Salut!

Keith is king

Go back over the bits of the Salut! empire that interest him and you'll find wit, warmth and wisdom in the contributions of one Keith.

I know who Keith is, since we worked together for long enough, and I know him to be a Man Utd supporter - one who has even been to Manchester a couple of times - with a penchant for making fun of my footballing allegiance, my sporting interests and my musical tastes.

And now he has won a competition. Keith's response to my list of pop music hits and misses will actually force me to listen, or listen again, to two or three records mentioned in his Desert Island selection. His pet hates, with the exception of "anything by Bob Dylan' and perhaps even Imagine, mirror my own.

A copy of the first edition of The National - that's an arty shot above, taken by Sammy Dallal, from one of our news conferences - is on its way to reward him, and also to remind him of what a quality broadsheet newspaper looks like.

His lists follow.......

Nicking Hornby: version française

....infectious nonsense? Or just nonsense?

On any list of the things I miss about France, karaoke would come a long way down. Not because French pop music is all as bad as one singer, Benjamin Biolay, told me it was ( but then, he is difficult to please; he already had Catherine Deneuve's daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, as a wife only to move on soon after we spoke to Virginie Ledoyen).

It is just that mention of the two words - French and karaoke - in close proximity reminds me of some of the more excruciating performances of the more excruciating pop songs I witnessed on visits to the Goëland bar in Le Lavandou.

Here's my list of five of the worst

Oh, Champs Elysées Joe Dassin...always reminds me of the lady who wrote in to the Telegraph Paris blog to rebuke me for saying I quite liked the Champs Elysées. She was right.
Pour que tu m'aimes encore Celine Dion...after you've heard this five times, from different wannabe Dions, in one evening, suicide seems attractive.
Alexandrie Alexandra Claude François.....a jolly singalong chorus with lots of Aas and Aaahs. Gruesome.
Sur la route de Memphis Eddy Mitchell.. How could Eddy be omitted from a list of this sort?
Mon mec et moi Patricia Kaas..."he talks about love like he talks about cars" is one of its lines. Ça suffit?

But there were saving graces. Some French standards are delicious, and occasionally a very good singer would turn up at the Goëland and sing them.

And then there was Rudy Liétot, the witty and talented MC, who would always plead with me to have yet another go at Don't You Want Me (often enough, faute de mieux, him doing the girl parts). Needless to say, my attempt at being the bloke from Human League should more properly and honestly appear in the first list, but the second was running short and, as more than one of you has pointed out, most songs could probably slot easily into either Best or Worst category, depending on mood.......

nick Hornby's formula and pretend it's your own

Having your Cake.....

No time for more than this: a hasty list of five anthemic pop or rock songs the world - or at least Salut!'s world - would happily do without:

* December 1963 (Oh, What a Night) The Four Seasons...guaranteed to get 'em dancing, and me leaving

* I Will Survive Gloria Gaynor.......best left to girls dancing round their handbags

* Hotel California The Eagles........was pomp rock invented with this monstrosity?

* Hi Ho Silver Lining Jeff Beck.....he should never have left the Yardbirds

* It's raining men The Weather Girls....somehow encapsulates every bad dancefloor memory

.......and five of the best:

* Like a Rolling Stone Rolling Stones....somehow preferred to Dylan's original, and the best number they didn't play last time I saw them live (Paris)

* Knockin' on Heaven's Door Guns 'N Roses .......ditto, great version

* I Will Survive Cake..... the version that turns it into a proper rock song

* Bohemian Rhapsody Queen....but could as easily fit into the first list

* Sultans of Swing Dire Straits..... with Fix You by Coldplay as substitute

*with due apologies to Nick Hornby, whose lists helped to make High Fidelity such a great read. A first-day copy of The National to the reader who produces the best alternative lists (enter with Comments or by the e-mail link: Salut!'s decision final) *

A newspaper is born.......(2)

Not everyone in the world is especially interested in the press in general, or The National in particular. But I hope I may be permitted my moments of excitement after being involved for the first time in my career in a newspaper launch.

There is so much else to read at the Salut! group of websites, by simple navigation here or at Salut! North, Salut! Live and Salut! Sunderland, that I feel entitled to feel that plenty of options are available. Poor old Salut! North with its tales of life - my life - in the North East of England, could actually do with a hint of the readership levels enjoyed by the other three.

But please do not expect, today of all days, Salut! proper to offer thoughts on France or any of the other subjects that so often occupy its pages.

When I left the printing plant at 1.30am, copies of the Business and Sport sections were still streaming off the press. Printing of the main part of the paper began when I was asleep, and my first sight of the finished product came when I returned to the works a little before eight o'clock this morning.

