Salut!

Hallyday had his day? Non monsieur, Johnny be good (2)

Johnny in public service mode. Picture: ParisDailyPhoto

The second part of Robb Johnson's epic work on his implausible héros Johnny Hallyday can now be found at Salut! Live, along with another clip of Johnny in action.

Come back here later today for a wonderful tale of granny rage, French style.

You become a donor? Not bloody likely

Picture: ant_cross

The medics can have had no idea how much courage my wife had to muster before bringing herself to walk into the mairie with the intention of bleeding for France.

Tony Hancock, in that unforgettable episode (seventh and final series of what began as Hancock's Half Hour but became Hancock), fretted about losing "very nearly an armful" on hearing how much blood he was expected to give after volunteering as a donor.

Joëlle's concerns were inspired by a lifelong dread of needles, to which can be added an eccentric aversion to white-coated doctors and nurses.

Petite Anglaise: the difference a year makes

One year ago today, I had the pleasure of launching Petite Anglaise, soon afterwards known also as Catherine Sanderson, on to an unsuspecting world.

In truth, there were two worlds, one less unsuspecting than the other.
Catherine was an extraordinarily successful blogger, with the sort of hit rate that makes even Salut!'s recent spurt seem good enough reason to give up.

There had been no leg-up for her in the process. It was all her own work. She had cleverly applied her amusing, intelligent style of writing to reflections on the everyday life of a young Englishwoman in Paris, and people all over the world* had warmed to her.

But even in that more informed world, relatively little was known in any detail about the person behind the blog. That was where I came in, with my story revealing the case of the bilingual secretary fired by an English firm of accountants in the French capital on the grounds that her site, though anonymous and never identifying her employers, somehow brought them into disrepute.

Of course, I already knew Catherine by the time the article appeared, unleashing an astonishing - to her more than to me - explosion of international publicity. We had met on line, for no other reason than that we both lived in Paris and wrote blogs, and this had led her to confide in me when her world seemed to cave in.

Rather a lot has happened since we first met and I poured white wine down her throat (she suspected at the time that I was trying to loosen her tongue, and I suppose I should be grateful that she didn't suspect worse).

In fact, the bottle was produced a) because journalists must live up to their reputation of needing little excuse to produce bottles and b) to break the ice; I was perfectly happy to wait until Catherine was ready for her story to be told.

Blowing trumpets

Salut! and its offshots, Salut Live! and Salut! Sunderland, have no special rule book about the separation of editorial and advertising.

These site take a lot of time to maintain, and have no obvious source of proper income. They are, on the other hand very rewarding in other ways and I love the exchanges, many of them sharp or funny orilluminating, that my postings sometimes inspire.

A lot of you have said you like at least some of what you find here. Some, as I have admitted before, will arrive by chance, recoil in horror or yawn and scarper as fast as their cyber legs will carry them.

But if you are in the first category, please do not be offended if I occasionally draw your attention to small ways in which, absolutely according to your own choice, you can help me keep the sites going and keep looking as enthusiastically as now for interesting material to share.

The book and music links are obvious examples. If you come here, and then find out about something you might like to read or hear, please use the links down the right hand column to make such purchases from Amazon.

If you like a flutter, and are at Salut! Sunderland, look up the Boylesports link (the Irish bookmakers are, for unsuspecting folkies and francophiles, the new sponsors of Sunderland AFC.

And if it's a visit to Cornwall that appeals, visit the site of my old friend and former colleague Mike Fleet, whose B&B near Lostwithiel makes an appearance from today. I have not been there and will offer no personal recommendation save to say that Mike's a grand lad, despite being a Plymouth supporter, and is rather proud of his fry-ups.

Marchons, marchons......le 14 juillet

One of today's choristers from Les Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Bois
Picture:Julie70

There is so much Frogbashing to be found out there, especially in the English-speaking press, that even someone with a healthily critical eye on France - someone like me, you were perhaps thinking - feels no shame in occasionally redressing the balance.

Most of the venom tends to stream from a certain kind of pundit. They range from witty oafs to oafs who are not witty and share, as well as being oafs, the unchanging appearances of people who were already in their mid or late 30s when born.

These characters, or many of them, still come to France on holiday, because in their hearts they realise what a great country it is.

What they don't realise is that they should actually be stopped at Calais and exchanged for those poor souls who tramp the streets of the town, after journeys through hell and high water fuelled by the desire to live in Britain. Except, of course, that Calais has not yet done nothing sufficiently bad to deserve such a fate.

I cannot explain precisely why these thoughts came to mind as I watched live coverage of the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris.

Confounded by Cécilia

Picture: marcokalmann

Neatly avoiding the sideshow featuring Two of the Garçons and restricted to the comments field, let me offer praise where it's due.

Only the other day, I was writing elsewhere about the Cécilia effect, suggesting that one or two minor scrapes involving her seemed to be detracting from an otherwise flying start for Sarko's presidency.

