Salut!

Competition time (3)

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 [email protected] 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 of Fairport Convention
Originally uploaded by 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.

Labels: competition. Daily Telegraph, De Dannan, Fairport Convention, France

Competition time (2)

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 [email protected]
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.

Labels: competition, Indian food, prize

Competition time (1)

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
[email protected]

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........

Labels: blogging, competition, food, France, prize, Salut

Faint praise and a big birth

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.

Labels: praise, Sally Pook, Sarah Hague

No show

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.

Labels: casinos, Cavalaire, France, gambling, identity, Law, Le Lavandou, passport

Minding our language*

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.

Labels: English, free speech, grammar, newspapers, pedantry, Queen's English Society, style

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

"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.

Labels: Barbara Dickson, Benjamin Castaldi, Colditz, football pools, France, Le Mur, quiz shows, Shildon, television

A sense of Libération from making ends meet

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.

Labels: Britain, football, France, freelance, journalism, Libération, Paris

Polls built from straw?

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.

Labels: Daily Telegraph, election, François Bayrou, Guardian, Muslims, polling, polls, president

All right, Jacques?

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?

Labels: Agnès Poirier, Champs Elysées, Elysée, France, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, nuclear, Pacific, Paris, president, Sun, Var