Salut!

Back soon

Thank you. The counter may have started late, but the number it displays is gratifyingly high. I feared at first that I'd have to stay up all night hitting the refresh button to get the total into three figures. But recent events have made it impossible for Salut! to get properly into its stride. There have been days when access to the internet has been difficult, and there have been - still are - lots of things concerning my future to sort out. I do have plans for building on what you have seen here so far. There is scope to do so much more and I intend to explore it. For now, please accept my sincere appreciation of your support and feedback. Word is spreading, I am pleased to report, and it would be excellent if some new faces turned up in Comments. The next few days will find me out of France, and my visits to the blog are likely to be patchy. I do not know how often I will be able to check in to see what is happening here. But check in I shall, since I have decided that in the great traditions of Another Place, I should show my readers a degree of trust and let them - you - decide what to talk about until I get back.

Feel free to range over previous posts - I promise to keep a look-out for new comments.

Has ITV gone to(o) far?

When you have a biggish decision to make, as in whether to stay in France jobless but undefeated or go back to Britain jobless but undefeated, little things suddenly - and maybe irrationally - mean a lot. If I were to reach a verdict based on the past few days, when I have found myself by accident watching an awful lot of ITV (and yes, you can move the "awful" along a couple of words), the choice would be simple. Cancel those P&O shares that bring concessionary fares, throw away the Eurostar Frequent Traveller card and forget that Easyjet ever existed. Is it just me? Or has today's equivalent of News at Ten become a televised caricature of tabloid journalism at its most wretched? Since the end of last week, I have watched enough to make me feel grateful for the gentle restraint of French TV news, which - like the French press - is not always hugely impressive but at least tries to present itself as an intelligent digest of what's going on in the world. On one evening, ITN had a report on a despicable child abduction and rape in which there was a garish reconstruction and the reporter actually spoke of the day "the nasty man" came to call. Then there was the bizarre spectacle of an honest political correspondent undermining a shrill lead item about immigration curbs by trying to inject a little realism into the detail. He'll need to watch his step. And did anyone else catch last night's report on the possibility that the world's first full face transplant will take place soon in the UK? Clever strokes were pulled to change the science reporter Lawrence McGinty's own face several times as he spoke to camera. It made you look, but it also made you think how damned hard it was to follow his analysis of the likely psychological effects of the surgery. As if to enrage literate viewers, someone had also composed a slogan to flash up on the screen asking if it wasn't all a case of medical science "going to far". The tragedy is that in each case I have cited, the subject was serious enough to overcome any jumped-up executive's desire to make viewers feel they were being shouted at. I appreciate the "And finally......" items, offbeat tales that give essential balance to the news diet, whether in broadcast or printed format. But is it so old-fashioned and unrealistic to expect proper news to be handled as if those presenting it are taking it seriously? It was so appalling that it made me, for a while, stop thinking about the horrors of a two-part ITV drama that ended last night and might otherwise have dominated this posting. Bon Voyage it was called, and it was about a nightmarish family on holiday in France and having a nightmarish experience even they didn't deserve. The script and plot were so bad that the cast looked as if they were embarrassed to be involved; M et Mme Randall found it impossible not to laugh while watching the supposedly tense and thrill-packed climax. But back to the news. Once, when some Telegraph wag sent me (a Sunderland supporter) to Tyneside to report on a Newcastle United boardroom crisis, I met a lovely man who worked for the Daily Star. He was educated, intelligent and sharp. But all he'd ever wanted in life was to work for the Daily Star. His mildly dubious reasoning was that while announcing yourself as being from the Sun was likely to produce either a torrent of abuse or an instant demand for money, the worst he'd ever had to endure, as the Man from the Star, was laughter and pity. That, it seems to me, is fine. No one expects the Star to be other than what it is. Wasn't a recent advertising jingle Ooh aah, ooh aah, say ooh aah Daily Star ? But if a flagship television news bulletin does not aspire to greater things, then even I will begin to despair that my trade is, well, Going To Far. The phrase could catch on.

