Tom Cupples' Riviera Blog

Orange - A One Man band

2012-01-23T17:03:00.000+01:00

So I’m doing some remedial work on a villa that I, sorry, J, looks after (see blog post ‘The Anal Banker’ (http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/anal-banker-and-i-said-banker.html). I go round at 7.45am as Orange (France Telecom to you and me) have said they’ll be there between 8am and 1pm to fix the faulty telephone line.

Nobody there so I start clearing up after a flood a few weeks ago - a bit of painting, scrubbing and washing and then I notice a guy wandering around outside. ‘France Telecom ?’, I ask him.

‘No’ was the answer, so I left him to it but I did notice that he was paying particular attention to the telephone pole straight across from the front door. I went back to my scrubbing.

A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. ‘I am here to fix your telephone’, he said and with that he jumped back in his van and I didn’t see him again for 20 minutes.

I was intrigued but it turned out that Orange must sub-contract faults to another company and here he was – Orange by any other name!

Once he came back, he asked me how many ‘prises’ (telephone sockets) there were in the house. ‘No idea’, I said. ‘I’m only the handyman.’ He looked around then went back outside, moved his truck into position and got himself on one of these little hoist platforms, moved up the pole, had a good look around and then, not to my surprise, said, ‘no faults out here.’

Back into the house he asked if ‘we’ had a loft space. ‘No idea, I’m only the handyman’, I said once again, but looking around I spotted a panel in the ceiling at the end of the hall.

‘Have you got any ladders’, he asked.

As it happened I had picked up some ladders from the garage earlier to paint the ceiling, so I showed them to him.

‘No use’, he said.

I thought that was it but he went outside and came back in with a set of really high-tech ladders and asked me to open the loft, which I did only to be covered by multiple rat droppings and a rat-poison block!

I looked at him and he looked at me. I got the distinct impression there was something wrong. ‘What’s the problem’, I asked him.

‘I can’t climb the ladders unless you hold them’, he said.

So, as I was thinking why they send single people out (note: not sexist) to fix things which are generally high up when they are not allowed to climb ladders but then remembering we’re in France, he convinced me to hold the ladders whilst he climbed up into the loft space.

There then followed what I assumed to be a string of profanities before he climbed back down the ladders. ‘Not good’, he said.

He took his ladders outside, put them up against the guttering (with me holding them) and wandered around the roof before exclaiming, ‘I’ve found it’.

He was almost beside himself with self-satisfaction. I could see from the ground that the telephone wire had chaffed itself against the chimney and that was the problem.

Back down the ladder, into his van and a 50 metre length of cable appeared.

After a long Franglais conversation, I worked out that he now wanted me to go into the loft space and wait whilst he threaded the new cable through the roof tiles. I felt like I should say that he needed to hold the ladders for me but as he was now bounding up his own set outside I let it pass and climbed into the loft.

He had instructed me where to go but with no visible floor (it was under 6 inches of insulation), I was a bit tentative in case I ended up going through the ceiling (floor – whatever) but I could hear him shouting at me so I scurried across, throwing up clouds of fibres which started me off sneezing and scratching.

Eventually, we got the new cable to the correct place and he carried on with his work whilst I went back down to ground level.

Rather than come back down from the loft he proceeded to ask me something in (technical ) French which later transpired to be, ‘could you take my test meter and see if there is a current on the two wires which are for the phone.’

Now, my French might be ok in a bistro but this was a bit much for me so he had to lower himself down from the loft and do his own test.

It worked! He even phoned the house number to prove it and such was the look of self satisfaction on his little face that I felt compelled to congratulate him.

Then it was the paperwork.

J had already warned me that if the fault was deemed to be the house owners, there would be a hefty bill so I tentatively asked whose fault it was.

‘50/50’ was the response.

‘Ah, OK – here’s a bottle of Chablis for you’, I said, using the old trick of seducing a Frenchman with a decent bottle of plonk.

‘Ah, that’s very good of you’, he said, ‘but I am not allowed to accept gifts but thinking about it, it’s not your fault at all – the bill will be zero.’

Result! I put the Chablis back in my bag, said goodbye and went and had a shower (I was still scratching like mad), but not before he said, ‘you have a three week (three weeks !!!!) guarantee on my work – call this number if there’s a problem.’

The moral of the story – say you’re afraid of heights, allergic to loft insulation and always offer bottle of wine to a tradesman!

Boy's Lunches

2011-12-23T18:14:00.001+01:00

Despite having retired over four years ago, I still attend the traditional boy’s festive lunches for the companies I used to work for, IBM and BT.

The BT South of France Xmas Lunch comprises three or four attendees (it was only three this year) and is traditionally held in the New Punjab curry house in Grasse.

Now before you cry ‘sacrilege’, I suspect, Ashley, Ian and myself are so fed up with French food by the time Christmas comes around, we deserve something a little more ‘piquant’.

Normally, the three of us are the only diners in the New Punjab apart from maybe a visiting British couple who happen to stumble across the restaurant which is very well hidden, but this year, the place was full – full of French Xmas partygoers. I say ‘partygoers’, but in fact, it was all very sedate with the nearest the lunchtime revelers got to anything approaching a normal, dare I say, British company do, was when they ordered a round of non-alcoholic cocktails! Vive la difference!

My next festive outing was somewhat further afield, in London for the traditional IBM Boy’s Lunch. There’s a couple of points to make about this; (a) it is most definitely a ‘Boy’s Lunch’ and although the behaviour has ‘settled down’ over the last few years, females would find the constant chatter about sport, economics and fine wines, difficult to cope with, and (b) the lunches have been going strong for thirty years or more so it is a well established routine – meet up, drinks, lunch, more drinks, sometimes dinner and then, strangely enough, more drinks.

The Famous Long Room at Lords

I didn’t make it last year, as paying around £500-£600 for a lunch (including flights and hotels) is extravagant even by a London banker’s standards, but this year, I decided that the venue simply could not be missed – it was being held in the historic and iconic Long Room at Lords Cricket Ground.

My mate Mick who was organizing the tickets had sent an e-mail saying the dress code was ‘lounge suits’ but dragging a suit all the way to London was a non-starter as far as I was concerned and so I turned up in a smart, but nevertheless, non-dress code sports jacket and slacks which was a bit of a faux pas on my part as I reckon I was the only one in the room not dressed to the required code.

The Lords Pavillion

You might be getting the impression at this point that it was a rather posh do and indeed I got that impression myself, as almost as soon as we had sat down to eat, after a champagne welcoming, there was a short speech and a request for ‘my Lords, ladies and gentlemen’ to stand for the loyal toast.

Lunch itself was a fairly standard affair with various members of our table trying to ‘seduce’ the waitress into bringing us more than our allocated wine ration which she steadfastly refused to do and so copious additional bottles were ordered at an exorbitant price.

Once lunch had finished, Mick took us on a tour of the Pavillion and even managed to get us into the player’s dressing rooms which is where I made quite a discovery, well, for me at least.

Alistair Cook and the Batting Board

At Lords, the acknowledged ‘home of cricket’, when a batsmen scores over 99 runs his name is etched onto a board and bowlers who take five or more wickets or ten or more wickets also have their names etched onto a board. Now these boards containing the names of the greatest cricketers who have graced Lords are frequently shown on TV but I was amazed to find that the boards are actually on the walls of the respective dressing rooms. What an inspiration for those cricketers going out to bat or bowl to see the names of their countrymen on the walls of the greatest cricket ground in the world.

After staggering out of Lords and into a cab, it was off into the City to find a pub where my mates could drink ales and stouts whilst I stuck to my white wine.

At some stage in the evening, remembering J was alone in the hotel back in Kilburn, I said my goodbyes and the next thing I remember was sleeping on the floor of the hotel bedroom with a king size bed nearby – what a waste!

It was a great trip, made all the more special by being able to wander around the Lords Pavillion where cricket officiandos would give their right arm to be.

Julie's Latest Trip To Kenya

2011-12-09T14:02:00.005+01:00

I am including a Newsletter which Julie sent out to her friends and donors. You may not have seen it.

Kenyan Kids News – November 2011

This newsletter aims to give an account of how some of your generous donations were used on my latest trip to Kenya. I apologise in advance for its length but I wanted to portray how seriously I take the stewardship of each and every one of your donations. Big or small, every centime does count and makes a huge difference to the life of one or many. Whether your money has been used for a small hand out or a larger hand up, the details are all below. Please accept a big personal, thank you and a warm hug from everyone mentioned in the newsletter.

The kids of Namatotoa so proud in their new clothes…thanks to all of you.

Monday, 31st October

My plan today was to try and find a bank that would consider giving me an account – just as I had wanted to be legally registered in France I wanted to have similar ‘accountability’ in Kenya too. However, as we were waiting in the queue, Moses glanced down at my leg and remarked that the mozzies had made a meal of me last night. As I glanced down to look at my legs, the first thing that came to mind was a dot-to-dot page in a children's colouring book except these little red dots were too numerous to count. He looked at me - I looked at him. "It's bed bugs, isn't it?" I said. So, with all thoughts of banking forgotten, we returned back to Covenant Home and set about spraying my room with enough poison to kill a small elephant. In spite of being provided with a new mattress and even new sheets (thank you Pat), these little blighters hide in skirting boards and any dark little crevice during the day, only to come out at night, climb into bed with you and yum, you know the rest. Oh it's nice to be accepted – I feel like a proper visitor now, not just a tourist!

Tuesday, 1st November was spent visiting some of the Standard Eight (i.e. end of primary years) kids in schools who are getting ready to take their exams in a week’s time.

In the picture on the right is Jackson, one of the many kids the Isaiah Trust support, gratefully accepting a giant greetings card wishing everyone success in their forthcoming exams.

For those in boarding school, we took some ‘presents’ to help get them through until the end of term. Gifts ranged from toiletries for the girls, weetabix, bread, hot chocolate powder, soap, toothpaste and brushes, shoe polish, pencils and washing soap. It means a great deal to these kids that we take the time to visit them especially as most of their friends have parents who visit on a regular basis and they do not.

That evening, it was wonderful to see old friends again at the Isaiah Trust Kachok Outreach programme next to the rubbish tips. How I love cuddling the smallest children - their little hands full of bread (and biscuits if they are lucky) clutching on to a mug of sweet, milky African tea or juice. This always costs a little money but is so worthwhile as the photo below shows – thank you to all who donated.

We went back to Covenant (http://www.covenanthome.co.uk) to meet with Moses’s little daughter Vashni who had developed a serious case of malaria. Usually with Malaria, all that is needed is a three day course of tablets but whatever the strain of malaria poor Vashni got, it was not giving up easily.

Vashni is like any talkative 2-year-old, running around rather than walking, smiling, singing, reaching up your leg for a cuddle. It was obvious how poorly she was - she didn’t speak, she didn’t even whinge, she just flopped about, fell asleep anywhere she could, in a lap, a chair and refused even the slightest drink of water. As her mum gave her paracetamol to try and bring her temperature down, she just vomited it back up. Not responding to anything at home, she was taken to hospital where they diagnosed Malaria and also Septicaemia.

A 3-day course of intravenous injections was recommended and when she came back to the Covenant I was amazed to see my bedroom turned efficiently into a hospital room. Fortunately, we have a qualified Doctor who lives here. Collins is one of Pat’s original boys of whom she is enormously proud and with one phone call he agreed to come to help at the end of his usual fourteen hour day (of a 7 day week).

Collins prepared the vaccination and then hung the drip from the curtain rail while I held little Vashni and tried to calm her. Most of us know what hysterical 2 year olds can be like and for me it brought back memories from a long time ago. The crying is okay but it’s the sobs that upset me. Anyway, like any child of her age, exhaustion set in after approximately 60 seconds and she fell asleep across my lap. Still sitting on the edge of the chair, not daring to move in case I disturbed her, I recalled those days of nighttime childhood illnesses and how much mummies sacrifice their own sleep and wellbeing for the sake of their child.

As you can see Vashni (left) was one of the lucky ones – she has both parents and they were able to get the treatment she needed but, for the majority of families I see, any medication cost equates to approximately half a day’s salary and is unaffordable.

This wasn’t the only time I was able to help just during this short trip - one of the boys came to find me at Covenant Home, worried about his 10 year old sister who’d been ill and unresponsive for two days. We were able to get her medical help and a routine test for Typhoid, which, if left untreated could easily have caused her premature death.

Towards the end of the first week, we handed out the first batch of football shirts donated by my stepson Steve’s friends on his Face Book page, Footie Kits for Kenyan Kids. Fourteen year old Philip and Washington were delighted with their shirts. Philip in particular is football mad and Captain of the school team at the local Catholic run primary school. Unfortunately we couldn’t take any photos of them wearing the shirts as the nun drew the line at them getting undressed in her office. The rest of the shirts were put to one side to take up to the village children in Namatotoa as shown in the first photo in the newsletter. I hope those of you who donated clothes can recognise some of them in the first photo in this newsletter.

Phoebe

Home visits have always been an important part of my trip and this time I had been invited to visit Phoebe who is a widow living in one room in the Nyalenda slums. We visited her to see if we could help repair her roof as rainwater was streaming in. The side of the bed is just visible behind the curtain - she shares this space with three of her surviving children and her 7-year-old orphaned granddaughter. Phoebe lost another three of her children during infancy and her eldest daughter died of HIV when she was 28. Phoebe is only 51.

Ramanos was the next family on our list. Ramanos used to have a little business but he can no longer afford to purchase items of stock to sell out of this tiny room.

Constantly in arrears with his rent (the equivalent of £10 per month), he and his children are regular attendees at Kachok where they benefit from the bread and juice available. Widowed a few years ago, Ramanos searches to find any work he can but struggles to care for and feed his 5 children.

Saturday, 5th November saw us on our way to Siaya to visit Cosmas’s (an ex homeless tip dweller who is rehabilitated now) home village with a view to checking out his little land plot to see if we could put a little structure up for him so he could resettle there.

Whenever we head North West from Kisumu, we usually pass through Luanda and have the opportunity to stop off at its street market where we buy fresh pineapples, water melons, tiny bananas and some sesame seeds, which are mixed with brown sugar and shaped into small rounds - sticky burnt sugar flavour and delicious. Always on the lookout for a bargain, I stepped forward to see what was being sold by the cup full - it was that local delicacy, white ants (left). With no time to shout, 'I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here', I had little choice as some were poured into the palm of my hand to try them...salty, and a bit like tiny chewy potato chips. The wings do stick in your teeth though...

Sunday evening, 6th November and I need to write an overdue letter to my husband:

Darling Thomas, missing you like mad but just thought I’d let you know that I am going to do what I do best tomorrow – shopping! Now before you get too worried, I do have to say that it’s not the usual designer shopping spree of old, in fact, I could do with your help. Please advise where can I get 2 lorry loads of red soil? And then there is the rest; 2 wheelbarrows, 2 spades, 3 trowels, 1 broom, 2 watering cans, 1 oil can, 2 litres of lubricating oil, 2 hoe (what is the plural of hoe, hoes? – any more and it will sound like Christmas has come early, ho ho ho), 5 pairs of gum boots (non designer and men’s sizes), 5 protective helmets, 5 pairs of overalls, enough polythene roll to cover a small house (shall we get ever fashionable black or see thru?), 20 litres of ‘dirty’ oil (where is your brother Robert when we need a delivery) and last but not least 40 bags of cement. And if the shop even thinks of charging me for carrier bags, then I will throw a wobbly! Your ever loving wife xxx

This is the brick-making machine that has been funded by Kenyan Kids donors. You can see that all the guys were very excited about it and continued working on the bricks even as it grew dark. As I understand it, you mix a bit of cement with a bit of red soil, attach a lever (a bit like one half of a seesaw), then compress it and hey presto, a brick comes out the other end. This machine is our first big purchase. When I first saw it, I was keen to ask Moses, 'Do you really think it will build a house?' He looked at me, shook his head in his serious way and said, “No, Julie, it will not build a house.” I took a sharp intake of breath thinking about my donor’s hard-earned contributions. He continued: “I believe it will build a city”!

Wednesday 9th November

The saddest part of this trip was learning the news about Easter Lily. After my last visit, I shared with you the story of the abandoned Easter baby (left) that came to our notice whilst visiting the maternity unit of the District Hospital. At the time, I asked Pat who runs Covenant Home if she would be willing to take the baby in and she agreed immediately. However about two weeks later, I received an email from Pat telling me, "Baby Lily's parents turned up and claimed her. What the story was we don't know, we were just told it was a domestic problem which has now been sorted."

During those intervening weeks and touched by Lily's story Angela, of Le Petit Cabanon, knitted Lily the most beautiful blanket (right) which I had brought with me this trip. Moses was very keen that we should find Lily's parents and take the blanket (inscribed with her name) to her even though several weeks had passed. Sadly, it wasn't meant to be and as we sat in the Sister's office she explained that she checked her files and Easter Lily had again been admitted. "It seems the parents split up again but this time, the mother brought her in." There was a pause: "I am sorry, we lost her".

Perhaps we'll never know what really happened in Easter Lily's short life. I could only compare her to Moses’s daughter Vashni who had been desperately ill earlier on in the week. Some families can afford medication and some cannot. Easter Lily had slipped through the net. As we walked back to the car I not only wept for her, but for all the children whose lives are lost in situations that would be unthinkable to us within our ‘comfortable’ existence.

Shortly afterwards, Angela of Le Petit Cabanon (http://www.justgiving.com/kraftedforkenyankids2) apologised on Facebook that her Saturday Krafted for Kenyan Kids Fair fund raising had only secured a meagre amount. I had to remind her that it certainly wasn't meagre by African standards; just 50 centimes, 50 pence worth of medication could possibly have saved that child's life. In our Western world, losing a child becomes a statistic that we cannot/don't want to absorb. For me, the reality of losing that precious child drives me on to help the next one and the next one so please help where you can.

It’s impossible to stay sad for too long as one situation quickly moves into another. Immediately after hearing the sad news about Easter Lily, we visited Dorcas, an elderly grandmother who cares for seven orphaned grandchildren. It's always a pleasure to visit Dorcas who is always full of smiles. This woman usually has tremendous energy but since last time, I noticed that she appeared to be slowing down and getting more tired. One of the problems Dorcas faces is having to walk over 50 minutes, each way, to collect clean water. Perhaps to some that doesn’t sound all that bad but consider that the last 20 minutes of her road has the steepness of our road leading up to the Courmettes and that’s a difficult steep path for any of us to walk.

I regularly complain about the time my son spends in the shower but imagine when every drop of water for use in the house has to be carried. Dorcas can manage to carry around 10 litres of water at a time. Think how you struggle with a 6-pack of water bottles, transferring it from supermarket trolley to car boot yet Dorcas (aged 70+) manages to carry more than that and up a steep hill in 32 degree heat.

As we sat chatting, we wondered how we could help when the heavens suddenly opened. As if by magic, we were prompted to wonder if there was some way we could harvest the rainwater from the roof and channel it into gutters and on into the house. This huge amount of rainfall would more than provide her and her family with a source of clean water. We came away feeling pleased that we had managed to find and fund a solution that would be a huge help to Dorcas and her family in the future.

Thursday evening, 10th November was our regular trip to the Kachok Outreach programme and we were able to provide a nutritious meal of chapatis and beans to more than 50 children and adults. There is rarely a better sight than a hungry child with a plateful of nutritious food in front of them.

The rain stayed away and were concerned that so many of the little ones arrive barefoot so we also handed out more than twenty pairs of flip flops – everyone was so grateful and we are reminded yet again how the smallest item can help.

Friday, 11th November

Originally we were planning to leave for Namatotoa on Thursday but as Moses is always so busy we had to delay the trip to Friday giving me a few free hours. We eventually got on the road at 6:00 pm for the two hour journey, north to Namatotoa. The car was packed with Nakumat (supermarket) shopping, Moses’s guitar, my bedding, camping lights, mosquito repellent, disinfectant and microbe activators for the African loo, snacks for the journey, biscuits and sweeties for the many kids we would see in the tiny rural village and a defrosting chicken for our one-pan risotto supper.

The journey always takes me back to family holidays when so many are uncomfortably packed into the car but we sang and giggled and bumped along the uneven road surfaces until we eventually arrived and were greeted in pitch blackness by Pastor Pete and his wife, Moses’s sister Agneta and his half brother, Vincent who had both travelled 3 hours by Matatu (mini bus) from Kitale.

Happy faces on the road under Pat’s best new quilt

It must have been well after midnight by the time the ‘risotto’ had been prepared for all of us on the single ring gas stove. In the simple three-roomed house, the two girls shared the smallest room, Moses, Anton and Vincent slept on the living room floor and I shared the double bed with Agneta.

It was only during my second trip that I was invited to visit Moses’s home village. That first morning as I walked along the narrow, rutted paths through the sugar cane and maize fields, I felt a strong sense of ‘coming home’. It was a strange sensation to experience, especially to someone who loves her home comforts but I simply felt enveloped in a peace and tranquillity that I have rarely experienced before.

Each time I visit Namatotoa, I am struck by more details. This morning as I passed by the straw mud huts, I saw the smoke curling from charcoal being cured in mud bonfires and many barefoot ragged children, bare bottomed babies being carried by children who were 4 or maybe 5 years old themselves.

If a child cried, the mother would lift the child to her breast and anyone who has breast fed their own child could not fail to be moved by what I saw. In the Western developed world, the mother’s breast is full, rounded and nurturing to the child. The breasts these children were trying to latch on to resembled empty sacks yet still the child would grasp and pull at the nipple with both hands receiving little but a small amount of comfort.

The majority of the children hung back shyly hiding around corners or behind their mother’s legs in the doorway to the darkened interior. Maybe this kind of poverty does exist in Kisumu town but I hadn’t noticed it. Here the poverty of a whole village was presented to me in bright sunlight. A 2 year old’s feet hardened through lack of shoes having learnt to walk on maize and sugar cane husks, strange markings on their scalps which I later found out to be ring worm. Swollen bellies and distended tummy buttons, skin rashes and ingrained dirt on both mothers and their children.

Still, they came outside to see who the Mzungu (foreigner) was. For many, there appears to be no hope in their spirit. Their eyes were glassy as if fixed on something (or nothing) a long way off in the distance.

On my last Sunday as I sat amongst these villagers and we shared a meal of meat and rice, I knew the time was perfect to begin our project. We shouldn’t wait a minute longer.

