In a searing indictment of the awfulness of French TV, close to 300 people packed into the local village hall (salle polyvalente) on a Saturday night, in order to play bingo or – as they call it here – Loto. We joined them, eschewing the far more uplifting televisual entertainment offered by British programme-makers (Britain’s Got…
Last year, in an escalation of the ceaseless struggle against ever encroaching weeds – if you wanted to flaunt your French vocabulary, you could call it the war on terroir – I traded up from an electric to a petrol-driven lawnmower. Despite my initial concerns, this has actually turned out to be rather effective: to…
It’s my birthday later this week. Given the title of this post, you may want to hazard a guess as to how old I’ll be…. Well done. Did you immediately think of the classic Beatles song from Sergeant Pepper? Me too. Sergeant Pepper came out in 1967 (fiftieth anniversary next year: how scary is that?),…
Browsing my news sources this morning, I happened to spot this little item on the Sky News website, under the headline “Prince ‘Fighting Flu After Emergency Landing’”: Now, I have nothing whatsoever against Prince, who is an accomplished and very interesting musician (57 though: who knew?) and I wish him a speedy recovery. However, this…
Some of you may be wondering whatever happened to the public service joint venture – announced with so much fanfare at the beginning of last year – between this blog and the local newspaper, ‘Le Quotidien de Faire-le-Dodo (87)’. Late last year Le Quotidien, like so many other print journals faced with rising print costs…
My broad aversion to travel has been well documented in these pages. To be clear, though, while A (home) is always to be preferred, I’ve no objections whatsoever to B, C or – venturing further afield – even D. Being somewhere else is fine, it’s the getting there that I don’t care for. That’s because…
From 2016, thinking about nuances of meaning… Yes and no Many French expressions have found their way into everyday usage in the Anglophone world. Think of fait accompli, for example, or le mot juste. Even that (allegedly) archetypal British character trait, sang-froid. I could throw in déjà vu as well, but you’ve probably already seen it. There’s…
Never look a gift horse in the mouth, it’s said. Especially when it offers you an opportunity for a little tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation, as in this recent Daily Prompt from WordPress: ‘Quirk of habit: Which quirky habit annoys you the most, and what quirky habit do you love — in yourself, or others” As a general…
If they can update the seven wonders of the world to modern times, perhaps it’s worth thinking about a new list of modern sins. A recent WordPress Daily Prompt – they seem to be on a bit of a roll at the moment – had the great idea of asking what your eighth deadly sin would…
Nowadays, with all-pervasive social media and the universal availability of the tools to produce it, seeing and hearing yourself is a commonplace, However, it was not always thus. The first time I saw myself on ‘video’ – although back in 1964 it was called film – I was standing around aimlessly playing in a school cricket…
the only deadhead in the hameau 