Salut!

Guests this way

The thought occurred to me that now is as good a time as any for Salut! readers to offer guest columns in the Salut! Forum series.

My present circumstances, arranging the next phase of my three-location move and having only occasional access to the internet, will limit my own ability to post meaningfully in the coming days. I shall do my best, but make no promises.

Fill the void. It takes me a lot less time to process a reader's offering than to sit down and compose a carefully crafted piece myself.

Don't be miffed if this is the only approach you have had. Not all my guests wrote their columns in response to an invitation. One or two came to me. E-mail me - there is a link from my home page - with your ideas.

Home sweet ****

The homecoming welcome might have been warmer. Almost the first words my neighbour uttered were: "You aren't my favourite person."

Back in our west London home after three years away in France, our belief that the last of three sets of tenants had been models of good behaviour, as billed by the agents, was rudely shattered.

Another au revoir

Exactly a year ago today, a phone call from London ended my 29-year career on the Daily Telegraph. There was no invitation to head office to discuss impending changes in foreign coverage; nor did my (very new) boss offer to visit me in France, where my work as Paris correspondent had attracted praise, so far as I was aware, from everyone but him. He dispensed with me in a conference call lasting all of about three minutes. A few days later, I wrote this valedictory posting to my Telegraph blog. As I bid au revoir to France to return to my newspaper career a long way away, I mark the anniversary by running that last posting again, here. Virtually all that I said then still applies, though subsequent purges mean that rather fewer friends remain

A few days before the axe fell, I chanced upon an e-mail sent by a reader a year ago, three months before I began writing this blog.

After seeing my report about two teenage girls who had committed suicide together, he wanted to know, as a man who prided himself on a reasonable command of English, what was meant by the story’s references to a blog...

Although my custom is to reply to readers wherever possible, I inexplicably overlooked his message.

In my belated reply, I explained that I, too, had been ignorant of the blogosphere until as recently as late 2004. I think I became acquainted with the concept on learning that Alain Juppé, the former prime minister (let us, for once, dispose of the “disgraced” that normally appears between “the” and “former”) had a blog.

Now, it seems, they’re everywhere. When, the night before last, I set up my own I was astonished that it took only a couple of minutes.

You know all about The Wags; now meet Les Fecs

Les Fecs are in there somewhere

Football has its Wags, players' wives and girlfriends. Having watched Coralie, Justine and two other delightful, articulate young ladies interviewed on French TV just before France v Ireland the other night, I can share my discovery that rugby has Les Fecs: femmes et copines des rugbymen.

We met four of them during TF1's build-up to the game, and diligent research enables me to introduce them - and the other members of the clan - here.

But you know you're getting on a bit when you suddenly start writing with affection about rugby. The game's appeal has always eluded me.

At school, you had to opt in to rugby. Otherwise, you played football. So far so good. But with the World Cup currently dominating media sports coverage in France, it is hard to avoid the game.

Merde.....he's not taking me to Derby!...updated

The old Midland station in Derby
Picture: Claire Pendrous

Well no, he isn't.

But that was how it sounded on the one end of the telephone conversation Mme Salut could hear when the first call came inviting me to take a new job in Abu Dhabi.

If this looks familiar, scroll down to the footnote...........but new readers bear with me.

End of the Piers show

Picture: jenniferh2525

The great Piers Morgan competition is behind us at last.

I said:

Morgan, famed/notorious for his career as a redtop tabloid editor, was enjoying a freebie holiday (sorry, writitng for travel pages) in Sardinia. When a "burly-but-dim" fellow hotel guest started taking pictures of him, he indignantly protested. What should have been burly-but-dim's response?

You said:

Not a great deal

Maybe the need for a spot of mental effort put people off. Maybe it was the prize - a copy of Piers Morgan's book. But it would be an exaggeration to say I was inundated with replies.

It was a challenge. Yet there is a winner.

One last marché provençal

Thursday was market day back in the Bishop Auckland of my youth.

This was decades before the liberalisation of licensing laws but the pubs were allowed to stay open all afternoon, with predictable results on the streets. Otherwise, I recall the buses running more frequently, but little or nothing of the market itself.

Market day in Le Lavandou is also Thursday.

France has always had all-day drinking for the few that seem to want it, and open displays of drunkenness on the streets are rare (though binge drinking is catching on, prompting the mayor to order earlier closure of bars here after some skirmishes between rival louts).

But when I leave the Var a few days from now, I will take memories of Thursday mornings in the marché provençal.