Before my departure the next day, I stood amongst the sugar cane and spread out the blue print of our nursery. I was joined by some small children whose mother had no choice but to leave them alone for the whole day whilst she’d gone in search of work. Who was feeding these children while she was away? I thought of 7 year old Rosa who had lost the sight of one eye whilst play fighting in the sugar cane fields. Who was looking after these little ones in the absence of any adults?

Rosa (left) still has a happy smile following the operation which Kenyan Kids helped to fund.

The trip from which I returned on the 17th November had been my fourth visit to Kenya in just over 18 months. During those visits my time has been spent exploring the different areas with an objective of trying to get an understanding of the impact poverty has on this particular region. To me the challenge of Africa is its diversity of problems and trying to get to the root causes is confusing. All too easily, you can become so overwhelmed that you then, quite probably, decide to do nothing. For me, each visit unearthed yet another issue. It could be street boys living rough and high on glue, young girls being trafficked at bus stations - having little choice but to turn to prostitution, families destroyed and decimated by HIV/Aids which has taken away a generation of young parents. No education, no care and certainly not a glimmer of hope in this wasted society. All too often, it is the elderly grandparents, barely able to look after themselves, who attempt to become the carers of orphan children.

Sickness is rife everywhere. I remember the first time I came across a child with malaria. I was shocked but became even more horrified when I realised the pittance it would cost to actually cure that child simply by administering a three-day course of tablets. Illnesses we rarely hear about in our world, like Typhoid and TB, lost some of their fear to me as they are a daily and commonplace reality for the people around me.

I felt the ‘root’ cause of all problems could be positively impacted with education.

When I was introduced to the inhabitants of Namatotoa, it soon became apparent that children were being left by the wayside, both physically in terms of abandonment and neglect through lack of schooling. It is these children who, uneducated, run away to the big towns. There they arrive at the bus depots and end up on the streets either victims of trafficking or addicted to glue (because this takes away the pain of hunger and cold).

A previous attempt to start a nursery school in the village was thwarted because funds were too scarce but that was before I met Moses and before Kenyan Kids came into existence, Now, if we can provide a simple structure of a school building these village kids can start to be educated and their carers can go out and find local employment.

Coincidentally I met a pastor friend of our Moses, a Bishop Sebastian who lives close by Namatotoa. As he was speaking to me he showed me a small, wispy seedling and said: "Julie, this is like your ministry. Things start small." Then he took his shovel and carefully unearthed the huge heart of the plant below (right). “I want you to transplant this in your village and always remember, as this seedling grows so will your ministry.” At the time, I was too choked up to make any kind of response other than a hurried thank you.

The next day, as I poured over the blueprints for the nursery school, I knew that what we were looking at was real and achievable so the school is now our top priority. How we will raise funds for the school is still a bit of a mystery but then isn’t that the fun of it? Thanks to your generosity we already have purchased a brick-making machine. Now I know we can progress brick by brick and when we have enough bricks, we will buy a door or a window.

Local labour will be used to build it, parents who can’t pay towards school fees will be asked to prepare food for the children or bring in wood for the kitchen fire. It’s not all about money but bringing a community together – both the African community and the community of people here in the South of France, in Cyprus, the UK and anywhere caring people, who really want to make a difference are located. The vision is there. Help us by being part of it, whether by buying one brick at a time or by providing one mug of porridge for a malnourished child. Let’s try and give these children what we give our own children - ‘A chance for a lifetime’. With heartfelt thanks - Julie

Standing in the small sugar cane field I know our dreams can become a reality if we all work together.

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Nature - What's Going On ?

2011-11-08T10:53:00.000+01:00

Floods on The Riviera

We’ve had a torrent of rain over the weekend. Reports of flooding and many properties being inundated with water are remote from our thinking as, being on the side of a mountain, the water just disappears down the hill with our only evidence of the floods being the fact that the gravel pile at the top of my drive eventually ends up at the bottom of the slope, but this is nothing compared to the fact that the aftermath of six months of rain falling in less than 24 hours is that at least 20 people have died and many thousands of householders are left without homes.

It was forecast that we’d have about 1.5 inches per day but in fact according to the water level in Tan’s pool, we actually had more than 6 inches over Saturday and Sunday, and as I sit on the terrace, particularly at midday when it is quiet, I can hear the river Loup about 2 miles away, raging through the valley.

It’s been a strange old year with regard to nature. My long dead pear tree burst back into life last year and was covered in fruit this summer until our visiting deer decided that they would make a tasty dessert and stripped the tree of every single pear, completely ignoring the quinces on the adjacent tree.

The Magnolia Last Spring

My treasured magnolia trees also did strange things. The large one in the garden did not burst into flower in Spring as it is supposed to do, whilst the one on the terrace, which again only ever flowers once a year, decided to produce beautiful flowers in February and also in September, and even stranger is my Brazilian vine, which bought as a pure white flowering plant, has now decided that it will produce both pink and white flowers – on the same stem!

Two Colours on the Same Stem ???

The rain has started to make the grass grow on my newly ‘strimmed’ terraces and I suppose after ten years of neglect, it is delighted to be able to poke its head above the perennial weeds.

Green(ish) Terraces !

The oak trees down on the terraces, which by now are usually turning brown before shedding all their leaves, are greener than I’ve ever seen them. It’s amazing to think that in a few weeks the branches will be bare – although who knows this year?

So, things are strange this year. Maybe it’s going to be a cold winter with more than our normal two days of snow?

Who knows with nature?

The Adventures of Tintin ................

2011-11-02T16:42:00.000+01:00

The Original Comic Book Cast

When I was a boy, way back when I was seven or eight, every night when I'd got back from school, I'd change my clothes and then dash over to the local library. The library was only about 100 yards away but I had to cross four or five streets to get there and given the Glasgow traffic in the late 50's, it was a miracle that I made it - every time! When I got there, I would dash up the stairs and breathlessly ask the librarian, and yes, she was severe and wore thick rimmed glasses, 'is TinTin back yet'. What I meant of course, was that I was desperate to read one of Hergé's Tintin books and had any been returned.

Invariably, the answer was a stern 'No', but it never stopped me and occasionally, just occasionally, one of the dog-eared books was free and I signed it out, rushed back to our tenement flat and read it and read it and re-read it.

I thought Tintin was a hero, battling the evil powers with the Thomson twins, but for a better description of what it was all about, read this Wikipedia excerpt.......

The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by the Belgian artist Georges Rémi (1907-1983), who wrote under the pen name of Hergé. The series is one of the most popular European comic books of the 20th century, with transaltions published in more than 80 languages and more than 350 million copies of the books sold to date.

Set during a largely realistic 20th century, the hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures from the beginning by his faithful fox terrier dog, 'Snowy'. Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash, cynical and grumpy 'Captain Haddock', the highly intelligent but hearing-impaired 'Professor Calculus' and other supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives, 'Thomson and Thomson'.

In this respect then, i.e., the book's popularity and the number sold, TinTin was the original Harry Potter and it's maybe strange that although I just adored the Tintin books with their escapism and great plots, I have never been able to get into the Potter books despite trying and trying. Whatever, the Hergé books were brilliant and although several film adaptations were made, I was probably into Steppenwolf and Led Zeppelin by the time they came out and never saw them.

Tintin and Snowy in the new film

Of course, my interest has been rekindled by the recent release of the Steven Speilberg 'Tintin' film and as I was sitting in the Bar des Sports today having a quick lunch (Croque Madame with salad), I was reading a couple of reviews of the film.

Now, I've read reviews of films which I thought were great, (i.e. I thought the film was great) only to find that the general consensus was that the critics thought it was a waste of celluloid, or whatever they use these days. I've also, and this is more disturbing, thought some films were absolute rubbish, only to find myself in a minority of one as the critics acclaimed it! Is it me or is it them ?

Anyway, as I sat there today reading the reviews and taking in a basic 50/50 split which thought the film was rubbish/brilliant, I was completely thrown by a review written by a certain Tom McCarthy of the Guardian newspaper.

Now the Tintin films will probably be attended by old guys like me introducing their sons, and maybe their daughters to a great cartoon character of the past, and despite the fact that the film is a 'PG' (parental guidance required), I suspect that it will be a huge hit with the kids given the trailers I've seen. I've forgotten many of the details of the character(s) and indeed the plots (The Crab with the Golden Claws - sounds like a James Bond movie!!) but when I read the Tom McCarthy review, I thought sense had gone out of the window. This is, after all, a cartoon movie, but Mr McCarthy obviously decided that it needed to be critiqued as if it were an epic masterpiece seeking critical acclaim from those on high. Read this and try and work out what the hell he's on about ...............

Their recurrent themes and symbols – the downfall of noble houses, host-guest encounters gone drastically wrong, tombs and their secrets, water, forgery, the Sun (to name but a few) – are entirely classical, the same found in Aeschylus or Shakespeare or Faulkner. They are eminently political, depicting, first from a rightwing perspective, then, increasingly, a leftist one.....

But worst of all is the violence perpetrated against the core impulses of Hergé's work. The deep and disturbing power of the Tintin books lies in the way that they immerse the reader in an inauthentic universe, a world whose veneers are constantly being peeled back to reveal inner emptiness.......

Thus Hollywood's idiotic "message" is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction. It's like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian.....

Perhaps this movie will be studied, in years to come, as a Žižekian example of a dominant ideology's capacity to recuperate its own negation.......

What a load of old bollocks - it's just a film, a cartoon, but maybe McCarthy was smoking dope before he went to the preview?

A Day At The Races

2011-10-29T21:36:00.000+02:00

Ascot - One of the Races

Now I’m not a great fan of being at the races but I do like the spectacle of a horse coming from the back of the field and working its way through the crowd and pushing its nose over the line in first place. Years ago, I even had the luxury of a box at Kempton once or twice but preferred to have a glass of champers in the confines of the hospitality area and watch the race on the telly, so when I was invited to a day at the races, I was none too keen.

But I was relieved, this was not an invitation to the circular track at Cagnes where the horses trot rather than run and the last horse is served up the next day as the Plat du Jour, this was my friend Gerry inviting me to his house in the village to watch Channel 4 racing but with a twist – we’d bet on the outcome of each race.

We met in the Bar des Sport for a nice lunch beforehand and then it was a quick walk to his house just off the village square - only about 100 yards.

Gerry is an ‘old’ amateur jockey and every Saturday he is to be found in a corner of either the Bar des Sports or the Midi studying the form.

Now being a competitive Scot who cheats at tiddlywinks, the thought of betting and probably losing against an ‘old’ jockey who no doubt had an inside track (pun intended) on who was going to win each race did not fill me with whatever you're supposed to be filled with when you know you'll just be opening your wallet and pouring money out!

Watching the Races with a View

Whatever, after lunch we sat in his lounge with a glass of rosé and just as I was admiring the amazing views, the architecture and the quails eggs Leslie put out for nibbles, Gerry announced it was time for the first race – and a euro was demanded.

Now, I have to say that at 6am that morning I was studying the form (am I competitive or what?), looking up the Racing Post on the internet to see what was due to win and what the odds were but when it came time to choose my runner, I reverted to type and chose the nicest silks worn by the jockeys combined with the name of the horse, unless ……… there was a grey horse running in which case, that was my choice.

To cut a long, sad story short, there were eight races shown on telly and despite the advantage of having my iPad tell me which horses were destined for the dog food factory after running, I still did not manage to pick a single winner. Indeed, the winner of the combined bet, three euros unless there was a rollover, wasn’t necessarily the winner, just the horse which managed it into the top three – and I didn’t manage a single one. Indeed, by the end of the afternoon, I was sick of the TV commentator mentioning my horses in terms of, ‘pulled up’, ‘oh – there’s a faller’ and ‘that horse shouldn’t be in this field’. Was I depressed?

Being a ‘numbers man’ by trade or a statistician as most folk would call it, I couldn’t work it out – there were three of us betting and by the law of averages, I should have won at least two races, sorry two pots, but I didn’t – Gerry and Leslie cleaned me out!

Needless to say, they are not being invited to my place on a reciprocal visit. I am such a bad loser. But their house is gorgeous and has amazing views.

Venice In Peril

2011-10-25T21:56:00.001+02:00

Venice is always in peril and has been for centuries. I suspect many reading this will have been to Venice, one of the most amazing places on earth and a must for the romantics but with the ever-rising lagoon and some of the buildings suffering from their wooden piles disintegrating, it can only be a matter of time before there is a major flood or a collapsed building and serious damage happens.

I first visited Venice in 1982. I was lucky enough to attend an IBM Sales Convention there and despite the reservations about spending four days with your sales mates in a place not particularly known for its wild nightlife, it turned out to be an amazing trip, one which has remained with me all these years and one which drew me back to Venice several times over the following years.

The Lido with Venice in the far background

With the IBM trip being so long ago, some of my memories are hazy. How did we get to the Lido where we (all 500 of us) were staying in fancy hotels? Which fancy hotel did I stay in? Where was the convention centre where we had to attend various ‘business sessions’ so that IBM could claim the trip was a legitimate business expense? How did we get to and from the main part of Venice on the small ferry boats without anyone falling in the lagoon?

The one thing I did/do remember though was entering the convention centre on the first afternoon and hearing the most amazing atmospheric music. On stage was a small orchestra, the players dressed in Venetian period costumes, complete with masks and filling the vast hall with music which was totally in tune with the Venice we’ve all read about in books and seen in films. It was absolutely stunning – so stunning in fact that as soon as I returned to the UK, I went straight into my local music store and ordered the CD – Venice in Peril by Rondo Veneziano.

So why am I writing about this now?

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that now I am down in the ‘jungle’ slashing and burning, it would pass the time quicker if I had some music on my iPhone and so over a period of a couple of days I transferred my whole CD collection into iTunes and thereafter onto my iPad and my iPhone. It was only after I’d removed and copied all my CDs that I found a long lost CD lying without a cover at the back of the CD rack – yup – Rondo Veneziano’s Venice in Peril. I’ve been playing it ever since.

Now, I know that it will not be everyone’s cup of tea but if you had been walking into that convention hall on the Lido with a misty Venice a few miles across the lagoon looking like it had a limited lifespan, you too might have been affected like I was.

Not everything was quite so romantic on that trip I hasten to add. Apparently, the IBM ‘cash man’, a faceless, nameless guy who traveled with a case full of £250,000 cash in local currency to ‘sort out’ local difficulties was in demand all over Venice as group dinners went unpaid, bars were drunk dry and police fines were racked up at an alarming rate.

The supporting act at IBM’s gala dinner, his name shall not be revealed, (the main performer was Gloria Gaynor – ‘I Will Survive) who had been invited to a drink in our room was last seen coming out of the bathroom with white powder all over his nose, being chased by his wife and convinced that one of our sales guys was Marvin Hagler, the newly crowned World Middleweight Boxing Champion.

Fun days indeed.

If you wish to hear Rondo Veneziano, click on the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4YBT6-Oehs&feature=related

The Bushcutter Saga

2011-10-14T14:14:00.001+02:00

The first thing to say is that we’re having unseasonably warm weather. It’s normally quite mild in October but not this warm! I can usually remember the last time I swam in the pool the previous year and it’s usually mid-September when the night chill cools the water down to a painful 18 degrees but this year, the water temperature is staying stubbornly above 20 so it’s a delight to plunge into the pool after some gardening or log cutting.

The numerous visitors this year have benefited from the pleasant summer we’ve had and by ‘pleasant’ I mean that it does not get much hotter than 85 degrees (or 29c) although when my family came out in June, the gauge topped 107 degrees (42c) which is pretty hot by anyone’s standards. But by and large, it’s been a lovely summer.

The nice, but not too hot weather meant I was able to get the debrusailleuse out and attack the brambles which were threatening to take over, but as usual my Stihl Bushcutter wouldn’t work when required. This meant another run-in with the shop who sold it – it had already been returned twice not long after I bought it last May.

Those who have long memories will recall that my last bushcutter was left out in the rain and the surly mechanic had said that it was water damaged and unrepairable. Nothing is unrepairable so I assumed he meant that it was uneconomic to repair it so I bit the bullet and shelled out a not inconsiderable £600 for a new machine having been given a £200 allowance against my ‘unusable’ Stihl. Stupidly, I forgot to see if the ‘unrepairable’ bushcutter was on sale the next time I passed the mechanic’s shop.

Now Stihls are probably the Rolls Royce of bushcutters, well at least the Range Rover of bushcutters, so they should be pretty rugged and in theory should start every time – but not this one. I did everything by the manual and even bought their special Stihl petrol/oil mixture, which at £20 a gallon is an extravagance which appalled me.

Even this liquid gold being poured into its tank didn’t do the trick so I piled the Stihl into the jeep and drove down to the shop which is a large garden centre/farm supplies business on the edge of Vence.

I took the machine to the cash desk and said it wasn’t working but was still under guarantee.

Taking it round to the mechanic’s shop as I’d been asked, I was ready for my annual lesson in the worst that France can throw at you in terms of ‘customer service’. The guy is so surly he makes Guy and Kitty look like gregarious angels but onward I marched and stopped at his desk where he was working on another customer’s machine. I didn’t expect him to look up and acknowledge me (he never does) and surprise, surprise, he didn’t, so I stood and waited and waited. After about 5 minutes and becoming increasingly impatient, I interrupted his work. The other customer who obviously knows the mechanic better than I did stood back as if amazed at my impertinence.

‘Yes’ was the reply.

‘My Stihl isn’t starting. It’s only a year old and has never started properly. This is the third time in a year it’s been back here’. And then I added, ‘and I buy that expensive petrol you suggested and it’s still not starting.’

He tried a couple of pulls of the starter string and said I should come back in a couple of days, which I did.

‘It’s water damaged’ he said. Using a mixture of French and English, I informed him that this was complete bollocks as it had been in the garage for the last 4 months and was working when I put it away.

Surprised by my tenacity, or maybe it was the emphasis I applied to the word ‘bollocks’, he said, ‘Oh, ok then – leave it with me and I’ll see what I can do’.

There then followed a bit of a saga with new parts being ordered and him eventually repairing it a few weeks later and then phoning me to pick up the Stihl which I did.

As I was driving past him on my way out of the store car park, he jumped out in front of the car forcing me stop and shouted, ‘you must pay, you must pay’.

I went to the cash desk and explained that my Stihl was under guarantee and I wouldn’t be paying a penny, sorry, cent, whereupon the mechanic grabbed my machine, ran to his workshop and locked the bushcutter in a storeroom.

With an air of Gallic one-upmanship creasing his face, he pointed to the locked room and attempted what I can only say was the sort of rubbish we English spout when we try and get a bit above ourselves with French – ‘your machine is hostage until you pay’.

I just laughed and started to walk away but was thinking as I did so that they were the winners. I might have my pride but they had my Stihl.

The stand off lasted another week and then I returned to the store to find they had apparently contacted the manufacturers and they had agreed that the guarantee should cover the work.

As I triumphantly walked out of the store with my bushcutter, I vowed never again to buy anything from them – until the following week when I had to crawl back and buy a new blade for my Stihl, only available from Gamm Vert !

Life Can Be Grim

2011-10-13T18:44:00.000+02:00

We had a very windy night a few days ago and as usual, the next morning I ventured outside to see what damage had been done. I hadn’t heard any crashing of candle glasses on the terrace nor the sun loungers being thrown into the pool nor the sun umbrellas being ripped apart, but the new rear (plastic) window which I had fitted to my Alfa a few days previously had been blown in – obviously I hadn’t fixed it to the hood properly. It’s a very fiddly job and I was not looking forward to doing it again.

I started the Alfa to move it to a cooler spot (we’re still having unseasonably warm weather here) and there was a terrible clanking noise and the battery gave out. My immediate thought was that it sounded a very expensive noise. Could it be that the timing belt had finally given way and perished – if so, it was a 1200 euro repair or worse!

I put the battery on charge and went to lie down, or rather, check my bank balance.

Trying to access my online bank, it appeared that the internet connection was down. Could this be something to do with the new, all embracing package I’d just ordered from Orange (France Telecom)?

Just then the kids came in and as usual they were straight onto the internet, or so they thought.

‘It’s down”, I said. ‘I’ll call them tomorrow’.

After several minutes of moaning and groaning and a realization that even Tom’ll Fix It couldn’t fix it, they headed for the TV, switched it on and there was a clicking sound – no picture, just a clicking sound.

Now, kids can be a real pain sometimes but never more so than when there’s no entertainment in the house.

‘Go for a swim’, I said, but that was met with incredulous stares.

‘Read a book’, I suggested but that was met with even more incredulity.

‘We’ll just watch it in your bedroom’, was the reply and off they trooped to mess up my bed.

The next day I called Orange and spoke to a very nice lady called Florence who worked in Nantes (thankfully not Bangalore !). She ran a few tests and said it was serious. ‘Ah, I see you’ve just ordered one of our new packages’, she said. ‘They’re great value for money’ and then added, ‘when they work’ ! ‘I’ll get an engineer to call’, she said.

I was dreading the return of the ‘kids from hell’ from school so I decided to look at the TV which has had this fault intermittently for the last year or so but no matter that I tried all my previous tricks to get it working, it stayed resolutely blank – it just kept clicking.

No Alfa. No internet. No TV. It couldn’t get any worse, could it? Life was indeed grim.

The third day arrived. I was up at the crack of dawn. Technology wouldn’t beat me.

The first thing was the Alfa. It had now been on charge for two days. I disconnected the charger, put the key into the barrel, turned it and the car sprang into life, sounding just as sweet as she ever did. Result!

Next – the rear window. Now, I’ve taken the window of the Alfa out so often that I could probably do it in my sleep but it’s still an incredibly difficult job but today the screws came out easily, I didn’t cut myself on the metal edge of the window frame and the zip, which can be more difficult to undo than one of those on J’s evening dresses, undid easily.

Into the garage and 30 minutes later and some new extra strong staples bought the day previously which sank through the 4mm PVC like the proverbial hot knife through butter, and the new window looked stronger than ever.

It even went back in like a dream. One job done – two to go.

I called Orange again. Of course, there was no chance I would get Florence but got some guy in Paris called Claude. He did some more tests, confirmed it was serious but gave me the good news that my line had been ‘upgraded’ from a 700k download speed to 15mb. ‘That’s great’, I said, ‘but it’s no use without a connection’. I sensed a Gallic shrug at some nondescript warehouse in Paris.

He then must have read his script and sympathized but not before I suggested re-installing the router. ‘That’s not the problem’, he countered, ‘it’s this new package you’ve bought – it just doesn’t work.’

