Salut!

Gone fishing again

In the early hours of tomorrow, Salut! takes wing for a fortnight back in Europe.

A day in London, an awayday to Middlesbrough for the wedding of my nephew Andrew and his fiancee, Sarah, then off to Gothenburg and - heureusement - the south of France.

People here, and back in Europe, react in different ways to our break. Some are envious, others advise us to make the most of the chilly weather before we have to face the fierce heat and airless humidity of our introduction to Arabian summertime.

A colleague who preceded me back to the UK writes from Shropshire: "It is boiling here. Nearly 50f. Phew."

Then, he amplifies the bulletin: "Pours every day and is freezing cold. Spent as much in petrol in four days as in eight weeks in Abu Dhabi....."

The wife of one of the ambassadors I have met here says simply: "Enjoy, and save your energies for the return....it will be your first summer in Abu Dhabi."

Max Hastings and a wandering hand

It seemed a shame to hear that the Daily Mail had taken down from its site a rather fetching photograph of my former boss, Max Hastings, who now spends his time pottering about the garden of his Home Counties cottage.

The news came from a recently acquired electronic penfriend who, suspecting the photograph's likely fate, had taken care to save a copy, which Salut! is happy to share.

Sir Max always came across as the sort of country-loving chap who would do his best to find work for local folk, so it is good to see that he has hired an extra hand for his labours.

At first, my correspondent appeared to be mistaken, since I had no difficulty locating the original article, complete with the same photo you see here but larger, and capable of being enlarged again.

Visitors to Salut! yesterday will recall that I pointed them in the direction of the Mail site, where they could get a better look at the extra body part (for some people, being 6ft 5ins is clearly not enough) and also read all about the sweet pea named after our hero.

Sadly, and doubtless amid much finger pointing and fist shaking, the Mail belatedly got a grip and airbrushed Sir Max's third hand out of sight. So go to this link only if you need to know about the sweet peas.

But while the hand may have wandered out of general view, let us preserve its memory here in the picture above.

One man's poisson....a fishy tale from France

Hunt the imitation....

Tell the averagely educated visitor from Mars, accustomed to a rigid diet of green cheese, that you are going to the restaurant with hopes of dining on frogs' legs, snails or pig's intestines and he may well raise questions about your sanity.

But with that average education of his, it is just possible that he will have heard of the easier-on-the-eye French translations: cuisses de grenouilles sautées à l'ail , escargots de bourgogne and andouillettes de Troyes (below). Especially if Martian TV - maybe one of the fancier terrestrial channels - has a Delia Smith equivalent. For all exist as classic examples of French cuisine.

But what of pastiche du poisson?

Out of the frying fan, into the fridge

So this, chez Salut!, is the pièce de résistance.

Looks and is great, with plenty of space to relax, entertain and take in the striking city view. But we are about to discover how resistant our pièce is to the Abu Dhabi summer.

For weeks, people have been warning that the balcony, the feature that makes a tiny flat seem spacious (it was marketed as two-bedroomed, but is actually nothing of the sort), will soon be out of bounds.

Beneath the heat of the day, with temperatures edging upwards of 40 degrees, it is already difficult to stay out much longer than it takes to water Mme Salut's attempts to relocate the Royal Botanic Gardens somewhere east of Kew.

Curry favours

Pattaya's finest; at least nothing like this exists in France

If I had no right to expect to find a decent curry in France, the Middle East was surely in a different league. And so it has proved.

A couple of weeks or so from now, I will be heading back to Le Lavandou - via Middlesbrough as it happens...where else? - and, for all sorts of reasons, cannot wait to be there.

My home has been empty since last September, or at least I sincerely hope it has, and it will be marvellous to be back, sipping rosé on the terrace, looking out over Provençal rooftops to the hills of the Var and taking evening strolls along the seafront.

What I will not find, of course, is an Indian meal worth eating. The goal I set myself three years ago, to find the French equivalent of an ordinarily good, English suburban tandoori, was always doomed to failure.

