An Update From Le Brin d’Olivier

Well the weather here is strange at the moment – one day sunny, the next rainy, the next sunny, the next thunderstorms. It makes it difficult to do anything (that’s my excuse). The ground doesn’t dry out so gardening is out of the question and I’m re-gravelling my drive but the gravel is soaking wet which doubles its weight and whilst I’d like to build up my six-pack for the summer, I don’t want to overdo it!

J went off on her travels to the Kenyan orphanage last week. Her rather convoluted trip took her from Nice to Manchester and then on to Paris before catching a flight to Nairobi. During the day’s stopover there she visited an elephant orphanage and fed some giraffes by holding treats in her mouth. She said it was disgusting – I never knew giraffes had blue tongues but she assures me they have!

The next leg of the trip was an internal flight to Kinsumu where the children's orphanage is located. Total travel time was some 40 hours and she says she never slept a wink, poor thing.

We’ve had regular updates and I’ve said I’ll give my blog over to her when she eventually gets something written but she appears to be having a wonderful, if emotional time out there, pouring love all over the kids who have lost their parents. An excerpt here from her Facebook posting:

The real street urchins are barefooted and in rags. To have such a broken spirit aged 7 just tears you apart...two or three turned up at our meeting, no eye contact, but so wanting to be amongst us. We sat in a windowless, roofless slum dwelling in the rain and tried to talk to them about dreaming 'big' until darkness fell. We came home to our evening meal and bed - I have no idea how or where they are sleeping.

Back home, my kids are a model of good behaviour. Despite the clocks going forward they still get up in time for school and go off with a smile on their faces – well Guy does! Maybe it’s because this is the last week before the Easter holidays?

J in her ‘caring’ way had lined up all sorts of people to feed us and make sure we’re being looked after and it’s been non-stop. On Sunday, Sam and her boys came round before we all headed next door where Tan and Angie hosted an impromptu terrace party and then on Tuesday, John and Helen came round for dinner bringing all sorts of food goodies with them. It was back to Tan and Angie’s on Wednesday for probably the best lasagne I’ve ever eaten.

I’ve got lunch in the village today (Friday) with a couple of friends, followed by a football day which I’m hosting on Saturday where my bar will get its first visitors of the year and then on Monday, the kids and I are having an Easter lunch at John and Linda’s down the hill. And then on Wednesday I think we’re off to Dave and Sarah’s although as the invitation was given when I was a bit tipsy the other night, I’m not quite sure. David, Tan – help me here!

As is usual when J goes on a trip, I am determined to empty the freezer by the time she gets back but with all these invitations to eat out it looks like most of the unrecognizable ‘stuff’ in unmarked plastic bags will still be there when she returns to Le Brin. Last night in a fit of culinary inspiration, I made the kids Fajitas Guadalajara – don’t ask!

That’s about it. Must get on with my ironing now. A pair of jeans does me a week – why do they need a clean pair every day?

A Hung Parliament ?

It’s looking increasingly likely that there will be no overall majority when the election runs its course in May. From a position of absolute strength a couple of months ago, the Tories are now struggling to keep ahead in the polls.

How has it come to this?

Who would vote those lying, incompetent Labourites back into power when they’ve virtually destroyed Britain? They’ve turned, what was a very strong economy, in 1997 when they took power, into that of a third world country. Probably the best measure of how well a country is run is not the amount of debt the country has run up (a lot of that is due to the bailout of the banks which ultimately will turn out to be a necessary and profitable move) but the amount a country spends on running itself.

In 1997 the proportion of GDP spent on running the UK was 36% - a world beating figure. Now it is 52%. This has been caused by Labour’s ‘interventionist’ policies and outrageous spending, much of which has been expended on so-called ‘managers’ running the NHS, education and other public facing departments.

Let’s put it very simply. When I was a manager at IBM and BT, I was virtually left alone to run my department. A meeting once a month to check my sales figures and that was it. If I was in the NHS (to take the popular example), I would have had several managers checking my figures daily and would have been involved in interminable meetings, all taking invaluable time from my real job – to sell things.

Anyway, getting back to the election battle - the Tories have messed it up big time. Only latterly are they attacking Gordon Brown’s disastrous mistakes when he was Chancellor; selling Britain’s stockpile of Gold at the absolute bottom of the market, raiding the pensions funds of dividend tax credits which took something approaching £100 billion out of the funds of pensioners (like me) and completely destroyed probably the world’s best pension system. I wouldn’t have cared if Brown had used that £100 billion to improve the nation but it was just squandered away. He’s screwed the armed forces at a time when they need maximum support and filled the country with immigrants soaking up every cent (sorry, penny) the country throws at them.

Last weekend Labour started attacking George Osborne, the Tories man for Chancellor as weak, ineffective and ‘shrill’. True, he doesn’t come across well but does Brown? Did Brown fill the country with hope when he became Chancellor in 1997? I’m afraid we’re down to personalities again but if the country chooses Labour ahead of the Tories on personality alone, it’ll reap what it sowed.

So what of a hung Parliament? The pound will sink against all major currencies, the stock market will fall and the wider financial markets will take a dim view that the UK cannot sort itself out and the three parties will argue about what policies to introduce – it’ll be the UK managed by committee and we all know what happens when committees get involved – nothing! If you are a non-UK taxpayer it’ll be interesting however because we’ve not had a ‘coalition’ government for decades and the Liberals will finally get a say. Will they help or hinder? Will they get caught in the headlights like frightened bunnies? Only time will tell.

Greece – Think It Doesn’t Affect You ?

If Greece was a company they’d be declared bankrupt and the administrators would be called in to try and salvage what they could. How has this wonderful country which I holidayed in for nine years in a row ended up in this situation?

I have to admit it was a puzzle to me as I was there (well – Corfu, one of its islands) only last year and despite the fact that the infrastructure is a bit basic, the locals seem to live a good life – and there’s the hub of it. The Greeks only pay tax when they feel like it and if they do declare their earnings, they generally grossly underestimate them. Even when caught, there’s a good chance the tax official will take a bribe to cancel the tax evasion penalty!

The statistics show that Greek revenue from income tax is a measly 4.5% compared to the EU average of 8%. Even as Greece’s GDP (the output of the country) was growing at 4% a year, its tax revenues were falling, which in economic parlance is virtually impossible!

Go into a garage to pay a bill and ask for a receipt and the price will go up – because the garage owner will have to declare the income. Apparently, half the doctors in the country declare an annual income of less than €30,000 which is a laugh given what you have to pay them when you’re ill on holiday.