I thought of my years in BT and how I would have dreaded a BT call centre operator (sorry, technical service assistant executive……) saying that to a customer. The French were honest if nothing else.

As soon as he got off the line, I reinstalled the router and hey presto, despite his advice, the connection burst into life with a 13mb download speed. Things were indeed looking up. Life was not so grim after all.

Next – the TV. Once again, I tried all the previous remedies – switching it off and on rapidly, switching it on with the remote, and finally, bashing it. Nothing worked. That’ll teach me for buying an ex-display model which had probably been on for eons without a break.

I decided to call the repair shop, despite the new super-duper faster Google telling me that it wasn’t usually economic to repair LCD TVs. No phone line – dead as a dodo! Great internet connection – no phone line – amazing!

Life is indeed grim !

Driven Indoors By A Fly

2011-08-26T15:24:00.002+02:00

In a rare fit of enthusiasm for outdoor work I bounded out of bed at 8am and headed own into the garage, got all dressed up in my strimming gear (long sleeve shirt, jeans, Wellington boots, full body harness and hard hat and visor), pulled the starter string of my industrial sized machine and as usual, it didn’t start. This has happened now for a few days and I should have known better than to try and start it after getting ‘dressed up’ because after about twenty pulls of the string, I was soaking in sweat and physically exhausted.

Cursing it as if it was capable of hearing and understanding me, I got into lighter clothing and decided to try something a little less energetic – cutting the brambles and bushes which grow down the lane leading to the house. Unlike most plants which tend to grow upwards, these things bizarrely grow outwards and if left to their own devices, grow far enough out into the lane to scrape down the sides of passing cars. I’m not too worried about the post van or even J’s Honda (it would be physically impossible to spot another scratch on it anyway), but the thought of a bit of unkempt vegetation scraping Tan and Angie’s newish Tiguan would be a disaster – Tan’s planning a party if it gets to be 1 year old and hasn’t been scratched – unheard of in France – a 1 year old car without a scratch that is.

Secateurs in hand, gloves on, garden waste bin in tow, I headed down the lane to the bit where I stopped last week and started cutting. It must’ve been 85+ degrees and it wasn’t long before I started dripping with sweat, or is perspiration a more acceptable word?

Then the buzzing. I could hear it but I couldn’t see it but I knew what it was – the dreaded horse fly (Tabannus Linnaeus). Flown in from some distant field, miles away, seduced by my sweat glands no doubt.

Usually in May, horse flies by the dozen come into the house and then bizarrely land on the windows ……….. and die! But not this year. We’ve only had a few although Tan and Angie have had quite a lot. But outside, they’re everywhere, drowning out even the shrillest magpie with their buzzing.

I tried to ignore it, but every second or so I could see this black ‘thing’ flash past my eyes and then it all went silent and that’s when you get worried. Where has it landed? On my neck or arm?

Then the pain on my ankle as it sunk its jaws into my flesh and if you think I’m being a bit mamby-pamby or overly melodramatic, read this excerpt from Wikipedia:

The bite from a large specimen is painful. Most short tongued species of horse flies use their knife-like mandibles to rip and/or slice flesh apart. Flies with longer proboscides bite more like a mosquito, their stylet-like mouthparts piercing the host's skin like needles.

That was it as far as I was concerned. Finished for the day and it was only 10.30am !

A Momentous Moment

2011-08-24T13:01:00.000+02:00

Well some of you may not think so but when your French neighbour speaks to you for the first time since you arrived twelve years ago, it’s bound to be an important event.

But first an update.

We’ve had loads of visitors this year, one is still here and some have still to arrive so it’s been a busy season. It was a beautiful summer until a couple of weeks ago when the weather suddenly got really hot, hitting 100 degrees (or 37 C) for the last ten days. It’s been too hot to do anything meaningful outside which is a nuisance and sleeping at night is almost impossible. You either sleep on top of the sheets and let the mossies have a feast (despite the burners) or you put the fan on which has a double benefit of blowing the mossies away and keeps you cool, but have you ever tried to fall asleep in a gale?

And then today, the weather cooled a bit, down to a more manageable 85 degrees and so I got my chainsaw out and started cutting a pile of wood which has been a blot on the landscape for quite a few months.

As I was taking one barrowful of wood to my stack I heard someone calling ‘Monsieur, Monsiur’ and as I looked up I could see it was my neighbour, an old lady, probably in her nineties, standing at our boundary fence and calling me over.

I was astonished as she has never spoken to me, despite us both working on our terraces, in the twelve years I’ve been here.

Her late husband, Pierre, was the old guy who used to both instruct and annoy me. He would tell me what trees to plant, what fertilizer to buy and how to cut back my bushes, and on other occasions he would go berserk when the red boundary markers (the holy grail to French people apparently) disappeared under weeds! I never knew what sort of mood he’d be in so contact was infrequent.

And then he disappeared. He didn’t appear on the terraces for months and I thought they’d simply returned to their Parisian home but I learnt a few months later that he had died.

The terraces were kept in check by a young man and although I never saw the lady, I occasionally saw washing hanging on the line strung between a couple of trees higher up the hillside.

And then today – contact !

My once 10ft high Cyprus is growing again !

I wandered over and said hello. She started off by speaking very quickly in French and I had to stop her as I couldn’t understand what she was saying – it was something about trees. And then she staggered me by speaking in English, albeit very bad English. For years I had been trying to build bridges with Old Pierre by inviting him down for an aperitif (the French have aperitifs – not drinks !) but he always refused saying his wife would not come which I took to mean, she didn’t speak a word of English and would find it difficult to socialise, and here she was, trying to explain in her faltering English, a problem she had about trees.

When I finally figured out the subject matter, trees, I was able to speak to her in French and discovered that she was asking me to cut my Mimosa tree once the branches started overhanging her land as they might fall on their electric fence.

I laughed and told her a couple of stories about Old Pierre.

When I first recovered the upper terraces from a jungle state they’d been in for several years and started planting trees, Old Pierre would be hanging over his fence shaking his head. ‘You can’t plant those – those are palm trees’, he would cry. ‘You shouldn’t plant that tree there’, and ‘that tree (the Mimosa tree) is too close to my boundary fence but ok you can leave it.’

The Mimosa

And then when a large stag came onto the land and decided to decimate my trees including a Cyprus tree I had bought the week previously for 150 euros (I was gutted !) Old Pierre was straight down to the gardening shop to buy and install an electric, deer proof, fence around his land. My misfortune had been the first evidence of deer starting to come down from the hills and he was not about to let his fruit trees become their dessert.

He did gloat a bit, hanging over the fence and telling me that none of the affected trees would survive, specifically the Mimosa which had been reduced to a stump.

I laughed as I told the old lady about Pierre’s prognosis of my trees and how she was now asking me to keep an eye on the Mimosa as it was growing vigorously.

We exchanged stories about the deer, our fruit trees and that the deer had just eaten every single pear I had whilst leaving every quince on the branches. And then, as she wandered off, I promised to keep my eye on the Mimosa, thinking that, given its size, it would be several years before it posed any problems to her deer fence.

The Palm Tree Pierre Hated

The original blog posting about the deer can be found here:

http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/oh-deer-oh-deer.html

And my original blog when Pierre died:

http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/old-pierre-is-dead-rip.html

The Anal Banker ..... and I said, Banker

2011-07-26T12:56:00.002+02:00

J’s been managing a villa not far from where we live for a London couple. During the winter, her main responsibility was to arrange maintenance and make sure the house was prepared for the summer letting months, but when those summer letting months arrived and the first guests moved in, J kindly went on holiday leaving me to handle the variety of requests and complaints from the ‘guests’.

The first set of guests were lovely and quite patient despite the fact that the electric gates to the drive failed intermittently leaving their cars impounded, usually and frustratingly when the guests were dashing off to the airport.

Those guests left after two weeks and despite the gate problem, they left behind very generous and extremely positive comments about both the villa and Bea, the lady who cleans the villa every week.

Then the second set of ‘guests’ arrived and I kid you not, within ten seconds of contact with them, I knew they’d be trouble.

The first contact was a phone call on Sunday afternoon saying they couldn’t find the villa. I explained the general location, the number and a description of the villa stating that they ‘couldn’t possibly miss the bright blue/lilac shutters’. Then the first complaint – the road numbers were not concurrent – how could they ‘possibly find a villa when the street numbers were not concurrent?’

I explained that house numbers in

France

(certainly down here) are a measurement of how far a house is from the last road junction, e.g. the villa’s street number was 55 and therefore it was 55 metres from the last junction. ‘Don’t tell me that – my husband’s French you know’, screeched this woman, then adding, ‘the numbers are not concurrent, the numbers are not concurrent.’

Now far be it from me to lecture someone on English so I refrained from explaining how the definition of ‘concurrent’ couldn’t possibly be applied to house numbers and that she possibly meant ‘consecutive’.

Anyway – I let it drop, told them I’d look up the villa on Google Street View and Google Earth for a better description of how to get to it and they should call me back in a few minutes. They never did – I reckon they finally spotted the bright lilac shutters which can be spotted a mile away.

All was quiet until Monday morning when I got a call from ‘James’, saying the villa was filthy and what was I going to do about it. I stated that the cleaner had been in for seven hours on the Friday after the previous guests had left and it couldn’t possibly be filthy but I would call round to see what his complaint was.

Now this rather quick capitulation on my part must have confused him and it was obvious that he desperately wanted to berate me on the phone for a longer period of time and so he continued despite my repeated statement that I would call round. On and on he went until I told him that I had heard enough and would be putting the phone down. On and on went the diatribe and I put the phone down – mid sentence.

I called round to the villa about an hour later and was ‘greeted’ by James who was quite pleasant. I didn’t want to waste time, after all this was not my job, and I immediately asked him to show me the problems he’d encountered.

The first room on the ‘filthy tour’ was the kitchen.

‘Look at that’, James said as he pointed out the waste paper bin. ‘Yes, what’s wrong with it’, I replied. ‘It’s all dusty’, he whined. Now, the bin was a dark blue colour and the lid had a mottled paint finish so I had to get down on my knees to spot the dust. And yes, there was dust on the lid, but it couldn’t be seen unless you were on your knees.

‘And there’s a mark in the cupboard’, he said, opening the door. I looked in the cupboard and couldn’t see a mark but I nodded and asked him what was next. ‘The cooker hood – it’s disgusting’, he stated. I went over to the cooker hood and I have to say, if my cooker hood had been as immaculately clean as this one was, I’d have been delighted. ‘Exactly where is it dirty’, I asked. He pushed in a button and a fleck of dust fell out of the recess. ‘Aaah – see’, it’s filthy. I can’t stay in a place like this’, he complained.

At this point, I was beginning to think this was a joke J had set up to fill my lonely week with a bit of ‘off-the-wall humour’ but no, he dragged me out onto the terrace and said, ‘look behind the shutters, there are cobwebs’. Now, in the South of France with shutters being closed each evening, and the propensity for spiders to look for a nice sheltered place, you are bound to get cobwebs, indeed, you would think something was wrong if you didn’t, but this hadn’t registered with this guy. ‘I had to brush behind the bedroom shutters last night – I couldn’t go to sleep with that mess outside the bedroom window’, he said.

‘OK – what’s next’, I asked.

‘Well there’s a dustball in the lounge’, and sure enough one of those little balls of fluff was nestling happily in the corner of the lounge. By this stage I was getting a bit fed up and I looked closely at the dustball and queried mockingly whether he thought the hairs were animal or human. ‘They’re definitely human’, he said. ‘Yes – I thought they looked a bit wiry and curly’, I answered. It didn’t register.

‘Next’, I asked.

‘Well, just look at this’, he said, pulling the sofa cushions apart to show me some dust which had gathered in the deepest recess. ‘I can’t possibly sit on that’, he moaned.

I was diligently noting all of these things down as we moved outside to the pool terraces. Pulling back a jasmine bush, he pointed to some leaves on the tiles. ‘Look’, he said. ‘Yes – so what? Bushes do lose leaves’, I said. ‘And the pool, it’s got some leaves in it’, he complained. ‘The pool man calls twice a week, I’m sure he’ll scoop them out for you the next time he calls’, I said, biting my lip and not telling him he was an anal twat.

‘And then there’s this’, he proudly said pointing to the BBQ.

Fearing the worst (we all know what BBQ’s get like), I opened the dome and it was utterly immaculate inside. Clean as the day it had been purchased.

‘What’s the problem’, I asked. ‘It’s filthy’, he said. ‘Look at that grease mark.’ Sure enough, on the panel beside the grill, there was a small grease mark. ‘That’s not a problem’, I stated. ‘A quick wipe with a cloth and it’ll be gone.’

‘OK’ he said. ‘I am not staying in this filthy place. I have paid a lot of money (which he had) to stay here and it’s filthy. What are you going to do about it?’

Now, by this stage I reckoned James’s head was so far up his own backside that when he spoke there was a sound of farting and whilst I had been diligent and reasonably calm, I now felt I had to tell him some home truths. ‘This place is not filthy’, I said. ‘OK, there a few things which need attention and I’ll get Bea to come in this afternoon and fix them, but the place definitely isn’t filthy’, I repeated.

And then the response which proves that you can take the boy out of Glasgow and indeed take Glasgow out of the boy………’well with your accent, you obviously have lower cleanliness standards than I have’, he said. ‘I think the place is filthy’, he continued.

At that point, I put my pen and paper down and was just about to punch his lights out when I thought of Fred and Hilda back in London receiving a lawsuit from some very expensively hired solicitors whilst I languished in a French jail. And so I just laughed.

‘You’re laughing at me’, he whined. ‘You think this is all a joke don’t you.’

I repeated my mantra that the house was definitely not filthy but I would get Bea round that afternoon, but he wasn’t finished. ‘If you can stop laughing, come with me’, he ordered. I followed him back upstairs.

‘Do you know when I opened the safe, I spotted that the batteries were just about to start leaking and do you know what happens when batteries leak’, he asked. ‘I have no idea’, I lied.

‘Well, they make an awful mess and could actually lock the safe with my things inside. Anyway, I’ve changed them’. ‘Congratulations’, I said. ‘Well done.’ He didn’t even spot the sarcasm !

‘So – come back into the kitchen – there’s another cobweb I want to show you. I forgot it earlier’, he said.

At that point, I’m afraid I lost it and started laughing again which upset him even more. I’d had enough. As I walked out of the front door, he followed me and said,’ I’m important you know. I have serious connections in this part of the world. I can get things to happen.’

I turned to face him. ‘So who are your connections then James. Tell me who your connections are’, I said quite close to his face thinking that whoever his connections were, unlike some of mine they probably didn’t carry baseball bats.

‘Well I know the deputy mayor of St Paul – well he was deputy mayor five years ago’, he said, completely destroying any semblance of credibility he may have had. ‘I can do things here’, he continued. ‘I will get this villa closed down, I’ll call the police and the tax authorities and I’ll even start damaging it. I can damage this villa you know.’

By this time, I’d climbed into my car laughing hysterically and was starting the engine. James was standing in front of the car in a vain attempt to stop me leaving.

‘James – I would suggest you move away’, I said. ‘Go and enjoy your holiday and stop being silly.’ ‘Silly? Who’s being silly’, he whined as I drove off just missing him.

Blood Money

2011-06-17T11:20:00.001+02:00

Now my body’s not too bad for a sixty year old. I don’t mean the shape which seems a bit top heavy, but its condition. I’ve had a few problems some of which were hereditary (Hay Fever, Asthma) and some which were self inflicted (smashed knee (skiing) and bad ear (swimming in a polluted Med)). But in general terms I’ve been remarkably lucky, considering I was born in a part of Glasgow which has the lowest male expectancy in Europe – all of 57 years!

In the 12 years I’ve lived out here, apart from a couple of emergencies, I’ve only been to the doctor’s about three times, preferring to let nature take its course which it invariably does, but last week was different.

It started on Saturday night when I leant over in bed and there was a pain under my ribcage. The following morning, I could hardly move but seemed to recall that I’d had a similar problem a couple of years previously and that it had ‘fixed itself’ within a day or so and I resolved, once again, to let nature take its course.

On Sunday night however, I was in agony, so much so that my caring wife moved down into the Studio so she could get a decent night’s sleep but she did give me some Ibuprofen for the pain before she disappeared.

Still convinced that my pain was temporary I researched the internet and came to the conclusion that my symptoms (stomach spasms, pain in the ribcage, indigestion etc) meant that I had Acid Reflux or GERD ( Gastroesophageal reflux disease). Strangely, I was quite heartened by this and by Tuesday night, after refusing J’s offer of a trip to the doctor, I was improving and had 1 glass of wine with dinner – my appetite hadn’t been affected!

Well, on Wednesday night I was literally screaming in pain and on Thursday J booked me into the doctor’s and despite the fact that during the day I was virtually OK, I decided to go and see this marvel called Yolandea (Dutch female doctor).

When I eventually found her surgery, I had wandered straight into her consulting room by mistake (luckily it was a male patient – and he wasn’t bending over!), but on entering the waiting room it was all a bit surreal, not only were J and Kitty sitting there but my neighbour Tan also! Talk about a small world!

Anyway, unlike our village doctor, Dr Fang, who over a period of 12 years had never said anything more than ‘wot wong wiv you Misser Evans?’ (long story), Yolandea actually asked me about my family history and my own health record before asking what my symptoms were and then examining me.

Finally, she said that it sounded like I had gall stones and asked that I go for a blood analysis and an ultrasound scan, both of which were booked for Tuesday as Monday was a holiday. All very efficient this French Health Service.

Thankfully, Not My Ultrasound !!

Now during this period, Shadow had started showing similar symptoms to those he had last year when he was diagnosed as having a Thyroid problem so he was booked into the vet’s.

On the Tuesday I gave my blood sample and later had my ultrasound which fortunately showed that my stomach is as healthy as any other eastern Glaswegian who has a life expectancy of 57 (seriously – it was clear) and then it was onto the vets for Shadow’s blood test.

Now both Shadow and I are awaiting our blood test results but hear this – the bill for my blood test and full analysis and my ultrasound performed by a specialist, including a full explanation of my insides, totaled 78 euros. Shadow’s blood test was ………. 91 euros! How come?

PS – I got my results back. It says I am overweight, I have to eat more roughage, I have to apply Vaseline to my dry, scabby nose and I need to be de-wormed. Unfortunately, I did all this for the following few days before I realized I’d mistakenly been reading Shadow’s results and prescribed treatment!

Drugs ! I Blame Patrice.

2011-05-19T12:24:00.001+02:00

It was a few months ago when Patrice my hairdresser nearly cut my throat with his open razor because of my sneezing that he thrust a piece of paper into my hand and said that ‘Aerius’ was a sure fire cure for hay fever.

I wandered into the nearest pharmacy, handed over the bit of paper, said I was on holiday and could I have some Aerius please. The pharmacist shook her head and said ‘not without a prescription’.

J suggested I go to Dr Fang but he hates being told what to prescribe so I passed on that suggestion.

After researching Aerius on the internet and finding that indeed, it is usually only available by prescription, I entered another pharmacy the following day and once again handed over the paper and asked for some Aerius, again explaining that I was on holiday and was really suffering. Once more, there was a shake of the head and a ‘not without a prescription’. I’d also taken Guy’s inhaler along (which I use) and held that out explaining that it was empty and could I have a refill. Inhalers are also only available by prescription, but within seconds I had a new inhaler in my hands, and I wandered out thinking, ‘only in France’.

Undaunted by my Aerius rejections, I sent an e-mail to my neighbour Angie’s mother, who used to run a chain of pharmacies in Florida where she still lives. ‘Could she investigate the availability of Aerius for me and maybe send me some’.

Tina came back to me within hours saying that she would indeed get me some, or Neo-Clarityn which is the same thing, but in the meantime, I found that Aerius was available on-line and said that rather than involve her in the ‘Aerius project’, I would try and get some myself.

It was cheaper to order Neo-Clarityn, so I ordered 60 tablets, pressed the button and a few days later my UK account was debited and I waited. And waited. And waited.

I sent an e-mail to the pharmacy company but there was no reply. I sent another e-mail a few days later and ……… the website had closed down! I mentally accepted that my $50 had disappeared into some scamster’s pocket.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, a rather official looking letter from the French Customs (Douanes) arrived asking me to go to their offices at Nice Airport on a designated day at a designated hour. I knew exactly what they’d got their hands on – my Neo-Clarityn!

Onto the internet once more, I discovered that the importation of drugs into France without a licence is a complete no-no. I kind of suspected this but if you don’t look you don’t get worried! But I did, and I am!

And so yesterday I got on my scooter and headed off to the airport. There were quite a few signs for ‘Douanes Français’ and upon reaching the security post I handed over my letter. My identity card was exchanged for a pass and I was told where to go.

Once inside the complex which was worryingly close to, if not, air-side, I wandered around completely untroubled by the many workers loading and unloading freight and after a few minutes found myself in a decidedly administrative area which didn’t look quite right.

As I was an hour early for my meeting, I had breakfast in what was quite obviously a staff restaurant, read the Nice Matin and then followed the signs for the ‘Chef Douanes’.

At the office, I handed my letter to a woman who shook her head and said I shouldn’t be in that area, it was 'interdit' and I needed to go over to Terminal 1.

Off to T1 I went and handed my letter to the guy who does Vat Reclaims. He suggested as I was still early, I wait 10 minutes. I grabbed a free FT and sat down.

A few minutes later I was escorted into an office and there sat the fiercest looking woman I’ve ever seen. Not good news.

She indicated a chair I should sit on and started typing on her computer, never once looking at me and the following conversation took place in French (or Franglais in my case!):

Name?

Tom Cupples.

First name only please?

Tom (she had my ID card so I don’t know why she was asking).

Address?

I provided it.

Occupation?

Retired.

Do you know it is illegal to import drugs into France?

They’re not drugs – they’re medicine. They’re for my hay fever.

Medicine is drugs. Were you aware?

No (lying).

Where did you order them from?

I told her the web site name.

Is this the first time you ordered drugs on the internet?

Yes.

Good.

Oh no – I forgot, I get my dog’s drugs on the internet.

I didn’t hear that.

I said I order my dog’s drugs on the internet. My vet is ok with it.

I said I didn’t hear it.

Ah O.K. (finally getting the message).

There then followed a 30 minute lecture on the carrying of and importation of ‘drugs’ into France. Then the nasty bit:

There is a penalty.

You mean a fine?

Whatever.

Now I had mentally prepared myself for something approaching €500 and when she said €100 I almost smiled but caught myself just in time.

