27 March 2009

The Big House on the Hill

I first saw the house when my friend, Clive offered to show me round his new project. Clive renovates villas and was trained in the architectural practice of Robert Dallas, probably the most sought after person out here to design your house – if you can afford him! Clive therefore has a wealth of contacts and a good eye for the sort of things people want designed into their houses and apparently one of his contacts told him about this partially finished house, occupying a commanding position on the hill behind the village. From what I recall of what Clive told me, some partners were building the house when they hit financial trouble and the bank foreclosed on them.

I don’t know the details but Clive bought the house from the bank (or he could have agreed to finish it for the bank) and set about creating probably the largest, most luxurious, most expensive house for miles around. When I saw it in its partially completed state, it was already stunning. The lounge itself was the size of most houses. The hall and floors were finished in the finest marble and the views were spectacular. If I tell you that most houses out here are between 150-200 sq metres and this place was 500 sq metres, you might get an idea of the imposing nature of it. It was truly awesome – as they say.

Once finished, it was put on the market for £3.5m and I lost interest in it after seeing it in the estate agent’s window for month after month.

About a year later I was having a conversation with my ex and when I said where I lived, she said her best friend’s husband had just walked out on her and had bought a £3.5m house in that very village. A small world indeed.

Clive later told me that the guy who purchased it worked in London and would only be using it occasionally and that he had asked for a car, the exact same spec as Clive’s to be bought and stored in the garage. It was a very distinctive Wrangler Jeep, dark green with a tan soft top. Thereafter, I would see this Jeep driving around the village and I would think – 'there’s one very rich guy - a £3.5m house which he uses only occasionally’!

Once again I forgot about the house, and even the fact that I hadn’t seen the Jeep driving around for quite a while never registered. After all, to afford a house like that he was probably a banker and we all know how busy they are at the moment!

Then Kitty came home from her friend’s last week and shouted, ‘you’ll never guess who’s bought the big house on the hill’. Well – it could have been anybody so where do you start? Anyway, the answer was Eva Longoria (her of Desperate Housewives fame). I was highly dubious. After all, why buy a house in the backwater of  Tourrettes when you can afford St Tropez, Monaco, Cap Ferrat?

So I did some research – she’s married to a French guy (with a not very French name – Tony Parker), who’s just bought into a French basketball team. They holiday in St Tropez and Eva was in Nice recently and they have been looking for a house in France. It all adds up. But I’m still dubious. Until I bump into Eva in the Midi and she asks me for a light for her cigarette, I won’t believe it. Now you know why there’s a picture of Eva at the start.

The house is on Google Earth at the following coordinates…. 43.43.33.48N and 7.03.59.12E. Kitty has sneaked into the garden and taken a grainy picture of it but unfortunately the quality wasn't good enough for my blog, nor was the gorgeous Eva sunbathing in one of her skimpy swimsuits!

26 March 2009

Jade Goody (1981-2009)

Yes I know – you’re all sick of hearing about her, even in death but I couldn’t let her passing go without saying something, especially about those two-faced rags which made her and then brought her down and finally paid her the most fulsome compliments in death as if she was some sort of saint.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ms Goody, she was a complete nonentity who managed to get onto one of those tedious reality shows and, even more amazingly, managed to win it.

She probably got a slot on ‘Big Brother’ because when she was no doubt interviewed along with thousands of others, she was by a country mile, the thickest person they’d ever encountered. I bet they couldn’t believe their luck.

She thought Rio de Janeiro was a football player. She thought that East Anglia, which she pronounced as East Angular, was an African country. She had no idea what asparagus was and famously declared that she was ‘intelligent but I let myself down because I can’t speak properly or spell.’ She was dirty and had the most awful, blackened feet, of which she was strangely proud, but, and this is where her life story changed, the public and the tabloid press loved her and voted her the winner, allowing her to pick up the £100,000 prize.

A couple of years later, having been transformed by spending a fortune on a makeover, she appeared in Celebrity Big Brother and racially insulted a female Indian movie star. She was pilloried as a racist, especially by the tabloids and her earnings plummeted. Not even a tearful apology on TV got her back into the public’s affections. You can take the girl out of Essex but obviously, you cannot take Essex out of the girl.

Despite the issue not really going away, she managed to hang onto her ‘C’ list celebrity status, most probably being invited to events in the hope she would commit some awful faux pas but at least she remained in the public eye, albeit not as frequently as before.

Now to the current controversy. Should she have allowed cameras to film her battle with cancer, right up to the point of death? She maintained it was to raise money to ensure her children were well educated and wanted for nothing but many observers think it was simply because, in death, as in life, she had craved the cameras. Whatever people thought of her, she’ll certainly be remembered for bringing cervical cancer screening for young girls to the public’s attention and on that score alone, her death was not a waste of a life, indeed, without really knowing, she might save countless others.