I do not visit the market anything like every week, but when I do go, my senses are assailed by the mélange of sights and smells just as, on the busier days, my shoulder and ribs are assailed in the bustle of fellow shoppers

Piers Morgan and the price of infamy

Allow me to remind you of this competition: closing date for entries is Friday Sept 21 at midnight

Sometimes Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan makes me think of a boy I knew at school.

My classmate had a rather more prosaic name, David. Like Piers, David was very clever in many ways - producing, at 11 or 12, powerful home-made catapults, cigarette rollers and electric shock machines - but he was always in desperate trouble for being a prankster, shirker and all-round rascal.

Whether Morgan had an inventive sort of mind when small I do not know. He became a successful tabloid newspaper editor, and inventiveness may well come in handy in that line of business.

But just as David was never far from painful retribution at school, Piers Morgan skated on ever-thinning ice in his newspaper career as he ploughed into all sorts of mischief-making scrapes. Ultimately he was sacked by the Daily Mirror for publishing faked pictures of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner.

Since then, he has carved out a mostly flourishing second career. As a celebrity. Morgan is disdainful of people who are famous for little more than being famous, but he cheerfully admits that he more or less falls into the same category (at Salut! Sunderland, I suggested "famous for being infamous" as a viable alternative).

Before I get to the subject of my latest little competition, let me say that I have never met Morgan and bear him no grudge.

A few years ago, I saw him make a very funny speech honouring a good friend, Sydney Young, who was retiring after decades on the Mirror. Morgan answered critics who accused him of dumbing down the paper by recalling the diet of meaningless drivel and soap star snippets that filled the pages on the day Syd started work there.

And I find his books about editing and his celebrity life rather amusing. A daughter recently gave me one of them - Don't You Know Who I Am? - as a birthday present. It is packed with anecdotes, embellished or otherwise, of Morgan's encounters with assorted stars, wannabe stars and - oddly enough - hoodies and makes me chuckle as often as it infuriates.

Beyond offering ample evidence of Morgan's ability to drain wine and champagne lakes in Depardieu fashion, the book has nothing to do with France, so comes within the "more besides" part of my banner description.

But I could not let one glaring piece of hypocrisy go without comment - and this is where you, and your powers of wit, come in.

The heavy price of customer service

That'll be £2.90 each, sir
Picture: Rhan

Here's news of a theatrical postscript to Louise Manfield's excellent guest column on the hidden extras of flying with "low cost" airlines.

I have just booked two seats for a London show. No quarrels with the seat prices of £29 each (assuming I'll be able to see the stage).

Even the charge of £3.50 for using a credit card seemed unremarkable these days, though I am not sure how else payment can be made when bookings are made over the internet.

The box offices and agencies may also be justified in charging the cost of a stamp for posting tickets to purchasers, though £5.90 (UK) and £8.90 (overseas) - PER TICKET, for heaven's sake - suggests they are using collectors' stamps bought at auction.

So I chose to collect my tickets on the night of the show. You'd think, looking at what the London Westend Ticket Service charges to post a letter, that this at least was a decison that would save me a lot of money.

But they are even charging me, to the tune of £2.90 a ticket, for the privilege of presenting myself at the counter, announcing my name and showing a ticket voucher from my printer.

It is not so far removed from RyanAir's announcement that passengers are to face new charges for doing what airline travellers have always done - check in at a desk. Two questions arise: who else is milking consumers in this way and has the world gone completely bonkers?

Bullfighting: the glory and the shame

So, asked the stern little text message from my elder daughter, how many poor bulls have been murdered? Leaving aside the perjorative second verb, the answer was five, with one to go.

And the thing with bullfighting is that you know exactly that they will indeed go. There is not meant to be any other outcome and the odds on a bull surviving an encounter with a toreador - and, of course, the array of other armed men confronting it - are probably similar to those a condemned man might rely on when hoping to be spared if the trapdoor fails to open.

With differing degrees of resistance, all six bulls at the 5pm corrida in the imposing Roman arènes of Nimes played their parts according to script. Not all went as swiftly and cleanly as is prescribed; cries of assassin could be heard during a couple of botched, delayed kills.

And when it was all over, I left the arena with the usual mixture of emotions: wonder and even elation at the gripping, colourful spectacle, accompanied by such powerfully evocative tradition, and sheer, unmitigated guilt at having colluded as a spectator with the perpetrators of such dark cruelty.

It is, as I have said before, a thoroughly uneven contest. The toreador does not engage the bull man to beast until the hapless thing has been weakened by the horse-mounted picadors and prancing banderilleros.