And that’s it in a nutshell – Greece has been spending just like the UK Government only without the tax revenues to support it. The international money markets have spotted this and the price Greece has to pay to borrow in the money markets has risen to the point where they just cannot afford the interest payments. Do they default, i.e. not pay their creditors and be classified along with African and South American countries who regularly refuse to pay their bills? Or do they go cap-in-hand to the EU with the begging bowl?

Well, good old Greece has been playing hard ball, threatening to quit the EU and throw the single currency concept into utter chaos. Germany and France, who would suffer most if Greece pulled out of the EU, are desperately trying to come up with a solution but at the end of the day, they’ll have to dig deep into their pockets and bail the Greeks out. And, any billions they spend helping keep the doctors in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed will inevitably filter through to the good old UK because France and Germany will argue for a ‘re-balancing’ of the EU budget and we’ll have to pay more.

Finally – some career advice. Become a doctor in Greece – it’s a very well paid job!

PS - Nigel is up to his tricks again. Find out what he's been up to at http://monaconigel.blogspot.com/

No Women And Are You On The Buses ?

When looking at Guy’s possible Lyceé down in Antibes, I remarked that he might have to get some ‘digs’ because the college was so far from home. ‘What’s digs Thomas’? he asked.

I explained that digs down here was the equivalent of renting a room in a house. ‘Have you ever been in digs Thomas’? he continued.

Have I been in digs Guy – let me tell you ………………………….

I was 17 and I’d been living in a cupboard at my aunt’s house in the west end of Glasgow. OK it was a big cupboard but it was still a cupboard. I had started to look for some larger premises when I found out that my employer, Rootes the carmaker, would double my wages if I had to stay in digs in order to reduce travelling time to the factory, so I said thanks to my aunt and wandered down Dumbarton Road looking in the various newspaper shops for ‘rooms to let’. I found what looked like a suitable room (on paper) and headed off to Rosevale Street which was about a 15 minute walk from my aunt’s house.

‘Knock, knock’. The door opened about 2 inches and a wizened old woman looked through the gap. ‘Yes – what do you want’? ‘I’ve come about the room’. ‘Yer no on the buses are yeh’? (there was a large bus garage beside the house)‘No – I’m not on the buses – I work in Paisley’. ‘That’s alright then – yeh can come in’. And so started two wonderful years in my life in Rosevale St.

The ‘interview’ was quite surreal. Mrs McLean who must’ve been in her eighties and who was four foot nothing, laid down the rules. “It’ll be £2.50 a week. That’s more than I normally charge but you’ll have a room to yourself. I’ll do you a cooked breakfast, sandwich box for lunch and a 3-course dinner at night.” I took all this in and then said, I wouldn’t need a lunch box. ‘It won’t be any cheaper she said’. I laughed as at £2.50 a week, the ‘digs’ were a bargain. “I’ll get the room re-decorated before you move in”, she said.

I moved in a week later to find a couple of Irish builders sharing a room across the corridor which was about a quarter the size of mine. Paddy and Mick (yes really) would get up at 5am, have breakfast, come home at 6pm, wash and have dinner with me. They never said a word and then went to bed about 7.30 and then got up at 5am again. What a life!

My breakfast typically took the form of orange juice, cereals, two fried pork chops or a steak and a couple of fried eggs. Oh and with 3 slices of toast! After a couple of days, I had to tell Mrs McLean that I would be happy with just the cereals. ‘The room won’t be any cheaper’, she said.

I loved it there. I usually took her flowers on a Friday night and on a Saturday when she entertained some of her lady friends in her main room and they’d all be drinking their little glasses of whisky, I’d present her with a half bottle. She thought I was a saint but in reality with Rootes giving me £7.50 a week for my ‘digs’, I felt guilty that I was getting away for a third of that.

And then the trouble started.

After a couple of months, I said to Mrs McLean that I was unhappy paying £2.50 a week. ‘Oh – I don’t want to lose you – shall we say £2 a week from now on’, she said. When I told her that I wanted her to take £4 a week she was beside herself. The problem was she put the rent for Pat and Mick up to £3.50 and they went ballistic. Every night at dinner I’d get the pair of them having a go at me, so in the end I had to tell Mrs McLean that as their room was tiny, it was unfair to charge them virtually the same as me. She relented and peace broke out for a while but only until my fiancée, Fiona (who was to become my wife) started to come to Mrs Mclean’s.

Mrs McLean liked her from the start and was happy for Fiona to visit me. Tea and biscuits would be delivered and occasionally a couple of glasses of sherry would be handed into the room.

Problem was Paddy and Mick had been told – ‘absolutely no women in your room - especially if they’re on the buses’!

Dr Fang

On Friday, just as J was starting her trip from England to Kenya, she’d left me with instructions to take Kitty to the doctors. I duly turned up at the appointed hour of 11am and at 11.30 he appeared in the waiting room and looked at me quizzically – ‘who ah you?’ ‘I’m Mr Evans’, I said (it’s easier being somebody I’m not with this doctor). ‘Ah – come in’. There seemed to be a glimmer of recognition. Anyway, once in his room, I was just about to question his timekeeping when he spotted the cigarettes coming out of my pocket as I looked for the Carte Vitale (Health card) and he started lecturing me on smoking. It took me back to the last time I was in his surgery – 18 months ago when I blogged about it thus …….

Ever since I challenged J to get back into her wedding dress there’s been a marked change in the household. She now walks to the village (4 miles) when she used to take the car to the post box (50 yards). We now are fed Weetabix, without sugar or milk, for breakfast and we have muesli for dinner. I will not divulge what the Wii said when she stepped on it for a weight test but it was along the lines of, ‘one at a time please’. She nags me for having two saccharin in my mug of tea and the kids go to school looking like undernourished refugees. All the exercise she is doing is making me look like a retired, lazy executive, which I vainly profess to being.

So it was with some degree of shardenfreude on my part that she returned from a walk the other day with a poorly ankle. Having set out to walk 100 yards to the nearest bar, her friend proceeded to take her up a near vertical climb to a place called Gourdon (see picture – you might have to zoom in to see it). Despite the fact that she was wearing flip-flops, she made it to the top but on the way back down, she fell over a wild herb which had grown across the path and she sprained her ankle. Luckily a French doctor was travelling in the opposite direction on another climb but by waving her bra in the air she managed to attract his attention. I wouldn’t say that J has a big bust but EasyJet pilots and astronauts on the space station also saw this distress signal so quite a rescue operation ensued. To his credit, the French doctor carried her down the mountain and then presented her with a bill (which is what they all do) and as usual insisted she take all her clothes off to examine her ankle.

