Salut!

Turning sixty

Stop press: my friend Dumdad has written charmingly about my birthday at his own website, The Other Side of Paris.......

Sixty and flying. Well, 60 minus two days and flying today to be in the UK to mark the occasion.

Bill Taylor, who wrote an entertaining guest column at Salut! about reaching the milestone an awful lot earlier, has sent my first present: a copy of his book Paris is...Paris est capturing the glories and mundanities of Paris in strikingly good black and white photographs.

M and Mme Salut were snapped during a soirée with the Taylors one cold night on the Left Bank. M Salut was emphatically not picking his nose.

The other image chosen to illustrate this article is Bill's choice - at my request - from the other pages of the book.

Thanks Bill, and for those who can bear to read about the elderly, here are extracts from my column in today's edition of The National which you can find in full in the Arts and Life section of the newspaper's website:

If I already admit that the prospect of becoming a grandfather makes me feel old, how on earth will I cope two days from now?

There is no point in beating about the bush. A milestone birthday looms and while the kind Omani who speculated that I was about to be 40 became my friend for life, he undoubtedly knew he was some way out.

No matter how I try, I struggle to keep a straight face while telling anyone 60 is the new 30. Nor, despite having approached my 30th, 40th and, to a lesser extent, 50th birthdays with equanimity, can I honestly claim to be entirely at ease about completing a sixth decade.

The badger that defied the lion

Christelle Randall has never been lost for words. So, not least because her Friday night offering attracted a large weekend readership, let's make it a Christelle in Africa weekend for Salut!. She thought she was adding a few paragraphs to tag on to the tale of Snout the cobra and Cedric the croc. But it was just too good to throw away like that......

Here are two fantastic nature stories.

Firstly, the other day one of the resident collared leopards Thilo stumbled across an enormous python who had just killed an impala.

As the python lay sleepily post-meal, no doubt congratulating himself on his pretty impressive kill, Thilo jumped down from her hiding place, killed the python (unable to put up any resistance due to being so full and physically unable to move due to the impala not being digested and still fully in tact in his belly) and promptly ate both python and the impala inside!

I can't help but feel really sorry for the poor python who would normally have put up quite a fight but in this case was literally immobile yet impressed at how smart Thilo was..

The second story accompanies the great picture above.

The lion is Zero, Karongowe's resident male, who is the uncontested king of the jungle weighing in at 250kg.

Snout the cobra, and how to frighten your parents

Snakes, leopards, lions and hyenas - and more mice - loom once more in the life of Christelle Randall as she continues her African adventures - and her determined campaign to scare the wits out of her poor old mum and dad.....

I am writing from the town of Tzaneen, about 80km away from our new reserve Karongowe, which lies close to the incredible Drakensberg mountains.

Karongowe is a much more commercial reserve compared with Venetia and we live in a big farmhouse as opposed to the tents we used before.

The Marieskop mountain lies right behind the house and at night its slopes burn with bush fires. From the house, it looks as if the mountain is adorned with fairy lights, like a Christmas tree.

There is no fence around the house so we are not allowed off the verandah at night although the only things that usually run through camp are hyenas and bush pigs. Lions and leopards are not usually seen around this area.

Love, war and a writer's tears

Rosemary Bailey is, on her own assessment. an emotional writer.

When I interviewed her for The National - the piece has been published today at this link - she told me she had wept as she wrote her new book, Love and War in the Pyrenees: A Story of Courage, Fear and Hope 1939-1944*.

In previous books, she wrote about her own life in the Pyrenees, where she worked on the restoration of a monastery, and her brother's death from Aids, written with his blessing after he became ill, which describes the support he received in the Yorkshire mining community he served as an Anglican priest.

Road hogs, chauffards and piratas della strada

In the few months I have been driving in the UAE, I have regularly encountered psychopathic tailgaters, hard-of-thinking lane weavers, doddery oafs refusing to budge from the third of four motorway lanes at 50mph, routine refusal to indicate (unless to signal the opposite of what is intended, or after the manoeuvre has been completed) and lunatic boy racers.

One morning, I watched a man licking nonchalantly at his ice cream as he took his 4x4 monster so close to the gold-and-white cab in front that he'd have been hard pressed to fit his wafer between the two bumpers. He wanted, naturally, to get past and wasn't too fussy about how this would be accomplished.

I have yet to see anyone reversing on a roundabout after missing an exit, and no one has gone quite so far as to overtake me by barging past somehow in the same outside lane, though I have the Time Out Guide to Dubai's word for it that both of these things happen, too.

