Salut!

The Fall of London (1)

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Perhaps because it had been such a glorious spring, there remained plenty of optimists to convince themselves that London and indeed Britain would resist. But their numbers were dwindling fast.

Even wartime censorship had failed to stop people knowing that the Germans had effectively isolated the main British concentrations of troops in the south of England since their surprise landings in Harwich, the Channel ports, Portsmouth and Plymouth.

German air strike power was superior, crackly English-language broadcasts by the enemy on captured Belgian transmitters pretended to carry the urgings of patriotic Britons for rejection of Churchill and the war effort. Almost all the French forces that had been standing alongside their British allies had retreated to the other side of the Channel, thanks to a remarkable evacuation from Folkestone and Dover.

But as this month of June began 67 years ago, some hope lingered. This was Britain, the British were time-honoured warriors and would never succumb to an evil foreign invader. In our time of need, the Americans would rush to our aid.

Yet each day brought glummer news of the fighting, and of the relentless advance of the enemy to within striking distance of the capital, and a mass exodus duly began.

At first by train and bus, then in cars and vans and lorries, eventually on horse-drawn carts and finally by bicycle and on foot, people were leaving with what belongings they could take. In Golders Green and elsewhere, Jewish families grew nervous, and many joined the flow to the country.

And everyone knew the writing was on the wall when Churchill rose in Parliament and said gravely: "Britain cannot die. And if one day I were told that only a miracle could save Britain, that day I would say, 'I believe in the miracle because I believe in Britain'."

Those, save for the obvious changes, were the words used by the French prime minister Paul Reynaud to members of his national assembly on May 21. As Herbert R Lottman indicates in his utterly fascinating book, The Fall of Paris, which I have belatedly been reading, they sent shivers down the spines of Frenchmen able to strip away the bold coating to reveal the true level of threat. One only a miracle could repel.

There is only so far you can take the trick of substituting British for French references to imagine a scenario such as the one sketched out above. But let me continue for a little while longer, to explore what might have been had London and not Paris fallen on June 14 1940........

Rattling good health

Picture: plagueoftruth

There is a bar on the seafront in Le Lavandou, the Bora Bora, that is quiet just now but enjoys great popularity among the tourists who will be swarming here very soon.

If freelance writing for a living suffers any kind of a post-elections dip, I can always offer to moonlight as one of the maracas they place on tables for people to rattle along to the music.

For I have just worked out that I am regularly taking nine tablets of one kind or another. Seven of them are prescribed by doctors and most are swallowed on a daily basis. Turned upside down and shaken vigorously, I'd make a very good maraca.

The list of médicaments - don't worry, I'll spare most detail, though high blood pressure and cholesterol have some part to play - tells only part of the story. I am about to start a course of physiotherapy on badminton-damaged ankles, a condition that also requires me to have an ultrasound examination tomorrow.

Then there's next week's dental appointment and the need to see the chiropodist again before long (she is responsible for a further three treatments, two for my feet and the other for my shoes).

Not that long ago, I was fitted with a contraption to measure the heartbeat, the second such 24-hour testing device to be attached to my chest in the space of a few months, each relating to a different function. And I was packed off recently to a clinic just outside Toulon to undergo a brain scan.

Dying for a quick buck

Salut! is opposed to capital punishment. No qualifications, no unlesses.

Picture: Bob*

We - by which is meant I - would not have hanged Saddam or butchered his half-brother, or executed Nazi war criminals or, indeed, sent Ian Huntley, Ian Brady and numerous other vile murderers to the gallows. We feel disgust at the barbaric use of the death penalty in such countries as Iran but also when supposedly more civilised nations kill people for crimes committed as juveniles or lunatics.

So sadness as well as complete disagreement are the only proper responses to the sentences of death handed out to French, Dutch and Chinese nationals for their roles in producing ecstasy in Indonesia.

I am not especially concerned with the detail of each individual's case, for the simple reason that I have no means of testing it. For example, the claim of the Frenchman, Serge Areski Atlaoui, is that he did not merit the most severe punishment because he had carried out only menial maintenance at the drug factory.

Scary headlines

Not the same Peugeot
Picture: ardorius

Do not let it put you off coming to the Var.

No matter how crowded the département gets in July and even more so in August, it is not my intention to deter you from making your visit, least of all when there is still my Le Lavandou competition to enter.

Var Matin ran its scary headline across the top of page one, three days after a horrific crash that occurred when a young man drove his VW Polo the wrong way along the A8 motorway near Fréjus and ran smack into a Peugeot 205.

Two men inside the Peugeot were killed. A couple and a child were injured when their car ran into the wreckage a minute or two later.

The newspaper's headline: 80 contresens par an sur les autoroutes varoises

You'd think such an appalling thing could come along only once in a blue moon. It's what you associate with the doddery octogenarian who somehow finds himself or herself ambling along the M1 in the face of oncoming traffic.

Yet the presumed culprit in the story of the fatal pile-up is just 22, and what he did happens all too often, according to the Var Matin statistic.