Salut!

Photos du weekend. 'Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?': Chez Jo, naturellement

Be warned about the recommendation that follows. Chez Jo may well be as good a place as any to eat along the Varois coast, say between Toulon and Saint-Tropez, but it has its peculiarity. This is how I put it a year ago:

If you do explore the beaches outside Le Lavandou, Saint-Clair is the prettiest but it also small and, consequently, the most crowded. Le Layet is not recommended unless you propose to take everything off or have booked a table at the excellent Chez Jo where customers eat in clothing (making them what naturists call les textiles) and don't mind seeing the exposed bits of non-textiles wandering over to inspect the menu ...

Minding our language: the words column is back

Two minor pieces of columnar news. I have two new columns to share here with you, though the second of these cannot be mentioned until Tuesday. Let's start with the other one: when my weekly thoughts on the English language were repeated here, having been published by The National, Abu Dhabi, the responses were so interesting and animated that I thought there might be a book in it.

A couple of publishers had kind words to say about the idea but thought the market too crowded. A published friend was harsher. But here we go again: The National has suggested a resumption of the column, on a less frequent basis (monthly) and this is how I introduced its return

Britain vs the Press: not quite the pounds of flesh authority wanted

It is no secret that I believe authority to be in a state of war with the press. The conviction of Andy Coulson for conspiracy to hack mobile phones will give it a slice of flesh, but not remotely enough to justify the extravagant amounts of public funds and resources invested in securing a few scalps ...

Reporters who regularly cover court cases know that while it is respectable to disagree privately with a jury's verdict, it is wrong and potentially very libellous indeed to question, loudly, that verdict if it happens to be Not Guilty.

Photos du weekend: how was la Fête de la Musique for you?

Most people know about the annual celebration of music that originated in France but is now held on the first day of summer in many other countries, too.

Le Lavandou had its little slice of the action. Paris will have been buzzing, Montpellier certainly was, but the event is not confined to the capital and bigger cities.

The brave new world of newspapers: engineers to replace quality writing

Gisèle Casadesus and a tour de force at 100

Most striking item on French TV news this week?

Not the footage from the Islamist insurrection in parts of Iraq, or of the terrible carnage inflicted by terrorists allied to Al Qaeda in Kenya. Nor the more dramatic moments from the World Cup in Brazil, or reports on SNCF strikers lighting fires and generally behaving badly around France.

Save World Cup footballers from life-changing injuries we see feigned nightly

When lives are at stake, the plight of the world's top footballers out there in Brazil is just too important to be left to a single-club site like Salut! Sunderland. As a public service, I therefore reproduce this article for Salut!'s smaller but broader-based readership ...

Médecin malgré lui, musicien ... and now l'artiste

So, the man's a cardiologist and, I am sure and assured, a very good one. He's a drummer whose love of music is so strong he'll jump on a plane from Nice to catch a show at Ronnie Scott's club in London and he's an occasional wannabe racing driver putting Ferraris through their paces at the Paul Ricard circuit in Castellet.

And then there's his art.

Trojan horses, sitting ducks and white elephants

The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy by Domenico Tiepolo (1773), inspired by Virgil's Aeneid. Public domain

This is an attempt to report without the shrill tones adopted by some on the serious issue of Islamist indoctrination which, in the case of the Trojan Horse controversy in Birmingham, appears to reveal a mixture of proper grounds for concern and more than a little unsavoury demonisation ...

The British government has reacted sharply to claims of “hardline” Islamist infiltration of a city’s schools, calling for spot checks by inspectors and summoning ministers to a meeting of its “extremism task force”.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of the national inspection agency Ofsted, said when delivering a series of reports on 21 individual schools in Birmingham that “a culture of fear and intimidation” had taken hold in the worst cases.

Photos du weekend: possibly the best bread in the world is no more

STOP PRESS: September update: bumped into the owner, emerging from his closed-down shop. He confirmed the worst: "tough economics, just couldn't compete with Tesco and Lidl"

Behind the newspaper-covered windows of this nondescript shop - who said the printed press was dead? - was baked the finest bread I have tasted in any of the five continents I have visited.

It was a granary cob, a round loaf with a wonderful crust, and cost just 90p.