest or support, or both, and thanks also for the lively and - for the most part - acceptable debate and banter.

I felt sneaking sympathy for Colin Berry's daughter and the loyalty she quite properly showed towards her father.

It does seem to me that, within reason and the usual bounds of decency and the law, this site should be open to pretty much anyone.

Perhaps there are decent and lawful contributions still to come that I will feel, for one reason or another, ought to be discouraged.

Mere disagreement with someone (as often occurs with Bill Taylor, close friend though he is, as well as with strangers, Colin Berry included) would not be such a reason.

But Corinne's deception, leading a poor chap on to think she cared enough about the footballing fortunes of Sunderland to look up the score from a lowly Saturday match, does present a tough test of my Voltaire-like advocacy of free speech.

Suspicions have been raised by others. And the fact that Corinne's, complete with apostrophe s, rhymes passably with the way most French people pronounce my Christian name, and therefore Colin Berry's too, may be too much of a coincidence.

It is just possible that CB dislikes his first name. I will never be able to forget the day, a birthday come to that, when my name appeared prominently on one arts page feature, about Linda Thompson, only to be juxtaposed with another in which the actor Colin Firth lamented that he'd been lumbered with "the sort of name you give your goldfish".

But the evidence is still thin, whatever trouble people appear to have staying away each time they say they will. Why, even Natalie returned briefly, all smiles and forgiveness, despite my disapproval of Texan penal policies and the efforts of Richard of Orléans to impose a Frenchified H on her prénom.

It is for my namesake to declare himself if he chooses.

Anonymity and pseudonyms have their uses, and I would not wish to insist on everyone posting a proper identification.

If Corinne is Colin (B), however, then he is as guilty of stretching an amusing ruse a little too far as one or two others may have been of turning him into a punchbag.

Matt's gloss on a career

2006-11-21T14:46:00.000+01:00

The learning curve will have to wait. Otherwise, much of the rest of my life will be spent trying to photograph and upload images. Memo to Salut!: buy yourself a scanner.

But here they are. My three personalised Matt cartoons.

It's not a case of bragging, by the way. I have posted them because anyone reading this blog will know at least something about the aspects of my life that inspired Matt, and because anything he draws is worth seeing.

What is more, a valued former colleague, Peter Floyd, who has triumphed over unpromising origins (he supports West Ham United) to become a thoroughly decent man, says he has five Matt cartoons.

Mine trace obvious milestones.

* The canine gag marks my completion of 25 years on the Daily Telegraph in 2002. I had the choice of a gift worth £200 or a drinks party, presumably based on a similar value of booze, in the executive dining suite. I opted for the latter but felt obliged to put the same again behind the bar at the pub afterwards.

* The perplexed baker was brought to his shop window to welcome me on my arrival in Paris in July 2004. He's had plenty of business since but the out-of-Paris, out-of-work life change will necessitate a stricter diet.

* And the parting shot you saw yesterday. By a not too surprising coincidence, I had already decided - before seeing it - to mention "my date with the executioner" in the leaving party speech.

Thanks again, Matt. And my former Telegraph reporting colleague, news editor, home editor and editor Martin Newland - Matt's wife is his wife's sister, as it happens and if you follow me - for an impossibly flattering mention elsewhere.

Matt: coming to the aid of the party

2006-11-20T15:04:00.000+01:00

Tell Matt Pritchett you're writing a book that is bound to make a fortune, and offer to pay him for a few cartoons that would make that fortune bigger still, and he'll politely decline.

"If I started saying yes to all those things, I'd never see my children," he once explained.

But ask him to draw a cartoon for someone's leaving souvenir - a mock-up front page that newspaper people traditionally produce for a departing colleague - and the answer is invariably Yes.

As one responsible for a number of such pages when I worked in London, I never ceased to be amazed at the man's generosity with his time.

Often enough, he'd barely know the colleague in question; reading a draft of the main story for the page was enough for him to come up with an inspired image and/or gag.

