Salut!

When old (and less old) scribes gather

Health warning: if you have no interest in newspapers or the people who work for them, this posting may not be for you.

What follows is just a list of names, really. The names belong to some of the people who assembled in a London drinking hole to bid farewell to Paul Eccleston and Graham Tibbetts, until recently parishioners of the extended reach of St Bride's, Fleet Street.

Both were casualties of the cuts that have been a feature of life at The Daily Telegraph in recent times.

But what names they managed to draw to their joint leaving party.

Journalists get a bad press. They sometimes earn it. But among those present at the bash for Paul and Graham, I recognise some of the best I have worked with. What is more, they are all real characters in a trade that desperately needs real characters; the party must have been a classic.

Obama and the Gulf press

This is how three of the daily newspapers in the UAE covered the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

The supplement you see on the left of the montage is the eight-page pullout special from The National. I thought my colleagues did a particularly good job, from preparation of the supplement to their reporting of the day's events. But then I would say that.

Sir John Mortimer: when our lives met

John Mortimer would have deserved to be remembered with some fondness had Rumpole of the Bailey been his only creation, or even the sole memorable product of his life’s work.

However, as those who have read the more timely obituaries will have seen (if they needed reminding), here was a man of considerable literary merit, producing highly acclaimed novels, plays and essays, who had also excelled in his first career, as a barrister.

I was fortunate enough to encounter John Mortimer, learned counsel, and also John Mortimer, gifted writer.

From hair to there

Bad hair days? I do not have too many. Too many hairs, that is. In fact, hardly any of those I had when this photo was taken 37 and a bit years ago.
Some people spend an age on their hair. I managed to get from there to here, from hair to there if you like (second photo), with the least effort.
Much as people also fret about hair loss, it seemed a jolly enough subject for my midweek column in The National and, since that column appears without illustration (possibly in deference to readers' sensibilities) worth posting here with the pictorial evidence......

All I did was spot an empty chair inside a cheap and cheerful Abu Dhabi barber’s shop, ask for the usual trim and sit back in silence (the Bangladeshi hairdresser struggles with my language, though somewhat less than I struggle with his).

But in the few days that have passed since I spent Dh17 for 20 minutes in his company, his work has been the cause of much comment. “What’s with the new look?” a colleague asked. “Did you mean it to be quite so savage?” inquired another.

When you have hair only at the back and sides, haircuts are easy to overlook. Yet there seems something deeply unattractive about thickening, wayward clumps appearing on the margins of a bald head. So when I finally get around to it, I raise no protest if the barber displays an excess of zeal. And so it was: the “number two” he promised turned, in the event, into more of a head shave.

One colleague took unexpectedly close interest in my even more hairless than usual state. At 28, he detects the onset of hereditary baldness. Furthermore, he claims some success with one of those modern treatments that have replaced the mixture of iron, red lead, onions, alabaster and honey favoured by ancient Egyptians.

To be honest, I had noticed neither my colleague’s loss of so much as a single follicle, nor its regrowth.

But then, there are photographs of me at 23 with hair as long and apparently as thick as my wife’s, and that was six years after I first realised I was following my father into premature baldness.

My attempts to conform to the conventions of Sixties youth had led, in my teens, to occasional comparison, rather flatteringly, to Paul McCartney. How could I know then that I would have to settle in later life for the dour former French prime minister Alain Juppé and the evidently well fed British comedian Mel Smith?

At 17, in my first job, I had sat in despair looking at the top of my desk. Every so often, a hair – my hair – would flutter down to the white sheet of paper on which I was working. At first I tried to persuade myself it was natural moulting; this attempt was not assisted by the knowledge that I had never known my father with a trace of hair on top. Keeping my hair long or longish somehow saw me through most of the 1970s, but by the time I was 30, the patches were becoming harder to conceal.

I was never tempted by Egyptian or Greek remedies, nor even by the story that nothing worked quite so well as cow dung from the pastures of the English West Country. Instead, I grew to accept baldness as inevitable and incurable, and to console myself that baldies were thought the world over to possess, by way of compensation, not only great manliness but a full head of intelligence.

Systemic hitch

Salut! needs a doctor. It is suffering from a little known but painful condition known as Typepaditis.

Ever since the web hosting operation (Typepad) introduced some fancy new "improvements", posting to the far-flung empire of Salut! sites has become a nightmare.

Harvey Nicks, foie gras and me

Christmas was a-coming. In various corners of south-western France, the geese were getting fat.

But the sale of the foie gras they were on their way to becoming was putting no pennies in the hat of whichever old man runs the Harvey Nichols food hall. The stuff is banned there, as Mme Salut! discovered when she tried to buy some.

For Amber

Salut!, I hope, is rarely a particularly gloomy site.

Every so often, however, when wondering what next to write about, I come across something that is grim but also compelling.

Amber Marie Chochrane is a name that meant nothing to me* until last night when, purely by chance, I found this clip of her, a slideshow of still photos rather than a video, on YouTube.

Bonne année....

....is what Salut! is happy, in these somewhat unhappy times, to wish all readers, admittedly more in hope than serious expectation.

Bad luck has already marred my own start to 2009. Just when I was hoping to spend my windfall - I swear someone told me it would stretch to a small loaf of bread - I took another look at the expiry date.

And realised that as of midnight last night, I was $25 billion poorer.