Helen Mirren: dame, queen and rebel

Bardot and Deneuve, Adjani and Beart, Audrey Tautou and Virginie Ledoyen.......the list could go on. French actresses have long been credited with special powers to enthrall and excite English speaking cinema goers. Even Beatrice Dalle, who has hardly (I nearly said barely) done anything memorable since Betty Blue, managed to grab a few headlines when, in the latest chapter of her offbeat life, she married a French villain in jail. But the fascination works both ways. Interviews with American, British and other Anglophone actresses seem to be must-haves for the French glossy magazines and newspapers. All the better, for audiences in France, if there is a certain Frenchness about the leading lady in the spotlight. Jodie Foster, for example, because she was educated at a lycee in California. Helena Bonham Carter, Charlotte Rampling, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emma Thompson because they all speak such good French. Jane Birkin because she doesn't - or, at any rate, because she clings to the extravagant English accent and schoolgirlish constructions that so charm the French (while actually being able to speak the language flawlessly, according to my spies). Rampling turned 60 this year. Birkin reaches the milestone in December. And the flavour of the month is another sixtysomething. Step forward Dame Helen Mirren. Eight million viewers apparently watched the concluding episode of her last (last ever, or last for now?) appearance as Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. It was a majestic performance, full of tension and humanity, and probably needed to be in order to rise above a plot full of implausible twists. But the French are not raving about Mirren's portrayal of an alcoholic cop's final case. They have another, even more majestic role in mind - her incarnation of The Queen in Stephen Frears's excellent new film about the days that followed the death in Paris of Diana, Princess of Wales. "Amazing". "Utterly royal". "Incredible". "Mesmerising". From Le Monde and Le Figaro Magazine to the online Absolu Feminin, the plaudits have been truly impressive. And rightly so. Mirren not only manages to look the part but draws on her matchless technique to capture all that we know, and much more that we believe, about the monarch. She is certainly helped in her endeavours by the strength of the supporting cast. Mark Bazeley gets Alastair Campbell to a slightly thuggish perfection, James Cromwell - an American for heaven's sake - is splendid as a curmudgeonly and harrumphing Prince Philip. But it is Mirren who beyond question steals the show. All the more disappointing, then, that box office figures in France have so far fallen way short of The Queen's very successful start in Britain. Perhaps the French need to be reassured that while the lady may be a dame and be happy to play a queen, she is no royalist. Once they realise that she shares their republican instincts and has always been seen as something of a rebel, they will surely flock to their nearest salle de cinema multiplex.

Sex, crime and the French

A bleak tale of our times, told during a holiday reunion party south of Paris at the weekend, fuelled some more thoughts on the glaring inconsistencies that crop up in criminal justice. Some of you may recall my mention in passing, while discussing crime and punishment elsewhere, the horror I felt when a French court jailed Margaret MacDonald for four years for running a superior call-girl service. She broke the law. But there wasn't the least hint of coercion or exploitation in anything she did. No sex slaves, no unwilling, downtrodden girls beaten into submission by evil pimps. You did not have to approve of prostitution to think that MacDonald had been given a vicious sentence, for as close as you get to a victimless crime, and that it made a mockery of France's supposedly grown-up and tolerant approach to sex. The investigation that led to her trial was protracted and complex, and must have cost the French authorities a small fortune. Will the same energy and resources be devoted to finding and prosecuting the gang that burgled Pascal and Laurence, one of the couples I met after paying good money to be tossed about in a catamaran in the French West Indies a few months ago? This was no ordinary burglary. The gang carried it out with ruthlessness and near-military precision, taking advantage of opened windows during the hot summer to gas my friends as they slept before stripping their home of all valuables. Police suspect, from tracking the use of mobile phones stolen in the raid, that the gang is based in Seine St Denis, the tough Neuf-trois suburb north of Paris, but originates in Romania. How many times more vile than Margaret MacDonald does their crime make them? But what are the true prospects of them being caught, and how long would they then spend in jail? At a guess, I'd say they would feel a little unfortunate to be hunted down at all, and really unlucky to pick up jail terms much stiffer than hers. Of course, anomalies occur in every country's approach to crime, and civilised nations are hardly exempt. Canada has hardly covered itself in glory in its treatment of Nathalie Gettliffe. Blair's Britain was rightly condemned for delivering the NatWest Three and an alleged computer hacker to American justice, where they face - if convicted - ludicrously disproportionate sentences way beyond anything a court in the UK would impose. Indonesia hands out a car-bombing sentence to an Australian girl stupid enough to arrive on holiday with some cannabis on her, and lets off someone involved in the Bali terrorist attacks with rapped knuckles. I am occasionally accused of being too liberal on penal issues. Yet I hope with all the fervour of a hang 'em and flog 'em Colonel Blimp that my friends live to see their aggressors brought to justice and that the penalties handed out do not merely raise a few smirks in the dock. Forgive me, though, if I am not holding my breath.

Counting your blessings

Salut! is not Billy No Mates.