After an afternoon resting with a bottle of champagne beside the bed (yes – those of you who know her will recognise the post operative care she demands) she decided to call the local doctor to get a brace. I was told (not asked) to go to the doctors the next morning at 9am sharp to pick up a prescription for the said brace and to be on the safe side I got there at 8.50am. There was a rather tasty woman in the waiting room so the usual wait to be called was not too onerous. I kept thinking about how lucky the doctor was if she had ……no – let’s not go there.

Anyway, at 9.25am I was called in. Doctor Fang is Vietnamese and speaks a little English so he was a bit surprised when he called Mrs Evans’ name (she’s not decided how long she’ll stay with me so hasn’t changed her name yet) and I stood up. ‘Ah you Mr Evans’, he said. ‘Nope – I’m Mr Cupples’, I replied. He called out ‘Mrs Evans’ again and I explained that I was her carer and had come for the prescription.

He ushered me into his little room (just big enough to swing a cat and no more) and immediately laid into me. I won’t bother with the quotes but here goes… You Engrish – you come ovah here an sink you can juss order us docors alound. You sink you can juss phone up an order plescliptions like you do in Engrand and we just han them over. All you want is this bit of paper (pointing to his prescription pad) so you can get leimbursed. I don know what sort of injuly Mrs Evans has – I could give her wong fing and then you sue me. This is not light – not collect plocedure. I could see his English was struggling at this point so I started on him.

Risten, I’m only the carer so don’t have a go at me. If you are not comfortable don’t do it. I’ll drag the poor rady in here so you can see for yourself. And another thing – I’m not Engrish so don’t go there. If you don’t want to lite a plescliption don’t do it. And another fling – if you so much as ask her to take her crothes off I’ll come down here with my rawyer – ok ?

He replied – ‘you taking the piss’. I smiled and reft….sorry….left.

Later that morning J had to go back to his surgery where she had to take all her clothes off to have her ankle examined. He gave her a prescription for a brace. C’est la vie.

You’re **** - Je Ne Comprends Pas

The guy is pretty much at the top of his profession. He’s probably paid about £2.5 million a year and is on a long-term contract. His company is in England and all of his business is conducted in English ……. but he doesn’t speak a word of it! Nice work if you can get it.

Yup – we’re talking football again.

I missed most of the Saturday night football round-up show as J and I had been invited out to dinner and despite a relatively bad head on Sunday morning, I was awake early enough to switch on the repeat show and see a couple of Spurs teammates pushing and shoving each other.

Now this is not an unknown phenomenon in British football, indeed when it involves a couple of Brits, they are usually punching each other’s lights out, whereas the foreigners, as the two I’m referring to just happen to be, push a bit, back off then approach each other and push a bit more. All very ‘handbags at ten paces’ stuff. One of the errant Spurs players is a guy called Benoît Assou-Ekotto and Harry Redknapp, his manager, summed up this particular, French-Cameroonian thus:

"Benoît is a strange boy," he said. "He's a bit highly strung and hardly speaks English. If you say something to him he's hard work. He hasn't improved his English in the couple of years he's been here."

Asked why his left-back had walked off alone (at the end of the game), apparently unhappy, Redknapp said: "He didn't know the result. He probably thought we'd drawn (when in fact Spurs won the match). He'll turn up Wednesday and play great, but he won't know we're playing Fulham until someone tells him. That's how he is. He's unreal. He walks off (the pitch) and he's thinking about the music he's going to play when he puts his headphones on."

As I say, nice work if you can get it!

However, his claim not to speak any English doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. When a fan called out “you’re shit”, in a game where he hadn’t performed particularly well and Spurs had been beaten, he most certainly understood what was being said and tried to get to the fan. In the absence of video footage of his latest transgression, see him trying to sort out the Spurs fan who let him know how he played that day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPeFUbEi358

Mipim’d in Cannes

It’s the annual Mipim property conference in Cannes.

What does ‘Mipim’ stand for? I have absolutely no idea. I’ve looked and looked and can’t find an explanation anywhere – couldn’t even find one on the Mipim homepage. Still, it’s probably not important – what is important is that our poor beleaguered UK bankers and estate agents can all come down to the South of France and have a jolly good time whilst trying to drum up some more lousy business which will come home to roost in about 5 years time.

Now I don’t like Cannes very much. Like virtually every other French city, it’s almost impossible to park and when the Cannes Conference Centre (actually called ‘Le Palais des Festivals’- pictured) has a major exhibition on, not only can’t you park, every restaurant is full and moving around the Croisette is a nightmare with thousands of delegates wandering around with their plastic carrier bags full of brochures and other marketing material which will be dumped into their hotel waste paper bins as soon as they reach the sanctity of their rooms.

But for the delegates it must be wonderful. All winter long the banking and property sectors have been hammered. Bankers are the most hated species since Estate Agents topped the charts a few years ago and the poor property magnates have lost a fortune as the value of their shopping centres and buy-to-lets have plummeted. So a bit of spring sun, a fancy hotel and a chance to wine and dine with the best of them is just what they need to recharge their batteries before getting home this week and finding out that the Chancellor has shafted them – again! Of course the Brits amongst them might find that they have to stay down here a few more days given the BA strike, not that that will worry them unduly.

What drew my attention to Mipim this year was a report that the Royal Bank of Scotland (84% owned by the taxpayer) and Lloyds bank (47% owned by us) have both rented magnificent ‘hillside villa retreats’ in which to entertain their prospective ‘Mipim’ clients.

Maybe I should have dragged one of my few remaining business suits out of retirement and wandered down to Le Palais and shown some interest in a £1 billion set of London office blocks they were selling (called White Tower if you’re interested). I would then have wangled an invite to one of these fancy villas to discuss my finance requirements over dinner with some people from RBS and Lloyds.

If that had failed I might have shown interest in a £200m collection of shops and offices on offer and located on Oxford Street in London.

If truth be known I’d simply have been happy to just get into one of those villas and watch deals going down over dinner. Sitting there at the end of the table sipping exquisite white wine listening to bankers and their clients discussing whether they needed £900 million or did they need to stretch it to the magical £1 billion? But then I would have remembered that the bankers were being overly enthusiastic with my money and then the wine would have tasted sour.

Degree in Disco Lights

If you've been reading my blog you’ll know that J is doing an Open University degree in Kitchen and Fridge Management and I’m proud to say that she recently achieved a 96% pass mark for her latest assignment. Apparently she had to work out which shelf to put fresh milk on and that lettuce went in the ‘salad drawer’. Successfully getting ice cubes to drop down the chute and into a glass was an optional assignment which gave her some bonus marks. She’s a clever girl!