I handed over €100.

OK, so can I have my Neo-Clarityn?

No – they’re confiscated.

Not even a few?

Good day Mr Cupples – as she handed me my receipt. Then, as I was leaving her office, she called me back and handed me 10 tablets. Aaaah!

PS - J has just returned from Dr Fang's (Guy's ill) and handed me a packet of Aerius. They were free!!!!

My wife isn't often wrong but she was right again.

What's Happening at Le Brin ?

2011-05-11T19:55:00.006+02:00

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post but there are no apologies. I’ve been enjoying the solitude and peace whilst my family has been in Kenya doing all sorts of things to help the less fortunate.

Of course, the trip to Kenya was the first visit for Guy and Kitty and whilst Guy appears to have embraced it despite the lack of technology but reveling in his technical ability to ‘fix things’, it also appears that Kitty had a more difficult time adjusting to life without her make-up, her boyfriend, her en-suite bathroom and her four poster bed! Still, she managed to shoot many wonderful photos which will do her well in her quest to get into the local Lycée which specializes in the Arts.

Little Lily

J did send one post to me during her visit apart from those pleading with me to send more money (try ‘Kenyan Kids’ on Facebook) which said she’d been ‘introduced’ to an abandoned baby in a Kenyan maternity hospital and felt that she needed to bring her home but I pointed out that as she visits twice a year and as she seems to find one of these ‘deserving causes’ on each trip, after a few years we’d be inundated with kids! So we’re sponsoring her life in Kenya – a good compromise methinks. Named initially after J, it’s now been decided to call her Lily. Let’s wish Lily a good life.

So whilst my family have been several thousand miles away I’ve been transitioning the house from winter/spring into summer and ready for the (vast) stream of visitors we have arriving this year.

What does that involve? Cleaning the house terraces and fixing the BBQ (again). Starting the automatic pool cleaning process after its winter shutdown, mowing the (grass) terraces for the first time this year and getting rid of all the gunge which falls from the trees during the spring winds.

85 or 91 Years Old ?

Apart from that we’ve been congratulating Shadow on his 13^th birthday (91 or 85 in human years depending on how you calculate it), finding the remains of mice and rats which the cats have dragged in alive and then let go to rot in corners of the house (only discovered when the smell became unbearable!) and generally trying to keep the multitude of vehicles (4 cars and 4 scooters – long story) arranged in such a way that people don’t think we’re rich.

The stream of visitors has already started and we’re almost fully booked now until the end of July. During this period, J and the kids will be off to Cyprus for a couple of weeks and despite the fact that I was desperate to accompany them (for J’s sister’s 70^th birthday), J has insisted I stay at home and clean the house ready for the next set of visitors.

That’s about it – apart from me working my socks off, there’s not a lot happening although tonight I did come across what looked like a mountain rescue team just down the road where a German couple have been building a house for the last six years. Maybe she chose an inappropriately expensive kitchen and he's buried his wife in the hills.

Manicured Terraces - But How Long Before The Weeds Come Through

Being German, he will of course probably not know that Billy Connolly suggests that if you’re going to do away with the missus, you should bury her with her bottom just sticking out of it so you can use it for something practical.

See his little story here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slw08b3bHFE

A Prize Idiot

2011-04-06T05:31:00.002+02:00

I knew it was April 1^st. Despite most of my days being pretty much the same I had known it was April Fool’s Day when I was up during the night (hay fever) and had read a newspaper article which stated that Sir Alex Ferguson was to become the Life President of the Football Referees Association. But then I went back to bed and when I awoke a few hours later, I had forgotten all about it. It was as I was walking out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee that J said, ‘Oh – did you see that e-mail from Tan (my neighbour)?’

Now I didn't know what it was but I immediately thought that the e-mail was going to say that he was leaving – i.e. moving away.

Tan and Angie have now been next door for four and a half years which is not bad considering they only came up to Tourrettes to see what the house was like. I think they liked it and stayed. They have become great mates and we all get on enormously well – just like one big family, which is just as well as there is only about 30 metres between our two houses!

I opened the e-mail and sure enough, my instinct was correct – Tan and Angie were moving. Here is the e-mail Tan sent:

Hi Tom, Julie,

I have been trying to meet up and have a chat these past few weeks but with me being away it’s been difficult. The time has arrived for us to depart these shores I’m afraid, I have a job offer I simply cannot refuse. This has all come about the last couple of weeks, Amadeus Spain, has asked me to join them as the Global Deployment Manager on a permanent basis, I got the official paperwork yesterday.

I will be based in Madrid but we are looking at living outside of the city in a medieval village called Avila, so it will feel like Tourrettes hopefully. This has been a very difficult decision for us but I think its the right move in terms of prospects (now that I am over 40) and career path. We also really love Spain and hopefully, if we have half the fun out there as we have in your house, it will be worth it.

Am sure the kids will be ok, well for Violet it will be tough I guess for her to understand what’s happened but they forget quickly, right?

Anyway, just wanted to say you two, (and guy and kitty) have been absolutely wonderful to us, as friends, neighbours and landlords. We couldn't have imagined it any better to be honest when we first visited the house, and we will always be friends.

I think we need between 4-8 weeks to move, so I hope this notice period is acceptable and gives you enough time to find replacements.

I guess we can talk Saturday once I am back face to face, sorry its over email but wanted to get the ball rolling.

speak soon

Tan and Angie

PS. Angie can also practice her Spanish!

As my mind had already predicted what the e-mail was going to be about, I immediately sent a reply, wishing him and Angie all the best in their new life. My response is below – aaah nice eh ?

Hey Tan - you'll do anything to get to the Bernabau won't you ????
We'll be sorry to see you guys go too. It's been great and I don't think we'll ever get another set of neighbours like you. Maybe we could come too ? But, the job sounds great and Spain was always somewhere I wanted to live - we're supposed to get 300 days of sunshine down here (blatant lie) but in Spain, I think it's the real deal.
I'm sure we'll see you over the weekend sometime and we can discuss things.

Regards
Tom

Once the reply was sent, I immediately switched into T Cupples Commercial and Oraganisation mode. If they left in the next six weeks I could put the house on the holiday rental market and make a bomb – should I make it £2,000 or £2,500 a week? And once October came along and I was rolling in dosh I could put it up for long term rental. Yes – this would all work out splendidly. Now how would I market it? Put it on our friend’s holiday homes website or simply put a notice on Angloinfo?

I decided to think about that later. Then I thought about all of the furniture which Tan and Angie have bought and which I would have to replace to put the house back on the rental market. I worked my way through each of their rooms in turn, mentally preparing a list of what I would need to buy. I was frustrated in that J had only just been to Ikea down in Toulon – we’d need another trip now.

What else would I need to do? Maybe tidy the garden up a bit and I would certainly have to re-grout the kitchen tiles but that job was scheduled for the end of April anyway.

It was all falling into place. Another cup of coffee was required. As I wandered into the kitchen, J said, ‘Did you see Tan’s e-mail?’ ‘Yeah – bit of a bummer eh. Still, things move on’, I replied.

‘You idiot’, said J. ‘Don’t you know what date it is today.? It’s April Fools Day.’

Well, I could have thrown myself in the pool off of the terrace, hit my head off of the wall, thrown myself under a truck on the main road. None of these actions would have made me feel worse than I felt when J uttered those words.

I just went and sat down and castigated myself for being a total idiot.

After a few minutes, I thought that maybe if Tan and Angie hadn’t realized by my initial reply that I had sussed what was going on, I could carry this little joke on a bit further, so I penned another e-mail below:

Tan - I hope you don't think I have been doing this with undue haste but there's a couple coming to see your house tonight. They've been on at me for months to be alerted when you were leaving and are desperate to get out of their house in Vence.

Could you please make sure the house is clean and tidy for their visit, remove all the kids’ toys from the lounge and move the trampoline so they can see the full extent of the terrace.

They are 99.9% sure of taking the house (they lived in it for a weekend last year when you were away - roadtesting I think it's called) and have asked me to fit a double oven and air-con. The oven will be fitted this weekend but I'd appreciate it if you would refrain from using it - maybe Angie could use the deep-fat fryer?? Sorry about this.

Finally, they have asked for a moving-in date of 27th April which is about 3 weeks away and which is slightly less than you were suggesting but as it'll take you a couple of weeks to get to Madrid you'll probably find it works out ok.

Once again, we'll be sorry to see the back of you - sorry - see you leave. Please make sure you feed the fish so they are in good condition for the new owners.

Regards
Tom

But it didn’t work. Tan’s Reply was unprintable and Angie’s was ‘Speechless’!!

We all got together the following night on Tan’s terrace, sorry MY TERRACE, next door and had a good laugh about it.

The PC is Back ….. and English Mechanics

2011-03-31T22:29:00.001+02:00

Don't Buy One !!

My regular readers will know that in a fit of extremely unusual extravagance when I was in New York for my honeymoon, I splashed out several hundred dollars on a new PC. Unfortunately, the PC I bought was a top-spec HP Pavillion dv6000 which, unknown to me was a crap piece of kit wrapped up in a very attractive case – shiny piano black, every bell and whistle you can think of and a few you probably haven’t even heard of!

The problem with this particular PC, which I would have known about had I bothered to research it properly, was that it melts, or to be more precise, the graphics board melts and eventually, the problems spread and so it turned out to be.

It’s been down to Wolfgang, our trusty German PC engineer in Antibes a couple of times and last year after a new graphics board was fitted, the motherboard (quite important) gave up and he fitted a new one of these too. This motherboard lasted approximately 6 weeks by which time the warranty of the board was up so last October, the HP went back to Wolfgang and it’s taken this long to fix.

And so yesterday, I got the Beemer out, put the top down and headed off down to Antibes to pick it up. It was a beautiful day and driving my new toy for the first time with the hood down was great.

I got to Wolfgang’s house in just under an hour, picked up the PC and headed back into Antibes to meet a lady, who shall remain nameless and who was handing over some VHS tapes for me to copy to DVD.

When we finally managed to meet up (Antibes centre is a nightmare when you have a car), she handed me the tapes and said one was old home movies and was precious whilst the other was of her wedding. I looked at the wedding tape and said that it didn’t look to be very long. I estimated 25 minutes. ‘Yes’, she said, and that’s about how long the marriage lasted! I didn’t dare ask why she wanted it converted to DVD.

Opio Village

About 20 minutes from home, I had to stop for some groceries and decided to have a sandwich and a glass of wine in a brasserie attached to the supermarket. I ordered a Jambon Cru sandwich. ‘Non monsieur.’ I asked for a fromage sandwich. ‘Non monsieur.’ What about a jambon sandwich? ‘Non monsieur – we don’t have any bread.’ ‘Well there’s a supermarket next door. You could actually get a baguette there’, I suggested. ‘Mais oui’, he said with a surprised look on his face as if I had come up with some startling idea which would transform his business!

It was as I was sitting waiting for the chef to go and get some bread that I noticed a rather noisy table of six guys having lunch. They were tucking into Pesto soup, braised rabbit with piles of vegetables and some sort of tart with cream for dessert. All for 14 euros – not bad!

But it was the ‘formidables’ (very large beers) some of them were drinking which gave the game away – they were English, and further inspection of their clothes told me they were from a local garage not far from the brasserie.

Now this business has been there for quite a few years and specializes in top-of-the-range cars, some costing over €100,000, and they are second hand! Now, contradict me if you like, but if I was spending €100,000 on a used car, I would go to some fancy garage in Cannes, not a piece of gravel and grass beside a big shed in Opio.

Anyway, the business must thrive as it’s been there for years and it was as I was thinking about who buys their cars that I also wondered if this was some sort of day out for these mechanics as it was obvious that they’d been there for quite a while, and as it was now 2.30pm, they were quite clearly using their outing to embrace the French custom of long lunches.

Then it came time to pay the bill. They tried four credit cards which were all refused and then the waiter said, ‘don’t bother you can pay tomorrow.’

That answered my question.

Winter Straight to Summer ?

2011-03-23T13:50:00.001+01:00

After the wettest winter here I can recall we seem to have gone straight to summer, with the sun out, temperatures heading towards 20 degrees and everything looking much better than it did only a week ago.

The roof is down on the BMW, I can go on my scooter with a sweater on rather than look like the Michelin Man and the grass is growing again. My beautiful Magnolia tree is in bloom and even Shadow lies in the sun all day – the phrase ‘mad dogs and Englishmen etc’ comes to mind. The cats play with the shadows as they cross the lounge and just love lying stretched out soaking up the unusual warmth.

Of course, with the sun comes loads of work. Tan, who finally seems to have conquered the maintenance of his pool, continually shouts over that mine ‘looks a bit green’ and compared to his, it is, and so I’ve been cleaning mine, ready for the algae which comes with the sunshine and causes even more pool work.

I’m desperately trying to put off the annual spring cleaning of the terraces and poolside as the dreaded ‘yellow dust’, which comes from the pine trees, is due to arrive in the wind. This covers everything and on bad days you can actually see huge clouds of it swirling below in the valley. That’s my excuse for not doing the terraces although according to my diary, the dust is a week late this year – maybe because of the rain we’ve had?

The cafés and bars will soon have their tables outside, the rosé wine will start to be served and everything is looking good.

I’ve used this early spell of good weather to put my Alfa up for sale as ‘the perfect summer car’. I’ll be sorry to see it go but if I’m left with it, I won’t be too worried although the stigma of having two convertibles in the drive might make me a bit self conscious, particularly when J has her ‘raise money for starving Kenya kids’ coffee mornings at our house!

And that’s about it for this update except to say that Guy is entering the final few days of his ‘stage’ which is a three week work experience programme. Through a friend, we managed to get him placed with an executive recruitment company and despite the fact that he’s been restricted to the accounts department, he’s thoroughly enjoyed it, is getting paid, and is now making noises about college being boring! I actually think he likes the prospect of two-hour French lunches or maybe it’s because he’s actually going to have some real money to spend next week after he picks up his three week payment!

Now, how much was that he owed me?

World Champions at Pessimism (The French)

2011-03-21T21:23:00.001+01:00

I was writing this blog a few days ago when I read a report of a ‘pessimism survey’ which concluded that the French are the most pessimistic nation on earth despite the country being considered by many foreigners as one of the richest, safest and most agreeable places to live on the planet.

Jean-Hervé Lorenzi, economics professor at the Paris-Dauphine University, said he launched the 'Tous Optimistes' (All Optimists) web site to counter an army of doom mongers who preach that France is inexorably heading for economic and social ruin. But in January, a poll found France to be the "world champions of pessimism", fearful of the future and longing for the past.

The findings suggested the French take a gloomier view of their prospects in 2011 than the worn-torn residents of Afghanistan and Iraq. Believe it or not, Vietnam and Nigeria were the most wildly optimistic. Britain came fifth in the pessimism stakes, i.e 5^th pessimistic.

The French pessimism is being led by a group of ’declinologists’, claims Prof Lorenzi. Their ‘high priest’, Nicolas Bavarez, wrote an article in Le Point magazine last month proclaiming that ‘France's economy is going up the spout, a strangely English phrase.

Its businesses are being subjected to ‘euthanasia, its industry is ‘heading for extinction’, its trade deficit is enormous and its heavyweight multinationals make 80 per cent of their profits abroad, he wrote.

Prof Lorenzi, however, is convinced there are signs France is finally freeing itself from the declinologists' clutches. His website gathers a raft of books, essays and articles that support his claim that France is ‘in a far better state’ than the declinologists claim and is ‘potentially one of the most dynamic countries in the Western world’.

Among the arguments in France's favour, he cites France's birth rate – the highest in Europe alongside Ireland (maybe because of France’s tax breaks for having a large family), the ‘record’ number of new businesses created last year – around 630,000 – and the country's huge amount of untapped personal savings (again probably because the government sponsors tax break savings schemes for everybody – kids and ex-pats alike).

And then, almost as if I’d made up the TV schedules myself, a British TV programme about Nicolas Sarkozy came on and started by declaring that France has, ‘the biggest budget deficit in the G7’, they ‘only work a 35 hour week’ and ‘virtually everybody still has a two hour lunch’. France has the worst riots in Europe when the masses don’t like something the government is doing and most of their ultra-high earners have moved domicile because of

France

’s high personal tax rates.

Make of that mixed bag what you will.

My view? I’m afraid I don’t know because the only French people we mix with live in this comparatively well-to-do part of France and many of them have been left either land, houses or inheritances by their family.

People in the bars seem quite happy (and not because they drink their troubles away – the French don’t do that!) and any unhappy people I meet are probably ‘unhappy’ because they have to deal with difficult Brits!

I’m tempted to say that compared to people in Britain I talk to, the French seem happier by comparison – but then most of the Brits cannot afford the time for two hour lunches every day!

Ninety Minutes in Vence

2011-03-13T17:17:00.001+01:00

‘You’re a day late’, said Patrice, my hairdresser. ‘You were booked in yesterday.’

And so with groveling apologies, I asked Patrice what he could do and thankfully he had a spare slot ninety minutes later which I accepted.

It was only as I left his shop that I wondered what I’d do next. I’m not like J who would have happily wandered round the shops, melting her plastic on the way and making Vence one of the most prosperous towns in France. No, shopping is not my thing and working out that if I went back home on the scooter (20 minutes) and then back into Vence (another 20 minutes), it would be a waste of time, I decided to do the tourist bit, but first of all I had to do a few things at the bank.

I wandered in and looked at the refurbishment job they’d done last year. I saw a banker-woman and asked her where the counter was. ‘We don’t have a counter – you have to do everything for yourself’, she said.

‘OK – I want to pay this cheque in please.’ ‘Right’, she said, ‘just come over here and I’ll do it for you’, taking my cheque, pay-in slip and enevelope. ‘Anything else’, she enquired. ‘Yes – I need some plastic containers for all my copper coins that the kids have saved up’. ‘Here you are – we have a new system. Just put all your coins in this plastic bag’, she said handing me what looked like a Ziploc bag. ‘Anything else?’ she asked. ‘I need some cash’, I said, ‘but I reckon I’ll have to do that myself – eh?’ ‘Well, I could show you if you’ve not used our new machines before’, she said and with that I was given the final part of my new ‘do-it-yourself’ banking service.

I then wandered down to see my mate who has a wine business which he runs from home but he wasn’t in and so I stopped at the Château de Villeneuve next door which is a 17^th Century building annexed to a 12^th century tower (see pictures). I’d passed it many times before but had never had the time to walk round it. Looking at the signs outside, it said there was an ‘exposition’ of art on display but I was more interested in the fabric of the building and stepped inside. I took a few steps up the main staircase when a lady shouted that I hadn’t paid the fee.

A fee? There had been no mention of an entrance fee outside but I paid the €5 and walked up the staircase once again. Looking around there wasn’t much to show for a 17^th Century castle, certainly not compared to what J and I had just seen in Florence.

I reached the first floor and found that all the walls in the vast rooms had been boarded up to hang the art but I reckoned that this was permanent, there was virtually nothing of the inside of the building which could be seen apart from a few ornate fireplaces.

In the first room, I stood and looked at a piece of art which looked like it had been a bad paint spraying job on a car. It was a board about 1 foot square and was just painted black. I stood there shaking my head and then noticed that a lady attendant was smiling at me – it was obvious she couldn’t work it out either.

The next room also had a lady attendant and was full of about 60 prints of the same guy growing older. The adjacent room had another lady attendant and looked like the walls had been vandalized – but no, it was art!

As I went to climb the stairs to the next level, I spotted the most amazing chandelier and asked if I could take a photo with my iPhone. I was told NO! I protested that it wasn’t the art I wanted to photograph but the one and only interesting part of the château on display which I wanted to record. ‘Non monsieur’, was the reply.

I climbed the stairs to the next level which had been given over to an exhibition of Matisse who famously lived in Vence and designed a Chapel just outside the town. This was rather more interesting as you could actually work out what he had been painting but what was intriguing was that there were no attendants present. All the ‘tat’ downstairs was being guarded, even from photographs being taken, whilst here there were dozens of Matisse prints with nobody in attendance! Bizarre.

After about thirty minutes, I headed to the café on the corner but first stopped at an estate agent’s premises as tourists generally do but what grabbed my attention wasn’t the houses for sale but the estate agent’s fees (see picture), ranging from an eye-watering 11% of the sale price to 5% for the most expensive properties. And they don’t let foreigners run estate agencies until they’ve had something like 10 years training – talk about keeping the money for the French. Anyway, seeing this ‘fees’ sign reinforced my determination to sell my own house when the time comes.

Then it was the café for a glass of wine and a cigarette. I spoke in French – they spoke in English – how did they know?

I got my wine and sat down outside looking at the Château which was just across the road and then it started – Arabic pop music. Blaring from the speakers it was like a call for all the Moroccans and Tunisians who congregate on Vence’s corners and sure enough they started to arrive and order their tiny little coffees. I could only put up with an 'Arabacsised' version of Leona Lewis for so long before I was driven away. Away for my number two with Patrice.

International Women's Day

2011-03-10T14:53:00.003+01:00

Quite a few of you will already know that J is running a fundraising project to rehabilitate and educate Kenyan children, many of whom are orphans.

I’m pleased to say that over the past few weeks J has raised over €1,300 to help these kids.

Most of this will be sent to the Isaiah Trust, the registered charity which started the enterprise off, some of it has already been sent direct to Kenya to alleviate a food shortage, and J has started a small enterprise of her own, getting scarves (see picture) sent from Kenya which she sells on to the ladies of the Côte d’Azur. This small ‘business’ supports the people who make the scarves, the market stallholders who sell them, and pays a small commission to the student who sources the scarves and sends them to J.

J has already sold quite a few of the scarves and by the middle of the year, another €1,000 should be raised to send to

Kenya

I’m pleased and proud to say that J’s efforts down here have not gone unnoticed. We now have regular quiz nights (a la British pub style), there are frequent ladies evenings, lunches and ‘bring and buy’ sales which allows people to get rid of unwanted household items which amazingly somebody else always wants!

And as if to underline her efforts, a local publication celebrating the 100^th International Women’s Day listed J in third place after Annie Lennox (who also supports African charities) and Paula Radcliffe the runner (who is a Champion for Peace)! Of course, virtually every publication has their own list but it’s great that J’s efforts have been recognised. You can find the articles at the URLs below.

http://uk.mg1.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?.gx=1&.rand=3uhnalv4rk1qe

http://www.therivierawoman.com/index.php?module=g_people&page=getLong&id=84

People’s generosity never fails to amaze me. Only last week, a woman who read about J’s exploits arranged to meet her and after hearing what she was doing, handed over a cheque for over €400!

