Salut!

Salutland: new readers start here

A colleague who has lived in Moscow mentioned recently that the Russians officially regard any blogger who receives 1,000 or more hits a day as a media organisation.

Yesterday, Salut! - or rather the Salut! group of sites - got within a whisker of having to apply for our official status to whoever deals with such matters at the Kremlin. If you added the people who visited in today's small hours, the application would still be necessary.

Does size matter?

The cartons from England have been delivered. A man from Bombay organised a pick-up truck to transfer a few possessions across town for about £12, a mattress is due on Sunday night and the bed and wardrobe should follow on Monday.

After five months in hotels, on the floor of a colleague's then empty flat and now staying with a friend, I am finally about to move into a place of my own.

Not Colditz, the flat with an extensive terrace but three significant problems: there is no access to it from inside, a 7/8ft wall is the only view from all but a tiny part of it and the building is still not read for occupation. Salut!, having given that one up as a bad job, will settle for a small apartment that boasts a large balcony, great views and cheerful rooms with bags of light and, in the case of the lounge, a tree outside the window.

Bill Deedes: saints and stinkers

After I had been lured to Facebook by addicted daughters, I signed up to a section called the "Bill Deedes Memorial Group" in memory of W F - or Lord - Deedes, a valued former colleague and something of a national treasure for readers of the Daily Telegraph.

These are the words I wrote in a message at the group's little corner of the site:

One thing I loved about Bill was that he thought of himself as a reporter. Another was that while, unlike me, he was a Tory, he was at least the one-nation sort. Better still, on the last occasion that we met, in 2005, he told me he wasn't so sure, taking all things (including events at the Telegraph) into account, of even that level of Conservatism. I realise his instinctively Conservative supporters here may find that unpalatable, but if he confided as much in me - a colleague, admirer, occasional drinks companion but not really much more - he will almost certainly have expressed similar thoughts to others.

Little did I know just how strongly he had "expressed similar thoughts to others". I do not yet know whether the political doubts are discussed in the new biography, by Stephen Robinson, which can be bought for a proper price here.

But he evidently had plenty to say to Robinson about one of the causes of those doubts. My copy of the book is on its way to the Gulf, but if I say Bill used such words as "stinking mob" to describe the new regime at the Telegraph, you will get the picture.

Unmoved in Abu Dhabi? Not soon, I won't be

Done it. After all that whingeing; sleeping on a friend's floor; paying sky-high hotel bills; stepping over sleeping workmen; being told there was never meant to be a door leading to the terrace ("it wasn't on the plans"); hearing a new completion date every month from Nov 2007 to mid-March 2008.

And, indeed, after the spectacular triple negative of my headline. At last I have a flat. Or rather, I very soon will have one.

No one who has followed my saga of homelessness in Abu Dhabi, a city and country I have grown to like a great deal but also home to some questionable property rental practices, will be surprised to learn that this involves a dramatic change of plan.

Libel shock...newspaper wins

It is fair to say I rarely find myself lapsing into praise for the system of justice that prevails in Northern Ireland, or indeed for the judges who preside over the courts there.

To maintain the spirit of fairness, I should also say that I am not entirely impartial. In the days when I covered Irish affairs, a lot of money was once awarded in respect of an article I had written.

Now that did not seem especially fair at the time; the Daily Telegraph's leading counsel had described me as one of the finest witnesses he had seen in a Belfast court. But at least his praise meant that when I returned to London, I was treated as hero of the hour, perhaps having stopped the damages rising still higher, not a reckless oaf who deserved the sack.

Never mind all that. Let it be said loud and clear that Salut! is today full of admiration for the Northern Ireland Chief Justice Sir Brian Kerr. He has just rectified one of the most preposterous judgments I have come across in four decades of attending or taking interest in criminal and civil cases the world over.

Lord Chief Justice Kerr overturned a £25,000 award against a newspaper that published a straightforward example of a restaurant critic doing her job: criticising a restaurant in which she had a meal and dining experience she considered sloppy and unappetising.

Derby? Aberdovey? Isn't that what he said?

It has already been recorded that when Martin Newland, editor of the new daily newspaper due to launch in Abu Dhabi, rang to offer me a job, Mme Salut spectacularly misheard my end of the conversation,

"Merde!" she famously thought but didn't say (she is, after all, a well brought up French lady who would never stoop to uttering les cinq lettres), "he's not thinking of taking me to Derby."

There have been times, during our accommodation nightmare, when the East Midlands has seemed implausibly alluring. But then we remember rain-sodden days when I've been at football and she has been wandering around the unappealing city centre.

But now we head off to a much more attractive corner of Britain for the latest example of similar confusion between here and elsewhere. To, of all places, Snowdonia.

War of words (2)

An appendix to my style guide for the newspaper about to be launched in Abu Dhabi offers ample proof that neither snobbery nor racism lies at the root of a declared preference for British English.

Due allowance is made for words and phrases that have become so commonly used on both sides of the Atlantic that to ban them would be absurd. Correction: due allowance has been made for some of them. Flats/apartments is a good example.

But am I supposed to feel snobbish or worse for insisting that no one so much as thinks of writing awesome to describe some mildly impressive experience or an interesting piece of electrical equipment as opposed, say, to the power of the sea?

There are those who look down their noses at American use of English. I take a more philosophical view, though I did at one stage consider adding the words "they know not what they do" to a ruling that where a misspelling forms part of a proper noun, the World Trade Center for example, we should not correct it.

War of words (1!)

Salut! is still homeless and, once again, wifeless in Abu Dhabi. It is also deeply entrenched in war - on the side of the good in a conflict between British English and American English - but promises to toil late into the night to ensure that normal service is soon resumed.