Salut! ducks punches, spreads wings

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.

Nathalie Gettliffe to be freed

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.

Christmas lesson in school catering

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

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.

End of the road?

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

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.