Salut!

Everything Salut! would want to say about the royal wedding

One way of supporting the headline would be to direct readers to the Tom Paxton song, The Ballad of Spiro Agnew:

I'll sing you a song of// Spriro Agnew// And all the things he's done

... and then invite them to check the subsequent verses, which capture all my deeper thoughts on the wedding of William and Kate-cum-Catherine.

Ahmed, five-star squalor and what Sarko and Berlusconi were arguing about

From Paris, my friend Peter Allen reported on Tunisians gathering at the Gare du Nord, "desperate immigrants fleeing the chaos in North Africa", in the hope of travelling to Britain.

And my part in chronicling the human fall-out from the jasmine revolution took me across the border to the town of Ventimiglia, or Vintimille as the French call it. The jasmine revolution has been warmly welcomed in the West; the human fall-out, namely the migrants, have not.

Kate and William, stately rumours and watching paint dry

"Why aren't you back in England for the wedding?", my newsagent Marie-Noëlle asked as I picked up my Var-Matin (and a British newspaper that shall remain nameless) this morning.

Intermarché, Tesco and loyalties that go both ways or just one

Life is too short to keep on worrying about the routinely ignored one-way system in the Intermarché car park.

The other day, I even saw a Police Municipale patrol car, on no obvious mission of urgency, cut into the wrong lane.

Salut!'s royal wedding menu in case Kate Middleton needs building up

Image: Poppet with a Camera

From French television news I learn that British newspapers are worried about Kate Middleton. She looks fine on my screen but clearly isn't bulky enough for Her Majesty's press.

The French may have done away with royalty, chopping off heads but keeping the palaces for tourists, but they show lingering fascination with ours. And, eccentric pretenders aside, with the nearest thing that remains to one of their own, the Grimaldis of Monaco.

The railway children, version française

Kids of today! Don't know they're born.

Now I always thought that was a fairly stupid phrase, but I do know what it means.

In the Var-Matin today is the story of a Corsican travelling by rail from Toulon with his children aged two and four. While still lugging his cases on to the platform on arrival at Saint Raphaël, he watched in horror as the doors closed and the train departed.

The children proceeded to the next stop Cannes, where they were recovered (safe and sound; I have yet to read the full details of how they passed that journey, but can well imagine their little faces pressed against right-hand windows admiring the splendid views of sea and valleys).

The story made page one. A similar tale of a child making a train journey alone was on national television news in France the other evening.

Mark my words, as I used to say every Saturday at Salut! By the time I was four, or perhaps even two, I was:

* adept at manoeuvring a sledge down snowy banks in winter (and sometimes spring and autumn, since this was the North East of England)

Image: Dave Haygarth

But not just that ...

* catching the United, Eden and OK buses towards Bishop Auckland, West Auckland and Spennymoor

* hopping on to the milk floats, tea vans, household coal delivery lorries and ice cream vans that came down our street and staying there as long as I felt like it

* hitchhiking down the A1 to folk festivals in the south

* booking the ferry to France

* ducking out of family holidays in Blackpool to take the short flight to the Isle of Man

* driving my dad's old Wolseley when he wasn't looking (and it would start)

* making the bus/train journey from Shildon to Roker Park every other Saturday to see Sunderland play at home

Not to mention all those times I biked up Busty Bank - long and steep - or scootered along the recreation ground path or rode donkeys on the beach at Saltburn.

And none of it ever made so much as a downpage, back-of-the-book paragraph in the Auckland Chronicle.

Var-Matin reports that our two little Corsicans, Jeanne and Joseph, took it all just stoically as I would expect. They had, after all, travelled 7,000km by rail (and on bikes) through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam last year without incident. It was to exhibit their father Jacques Steiner's photographs from that odyssey that the family was apparently heading to Théoule-sur-Mer.

"You saw us as the train left, Papa," Jeanne said after completing the extra leg of her journey with her younger brother and being reunited with les parents. "We didn't even cry."

Don't know they're born.

Speed cameras, phonetapping and le fair-play britannique

Image: Annie Mole* - London Underground Tube Diary

A few years ago, there was a minor fuss about speed cameras. Some police forces were sneakily camouflaging theirs, using green-coloured boxes to make them indistinguishable among the roadside trees so unsuspecting motorists could be trapped before they had a chance to see them.

If my memory is right, those forces were smartly instructed to revert to colours such as the grey that is otherwise commonplace. It sticks out, you see it, you slow down.

There was a hint of the British spirit of fair play at work here. We all know speeding is wrong, can and does kill, needs to be controlled.

But we don't really approve of policemen jumping out of the bush, even when - as here - taking inanimate electronic form. It may also have something to do with the widely held belief that while improving road safety is undoubtedly one of the motives at play in this cat-and-mouse game, revenue-building is certainly another.

Smoke signals: dreaming and dying for a fag

We can all joke about smoking, especially once we've given up. I'm working just now on the possibility of trying to flog off merchandise at Salut! Sunderland and wondered about an ashtray with the slogan "Watching Sunderland can seriously damage your health".

The French, as you can see above, don't mess around with conditionals. I'm a long time not smoking, so am not sure whether similar warnings on packets of fags in the UK are bold enough to leave as little doubt.

Of mountains, sea and songs

Not much more than an excuse to post a few photos as the south of France enters one of its loveliest times of the year ...

Another trip up into the Mercantour, an Alpine haven from the Côte d'Azur north of Nice, followed by a leisurely drive back along the Corniche west from Cannes and then a day in Marseille ... things could be worse.

A dodgy Natalie Portman film, Fermeture Annuelle signs and missing Altan

And if only we'd known earlier, we could have been in the mountains seeing the wonderful Altan live ("in Fontaine, France playing gig in a lovely venue La Source this evening..... Looking out at the Alps on this bright sunny day", says my Altan Facebook friend Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh). Where are they tomorrow night? ...

Today, the sun was blazing, making it worth the effort to lump the table round to the front and catch the heat while gazing out over the Varois hills and tucking into the first asparagus (à la crème, bien sur) of the year.

There are not many things better than this part of France when the weather suddenly decides, after an iffy spell, to be kind.