Salut!

Secretary to Carole Cadwalladr: take a letter, Miss

The Maggie Gyllenhaal version
Picture:Aaron Hillis

Does this image represent the view of the role and value of the secretary currently held by The Observer, that fine old bastion of English liberal, even radical, thought?

I ask only because nothing is more calculated to raise Mme Salut!'s hackles than the occasional portrayal of secretaries, most commonly in the mid-market media and below, as brainless bimbos.

Latest culprit? My old friend Carole Cadwalladr, in her long and entertaining piece at the weekend on a grim-sounding gathering of characters who make fortunes working in hedge funds. Let Carole's words speak for themselves:

It really doesn't look anything out of the ordinary at first sight. The welcome barbecue, held in the club house after the first practice race, with everybody still in their cagoules, could be a scene straight out of Southwold: there is Pimm's, of course, and beer; it's mostly men but there are a few women, though they seem to be more of the secretaries-and-mistresses variety.

Beaches covered, one covers up

This is intended to make all my readers in wet Britain or chilly northern France - and do let me know what it's doing your way, too - feel a little better.

Le tout Paris is here, or on its way. The entire population of France, rubbing shoulders with a good many people from the UK and the rest of northern Europe, has set up temporary home. The place is going to seem uncomfortably crowded for a while.

And the beach at Saint-Clair, one of a dozen within the commune of Le Lavandou and the one favoured by Sir Mick's ex Jerry Hall, who has a place there, has barely got into its stride. My picture was taken on Saturday afternoon; on Sunday, we were reading that the beaches of the Var were not yet by any means full.

Going out for a drink can cost you £26 each

A lawful outside drink
Picture: Blue Blanket

A common cry of the francophile is that the French know so much better than Anglo-Saxons how to drink.

What is usually meant is that by and large, they don't drink, or at least, not to the same degree and not in the same way.

They don't go in for binge drinking, we tell ourselves, and they grow up with a sensible attitude towards alcohol fashioned by years of sipping eau rougie - reddened water, that is to say heavily diluted table wine - from relatively early childhood.

French tourism officials of my acquaintance agree that one of the reasons bars sometimes struggle to make ends meet in France is that there is simply no culture of "rounds".

Even a group of young friends will often make do with a single drink each, however long they choose to occupy their table. Given the price of consommations in the café, the reluctance to splash out is understandable - and perhaps makes a cause-and-effect contribution to ensuring a cocktail or beer costs way too much.

And we've all spotted the French couples making a half bottle of wine last all the way through a plateau de fruits de mer. Have you ever seen a British couple do that?

Yet when I had to check on the figures recently, France was still some way ahead of the UK and most other countries for alcoholism rates. The opposite message of anecdotal evidence means that someone in France must be doing an awful lot of drinking to keep the averages so high.

And what is this I read in my trusted old stand-by Var-Matin ? Four communes in the Var enforcing strict bans on drinking in public places........

Johnny Hallyday: the last chapter

For anyone who began following Robb Johnson's tribute to Johnny Hallyday here, the third and final part now appears at Salut! Live. He has some provocative thoughts on French and Anglo-American pop cultures, and I have naturally added another YouTube clip of his héros in action.

My thanks are due to him for a work of real depth. Robb is such a prolific writer on his own account that he's probably put himself 1,000 new songs behind schedule. Oh, and that's Robb not Johnny above, of course.

And I'll be back over the weekend with some thoughts on the French and Anglo drinking cultures.......

Blogging awards: everyone's a winner

There has been an explosion of blog awards recently.

The ones that have come my way arrived with no prize money, free foreign travel or promises of eternal life, but are greatly appreciated all the same.

Dumdad, an Englishman in Paris and occasional contributor in various guises to Salut! sites, was kind enough to declare me the recipient of the - his? - Awesome Dude Blogger award.

He also declared an interest. We are not only fellow bloggers but friends. In a spirit of friendship, then, I should add that even though there was already a link from this page to his own very entertaining site, The Other Side of Paris, there is now another, here.

Sarah Hague, with equal kindness, included Salut! among her five nominations for something calling itself the Thinking Blogger Award.

Sarah and I have never met, but she has loyally followed my online exploits since I became one of the Daily Telegraph's earliest bloggers, while I have long carried a link to her own, rightly popular (as in regularly to be found highish up in one of those blogger hit parades) St Bloggie de Riviere.

And Sandy Lancaster, a retired accountant in the Languedoc, announced a few weeks ago that his beloved, Tish, who evidently reads every ex-pat blog (for which she surely deserves some kind of award of her own) had decided to judge them all and had placed mine second.

