Salut!

"Drive 400 metres, then plunge down a ravine"

Image: Frédérique Voisin-Demery

There are worse places to end up on a Sunday afternoon than the beautiful hills and forests of the Massif de Maures, between the Var coastline and the inland villages of Grimaud and La Garde-Freinet.

Old news on the Irish priest from hell

Common knowledge presented as red-hot news. An Ulster priest's murderous secret life led to what he would have regarded as nine casualties of war (inconveniently, Catholics as well as Protestants), one of them a nine-year-old girl, Kathryn Eakin. But didn't we know this already? ...

Many years ago, I sat down in the vast and what must once have been wonderful village green of Kew, these days bisected by the South Circular Road, and refreshed my memory of Brian Inglis's essential biography of Sir Roger Casement.

Previously secret Casement papers were about to be released at the nearby Public Records Office. But I was too early; the place wasn't yet open. So I found a bench and browsed the Inglis paperback I'd brought along as a handy reference.

When, finally, I was able to examine the documents, some still bearing the marks of government censors, I found myself amused by the excitement of some of the other journalists present. They thought they had stumbled upon a historical goldmine, yet much of what they believed to be new had already been published, years earlier, in Mr Inglis's work and, I am sure, the writing of others.

Serge Gainsbourg and Lucy Gordon: lives wasted

Encouraged, up to a point, by the daughter who works in film publicity, I went to see Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque).

It was, from my purely amateur viewpoint, an excellent film, appearing to capture something of the confusion, wit, romance, rebelliousness, self-destructiveness and genius of the man and his life.

He died many years before the statistical average age for French males, in fact at roughly my own age now, and it is fitting that his rumbustious life and times should have been turned into a film.

It would be pointless to ramble on about it. If you didn't care for Gainsbourg, there probably isn't much in the film for you and you may even find one or two of the director Joann Sfar's devices irritating.

But what will strike those who do catch the film, and read anything at all about it, is that they will be seeing what I assume was the last professional work of Lucy Gordon, superbly cast as one of the loves (along with the booze and fags that saw him off to an early grave) of Gainsbourg's life, Jane Birkin.

She was two days short of her 29th birthday when she apparently committed suicide, hanging herself in her Paris apartment.

I have no idea what demons drove her to take her own life, but assume depression to have played its part. The clinical form, as opposed to feeling a bit down,
is a vicious condition, as I have seen when covering inquests on prominent people who seemed to outsiders to have seriously successful lives but suffered the kind of mood swings most of us never know.

The credits made special reference to Lucy, dedicating the film in her memory. But what a pity she did not live to see the finished product, which I believe to the case, or to gain some support and strength from the kind words many have said or written about her performance.

* I am reminded of my friend Dumdad's charming account of the day Serge Gainsbourg's grandson tried to pick up his daughter ... click here to read it

The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of ... La Croix Valmer

Another night beneath Varois skies and another night of free music.

Vile bodies: 5,000 spammers and one mystery

Image: Don O'Brien

Spammers of the world unite. Well, there's no need for them to do so: they already create a passing impression of being a strong, cohesive world movement.

Overnight, my good friends at footballunited.com, the umbrella network for my football website Salut! Sunderland, notched up the 5000th thwarted attempt by SEO ("search engine optimisation") specialists, company IT geeks and others to dump drivel in the comments field.

Olivia Ruiz: beach girl giving French pop a good name?

Through a cloud of smoke over coffee (mine may have been a beer) at the Lutetia hotel, once home to the Gestapo, Benjamin Biolay, a sort of latter-day Serge Gainsbourg, gave me the lowdown on French pop: "Mostly, it's just crap."

Raising the bar on the Cote d'Azur

It is hidden away from the bright lights of the seafront in a former hairdressing salon in the Avenue des Commandos d'Afrique. There is no line-dancing, drag queen or a trillionth singalong to Sunlight des tropiques or Début de soirée - Nuit de folie.

Britain's justice down the tubes?

Christmas shopping underway in Oxford Street, news of scummy days out from Surrey to pay homage at Raoul Moat's funeral, people still thrusting free newspapers in your face as you walk around London.

All of these seemed reasonable cause for annoyance during a trip back to London.