Impolitesse revisited

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.........

Dreaming of Barnsley and the Elysée

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.

Pottering about in the Guardian

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

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.

Wrong Salut! The Red and White one is elsewhere

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.

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.