So many people down here, many of whom live privileged lifestyles are looking to help others and when they hear of J’s project, are only too willing to help.

It’s only a few weeks now until J, Guy and Kitty head off to Kenya.

No doubt there will be the usual update when she returns.

The Beemer is Finished (Nearly)

2011-03-09T13:39:00.002+01:00

Now I haven’t been spending every waking hour on it as there’s been quite a bit of waiting for special tools and a lot of internet research required, but finally all the things which have been bugging me are resolved.

After a complete rebuild of the front braking system, the final, usually quick job of bleeding the brakes proved to be something of a challenge. After waiting for Guy to return from a four day trip to his father’s and getting him to pump the brakes for about twenty minutes, nothing was happening. A quick look at the manual and it was stated that it is a pressurized system, which needed either a garage or a special bleeding system, and that’s not a profanity!! The garage option was favourite until I worked out that it would probably cost a hundred euros or so and the tools on the internet ranged from €80 to over €300! Then I spotted a system on Amazon – Eezibleed - cost €25.

I was a bit doubtful that it could be so cheap and work but the reviews were favorable and only four days after ordering it, a rather Heath Robinson looking device arrived and which uses the pressure from the spare wheel. Ten minutes after starting the job on my own (it’s usually a two-man job), the brakes were working.

I’ll let J test them on the mountain road just to make sure they are ok though!

The next, and related problem, was a BMW fiddle. Even after fixing the brakes, the warning light was illuminating the dashboard and some internet research showed that you need to take it to a BMW dealership to have the system reset but a much quicker fix was simply to cut the wires leading to the sensor and connect them together. Problem solved. I look at my brakes every few months anyway so a sensor is superfluous for me.

The next and rather confusing issue was that the theft alarm kept going off. This was caused by the removal of the battery when I was working on the electrics, and like the brake warning light, the alarm, or rather, the car needs to be taken to a specialist to have the system reset. Removing the fuse wasn’t the answer as the radio was hooked up to the alarm as were the hazard lights. I disconnected the alarm box but it was full of circuit boards which frighten me to death so I simply removed all the connectors, dumped the box and hey presto – everything worked.

And that was it. You may notice that I haven’t photographed the Beemer from the side which has a large bash on it – that’s a summer job and is quite a complicated task necessitating the removal of the bumper, the lights, bonnet hinges and a few other things. I’ll order a wing on the internet, get it painted and then fit it when there’s a few warm days on the horizon.

The next thing of course is to put the Beemer through it’s Controle Technique (MOT) which is always an anxious time but we’ll see what happens this afternoon when I drive it up to the centre and hand it over. It’s worse than childbirth (or waiting for your wife to give birth), watching the guys crawl all over the car, shoving torches into every nook and cranny as they look for the slightest problem.

Given the state of some of the cars on the road over here, it always amazes me when they might fail a German manufactured, superbly built BMW 328i for a slight problem, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed and see what happens.

And after that it’s the open road. Can’t wait.

Stop Press - YES !!! It passed.

Internet Buying and Postage

2011-02-24T09:52:00.000+01:00

Although you might think these are inter-related subjects, they are and they aren’t – let me explain.

In France, quite a lot of things are very expensive, certainly compared to the

and so for the last few years, nearly everything we buy, apart from food and DIY stuff, is purchased on the internet.

Virtually all the kid’s clothes are bought on-line with t-shirts flying in from the far east and shoes and trousers coming from a variety of sources. I’ve given up trying to find decent and reasonably priced clothes over here and thank the day that M&S started shipping their online catalogue to Europe.

Of course, we, like virtually everybody else use Amazon but tend to find that Amazon UK is cheaper than Amazon France (for the same book), even when you include the postage costs (Amazon France is generally postage free) and you may have read on my blog that I’ve been buying tyres and other car parts on the net and quite a few of these are coming from the UK as well.

And I reckon I’ve worked out why things are cheaper to get from the UK and that’s because postage charges in France are exorbitantly expensive.

A couple of postage stories – it takes maybe ten days for my insurance company in Nice to send me a policy in the post (well they blame the post) whilst J has had rather large parcels delivered from Kenya in a couple of days which I can’t quite work out given that the parcels eventually get handled by La Poste when they reach French soil.

Secondly, I’ve just had some brake parts delivered from the UK for my BMW. Postage costs were £14.95. The company concerned take back your old parts and give you a rebate for them, which at £30 a time is not to be sneezed at. And so when I picked up my new parts the other day from La Poste, which, amazingly was open for once, I asked the girl to put the package back on the scales to see how much it would cost to send back to the UK because I reckoned I would just put the old parts back in the same box and ship it back for my rebate.

Of course, confusion reigned. ‘You’ve not even taken delivery of your parcel and you want to send it back?’ she queried.

‘No – I just want to see what it would cost to send it back to the UK’, I said.

Well, the discussion and explanation went on for a couple of minutes much to the annoyance of the usual queue in our Post Office which is a space of about 8 feet by 2 feet (I kid you not). Eventually, I managed to get Mrs La Poste to understand that it wasn’t the incoming parcel I wanted to send to the UK but one of exactly the same dimensions and weight.

She plonked it on the scales and said, ‘Cent Trente Neuf Euros.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘One hundred thirty nine’, she said in almost perfect English. ‘And that’s normal post, it’ll be more if it’s express and more if you want it signed for at the other end.’

‘One hundred and thirty nine euros – that’s about £120’, I said. ‘It only cost £15 to send them from the UK.’

She shrugged. I shrugged and in an instant worked out why French things are expensive to buy, and get delivered, on the internet.

PS – on a similar subject, we ordered a new PC battery for Guy off of eBay. It was ordered on 7^th December, the money was debited via PayPal a day later and ……. yup – it never arrived.

By the time the ‘retailer’ in Hong Kong (I should have smelled somefing velly funny) had ‘investigated’ the non-delivery, it was too late to complain via eBay and now the retailer’s e-mail has ‘ceased to exist’. Beware!!

'Bigger Than Mickey Mouse'

2011-02-22T21:16:00.000+01:00

I got J an iPad for her Xmas. I know I should have waited until April when the new super-wizzy version with a larger screen and a camera is apparently to be announced but you can wait for ever for these new versions so I took the plunge, ordered it off of the internet, it was delivered in good time, all beautifully wrapped and it was put under the tree and eventually gratefully received. Not ‘eventually’ in that it took my wife ages to acknowledge the gift but that it was delivered early and lay under the tree for a couple of weeks.

Despite not having the usual Windows applications such as Excel, Word or Powerpoint, the iPad comes into its own when used simply as an internet access device. Despite costing twice what a good laptop would set you back, the touch-screen interface to the internet and e-mail is brilliant. Before I got J the iPad, I’d read that once you use an iPad to access the Net, you never want to go back to the mouse based system, and it’s true – as soon as J puts her iPad down, either me, Guy or Kitty are racing to get our hands on it.

It’s not without its faults though. Like the iPhone and the iTouch, there is no ability to run Flash so I cannot watch some videos and cannot see any Flash based football games on it. It doesn’t have a file input device such as a USB port or Bluetooth – everything you want to get on your iPad has to go through iTunes which is a bit of a nuisance. Still – its good points outscore the bad.

As soon as we, sorry, J had the iPad we were looking for the best applications. Very quickly Wunderadio (a digital radio app which gives J her Classic FM and me, my Talksport), Accuweather (for beautifully presented weather forecasts) and Jukebox, were downloaded, soon to be followed by a few free games such as Casino, Paper Toss and a paid one, Angry Birds.

I hadn’t heard of Angry Birds before, I guess Guy downloaded it but it is horribly addictive, encouraging you to play for hours trying to get from one level to the next. It was only developed as an ‘App’ in 2009 but two years later, Angry Birds has become the iPhone’s most popular App, in other words, the piece of software that has been installed on the most number of handsets worldwide (quite an achievement when you consider that it’s one of 300,000 applications on offer) and has quickly spread to Apple’s iPad and other types of phones as well.

The game has been downloaded 50 million times. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, has admitted to a mild addiction, as have a variety of other supposedly busy people, from Dick Cheney to Mad Men actor Jon Hamm. Last year, two brothers, Rodrigo and Gustavo Dauster, competed against each other in a two-month marathon session to see who could score the maximum number of points.

In total, the game notches up 200 million minutes of play time every day, which is close to the number of minutes viewers in the

United States

spend watching the average prime-time television programme. Versions of the game are being developed for the PlayStation, Xbox and Wii. There is a line of Angry Birds soft toys, Mattel is working on a board game and before long there will be a cartoon series, and, if all goes well, a film.

Rovio, the company behind the development of Angry Birds, certainly doesn’t lack ambition. At a conference in Munich last month, Peter Vesterbacka, the company’s head of business development, boasted that Angry Birds was “bigger than Mickey Mouse”. He was referring to the number of times the two terms were searched for on Google.

It’s certainly the most addictive way to pass some spare time, and that’s how it was developed – for people standing at a bus stop waiting for a few minutes and wanting something mildly amusing and challenging to play on their smart phone, with the ability to pick up where you left off, either the following day, or if you’re like me, as soon as you can find a quiet corner.

Try it - but heed my warning – you will not be able to put it down.

The BMW 'Restoration'

2011-02-16T13:25:00.003+01:00

As bought - not much damage visible !

Restoration is probably too strong a word but there's plenty of work to do as I'm finding out as I work my way through the car.

When I bought it, Cindy, the seller told me of the obvious faults: the disintegrating front brakes, the bashes on both front wings and the non-opening boot. She also said that there was a leak into the cabin but as all convertibles leak, some from birth, that wasn't unusual.

When I got it home I started to strip the brakes but didn't get far when I discovered the bolts holding the brake caliper were seized. I WD40'd them and after a few hours including a bit of heat from my blowtorch and they were loose. The other side was relatively easy. It's the same with all cars - the first side takes ages and the second side just seems to fall off!

Having stupidly bought the brake disks and pads from the local motoring supermarket, I then found them on the internet for a quarter of the price. Luckily, I'd priced the calipers at the BMW franchise at €258 each, I was therefore delighted when I found them on the internet for €55 each!

The non-opening boot was more of a challenge. The trick was to press the panel which raises to allow you to store the folding roof and, once closed, this allowed the boot to open. The design is to prevent the boot lid and the roof cover from jamming together and causing damage. It took about an hour for me to spot a micro-switch which only activates when the roof stowing panel is firmly closed and a quick adjustment of the panel and the micro-switch clicked and hey-presto, the boot could open.

The roof panel however only closes when all the electrics are working and after discovering about two dozen relay switches, none of which I could test, I decided that a couple of latches would do the trick - result! Cost - €7.50.

Next on the list was the manual boot opening mechanism which is used when all the electrics fail. This consists of a particularly flimsy lever under the back seat which when pulled, releases the lock in the boot. Not unusually after 15 years, some of the cables had frayed and needed to be replaced so it was off to the DIY store to get 6 metres of wire cable. An hour later and the cables were replaced. Result! Cost of cable €5.40.

Bumper work - typical Cote d'Azur damage

The bash on the passenger side front wing was easily fixed. A foot pushed against the outward-facing dent and it 'folded' back into place. There is still a crease in the panel but it's almost invisible compared to what it was like before.

However, the major surprise when I opened the car after two days of rain was the complete flooding of the roof storage bay, the boot and the space under the back seat. The pools of water were so deep you could have kept goldfish in them! Although Cindy had told me there was a leak, the amount of water was a shock. First to get inspected was the roof storage bay. It was quite obvious and very strange that water could flow into the bay - there were no seals or mouldings to divert rain. After 30 minutes of complete bafflement, I spotted a couple of rubber plugs in the base of each side of the bay and when poked with a long screwdriver, the water flowed out under the car. It's quite obvious that the 3-series design allows water to flood into the storage bay but then drains out through these plugs - success !

Following this rather simple 'fix', and after a few more days of rain, the BMW is now quite dry. Result.

Fixing the bumpers - brakes being stripped

The front bumper has been filled and resprayed and is looking good. Unfortunately, the rather large bash in the driver's side front wing will necessitate a replacement - a summer job I think.

Unfortunately, my brake parts which are coming from the UK have been delayed by of all things, a dodgy computer system although the cynic in me thinks the company wanted to have the credit card cash in their account before they released the calipers however, they should be here by the time J and I get back from Florence this weekend.

In summary then, apart from rebuilding the brakes, all that remains to be done is to have the car MOT'd and then registered and then I'll be roaring round the Tourrettes lanes.

A Beautiful Morning

2011-02-08T18:43:00.000+01:00

After what seemed like weeks of rain, we've now had two weeks of wonderful weather, cold in the mornings and at night but nice and sunny during the day.

This morning was one of the special ones with mist down below in the valley but what was really special and something I haven't seen before was a huge bank of mist over the Med. It looked like it was a grassy plain with a covering of mist (see pictures).

We've also seen Corsica on quite a few mornings but as usual, it disappeared back into the haze within minutes.

The cars have been covered in a thick frost each morning and after what seems like years of trying, I still haven't persuaded J that pouring a kettle of boiling water over the windscreen is a bad idea! With a two inch crack on the passenger side you'd think she'd never seen one of those repetitive Autoglass adverts.

Still, it's her car although if the windscreen caves in one frosty morning, it'll suddenly become my car! C'est la vie!

My newest addition however, is looking good despite the fact that the complete braking system is in the trailer, waiting to be taken to the dump. The bumpers have been repaired and re-painted and it no longer looks like a typical Cote d'Azur car. It's strange that although it's spent all of its fifteen years down here with crazy drivers, it doesn't have any of those door dings and other little bashes which virtually every vehicle down here suffers from.

The main part of the braking system hopefully is en-route from the UK and it really irked me that having bought the new disks and pads from the main car supermarket, I then found I could have got them on-line from the UK at a quarter of the cost. Luckily, I'd wandered into the local BMW service point to price the brake cailipers and fainted when the guy told me they'd be €258 - each! I got them on-line for £40 each! Still - one learns.

The electrics on the other hand are a nightmare. BMW's, even old ones like mine have a plethora of electrical gadgets and whilst the majority of them seem to be working ok, the powered convertible hood just doesn't work. There's about twenty different relays which do various things, e.g. stopping the boot from opening when the hood cover is unlocked, locking the hood cover when the boot is unlocked but I can't be bothered working my way through the relays and giving BMW a fortune and as we tend not to get sudden downpours here, which necessitates a powered hood, I'll simply rig up a new locking system.

Being a bit of a nut though, I still start the 2.8 engine every couple of days and I just sit there listening to it purring. I can't wait.

What’s The World Coming To ?

2011-02-02T17:53:00.001+01:00

Last week I posted a blog which was a bit tongue in cheek but I still got some stick for it, predictably from females, who thought it was a bit sexist. It was about females and football (an oxymoron ?) and I finished with some statements about an assistant referee in a Premier League football match, to whom some commentators were making disparaging remarks, off the record.

Well, this turned out to be a bit of a ‘scoop’ on my part because the story blew up big time and both commentators are now looking for new jobs!

Well, just to balance things out a bit, this blog is about men, so you girls can have a bit of a laugh and I’m sure the boys will have a titter as well.

Look at the picture on the left. Quite pretty aren’t they? Well, pretty for models. They’re usually so skinny and gaunt (there I go again) but the one on the right appears to have quite a nice body if you like that sort of thing.

Well, I’m sorry to inform you that the models in the picture are one and the same person and ‘she’ is a male!

I’ve lost the original article in one of the papers but for some reason, the guy is in huge demand to model female couture. And it’s not some obscure fashion house using ‘him’. The major couture houses are using ‘him’ and he’s probably raking it in. Maybe it’s because he’s tall and has no boobs (there I go again!).

What’s the world coming to?

And then there’s the story about PC Air in Thailand, which has yet to take to the skies, and which selected three "Ladyboys" in its first round of hiring to act (perform?) as ‘stewardesses’ for the new airline (see picture below - I'm sure I know one of them!).

In an act to promote equal opportunities for what is dubbed the "third sex" in Thailand, Peter Chan, the new airline's boss, was enthusiastic about his groundbreaking move because of the opportunities it would afford transsexuals.

One of the successful candidates was Thanyarat "Film" Jiraphatpakorn, who won the annual Miss Tiffany "katoey" beauty pageant in 2007. "At first I thought they would just take applications but not actually recruit us, as happened at other places before," said the 23-year-old, adding that ‘she’ was delighted to have been chosen.

Thailand

has the largest number of "katoeys" – as they are called in Thai – in the world, with the country's surgeons pioneering cheaper and quicker sex change operations because of the sky-high demand from men wishing to become women.

PC Air did not make proof of sexual reassignment a criteria for the job, merely that the applicants possessed the necessary oral skills and the potential to provide a good service.

The mind boggles.

And finally, a male shop assistant in London is claiming sex discrimination after a 68-year-old woman colleague allegedly slapped his bottom three times while working at the flagship John Lewis department store.

Konstantinos Kalomoiris, 40, says Bianca Revrenna (you couldn’t get two better names could you?) tapped his bottom in the locker room and twice on the shop floor of the Oxford Street shop.

Furniture department worker Mr Kalomoiris, who says he quit his job as a result, told an employment tribunal that when he told her to stop, she replied: "I do that to all the boys."

What’s the world coming to?

La Turbie

2011-01-31T06:07:00.000+01:00

The village of La Turbie is one of those places which you only visit if you happen to be passing through it. Positioned on the high road just east of Monaco, it is a lovely little village with a rich Roman history.

In our part of the country La Turbie is never out of the news however, as when the single-lane road heading down into Monaco is closed because of the volume of vehicles, all the motorway traffic is routed through the village, hence it makes the radio traffic bulletins seemingly on a daily basis!

I had to go to La Turbie twice last week, firstly, to negotiate the purchase (successful I’m pleased to say) of a car I quite liked the look of and secondly on the Friday, to pick the car up and bring it home, which was an adventure in itself given that its brakes were shot!

On the day I was to view the car I got to La Turbie an hour early. Sitting on a very slow moving motorway beside Nice Airport, an overhead gantry sign said I would be in La Turbie in 15 minutes which was scarcely believable. ‘They’ve got this one wrong’, I said but 15 minutes later I was parking in the village!

With an hour to spend, I walked around looking at it’s small area of shops and restaurants, the views down to Cap Ferrat and the quaint alleyways, most of which led up to La Tropheé des Alpes which was constructed in 5BC in honour of the emperor Augustus to commemorate the conquest of the Alps and the submission of 44 Ligurian tribes during Augustus' campaigns in 25, 16 and 15 BC. An inscription dedicates the ‘temple’ to the son of Ceasar thus:

TO THE EMPEROR AUGUSTUS CAESAR, SON OF THE DIVINE (JULIUS CAESAR)
SOVEREIGN PONTIFF, EMPEROR FOR THE XIVTH TIME, TRIBUNE FOR THE XVIITH TIME
THE SENATE AND THE ROMAN PEOPLE

The picture to the left shows the building as it was when it was constructed some 2,016 years ago. The picture above shows it as it is today.

But that’s enough of La Turbie, now the car.

Even since Guy and Kitty have outgrown the miniscule rear compartment in the Alfa, I’ve been looking for a 4-seater convertible. I’d always fancied a BMW, an Audi or a Saab and it was the other evening when I spotted an advert for a 1996 BMW 328i convertible (yes – in Angloinfo) that my pulse started racing. Despite being almost 15 years old, having 90,000 miles on the clock and having a few bashes and scrapes, I was sold – or rather it was. And when I test drove it and put my foot on the throttle rather too firmly and the car shot off (with Cindy its owner and her two young kids covering their eyes), I was determined to have it.

A quick negotiation, a shake of the hands and it was mine. A gleaming (parts of it!) BMW which is so quick it frightens me. Cindy, informed me that she’d already had a call that morning from a guy who was prepared to drive over with his cheque book and pay her the full price on the spot, so the fact that I got a decent reduction can only be put down to the fact that her kids loved the ‘scary’ ride I gave them!

It’ll be off the road for a few weeks whilst I completely replace the braking system (hubs and all) but then it’ll be ready for the spring and summer months. I can’t wait.

The French Are Such Wine Snobs

2011-01-26T02:42:00.001+01:00

No surprise in that statement eh? So why do the bars sell absolute plonk for €1.20 a glass when we’d pay more for better quality wine? Well, the Brits would, we’re used to paying extortionate prices in the UK.

But enough of that for the moment, I’m here to talk about the plumber, Monsieur Patane.

A few weeks ago I noticed a wet patch on the garage ceiling. As the days passed, the wet patch became wetter until there were drips falling. Now, I’m all for letting things fix themselves or until they become a disaster and after dismissing the theory that the water was a result of the ultra wet weather we’ve had recently, I called, or rather, J called our builder, Antonio. I reckoned one of our water pipes, embedded in the concrete kitchen floor had burst, and that would be an absolute disaster.

Antonio turned up the next day and when we met at the front door it was kisses all round and it’s not many builders who kiss their English clients, and it is most certainly unique for English clients to kiss their builders and I’m not just talking about J, I got kisses as well!

In he came, looked under the kitchen sink and shook his head. ‘C’est grave. C’est serieux’, he said shaking his head again. ‘It’s a leak’, he said.

Two things sprung immediately to mind. One – even Shadow could see it was a leak as when he needed water, all he had to do was go into the garage and have a shower, and two - maybe it wasn’t that bad as when he was building the house, Antonio was always shaking his head at J’s designs, saying, ‘C’est grave. Pas possible’!

‘The floor will have to come up. How many spare ceramic floor tiles have you got left?’ he said, conveniently forgetting that when he’d finished the house, he took most of the spare tiles for his next project!

‘I will call Patane the Plombier’, he said.

Mr Patane called round a few days later and looked at the ‘leak’. He shook his head. ‘No leak’, despite the fact that the floor under the sink was soaking wet. He then checked the other sink in the kitchen (J decided to have two sinks installed in our kitchen – his and his !) and after a few minutes declared that he had found the leak.

It appeared that the water from the ‘proper’ leak was working its way under the floor, along the protective covering and up and out of the other end of the pipe, a physics phenomenon which I will research and cover in another posting when I’m totally bored. Either that or it’s a second leak!

