Salut!

Sooty, sweep and a brush with an elephant

Another week on the trail of wildlife in Africa has seen Christelle Randall studying for exams, sweeping leaves, getting covered in soot on camp chores, encountering a grumpy bull elephant and becoming a Zimbabwean billionaire..

So another week has gone by and a lot of interesting things have happened. We took all our exams last weekend, following a week of serious training and are now able to hit the fields and participate in proper wildlife research.

Our group of 12 has been split into two and each day one person from each group is allocated a duty for which he or she is responsible.

For instance camp duty involves staying behind in camp, cleaning, preparing food for the whole group/staff and all chores.

I did this on Monday where I cooked macaroni cheese for 17 people, cleaned out and re-lit the “donkey”, our water heating system for which we cut and burn wood to heat up the boiler tank and refuelled the paraffin lamps around camp.

By the end of the day I was completely black, covered in soot, and I had earnt the nickname of Cinders. Anyone from work reading this who still suspects I am on a three-month holiday might think again….

Gigi, St Tropez and England's finest: a winning combination

Overwhelming is not quite the word to describe your response to the Fawlty Towers competition. It is likely, however, that no amount of entries would have produced a Basil Fawlty or Mrs Richards moment to better Gigi. Otherwise known as Gill Baconnier, Gigi - a frequent visitor to these shores, and seen below with a familiar face - wins the complete DVD set of the two series, or whatever item she should choose from the Amazon shelves at any of the Salut! sites. Why Gigi? Because she quoted from this gloriously depressing account of a scene enacted before her eyes in the lovely resort of St Tropez.
Gigi wrote at Salut!: "My own Basil Fawlty moment happened just recently in St Tropez. A very rude tourist was trying to get out of paying for his meal on the grounds that there wasn't any cream in his moules marinière."
Salut! reproduces it in full from Gigi's own site, French Windows......

Lionesses outside the tent

For days, nothing. Then a flurry of text messages, phone calls and finally a long e-mail confirmed that Christelle Randall remained in one piece, healthy and contented, and able to bring news of her African wildlife adventure.....

Firstly, apologies for taking so long to do my first blog post but the last couple of weeks have been really crazy.

I had fully planned to write with news of the first few days in Jo'burg and the journey down to our reserve (Venetia Reserve), located in the Limpopo Province, nearest town Messina.

But I have not had a minute to myself, so have decided to write now and launch straight into what has been going on here in Venetia.

The reserve is spread across 32,000 hectares and is owned by the De Beers family who have a large diamond mine here. Their interest in conservation coinciding nicely with any guilt caused by their plundering?

On the first morning we were woken by the sound of screaming monkeys and one of the girls in our tent looked out of the window only to see three lionesses walking past. We were later told that this was unusual and lions tend to stay away from camp. Something I am now grateful for after hearing about migrant Zimbabweans who stray into the reserve only to get eaten..

Each morning here is freezing, or feels so three degrees - if you are out on the trucks at this time you get borderline frostbite on the face, only to be sunburnt a few hours later, which I am sure does wonders for the facial ageing process.

A date with the desert sunset

Go to Liwa Oasis, it said on the little pocket map, and prepare to be blown away.

That, on the basis of one visit, is an overstatement.

Liwa comes at the end of a 235km drive towards the Saudi border from Abu Dhabi. You do not travel through the desert and expect to see lush valleys or snow-capped mountain tops, so it would be unfair to say the road is drab.

After Madinat Zayed, it perks up a little, as the sand becomes reddish brown in parts and more greenery, even the occasional farm, appears by the roadside.

The first impression is of a friendly little community. Asked if there is anywhere where my wife can buy a swimsuit for the hotel pool, an Emirati instantly beckons us to follow his 4x4 to a parade of shops where a one-size model, hardly the stuff of catwalks but functional (and available), costs all of two pounds.

Basil Fawlty, Mrs Richards and me

Like the World's Oldest Blogger, Joan Sanderson waited a long time for her version of Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame.

