lundi 30 avril 2007

Service with a smile

Of course on the Anglo Saxon blogs and journos we get the continuous criticism of the French public services. Bureaucratic, unionised and what have you.

Well last Friday I put out our wheely bin for the biweekly rubbish collection Saturday morning. Mid morning Saturday I see our bin has lost a wheel and have difficulty in bringing it back in. In the wheely bin was a polite notice apologising for having eaten the bin and advising me if I call a certain number I’ll get a new bin. I dump the notice on my wife’s desk and get on with a man’s business. My wife after a weekend in Paris reappears on Monday morning and calls the number. Because the bin is only slightly broken the rubbish service come out Monday afternoon and hey presto I now have a repaired bin ready to be wheeled out Tuesday evening all for free.

And is it only rubbish? NO it isn’t. I put a letter in the local letterbox with a quotation for a customer. I quickly realized I had made a big error. What to do? Inform the customer that I had made a big mistake before it was put into the decision process? Maybe, but it wasn’t going to cover me with glory when I was fighting for the contract, especially since I had miscalculated the postage and the customer would have to pay a fee to receive my mail. No much better to put a post it on the post box, Cher Facteur and ask that he return it to my letter box. Having held off on informing my customer I was relieved to find the returned letter in my letter box that evening. Yes I do give a tip to my facteur, this year it will be a bit bigger. I got that contract.

dimanche 29 avril 2007

Claptrap and hogwash

Actually I am getting rather confused over this rubbish issue. I seem to have difficulty in following the tripe printed by the English gutter press. If I understand rightly Gordon Brown, a Scot, seeking to leave Europe, is convinced that Scotland, who don’t belong to Europe but want to join Europe, will have their application vetoed by England who belong to Europe but want to leave and other such balderdash. Any way he has decided having spent a fortune on public health, wrecked the country’s finances and made a wasteland of people’s pensions, to now overload the hospitals with people sick from maggots, vermin and rodents running in the street after paying a call to the London sewers or other such dire drivel.

Although it may be that he is trying to create a divertissement for the junk projections that were given to the Olympic committee, garbage in, trash out. Anyway he seems to have got himself into a bottomless cess pit of crappy numbers which should, run and run, as with diarrhoea.

The up tick is that the army, which has got itself into a shithole in Iraq following Blair’s bunkum and eyewash, has a problem of soldiers mixed body parts. They are concerned that Gordon’s maggots will get into the rotting coffins of the young soldiers before they have time to sort out the DNA. The matter is creating a foul stench since it will later be necessary to get the right worm into the right coffin. And that before the royal dreg comes along to the cemetery.

Meanwhile Bliar in an attempt to create international sympathy and to pinch development funds from deserving countries has declared Kent a trashed county as a result of an earthquake of .001 on the Richter scale. Tragically, litter baskets have been wrecked, but no support is forthcoming. Hard crap living in a detested tip of a country.

As they say, where does the rubbish begin and the trash end*. Meanwhile over here we are splitting our sides laughing as the rosbifs are sinking in their own detritus.

(*Official answer John O’Groats and Lands End or vice versa)

samedi 28 avril 2007




We liked Porto very much. Above is a photo taken from the opposite bank of the Douro looking towards Porto. The river bank on which I am standing while taking this photo, is the bank where all the famous Port cellars are located, Sandeman etc. I enjoyed a 30 year old porto at a small bar. On the Porto side of the river is the old town. It is an area with a lot of pleasant restaurants. We enjoyed a delightful Dorade later that evening accompanied by a vino verde.

Porto is obviously a city that has seen better times. Indeed I suspect it was once a rich town. This steel girder bridge was erected at the beginning of the twentieth century. An ambitious and expensive project at that time. Today there are quite a lot of buildings which could do with a substantial renovation.




What I suspect has happened is that the town did extremely well out of it’s port at one time, but the fashion of fortified wines has passed and the town has not developed new sources of wealth.

Of course port was very much an English drink. Many of the famous brands bear English names. The drink was really boosted through the slave trade. The British ships coming back from America would drop off, in Liverpool, the raw materials produced by the American slave plantations. A few drunken nights in Liverpool and the ship headed off to Porto to pick up the necessary alcohol. The crews on the slave ships were not a happy lot. Inevitably the nature of the trade led to many psychological disorders in the crew members. It was well known in the trade that the crew on the English ships would get drunk on lashings of port before gang raping the slaves, both sexes. The inconvenience was that they passed on their venereal diseases, syphilis mainly. The market became very depressed for English slaves. Obviously the American plantation owners didn’t want to catch English crabs from their slaves. So the City of London seeing that profits were declining decided to pull out and came up with the Wilberforce line of spin.