On Friday, I found myself taking possession of my third personal Matt cartoon. He has given me permission to post it here, and I know he will not mind me adding the previous two once I get the hang** of it. All appear on the next Salut! posting - Matt's gloss on a career - but I have deleted the inferior reproduction of the latest cartoon that was originally here.

Matt could not make it to the Cheshire Cheese, the pub in Fleet Street (where else?) that I chose for my send-off, just as I had thrown parties there when I left the Press Association for the Telegraph and London for Paris.

But I am glad to say that his final cartoon for me came along to the party, safely inserted at the foot of my spoof page one. There was also, in keeping with another tradition, a framed original.

Needless to say, the cartoon injects a little dignity into a page otherwise devoted to impertinent jibes about my tastes in music and football, an alleged obsession with curries, seafood and foie gras of which I was naturally unaware and my dubious origins (brought up from infancy in County Durham but born, unpardonably, in Hove).

That Matt is a genius is beyond serious debate. No one needs to inspect or even know about the fistful of awards to see how gifted he is. It shines from each work that is published and, since he submits six contenders daily for one or at most two slots, from many that are not.

Perhaps most people would settle for being a genius at whatever it is they do. To be a great bloke as well as a genius lifts rarity to a new level.

** And apologies for the amateurish and uneven first attempt to post the cartoon. Almost any child of 10 could have done it properly in a fraction of the time it took me to do it badly.

Segomania

2006-11-17T15:06:00.000+01:00

London, Friday.
Even from the other side of the Channel, the victory of the gazelle over the elephants can be seen to have been pretty crushing.

Segolene Royal faces a harder battle to reach the Elysee (no accents today, by the way). But she was comfortably the best equipped of the three socialist candidates to muster a strong challenge.

Whatever admirable qualities Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn possess, these did not rationally seem to include much prospect of being electable as president next spring.

The Parti Socialiste members who voted emphatically to make Mme Royal their candidate clearly had no wish to hand a gilt-edged present to Nicolas Sarkozy - or, if Bernadette's latest thoughts on the subject are to be taken seriously, one Jacques Chirac.

And while I am as yet unconvinced that she - Segolene, not Mme Chirac - would make a great president if elected, I do draw some satisfaction from her success, having indentified her as a serious potential candidate at a time when others, supposedly wiser, gave her no chance.

I disagree with the view that Sego's triumph ensures a contest even more boring than usual. Surely she is at least less grey than either of her defeated rivals.

And there will be all sorts of tests of her temperament, her Left wing credentials and her substance on the bigger issues of nation and world. There will be plenty of people, of the Left as well as the Right as has been seen in the dirty tricks produced in an attempt to undermine her campaign, eager to trip her up.

Jack Lang, who withdrew from the socialists' nomination battle to support Segolene though you just know he thinks the French would really be better off with him, got it spot on in an eve-of-vote interview with France Soir.

"You'll see in the coming days," he said. "The whole world's press will start taking an interest in our presidential elections and just because of her."

M Lang's other proposition - that Segolene may be the best option for the French merely because she's a woman - is perhaps less compelling and Sarko can be trusted to do his utmost to tear it apart. Boring campaign? I think not.

France in flashes....2

2006-11-16T09:57:00.000+01:00

*** Anna Perry is another casualty of the linking problem.
If you want to see past references to her, go to the Telegraph blogs home page, click on foreign and then you find me as "archived" at the bottom of the list of foreign correspondents. Type her name into the search facility.
Regulars will remember the makeover that left all early posts looking as if no one had replied. But go back to the very first in December 2005 and there is a link to the original version, complete with comments left at the time.

Qualities of mercy

2006-11-15T14:41:00.000+01:00

Of two reports from Canada, both of which I must take at face value, one does deal with the Nathalie Gettliffe affair and one does not.

When I express the hope that this wretched woman will be dealt with mercifully two weeks from now, I respectfully draw the sentencing judge's attention to the second matter, a quite extraordinary case that has nothing to do with her.