On Saturday we all travelled down to Antibes to a Lyceé (pictured) which specializes in Computing Science and where Guy might eventually go later this summer if his marks are good enough. Lyceé is the 4^th and final part of the school education system (maternelle, primaire, collège and lyceé) and determines if a student enters the university system.

This particular Lyceé was holding an Open Day to publicise its courses and facilities and I have to say I was quite impressed. As you approached the front door, senior students would accost you and drag you off to the relevant part of the establishment where college lecturers were waiting to explain the various courses and bemoan the selection system which is quite bizarre. The collège (where Guy is now) sends his marks to a central clearing house with his preferences in terms of Lyceé and subject and they simply choose who to send where. No interviews by the college, no understanding about the fact that Guy is a budding IT expert, probably no consideration of where the student lives, just a list telling the ‘clearing house’ how many times he’s missed classes and his marks in the major subjects.

Dragging the IT lecturer into a corner and using my ‘extensive’ experience of IT and networks (who am I kidding?) I started quizzing him on how many students could actually speak English well enough to understand the universal IT language which is – English, obviously trying to push Guy’s excellent bi-lingual capabilities. He rather took the wind out of my sails when he showed me a whole range of network manuals in French but as he flicked through the pages I spotted a section in English – it was something to do with network protocols or whatever and of course I said, ‘ah ha – they’ll need English for that bit won’t they, and when they do the Cisco Accreditation, they’ll need good English for that’. I had no idea whether what I was saying was correct or not but it just seemed strange to me that in a French Collège (in France) there was a large Cisco Accreditation Certificate on the wall - in ENGLISH! ‘Mais oui. Bien sur’, he replied. I smiled smugly and said Guy was totally bilingual. He wandered off. He didn't seem impressed.

I then went off to find J and Guy who had become a bit embarrassed by my rather Anglo-centric attitude and had wandered off to find the ‘first year’ workshop. I strolled in and despite my limited French understood that that the lecturer in this workshop was explaining that all students had to study the workings of washing machines, burglar alarms, telephone systems and disco lights during their first 12 months.

Scuse me – disco lights? Yes! And there they were – strung all along the ceiling of the workshop and flashing green, red and blue. Why hadn’t I seen them when I wandered in?

And so there we have it. If everything works out J will get an MBA in Kitchen and Fridge Management and Guy will get an Honours Degree in Disco Light synchronization. What a house! What a family! What a country!

PS - Nigel's latest posting from New York is now available. Watch out for the bad language.

http://monaconigel.blogspot.com/

A £1.5 billion Shopping Spree – No, Not J !

I bet you don’t think about it. You wander around, eating in nice restaurants, flying around the globe, staying overnight in a hotel or spending money in shops completely oblivious to the fact that the businesses you’re giving your custom to, are owned by some other entity, in many cases, a bank.

Eat in one of Sir Terence Conran’s restaurants and you’re giving your money to Lloyds Bank.

Stay or eat at the Grosvenor House in London’s Park Lane (pictured) and you’re boosting the profits of its rival, the Royal bank of Scotland.

Go to the pictures in a Vue cinema or shop in House of Fraser and you’re again giving your money to Lloyds Bank. Lloyds even also own Rangers Football Club in that they provided the finance to the guy who owns 96% of the shares – if his business was to fold - aaagh! On the same basis, RBS own Liverpool Football Club in that if the American owners ever default the bank will take over the shares.

But then again on a secondary level, if you’re a Royal Bank of Scotland or Lloyds or Northern Rock account holder, not only are you boosting the Government’s coffers every time you pay a charge to the bank, every time you shop, eat or ‘Vue’ you’re adding to the bank’s profits and hence the Government’s revenues, given that they own 47% of Lloyds and 84% of RBS.

Fly British Midland and you’re actually flying with German airline Lufthansa who own the British company. Have a holiday at Centerparcs and your money goes to an American finance house.

And over here in France if I shop at the local Darty TV shop I’m giving my money to Comet, that well known UK company. Similarly, if I buy something in the Castorama DIY store, I’m actually shopping at the UK chain, B&Q who owns them.

There are lots of examples where a well known company you purchase from is actually owned by unknown entities, in many cases anonymous finance houses, but rather more public is Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS to you and me) which takes the biscuit with the largest, most diversified portfolio of non-bank companies. This is one reason why HBOS nearly bankrupted Lloyds who took the Scottish Bank over when the UK banking crisis was at its height.

In a spending spree lasting several years (J, eat your heart out), HBOS (probably the Bank of Scotland bit – we’ll spare Halifax) not only purchased the Vue cinema chain and House of Fraser stores but also Caffé Nero, David Lloyd Leisure clubs, McCarthy & Stone the housebuilders and Crest Nicolson, the commercial premises specialists. The spree ended up with HBOS owning some 80 companies outright but with significant stakes, across Europe in another 900 companies.

This portfolio, bought at the top of the market is now showing losses running into hundreds of millions but predictably, the guy who ran it disappeared off into the sunset, following years of receiving a multi-million pound salary. Oh and his pension was nearly as much as the pilloried, RBS CEO, Fred Goodwin.

Why Didn’t I Think Of It Before ?

Now you’d have to drug me out of my eyeballs to get me on a Ryanair flight. It’s so frustrating to me that that complete moron, Michael O’Leary (CEO of Ryanair, or Dan Dare as it’s often called), manages to run a successful airline whilst showing complete disregard for his customers.

I flew with them once – long before O’Leary started calling his paying customers, ‘idiots’ and treating them like cattle going to the abattoir. As far as I can recall, the flight was ok but I had to laugh that the destination was described as ‘Glasgow (Prestwick)’ – in geographical comparisons, Prestwick is to Glasgow what Chicago is to New York. It’s all a con.

And so for the last 10 years, I’ve been flying Easyjet. Never had too many problems – they’ve put me up in a hotel when the last flight developed a fault and on the odd occasion I’ve had to complain to Customer Service, my complaint has been dealt with reasonably efficiently and to my satisfaction.

So it was all a bit disappointing when I booked some flights for J and myself a few weeks ago. Well, I had hoped to book flights for J, but the vagaries of the website meant that I ended up with all four flights in my name. Not to worry I thought, it’s quite a while before we fly – I’ll get Customer Service to sort it out – after all, as far as I was concerned, it was a ‘bug’ in the website. Really – it was!

Firstly, I refuse to use their chargeable telephone numbers – calling these in the UK is bad enough but when my French calling plan adds another 20p a minute, a typical call can cost almost as much as the flight! So I use ‘contact us’ on their website – ever tried to find it? It’s so well hidden they could use it in an ‘A’ Level exam on website navigation.