Mr Patane cut out the offending section of pipe and when he was out at his van, I checked the length of copper and noticed that it was one of his joints which had split. ‘This will be interesting if he presents me with a bill’, I thought, also wondering just how long plumbing work is guaranteed in a French new build. Anyway, 15 minutes later, he proudly stated that it was fixed.

As he headed for the door, I grabbed a bottle of wine to give him as a gift in case no bill was forthcoming and as things turned out, he did not present a bill, but shook my hand and said ‘au revoir’. I said ‘thank you Mr Patane’, and handed him the wine.

Instead of thanking me and continuing his walk to his van, Mr Patane set down his tools on the drive and carefully looked at the bottle I’d given him (a nice white burgundy). He looked at the label, he looked at the vintage, he turned it round and looked at details of the chateau which had produced it and finally, held it at arm’s length and nodded in a sort of 'knowing' way.

This wasn’t somebody checking the wine as a form of gratitude. This was somebody looking at it to see if it was the plonk they sell in The Midi!

I’m a Mystery Wrapped in a Riddle Inside an Enigma

2011-01-23T22:14:00.000+01:00

In many respects I’m an old fashioned guy. I think that when I organize a ‘boy’s lunch’, J should not turn up unannounced, simply because she knows I’m there with my mates and she fancies a Kir.

I believe that there are certain household duties which the man should do, whilst the woman should have her responsibilities and don’t think by that I mean the kitchen because ….. I have just prepared and cooked a roast lunch. I do my own ironing and hang out the washing regularly, much to Tan’s disgust. I clean the house and put the washing on, but of course, I only do this so that J has plenty of time for her girlie lunches and doesn’t feel the need to gatecrash mine! So, in many respects the traditional role of women with me is a blurred boundary.

But I do draw the line when I see women writing football articles. I mean what do they know about football? The offside law for a start is completely foreign to them – they haven’t got a clue. And what does a female football physio do when the guy has been kicked in the ‘unmentionables’ – how can she possibly ease the pain by putting a cold sponge on the affected parts without the crowd going into a frenzy?

I would hate to see a woman presenter on ‘Top Gear’ and yet I get all hot and bothered (in the nicest possible way) when I see Vicki Butler-Henderson on 5^th Gear, a rival programme. I hate men presenting the weather – give me a shapely female any day, despite the fact that it’s probably a guy who has interpreted all the graphs and statistics and written the script.

Women are technophobes and yet I adore Suzi Perry on The Gadget Show. The fact that she was also a successful motor cycle racer and model just adds to the allure which confuses me and those that know me. If J was single and bought a new telly, it would lie unused for ages until man came into the house to show her how to program it, and I guess that’s the case for most women.

And yet, those that do know me are astounded to find out that at one stage I had four women working on my technical sales team out of a complement of six, and they were all recruited by me – not inherited! So nobody can cast asparagus at me on that score. I knew my clients were a bunch of randy old sods and I just reckoned that the girls would sell more and so it proved.

Yet when a crowd of us go out for a meal, I reckon it’s the boy’s duty to organize things and pay the bill. I always open doors for women whether I know them or not and I would never pass a woman in distress. I once stopped a cab I was in because a guy was giving this woman a severe slapping in the street and when I’d dragged him off, I was astonished when the woman started laying into me saying I shouldn’t be so rough with her husband! Has that put me off? No way, I would do the same again.

So where did all this come from? From a football article in Saturday’s Gurdian newspaper which was something I really wanted to read but which I didn’t because it was written by a ……. woman! What do they know about football?

And if to prove my point, one of the top football games on Saturday had a female assistant (she’s pictured above) and unfortunately, two Sky presenters were making disparaging remarks about her and her understanding of the offside law when they thought their microphones were switched off!

But to her credit, she got an absolutely crucial offside decision spot on – she would have been crucified if she hadn’t!

What do I know?

I Used to Go There …….

2011-01-20T08:20:00.001+01:00

I’ve had so many complaints about stopping my blog postings that I’ve relented a bit. I say, ‘a bit’ because I never said I was giving it up completely, I said I would post occasionally if there was something worth writing about.

It appears that many of you feel lost without my blog in the background as your morning coffee is being made, or if you’re in an office and you are preparing for the day ahead or, more likely, if you can’t get to sleep at night! This is all very complimentary (I think) but as I said previously, the 5-times a week blog is probably gone, unless of course, a rich seam of material suddenly becomes available.

I had actually noted this item down as a potential posting a few months ago but had never got around to writing it but as the launch of ‘One Hyde Park’ takes place in London today, it seems like a good time to put it down in print.

One Hyde Park – the most expensive apartments on the planet with the top one costing a whopping £140 million, $200 million or about €160 million!

You may recall a posting I did a few weeks back about house prices down here (http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/house-prices-we-talk-about-them-here-as.html) and the fact that Monaco led the world with a price of €45,000 per sq metre, well One Hyde Park completely obliterates that with an average price of about €60,000 per sq metre.

Why am I writing about more house prices? Well, One Hyde Park has a special place in my heart – albeit, back then it was the Bowater Building, a totally nondescript glass and steel framed office block which, when compared with the buildings around it, made it stand out as one of those ‘carbuncles’ (a Prince Charles phrase) which makes you wonder why it ever got planning permission.

The Old Bowater Building

I had to visit a company there not long after I got my first Sales Managers job in IBM and just going into the building was depressing. I remember thinking at the time that I would have hated to have worked there. In the event, we actually did business with the company concerned and I had to spend quite a bit of time at One Hyde Park.

Now, and after a relatively short development phase, the Monaco based, but London active Candy Brothers have transformed the building. I’m still not too sure about the exterior but the interiors look amazing, helped in no small way by the magnificent views over – yup, Hyde Park.

Here are some details of what you get for £140 million:

Prices start at £6.5m for a simple one-bedroom flat and rise to £140m for one of the penthouses. The prices, averaging about £6,000 a square foot, are the highest ever paid for residential space, according to property experts.

As well as interiors designed by the Candys, residents at the highly anticipated development can call on valets, a concierge and butler room service from the next-door Mandarin Oriental hotel’s two restaurants, overseen by Heston Blumenthal and Daniel Boulud.

The buildings have shared features including a cinema, a 21m swimming pool, saunas, a gym, a golf simulator and a wine cellar. There are eye-scanners in the lifts and panic rooms for added security.

The build included 15 different types of stone and marble specially sourced from Turkey, Italy, Brazil, China and Egypt; and £50m of "sparkly" concrete with limestone aggregate.

When the brothers started the project four years ago, it attracted criticism for being too extravagant and expensive. With the onslaught of the credit crisis, many believed that the development would never sell, but the Candys claim that 60pc of the 83 apartments have already been snapped up, mainly by foreign buyers from the Middle East and Asia.

Hurry, there’s obviously a few left if you want to reserve one!

100 Planes Crash - 26,500 People Killed

2011-01-13T11:36:00.001+01:00

Monday 13^th December - My Last Day in Kenya

I could have stayed in bed all morning but as John Felix slept, I completed my packing and showered. Moses was collecting us around 8.30 am and as it was only 8:00 am I had plenty of time. “Come on John”, I coaxed, “Time to get up! What would you like for breakfast?” Aware that he usually only had bread, I’d bought in juice and planned on having toast or even eggs. As I wondered what time Moses would appear, I suddenly heard some guitar music playing. “What’s going on?” I checked my watch – 8.05 am. I then thought I heard some unmistakeable laughter. “Surely, he’s not here already??” I opened my bedroom door and peered over the mezanine balcony.

“Good morning” chorused not only Moses, but Tatu, Vashni and Paul James. As they played and sang, I saw that Eric had already made them welcome and given them breakfast. What a wonderful sight to greet me and what a wonderful send off for this was the day I was leaving to return to France.

I dragged my heels on the way to the airport. As for John Felix, he grew quieter and quieter .... wouldn’t eat any breakfast. Eventually as we climbed out of the car at the airport, the tears came. The little boy just cried and cried. We all tried to comfort him, but to no avail. We all tried to explain that I had to leave but I was coming back. As I pulled him onto my knee and hugged him close, his tears not to mention his nose ‘dribbled’ all down my clean t shirt. I didn’t mind one bit. It was as if every bit of emotion that child had been hanging on to for the last ten years was released there and then. Eventually, we walked together around the perimeter fence and made our promises. I bit my lip handing John Felix over to his other 'mum', Tatu, I bit my lip as I said goodbye to Moses and Paul James, I bit my lip as I walked across the tarmac until I was safely inside the plane.....

So it’s now the middle of January. My return to ‘normal’ life wasn’t quite so hard this time. After my first trip, there were many nights when I would wake and not be able to go back to sleep worrying about all the kids. This time has been different. I look back on the photographs of Eric, Magdalena, Evelyn, John Felix, Ruth and her siblings and smile. Together we have made such a difference to their lives and I know that together we will continue to make it happen.

Bono famously said “If you want to eliminate hunger, everybody has to be involved”. So my job now is to start by raising awareness. So just for a moment, I want you to imagine a newspaper headline that says, "One Hundred Jetliners Crash, Killing 26,500”. Think of the worldwide media frenzy and implications of this one event as everyone shared the shocking news. Now imagine, the very next day that another 100 jetliners crashed and another hundred the day after that, and then following day ….. but no one did anything about it. It is an unimaginable situation but it will happen today for the world's hungry children and it will continue to happen. Almost 10 million children will be dead from hunger related causes in the course of this year. And then another 10 million next year and 10 million the year after that.

Let’s try and shrink the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ of this world. A single airline crash can dominate the news for days so why does the equivalent of 100 planes, each filled with children, crashing on a daily basis, never reach our ears?

Each one of us has a something we can contribute. Whether that is Thomas letting me use his Air Miles for my flights or taking over my role with Guy and Kitty whilst I’m away, Angela sending over a bag of fabric for Violet to practice her sewing on, maybe buying some chickens in place of giving someone an ‘unwanted’ wedding gift, everyone has something of value they can offer be it financial or otherwise. I have prepared a short presentation on my Africa experiences – if you’re looking for a guest speaker for an event you are holding, then please get in touch – I’m willing to travel.

Thank you for allowing me to raise your awareness! My next instalment will be after the Easter break when I return to Kenya, this time with Guy and Kitty.

Con Artists

2011-01-11T08:41:00.000+01:00

Drivers in France have been warned to be on the lookout for a hitchhiker who is adept at swindling money out of motorists with a string of elaborate stories. Known as ‘Max the Swiss Hitchhiker’, the man manages to talk food, transport and accommodation out of unwitting drivers by telling them he is either a businessman, grandfather or academic whose car has been stolen.

He is so charming that he has been invited home with many a motorist and given a bed for the night. He then invites his hosts to visit his chalet in the Swiss Alps, which, of course, does not exist. He also vows to pay them back for their hospitality, but the promised cheque never arrives.

Because he does not actually ask for money - motorists always offer to help after hearing his sob stories, and whilst some of them do give him money - Max cannot be convicted of fraud.

In a recent case brought by three drivers who spotted him on a bus in central France, he was found not guilty, despite failing to appear in court.

This fraudster is similar to an ‘English spoken’ con artist who targeted people coming out of Nice airport. He did ask for money, usually 50 euros, on the basis that he’d lost his wallet, promising to send it back which he never did. He was very successful in extracting cash but so brazen that his luck eventually ran out and he was lifted, convicted by the French courts and sent to prison.

This happened to me in London a few years ago when a young guy stopped me just as I was leaving the tube station, heading for my hotel. He claimed he had lost his wallet and only needed £5 to help him get a train ticket to get home to one of London’s suburbs. He was so good, he even asked me for a business card so he could send the money back.

I gave him the £5, it was Christmas after all, and went on my way wishing him luck but as I walked to my hotel, I felt something wasn’t quite right.

I walked back to the station expecting to see him asking other people for the rest of his train fare but he was waiting for the public phone to become free. I managed to get quite close to him without him noticing and heard him quite clearly say to the person on the other end of the line, ‘it’s ok I’ve got £5, I’ll get another couple of fivers and I’ll buy the booze before I get to your place.’

As he turned round, I approached him and said I felt mean and that if he gave me the £5 back, I’d given him his full train fare (I was holding out a tenner).

He gave me the £5, I told him where to go, and left him fuming. I’d managed to scam a scammer!

And with that, I’m stopping my daily blog, which for the last 624 days (excluding holidays and weekends) has taken not a lot of my time, but enough to prevent me from concentrating on my book.

I’ll still post a blog if I’ve something to say, but for the last week or so (you’ve probably noticed) I’ve been struggling, so from now on I will not be posting a blog for the sake of it, it’ll be posted when there’s groundbreaking news of some sort or another!

Watch it Guys – The Missus Could Put You in the Slammer

2011-01-10T09:08:00.001+01:00

A husband is facing five years in jail after ‘hacking’ into his wife's email. He suspected that his wife was having an affair and read her emails without her permission.

Leon Walker has been charged under anti-hacking laws aimed at preventing identity theft in the United States. The 33-year-old had suspected his wife Clara, who had been married twice before was having an affair with her former husband.

He is alleged to have used his computer skills to gain access to her email account on the shared home computer and discovered a series of emails which confirmed his suspicions that his wife was cheating on him.

When he confronted his wife, she knew he could only have obtained the information he used from her e-mail account, so she promptly had him arrested.

When I read this I thought of how things work in our house. Nobody is allowed to touch Guy’s PC and he probably has an interface and software on it which would render it useless to us mere mortals in any case. Kitty’s PC is used simply for photos and MSN – there’s nothing else on it which would make it useful to a normal internet user. My laptop is still waiting to go down to Antibes to get fixed and so J and I share her trusty Toshiba but with her travelling netbook and her iPad, she generally uses those, leaving me with the laptop.

The thing is, we all know each other’s passwords so if I found some naughty e-mails between J and the security guard at the Cap 3000 mall, whom she probably sees more than me, could I be arrested and thrown in the local slammer?

Another case of the US laws being a bit over the top or could it spread to Europe?

Of course, it doesn’t help when guys such as me have the delectable Meg Ryan announcing, ’Three little words – you’ve got mail’, whenever something arrives in our mailbox. Get a copy of the wav file at the URL below and copy it to your ‘Windows/Media’ folder usually found on your ‘C’ drive and then assign it to your mail notification sound on your Control Panel.

http://simplythebest.net/sounds/WAV/events_WAV/email_wavs.html

What’s Happening at Le Brin ?

2011-01-07T07:45:00.002+01:00

Well, we had a very busy Xmas and New Year. You may have read that we had a lunch for fourteen people at Xmas but that was surpassed on New Year’s Eve when eighteen people turned up, some of whom I’d never met before, and J hadn’t either just in case you were thinking they were friends of hers!

One of the ‘unknowns', a lady (Karen), handed me a bottle of Glenfiddich (Malt Whisky for the uninitiated) as she came into Le Brin and whispered in my ear that she’d brought it so she could drink it herself (!!) but when she left, it was still unopened so that was a bonus. No doubt, my youngest son, Tim, will beg me to open it the next time he comes down.

We had a great night and managed to get all the speeches and songs over just in time for the ‘Bells’ and then we had a huge fireworks display, putting some of the village shows to shame. Thanks David – getting a large box of fireworks in France in December is no mean feat.

After most of the visitors had departed we ‘hit’ Tan and Angie’s (who had their own guests) where the drinking, singing and dancing continued on their terrace until 4am and amazingly, I was able to walk the 50 metres back home unaided! Astounding!

Of course, the following week was pretty quiet after that. Guy returned from his trip to Ireland with his dad, and Kitty finally decided to come home after spending what seemed like the whole of the festive period at her boyfriend’s parent’s house.

The peace and solitude (once the kids had gone back to school) then allowed me to start writing my book again after a gap of over two years (writer’s block) and it was a bit of a struggle – I had to re-read all that I’d previously written so I could establish where to start and how to continue.

The last words were written up in Normandy at Brian and Lynn’s idyllic cottage and I now know why writers often buy or rent a house way out in the country to allow them to write in absolute peace and quiet. It was such a productive time. I wrote for maybe three or four hours a day, only interrupted by Brian continually asking if I wanted another glass of Rosé.

Easterhouse - A Nice Name, A Terrible Place

The book really isn’t for publication. It’s for my children to understand what it was like, to be brought up in the mean streets of Glasgow and then later on, probably the worst housing estate in Europe. Money was tight, gangs roamed the streets and school was a nightmare. Our mother died and our father ‘did a runner’ …… but I can’t say any more or I’ll give the story away!

No doubt, Clint Eastwood will read this blog posting and get in touch. I read recently that he’s quite a fan of ‘basic scripts’ which he can then mould into a film of his own making. Just in case you do read this Clint, I’d like my young self to be played by Guy and the older Thomas by Brad Pitt – he’ll need make up of course to make him look younger!

So, that’s about it. The rainy weather has returned, curtailing all outside work which allows me and J, and our friends, to spend lots of time in The Midi, which is no bad thing.

A belated Happy New Year to you all.

The 3-Pin Plug

2011-01-06T00:38:00.002+01:00

The 'Old' 3-Pin Plug

Now I know I write some boring blog postings and some of you are quite quick to tell me they're boring but even I have to admit, that for the normal non-geek person, this one really is boring but as it's my blog,

I'm including it. So there!

Sometimes, just sometimes, an invention comes along and you look at it and think why it was never invented before. It’s so simple that it’s beyond comprehension why nobody took the base product and refined or changed it for the better.

Yup – I’m talking about the good old UK 3-pin plug, a device which has hardly changed since 1946 when it was first introduced.

Redesigned 3-Pin Plug

Icon, the design magazine, recently covered The Royal College of Art's graduate show, and this year, the show-stopper was a plug – the humble old 3-pin plug! Min-Kyu Choi impressed with his neat re-design of the plug which folds down to the width of an Apple MacBook Air. "The MacBook Air is the world's thinnest laptop ever. However, here in the UK, we still use the world's biggest three-pin plug," says Choi.

Choi's plug is just 10mm wide when it is folded. To unfold it, the two live pins swivel 90 degrees, and the plastic surround folds back around the pins so the face of the plug looks the same as a standard UK plug. The idea produced a spin off, too. Choi created a multi-plug adaptor, a compact standard plug sized unit with space for three folded plugs to slot in, as well as one that charges USB devices.

It's so plausible and so obvious a product that it should produce a few red faces; how many more years were we going to attach our palm sized mobiles and wafer thin laptops to an object that's barely been touched in sixty years? Choi picked an everyday product that most other designers find too mundane to dabble with and drastically improved it. Good on him – I hope he makes a million.

The Innocence of Youth

2011-01-05T07:36:00.000+01:00

It’s very interesting watching Guy and Kitty grow into adolescence. Kitty has her first real boyfriend and is now involved in the romance of the century (!) and sneaks little kisses from him when she thinks we’re not looking, whilst Guy has met and dumped his first girlfriend and is now more interested in his mates who have scooters. That’s ma boy! It's cheaper!

Never having been independent enough to go into town before this year, they now disappear at regular intervals with their ‘allowance’ (as Kitty calls her pocket money) and of course, Guy, with his scooter, can pop into town whenever he wants, although there are strict conditions about when he has to be home.

Despite their independence, it’s still nice that as a family we sit down together every night for dinner and a few nights ago, gathered in front of the telly to watch the film ‘The Social Network’.

We all use Facebook and although I knew most of the story, it was interesting to watch it with Guy and Kitty. Kitty wanted to know all the ins and outs of the subterfuge involved in the lawsuit with the Winklevoss twins, whilst Guy was desperately trying to look at Mark Zuckerberg’s coding.

But it’s when we all start ‘fighting’ on the carpet in front of the fire that the memories come flooding back. When they were much smaller, Guy and Kitty would ambush me (a la Kato in Inspector Clouseau) by jumping on my back and trying to smother me, shouting, ‘pile on, pile on’. Occasionally, we’d even get Shadow to join in.

The other night Guy ambushed me. In the old days, I’d simply throw him off but these days he’s quite a bit heavier and stronger and trying to throw him over my shoulder just doesn’t work any more. So I was in this ‘death grip’ the other night, quite unable to free myself but there’s always an alternative way of dealing with assailants – I just tickled him and within seconds his grip on me had loosened and he was lying on his back, completely disabled through laughter.

I love that they’re growing up (fast), but occasionally, just occasionally, the innocence of youth shines through.

Heard About Groupon ? Don’t Switch Off – It Could Save You a Fortune.

2011-01-04T06:20:00.000+01:00

Some of you will have heard of Groupon, but many will not.

Groupon first came to my attention a couple of months ago when Google tried to buy the company for $6 billion. Now although I’m well out of business life, I still like to follow what’s happening in the market and I’d never heard of Groupon and here was Google desperate to pay $6 billion for them. This needed a bit of research.

It turned out that Groupon is a so-called discount voucher company and the concept is so ridiculously simple that when you work out what it does, it’s one of those, ‘why wasn’t it thought of before’, moments. And it’s so successful, it’s the fastest growing company in the world, will probably sit alongside Facebook, or even be part of it (surely I’m not the only one to see the commercial affinity between Groupon and Facebook ?) and has, whilst spurning Google, decided to list on the stock market or sell some of its stock valuing the company at over $7 billion. I reckon Google will be kicking themselves in a year or two.

‘So Cupples, get on with it, what is Groupon?’

It’s so easy. You register your e-mail address with Groupon (registration takes all of a minute – no kidding!), choose your city and that’s it. Thereafter, you will get a few e-mails a day telling you of ‘special deals’ in the city, or cities, you chose, and a special deal is just that – 61% off a meal for two, 80% off of a Spa stay, £49 for a multi-media course instead of £197!

‘Great discounts, How do they do it?’

Well the vouchers for the ‘special deals’ are usually only available to be bought on the day you get the e-mail but the voucher can then be redeemed over a period of time, e.g. for a restaurant, usually from the following day for a period of one month. Had I still been working in London, I would have received these e-mails during the day, and could have been in the featured restaurant the following day on my way home. It would have been great. Linked to local Facebook friends or people in the office, it would be a terrific way of socializing on the cheap!

The one thing which is not generally known unless you have a geek like me telling you is that Groupon need to get a predetermined level of interest in a ‘special deal’ before it kicks in, so for example, I could have registered my interest in today’s deal at the restaurant owned by Frankie Dettori (famous jockey) and Marco Pierre White (needs no introduction surely) in Chelsea where they are offering a Pizza and a glass of wine for £5.50 instead of £14 but unless they get the numbers stipulated by Frankie and Bennie’s, you don’t get the deal. I suppose that’s one disadvantage (and I have to admit that I’ve not actually registered for a specific deal yet only having registered for London – I’ve now linked myself to deals in Antibes), you could actually set up a group of friends to go to a specific place and then find they haven’t attracted the necessary numbers.

