Salut!

French cheese: a certain Savoie faire

A little cheesy, some may feel, but Salut! thought it worth giving its morsel of Tomme de Savoie a quick bump back up the ladder to mark our first appearance at the Cold Mud food site for rather a long time ...

One of the delights of making an overnight stop when driving between the Channel ports and the south of France is the opportunity to sample regional cuisine, in particular Burgundy cuisine since that is invariably where we stay the night.

At the Auberge Bourguignonne in Beaune, not everyone's favourite town but I quite like it except when it's heaving, the highlight of dinner has always been the cheese trolley.

Toon truly doon

It is not often in life that good things happen in combination, or that a combination of things brings good.

Sarko and Carla, Bormes and me

Now, I've always liked Bormes-les-Mimosas. It doesn't actually need the -les-Mimosas bit and once got along very well without it, but the French are very fond of marketing so B-l-M it is.

It is a pretty little village just above Le Lavandou. One of the best restaurants around - La Tonnelle - is found there, as are lots of charming little windy lanes and an immaculate cluster of buildings arranged higgledy-piggledy on the hillsides.

There is even a church fit for presidents, the official holiday retreat of the Fort de Brégançon being a short drive away. Jacques Chirac and Mme Chi-Chi joined the congregation often enough, Bernadette also making it her business to open the annual carnival with a procession of floats making the most of the proliferation of mimosas.

Trains of thought

First I spotted the TGV or Train à Grande Vitessee (as corrected: see comment) slicing through the fields on its way to Nice. Then, on the other side of the small town of Carnoules, I found where the trains stop. Though not the TGV.

I love trains, even the new Grand Central one that goes from King's Cross to what must be the bleakest, shabbiest national railway terminus on the western world: Sunderland Central Station.

Most of all, I love - or loved - steam trains. The one episode of minor vandalism I recall from adolescence is aiming a feeble kick at one of the new-fangled diesel trains BR had introduced on the Darlington-Bishop Auckland line. It hurt my toe, but left the diesel undamaged.

So why should I have felt nostalgic about joining 40-odd other souls on the swish platform you see above to board the dinky little diesel you see below (complete with mobile level crossing)?

Because deep down, I suppose, I still love all trains. This one is called a Picasso because of the driver's cab on the roof gives it an odd sort of shape. Just like Pic ... no, let them work it out for themselves.

It took us all the way to Brignoles, in the heart of the Var countryside, and all the way back. That's 44km in all. Not an outing to write home about,, though I am writing at Salut! about it, but a pleasant enough way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

East, west and a Varois sky

One view of the early evening sky from my garden in Le Lavandou.

Taking the photograph meant looking - broadly speaking - to the north and I am, of course, in the south of France.

But East/west is the title of a new column I am writing for The National in Abu Dhabi. If my previous offerings in the Arts & Life section represented the musings of an expat, East/west perhaps brings the thoughts of an ex-expat.

Each Tuesday (which feels like a promotion; the previous column appeared on Wednesdays), I give readers in the Middle East - or beyond, if they look at the newspaper's website from afar - snapshots of how things are back in Europe, doing my best where possible to draw comparisons with, or make allusion to, the life I knew in the UAE.

Some things don't change

Despite the recession, a record winter season is being reported from the French Alps. "Not everyone is affected," says one official.

And so at St Tropez, it will still cost you millions of euros to buy one of these little Mediterranean runabouts, or €400,000 to rent one for the week.