Eventually I locate it and send my request to change two of the flights into J’s name. Polite, concise and pointing out that I thought their website needed a bit of clarification, I waited for the reply. I got it next day – ‘high volumes of e-mails’ etc etc etc! I wait and send another reminder two weeks later - ‘high volumes of e-mails’ etc etc etc!

A few weeks later nothing’s happened. I have a brainwave (well I thought it was) – write an e-mail to the CEO but how do I get his address? Luckily his name (Andy Harrison - pictured) is not too difficult to guess for an e-mail format and so I cross my fingers and send Andy.Harrison@easyjet.com a nice, concise, polite request pointing out that his Customer Service organization is not working too well at the moment.

Now Mr Harrison is leaving Easyjet in the summer so I don’t really expect too much in the way of a response but amazingly, I get a reply 8 days later saying he was ‘sorry and that a Lidia Stefanowska would sort it for me – free of charge’.

Two weeks pass – nothing. I send her an e-mail (Andy Harrison had copied her so I knew her address) - nothing. Another two weeks pass – nothing. I send her another reminder – nothing. I send another e-mail to Andy Harrison – nothing. I reckon it’s all been a wind-up.

Then the brain-wave. I Google ‘Lidia Stefanowska’ and find she’s Easyjet’s ‘Customer Experience Manager’ and there are references to her all over the search engine. None however give any real details that I can use.

Then the 2^nd and even more impressive brain-wave. Is she by any chance on Facebook? Yes she is!

I post a message on her Facebook page and guess what? I get a groveling apology the next day with promises to fix my problem which, even more amazingly, is resolved within 24 hours. Needless to say, she didn't accept me as a 'friend'. Result or what?

The Ex-Pat Pensions Con

I don’t receive a government (old age) pension yet. There’s another six years at least before that indignity befalls me but the ruling the other day by the European Court of Human Rights whereby ex-pats who have moved to non-EU countries such as Australia, Canada and South Africa will not receive increases that everybody else in the EU gets, is absurd.

And before you say, ‘quite right – they’ve moved elsewhere – they shouldn’t get it’, just remember that these people paid their subscriptions like everybody else and some even continued to pay their dues after they had moved abroad.

This has been a long-running dispute and was brought by 13 pensioners who have fought the issue at every stage of British and European law. Having now exhausted the last stage of the legal process they will now have to exist on annually decreasing pensions (due to inflation) with some receiving a miserly £25 a week whilst the ‘normal’ person gets £95.

There are approximately 540,000 pensioners in around 150 countries who are affected by this ruling and one old lady who moved to South Africa in 1989 has ‘lost’ the equivalent of £100,000 over the years.

Even government ministers declared the ruling ‘illogical’ but hamstrung by their lord and masters desire to hang on to every last penny, they have been particularly silent on the matter.

Before the ruling on Tuesday, I was absolutely convinced that the European Court would throw out the British Government’s case (not to award increases) but in a baffling statement they said, ’that denying pension increases did not breach a human rights convention declaration that "the enjoyment of (convention) rights and freedoms shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’.

What really bugs me is that some layabout who has never worked in his or her life gets their contributions paid for by the state and so when the time comes, they will pick up a nice little pension, with annual increases for doing absolutely nothing.

Similarly, a Latvian or an Estonian who wanders across a few borders and ‘settles down’ in the UK for a few years and doesn’t earn very much but rakes it in in benefits will also receive a Pension Credit so they can live comfortably in their old age.

The world is crackers. The UK Government is crackers but of course they’re all on their inflation proofed pensions so they don’t really have to worry too much!

PMQs and the Comedian’s Forum

At 1pm on a Wednesday everything stops. The kids are exceptionally nice, even offering to clean away the lunch dishes (they have a half day on a Wednesday) and make me a cup of coffee. They know to close the kitchen door and leave me to it – it’s Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQ’s)on TV and I just have to watch it to see that lying toad, Gordon Brown, wriggle and lie his way through another 30 minutes of questions asked by various Members of Parliament.

Of course, his own side submit their pre-rehearsed questions ahead of time so ‘toady’ can research the subject and prepare his next pack of lies whereas he has little knowledge of what is coming from the ‘other sides’ although his henchmen will have predicted the sort of interrogation he is likely to get so he can be semi-briefed.

Yesterday was a classic – Brown decided to come clean under a beautifully crafted question from a Conservative member and admit that he made a mistake about the Defence budget which has been in the news recently because of the answers he (Toady) gave to the Chilcott Enquiry which has been looking at why the UK went to war with Iraq.

Now given that Toady infamously micro-managed the economy as Chancellor of the Exchequer and paid particular attention to large spending departments such as Defence, and has been spouting stats and spending details like a deranged maths professor for the last 13 years, admitting he got ‘something wrong’ with a set of numbers is akin to the Pope actually admitting he is a Protestant and a Rangers supporter to boot. Brown has never, NEVER admitted he got anything wrong but given that it was his specialist subject which he got wrong, every commentator concluded that what he’d been saying for months was a blatant lie.

Anyway, I’m sure this will blow up over the next day or so, so I’ll leave it there but what I really wanted to write about is the website I log onto when PMQ’s is on telly. It’s a forum on the Guido Fawkes Blog site for politic nuts like me and allows them to commentate on PMQ’s as it happens and some of the comments are classic – here are some of the cleaner ones from yesterday, with an explanation where needed:

Nice to see the pugnacious pie-vomiting bulimic prat from Hull showing his nice side on TV – a reference obviously to John Prescott

I miss Harperson’s old giraffe outfit – a first reference to the clothes worn by the lady members, in this case Harriet Harman

Was that Brown admitting a mistake? – somebody has spotted Brown grovelling at the Dispatch Box

He lied and they died – a reference to the fact that Brown has consistently denied cutting the Defence Budget for the troops in Iraq

Oh my God he’s admitting a mistake – somebody cannot believe it

Can you believe a liar when he admits he’s lied – a bit of philosophy here

Looks like Jacqui has been fighting over the pies again with Prescott- a reference to the fact that Jacqui Smith has been piling on the weight

Is that a yeti on the front bench? – another clothing reference

She looks like a sofa I once owned in 1989 – yet another clothing reference

Hain has topped up on the Creosote again – a reference to the permanently tanned Peter Hain, and finally,

More full of crap than King Kong’s colostomy bag – another reference to our esteemed Prime Minister

And that was just the first ten minutes.

