Salut!

Sunny places for shady people. I even miss Antibes when in Brexitland

The murderous Westminster attack happened the day before I flew back to London for a week.

The threat of terrorist atrocities has been a feature of life in the capital for most of the time I have spent here since moving down from the North East in 1973 so I am hardly going to start fretting about it now.

Everyone should take appropriate precautions but the sad reality is that this is a random phenomenon; never forget the poor man who texted "I'm safe" from Brussels airport only to be killed in the next bomb blast, on the Metro.

Forget Trump, Le Pen, Farage and other modern horrors. Enjoy Hampstead Heath

To be honest, I have just a feeling someone beat me to this image, and did so on canvas rather than by pointing a mobile phone at it and hoping for the best.

But it was a view that struck me yesterday as we wandered, trudged, slid around Hampstead Heath and was by no means the only feast for the eyes on a not-too-chilly November afternoon in London.

Le Lavandou to Ealing: thank you for the music et au revoir

Why on earth would anyone give up this and willingly return to a gloomy, grey post-Brexit Britain in which, as my great friend Pete Sixsmith put it on the phone today, there is a distinctly nasty atmosphere? Not so much racism, he thought, but xenophobia, a loathing of all foreigners.

Dave Swarbrick, fiddler exemplaire. Gone before his time, gone now. Rest easy, Swarb

I reported the death of Dave Swarbrick, one of my favourite musicians, at Salut! Live on the day he passed away. Here are some additional thoughts, plus clarification of the geography and other factual details with the help of Swarb's widow, Jill ...

The lily-painting Monet's role in the life of Monette, the globe-trotting cat

See also how this story appears, in slightly different form and with a decidedly US approach to commas, at Cat McMahon's Cat's Stories website: http://www.catsstories.com/from-monet-to-monette-the-art-of-being-a-globetrotting-cat.html

Had it all happened 80 years earlier, the generously bearded Claude Monet might have been standing there in his magnificent gardens at Giverny, 40 miles outside Paris, including Monette in one of the final works of his long life as an artist.

At the Royal Academy in London, however, there was no trace of this delightful creature of Giverny, the cat that lived there briefly at the start of an eventful life.

Manchester Men: we've introduced Louis van Gaal. Now for Pep Guardiola

Buy from the Salut! Amazon link at http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00NVFNIS2/salusund-21

Try as I might, there was no way of injecting a sly Sunderland link (like that one, say) into a profile of Pep Guardiola*, the impossibly rich, handsome and talented manager-in-waiting of moneybags Manchester City. My profile of Louis van Gaal, when he was appointed manager of Manchester United, still attracts loads of visitors to Salut. Let's hope Pep is a little more mature in his dealings with the press; fabulously rewarded men and women in very public roles simply have to learn the law of rough and smooth ...

As Pep Guardiola prepares for the latest challenge of a mighty career, entrusted with the task of completing Manchester City’s rise to footballing world-beaters, he might come across words attributed to the Victorian statesman Benjamin Disraeli.

“What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow,” Disraeli, twice Britain’s prime minister, reputedly said in praise of the city’s reputation for innovation and example.

Wasps for breakfast, crickets for lunch, scorpions for dinner? Ask Mohammed Ashour

Actually, I am not sure about wasps though some swear by the deliciousness of their larvae. And my wife was once served a wasp fried to perfection as an unintended part of her full English breakfast in the Swaledale village of Reeth (mentioned in Vive la différencean epic about Anglo-French love written for for the Telegraph 12 years ago). But crickets and scorpions are among 1,900 bugs** regarded as edible for humans.

The nearest I have been been, consciously at least, to eating insects was on holiday in China when I was tempted to try fried scorpions. The tour guide discouraged me, insisting they tasted "oily and vile", though others would dispute this* ...

When tourists wander around Beijing’s street markets, they often come across stalls selling fried scorpions. In downtown Bangkok, passers-by are offered bamboo worms and crickets.

Missing the Geldof wedding but lunching like stars on Marseille's Calanques

Although Bob Geldof lives just down the road - well, OK, a few miles down the road, but we're close enough - my invitation to what Var-Matin calls "a sort of re-confirmation" of his wedding in April to Jeanne Marine must have been lost in the post.

So as Jagger and his ex-Jerry Hall (she's an even nearer neighbour when not on Richmond hill), Sarah Ferguson, Kate Moss, Bono, Demi Moore and Richard Branson joined in the revelries at Le Rayol-Canadel, where the couple have their home, we went west.

Le Grand Tour: Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Menton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Cap d'Ail, Monaco

A great weekend with no football to worry about and lots of very decent food and wine to consume, while also visiting and revisiting a string of locations along the Riviera.

It coincides with the approach to that annual return to London, due at the end of this month.

Quebec or Mick Jagger: why is Ronnie Wood 'roi de la poutine'?

Credit: Jonathunder

Perhaps I did not expect to find a review of the Rolling Stones, closing their North American tour in Quebec, in Le Figaro. Something for the really old readers, I suppose.

But even less did I expect, in such a review, to see references to an indigestible-sounding Quebecois dish known as poutine. Or to learn that Mick Jagger uses "Le Roi de la Poutine" it as a nickname for the guitarist Ronnie Wood.