Salut!

The decline of France: from a chill in the mountains to Sarkozy's poisoned chalice

Today sees the launch of Salut! Forum, a series of occasional guest columns. If you want to contribute, tell me. In the first, Philip Howells* takes a long, critical look at the France Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to reform. Too harsh? A bit gloomy? Or spot on? You judge.

Recently my wife and I returned from France to England, something we've done countless times during the last 12 years.

The difference this time was that it felt very final. Paradoxically neither of us felt an overwhelming regret at leaving, even though as we drove down the mountain the sky was almost wall-to-wall blue and the snow covered mountains glistened as beautifully as you can ever imagine. We were sad, but not to the extent that made us want to turn round and go back because part of the sadness was the realisation that some of the French people we'd been prepared to live alongside were fundamentally unfriendly.

The personal hostility started a couple of years back when the French and the Dutch rejected the EU Constitution and a few other countries like Britain were saved from doing the same - as they surely would have done.

The mother of a close friend of mine in the village addressed me curtly outside her shop with the accusation that it was my fault. What she meant was that it was Britain's fault that the EU Constitution had failed to be accepted, that it was wrong for Britain to be enjoying financial and political success outside the Euro currency whilst France and the rest of the EU suffered.

Faced with such an attitude, logic has no purpose. It would have been a waste of time to remind her that it was her people, not mine, who'd rejected the Constitution, even more pointless to remind her that no-one forced the French to enter or create the EU in the first place and futile to note that France like the UK could have resisted all the events which had led France to the parlous state she was in then and remains in to today.

I did point out that all the polls suggested that had the UK voted in a referendum, it was likely that it too would have rejected the EU Constitution - but for the entirely the opposite reasons that the French people did. They rejected it because they perceived it as too much like the Anglo-American model; the UK would have done the same because they perceived it as too Gallic!

Salutary tale

What is Salut!? What is it for?

Leaving aside the small matter of how someone who criticises Bernie Taupin's lyrics can then have the gall to follow an exclamation mark with a question mark, it occurs to me that a few words of welcome may be in order.

The reason is simple. After a slightly lonely spell - did I become unreadable, was I a casualty of the Telegraph's blog mania or have people been enjoying the sun, or coping with floods, too much to bother? - a glance at the statistics reveals a gratifying upturn in "hits".

Visits to the site include many from first-timers. Not all will have the time or inclination to look into the archives or check out the various links to learn more.

People arrive here by different routes. Some followed me from the Telegraph, because they liked my blog for that newspaper or were outraged by my sacking after nearly 30 years on the paper. That is not meant to be self-serving; my Telegraph blog attracted more than its fair share of brickbats, too, and criticism of my dismissal was, oddly enough, given much more of an airing at the Telegraph's own site than here.

Other visitors find me when looking on the internet for something else. I naturally hope some of these like what they see and come back for more, but many will naturally stamp their feet and resume their original search.

My friend and web guru Craig McGinty has rebuked me for the puns and levity in my headlines. Search engines have no sense of humour, he points out, and you are therefore losing out on potential readers/visitors.

I have taken some notice of that, while every so often insisting on my quota of self indulgence. The Elton John heading may be a case in point. If it had read "Sir Elton John victorious", more people might well have strayed my way. Sometimes, though, temptation just cannot be resisted.

Back to the opening questions. For answers, you must read on........

And the winner is: Monsieur Elton John

One of the walks I particularly enjoyed in Paris took me along the Left Bank, starting say at the Palais de Justice and threading along the riverside until it was time to cross to the Tuileries.

Reasons to be cheerful
Picture: Dom8256

There were plenty of opportunities to take this stroll. On three occasions, I took it while attempting to keep track of the protracted legal saga of Sir Elton John and the fake statues of Greek Gods he bought on impulse after an agreeable Sunday lunch with his pal Gianni Versace almost exactly 11 years ago (and one year before the Italian fashion chief was murdered in Miami).

