Salut!

Fjord transit

MORE PHOTOS - AND ANOTHER OFFERING FOR COLLECTORS OF CAR PUNS _ AT SALUT! SALAM

Keith, in Comments, asks about the "deafening silence".

Well, I did consider taking time off from my enjoyment of Musandam, a gorgeous slice of Oman cut off from the rest of the country by the UAE.

But then it didn't take long to make up my mind. No, I did not go away to forget all the horrors inflicted by Bill and his kind on the English language.

I may well return to the subject and intrude on your semi-private debate. But not just yet, not while the fjords of Musandam, and the indolent dolphins that decided we should be satisfied with a few desultory tricks, are still fresh in mind.

My word

You may have noticed the minor skirmish, Salut! vs Bill Taylor, in the Comments section of the second of the London/Paris items. All good clean fun, which started with Bill pointing out a typo - I managed to put a second a into camembert - and proceeded to an exchange of views on language and writing. By coincidence, The National launches its Saturday edition today (it is already Saturday in Abu Dhabi) with a new columm dealing with - as the heading for this article (and also my chosen name for the column) may imply - the use and abuse of English. It is my column, and the first article gives a little background to my role as a newspaper stylist and discusses the decisions we made while creating The National. So many people have opinions of what constitute good English that I have decided to reproduce that introductory piece here (though not quite here - see Comments.....

London v Paris revisited (2)

Entente cordiale?**

Now this, to Bill and Louise but not to "Bridget Jones", will seem like cheating....but if the time of the year puts me in a sort of French mood, then there could hardly be a better moment to republish this as a follow-up to my thoughts, revisited, on London v Paris. It appeared as part of a "France in Flashes" series at Old Salut! on Nov 16 2006 - the anniversary of my wedding, the church bit of which occurred in provincial France and the honeymoon (if a few nights in a grubby hotel, obliged to stand outside humble restaurants and do mental arithmetic with the menu prices, counts as a lune de miel). It also attracted 50 replies, over which fact I might these days have drawn a veil had most of them not come from about three people. But having visited France only once this year - eight lovely days in the Var in June - and absent from Paris since 18 months before that, I wonder if Francophile/Francophobe readers can fill me on whether some or all of it still applies. London is mentioned only en passant, but feel free to make direct comparisons. Competition? You never know. If some interesting comments**** start trickling in - witty or wry, gentle or robust - I may well come up with a prize. Clicking away at my Google ads, buying incredibly cheap advertising space of your own or choosing items from my Amazon bookshelf is not a prerequisite of entry....and I may include the responses posted to London v Paris Revisited (1) as valid entries.

London v Paris revisited (1)

Two years ago, newly redundant, I went back (from Paris) to London to see family and sort out a few things concerning my future. I was doing quite a bit of that at the time, when I knew I would soon be setting myself up as a freelance journalist in the south of France but had no idea that, only a year later, I would be heading to the Middle East.
I came across this piece from that time while pottering about behind the Salut! scenes, peeking at where visitors to the site were coming from - and what had lured them here.
Now, of course, I am in neither city. But both are in my thoughts; I will see one of them - London - for Christmas, and one of the press releases I continue to receive from France informed me that the excellent Claire Chazal switched on the seasonal (pre-seasonal) lights at Galeries Lafayette in Paris a few nights ago. Forgive me for thinking it was worth sharing the results of my backstage meanderings. So many of the things I said then are still likely to apply two years on....

All that flitting between France and Britain has sharpened my appreciation of the little things that separate the two countries.

There are bigger distinctions too, of course, and I have a feeling these will crop up here as they did at another blogging place.

Picture by Paul Cooper

I always look forward to visits home but this has a lot to do with the people I want to see when I get there, and - as a past master of juggling travel plans with football fixtures lists - what I may want to do.

But on a largely football-free weekend (my regulars know of my less than wholehearted passion for internationals, though I will make a point of watching my younger daughter play for Acton Ladies tomorrow), I have been reduced to contemplating matters London vs Paris.

