Salut!

Princess Diana: still hogging la une

Picture: Paul Cooper

On the night Diana, Princess of Wales died, I was staying in north Yorkshire. Through the small hours, people in London were trying to call me, to send me off to Paris to report on the tragedy. In vain.

My old-fashioned pager was, for some reason, lodged in a pocket of a spare pair of trousers in the car boot. Unknown to me, I was in one of those areas of the country where my mobile phone, switched on and resting all night on a bedside table, had no signal.

When one of my hosts went down to the village shop for the Sunday papers, there was nothing in them about what had happened in the tunnel beneath La Place de l'Alma long after northern editions had been printed. She heard the news, word of mouth, from the newsagent.

My friend's husband knocked on the bedroom door a little later, offering cups of tea and the following words, which I remember verbatim to this day: "Princess Diana and Dodi have been killed in a car crash in Paris while being chased by paparazzi."

Nothing's too good for the working class

As I may have noted elsewhere, or even here, that is a phrase I first heard uttered by a Communist. He was a delegate, I was a young reporter and we were both attending the annual conference of the white collar union ASTMS, now swallowed up into something else or bearing a more dashing name.

It was Bournemouth in the 1970s, and I had never eaten anything as grand, except at my French wedding banquet, as the meal he ordered (if I remember rightly, he boasted later of having signed it off to another delegate's room number).

The feast included something fishy, maybe lobster (occasions linger in my mind, less so the detail), and was washed down with a superb Chablis.

If nothing is too good for the working class at trade union conferences, the same must surely apply to birthdays. Bouillabaisse , which has to be ordered in advance, was the clever idea of Mme Salut, to celebrate my, whisper it, 59th today.

Spending and flaunting it: the rich at play

Just one more look at Sanary, neither photo having a great deal to do with anything I plan to write about, before I move on.

Back at home, I found myself watching a People - in the French sense, meaning celeb gossip - programme that seemed to go on for ever, and covered three mega-rich characters, none of whom I'd ever heard, and what they got up to during the holidays.

There was an American divorcee called Denise Rich. Her name (OK, I've seen it in print once or twice) appears to do scant justice to her wealth she was shown flitting from one glitzy Cannes boutique to the next in hideous spend spend spend mode.

More commendably, she was also intent on organising, in honour of a daughter who died from cancer, a fabulously glitzy charity bash in St Tropez which a bit of bad family news, which I think remained unexplained, led her to cancel at disarmingly short notice.

For some reason it made me think of the revered French actor, Roland Giraud, who insisted on going on stage and somehow getting through a performance In Paris just after learning that his daughter had been murdered.

We were also invited to follow the distressing holiday woes of a French designer, Max Azria, who lives in America and planned to charter a sumptuous yacht for £20,000 a day to cruise the Med between the Riviera and Italy.

I swear I took no pleasure in seeing film of choppy seas making everyone as seasick as I'd been on a little catamaran in the French West Indies last year.

The the yacht conked out, and everyone had to make do with a palatial St Trop hotel until it was repaired. Max rarely looked very happy with his lot, though his very American daughters made touching speeches in his honour.

What one of my early Salut! Forum guest writers, Robb Johnson, would have made of the third subject is open to question.

When Route 66 and France 83 converge

The first sniff of work, after a three-minutes conference call lowered the curtain on a career spanning three decades, was as a transport correspondent, specialising in cars.

It wasn't so much an invitation to apply that was easy to refuse as one that was impossible to take seriously. What I know about cars can be written in triplicate on the back of a bus ticket, still leaving plenty of room for important notes.

While I have unbounded admiration for this manifestation of man's creative ingenuity, the motor car represents nothing more to me than a way of getting about, and comes a long way behind the train and even feet as a preferred means of transport. Le Mans may figure heavily in the geographical origins of la famille Salut! but motor sport has never seemed sport at all, more a kind of industrial exhibition.