Wheels of justice can turn slowly in France. Each time I attended the court, I was told by helpful staff that the case had been adjourned. The judge himself stopped once to explain the delays to me (expert evidence had to be verified) and even promised to ring me with the eventual judgment dates. I missed a couple of listed hearings because of other commitments, only to be reassured that they, too, had been postponed.

At last yesterday, sadly without that call ever coming (the thing dragged on so long, my circumstances - shall we say - altered and we lost touch), the five-page document confirming Sir Elton's victory streamed from an acquaintance's fax machine.

This was great news for Sir Elton - plain monsieur in French eyes, of course, and appropriately pictured here in fake Mme Tussauds form - and for Simon Yates, the British expert whose original assessment of the works as bogus is belatedly vindicated. "Brilliant," the normally calm and collected Simon exclaimed when I rang to break the news.

More whimsically, I rather liked the mélange of currencies used during the proceedings:

* $US360,000 (a figure I had previously seen expressed in French francs) as the purchase price of the four pieces, supposedly signed by the 18th century Italian sculptor Luigi Grossi but in fact made in a Chinese workshop within the last few decades

* 38,000 euros damages for résistance abusive

* 78,020.93 euros in costs.

All of this - plus what I imagine will be whacking interest on the purchase price though the amount has yet to be calculated - was awarded to the singer against an Parisian art and antique dealer, Jean Renoncourt, whose shop on the Quai Malaquais lies on the route of that old walk of mine.

France and Les Rosbifs: an overcooked stereotype

Alarming news sweeps along the coast.

Invaded territory?
Picture: Jamze Fisher

Métropole is an important looking monthly, printed on shiny paper and circulating - for our purposes - in the areas of Toulon, Hyères and La Seyne.

The front page of the current edition, tells of Nicolas Sarkozy's emphatic Blue Wave - the one he did get, in the presidentials, as opposed to the one he (small hurrah) didn't, in the parliamentaries.

The main picture illustrates a feature on that old standby, property prices, and we are also directed towards a piece about the flower market of Hyères that manages to clock up 150 million of sales a year.

Not flagged on page one is a short article linked to that cover story about property prices. Les étrangers toujours très présents, runs the headline.

Beneath, the sub-heading Welcome In Lorgues - no translation was thought necessary - Olivier Stéphan tells of the Var town where the Brits are not just coming, but have come, seen and conquered.

Une carte postale lavandouraine: lines from a Provençal resort

Won't be this quiet again for months
Aside from growing fascination at the admirably inclusive nature of Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet, and prurient interest in the debris of the power couple of the Left, Ségolène and François , France's election season has been and gone.

And it's not the only season that's gone or going. At the marché provençal, we learn, that's just about that for the asparagus, while the tranquility of our little resort has also nearly run its course.

Le Lavandou was heaving last night for its part in the nationwide Fête de la Musique, a great idea even if the music is not always great, too.

All the same, we chanced upon a couple of decent French bands on the seafront, one doing covers of British and American pop, the other - more to my younger daughter's taste, though she was not with us - rapping away with commendable vigour as if they were from troubled banlieues instead of the Côté d'Azur. Best of the lot, opposite Le Calypso bar, an amply built young woman belted out a robust version of The House of the Rising Sun.

Up the hill in Bormes-les-Mimosas, another group had promised the repertoire of the Shadows. In conversation earlier with one of my folkies, Martin Simpson, it was made clear that he would not have been tempted.

I rather liked Apache et al as a kid, and even practised the Shadows walk with tennis racket for guitar, but then Martin does happen to be a quite exceptional guitarist himself, so his view clearly deserves respect. He also teaches at an annual guitar workshop along the coast, so maybe he has encountered one or two of the musicians and knows something I don't.

The Fall of London (2)

As it used to be
Picture: dave_didcot

Or, more to the point, the consequences of how London was saved.

