Salut!

BT: Belated (good) Tidings

The news from home is a lot better than it was, and rewrites the message displayed on the screen above.

On Monday, the day we had been promised that elusive phone line (the first such promise having evaporated into nothing), Mike from the BT chairman's office informed us that the order had "failed" again.

He could not say why this was the case, but undertook to find out. I advised him to be prepared for a verbal onslaught when Mme Salut called, and this was duly delivered. I followed up with an embittered e-mail, no less forthright though mitigated by a stiffer upper lip than anyone with a Latin temperament will ever possess.

I reminded Mike that our experience of BT service had been downhill all the way since my very first call to place the order on September 30, when I was told by an exceedingly confident BT representative: "I have some good news for you - you'll be connected with three days and online two days after that."

First steps

Abu Dhabi is as warm as I'd expected.

By that, I mean that it feels, at 36 degrees C or more, very hot indeed when you've just arrived - not, in my case, from the blue skies of the French Riviera that were mine until recently but from a grey and often wet London. The more seasoned of my new acquaintances were doubtless thinking of wrapping up against the chill.

The photographs allow you to share the view from my 11th floor hotel window - a window that doesn't open, as the quality of the image may indicate - along with one classic juxtaposition of Europe and Arabia and another picture showing how the place looks from the first of the prospective apartments I inspected.

But initial impressions of Abu Dhabi, if you leave aside the new-kid-in-school pangs that affect many people, whatever their age, when landing in unfamiliar territory, are positive. There was a jolly quiz night to help ward off jet lag, and early progress in the search for a game of badminton.

Salut! and Salam

Le Lavandou in the early evening

Until I was 22, my foreign travel was limited to a couple of holidays in the Irish Republic, though I had been to Colwyn Bay and Clacton as well as to several towns dotted around the country visited by Sunderland AFC.

Despite a few trips to France to be presented to and get to know la belle famille - a.k.a the sceptical prospective in-laws - this essentially sheltered life continued for a while.

Slowly, work and holidays began to take me further afield. My world has not shrunk to the extent that I can claim to have seen all or even a great part of it, but I suppose the list has become reasonably varied: most of Europe, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, US, Canada, Peru, much of the Caribbean, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Singapore, Oman, Bahrain and other bits I've doubtless overlooked.

And in the past three years and a bit, I have come to consider myself a resident of France.

Flight from reality

It is bucketing down. Ealing is looking incredibly shabby, phone and internet connections still seem a distant dream and valuables are among items missing from the belongings delivered here from France.

Monette the (essentially Parisian) cat has gone down with SAD Syndrome. She clearly prefers not only Provençal sunshine to dull, rain-laden west London skies but lizards to grey squirrels.

But within a few days, all this will be behind me. It would be unwise to gloat but I shall be heading back to sunshine, albeit not to French sunshine, and leaving other parts of the famille Salut! to cope for now with BT, errant removal men, rotten weather and troubled pets.

My friend and former colleague Nick Britten made a compelling case for Derby in a recent comment, but I have decided to stick with Plan A and head for Abu Dhabi.

Watch this space for further news on various fronts. Salut! lives on........

BT: the plot thickens

Some of my London homes
Picture: Richard and Gill

One day soon, I hope to be able to declare "Mike from the BT chairman's office" my hero.

But not, I am afraid, just yet.

BT: putting the waiting into wanting

How I long for French bureaucracy and French public services.

So far, my return to the UK has involved:

* Paying the London Westend Ticket Service £5.80 for collecting two theatre tickets, in person, at the box office

* Standing in a phone box for hours, talking to five - or has it reach six or seven? - individuals, listening to a lot of ring tones and background music, hearing repeated "sorry we're very busy" messages and getting precisely nowhere in my calls about BT phone and internet services

* Spending two mornings in queues at India House, with a third in prospect, to arrange visas for a very expensive holiday

* Paying £4 for a single ticket on the Tube from Temple to Victoria. "It's the same even if you're just going one stop," the man at the counter assured me

* Failing to find any way of buying a TV licence. Post Offices, if you can find one, no longer do it. A couple of designated newsagents were unable to help. An online application failed at the first hurdle, seemingly because I could not enter a recognisable phone number (see BT references)

India's revenge?

Mahatma Ghandi would have been 138 tomorrow.

In honour of this most revered figure in the making of modern India, the day is quite properly a national holiday. The visa office at India House in central London will be closed.

That is just as well since I am not sure I could cope psychologically with a return visit quite so soon after my two-and-a-half hours in the queue snaking round the Aldwych today. And that was just to obtain the so-called Q ticket that entitles the applicant to enter the building in hope of re-emerging some time later with the magic stamp in the passport.

Even without today's downpour, it would surely rank among the grimmer experiences of London life. It certainly made me question my choice of a holiday in the sub-continent.