Salut!

He’s Queens Park Rangers. I’m Sunderland. His football writing deserves to go viral

 

My friend and fellow Sunderland supporter Pete Sixsmith is the main reason Salut! Sunderland, the fan site I launched in 2007, was so good (and why it is so sorely missed after the new owner let it go to rot). If Pete commends another football fan site, it is likely to be worth a visit and he ordered me to look at this piece by Clive Wittingham, whose Loft For Words is the must-go web place for QPR fans.

Just now, they’re having a miserable time, an experience Sunderland followers know only too well. Our club is doing rather well and last week heaped more unhappiness on QPR by winning 3-0 at their place.

Normally I would have been there. Loftus Road is the second nearest senior ground to me, just two bus rides away (I can walk to Brentford’s dinky little new stadium). My younger daughter played for the QPR women’s team, joining just one year too late to take part with the other girls as super-extras in Bend It Like Beckham. I had friends in the home end on Tuesday. But I couldn’t go and made do with the substandard Sky red button option. 

Clive’s report may have hurt to write but was a joy to read, especially if you support Sunderland, of course, but perhaps also if you just appreciate top-quality, wholly irreverent football writing. It had Pete and I laughing out loud.

For the full works, excellent photos included, go to the LoftforWords link:  https://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/queensparkrangers/news/59613/something-about-a-massacre-on-february-14--report

Here are chunky extracts ….

 

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Monty’s and Indian/Nepalese cuisine: bouncing back from an unfair defeat

 

 

When it comes to Indian food, I have grown to be a bit choosy.

The proliferation of basic curry and tandoori houses around Britain means that standards have, in my own view, fallen. It is much easier than used to be the case to eat badly and/or feel ripped off. You can dine very well indeed but that often means splashing out on posh Indian. 

When I lived and worked in Paris, and my duties as The Daily Telegraph's correspondent covering all things French included a blog for the paper's newish website, I embarked on a leisurely and haphazard search for France's best Indian restaurant.

It was a popular initiative among readers and, even more so, to me. In this strictly professional cause, I ate at the newspaper's expense at just the right number of places, once even taking the TGV down to Angoulême to check out a recommendation.

Then, just over seven years ago, I compared experiences at two restaurants, both long established and both familiar to me: the Gandhi in Saint-Tropez and Monty's just around the corner from Ealing Broadway station in West London.

It was a deeply flawed exercise, the outcome influenced by a rare disappointment at Monty's, and Gandhi came out marginally on top. 

 

Rishi, Boris, Keir etc: those wacky Brexit positions in full

Understanding Brexit and all the different positions people take on this most important subject can be tricky. Here is a cut-out-and-keep guide 

 

With renewed thanks to the Danish cartoonist Jens Hage 

Salut!’s Christmas Day message: glad tidings amid the gloom

 

Today is a day to be enjoyed.

And Salut! hopes its small band of readers - the folk music site Salut! Live gets many, many more and might even entertain you - have a great Christmas Day.

My pal Pete Sixsmith foregoes Sunderland games each Christmas to show there is professional life after a teaching career 

 

There are things we can try to forget for one day.

Forget the attacks ministers and media cheerleaders have made on ordinary people, most of them performing important duties of behalf of everyone, for attempting to defend or improve working conditions and negotiate fairer pay.

Forget, if we can for a day, Putin and his squalid invasion, a Hitleresque adventure he crazily justifies as countering neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

Forget the incompetence, misconduct and dubious relationship with the truth that have characterised a good part of the Tories’ 12 years in power. The Government’s default disclaimer - ´´global headwinds’´, ie the pandemic and war - diverts blame from its own failures and the role of Brexit, which makes every problem others face that much worse for the UK.

Forget Sir Keir Starmer’s ploy of pretending the stench of Brexit can somehow be turned by his magic wand into the sweetest of scents. 

Actually, don’t forget and certainly don’t forgive any of that.

But do try to make the most of the festive season, notably today and the New Year revelries. And remember the good things: the flawed wonder that is the NHS and its magnificent staff, people in public and other essential services, volunteers at homeless refuges and food banks, all those giving their time, effort, skills and sometimes their lives to make the world a better place.

Salut! wishes you all a happy Christmas and the best the new year can bring.

 

Macron's 2022 nears end with comforting embraces for Mbappe, mixed balance sheet for France

 

 

Where else but Qatar to start a review of France and Emmanuel Macron's year? The mix of emotions on show at the end of a thrilling World Cup final no one really deserved to lose offered a useful metaphor. My thanks to the editor of The National for consenting to reproduction of my work here ...  

 

Amid high drama in Qatar, the faces of Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe firing the imagination of a watching world, an eventful year for France was reflected in other images capturing the changing moods of President Emmanuel Macron.

In Mr Macron’s expressions could be seen unbridled exhilaration at France’s comeback from being two goals down, the despair of ultimate defeat, grudging respect for the Argentine opposition and warm consolation for the deflated players, Mbappe in particular.

France was no longer top of the world in football. After the trophy-winning World Cup exploits of 1998 and 2018, finishing second in Doha was a slip from heady heights mirrored in at least one other aspect of the President’s experience of 2022.

 

UK policy: nurses should shiver and starve to defeat Putin

Sad but true: many Conservatives say or maybe would say if asked that they naturally support - as a fundamental democratic right - the right of workers to withdraw labour. I have never met a Conservative who supports this or that strike ... my analysis for The National

 

In a world seemingly imagined by Nadhim Zahawi, chairman of Britain’s ruling Conservative party, Vladimir Putin sits glumly at his preposterously long table in the Kremlin.