This unfortunate connection with the English seems to have rendered the inhabitants of Porto rather lazy. They seem to think that they can just get away with marketing spin, cost control and delocalisation. They really have the English disease of never making the effort to improve the product. The time of fortified wines has passed. In the days of long unhealthy sea voyages and drunken crew it was a good solution. But today we prefer natural wine, lighter and more energising to the taste buds. Come on Porto, get rid of those dishonouring English names, build on the brilliant natural wines of the Douro valley. Cast off your infamous brush with the Anglo Saxons, Europe welcomes you.

dimanche 22 avril 2007

Did I get a glimpse of heaven?




So I return rather reluctantly from a magical week savouring the delights of Portugal. Until my visit there were only two countries in which I would live, France and Italy. Now there are three. Portugal has all the delights of a Latin country, the style of living the joie de vivre. The beautiful fish, fruit, salads. Lot’s of gorgeous wine. The people always helpful and friendly.

We started in Lisbon, went to Sintra, which was the only negative point, lot’s of Anglo Saxons. Then gradually up to Porto. An amazingly attractive lively town. A trip across the Doura valley which is scintillatingly beautiful. Back down to Coimbra the university town and finally to Lisbon for the last two days.

mercredi 11 avril 2007

Heaven in the here and now

Tomorrow I’m off to Portugal and the Porto. I have strict instructions from my French and Portugese friends to avoid the Algarve. Nothing but English and fish and chips.

My job takes me to all parts of the Orléans area. Today I was in a back street near the theatre. I spied a seedy brasserie and couldn’t resist a bit of local colour. The lunch took me way way back to my student days and lunch on 5 francs. Everything was right, the Gaulloise smoking Frenchmen at the bar,the paper table cloth which is soaked with red wine, the pernod carafe of water. The unidentified bottle of rouge from which you help yourself. Excellent taste once the sandpaper effect wears off. The meal was a fixed price 10 euro deal, nothing written down. Starter, oeuf dur mayonnaise. I just love them, I smother them with pepper and dip the baguette in the mayonnaise. On to an excellent omelette au jambon. Then, two whole camemberts dumped on the table, help yourself. Absolutely perfect, two large lumps were readily consumed. Yes, yes wait for it. Dessert was…. Crème caramel in those little offwhite dishes. The crème a dirty cream and the gorgeous bitter caramel at the bottom.

Heaven, heaven, heaven. Anyone for Macdo?

dimanche 8 avril 2007

Life is good


So it’s Easter Sunday and I had the obvious task of doing the shopping. Because 1) there are a lot of people doing their shopping at the same time, see photo above 2) we eat lots of super goodies, a gigot and big tarts, with a commensurate bill.

Anyway it’s all very nice. The kids are here, with attachments. The weather is lovely. The Easter bunny hid chocolate eggs in the garden. The garden looks beautiful with the cherry blossom. The company made a good profit in Q1. I have new customers. The new employee is working out well. I am off to Portugal for a week’s holiday on Friday. And I am going to open a bottle of burgundy from my cellar. Jesus isn’t life good. My wife went to church to pray that it continues, a bit anyway.
Happy Easter.

mercredi 4 avril 2007

Masters of Disinformation

If you send a message to the Telegraph, this is what they say.


"Thank you for your comment

Your comment has been submitted for moderation so may not appear for a few minutes."


Which in my humble opinion is not a very honest statement. So, after a whole sequence of harmless posts being axed, I sent a post in quoting this message and saying that the British are the masters of disinformation. My message didn't get posted, but the next one did!!!! Guilty conscience?

mardi 3 avril 2007

Sponge cake

The Brits seem to be jabbering on a lot about their pensions these days. Why should I care, I don’t have one cent of pension money coming from anyone in England; thank goodness.

In fact it is rather agreeable to sit back and see them squeezed. After all we have received endless abuse about how antiquated the French system is and how much better is the privatised UK system. Well if you really want your pension money used to finance a private equity buy out with leverage at 1 zillion to one and bankers, accountants, lawyers fees at 10 zillion euro then by all means the City is the place for your pension.

But should I be so smug? Are the English the sort of people to take their medicine? Or are they more likely to look at ways, fair but mainly foul, to pass on their suffering to people who have strictly nothing to do with the blundering of the British economy?

England is creating a lot of strays and waifs. Poorly pensioned boomers, late career journalists with low pension prospects, divorcees in need of child assistance, mangy horses. You guessed it, they are all turning up in France to sponge off our ‘antiquated system’. What do our pathetic politicians do? Do they put cameras under the trucks coming from England to detect these fugitives? Are they using converted old ships as holding lodging pending their return home? Do they plan charters from Paris to London to repatriate these sorry masses? Hell no, they just share all our goodies with these spongers, encouraging Brown to plan further cleansing of the economically invalid. Is Le Pen the only answer?