Dominos Pizzas

We had some friends round the other night and I went out and picked up five pizzas. There were seven of us including Guy and Kitty and normally when we eat in the pizza restaurant itself, we'll have a pizza each but for some reason, on Friday night we managed only two between the seven of us! So I've been dragging bits of pizza out of the freezer each day and chomping my way through Avocado Surprise, Perfect Pepperoni and something else only J knows the name of.

Pizzas in France leave a lot to be desired. Very thin, crispy bases and a variety of toppings never before encountered – including the avocado one mentioned above.

And then you’re sitting in front of the telly and Dominos are sponsoring some show or another and your taste buds go wild. Now I reckon Dominos do the best pizzas going but I haven’t tasted one for several years! I love Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust and Pizza Express’s Sloppy Guiseppe, but I could kill a Dominos right now.

Quite a few years ago when my eldest son, Stephen, arrived at my bachelor pad in Maidenhead for a long weekend and decided to stay for two years, I eventually decided my philanthropy was going too far and started to charge him rent. I took £100 a month off him and said it would be used for eating out.

We went to the Mexican and the Italian and the French and the pub but eventually, most of the money actually went to a Dominos franchise about 250 yards from my house.

The conversation usually went as follows when I emerged from the car after a 2 hour drive home through central London, ‘what do you fancy eating tonight dad?’ ‘Oh I can’t be bothered going out tonight or cooking anything so why don’t we just get a Dominos.’

After several months of this, Stephen would call Dominos of a night and they’d actually be on first name terms and not need to take an order because they now knew what we wanted. They’d have a chat and we’d get a few freebies and the guy would be at the door within minutes because of the short trip on his scooter. The pizzas were always roasting hot which isn’t always the case with pizza deliveries, and they were deeeeelicious.

After spending quite a bit with them, I casually mentioned to Stephen that he should seriously consider taking on a Dominos franchise and that I would help him with the cash.

He’s probably reading this right now and either (a) cutting his wrists because he didn’t accept my offer or (b) desperately trying to think when I made this amazingly generous offer but needless to say, he declined and of course the rest is history.

Back then, Dominos was in start-up mode and were looking for Franchisees and about £150k to start a delivery/take away premises, but Stephen wasn’t sure – maybe he thought he’d get fat eating all the profits!

Today Dominos is 600 stores strong in the UK and it now needs £280k to start a franchise and their profits are booming thanks to the recession when people are eating in more.

Stephen, we could have made a fortune!

And with that we move on to a 'lady' who made one fortune in one business and is out to make another in a completely new line of activity. Monaco Nigel's latest post is now available but contains adult themes.

http://monaconigel.blogspot.com/2010/03/naked-came-vintner.html

Granny 69

Now this is not a joke and it’s not rude. It’s something to do with France, so anything goes - particularly when it comes to culture and in particular, music based culture.

France is not well known for its singing stars. When Johnny Hallyday and Carla Bruni are feted as France’s finest, you know they are struggling to come up with anything or anybody remotely talented. So, the latest party circuit ‘princess’ to wow the night clubs and festivals of France with her DJ skills is a bit of a surprise, especially when you find out it’s a British granny who took a shine to the decks after going to a birthday disco for her grandson a few years ago.

Clad in her leopard-skin outfit and dark sunglasses, 69-year-old Ruth Flowers has conquered French clubland from the Cannes Film Festival to the top Paris nightspots with a mix of old-school hits, electrobeat and bling-bling style – whatever the latter two music genres might be.

"It started really when my grandson had a birthday party ... they always have a little disco, don't they, after the party," Flowers told Reuters, lounging on a white sofa in a Paris hotel in a green satin bomber jacket and trademark shades contrasting with her white hair.

While Flowers, a trained singer, was more used to church songs, she was so taken by the party that she decided there and then to become a disc jockey. "I had no idea at the time what electro music was," she said.

However, as someone with interests ranging from history to theatre and fashion, she was willing to learn. A friend put her in touch with French producer Aurelien Simon who taught her how to spin records and helped her to develop a style, sprinkling her techno sets with tunes from Abba, Queen and the Rolling Stones.

As I said, any country who has a tone deaf dinosaur, and a tuneless, guitar strumming chanteuse who is also the first lady who just happens to look good, as their national music treasures, then anything goes and usually does!

PS – where the 69 comes from, I have no idea, unless she’s 69 years old – yuck!

PPS - yup she's 69 years old and you can book her here for your very own party:

http://www.mamyrock.com/home.htm

Justice The French Way

Now I think if a person looks guilty, acts guilty and smells guilty then they probably are guilty but of course in a contradictory sense and to counteract that view, I also believe in the due process of law, the trial, the evidence, the jury and the verdict. But in my adopted country (France), all of that seems to go out of the window.

Take the latest criminal/trial sensation. André Bamberski, 72, a retired accountant from Toulouse, whose daughter Kalinka was aged 14 years when she died under particularly mysterious circumstances, has been pursuing a German doctor (Dieter Krombach) who injected his daughter with a substance that was supposed to encourage a tan. Later, on trial in Germany for causing her death, Krombach changed his statement to say it was a remedy for anaemia. He was cleared.

Bamberski never for a moment believed that Krombach was innocent and for 27 years has waged a campaign to have him tried in France for murder but the Germans refused to hand him over and so Bamberski was resigned to publicizing his campaign against Krombach wherever and whenever he could.

Last year, Krombach was kidnapped in Germany by a Croatian who claimed he was acting on purely altruistic reasons. Krombach was beaten, transported in a car boot across Germany and then dumped in a small French town. Bamberski had been told that this was about to happen and to his credit, he contacted the police and flew there immediately to see the ‘perpetrator’, whom he’d been chasing for 27 years.

Now at this stage it’s fair to point out that in the 27 years since Kalinka’s death, several things happened:

Kalinka’s post mortem did not establish the cause of death

Rape was strongly suspected but never investigated

Krombach was tried in Germany for the murder but was acquitted

Despite the German verdict, France tried Krombach in his absence and found him guilty, sentencing him to 15 years for manslaughter

Krombach is convicted in a German court of injecting a 16 year old with a dubious substance and is banned from practicing medicine

Krombach is convicted of fraud for continuing to work as a doctor in Germany despite the previous ban

Nine French judges rule that Krombach must stand trial in France, even though he had been kidnapped in Bavaria, taken across the border and delivered, bound and gagged, to French police

Bamberski, now also on trial in France for kidnap, along with the Croat who actually abducted Krombach, denies that his obsession with the German doctor has anything to do with the fact that he has a passionate dislike of Germans that was forged in the war when he and his sister were taken by the Nazis from their parents in France in 1940 and kept in prisons and homes in Poland and Germany.