Near the end of a solid acting career, which had included numerous television and stage roles including lots of Shakespeare, The Mousetrap and Please Sir!, Joan accepted a smallish part in Fawlty Towers.

She played the deaf-as-a-doorpost hotel guest, Mrs Richards, and the scene in which she complains about the view from her room is a classic of British broadcast humour, one of the most memorable moments of a fabulous comedy series. In 1982, three years after the episode was shown for the first time, Joan died aged 79.

Before I get round to the details of a little Salut! competition - the closing date for entries, I have decided, will be 9am UAE time on Thursday July 24 - I should say that by following this link or the one at the top of my list of items beneath the sidebar subheading The National, you will see that I have written about Mrs Richards in my weekly column, which appears today.

In it, I mention a few Mrs Richards moments from expat life and wonder, tongue in cheek naturellement, if the effect they have is turning me into Basil Fawlty.

On the trail of collared beasts

Christelle, my elder daughter (pictured, with friends, on a recent visit to Abu Dhabi), gave fair warning that her ability to keep the promise to post to Salut! from her African wildlife expedition would depend on access to the internet.

She hopes to write a full account of her first week very soon, but has so far managed to send only a couple of text messages, via a companion's mobile phone.

Her first message was another of her frighten-the-parents classics , along the lines of: woke up to the sounds of monkeys, looked out and saw three lions walk by (even if it turned out to be someone else who saw them).

Olive Riley RIP

Just when I was beginning to fear I might be the world's oldest blogger, I learn that I am far from it.

Or, at least, I was far from it.

At the grand age of 108, Olive Riley last posted an item at her blog - like me, she actually had blogs plural, Life of Riley and World's Oldest Blogger - on June 26, voicing thanks for "a whole swag of e-mails and comments from my internet friends".

Stars of Salut!

There has always been a star culture in the media. In the past, the BBC had Alistair Cook, the Daily Mirror Cassandra. Today, tubthumping, harrumphing columnists such as Richard Littlejohn, and celebrity pundits like Piers Morgan, are household names, and filthy rich with it.

The modest Salut! empire has its own stars. Pete Sixsmith writes as well at Salut! Sunderland as do many Fleet Street sports journalists in their papers. Salut! Live's verbatim interviews reveal the brighter lights of folk music - Rachel Unthank, for example, and Karine Polwart - to be handy with words, too. And even Salut! North has the Girl at the Redworth Bus Stop.

Now step forward a new star of Salut!, who happens to be another C Randall (pictured above, on the right).

Ingrid Betancourt: when headlines help save lives

L'ex-otage

The wonderful news that the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt is today safe, well and in the midst of her loved ones in or on her way to France, the country where she grew up, cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed here.

Rarely has an item of news made me happier than yesterday morning's first reports that she had been freed after more than six years as a hostage of Farc rebels.

It gave me a little more pleasure to read that her release was apparently achieved without bloodshed; it is surely a defeat for terrorism when terrorists are denied martyrdom at the moment their rotten endeavours fail.

The kidnapping of Betancourt aroused particular attention in France because she is not only French-Colombian but is blessed with a son and daughter, Mélanie and Lorenzo, who were determined to campaign relentlessly for her release. Their success in keeping their mother's name in the public consciousness - at least in the French and Spanish speaking worlds - was indirectly a factor in the outcome.

Inshallah Towers (2)

The answer to the little quiz, of course, is that I had so little to write about in my column that I agreed to let Monette, aka the ungovernable French cat, sink her teeth into my left index finger.

It is a sad little story, starting with my elder daughter Christelle's big project, three months' leave of absence to work on an African game reserve, and ending with the all-too-true comment of a friend, Jon Ryan, that beautiful as Monette may be, you look into her eyes and see directly into the jungle.

Along the way, Christelle is alerted by her dad to the need for rabies injections (although fear of rabies may not be the first thing that springs to mind if you are mauled by a lion), and dad is told he needs five rabies injections after being bitten by a non-rabid family pet.

Professional etiquette required that I should not write my Wednesday column here before it appeared, as it were, there. Today is that day, and you can read it if you wish by following this link.