Salut!

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Salut! is off on its travels.

A longish journey, to China, for a shortish break, back Feb 8.

It is a packed itinerary so there may not be too much time for reading, whether in Mandarin (in which all the time in the world would be of little use) or English.

IF, however, I get the chance, the choice will be between the following books that have come my way of late, all part-read:

Expat life: it's raining goals

This probaby belongs at Salut! Sunderland. But then again, why break more hearts? ...

Always look on the bright side of life, sang the Monty Python team 30 years ago.

On his way to Chelsea Football Club’s Stamford Bridge stadium, a friend visiting from Paris heard the game was sold out.

Pressing on regardless, he found his bright side. A spectator approached to offer a spare seat in his private box, telling my pal, who was smartly dressed: “You look the sort of chap we wouldn’t mind having with us.”

Junk on the web: when imbecility gets nasty, by accident

An everyday story of websites and parasites ...

Who was Stephen Wilson and who is Andrew A Sailer?

The answer to the first question is easy. Stephen, pictured (far right) with fellow Sunderland supporters at a pre-season trip to Amsterdam, was an amiable man who met an end he did not deserve. He was killed in an attack outside a pub in Bishop Auckland, Co Durham. My friend Pete Sixsmith, who is seen on the extreme left of the picture, wrote an eloquent and touching tribute to him at Salut! Sunderland, entitled simply "Stephen Wilson RIP".

Expat life: in polite society, you're a dirty, rotten ... breadstick

The Campaign for Courtesy began life as the Polite Society. Perhaps the founder, the Rev Ian Gregory, discovered there already was one: an American group dedicated to firearms and taking the title from the words of one Robert A Heinlein: "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life." As Mr Littlejohn might observe, you couldn't make it up ...

An organisation called the Campaign for Courtesy, registered in Britain as a charity, has the objective of eradicating “excesses of anti-social behaviour which blight the life in our cities, towns and villages”.

Enough to drive you to drink?

I have a few candidates ...

* restaurants (only in the UK) that treat requests for jugs of water, whether or not wine is also ordered, as akin to breaking drought restrictions

* restaurants everywhere that start wine list prices at £15 or more when you know bottles at the bottom end probably cost them no more than a fiver

Mark my words: teenspeak and the language tsar

What is the correct age at which adults should start complaining about teenagers? Probably about 35. It is as much a function of old age as noticing how much younger police officers are these days ...

Are the teenagers of today really a bunch of moronic, monosyllabic idlers whose inarticulacy renders them unemployable?

Do we get a good press? 2: the Daily Star

For the second part of Salut!'s occasional series looking at the British national press, attention is turned to a title that is usually regarded as the weakest and most vulnerable of the redtops, but turns out to pack an unexpected punch ...

Names will be withheld to protect the guilty.

Two bright young reporters in a fairly grim northern city, one working for a regional newspaper and the other for a news agency, discuss their ambitions.

One knows he will end up on a broadsheet and that he will probably rise to a high position (or apply his considerable brainpower to another career). The other also has considerable brainpower, but only one aim: to work for the Daily Star.

Expat life: from snowed in to skating on thin street ice

The British are obsessed with the weather. Why, we ask, can't we be more like countries that seem so well prepared for the snow they get every year? Well, comes the reply, because we don't get snow like that every year; it just seems that way. So the cost of being prepared would be too much to bear. Here's a little more* on how I fared in the Big Freeze ...

After all that wimpish fretting about snow casting doubt on my New Year trip to France, the journey turned out to be uneventful, unless torrential rain in Normandy counts as an event.

It did become rather cold but this was wrap-scarf-around-your-neck cold, nowhere near nippy enough to serve as a dress rehearsal for what awaited my return to the UK.

Rupert Hamer and Phil Coburn: a confrère's salute

It is rare for journalists to receive or, I suppose, qualify for sympathy. And I am another journalist, of course.

But I wish to add Salut!'s voice to the tributes being paid to Rupert Hamer, the Sunday Mirror defence correspondent killed in a blast in Afghanistan, and Phil Coburn, the photographer badly injured in the same incident.

Sympathy is equally due to the families of the American serviceman who also lost his life, and Private Robert Hayes, 19, the first British soldier to be killed in the conflict this year. The bodies of Pte Hayes and Mr Hamer, pictured above by courtesy of the Sunday Mirror, were returned to the UK on the same flight.

I did not know Mr Hamer but have been told by friends who did have dealings with him that he was a good man and also a fine, courageous journalist. My thoughts tonight are with his widow and three children

Phil, also pictured with the consent of his newspaper, is a man I consider a mate. I have worked with him - he has a lot of war duty under his belt, but I first met him when he was freelancing at the High Court in London. He contributed regularly to The Daily Telegraph on cases I was covering, and we have been known to socialise in the pub after work. I last spoke to him at a Fleet Street function immediately before Christmas and he was in great form.

He lost a foot in the explosion and I am told the leg had to be amputated below the knee.

Phil, who has my heartiest wishes for the strongest and fastest recovery possible, has been flown home for treatment in the UK.

"He's a fighter," says his picture desk boss, Mike Sharp, "and we're happy to have him back home."

Further words are probably unnecessary and unhelpful. I shall leave it there, except to point readers in the direction of this outstanding piece by my colleague David Sapsted about his own, much closer friendship and professional links with Phil Coburn.

Snow oop north follows me doon sooth

We all know about those southern softies.

At the first trace of winter, they persuade themselves climate change means global cooling and fear they've been consigned to Siberia.

It's a source of constant mirth for tough northerners, even those of us who spent our first three months in the wimpish south. I well remember, on my first winter in London, watching colleagues rush to the window at the sight of a few stray flakes of snow. What would they have done had a cow wandered past, since so many Londoners have never seen one?

But I've grown soft, too. And I feel I am getting too old to be sent oop north to Lancashire and, in the call of professional duty, shiver amid the splendidly dark, satanic and (less splendidly) redundant mills of Lancashire.

At 6am yesterday, plodding to the Tube station, all seemed well enough. A little chilly, but no more than we expect in January. I knew I was travelling north-west, but had been negligent in my attention to news bulletins the night before, hearing only that Scotland faced a heavy snowfall.

My snowfall started as the train passed through the northern Midlands. And never really stopped. Now that I am back with Virgin on a much-delayed train home, I hear that it's hit London sufficiently hard to confirm to any surviving former colleagues from the Harrow Observer that Siberia has indeed caught up with us.

Here, then, is a chronological display of the images of my trip to Lancashire ...