Salut!

Le Comeback competition: the winners are...

So the time has come to honour the winners and put the non-winners out of their misery.

Looking back over the comments posted in response to my competition, I feel it was well worth running. At first, I thought you needed to look quite carefully to find contributions that could truly be considered entries. But I was wrong. The competition drew a healthy postbag.

Apologies, first of all, to the nearly men: Bill Taylor, Pete Sixsmith, Steven E Bushnell. All took funny, imaginative or pertinent shots at the prizes. Bill even sent a gift, a book of his own choice (Stephen Foster's tale of woe as a Stoke City fan: She Stood There Laughing: A Man, His Son and Their Football Club), to await my return to Europe; was this a blatant attempt to influence the outcome or simply a nice gesture?

Steven came up with the idea of an entry as a scene from a play. Bill refined it. But in the end, with apologies to the runners-up (and especially Bill, who worked his socks off for a prize and probably deserved one too), I nominate the following as winners:

We have books. But who are the winners?

Sixty-three comments were posted by a smaller number of individuals, all or most of whom thought it worth staking a claim for one of the above three prizes, kindly provided by the publishers Continuum, a division of Penguin, to mark Salut!'s 200,000th hit.

Another au revoir

The party's over. A great crowd of friends and colleagues - perhaps as many as 200 - gathered on the beach of The Club in Abu Dhabi to bid farewell to M and Mme Salut! Photos will appear in due course.

We fly on Friday. These were my parting thoughts in today's edition of The National

...

Demob happy is not the right phrase. Demob(ilisation) suggests I am taking permanent leave of these pages, which is not the case. Happy oversimplifies my state of mind.

It is true, as revealed in last week’s account of the cat’s flight from the UAE, that my own departure is imminent.

Le comeback, French cinema and a shortlist!

UPDATE: there have been 50+ comments, and some of them even look like entries. Plenty of time to respond - see below - but the present shortlist, in no special order, is: Louise; Bill Taylor; Will Buckley; Pete Sixsmith; Roads of Stone. Jury is out on one or two others...

So here's the prize. It is available three times over. All it requires is for there to be three deserving winners between now and midnight on March 26 2009, my last full day in the UAE.

The scene was set in Le Comeback and Salut!'s 200,000th hit and it is to there that readers should return in order to post comments intended as entries. Comments may not be left here. Follow this link instead.

This isn't France!

As close as Salut! can get to another edition of What I Did On My Holidays. Pressure of work/packing/farewells limits me to this offering, from today's edition of The National, though Monette declined to pose for the paper.
Word from London is that our ungovernable French cat is content enough to be reacquainted with the world, any world, beyond closed doors and windows and therefore sees the move as a bit of a holiday - but also that she isn't taken in. Suburban London is not Provence, and she knows it...

The cat has flown. Monette’s expat experience, in the UAE at any rate, has proved shorter than mine.

Le comeback and Salut!'s 200,000th hit (updated)

DEADLINE FOR COMPETITION ENTRIES:

Midnight on March 26 2009 (as shown by the timings given below for comments)

This is a competition that was launched without a prize. It now has three, details of which have now appeared: three copies, courtesy of Continuum Books, of French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present, by Rémi Fournier Lanzoni.

I had to find some way of marking the 200,000th visit to Salut! since it staggered to its feet from the ashes of my Daily Telegraph career at the beginning of Oct 2006. The magic figure was reached during the morning of March 11.

"The bugger won't write": Dennis Johnson RIP

One of the happiest periods of my life was the seven years I spent in the West Country.

My children were small, we were living in an area where most people would be content to bring up a family and my work, as the South West England and South Wales correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, was a good mix of serious news and fun.

There was professional rivalry among the reporters doing similar work for different newspapers, but also great camaraderie. With heavy heart, I record the death, three days ago, of one of those confrères - he'd have liked that word - Dennis Johnson.

Goa, as you please

I do not always enthuse about holiday destinations. Goa - our last week away before the big return to Europe, coming up soon - is an exception.

A stunning green landscape. Superb food, at less than half London or Paris prices. Elegant architecture, much of it a legacy of 450 years of a Portuguese presence. Relaxed, friendly people (for the most part). And a bloody great shipwreck off the coast of Candolim...