25 March 2009

The World Is In Their Hands

 It’s not been a good couple of weeks for Gordon Brown’s supposedly closest allies, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama.

First of all Sarky, who has been lambasted in the French press for his ‘misuse’ of the French language which is so important to the French people that it’s felt that any deterioration of the language itself, will result in the total demise of the Republic. They’ve even got a minister of state whose job is to ‘protect' the language and the culture of France which is no bad thing but in the past, the department has taken a fair bit of flak for adopting words like ‘le weekend’ or 'le hot dog’ but they are now fighting back, but good old Sarky is not helping their cause.

Sarky is no intellectual but he is French and he’s expected by the electorate to speak ‘proper’ French and desist from using colloquialisms which is a cardinal sin in the eyes of many and a criminal offence for one in such high office. Apparently, he uses slang phrases and words in his everyday speech and last year, famously told a demonstrator to ‘Casse-toi pauv'con’, which politely translated means, ‘Get lost, jerk’. There are other translations of this saying but I cannot print them here! The influential newspaper, Le Parisien, stated that, ‘Molière must be turning in his grave’. It seems that Sarkozy was quite impressed by the semi-casual way Tony Blair wandered around the world being chummy with his mate, George Bush, who greeted him at one summit with the words’ ‘Yo Blair’. It seems that Sarky is doing his best to emulate him.

If his actual use of language wasn’t bad enough, a couple of weeks ago, no doubt to a French audience whom he desperately wanted to impress, he had a real go at Gordon Brown’s economic policies, stating that they were unworkable and he, (Sarkozy) had got France’s financial stimulus spot on. Now I am not a fan of GB but there is an unwritten rule in diplomatic circles that one leader does not criticise another leader’s policies if they do not impinge upon your country. Apparently, old Brownie was absolutely furious and if reports about his frequent rages are anything to go by, I’d love to have heard what he called his French cousin. 

And then we have the newly inaugurated Barack Obama. It is common courtesy when a new President meets other world leaders that gifts are exchanged and it seems that the Browns, having done their homework, took some dresses for the Obama’s daughters. Obama reciprocated by giving Brown a series of popular DVDs including 'Gone With The Wind' and 'ET', which, I suppose, given that Brown shuns anything remotely populist, is like giving Herod a book on childcare.

There are moves by the Americans to try and recover the situation (what do you do - say you gave the wrong present?) and I suppose old Sarky was thinking about this the other day and laughing into his Chateauneuf du Pape, desperately trying to ignore the fact that Brown was chosen to be the first European leader to meet Obama. But then he got a letter from Obama…….. addressed to Jaques Chirac saying that he (Obama) looked forward to working with him to resolve the world's issues! Quel problem!

And so, as the world leaders gather in London to try and stop the world going into financial meltdown, three of them will be apologising to each other. Sarky to Brown for being a bit of a dope. Obama to Sarky for being a bit of a dope, and Brown to the other two for just being a dope!   

24 March 2009

You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

We’re talking about Shadow by the way – not me!

Now Shadow must be about ten or even eleven by now and if you’re wondering why I don’t know his actual age, it’s because Shadow was part of the family before I arrived late in 1999, so he’s at least ten years old. Anyway, he’s a great dog. A bit unconventional but generally very well behaved.

I think, he thinks he’s actually a child (albeit a 70 year old child) and therefore part of the family in a human sense. He loves sleeping on the carpet in the bedroom, where his snores form a harmony with J’s. He loves lying in front of the fire in the lounge, gently bbqing his tummy and I’m sure he watches the telly although he does tend to go out of the room when the ‘Dog Whisperer’ comes on. He knows instinctively (or is it because he can read ‘EDs’ on her bags?)  when J has been to Ed’s supermarket and waits patiently for his bag of bones – he never shows any interest when J has been to one of the other shops. He knows when Angie next door is cooking burgers and will stroll, and I mean stroll, over there just in case she’s made a spare one.   

So far, so good and I really shouldn’t complain because everybody who meets Shadow says what a wonderful dog he is (maybe his head is getting too big?) but it’s when I want him to be a proper dog that he lets me down. And badly!

Before I arrived down here all those years ago, Shadow really did think he was a child which maybe had something to do with the fact that J put nappies on him and fed him from a bottle for the first 6 months (joking) so I had to teach him to bark (seriously), give a paw (when asked) and sit (when told). I’ve got to literally throw him in the river to fetch a stick, which is particularly embarrassing when there’s a few other people around with dogs, all of which happily bound into the river, fetch the stick and then drop it at their master’s feet, wagging their tails and looking gleefully into their owner’s eyes. Shadow reluctantly gets the stick (but not if it the river is too deep) and then drops it back into the water before he gets out and then covers everybody within a 5 metre distance as he shakes the water off of himself. Having done that he then finds the nearest patch of mud and then rolls in it! I mean, what’s the point of that?

