If only to avoid pining for France - autumn is one of my favourite times of the year in the Var, so feel free to tell me it is so grimly immersed in crisis that I am best out of it - I will reflect on two very different journeys.
Christelle, as most readers of Salut! know, has been trying out her language skills on inhabitants of the animal kingdom of Africa, and brought back some great pictures.
From cute cheetah cubs to dozy male lions, elephants in the river at dusk and some splendid landscapes, she captured a lot of the precious moments of her three-month stay.
She should, as Bill Taylor said and I have urged, write a book. There is plenty of material, from the jungle of course - but also in episodes of humour or frivolity that may owe something to the occasionally dreamy world of the London film world in which she dwells.
Creatures great and small have always fascinated Christelle. Now that she has experienced the wild, I wonder whether she will ever look at her pet cats in quite the same way
She can easily devote a chapter to her successful campaign to strike terror into her parents' hearts, with stories of close encounters in the bush followed by the cool announcement that she planned to follow all that by getting up close and personal with great white sharks (the picture of one such specimen, she says, "is what I saw but is not my photo").
One way or the other, she has memories to occupy her thoughts for years to come. A book would share them more fully with others. Get writing, girl!
Next up: Salut! in Petra......
It is a Var, Var better thing that you do now. Or words to that effect.
I love the expression on what I take to be the mother cheetah's face. Definitely a book here, Christelle.
Posted by: Bill Taylor | October 25, 2008 at 05:08 PM
one of these cute cheetah cubs is one i wrote about in one of my earlier pieces....ends up with a broken leg and in order to survive has to be seperated from it's mother..i think it's the one furthest to the left
Posted by: christelle randall | October 27, 2008 at 11:19 PM
i love your pictures their awesome i hope u get ur boook down good luck
Posted by: ashley | April 18, 2009 at 04:02 PM