I had just finished reading the Globe and Mail website account of the latest judicial attack on Gettliffe, this time by one Madam Justice Nicole Garson, when I saw another Canadian court report.

Pair held teen girls as sex slaves, ran the headline to a story from the Court of Queen's Bench in Manitoba.

The crimes of this evil pair, accused in connection with vile sexual assaults on two abducted girls aged 12 and 13, make for sickening reading. The woman's role included holding one victim by the shoulders while her companion raped her. She "played no part in the abduction", the judge said, but was guilty of forcible confinement.

The couple have had their comeuppance. But those tough-on-crime, show-'em-no-compassion champions of Canadian justice who inhabit this blog will have some explaining to do if a Vancouver judge comes down heavily on Gettliffe when she is sentenced (I am told on Dec 1).

For that comeuppance amounted, for our friendly neighbourhood sex fiends, to 10 years for the man, four for the woman. Credits for time served awaiting trial mean that man will serve only seven years for ruining two girls' lives.

Astonishingly, his co-accused qualified for almost immediate release under the so-called two-for-one scheme taking account of her two years spent in custody.

Nathalie Gettliffe was foolish and wrong to take her two children by her former husband, Scott Grant, to France in defiance of a court order. She may, as Judge Garson implied in the latest hearing, have begun criticising the religious activites of her former husband only after her flight.

I remain of the view that the humanitarian approach would nevertheless have been to grant Gettliffe bail, on whatever terms Canadian judges chose to impose, rather than force her to give birth as a prisoner and keep that poor infant in jail for the first weeks of his life.

That doesn't mean I swallow the more extravagant claims of some of Gettliffe's supporters about the treatment she has received in prison. I have no reliable information on suggestions that at least one suspected killer and people accused of serious drug offences have been freed on bail within the same jurisdiction that requires a heavily pregnant woman to be locked up in a child custody case.

Nor do I see it as especially edifying to see Gettliffe putting herself up for the French presidency.

Judge Garson appears to have made some compelling points, while refusing Gettliffe joint custody of Grant's children, about the effects of her actions. She had denied the children, she said, "permission to love their father" by taking them to France despite the court order and then vilifying him.

While I would not like to give the impression that this seemed an even-handed judgment, Judge Garson did increase Gettliffe's disgracefully meagre access to the children.

She also ordered that a neutral French speaker should be present at these meetings - once a fortnight under the more generous provisions - to prevent disparaging remarks about Grant or his religion. I am aware of no such order restraining Grant in what he says to the children (or the Canadian press) about their mother.

But let us get back to the kidnappers and where I feel their treatment has some bearing on what the Gettliffe sentencing judge, whoever this turns out to be, has to decide.

Assuming - big assumption, I know - that we now more or less know the worst about Gettliffe, is there a judge in British Columbia who could review the two cases and regard her as meriting a moment's further imprisonment? Another learned man of the bench has, after all, set down two years in pre-trial custody as a sanction stiff enough for a woman involved in what the Globe and Mail called "one of the province's most shocking sex crimes"?

Le blues du tennisman

2006-11-13T12:39:00.000+01:00

The curse of the catamaran has struck again.

Misfortune has followed misfortune since I introduced readers of the Telegraph blog to the crowd of French strangers, now friends, that I joined on holiday in the French Caribbean in February.

One of our number has seen his dry cleaning business collapse. He and his wife were then gassed as they slept, awakening to find their home outside Paris cleaned out by burglars. Two of us have lost our jobs.

At the weekend, it was Dominique's turn to recount a tale of woe.

Tall, lean and irritatingly handsome, Dominique is a successful tennis coach, with a decent collection of trophies bearing witness to his own playing skills.

He is also well read and sharp, with a magnetic personality. But as if living in Seine St Denis, the often grim north Parisian suburb, were not bad enough, he also seems to endure a somewhat patchy love life.