Queen Elizabeth II, crowned after narrowly defeating a French commoner in a joint referendum combining royalist and republican traditions, reigns from Versailles, takes holidays at Balmoral or Sandringham and uses Buckingham Palace for official visits to the former UK.

The Anglo-French or Franco-Anglais parliament alternates its sessions between Westminster and the Palais Bourbon.

Gendarmes patrol volatile estates side by side with bobbies and tourists flock in their thousands to photograph one another beside Napoleon's Column in what was once Trafalgar Square but is now La Place Austerlitz. Johnny Hallyday performs at least once a month at the Albert Hall while Robbie Williams is the resident star of the Folies Bergères.

Amusing fantasy? Poppycock?

Well, remember all that fuss a few months ago when it was "revealed" that the French government had proposed a union of Britain
and France in 1956, even offering to accept the sovereignty of the
British Queen. For the reference in my link, look at the Comments section

Reports told of the disclosures leaving scholars on both sides of the Channel "puzzled", as if no proposition of the sort had ever been put forward in recent history.

But there was nothing new to it. For my final dip into the remarkable Herbert R Lottman book The Fall of Paris, I draw attention to page 381.

Sea, sex and sun

Not as a sexy as badminton?
Picture: Alex Segre

Wasn't Serge Gainsbourg thinking about St Tropez when he wrote that song (which you can even see him perform if you stick around to page two)?

If so, I do not suppose he ever had it in mind to include badminton among the resort's attractions.

Taking each component of the title, I can say that the sea was never far away when teams from Le Lavandou, Cogolin, Le Luc en Provence and St Trop itself assembled in a bright school sports hall not far beyond the Places des Lices, home of the more sedate pursuit of boules.

It was also sunny enough. As for the rest, I will say only that the female players from Le Lavandou were by far the sexiest present. I cannot speak for the men.

This - badminton, not sex - is a sport I took up relatively late in life, having spent most of the previous 29 or 30 years thinking of it as a game for cissies or the beach. It then took me almost as long again, until yesterday, to get round to playing in my first tournament.

Whether because of any ability on my part, or because it was important to make up numbers, I was invited often enough when living in London. But I always declined, afraid that something would crop up at the last minute at work and cause me to let down my club.

The only thing standing between me and playing in this tournoi was the dodgy ankle. My physio worked small wonders to get me more or less fit to play in the short time from when I first presented myself to him as a sad middle-aged man with tendonisis.

He went through the usual routines involving ultrasound, massage and ice treatment and also banned rosé wine, milk and tomatoes - the last two were no special hardship - as items that would aggravate the condition.

By conscientiously following his regime, and swallowing an extraordinary cocktail of anti-inflammatories each day, I was probably 80 per cent ready for the competition. Le Lavandou's badminton club, however, was not.

Le Lavandou: The town I love so well (2)

It's Philippe Thorn's big day down here in the Var, the day the superbly renovated seafront building known as Le Château is officially opened as the new Maison du Lavandou.

Philippe, president of Le Lavandou's tourism department, could have done without the thin rain and grey skies with which his day has started, but you can bet on bright sunshine restoring normal service before long.

And with the help of Raphaël Dupouy, the man from the town hall who juggles numerous functions but also tacks a decent set of pictures, I decided to restore a little brightness to Salut! too after the sombre tone of my last posting.

There is another dark cloud. Anyone venturing to the continuation page will encounter Raphaël's warts-and-all picture of me passing myself off as a reporter again to interview Philippe the other day. Mme Salut! looks on, suitably blasé about the whole proceedings.

Georgia off its mind(1)

How many readers of Salut! have ever heard of Genarlow Wilson? There is only the most tenuous of French connections, so tenuous that it will have to wait while I rely, for now, on the self-indulgent promise of "more besides" in the banner hovering above these words.