Getting a ball is something he never does. Throw a ball and say, ‘get the ball Shadow’, and he just stands there, looks at you as if you are completely off your rocker and then walks off. It’s so frustrating.

If I drag him down the lane where we empty our bins, he’ll very reluctantly walk with you but as soon as your back is turned, he does a runner, straight back to the house and I’m left looking like an idiot, walking along saying ‘Shadow – good boy’, to absolutely nobody or nothing! I thought when I was writing this paragraph that I was exaggerating a bit but no. Last evening, Shadow was reluctantly dragged from his bed as Guy and I set off to empty the bins. We only got as far as our front gate when ‘old Frenchie’ stopped us and said ‘bonjour’. ‘Bonjour’ we replied (Guy with a much better accent than me). Old Frenchie was setting up an electric fence, ostensibly to keep out the deer but as we’ve only just had one visit from them in the last ten years, it seemed a bit extreme, but we had a bit of a chat about it (Guy more than me) and then when we turned round to continue our journey, Shadow was nowhere to be seen! He’d done it again.

He slept in the lounge one night as burglars wandered around, yes in the lounge, and never moved, but when the police came to do their report, he went for them! He obviously doesn’t like uniforms!

After being told he’s not getting any treats because he’s ‘broken into the kitchen’, eaten the cats food, drunk their milk and then puked all over the house, he looks at you with his sad eyes and goes and lies down in his bed, no doubt thinking of life’s injustices and how best to contact Amnesty International or the RSPCA. Showing him the empty cat’s bowls to try and get him to acknowledge or even register his crime, meets with a look of utter disdain. And he’s been doing this for about a year now!

Every morning when he goes out to ‘do his business’ he wanders off down through the ‘jungle’ and gets covered in all sorts of twigs and other plant life which attaches to his fur. He loves that morning stroll down to see his doggy friends but if I try and take him down there, where I am currently working every morning, he steadfastly refuses to move from his bed. You’d think he’d love rooting about in the leaves and discovering parts of the ‘jungle’ where even he has not been able to go because of the thickness of the undergrowth. But no. And if you’re thinking why I don’t just get his lead on him and drag him down there with me, you’ve never seen Shadow dig his four paws in and refuse to budge – he must be all of about 30 to 40 kilos!

So, in many ways he’s not a man’s dog but when he comes in at night and lays down in front of the fire and looks at me with those eyes (one white, one brown) and you can see the absolute adoration he has for me (I think that’s what it is), all is forgiven.  

23 March 2009

Hannah Montana

Now who is this girl? She’s on our telly all the time. Well from about 4.30pm until about 7pm when Kitty has absolute control of the remote! She sings, she dances and she acts and she’s quite cute, particularly in her blonde wig, although I mentioned the other day to Kitty that she was looking a bit podgy – not Kitty, Hannah Montana. Without a second’s hesitation Kitty said, ‘well that's cause she’s pregnant’. ‘Pregnant’, I replied. ‘She must only be about 16’. ‘Nah – she’s only 14’, said Kitty without batting an eyelid.

A couple of things to report before I go on. Hannah Montana who is actually a girl called Miley Cyrus, daughter of a ‘famous’ US country singing star, Billy Ray Cyrus, is only 15 years old and SHE IS NOT PREGNANT. It was one of these spoof stories which gets onto the internet and – whoosh – the whole world knows – even Kitty! Everbody except her biggest fan - me !

But the real point of this missive is to answer all of you who are wondering why a lazy, balding, fat, frequently drunk,  mean, geriatric, has-been (that’s J’s current description of me) is watching a 15 year old girl singer on the telly at 4.30pm.

It’s all to do with ‘remote wars’ you see and the utterly exhausting lives that both Kitty and I lead and which seem to coincide every day at approximately 4.30pm.

By 4.30pm ish I’ll have taken the kids down to the bus stop in the morning, made the bed, cleaned the house, washed and dried the dishes (the dishwasher blew up the other day), been down in the jungle clearing another square metre or two, have laid the fire, cut the wood, made my lunch, fed the dog and the cats, fixed something else in the house which needs repairing and then picked up Kitty from the bus stop after school.

Kitty for her part has gone to school, sat down all day and then come home.

And at precisely 4.37pm there is a battle royal for the TV remote control as we both sit exhausted on the sofa. Obviously, given my knowledge of Hannah Montana, who is Miley Cyrus or even Miley Stewart (her character on the show), I generally lose. But hey she’s a great little singer. See her at the following link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcMX-tXntS0&feature=related