It must be said that insisting on playing in a tournament on his wedding day was perhaps not the best start to his first marriage. I only think he is joking when he tells of trying to chat up a glamorous Swedish blonde. While he understood her to accept a date for "neuf heures", she knew she had actually replied in English: "Never."

But Dominique tells it so often that you start to feel something of the sort must once have happened to him.

Lately, however, life has been looking up. He has a newish companion. And he was anxious to please her with a holiday in the Maldives. The location looked wonderful, a sunny break from the chilly French autumn seemed assured.

Thanks to some over-enthusiastic manoeuvrings by the lady driver of a forklift truck, however, the excited couple got only as far as Charles de Gaulle airport.

The woman's task, loading food trolleys on to the Airbus, seemed simple enough. But according to local press accounts carefully cut out by Dominique, she managed to dig the vehicle's forks into the fuselage of the plane.

The damage was not discovered until technicians began final inspections before take-off. The forklift driver had not reported the incident; one of the newspaper stories said it was not clear whether she did not know what she had done, or knew but panicked.

On balance, the 300-plus would-be holidaymakers were probably relieved that departure was postponed.

They were less content to learn, and only then after a wait approaching 30 hours, that the damage could not be repaired in time and no substitute aircraft was available.

Dominique's relationship has so far survived the disappointment and he has hopes of taking the same holiday in February. But he still feels a little miffed at having switched allegiance from the Partir Pas Cher travel company to one that turned out to be Partir Pas du Tout .

Out of the original party of 10 on that winter cruise around Martinique and Guadeloupe, just five have so far remained untouched by the curse and will be fervently hoping that it has run its course.

And if it hasn't? Since two of the five are gynaecologists, we can only speculate as to what new mishaps lie ahead.

Now for something completely different

2006-11-10T16:47:00.000+01:00

Everybody is on their honour to behave over the weekend.

The internet access problems that, for various reasons, have dogged me since the end of August make daily blogging extremely difficult to fit in around everything else.

The Starbucks option recommended by one reader seems to be no more, at least at those I have tried in central Paris.

For the price of a coffee, I can pop into a neighbouring brasserie and log on for half an hour. But that's essentially a first-thing opportunity. They wouldn't thank me for spreading myself and a single coffee over a whole table once lunch and afternoon/evening customers begin to arrive.

Internet cafes seem to be getting more and more expensive and, in any case, involve a Métro trip or longish walk.

This weekend is unlikely to offer many free moments to wander off on a blogging mission, and I have become reluctant to resort to moderation. So I have decided to trust you again; the chatroom tendency is fine by me, provided I am not expected to have an opinion on every topic that comes up (having said that, I wouldn't hang Saddam either, monstrous a man though he is).

Back Monday, give or take unexpected access - like just now, when I had long enough to expel the Make Extra Money spammer again.

In the meantime, can anyone remember whether the story of the redundant coalminer who became a dressmaker was just that, a story for a song or a play, or actually happened in real life?

The question arises not because I am a frustrated seamstress or fashion designer but because I discovered recently that the National Union of Journalists has deals with employers for retraining packages. This got me wondering about eccentric career changes.

Dressmaking may be out for me, as are such jobs as male model, tap dancer and brain surgeon, but there are lots of other things I could, with a spot of tuition, turn my hands to.

A friend who has taught all his life would dearly love to run the buffet trolley on a train in the English Lake District. People with decades of work in drab offices long for something that gives them an outdoor life. One (female) journalist went on a home plumbing course, another became a barrister.

Then there's the man I know in the south of France. He makes his living repairing and maintaining swimming pools but thinks he'd quite like to reinvent himself as a Madame Pipi, one of those ladies whose days are spent sitting outside public lavatories collecting not only a steady wage but also a stream of tips.

He even knows where he wishes to ply this new trade - the Eiffel Tower, because he's heard conditions of work there are especially agreeable.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen him for a while. And whereas I have been often enough in the Var, I haven't been inside the tower in ages.