 

The news from London is bleak. Just as Mr Zahawi had urged, British nurses have accepted a pay offer they regard as desultory, thus sending a “clear message” to the Russian president that his warmongering, and weaponising of energy supply,are doomed to failure.

 

Mr Putin realises the game is up. His “special military operation” – or, as others see it, murderous invasion of neighbouring sovereign territory – must end forthwith, whatever the damage to personal and national pride.

 

Brexit and the Ukipification of Labour: Starmer own goal or sound tactics?

 

Brexit may be seen more and more for what it is, an unmitigated disaster, but its power to corrupt remains strong.

We've had Lord Frost and Liz Truss, so vocal in condemning the economic absurdity of leaving the EU before the referendum, hard Brexiters afterwards. Boris Johnson wrote opposing versions of a pre-referendum column, one pro-Remain, the other for Leave. I suspect BoJo’s reasoned preference was for the former but that ambition easily swayed him in the direction of the latter and the company of Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, IDS, Gove, Britain First, the EDL and - overseas -Trump, Putin, Wilders, and a Le Pen or two or three.

Jeremy Hunt? An emergency budget in which he talks about Putin, Covid, his own party's wretched economic gambles and "global headwinds". No mention of the other culprit (which he, too, knew all along would cause misery}.

And now Sir Keir Starmer. leader of His Majesty's Opposition. First he imposed a new form of omerta on his party, leaving senior colleagues in no doubt that criticism of Brexit, often enough even mention of it, was taboo. Ambition again; he wants to be PM and he worries about his red wall of voters who switched from lifelong Labour to duped (or xenophobic) Conservative because BoJo was Getting Brexit Done.

In this Comment piece for The National - which, according to house style about foreign titles, has him as Mr not Sir - I explore the pros and cons of the new pro-Brexit Starmer stance ...

 

 

 

Chris McAndrew

Jean-Marie Le Pen and the dark legacy of 50 years of far right agitation

Rassemblement National (National Rally) was the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen's creation until four years ago. As France's main far-right movement marks, as quietly as it can, today's 50th anniversary of its birth, there are shudders of disgust or at least distance among France's new intake of 89 MPs, forming the biggest single opposition party.

'I would not have joined the FN in 1972,' Alexandre Loubet, an MP from Moselle tells Le Figaro. 'I come from Debout La République [another populist, rightwing party, but without FN's toxic image] and consider myself a social Gaullist,' says Anne-Sophie Frigout, from Marne. Philippe Lottiaux, down here in the Var, assures me the RN of Le Pen's estranged daughter, Marine, is neither extreme nor right.

I respectfully disagree.

As Emmanuel Macron pointed out in this year's presidential election campaign, her crackpot idea of banning Muslim headwear would have criminalised, among so many others, Latifa Ibn Ziaten, a relentless campaigner against extremism whose son, a Muslim soldier, was one of the seven victims of Mohamed Merah, a terrorist killer, 10 years ago. That alone tells us a lot.

This is my Comment piece for The National on the anniversary the far right, for that is what is still is, would sooner forget ...

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Image of Jean-Marie Le Pen by staffpresi_esj

Marine Le Pen and her party's 50 years: a hesitant golden milestone

 

I felt it was appropriate to write about the 50th anniversary on Wednesday (Oct 5) of the creation of the party Jean-Marie Le Pen helped to found as the Front National (FN) and which his daughter, Marine, has striven to reform, making it something less or seeming less extreme, ditching a name resonant of jackboots in favour of the more inclusive Rassemblement National (National Rally or RN) and ditching her unreconstructed old far right dad.

We are hardly friends, FN-becoming-RN and me, and I believe RN is still an extreme rightwing party. But when it comes to news, I have always tried to be objective. A comment piece is to come but a quick look at The National's website - the link is here - will tell you whether I succeeded on this occasion. To no great surprise, Marine Le Pen and her father simply ignored my written questions as did RN's media chief, Isabelle Marchandier, though she did at least acknowledge and pass on an interview request to Jordan Bardella, who seems likely to replace Ms Le Pen as party president and already has the role on an interim basis (he also ignored the request).

Unlike another unresponsive MP (Laure Lavalette, mentioned below) and to his credit, Philippe Lottiaux replied generously to my approach. My French vote in June's legislative elections is not here but in London and most certainly did not go to the RN candidate. But M Lottiaux won the seat for a constituency that includes where I live when in France. Read the article itself, where his comments are summarised, at The National site. Here I reproduce the interview, conducted n French by e-mail ....

 

Macron, Franco-Algerian ups and down and a glancing blow at Liz Truss

As my consoeur at the London-based website French Morning put it today, Emmanuel Macron did not expect to be drawn into the Tory and therefore No 10 succession contest. Liz Truss's crass comment in Norwich ensured that he was.

His rapier-like riposte, so much more elegant than her Little Englander spot of frogbashing, came during a three-day official visit to Algeria, which I explained for The National. See - or even hear - the item at this link or read it below, where it is reproduced with the editor's customary consent ...

When a president takes a sizeable delegation on a visit to a country with a shared and troubled history, it is fair to assume the agenda is unusually long or complex.

If the entourage numbers more than 90, assumption turns to certainty.

So it was for France’s Emmanuel Macron when he crossed the Mediterranean to Algeria last Thursday. Accompanying him were senior ministers, business chiefs and religious leaders among others.