But I know what I like. And a pleasant day spent in the elegant little resort of Sanary, just west of Toulon, was capped by the unexpected appearance of a fleet of American limousines, trucks and sports cars from a bygone age.

To leave a bunch of rough-and-ready locals playing boules and take in tranquil harbour and bay views before encountering gleaming vintage cars is to pass from one essentially old-time culture to another. When the tannoy announcement came to warn an errant driver to move his car or else, it wasn't an old Ford or Cadillac that was causing offence, but a hapless, workaday Golf.

I will share some of the scenes I witnessed. Bill Taylor would have captured them more effectively, but he wasn't around so it was down to me and my little Panasonic DMC-FX07 to do the necessary.

Fishy tails

Picture: JOEGRAPHY

While I was flétan & frétan over what to put on Salut!, humming a tuna two as I reflected on the possibilities, I resolved that whatever else, there was no plaice for any of those juvenile fish puns.

"Eel regret admitting that," I hear some of you saying. But I sword I'd keep to my word.

This is not the start of a hake campaign against silly jokes. All of us, the hard of herring included, can have a whale of a time with them, and some are quite shark, bringing a ray of life into humdrum existences.

Yet it would truly be the fin end of the wedge to go too far down that road.

Hake having to break the news

Proud? You bet.

Elder daughter wanted to know, inevitably by text message, what the French was for halibut.

Why she wanted to know I have no idea. But quick as a flash. I was able to reply: Colin.

Yep, Colin. What's more, Mme Salut confirmed it.

Just checked the dictionary, out of mere curiosity.

Hope my daughter enjoyed her hake.

No queueing please, we're French

Intimidated by the anarchy of the boulangerie? Perplexed by the art of French kissing (calm down - on one another's cheeks, I mean)? Gigi, also known as Gill Baconnier*, took advice from Gérard Depardieu before slipping into Salut! Forum mode to navigate the minefield of French manners......

“Manners maketh man” somebody once said, before political correctness became de rigueur and spoilt the alliteration.

They had a point though, especially when it comes to table manners – you can tell a lot about a person by the way they wield a fork.

This noble implement was brought to France from Florence in 1533 by Catherine de Medici, when she married the future French King Henri II.

Until then, people had eaten with their fingers or with pointed knives - later banned by Louis XIV because they encouraged violence (presumably, in those days, you just stabbed the serving wench to death if the soup was cold). Eventually, forks caught on in England and table manners were born.

Good words, greater Deedes (2)

Abbie Trayler-Smith is a lovely person, a terrific photographer and a treasured former colleague.

She took these pictures of Bill Deedes in 2005 during his Ashford-to-Hannover odyssey, via the Normandy beaches and the route he had taken as a soldier in 1945.

Good words, greater Deedes (1)

The Gare du Nord seems an odd place for me to have met Bill Deedes - W F Deedes, if you prefer, or even Lord Deedes - for the last time.

Inconsequential chit-chat about politics or the press, over a beer in Canary Wharf, is how I remember him more typically.

But it was 2005, I was in Paris and Bill was on another of his crazy missions, for a man then 92; this one would retrace his Second World War steps from the Normandy beaches to Hannover 60 years earlier.

My assistant, Rebecca Schofield, had done a lot of sterling work in planning the hotel stops along his way, making sure due account was taken of his age and condition, and I was there to welcome him off the Eurostar.

He looked a bright as a button as he made his way towards la tête du train, with one exception: he was in a wheelchair, and I hadn't known him like that before I moved to France.

Montpellier museum piece....with strings

Sarah Hague, a seasoned blogueuse herself, has been one of my most loyal supporters from the launch of my blog at Another Place. I had no hesitation in inviting her to contribute to Salut! Forum

Bare Feet or Puppets?

Did you know that Americans were among the first collectors who were instrumental in developing the popularity of the Impressionists? I didn't, but I found exactly that out in the latest exhibition at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier: L'Impressionnisme, de France et d'Amerique.