The copy you see in the picture is that main section, held by my colleagues Maha Elhami, the editorial assistant, and (right) one of our reporters, Haneen Dajani. Click on the photo for a better view.

I wish to place on record here at Salut! my profound gratitude to all those at The National who have worked so hard during the past weeks and months to make our launch a success.

There were moments of exhilaration, and of frustration, throughout yesterday and into the night. Others will judge how well, in the end, we fared. But now we simply have to start all over again, for there is tomorrow's paper to produce.

I am not sure how I have managed to snatch the time even to post these few thoughts. In due course, I will make other pictures available. And do not forget, if you are interested, that The National has a website so you can take a look at the results of our labours wherever you are.

www.thenational.ae

Still not quite the launch issue.......but we produced a Special Preview Edition for distribution tonight to guests at a grand ceremony in the Emirates Palace hotel and this is it, in the hands of my colleague Karen Davies.

And I couldn't resist getting in on the act either.......click on the headline and you will be taken to our website, which successfully went live at 2am GMT.

A newspaper is born....... (1)

These pictures tell only a small - and early - part of the story of our preparations for the very first edition of The National, the new daily newspaper published in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

.....but if you come back some time later, I will tell you more about our day.

What you see so far is a group of page editors (a bit like sub-editors but explaining the distinctions would take for ever), my colleagues Rym Tina Ghazal, left, Rasheed Abou-Alsamh and Tala al Ramahi and, below, our editor, Martin Newland (the one who looks a little like Clark Kent), taking the morning news conference.

And finally, for now, this is what old-fashioned hacks (I plead guilty) call the news desk, but the new paper calls its national desk. Matt Slater, national editor, is seen on the right at the news conference and the last picture shows his deputy, Gregg Fray, deep in discussion about what to order for lunch. Both Matt and Gregg have played blinders in the run-up to launch, but then so have a lot of people.
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What matters

Two days from launch. The place is buzzing, and not just with the mosquitoes. Abu Dhabi is about to have a national daily newspaper, and I hope and believe that it will be a very good one

Preparing for this event has been the most invigorating period of my professional life. For all my moans when American and Canadian colleagues lapse into the use of words and phrases that have no place in a paper that has chosen a British broadsheet style, it is remarkable how well people from various corners of the world have risen to the challenge of expressing themselves in broadly the same language.

Some excellent work has been done already in the dry run pages we have been producing, and everyone's efforts will seem all the more impressive once we are writing, editing, photographing and designing for a real audience: the newspaper-buying public.

Pain and pleasure

French baguettes. Wherever honest men and women find themselves munching bread, if they are not in France, they think wistfully of the real thing. The bakers of other countries produce perfectly tasty examples of other kinds of bread; the baguette seems to resist all attempts to beat the French at their own game. Or does it? In another of Salut!'s guest columns, James Langton - a baker who dabbles in journalism* - is inspired by the recent bread Oscars to explain the growing upstart threat to French supremacy

There cannot be many international tournaments where victory and defeat taste equally sweet.

For those of you who may have missed it last weekend, it was the finals of the world cup. la Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in fact. Held every three years, the venue is always the same. Paris, France.

The France bit is necessary because for the past decade, the title has escaped the hosts. Despite what you might think, the French are not masters of the baguette in their own back yard.

In fact the winners of two titles, including the previous contest in 2005, have been the United States of America. One of the winning categories was the Golden Gate Bridge made from bread. The other title , as I recall, went to the Japanese.

Jetlagged and jabbed, Monette est arrivée

She's been a French country kitten, a Parisian apartment cat, a lizard-killing Mediterranean prowler and a SAD syndrome sufferer in London.

Now Monette is officially a resident of the UAE. After her varied first two-and-a-half years of life, she is making a third country her home. Time will tell what she thinks of it.

Grand National

Today, we moved into the gleaming new offices of The National, the daily newspaper we are about to launch in Abu Dhabi.

A lot has been achieved since Martin Newland, for whom I also worked when he edited The Daily Telegraph, arrived last July to assemble the team and the apparatus to give the capital of the United Arab Emirates a national voice, a newspaper that will report with authority on the nation, the region and the world.

The newsroom's space needs tell their own story; a handful of us began work six months ago in a small office of what is now the Abu Dhabi Media Company, which also produces Arabic publications and has a broadcasting arm.

As the people we recruited began to stream in, we moved to a building known as the auditorium but having the ambiance of a vast examination hall.

And now we have moved again.