So, just another ‘murder’ trial in France with no body, no real evidence, no witnesses but a hidden, political agenda. However, I still think Krombach sounds guilty.

Keep on Reading

Some of you reading my blog postings may have noticed the ‘counter’ which has recently been added to the page. This basically tells me how many ‘hits’ my site gets and other stats such as which countries the readers come from and less importantly, which browsers they use.

A few weeks ago, when I was struggling for subjects to write about and wasn’t feeling particularly inspired by anything (writer’s block?), I considered ‘shutting down’ the blog for a while but thought that before I did, I’d try and find just how many people actually read it, or at least visit the site.

I found a site-counter on the web but struggled for a couple of days trying to get the code onto my blog until Guy wandered past one night, saw me having problems and fixed it in about 30 seconds! Oh the confidence and abilities of youth!

That was about three weeks ago and since then you’ll see for yourselves that I’ve attracted some 700+ hits (not readers I hasten to add, just hits), approximately 200+ a week. But more fascinating than that is the country list of the visitors. Obviously the UK and France feature strongly, accounting for 75% of the hits, and then there’s a large percentage of readers (10%) who come into the ‘unknown’ category!

The US features, where I know I have at least a couple of readers in Allison and my mate Dave, as does Cyprus where J’s sister Cindy relieves the boredom of sitting in the sun each day by putting down her Pina Colada and visiting my blog. Thereafter the country list is quite interesting with readers from the following places having a look every now and again – Canada, Australia, Maylasia, Italy, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Hong Kong, Germany, Holland, the Lebanon and Estonia. And then there’s someone in St Vincent and the Grenadines who visits every now and again! I reckon Russia and Estonia are probably accounted for by my mate Ashley who works in Russia every couple of weeks and Tan, my neighbor who is working in Eastern Europe at the moment, but as to who the others are – I’ve no idea. I got a comment the other day which was in Chinese (I think it was Chinese) and maybe that was my Hong Kong reader – sorry whoever you are I couldn’t make out what you were saying. But I did click on your comment – and was taken to a Chinese sex site. Velly intelesting! For the geeks amongst you, as you would expect Internet Explorer is by far the most common browser used with 40% of the hits, followed by Safari (used by Apple devotees) on 32%. Firefox has a 24% following and there’s one ‘romantic’ still using Netscape Navigator – good on you whoever you are. So thank you one and all. After looking at my counter I was heartened and will continue writing rubbish every day with just the occasional foray into incisive ‘journalism’ when I feel particularly strongly about something – like the French! Keep reading – I love you all, I love you all!

Random Thoughts on the Terrorist Next Door

You might think this post is un-neighbourly – I DON’T CARE. You might think this post is racist – I DON’T CARE.

It all started a few weeks ago when my good friend and neighbor, Tan, went off on one of his working trips to some exotic part of the world. A week later he returned a different man.

Although he tried to blend back into Tourrettan society, he was conspicuous by his changed appearance (see picture) and strange new habits. Once a clean-shaven, bald-headed, loving father and husband, he now sports a foot long beard, wears a dirty tea-towel on his head, has traded his gleaming black Honda 4x4 for a camel and sits on the patio each night cleaning his AK47.

Being a kindly soul worried about the effect this strange new behaviour was having on his devoted family, I would wander over to his house and sit round the camp fire he’d built on the upper terrace and try and make him see sense. Unfortunately, each time I went over, his camel would spit at me. ‘Why’s it doing that’, I would ask. ‘Because you’re an infidel and a Rangers supporter’, Tan would reply and that would be that - conversation over.

I recommended that he keep a low profile but he did not help things when he approached the mayor’s office with a proposal to twin Tourrettes with Helmand Province. The dead sheep hanging from the upper balcony with their throats slit also did him no favours, with every dog in the neighbourhood heading for Tan’s house to eagerly lap up the rivers of blood which flowed towards the pool.

Poor Angie is also suffering as Tan has taken another five wives and is refusing to allow little Violet to be educated. He’s already talking about getting her married to Abdhul in Vence and she’s only 5! And poor Angie is no longer allowed to buy toilet paper as the Taliban only ever use their left hands for cleaning themselves after a ‘number two’, and as Tan was never too good on his right versus left, I refuse to shake his hand any more.

For the first two weeks after he came back from wherever he was ‘turned’, a strange noise was to be heard from his house which is a mere 20 metres away. Upon investigating the small explosions and constant hammering, I found Tan digging under the house to create a 4 bedroomed cave, complete with running water and Al Jazeera.

‘What are you doing’, I asked. ‘It’s to get away from the helicopter gunships which pass over looking for me every day’, Tan replied. ‘Tan don’t be paranoid, that’s just Gerri Halliwell and George Michael going to Monaco for their lunch’, I would say, but to no avail, the helicopters were the enemy and had to be dealt with. Unfortunately he drew more attention to himself when he went into Leclerc’s, parked his camel on the first floor and then tried to buy some SAM missiles. Failing to do so as Leclerc’s don’t even stock fireworks for Guy Fawkes night, he went off to the ladies section where he filled his trolley with all sorts of peroxide hair products and then completed his purchases with three bags of fertilizer. Ever since, a series of increasingly loud bangs can be heard crossing the divide between our houses as Tan obviously mixes his potions with varying levels of success.

I’ve also had to tell Tan that growing 2 acres of poppies is not allowed under the terms of the lease but he just sits there smoking a mixture of weeds and camel dung, chanting to himself and talking to his video camera.

So tensions are high but they will heighten considerably next month when Scotland take on Afghanistan in the international cricket competition. Will Tan Tan the Taliban Man fan the flames of international diplomacy by placing the Afghanistan flag on his roof and encouraging his camel to crap all over my drive or will he be back to normal saying, ‘another beer please Tom’?

Hey Jimmy and Sweaty Betty

J and I were watching an old TV show the other night when there was a scene shot at a greyhound racing track. ‘Didn’t you have something to do with greyhounds?’ my wife asked.

It brought it all flooding, or should I say, ‘racing’ back.

Back in about 1964, when I was 13 years old, my father fell in with a few men who owned some racing greyhounds. To my mother’s disappointment he started to disappear on Wednesday and Saturday nights to bet on them running at tracks throughout the central belt of Scotland.

We never knew if he won or lost because in working-class Glasgow homes, what a man did with his money was his concern but we did notice that on some nights when he returned, the smile was broad, whereas on other nights I would get a slap for still being up watching TV!