When I wrote about capital punishment a few days ago, the aim was to avoid sounding holier-than-thou about criminal justice systems in Third World or merely different-world countries without also acknowledging appalling injustices in supposedly mature democracies.

An inviting parallel was the tendency of the Land of the Free, or certain of its states, to put to death offenders who commit crimes when juveniles or while suffering what in other countries would be diagnosed as mental illness.

But let me race down the scale of criminal wrongdoing and draw attention to the grotesque case of the afore-mentioned Genarlow Wilson, who is serving a sentence of imprisonment for the heinous offence of engaging in oral sex with a consenting female when he was 17 and she 15. Not just any custodial sentence, but one of 10 years.

At his trial, he was formally treated as a child molester and, as an added penalty, ordered to be placed on Georgia's sex offenders' register for life.

Bizarrely, had Wilson had sexual intercourse with the girl, he would have faced no more than one year in jail and, under a so-called Romeo and Juliet exception in Georgian law, avoided the sex offender registry.

In all emotive cases, and I indeed include that of Nathalie Gettliffe, it is important to check as many sources as possible rather than rely on stripped-down agency reports or partisan online coverage.

It would be wrong therefore to pretend that Wilson and the girl were simply a couple of teens carried away by passion on a date. They were at an unruly New Year's Eve party, drink and drugs were available and an older girl (17) actually claimed later that Wilson had raped her.

He was cleared of that charge - the jury quickly reaching the view that she had consented - and there was no serious argument that he forced the younger girl, actually only a year and a bit his junior, to do anything against her will. Both, in fact it seems most of those at the party, were affected by whatever they had consumed.

As a further potentially aggravating feature, much of what occurred was captured on videotape. The behaviour, of both boy and (younger) girl and onlookers, was therefore less than edifying though hardly out of keeping with the mores of their times.

The following year (2004), state legislators revised their primitive law to make most consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanour rather than a felony. But they refused to make this retrospective, a decision endorsed by the Georgia Supreme Court when Wilson appealed.

Now, after a well publicised hearing in the Douglas County Superior Court, Judge Thomas Wilson has reduced the original punishment to one of 12 months for a misdemeanour. Since the accused has been in jail for two years or more already, that theoretically should mean his immediate release. But read on.

Le Lavandou: The town I love so well (1)

Picture: r h

My headline refers to Le Lavandou, where I now live, but is also the title of a great song about Stroke City - as in Derry/Londonderry, the stroke separating nationalist and loyalist versions of the name. From that city came the most unusual tourism boss I ever met.

A couple of days after his appointment as director of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, he invited me out from my hotel in Belfast to his near Aldergrove airport. There he announced that he was a confirmed teetotaller, because of the things he had seen growing up as a publican's son in Derry (his way of saying it). But he insisted on choosing my wine.

The bouquet, the nose, whatever it is the wine buffs talk and write about, gave him his pleasure. His sense of smell was so acute that when living in Glasgow, he had also been able to win whisky tasting contests, again without actually tasting the Scotch.

And across our table, he talked about his new job, "trying to market a war zone as a travel destination".

Though the Troubles were then long from over and he had therefore said nothing truly shocking, it was a fairly stark way of describing the challenge he had taken on.

In Le Lavandou, Philippe Thorn, the avuncular president of the syndicat du tourisme for this delightful resort, sat across from me in my favourite bar, Le Centre, and also took me aback with an assessment of his role.

No problems of civil insurrection exist in these parts. But it is Philippe's dream to see the numbers of people visiting Le Lavandou plummet.

Tourism chief wants fewer tourists? Talking himself out of a job? Not at all. Philippe was simply referrring to the height of the season, and in particular August, when Le Lavandou's 5,600 population is swelled by an influx of something like 100,000 holidaymakers and everyone knows that the place is stretched beyond its capabilities.

His team of eight staff at the tourism office work flat out, the front counter assistants dealing with 700 inquiries a day, no mean feat when it is considered that each person gets an average of four to five minutes of attention.