The winner, "by an old English mile", was Alex Hampshire's admirable site which carries the comprehensive self-description: "Days in the life of country folk, or, the life, loves, hates and ramblings of a man, one baguette short of a pique nique."

So you will see that I commend my own readers to each of the sites mentioned above; you are unlikely to be disappointed. I could go on, and turn this into an awards announcement of my own. But I won't, for two or three reasons.

John Mayall: Beano's just dandy

It didn't, to be truthful, get off to the greatest of starts.

Was I the only person doing quick mental calculations about male life expectancy as we waited the wrong side of locked doors at the entrance to the Théâtre de Verdure in Le Lavandou?

Men live slightly longer in France than in the UK. But the hitch - caused by a long delayed flight to Nice - threatened to eat into what time realistically remains on earth for certain concert goers and the star man alike.

Eventually, just in time to stop the trickle of refund-seeking fans growing into a stream, the gates opened. It would be an exaggeration to say the place was full, but there was a good and, once things finally got going, enthusiastic crowd for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers.

Fit, lively and unreasonably youthful for a man of 74, Mayall prowled the stage in shorts and maroon, sleeveless top, contributing earthy vocals, refined keyboards and harmonica to a solid session of what I like to call White Old Git blues.

The best bits were those based on that early Bluesbreakers record - "the Beano album" as Mayall puts its, in honour of the sleeve showing Eric Clapton sitting against a wall, engrossed in his comic. One of the most memorable tracks from then, Have You Heard, was last night's show-stealer.

And Mayall proved yet again how good he is at choosing his musicians, in particular his lead guitarists.

My Wear and tear, Tyne of his life

Failing as a father can be accidental, but then to fail as a prospective father-in-law begins to suggest negligence.

Not suitable for the more sensitive readers of my Sunderland site, perhaps confusing for non-English readers of this one, I present myself as that failure. Marvin doesn't just support the wrong football team; he supports the really wrong one.

I naturally prefer to blame him entirely. If your girlfriend's Sunderland-supporting dad drives all the way to the airport to pick you up (admittedly a journey taking just 20 minutes), and then produces - or his wife produces - a slap-up meal washed down with copious supplies of excellent local wine, you do NOT repay him by turning out to be a Newcastle fan.

And you most certainly do not appear at the table having dressed as if preparing for a visit to the home end at St James' Park.

John Mayall: the mayor's vote

Earlier in the tour
Picture: Cmicblog

Someone here - was it Gigi? - did express some mild jealousy at the time I said I was planning to catch John Mayall's Bluesbreakers when their tour reached, of all places, Le Lavandou.

Well, this is the week. On Wednesday night, the Théâtre de Verdure will be the place. And the reason may even have something to do with the fact that the mayor, Gil Bernardi, is a committed fan of Mayall, according to my informant.

Let's just hope it's a better, or at least warmer, concert than Jeff Beck's along the coast at Six-Fours the other night.

Dead good

In the latest contribution to Salut! Forum, my series of guest columns, Bill Taylor, familiar to most visitors to this site and its comments field for, well, being Bill Taylor, takes us back to his native North East of England to explore the complexity of emotions inspired by the death of his father

No, thanks, I didn't want to see my father's body. The man I knew was no longer in there. Better to look at the old pictures, like the one taken in 1938 when he and my mother, full of wide-eyed expectation for the future, got engaged. Though even then, she says, he had his cynical sense of humour and left-field view of the human condition.

I grew up with him constantly reminding me to "believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see". Not a bad grounding for a journalist, though my choice of profession made him look at me, too, with a jaundiced eye.

"Good morning," I said to him on my first day in newspapers.

"No comment," he replied.

He died at home in North East England. I wore a pink tie to his funeral, which caused minor outrage among some of the mourners but was what he'd always said he wanted. My sister's husband, who couldn't quite bring himself not to, wore a black one.

French granny rage: "Don't move and I'll shoot"

The cartoon says it all. A slouching, slovenly youth tells his girlfriend: "You don't feel safe any more with all these old people on the street."

Just ahead of the couple, a woman in her 80th year - christened Mamie Dalton by my local paper, Var-Matin, after Ma Dalton, from the Wild West family of little and big screen fame - brandishes a pistol at the driver of a bus full of children and says something along the lines of my headline. "Move your bus or I shoot the lot of you."

This is granny rage as practised in the normally sedate resort of Sanary, just west of Toulon.

Var-Matin should feel honoured. For my account on the day Mamie Dalton lost her cool, I rely entirely on the priceless, drole report of my confrère Michel Pasquini, flagged on la une and dominating page three of today's edition.

A mundane traffic hold-up lay at the root of these bizarre goings-on.