A couple of weeks later my father told me and my cousin Gordon to go to an old farm a couple of miles from our home and talk to a man called Frank. Within a couple of minutes Gordon and I had been hired as official greyhound trainers to ‘Hey Jimmy’ and ‘Sweaty Betty’.

We were soon to find out that training these dogs meant very long walks interspersed with getting them to chase fake rabbits pulled along a 100 metre ‘carpet’ by a pulley system, which amazingly managed to get the fake furry things to speed along at about 40 mph. It was all rather Heath Robinson but worked a treat.

I gradually learned that Jimmy and Betty were quite good especially when on a Monday (after a Saturday race) Gordon and I would get a bonus because the dogs had won.

The dogs got better and better, winning race after race but eventually for the consortium who owned the dogs it wasn’t worth betting on them because the odds were so short – i.e. you didn’t get much back if you had bet on them when they won. And there was not much to be gained by betting on the other dogs in the race either because invariably they didn’t win – ours did!

And so the plan was hatched. After a particularly easy win on the Saturday, Gordon and I were told to feed the dogs porridge for the next couple of weeks, which we did.

We later learned, after both dogs struggled to finish their next few races, that the porridge basically sat in the dogs’ stomachs and made them sluggish during races. Furthermore, it was not a drug and hence was undetectable.

The second part of the plan was then communicated to Gordon and myself. The dogs were to get their normal food for the following two weeks and had to receive extra training. Gordon and I didn’t need to be told that the consortium would then bet big at the next race on the basis that the dogs would be back to their best and the bets would return a fortune.

The problem was that when training the dogs on the Saturday morning prior to their ‘big’ race, they managed to slip their leads and ran off. Gordon and I chased them for miles and when we eventually caught them, the dogs and Gordon and myself were completely knackered. Of course, we never mentioned a thing and needless to say, Jimmy and Betty lost their respective races.

That night when my father came in from the greyhound track with a face like thunder - I got an extra heavy slap for still being awake!

Note: Monaco Nigel’s latest post can be found at the URL below but remember it has some adult themes.

http://monaconigel.blogspot.com/2010/03/sexy-serena.html

The Kenya Trip

On the 24^th March J will be off on a working trip to a Kenyan children’s centre (pictured) to support the Isaiah Trust, a charity set up by our good friend Nicky, and which aims to take orphans off the streets and rubbish tips in Kenya and provide them with accommodation, food and an education.

J has had a long held dream to ‘give something back’ to society and despite my view that she does enough by supporting a little girl in Africa and has two children of her own to bring up, there was a hankering to be on the ground and provide hands-on assistance to these poor children who are cast into the wilderness when their parents die.

Left to scavenge on rubbish tips for food, or thrown away items which can realize a few pence, and with no hope of an education because the state often insists on a uniform or shoes before they are allowed to attend schools, they are sentenced to a pitifully short life eking out an existence as best they can.

J, of course was desperate to go once the arrangements had been made but her enthusiasm was heightened greatly by the recent TV programme (Slumming It), where Kevin McLoed, previously known for his Grand Designs series, visited the Mumbai slums featured in the film, Slumdog Millionaire.

If you haven’t seen this two-part series I would urge you to try and find it on the web. One million people live in these slums and despite the fact that the children go off each day immaculate in their beautiful uniforms, many of them return home from school to spend hours raking in the rubbish tips for plastics, metals and other recyclable materials so that their family can exist.

The Kenyan children are not so fortunate and are excluded from school, don’t have even a basic form of housing and are regularly targeted by the authorities who want them off the streets but who do nothing to resolve the problem.

J will travel to Kenya with a willing heart, energy, empathy and love plus the usual bits and pieces adored by the children of the centre – old mobile phones, football shirts and for their studies, writing materials.

I’m sure the trip will change her life. Maybe she’ll take over this blog for a few days when she’s out there and we’ll get her thoughts as she experiences things first hand.

PS – our fundraising event on Friday 12^th March has been postponed. Nicky, the co-founder of the Isaiah Trust who was planning to accompany J on her trip has been hospitialized and is quite ill. Because of this, the trip itself was in danger until a few days ago and it was unfair to continue to tell those planning to attend that the fundraising was ‘on’, it was ‘off’ and then it was ‘on’ again and so we’ve postponed it until J returns.

Details of the Isaiah Trust at this URL: http://www.isaiahtrust.org/

Cooking the Raymond Blanc Way

There’s a new cooking series on the telly; Raymond Blanc’s Kitchen Secrets, and I’ve already worked out what his secret is – get yourself dozens of lackeys to do all the boring jobs and clean up after you.

His first programme, conveniently screened just before we had John and Linda over for dinner a couple of weeks ago, featured chocolate recipes, one of which I thought was just perfect to serve to our guests.

His chocolate panice (??) or tart seemed quite easy to make and off I went to our local supermarket with the list of ingredients:

70% chocolate

Cocoa powder

Cream (by the bucket load)

Full cream milk

Eggs

Corn Flakes

Hazelnut liqueur

Praline paste (couldn’t get any)

Ground Coffee

Gelatine

And on and on and on……..

After making just the base (I’ll spare you the details) I’d used just about every dish and utensil in the kitchen and then I realized what Blanc did. Every boring job he had to do, such as scrunching up the cornflakes, he got one of his sous chefs to do it, and every time a dish was dirtied, a sous chef appeared with a clean one. If the knife wasn’t sharp enough he got a lackey do sharpen it for him. On the other night’s show he had one of his chefs climbing trees (‘go to zee very top’) to get some apples for a dish he was making.

At one stage he was complaining bitterly about the design of a hand whisk which wouldn’t rest in a bowl without falling out (strangely I have also thought about this problem) and then when the commentator asked who had designed it – he looked at it and found out that it was Raymond Blanc! Cue hysterical laughter from the production team and total embarrassment from Monsieur Blanc! I’m sure I saw some of his lackeys chuckling in the background as well.

Anyway, back to the cooking of the chocolate tart.

One of the problems in France is that you just cannot get double (i.e. whisking) cream. They’ve all sorts of other types of cream but not the sort you can whisk into those fluffy ‘clouds’ and so I bought a variety of cartons and jars and tried a few before settling on the Créme Normandie. The chocolate filling seemed ok –ish until I chilled it in the fridge for a couple of days whereupon it turned into breeze-block. Nevertheless our guests were very kind and were quite complimentary about my culinary efforts but as it was so incredibly rich, they refused a second portion – well I think that’s why they refused!

So for the rest of the week, Kitty and I had chocolate tart each night and do you know, slightly warmed up in the microwave it was absolutely amazing. Clever Thomas! I might even make it again.