Not unlike Another Place,
where a redesign of the blogs meant that older items appeared without
any of the comments originally posted by readers, a glance at the
bottom of the page - though I have now moved it far higher on expert
advice - shows a meter with a rather pathetic head count.
I am not quite so devoid of readers. I swear more than four people, and
that number included me, had been here by the time I started composing
this post on Thursday. Not quite two days later, I am tolerably happy
to be nudging 400. It was an inquiry from elsewhere about the number of
visits Salut! has received to date that prompted me to discover
something new about blogging. How to count them. Unfortunately, it is
clearly not retrospective. So we start from scratch, as if today were
the first day on which anyone sought out or chanced upon this corner of
cyberspace. Such are the joys of learning.

No spice please, we're French

The task I set myself, ambitiously enough, was to find a good Indian meal in France. To qualify as good, the meal had to meet arbitrary tests on taste, service and cost. If I were not a little choosy in these matters, I would declare the place where I have just eaten as the winner. The Shahi-Qila, which promises Indian and Pakistani specialities in rue du Colisée, off the Champs Elysées, served my lunch companion a chicken tikka masala that he found excellent, while I enjoyed a lamb rogan josh. It was not cheap - 61 euros - but we could have opted for set menus at 15 or 20 euros each. Our bill was bumped up by the extras: one portion of rice, another of vegetables, cheese nans, a small Indian beer each and tea. Service was not brilliant; we had gone early to avoid the lunchtime rush, but still had to wait 20 minutes to pay. That was unfortunate but perhaps inevitable, and the experience otherwise confirmed my generally favourable impression. Shahi-Qila is not a bad Indian restaurant. For France. The qualification, I'm afraid, is important. Suggestions will continue to be made on where I should have gone, and I cannot pretend to have tried more than a fraction of the ever-increasing network of curry houses in France. But for now, I have to say that no restaurant known to me here offers the quality and value for money we have come to expect as standard in Indian cuisine, at its most basic, in the British Isles. As I have said before, this is not really surprising. The French palate is more attuned to the specialities left over, as it were, by a different colonial tradition. If I liked couscous, I'd be perfectly content in any French town. "The style of Indian food we get in England wouldn't work here," said my friend, a Briton who has lived in Paris for most of his adult life. "The French would find it too spicy." So I return to the do-it-yourself theme that had its origins on my previous blog. My main course choice was deliberate. It was essentially the same dish that had been served at dinner by my friend's French wife a few evenings ago. Hers knocked spots off the Shahi-Qila version, just as Mme Randall's tandoori chicken is streets ahead of theirs. So where did our dinner party hostess learn her secrets? From a book, Les Meilleurs currys indiens by Camellia Panjabi, who founded one of the great - though hardly cheap - London restaurants, the Bombay Brasserie, nearly a quarter of a century ago. I assume the book is a translation of the English-language edition 50 Great Curries of India. My friend is happily working her way through the recipes, hampered only by her failure to find anywhere in Paris that sells one of Camellia Panjabi's recommended spices, Black Cardamom. When I promised to return to this subject, I called it unfinished business, overspill from Another Place. My conclusions prove nothing much, and I suppose my search will go on, if less publicly. And maybe the quest will one day end at Monflanquin, 35 miles south of Bergerac in the Lot et Garonne. That is where Meena Bedi has made her home, and where she is launching what she calls a "private curry supper club". At a trial run, which took the form of a Pendaison de crémaillère, or house warming party, she served an elaborate menu of Punjabi cuisine to a mixed Anglo-French circle of friends. Could Meena, British of Indian origin, be the one to show France the way? She is already "under huge pressure" from fellow expats to satisfy their own cravings. And the French? "They were intitially quite wary," she reports. "But I think I won them over in the end."

Spicy stuff coming your way soon

Salut! still has internet connection problems, which I hope will be resolved soon to enable me to resume something approaching a normal service. But until things settle down generally, I am unlikely to make more than sporadic postings. Fortunately, you all seem to be able to get along quite well without me between my visits. A bell ringing in my head reminds me that at least one of my regulars at another place believed that I was vacating it without having declared a result to my search for a decent Indian meal in France. Actually, I could swear I came down heavily in favour of the tandoori chicken created by my wife Joelle out of jars bought from the shelves of Carrefour. I even made a light-hearted aside about the less clear cut success of her rice, an observation that has inevitably brought me endless grief. But let me say that if there is unfinished business on the Indian spice trail, I will attempt to deal with it in my next proper posting. For what it is worth, I have one Parisian restaurant to champion, and another do-it-yourself option that works on both sides of the Channel.