There is plenty wrong with life in Paris. It is stressful, crossing the road is perilous even on green, you get ripped off in many restaurants and bars and there is never an employee on hand to help when the machine rejects your perfectly valid Metro ticket.

But no Parisian, or French for that matter, barman has ever asked me to accept a cardboard cup for wine, as happened in the cafe next to Eurostar arrivals at Waterloo as I waited for my wife's train.

And no one is yet accosting me in Parisian streets with copies of free newspapers they want to shove in my face. Effectively unemployed for the first time since I was a teenager, I grudgingly acknowledge the boost this war of the freebies has given to a certain corner of the labour market.

Yet I cannot help sympathising with one wit I saw trying to win readers and reduce his pile of papers in the rain outside the Monument Tube station. "They're rubbish but they're free," he cried. "And they make good umbrellas."

Then there are the first stirrings of Christmas and New Year promotional activity, perhaps even more pronounced in the provinces. I came across Xmas dinner ads in Britan at the end of September; I don't think we'll see much of that in France for weeks to come.

London did threaten a late equaliser, though. A simple Indian meal in Chiswick, nowhere near the best I've encountered even in London W4, was nevertheless so good that I was quickly reminded of a significant downside to expat life in France.

Then a visit to the National Gallery enhanced our London experience by being free, which the Louvre isn't. Unfortunately, the paintings of Cezanne, Monet, Manet and Renoir made me homesick for the places depicted: the Bois de Boulogne (yes, by day), the Tuileries, Montmartre and Provence.

The honest truth is that I cannot wait to get back to the Gare (Gard for one reader's benefit; see comments) du Nord tomorrow night.

Salut! Salam: what, why and where

It is not really yet another blog. But Salut! Salam has made its debut as an independent site, breaking free from a mere sidebar location here.

There is a good reason for this.

Believe it or not, Salut! sites cannot be viewed from many, perhaps most, home computers in Abu Dhabi. I thought I was being censored, possibly because I occasionally use images from Flickr and - since Flickr is a vast photo-sharing archive that has been known to house some saucy material - that site has sometimes been blocked.

Obama vs McCain: no badge, no contest

The evening ended, for me, with Arabic commentary over images showing Brand Chelsea being ripped apart in Rome and Liverpool cheating their way to a draw against Atletico Madrid.But I was watching only because I had been lured to Dubai, and a subsequent spot of hotel TV channel hopping, for the US Mission to the UAE's election day reception.

In no way, of course, can my experience have any bearing on the outcome. Over in America, the queues to vote - or, as our American friends would have it, cast ballots - were so long that I feared at one point that there might never be an outcome.

But just so that you know: at the entrance to the function, there were two baskets or bowls, containing pro-Obama and pro-McCain badges (was there a third for Nader that I missed?).

My duty was tge be strictly neutral. Could I please have one of each?

"Sorry, sir," came the reply. "All the Obama ones have gone. We only have McCain left."

Well, I'd heard all about the impact a Redskins match, or the present thinking of American Roman Catholics, have on the results of presidential elections.

But was the imbalance in demand for badges in Dubai the final, conclusive pointer to what was going to happen?

My French bolthole: a very old farm with heaps of charm (3)

Emma Lee-Potter thought crusty old news editors bawling for "early copy" were a thing  of her past. She'd reckoned without Salut!'s determination to rely on as many others as possible to keep things ticking over even when it can't. In the latest instalment of Emma's campaign to transform a farmhouse ruin into her dream French home, we learn that everything is going rather slowly - except those eight captivating oak trees...

My heart sank momentarily when Colin’s e-mail pinged into my inbox. It was great, as always, to hear from my old Fleet Street pal, but his cheery missive reminded me about something I’ve been trying to put to the back of my mind. Namely, my mad decision to buy a tumbledown house in the south of France.

“Come on, Emma!” he’d written. “I’m waiting for more news of your French bolthole."

So here goes. The honest truth is that six months down the line from my first Salut! dispatch*, work on the house with no name is proceeding at a snail’s pace.

My architect friend Bernd has chipped the tiles off the steps that run through the centre of the house to reveal a beautiful stone staircase, ordered new windows from Germany and found a builder to fix the dodgy roof.