But if you want to know a little more about how well my quest travelled, as it were, have a look at what I have written in today's edition of The National.

What is more, you can then follow a link and read it again - and lots more about food - at an appetising site, new to my acquaintance, called Cold Mud.

Nicking Hornby: a winner's confession

Keith is pleased with his prize, a copy of the first edition of The National, for his lists of pop anthems to cherish and pop anthems to forget. He feels the paper "looks even better in the flesh, as it were".

But he also comes up with this suggestion:

By the way, if you had really wanted to test the honesty, integrity and sheer bad taste of your readership, you should have asked them to name the top five records that they are slightly embarrassed to admit they like!

Challenged to set the ball rolling, he offers this gruesome confessional (the comments are mine):

Sugar Sugar - The Archies....as near as he gets to a reason for being stripped of his original award

Goodbye To Love - The Carpenters (but only for the brilliant guitar solo)....that's what they all say. So why do nine radio DJs in 10 fade out the solo?

Blockbuster - Sweet......words fail me

Vogue - Madonna.....but does Keith know she's a closet folkie, too?

Relight My Fire - Take That (with Lulu)...was it strictly necessary to alert us to its existence?

Keith adds: "I have a terrible feeling I'm gonna regret this!"

My list will follow, but I certainly hope he is right........

Caught in a Blue Peter moment

This is one I made earlier. Pressure of work is inevitably creating gaps between postings but I thought it would be interesting to run this piece, written during our pre-launch trial runs but now past its shelf life for an Abu Dhabi audience. Are there cultural/pop culture events you left it late to see, or never got round to experiencing?......

There really was little excuse for taking so long to see The Mousetrap, and equally little reason to suppose that unpaid thespians in Abu Dhabi, performing at a social club built on land donated by the UAE's founding president, Sheikh Zayed, would end up filling my cultural gap.

It is hardly as if the long history of Agatha Christie’s whodunit, and the slightly shorter history of me, failed to offer an opportunity sooner.

First sprung on the public as a radio play, The Mousetrap made its debut on the London stage 55 years ago.

For 23 of those years, I lived in London and for a time nurtured a voracious appetite for all things Christie. I devoured her novels, studied the mysteries of her life and felt honoured to be sent as a young reporter to cover her memorial service in 1976.

And when I think of woeful shows I have paid good money to see, it is strange that I should never have got round to attending one of the 23,000 performances of that extraordinary run. But The Mousetrap remained, to me, a closed area. So now that I have rectified the omission, catching the Abu Dhabi Dramatic Society’s presentation of the play at the Club, I must surely be a satisfied man.

On the contrary. I feel only relief that the seat cost 50 dirhams (about £7), not extravagant West End prices.

My French bolthole: a very old farm with heaps of charm (1)

It doesn't seem five minutes since Emma Lee-Potter and I were having our bottoms done together, so to speak. Well, that is what we called it at the time, when we found ourselves in the same BA queue for jabs before travelling for our respective newspapers to cover a visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales to the Middle East. In fact, it was more than 20 years ago and Emma has brought up two children, become a published author and failed to age by a single second. Later than some, she also fell for the lure of France as a place to buy a bolthole. If you want an answer to her concluding question, watch out for the Salut! Forum sequel(s)......

The rot set in when I talked to a couple who’d sold up in rain-soaked Cumbria and moved lock, stock and barrel to a rambling house halfway up a French hillside.

Next I became transfixed by Matthew Parris’s A Castle in Spain, the story of his spur of the moment decision to buy a ruined castle in the wilds of Catalonia (he called it “one of those foolish challenges that grip us in middle life”.)

Then I was enthralled by C’est La Folie, Michael Wright’s uplifting tale of how he bade farewell to his safe south London existence and moved to a farm in the Dordogne with only a cat, a piano and a vintage aeroplane for company.