OK – so how does Groupon make its money?

It’s dead simple. They just take a cut from the discount voucher they e-mail you. And their revenues are growing exponentially.

Final point – I hate spam like the rest of you but I have to say, I don’t mind getting e-mails offering me 60% discounts. One of them might just be the next thing I was going to buy!

Now, you could just register with Groupon and off you go but as I told you about it (maybe not?), and as this is still the ‘season of goodwill to all men, why don’t you send me a quick e-mail and let me submit your e-mail address to them. That way, I’ll not have to pay £5.50 for a pizza and a glass of wine, I’ll get it for free! I just have to book my flights to London to get it!

www.groupon.co.uk

www.groupon.fr

J's Trip to Kenya - Part VI

2011-01-03T00:19:00.002+01:00

Thursday 9^th December

John Odiambo is one of 3 social workers who work with the Isaiah Trust. I had met John on my previous trip but as he is by far the quietest and softest spoken of the guys, I had never really had the opportunity to get to know him. The previous evening, he had approached me and asked if he could share his story with me and talk to me about one of the girls he takes care of, Evelyn. “I wanted to explain why I have such a heart for the girls” John began.

John’s story is not necessarily any more tragic than many I have heard. Both parents died at an early age, the difference being that he was the eldest boy to three younger sisters.

I too have ‘a heart’ for the girls. I remembered meeting Ruth for the first time and asking if she needed anything. In our heavily materialistic world, her only request was for “sanitary pads”. No adolescent girl should be in the position of asking for basic needs such as that. And this was John’s point too. Many girls turn to prostitution simply because they cannot afford to look after themselves. Not only selling their bodies to afford food, they sell their bodies to acquire their most basic needs.

With John’s sisters he knows only too well this was the reason they moved into prostitution. It was their way of maintaining at least some dignity. John now keeps an eye on 10 girls in the Isaiah Trust program. “Two of my sisters died having contracted HIV. I don’t want any of my girls to be in that situation ever again”, he whispered.

John and Evelyn

And that is how we came to be doing another home visit this Thursday morning. Evelyn lives with her grandmother, is top of her class and is poor, was all he would tell me. Touched by John’s story of the previous evening, I loaded up my supermarket trolley with the usual basics for Evelyn’s grandmother. Having just met John Felix’s grandmother the previous day, I wondering what this one was going to be like. Still with a heavy heart after talking to John about Evelyn, I filled a carrier bag with sanitary pads, hair shampoo, body lotion (for African skin this is somewhat of a necessity rather than a luxury), toothbrush, toothpaste, soaps and off we went.

As usual Moses drove his old car up a track that would test our 4x4! As we approached the house, we saw Evelyn sitting outside, astride a bench, armed with a bowl of water, a scrubbing brush and the biggest pile of washing I have ever seen. In another corner of the garden were three older boys, breaking up rocks. Rocks are a free commodity which when broken up to make gravel can be sold at the local market to building contractors.

We were invited inside to meet Evelyn’s grandmother. What a difference from yesterday’s grandmother! As I stepped over the threshold, she warmly greeted me and offered up prayers of thanks. As the other seven orphaned grandchildren gathered around me I was overcome with an emotion that I found hard to identify. Here was a woman whose grandchildren were her life. Yes, they had a roof over their heads but certainly no glass in the windows. They had a couple of sofas to sit on and other than the closeness of their family unit that was all. I hastily wiped some tears away. If I started now I knew I wouldn’t stop. This place was filled with so much love it was tangible. Struggling with my emotions, John, by my side, prompted me. “You know that Evelyn is top of her class?” he told me. “Ask her how long it takes her to walk to school each day.” Even glancing down at her shredded flip flops, no way was I prepared for the answer. Two and a half hours each way, every week day in rain or shine....this girl is determined to get an education.

Even Moses was surprised at Evelyn’s daily journey. We can change that now he said, she must be transferred to St Pauls (a much closer school) come January. Not wishing to completely bombard this shy girl, I turned to her and asked – “is that okay with you Evelyn? Will you miss your friends?” She smiled right into my eyes and said, “I will make new friends!” Her grandmother meanwhile was sitting opposite us, smiling quietly and continuing with her basket weaving. Like I did when I first met John Felix, I instinctively knew that this family would be part of my future life. John had been correct in introducing me and wanting to get me involved. “Okay, if you’re going to St Paul’s in January, then I guess you need a school uniform,” not to mention leather shoes, I thought!

From school necessities the conversation turned to books. I still had a donation from Frances on behalf of Olive (a schoolteacher friend who had recently died). Instead of sending flowers to the funeral, Frances wanted the money spent on school books. “Do you have libraries here?” I asked. The response I got was a complete surprise. There are no public lending libraries throughout the whole of Kenya. Perhaps in the universities but then only for reference books and manuscripts. Even in the schools, books are a luxury item. I thought about all of Guy’s and Kitty’s childhood books sold for pennies at the Vide Grenier. The thought of a child growing up without access to books (Enid Blyton, A A Milne, J K Rowling etc etc) was a complete puzzle to me. “Moses, we need to go to a book shop!” So we all piled back into the little car, Evelyn and her brother Athenas, John Felix, John Odiambo, Moses and myself.

First stop was to find the school shop for the new uniform. Moses had said that there shouldn’t be a problem enrolling Evelyn on the first day back in January. As we entered the shopping mall, out of the corner of my eye, I saw John Odiabo ‘high five’ a small nun.....dressed head to foot in cream rather than the usual black. We hung back to be introduced to this miniscule lady. Out of all the people to bump in to, this was the headmistress of St Paul’s. Evelyn was duly introduced and did an entrance interview for the school there and then! Don’t you just love how God pulls these kinds of surprises on you?

The Kids' First Visit to a Bookshop

Next stop was to order the school uniform to be made (two dresses, one jumper), leather shoes and two pairs of socks. Where to find a bookshop? As Moses led us to the doorway, the kids were full of excitement ready to pile in. “Stop right there”, I shouted as they were about to climb up the steps. Having ascertained that this was a ‘first’ for all the kids, I held their attention by commanding them to “Sniff!” All books and stationery shops have the same smell – some sort of clean paper smell - I love it. I hope those three kids will always remember it now too.

With Frances’s donation we were able to buy twenty-one books which hopefully will be the start of the Kibos reading library!

Friday 10^th December

My time left in Kisumu was flying by. I’d been here 12 days already and still not had time to visit Moses and Tatu at their home in Kibos! I teased Moses saying that I had not been invited for Chapatis and greengrams yet. He laughed his belly laugh and promised one of Tatu’s special lunches that afternoon after Prison visiting.

After Prison visiting?? Huh?? I gulped....

Moses explained that I would accompany him on his usual monthly visit to a counselling session with some of the inmates. The Kibos lunch afterwards was my reward. Once again, my Mastercard and I entered Nakumat supermarket. This time it was only (??) to pick up 30 loo rolls, 30 toothbrushes and 30 tubes of toothpaste. Never mind the prisoners, Thomas is going to commit murder when he sees my credit card bill.... after making a hasty phone call to Maurice (prison social worker), we decided we could probably get away with a loo roll for each of the 30, 15 tubes of toothpaste to be shared and 5 (two foot long) bars of washing soap. I assured Moses that I had a supply of toothbrushes back at Covenant. Having collected the said toothbrushes and counted them, I had a vision of starting a riot – I’d only got 18.....this fact did nothing to calm my nerves as we entered the highest security prison in the whole of Kenya.

The guards gave us cursory glances as we were waved through the main gate having parked up outside the prison on a patch of grass next to a bull. ‘That’s for Christmas lunch’, we were told by Maurice. The heavy door opened and in we went. As that door was locked behind us I stared ahead through the next iron doorway which led onto a huge courtyard where 2000 convicts were enjoying a bit of sun after taking lunch. Having signed in, this door was then unlocked for us and we were invited to cross the courtyard to the meeting room on the other side. I felt a sense of unreality. Where were the security cameras? Where were the closed circuit TVs? Were these guards (who looked equally as scary as the prisoners) only ‘armed’ with what looked like a rounders bat? I’m white, I’m blond, I’m female and I have to walk 100 metres across an open courtyard with only 18 toothbrushes ....

I tried to make myself small and unnoticeable as I walked between Moses and Maurice. I envisioned Thomas switching on Sky News and seeing stories of ‘White woman taken hostage on account of not bringing enough toothbrushes....’ As we got to the other side, it seemed to take an interminable amount of time before the guard unlocked his side of the gate and we were ‘safely’ ushered in to another block. I breathed a sigh of relief as we were welcomed into a kind of library and offered seats. ‘Phew, that was pretty scary’, I thought. As my heart beat slowed to a more normal pace, we were asked to wait as our group of inmates gathered outside (for what, I wondered??). The well-spoken gentleman seated behind the desk apologised for the delay - nice shirt, I thought. Eventually, we joined a circle of 22 inmates strangely enough all wearing the same striped shirts (and trousers).

Introductions over, Maurice wanted each prisoner to tell his own story, what crime they had committed and what goals they were now working towards. I have to say that in the end, it was a very humbling experience. The polite ‘librarian’ was in fact an ex school teacher inside for being an accomplice to robbery with violence. The age range of the prisoners was between 19 and 56. Nineteen of the twenty-two were serving life. Their crimes (glad I didn’t know this before I turned up) were mainly for murder, rape and\or defilement. One of the boys had murdered his brother, another had been involved in a ‘fracas’ with his fiancé, yet another an ex policeman. The saddest case of all was the 19 year old who, on his arrival, had naively traded sex for some scraps of soap. The cost of a clean body was to contract HIV. However, each one in the group, took part, spoke up articulately and honestly, and confessed to becoming born again Christians. Practically each one said that their crime had been committed as a result of drink/drugs or falling in with a bad crowd. Now being given the opportunity to perhaps learn a trade or help support someone else, they now had a reason for living and moving forward, regardless of their life sentences.

J with the Lifers

As our session came to an end, they stood up to sing for me. What wonderful African voices in harmony. As I stood up to thank them for sharing their stories with me, the librarian appeared with a present. “We thought you would like this, we made it in our workshop here.” I was lost for words as they handed me my very own Chapati stool and rolling pin. I walked out of Kibos prison feeling much better than how I had felt on my way in. How is it possible to feel sympathy for murderers and the like? Should we just lock them up and throw away the key? Is there a hope that these guys can change their lives around from the inside and in doing so make a positive influence of some of the others? Maurice and Moses both think so. Who am I to argue?

Laugh Your Way Into 2011

2010-12-31T03:31:00.001+01:00

Well, J and I are cleaning and readying Le Brin for another invasion tonight when we host a New Year's Eve party. We've even more people arriving tonight than we had for Xmas and so the bar is being prepared for the overspill, i.e. the guys. I'm sure it will be well used!

Thanks to all of you who read my blog. Without you , blah, blah blah. And with that, all that remains is for me to wish you, your families and friends a very happy New Year and a healthy and prosperous 2011.

And now - have a laugh. Read this at midnight and laugh from one year to the next.

What sort of woman can wash the dishes with her right hand, cook dinner with her left hand, sweep the floor with her left leg, dust the furniture with her right leg and open a beer bottle using her bum? A Swiss Army wife.

Internet virus warning. If you get an email titled "nude photo of Ann Widdecombe" DO NOT open it. It contains a nude photo of Ann Widdecombe.

Susan Boyle has taken steps to prevent any more prowlers coming into her home. She's bought herself a see-through nightie.

A used cigar that belonged to Sir Winston Churchill has sold at auction for £4500. Can you imagine what one of Bill Clinton's must be worth?

My mate got a slap from his missus when they were getting ready to go out on Saturday night. Emerging from the bedroom, she said: "Does my bum look big in this?" "I'm not sure," he replied. "Move your other bum out the way and I'll have a look..."

Two Irish blokes stagger out of the zoo covered in blood. one turns to the other and says: "That's the last time I go liondancing..."

The world-famous five-star Gleneagles Hotel recorded a loss of £554,000 last year. An overnight guest apparently sneaked out without paying his mini-bar bill.

If a single bed is 3ft wide, how come a double is 4ft 6in?

Proceedings at the Chelsea Flower Show were disrupted yesterday when an 85-year-old streaker ran amok at the event. She later won first prize for Best Dried arrangement.

The three dolls in a man's life. 1) His daughter - Baby doll. 2) His mistress - Barbie doll. 3) His wife - Panadol.

J walked out on me after I blew our life savings on a penis extension operation. She just couldn't take it any longer.

Our local bar in Tourrettes is being turned into a funeral parlour. I might pop down for a couple of stiff ones.

Ostrich, camel and kangaroo will be served up at this week's World Testicle Cooking Championships in Serbia. If Mrs Woods, aka, Elin Nordegren had her way, they’d have Tiger on the menu as well...

Are orphans allowed to watch PG-rated movies?

Someone stole J's knickers from the washing line. She's not bothered about the knickers, but she would like the 22 pegs back.

What about the drug dealer selling Viagra for just £2 a tablet who claims it's "the only way you can buy sex for two quid"? He's obviously never visited Glasgow's red light district.

At the mother-in-law's funeral yesterday, J accused me of being insensitive. At least I think that's what she said - I couldn't really hear her over my iPod.

An Irish guy put an advert in his local paper saying he’d take a driver’s job and he says - wait for it - that he's willing to travel...!!!

I went to the doctors the other day and he told me I've only got two weeks to live. When J heard she booked a holiday for three weeks!

'I'm a Celebrity' drama queen Gillian McKeith had food stashed in her knickers when she went into the jungle. Gives a whole new meaning to bushtucker, I suppose.

Susan Boyle is now worth £11million - and she still hasn't been kissed. I now predict a sex-change operation for Heather Mills.

I saw Kitty writing her Xmas wish list – it said, "Dear Santa, please bring me lots of clothes to give to the poor women on Thomas' computer..."

In Tourrettes the other day, I saw a poor old lady falling over in the snow and ice. I'm guessing she was poor as she only had 83 cents in her purse.

When the Road is Blocked - It's Blocked!

2010-12-30T07:44:00.001+01:00

People generally remark when they’re driving down here about the lack of cones or road works on the motorways and generally it’s true, certainly compared to the UK.

Whether it’s because France builds the roads better in the first place, I don’t know but there’s no shortage of heavy trucks thundering along the autoroute which runs along the Med from Spain all the way to Italy and as we all know, it’s the trucks which cause the damage. If you’ve ever driven up the M1 from London, you can’t fail to see the grooves which have been worn into the inside lane as truck after truck takes the road north.

But whilst France seemingly has the quality, it also has the quantity, with nearly three times the motorway miles of the UK (10,843km vs 3,555km). OK, it’s a bigger country but even allowing for it’s much greater size than the UK, it still has 25% more motorway kilometers when the area is taken into consideration.

Where is this post going?

Well, a couple of weeks ago, the A8 autoroute was blocked from midnight right through to the afternoon rush hour the following day because of an accident just outside Nice. Unfortunately, one of the drivers was killed but it was his load which caused the problems. It was a propane tanker which caught fire and melted the road.

Under normal circumstances, the road would have been cleared, the tarmac repair gangs would have been out and in most cases, the road would have been open again for the morning rush hour. But not that morning – the damage caused was considerable and by the following morning’s rush hour, the authorities started closing the road to motorists and trucks – all the way from St Tropez to Menton – a total of 54 miles or 88 kilometres!

And this is the problem. Driving north from London, you can take the M1, M40 or A1. Manchester is surrounded by motorways and even Glasgow has an excellent road network with alternative routes should one be blocked. Not down here.

Section of the A8 - Coastal Motorway

The closeness of the Alps to the coast is cited by many as the problem of having more than just a single trunk road running along the coast but there have been rumours of a new motorway being built inland which would help, but of course with the massive economic restrictions at the moment and the disruption to huge tracts of beautiful land (not to mention the NIMBY’s), there is little likelihood of it being constructed in the near future.

Until then, we will continue to use the one road linking the French and Italian Rivieras and hope that we don't get caught up in the huge jams we witnessed two weeks ago.

J's Trip to Kenya - Part V

2010-12-29T10:09:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 7th December

Heading for the Pot !

I missed my normal wake up call and as I came to, I giggled to myself recalling the morning two days previously when Moses appeared at my bedroom door with a live turkey – you’ve guessed - it was the plat du jour that evening!

Today I was meeting up with Ruth and her sisters, for a girly lunch and then a bit of shopping. I met Ruth on my last trip – she is 14 years old and whilst still in full time education she continues to take care of her younger siblings - all 5 of them! I wanted to catch up with the girls, take them out for chicken and ugali, followed by a bit of shopping. We started off in the hairdressers buying chemicals for their hair. The market trip was not very successful as the prices leapt by at least 200% due to my presence. In the end, it was decided that John would accompany them to the market later in the week.

The Thrill of a Supermarket

Instead, we went into the supermarket to buy essentials like shampoo and soap and toothpaste. The younger girls became increasingly more animated and Ruth struggled to retain a semblance of control with them. John informed me that they had never actually set foot in a supermarket before – ‘Supermarket’s are for rich people’. With that statement, we really started to enjoy ourselves. The trolley was soon loaded with jelly crystals, popcorn, biscuits, juice and sweeties (as well as the basics that would see them through until the New Year). As we loaded the happy girls and their shopping into a Tuk Tuk and took photographs, it became clear, that my friends, John and Sandie back home in France, would be thrilled with the outcome of their donation!

Wednesday 8th December

I had missed John Felix yesterday and I felt sad when I thought about having to leave him to return to France next week. I knew Moses was happy for me to spend more time with him but it was a delicate balance. I didn’t want to overwhelm John Felix with affection only to disappear back to my ‘other’ family - he’d faced so much rejection in his short life that I did not want to get anything skewed in our relationship. I felt so blessed and surprised that our relationship had developed into such closeness.

John Felix had moved in with the other boys in the previous April. Prior to that, he had been living with his grandmother in the slums. I talked about his sad story in the previous blog listings. He became my ‘second born’ boy after Guy. Since returning to France in April, I hadn’t had much contact with John Felix. It was important that he settled into the family home and learnt how to live with and relate to the other boys. Moses told me that there were a few ‘run ins’ when he had threatened to leave initially but overall he had settled and was starting to do well at school.

During the Christmas holidays the boys are given the chance to visit relatives, however it was thought that for John Felix, this trip back to see his grandmother on his own would be too early, and so it was decided that we would accompany him and take gifts.

As is usual, we ‘hit’ the supermarket for the basic provisions and John Felix chose a packet of biscuits to take for her which I wrapped. We climbed into the car and as we got nearer to her home, this affectionate, easy child, became uncommunicative and sullen. In silence, we walked across the flat land to her home. I held back as I did not want to intrude. Once there, she invited us in but it was obvious that this little boy was not very happy to be there. We tried to understand the background to his situation and some of it she shared with us.

John Felix’s mother was buried in the garden at his grandmother’s house – where we were now. She had run away from her husband when John F was about 3 years old, taking him and his younger brother with her. Her husband had found her and had inflicted terrible beatings on her. Years later she must have had some kind of brain haemorrhage, possibly as a result of the beatings and she had died when John F was 8. He doesn’t remember what happened to his younger brother.

Throughout, John Felix remained silent – his grandmother gave him neither welcome, acknowledgement nor any affection during the time we were there. The only communication she had with him was to dispatch him to find an extra chair from the house next door. I was relieved when we could depart. Once again, I hung back with John Felix. ‘You didn’t think we were going to leave you there, did you?’ I asked. John Felix didn’t respond. Out of sight of Moses, walking ahead of us with Paul James, I pulled John Felix into my arms and we both choked back tears.

John Felix and his Grandmother

When we broke away from each other, I held his little face between my hands and told him Nakupenda (I love you). I reassured him that he was my son now and would remain so for as long as it pleased him. His shoulder seemed to relax as if the weight of the world had suddenly left him. We linked hands and started to walk towards the others. Like our own families, some Africans typically do not show any outward affection but I knew there was absolutely no connection between the grandmother and John Felix. Perhaps I will never know what really went on in their family. At the door as we got ready to leave, I took a photo of both of them – their body language says it all.

That evening, I hosted a party at Covenant to which Moses and Tatu, John and Pheobe, Paul James, John Odiambo and Anton were all invited. I wanted to say thank you to everyone, including Mama Pat’s boys for looking after me so well. Eric and Motech were the stars helping me so much with preparation. There were 18 of us in total. We ate pasta and a pretty good salad followed by fruit. Tatu was really relaxed and thanked me profusely. I was so happy to repay the compliment of cooking for them.

After introducing the Africans to Pass the Parcel and musical chairs (what a cheat Moses is!), we rushed upstairs to the roof where we lit some fireworks. As the evening was drawing to a close, I sat down with John Odiamo who had requested that I allowed him to share his story with me which I will share with you in the next posting.

Christmas at Le Brin

2010-12-28T04:00:00.000+01:00

Everybody except Guy the Cameraman

Last year it was a quiet Xmas at home as Guy was in Ireland and we had no planned lunches, dinners or parties. This year was quite, quite different but onto the festivities later, first the weather over the festive season.

I know the UK has been suffering with Arctic conditions and just to keep in touch with what’s happening at ‘home’, I have the weather for Glasgow (my brother and sons), Margate (my aunt) and Oldham (my mate Steve) programmed into my iPhone, so I know it’s been pretty cold, indeed, my brother told me on Xmas eve that the temperature in Glasgow had not risen above zero degrees for six weeks!

Over here in ‘sunny’ France, it has been raining non-stop for days on end – two inches a day! It’s impossible to do anything; the wood for the fire gets wet no matter how well it’s covered, the fallen oak leaves get soggy and block everything up, and poor Shadow comes in looking like a drowned rat, a pretty big drowned rat it has to be said.

And then the cold came. For the last few mornings Tan and I have had skating rinks instead of swimming pools and I see the cats wondering what on earth is happening. They can’t quite work out how they cannot put their paws into the fish pond and hook out a juicy bit of fish. I’m just waiting for them to spot a bird on the other side of the pool and go for it only to find a watery grave instead!

But back to Xmas. Quite a few weeks ago, four couples got together and suggested we do a combined Xmas with all the food costs and the cooking shared. And, despite finding our previously ordered turkey had been sold to someone else (probably to a French family - they don’t seem to be worried about totally unscrupulous actions like this), we managed to feed the fourteen people who shared our table quite easily.