I harked back to the Elysée credit card row and the mischievous reports that she wants a pool built at the Fort de Brégançon - and keys to the door, plus chauffeur-driven cars, so the older Sarko children can visit independently.

Then there was the flap caused by the discovery that two of the workers giving a wash-and-brush-up to La Lanterne, the Versailles presidential hunting lodge Mme Sarkozy evidently prefers to the Elysée, were illegal Malian immigrants. Not to mention the unanswered questions about her failure to vote for her old man at the second round on May 6

So why am I now preparing to make an about-turn and pat her on the back?

Françoise Hardy: pour tous les garçons......

Forget Sandie Shaw, though I did once come across her, feet covered unlike in the old days, in a minor civil court case in London. She must have been in her late 40s, and looked great.

But Françoise Hardy.........

At the clear risk of alienating female readers, I cannot disagree with the man who suspected that most males of a certain age at some time fell for her.

Which is a lot more than Mlle Hardy ever did for that song. If you have been reading Salut! since it was plain old Colin Randall's blog at the Telegraph, you may know that I interviewed the great lady in Paris for an article published at the beginning of 2005, and included the encounter 11 months or so later in my highlights of the year.

And during that meeting, in Françoise's fabulous apartment near the Arc de Triomphe - there's an internal lift to get from the basement living area to her home studio - she revealed to me that she had always loathed Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles de Mon Age.

Hallyday had his day? Non monsieur, Johnny be good

French pop music is rubbish. Everyone knows that. Or is it? Robb Johnson*, an English singer-songwriter with impeccably radical views, uses Salut! Forum to discuss his improbable passion for Johnny Hallyday

Halfway through the last century, it became manifest to most of the youth of the industrialised western world that being a grown-up was not a particularly desirable option.

Teenagers, like women a sociological phenomenon recently empowered out of historical and economic necessity, literally faced conscription into an adult world organised upon naked principles of institutionalised violence, legalised murder and mass destruction.

If you want a three minute thumbnail sketch of what life was like in the 20th century for the industrialised masses, listen no further than Jacques Brel’s bleak howl of anguish and impotence Au Suivant.

Not surprisingly teenagers were less than enamoured of such career opportunities.

During the Second World War, Europe under fascism (which after all is only capitalism taken to brutally domestic extremes) saw the emergence of youth sub-cultures of not so much resistance as disaffection.

However, it took the US and the mid-50s before international youth finally found a language that expressed their adolescent rebellion against the awfulness of the adult world.

In the US, with black culture, there was a ready made template already at odds with the ruling hegemony. So America got rock’n’roll and Elvis Presley, Britain got rock’n’roll and Cliff Richard, and France got Yé-yé and Johnny Hallyday.

And that says it all really. Anybody care to own up to having Cliff’s latest album? Fifty years later, and the only one of that classic triumvirate still rocking, with a capital R, is Hallyday.

He is all your rock’n’roll dreams come true.

David Graves: more besides

Every so often, you still hear that extravagant, rising laugh of his.

You imagine him back in the old Telegraph newsroom. There, he'd be approaching each task with customary professionalism. If things were quiet, he'd be wandering from desk to desk showing quizzical interest in what others were up to.

For certain, he'd still be irritating the newsdesk on a regular basis with whinges about the paper's inexplicable failure to send a reporter (by implication him) on this or that (preferably foreign) story. And he'd still be boring everyone to bits about Wolverhampton Wanderers and U2.

But David is not there. Five years ago today, just a few weeks after his 50th birthday, he died in an accident that should not have happened while on a press diving trip to the Bahamas.

At the moment news came through next morning, I was sitting on the newsdesk fielding a call from an irate reader. "Get them off the line," someone called out. "David Graves is dead."

There was an immediate need for someone to go to David's home and be with his wife, Diana, and their two sons, Oliver, then eight, and six-year-old Nathan. I was the logical choice. David and I had known each other for a quarter of a century since we were at the Press Association together; he and Diana were good friends and our homes were no more than a couple of miles apart.

Vivid memories of the rest of that day will remain with me for ever. I would not even want to forget the serenity and skill that Diana somehow mustered to tell the boys their father was not coming home.

Steak with sauce

After an extraordinarily busy, but predictably frustrating day dealing with French bureaucracy, I thought I'd be happy to let the great bloody steak debate continue in the comments field of my last posting without feeling obliged to dream up something new.

But I could not let this related thought pass.

Back in County Durham, a young reporter took out his new girlfriend, a French au pair, on one of their first dates, for a meal.

Remembering how she would place her order in France, and translating literally, la jeune Sarthoise said something along the lines of: "Can I have a bloody steak?"

To which, I swear to this day, the waiter replied: "Aye, and I suppose you want some frigging chips an' all."

Back on Sunday, in more serious vein.