Rough and smooth (2)

What I have decided, at least for a trial period, is to disable the facility requiring me to moderate comments before posted, but to make it clear that I will delete any individual comment that gives me cause for concern. I will reserve one of my e-mail addresses* for the purpose of responding privately to anyone who feels aggrieved that his or her comment has been blocked in this way. How will I decide what stays and what goes? Broadly speaking, I do not regard it as sensible to allow personal abuse, whether aimed at others posting comments or at third parties, or indeed any comment that seems to put me or others at risk of litigation. One more thought: if I think it likely that I will be away from internet access for more than a short time, as for example in the past 24 hours, I may temporarily activate the moderating facility. So be patient if you try to post perfectly harmless messages and then cannot see them appear for a while. There is no way I can control what is said about me elsewhere, whether by broadcast, in print or on line. It has generally been very kind. But I have chosen to act with restraint, saying nothing about my situation that has not been placed in the public domain by others, and would ask those contributing to this blog to respect that. Of course, there is no reason why my readers - without whom, I realise, this blog would be pointless - should not have a lively, robust and even abrasive debate while keeping sight of the virtues of common sense and decency. And since I cannot spend hour after hour checking on each new comment, even my intended solution depends on a spirit of cooperation from you. * colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr

London vs Paris

All that flitting between France and Britain has sharpened my appreciation of the little things that separate the two countries. There are bigger distinctions too, of course, and I have a feeling these will crop up here as they did at another blogging place.

Picture by Paul Cooper

I always look
forward to visits home but this has a lot to do with the people I want
to see when I get there, and - as a past master of juggling travel
plans with football fixtures lists - what I may want to do.
But on a largely football-free weekend (my regulars know of my less
than wholehearted passion for internationals, though I will make a
point of watching my younger daughter play for Acton Ladies tomorrow),
I have been reduced to contemplating matters London vs Paris.
There is plenty wrong with life in Paris. It is stressful, crossing the
road is perilous even on green, you get ripped off in many restaurants
and bars and there is never an employee on hand to help when the
machine rejects your perfectly valid Metro ticket.
But no Parisian, or French for that matter, barman has ever asked me to
accept a cardboard cup for wine, as happened in the cafe next to
Eurostar arrivals at Waterloo as I waited for my wife's train.
And no one is yet accosting me in Parisian streets with copies of free
newspapers they want to shove in my face. Effectively unemployed for
the first time since I was a teenager, I grudgingly acknowledge the
boost this war of the freebies has given to a certain corner of the
labour market.
Yet I cannot help sympathising with one wit I saw trying to win readers
and reduce his pile of papers in the rain outside the Monument Tube
station. "They're rubbish but they're free," he cried. "And they make
good umbrellas."
Then there are the first stirrings of Christmas and New Year
promotional activity, perhaps even more pronounced in the provinces. I
came across Xmas dinner ads in Britan at the end of September; I don't
think we'll see much of that in France for weeks to come.
London did threaten a late equaliser, though. A simple Indian meal in
Chiswick, nowhere near the best I've encountered even in London W4, was
nevertheless so good that I was quickly reminded of a significant
downside to expat life in France.
Then a visit to the National Gallery enhanced our London experience by
being free, which the Louvre isn't. Unfortunately, the paintings of
Cezanne, Monet, Manet and Renoir made me homesick for the places
depicted: the Bois de Boulogne (yes, by day), the Tuileries, Montmartre
and Provence.
The honest truth is that I cannot wait to get back to the Gard du Nord
tomorrow night.

Rough and smooth

If you take part in a blog, you ought to be thick skinned enough to take the rough with the smooth. Throughout the time I was writing the Telegraph blog, I accepted the right of readers to criticise me, responding on relatively few occasions, usually if I felt something grossly unfair or simply wrong had been said. It is not my wish to censor anyone, but I do have to be careful about what appears. If I cannot always trust readers to be similarly careful, then I have to do something about it myself. There have been a couple of references that should not really have been made. I don't wish to draw attention to them now, but can more seasoned bloggers advise: am I right in fearing that there is no remedy open to me except to delete the entire posting*? If that is the case, and you see a posting disappear, then reappear without comments when you kenw there were several, you'll know the reason why. In fact, I have now decided that was the only thing for it! Apologies, but one comment in particular - indeed, one word - was offensive enough to concern me. Feel free to take pops at me, but please don't get me into trouble with Messrs Sue, Grabbitt and Runne. As for today's delayed comments, my fumbles with this blog are clearly not over. I thought I had deferred action on moderation but clearly not, having found the little queue of responses waiting to be seen by me and then posted. Try to bear with me until I have worked out a better way. * Yes, writing now, I know that there was no need to delete the entire post and all those comments - I simply hadn't spotted the dustbin.