The ladies all did marvelously well getting food for fourteen people cooked and served on time with a special mention going to Linda who came over on Xmas Eve and helped J turn a nondescript piece of patio furniture into a beautifully, festive dinner table.

Starting at about 2pm, eating at about 4pm and beginning the games about 9pm, it was a great day. As usual, I ended up at 2am snoring away, lying fully clothed on the carpet in the hall covered in Shadow’s towel. At least this time, my so called ‘friends’ covered me up!

Secret Santa was a success despite most people guessing who had given what to whom, but I reckon I got away with my edible g-string and can of squirty cream! My present was a ‘Demotivational’ calendar with the naughtiest wrapping paper I’ve ever seen. I’m still trying to work out what to do with the calendar but the paper is on my office wall already! Thanks Angie!

And then, as usual, just as the party was abating, we all headed over to Tan and Angie’s where it continued well into the night on their terrace, despite the freezing conditions. Apparently, I did participate in the heated debates about one thing or another and did dance a few steps before my lack of sleep, due to watching the cricket through the night, caught up with me.

And so it’s on to New Year. I’ve had people I don’t know stopping me in the village to say how much they are looking forward to spending New Year at our place! Methinks I need to make another visit to the wine store, oh and maybe wash Shadow's towel - just in case!

J's Trip to Kenya - Part IV

2010-12-27T13:25:00.001+01:00

Saturday 4th December

I can’t believe there is only one more day left on our rural retreat! I am managing to eat most of what is put in front of me (apart from the tripe and the intestines) and my embarrassment about using the outside loo is abating. However, I do need to find another place to empty my overnight ‘water’ bottle as the calf outside my bedroom window retaliates by pooing directly underneath the window! Tonight the visiting Pastors are going to finish their programme by anointing the local villagers in advance of the Baptisms taking place tomorrow and there is to be a Revival Rock Concert tonight which may actually rival X Factor.

Sunday 5th December

The church service ‘rocked’ last night until 1:00 in the morning, Our local kids from Kisumu tried desperately to out-sing and out-dance the kids from the local village. It was an amazing atmosphere, the praise and worship was unlike anything I had ever been involved in before. My British reserve diminished as the night wore on and (unfortunately) I have the video to prove it though if my daughter were to see me dancing and singing Gospel, I know that she would disown me. Roll on their trip next Easter!!

Monday 6th December

Moses' Wife Tatu and Vashi

By day 5 of my rural retreat, I was feeling relaxed and pampered. I would wake to hear Florence singing in the kitchen as she sparked the gas burner ready to prepare the breakfast tea. We would practice alternately, Swahili, French and pronunciation of certain English words, shouting them backwards and forth between the open rafters. I could earwig to ‘family’ conversations and though largely spoken in Swahili, I would intuitively understand Moses crooning to 18 month old Vashi when she woke in the middle of the night or hear his wife, Tatu, saying her prayers before falling asleep. The lack of privacy fosters a sharing, a closeness and a humour that I have rarely experienced before – and despite the space we have available to us as a family in France, I would return to these cramped conditions in a heartbeat!

Travel in Kenya

Before we knew it, it was time to pack to go back to the city. Magdalena and the girls were driven home, goodbyes were said, many photographs taken, rooms swept, remaining cabbages put in the boot and promises made to return. As the boys from Kibos drove the jeep home the previous night, piled high with mattresses, I began to wonder how we would all fit in the car.

Our drive home took two and half hours and comprised 5 adults, 2 ten year olds, 1 toddler and a live chicken with a plastic bag wrapped around its bottom....a happy moment as John Felix cuddled into me and slept on my knee for the whole of the journey.

Magdalena’s Story

Moses with his sister Magdalena

As I sat on the grass with the tiny ones who had joined us, Moses sister and Anton’s mum, Magdalena, arrived. Moses had driven me over to meet his sister on the Wednesday evening. Her story is a particularly sad one. As a young girl, Magdalena had met and married her husband. For many years they had enjoyed a reasonably happy life, building up his business. Her husband was a vet so they were able to lead a fairly affluent lifestyle, certainly by African standards. Magdalena ran the office and gave him all the support a good wife can, in between giving birth to six children. They each had a car and during the good times built a large and comfortable house in their rural home community. But as the years passed, her husband took a second and then a third wife as they can do in Kenyan society. He continued to support the 6 children along with numerous others now from his polygamous lifestyle.

As Magdalena talked to me, I could see the hurt and embarrassment that she still felt in retelling this story. Not only having to live on a daily basis with his unfaithfulness, disaster stuck one day when he came home to say that he had been diagnosed with HIV. Mercifully she and her children had been unaffected. However, as he became ill and eventually hospitalised, every single thing that they had built up during their life together had to be sold to pay for his treatment. The other two ‘wives’ were uninterested and it was Magdalena who nursed him on a daily basis at the same time as selling up everything they owned in order to pay the bills. The cars, the lab equipment, the house in Kisumu – everything had to be sold.

When he eventually died, with nothing left and no job, Magdalena had no other course of action than to return to her rural community and to the house they had built during the ‘good’ times. Now many years on, this house stood vandalised, inhabited by bees and damaged by bats. The large, (but now rusted) iron gate at the entrance to the estate, told of the grandeur of the house. This once elegant building stood forlorn, no water, no electricity, hardly a pane of glass remaining - the master bedroom and bathroom overrun with rats bigger than the stray cat that occupied the porch.

I was shocked to see Magdalena existing in such a poverty stricken environment. Her photographs show her as an elegant and beautiful woman. She is easy to be around, has a quick intelligence and a gentle sense of humour. She welcomed me into her house and served tea in a china cup as well as ground nuts (collected in the garden) which she had roasted and salted.

Virginie

Once again, I lost sleep thinking about Magdalena and her situation. When a distant relative and his young wife succumbed to Aids last year, leaving their 2 year old child orphaned, because the child tested positive with HIV, none of their closest relative would take her in. Despite her hardship and desperately trying to eke out an existence for herself and two youngest daughters, Magdalena took the child in and now regards Virginie as one of her own. For me it was incredibly poingnant seeing this elderly grandmother measure out the antiviral dosages each morning.

Virginie is just like every other 3 year old - shy, giggly, loves cuddles and being read to. The only difference is that she carries her own metal cup to drink out of, a reminder of the terrible, infectious nature of the illness she carries.

....And Seasons Greetings to You Too

2010-12-24T03:28:00.000+01:00

The letter shown was written by a Lib-Dem MP to one of his constituents who had obviously complained about next year's royal wedding and was featured on the Guido Fawkes, political blog site. Nice to see the spirit of 'goodwill to all men' at Christmas being extended to his voters!

Well, that’s it for a few days. Apologies that there have not been photos to accompany J’s Kenya blog but once again, the Google Blog editor doesn’t seem to be able to cope with longer than usual articles when accompanied by photos! Her final two articles will appear after Xmas.

We’re having a houseful for Xmas day and I’m sure we’ll have a ball if we manage to find seats at the lunch table for all fourteen people! After Xmas lunch on our own in 2009, Le Brin will be rocking this year!

J, Guy, Kitty and your's truly wish you and your families a great Xmas and a very happy new year.

J's Trip to Kenya - Part III

2010-12-23T02:00:00.002+01:00

Thursday 2nd December

Thursday morning dawned bright and early. The walls of my room were squared off before they reached the rafters, leaving open roof space below the corrugated iron covering meaning that no room in the dwelling had a ceiling. The small house consisted of three rooms plus a tiny kitchen, and because of the open ‘attic’, it was possible to hear every movement and every conversation taking place in the house.

Moses and his wife were in the other bedroom sharing the bed with their two youngest daughters aged 10 and 2. The four other visiting Pastors and family members were billeted throughout the village. They all convened in our house for breakfast where I had been promised an African version of deep fried doughnuts and copious amounts of African tea.

As I lay in my bed, listening to the morning sounds, I wondered what to do...I heard the gas being lit on the other side of the wall and water being poured out. Florence, yet another of Moses’ adopted daughters, started singing as she prepared tea. I slyly emptied my ‘water bottle’ out of the window. There was no way I was going to visit the loo during the darkness of the night. Thank God for the Shewee!! As I heard voices I recognised, I called out through the roof space ‘Habari za asabuhi’ (good morning in Swahili). Nzuri was the response I received, followed by ‘Julie, your water’s ready’!

My first encounter with an African toilet the previous evening had been somewhat embarrassing. I had held off as long as possible but eventually retrieved my loo roll and casually tried to navigate across the living room area. Moses was seated in conversation with the four visiting Pastors. Seeing me with the loo roll, in no doubt as to where I was going, he broke off his conversation to ask, ‘Are you sure you know what you are doing?? Is it a number 1 or a number 2??’ ‘Stop right there’ I yelled and fled across the garden only to return two minutes later as I realised I had forgotten to take the key!

After my visit to the toilet, I was quite prepared for my next initiation - the African shower. Tatu, Moses’ wife walked with me back to the ‘loo’. Sitting on top of the stool was a large bowl of water. Above the door were two nails, one on which to hang your clothes and the other, your towel. The ledge of the tiny high up, open, window is where you place your soap. Tatu explained that you start from the top of your body (your cleaner bits) and work down to the dirty bits. She had added a pan full of hot water into the bowl so it was a wonderful warm temperature. ‘I have made you an African shower’, she said proudly handing me an empty, plastic Blue Band margarine tub into which she had punctured many holes. Full of warm water and held above my head in the privacy of the tiny loo, this invention did a wonderful job!

Showered and dressed, I came out the loo to a hive of activity in the garden. Newly laundered clothes had been draped across bushes to dry in the hot sun. Paul James was busy ironing the creases out of his trousers. The iron was filled with hot charcoal. How do they find the motivation to do all this without electricity?

Friday 3rd December

Before I left

France

to return to Kisumu, I was very touched by the individuals who had given donations to take with me. I guess this started when I had a stall at the local Vide Grenier (car boot sale) here in Tourrettes. It was an incredibly tiring day but I managed to raise almost 300 euros and Nicky and Tim (the Isaiah Trust trustees) suggested I use this to supplement the Maize supply which would mean food on the table for the next four months or so.

As my travel day approached, numerous other donations begin to arrive. A local minister, now retired, hastily placed some ‘notes’ in my hand and someone who had read my interview in a local magazine, sent a cheque for 200 euros. I took my stewardship of this money very seriously. I really wanted to use it in a way that would form a strong connection or bond between the donor and the beneficiary. As soon as I met Pastor Peter Mackenzie, I knew he would be one of those beneficiaries.

When I asked him about his story he remembered Covenant House (the home I stay in when in Kisumu). He was one of Mama Pat’s original boys, orphaned, living rough on the streets and then he moved into her orphanage as a 10 year old. He was one of the lucky ones - he received an education and furthered his interests by enrolling in Bible College. Invited by Moses to start a church in Namamatatoa, he has a complete understanding of the pressures that influence the youths in this small rural community. Under his influence and guidance, 12 youths gave their lives to Christ and were baptised in the river during our 5 day stay. When asked if Pastor Pete needed anything, he said that his ministry could be greatly extended if only he had a bicycle to continue ‘spreading the word’. Thanks to the ‘divine connection’ with our local ex Minister, also called Peter, Pastor Peter Mackenzie now has a bike!

With the donation from another source, it is planned to lay the foundations and build a kindergarten so the tiny ones can be taken care of whilst their mothers work on the land to help feed the village. Maybe Namamatatoa may actually exist on Google Maps one day!

I was so busy talking to Magdalena and Pastor Pete that it was approaching lunchtime before I asked for an update on the progress of ‘my little boy’, John Felix. The response was not good. He’s been lying down all morning – ‘I think it’s Malaria’, said the Pastor.

I found him stretched out on a mattress in the shade, weak as a kitten, limp and with hardly any response at all. For me it was shocking but my rational mind told me that I had to accept that this is an everyday occurrence for many of the inhabitants here in Africa. With its limited funds, the Isaiah Trust cannot keep a stock of essential medicines and whilst serious illnesses (eg. Typhoid) would warrant a visit to the public hospital, many illnesses and infections are simply left to run their course.

I gently helped John Felix into my little bedroom and lay him on my bed. Looking through my stock of lotions, potions and medicines, I administered some Nurofen and then sponged him down with cold water. I lay on the bed next to him, held his tiny hand and thanked God that I was there to take care of him.

Later that day Moses took me to find a local pharmacy where I bought a stock of Malaria tablets (another donation put to good use). In charge of dosing up John Felix, day and night over the next few days, I am pleased to say he made an excellent recovery and became stronger. In no time at all he was sitting up playing games with me and winning. I thought of the 24/7 access to Hospitals, Clinics and Doctors that we have in our world and thanked God that for once, I was in the right place at the right time. No child should go through that despair and misery.

Les Anglais et Le Vin

2010-12-22T05:11:00.000+01:00

Much has been made of Britain's recent love affair with wine, yet our knowledge of ‘el vino’ hardly extends beyond telling the difference between red and white, a new survey claims.

Despite large increases in the amount we consume, it seems we do not take much notice of what we are actually pouring down our throats. More than half (58 per cent) of Britons still think that Chablis is a type of grape when it is actually a region in France, with a further 43 per cent thinking Chardonnay is a region in France when it is actually a grape. Another 43 per cent failed to recognise that Beaujolais is a region in France, no doubt thinking about the 2^nd Thursday in November when everybody in London gets legless by drinking the plonk which had only been bottled a couple of weeks previously!

And when it comes to Champers, despite the UK being the second biggest consumers of fizz in the world, nearly one in five (16 per cent) do not know that Champagne is in France rather than Spain, Italy or Germany. Sacrilege!

The research by Morrisons supermarket chain showed that nearly three quarters (74 per cent) of Britons claim that price is their main motivation when choosing a wine ahead of the label (44 per cent), colour (42 per cent), or to match their food (38 per cent).

Many of us do judge a book by its cover when it comes to wine, with almost a quarter (23 per cent) saying a pretty bottle will sway their decision.

Now I have to confess, when we did office ‘booze cruises’ to France (strangely called a booze cruise despite the fact that we generally took the train!), I piled as much cheap plonk as I could into my trolley. It was generally for my own drinking anyway, so quality wasn’t high on the list of priorities and I agree that given two similarly priced bottles, I would choose the one with the label which was most attractive.

Ten years on and having been exposed to, let’s say a more cultured way of drinking, I now know what wines to buy and whether a particular wine is a good buy.

Much of my wine comes from my mate who is running a wine business in the area and so I trust his judgement, and whilst some of his wines are quite superb, some are not quite so hot however, but it all comes down to personal taste in the end, and price of course.

But it was when a friend visited recently and I recalled that when she was my client in BT, she would decimate my expenses by ordering a hugely expensive wine, Gevrey Chambertin, so when she announced that she was coming down, I started looking for Gevrey Chambertin in the shops.

I found a 2002 at €22 and called my mate who has the wine business to see if he could supply it but his advice was ‘buy it – I can’t do it for that price’. Then I found a 2008 for €17 and latterly I’ve spotted a 1998 for €22, so despite my Scottish tendencies, I’ve been buying up expensive stocks of Gevrey Chambertin and laying them down for some time in the future when I’ll get a bottle out and think that if I was drinking it in a restaurant it would be costing €100 or so. And then I’ll put it back again – untouched, too mean to drink it!

Of course, J could wreak havoc on my Burgundy cellar by doing what she does to my stock of Chablis and Montagny Premier Cru – by using it in her cooking!

J's Trip To Kenya - Part II

2010-12-21T10:25:00.002+01:00

Thursday 2nd December

Thursday morning dawned bright and early. The walls of my room were squared off before they reached the rafters, leaving open roof space below the corrugated iron covering meaning that no room in the dwelling had a ceiling. The small house consisted of three rooms plus a tiny kitchen, and because of the open ‘attic’, it was possible to hear every movement and every conversation taking place in the house. Moses and his wife were in the other bedroom sharing the bed with their two youngest daughters aged 10 and 2. The four other visiting Pastors and family members were billeted throughout the village. They all convened in our house for breakfast where I had been promised an African version of deep fried doughnuts and copious amounts of African tea.

The Loo !

My shower !

Friday 3rd December

Before I left France to return to Kisumu, I was very touched by the individuals who had given donations to take with me. I guess this started when I had a stall at the local Vide Grenier (car boot sale) here in Tourrettes. It was an incredibly tiring day but I managed to raise almost 300 euros and Nicky and Tim (the Isaiah Trust trustees) suggested I use this to supplement the Maize supply which would mean food on the table for the next four months or so.

Namamatatoa

On the face of it, Namamatatoa would appear to sound idyllic. It is a beautiful, incredibly fertile place but is decimated by the Aids epidemic. The villagers who haven’t moved to the cities and the relatives of those who have died from Aids, now consist of widows and orphans all of whom are incredibly poor. No one more than Pastor Peter Mackenzie understands this demographic disaster more than he does. When I asked him about his story he remembered Covenant House (the home I stay in when in Kisumu). He was one of Mama Pat’s original boys, orphaned, living rough on the streets and then he moved into her orphanage as a 10 year old. He was one of the lucky ones - he received an education and furthered his interests by enrolling in Bible College. Invited by Moses to start a church in Namamatatoa, he has a complete understanding of the pressures that influence the youths in this small rural community. Under his influence and guidance, 12 youths gave their lives to Christ and were baptised in the river during our 5 day stay. When asked if Pastor Pete needed anything, he said that his ministry could be greatly extended if only he had a bicycle to continue ‘spreading the word’. Thanks to the ‘divine connection’ with our local ex Minister, also called Peter, Pastor Peter Mackenzie now has a bike!

A 'Well' John Felix

Later that day Moses took me to find a local pharmacy where I bought a stock of malaria tablets (another donation by our neighbours, Tan and Angie, put to good use). I gave medication to John Felix, day and night and over the following few days he made an excellent recovery and became much stronger. In no time at all, he was sitting up playing games with me and winning! I thought of the 24/7 access to hospitals, clinics and doctors that we have in our world and thanked God that for once, I was in the right place at the right time. No child should have to go through that pain, despair and misery.

Secret Santa

2010-12-20T09:02:00.000+01:00

J and I went to a dinner party on Saturday night. It was Mike and Lesley’s Xmas party and it was a terrific evening – starting at 7.30pm and finishing at 2am!

They do entertain well but both of them having spent many years in sales and marketing, they know how to do things beautifully. The house was very festive and a huge log fire was burning. There was copious amounts of wine and they served a delicious dinner – spicy parsnip soup followed by lamb shank, cheese and dessert.

They’d planned on ten guests but four people who had been invited but who couldn’t come because they were flying out for Xmas had their travel plans curtailed by the weather and called to see if they could still come along, so Mike and Lesley had to scramble around trying to find another four lamb shanks at virtually a moment’s notice. They did wonders.

The real highlight of the evening though was their Secret Santa game. Now many of you will have participated in this game at Xmas (where each person present picks a name out of a hat and provides an anonymous present – the giver knows who they are giving to but the recipient should have no idea who has provided their present), but Mike and Lesley do it a little differently.

Their version of the game has everybody who attends providing an anonymous present (low value and fun is the criteria) with the host and hostess providing quite a few extra, so in this case with fourteen guests and the few extra presents, there were about thirty parcels on the table.

You need two sets of playing cards with the first set being dealt out around the table in turn so some people had three cards with a few guests getting four. A person is chosen and their job is to take the second set of cards and turn over each card in turn. The person at the table who has the identical card in their hand from the first set of cards is then allowed to choose a present.

Inevitably, all the presents are claimed before the second set of cards are finished and as the final cards are turned over, people with a matching card are then allowed to choose a present already picked by another guest and this is where the real fun starts.

Human nature being what it is, the largest parcels are usually picked first but of course, it could be anything, as last night there were a few toilet rolls ingeniously disguised!

Being an unlucky sort of person, when my cards eventually matched those being drawn by Sandie, all the gifts had gone so I chose a couple of people and took theirs, much to their annoyance, but this tactic did not go unnoticed by the other guests still to claim parcels and by the end of the game, I was left with a single, small package – which turned out to be a pocket telephone note book! My big presents had gone!

It was a great way to end dinner – there was an edible bra, a couple of toilet rolls, an oven glove, a silly hat and so on.

And the final surprise of the evening – I was able to drive home. I had been a good boy. For once!

Frocks - Showing My Feminine Side

2010-12-17T07:38:00.001+01:00

Actually, it’s dresses today. ‘Frock’ is a word used by parents, Oxfam shops and probably Glasgow guys who haven’t moved south. Ouch!

It’s confession time. I don’t particularly like Liz Hurley. She’s a celebrity because of one thing and one thing only – ‘that’ dress. You remember the one – it was held together by safety pins and she wore it when she attended the premiere of ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ hanging onto Hugh Grant’s arm back in 1994. Since then, she’s made a career out of attending film premieres, escorting or marrying rich men and actually ‘starring’ in really bad films.

But that dress. Magnificent was the only word to describe it - a little black Versace number which fitted her perfectly and which must have sent millions of adolescent boys, and probably quite a few older males, into apoplexy.

It was the picture to the right which caused the press to go wild of course. That tilted back head, those boobs and the fact that nobody really knew her, all combined to catapult her into world stardom – well UK stardom.

That dress was actually voted the ‘greatest dress ever’ a couple of years ago but there may be a new contender for the crown – a dress worn by Gwyneth Paltrow last week, also to a premiere in LA.

Designed by somebody called Emilio Pucci (yeah – ok I’ve heard of him), Gwyneth, only second in my book to Jennifer Aniston in the ‘Girl Next Door’ stakes, looked sensational in her little white number, held together by gravity and a few strands of material.

Gwyneth doesn’t quite have Liz Hurley’s body, but at least Hurley wore knickers with her dress (I think) but us fashionistas were too interested in Gwyneth’s fabulous strappy sandals to notice the fact that she didn't have any on, until it was pointed out to us of course!

This is an unusually short, concise posting and is dedicated to Alison in the US who is always complimentary about my blog and who I know loves fashion. It’s also for all the boys out there – if you guys want ceiling sized copies of the photos, just let me know!

PS – as I was writing this last week, Liz Hurley was busy divorcing her Indian husband and shacking up with the cricketer, Shane Warne. Talk about ‘bowling a maiden over’ – ha ha!

Have a great weekend everybody.