If you need to ask the price.......

I did need to ask. So naturally, I couldn't afford it.

You cannot live in the UAE and not at least consider a visit to the Burj Al Arab Hotel, Dubai's grandiose answer to the Eiffel Tower and all other man-made monsters of construction the world over.

They don't mess about with false modesty. A brochure readily available on request at reception is titled The World's Most Luxurious Hotel.

It stands 321 metres tall on the shores of Jumeirah beach and resembles both the sails of an Arabian dhow, as intended, and a whale that has decided to stand on it tail.

A night in the cheapest room costs 8,500 dirhams, that is well over £1,000 even before 20 per cent worth of taxes and service charges are added on. The top rate, for the Royal Suite sets you back Dh55,000 (more than £7,000 once you've added the extras). Breakfast, please note, is not included, though I suspect that with 780 square metres of space, you might be able to sublet to a few dozen others to offset the cost.

Snap judgement

When I said my photograph from La Fête du Citron at Menton had no chance of being selected for the Schmap Nice Guide, there was no false modesty at play.

So far as I am concerned, it is a poor picture, and while I make no claims for the quality of my photography, I do know that I have taken better.

From Emma Williams, managing editor of Schmap Guides, comes news of a difference of opinion. "I am delighted to let you know," she writes, "that your submitted photo has been selected for inclusion in the newly released fifth edition of our Schmap Nice Guide."

Find it in context by going to this link to the guide. But do not expect it to look any better just because it is there....

Merde! Five letters de trop for the BBC

Have I been away too long? Has there been some renewed auntification of the BBC in my absence? Stand by for a sad little tale of censorship.

A quarter of a century or so ago, a woman called Geneviève wrote two books, Merde! and Merde Encore!, to help acquaint Anglo-Saxons with "the real French you were never taught at school".

Our heroine was described in the blurb as "a lady who swears with exquisite grammatical accuracy" in both French and English.

The "Merde family" of words and phrases took pride of place in the opening chapter of the first book, entitled The Musts.

One leopard to another: "Clap hands? Here comes Christelle."

When you need to go, you need to go. But it's best not to sound like a baboon* if your journey to the loo after nightfall takes you anywhere near leopards. Christelle Randall feels the advice may well be worth heeding....

Last Monday our group the Bladerunners left Venetia for the Leshaba mountain which lies about three hours north from camp.

We were delayed on our way out of the reserve by a herd of elephants that crossed the road in front of us led by their matriarch. We watched as one by one, about 12 elephants crossed with a few little ones at the end.

Anyone who has read my last couple of posts will know that I have not enjoyed all my encounters with elephants. I was just about to allow myself to start enjoying them again when a little further along we stumbled into a couple of bulls, one of which the reserve calls “Impy”, known for his curiosity and cheekiness, which in my language translates as an even better ability to petrify.

The GVI staffers at the front of the vehicle stopped the car and mentioned that the elephants might feel a bit more unnerved as they weren’t used to this particular engine. When we drive around camp on our game drives we tend to use the Mahindra vehicles and the animals have become accustomed to the engines.

However they apparently get very nervous with any other engine (both lions and elephants) possibly because the culling that went on a little while back was done from a different vehicle. Either way it didn’t do much to calm my nerves. Nor the fact that the elephants are super intelligent so actually enjoy playing this cat and mouse game with the vehicle.

So we had to reverse as quickly as possible to show the elephant he was boss. We were held up for about forty minutes waiting for the elephants to move on. It’s actually quite incredible how much elephant protocol we have to adhere to. They don’t like flashlights, they don’t like certain engines, they don’t like it if you look at them when talking to them and you need to talk to them in a low voice.

It’s almost like preparing for a visit from the blinking Queen.

Lion prides, wild dogs, cobras.....and mice

It is the reporter's nightmare. Great story to tell, no way of getting it back to the office. Christelle Randall now knows all about the problem. But fired by some marvellous footage on Animal Planet on TV, her old man has cobbled together some jottings from a quick e-mail and Facebook message.......

Keeping up the blog posts is tricky, as I have to share access with the whole of the group for the computer. When we go to town on our day off once every two weeks, we have to use the computer in a tiny shop and share it with everyone else.

Things at Venetia are still good....it's pretty hard core and I struggled a bit to be honest at first with the more scientifc elements of the work.

But I think I have proved myself now and am having an amazing time, though it's much harder than I thought it would be.