It doesn't happen with every Salut! posting. It doesn't happen at all at Salut! Live or Salut! Sunderland, since the subject matter of those sites is not to my good friend Dumdad's taste.
But once a week or so, he sends a kind e-mail praising an item while gently adding, "wearing my sub's hat", that this word appears to be missing, that phrase "doesn't quite read", the odd word is garbled.
The "sub's hat" fits very well, not least because in professional life Dumdad is indeed a sub-editor, and a very good one at that. I wanted him to come and work with me on The National in Abu Dhabi; we settled for the next best thing and he nips beneath the bonnet of the newspaper's website from his home in Paris, locating errors and tweaking errant headlines, captions and text.
This kind of thing does not work for everyone. Poor Giles Coren*, the hero of my chosen version (see below) of the present YouTube fad for spoof Hitler clips, took great exception when a sub removed a single word from a restaurant review he had written for The Times. The intemperate complaint he fired off has rocketed into the folklore of what is still called Fleet Street.
But it works for me.
Another string to Dumdad's bow is his beautifully written and engaging blog, The Other Side of Paris. There, he chronicles daily life in - sorry, Dumdad - a workaday Parisian suburb, while also reminiscing about his days as a tailor's assistant, cub reporter and Fleet Street sub.
Or rather, he did.
For Dumdad - he gives enough clues to identify himself a thousand times over but would be mortified if I were to publish his real name at Salut! - has decided, if not to hang up his blogging boots, to award himself an indeterminate period of rest.
He offers no reason for this move, which has caused predictable distress among his loyal, friendly followers (he has many fewer readers than Salut!, but they are somewhat more demonstrative than most of my mine, if you get my meaning). Just a curt: "I'm taking a short break. Back sometime."
Because we are friends, I know a little more and there seems no need to send out a search party. Beyond that, it would not be right to go. Dumdad can fill in the details if he wishes (are there any lengths to which Salut! will not stoop in order to drum up a few comments?).
In the meantime, let us leave Dumdad's Paris Other Siders sighing for his prompt return, and thank him for the entertainment he has provided so far. I also thank him for having already drawn attention to one howler - now corrected - in this posting. It took Mme Dumdad's even beadier eye to spot a second.
* Giles Coren, for those who still haven't heard, said this in his protest about the changed review:
I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh." It appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."
His profane reaction to the inexcusable deletion of the indefinite article that was intended as his penultimate word can be found in its entirety at Media Guardian.
The squeamish, ill-equipped to stomach a pretty foul-mouthed tirade, may prefer to leave it at this glorious summary of Mr Coren's complaint: "I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable. F***. f***, f***, f***."
And then to enjoy his priceless response, published in last Sunday's Observer, to the YouTube spoof in which our Adolf is presented as the chief sub-editor of The Times, subjecting his underlings to a ferocious interrogation about the disgracefully unstressed syllable.
"I'm fluent in German, so watching it with subtitles is not quite as funny for me as for everybody else. There was a time when an Englishman could speak fluent French and German, but I suppose the YouTube generation spends its time doing this instead. It would be funny for me if it was in Russian."
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