Once more unto the beach

As the English winter goes into what seems to be its 10th month, I’ve been turning grumpy. “If you’re so rude about the French”, asked a puzzled but loyal reader, “how come you can’t wait to get there?” Easy – I’m not rude about the French: I may not be mad about Sarko, but then I’m not crazy about most politicians, whatever their nationality or party. In fact, French pols are probably closer to the will of the people than ours are: at least they didn’t join George and Tony’s war while a million people walked the streets in protest. And yes, I have more French friends than English ones; and yes, perhaps I should give Sarko a decent chance. He’s certainly making the right noises, which is more than you could say for his predecessor: and his predecessor – the famous Resistance hero - was even worse. Meanwhile we Poms can’t talk: we have the man who isn’t Blair – or anyone else for that matter. But all will be well next week – just one look at that blue water and I’m Monsieur Nice.

Shoot-out at the Old Kop corral No one likes political posts, so, to the Matter of the Greatest Importance in the RW household.
The MGI is that Everton are fifth in the table - two points behind Liverpool, who are fourth, and there remain only seven games to play. Only the top four teams go into the Champions League. You get the picture.
On Sunday afternoon, the two play each other for the 207th time. If the Blues beat the Reds, we (I mean "they") go a point ahead and become fourth. If the other way round, Everton go five points behind. Wife is a Reds supporter – bless: she was very young at the time. It was built into the (unwritten) pre-nuptial agreement that I am forbidden from making disparaging remarks about them, even if they are a foreign-owned and –coached bunch of overpaid prima donnas, awash with money that you'd think they might be sharing with their poorer neighbours and – until 1892 – landlords. Now - another pillar of the pre-nup is the Exception to the Non-Disparagement Rule: that it does not apply when the two play each other. Now can you feel the tension?
Even had to iron my own blue shirt.

Stance and Circumpomp

We had a distinguished visitor in Windsor today: the vertically-challenged president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy and his new wife, Carla Bruni - so we went along to show a bit of entente cordiale. The Castle pulled out all the ceremonial stops – bands, cavalry, parades. Not Sarko. The last time I saw a republican president in this country it was William J. Clinton, and he did a walk-about and shook hands with us all. Not Sarko: he was met by the Queen at the railway station but, contrary to the advertised schedule, arrived by car, decided to stay at the castle one night instead of three, and, instead of travelling in the open coach with the Queen, skulked in the back of an enclosed carriage. At least he was polite enough to discard the Ray-bans – they're not an absolute necessity in Windsor. If there’s not much of him to see in bright sunshine, as the pic shows there’s even less in a shrouded coach.
Mrs S was a different item - I guess her name would translate into Charlie Brown. They went up to London to meet the PM. If he’d called in the Defence minister they’d have had three of a kind.

Au revoir Maroc

Take-away chicken We were kindly invited to Larache this weekend - it’s up north near Tangier - but we refused, mainly because it would be an eleven-hour round trip and we go home tomorrow. But there's another reason: the Rough Guide to Morocco advises that, if invited out, it’s considered polite to take food - and recommends a live chicken. The thought of sitting on a train holding a live chook for 5½ hours was too much. At least we wouldn't have to bring it back.

Tomorrow we swap our cloudless skies and 22 degree temperatures for rainy, 8ｰdegree London. We’ll miss Casablanca. We’ve had fun lampooning the strange, but we’ve really enjoyed the people here. OK, so the odd taxi-driver may have tried to rip us off - just like those in London do - but hardly anyone else. We’ll remember the many acts of kindness: the kid who got us through the labyrinthine Medina of Fes and refused any reward; the passengers on the train who told us to stay put although we were clearly in someone else’s seats and the rightful occupants were standing in the corridor (we moved); Hassan, with whom we've chatted every day, despite the fact that neither party could understand a word the other said. Will we be back next winter? As they say here, inchallah.

TAnGier

In a quandary over Cliff's tag. Because of baggage restrictions, I only have three books with me, and two of them don't have enough sentences on page 123. There's the Casablancan yellow pages - great cast, crap plot - which would bring us into Auto-collants, or Self-adhesives, so it looks like I'm stuck with book three.
It's called Morocco and is a collection of writings about the country. The quote is from Tangier: A Different Way by Lawdom Vaidon, American freelance journalist and table-tennis champion of northern Morocco for seven consecutive years, and tells of a cosmopolitan part of Tangier called Soco Chico, home to fugitive expatriates of various kinds. The first two sentences are about Bill Burroughs, heroin addict and wealthy grandson of the adding machine tycoon.
"He could produce an excellent curry when he felt like it, and though his quarters usually resembled a sea of books, typing paper, temporarily discarded clothes, syringes, needles and the remains of yesterday's spaghetti, he remained a popular host. The 'different' novel that he was writing was published in 1959 as The Naked Lunch.
Everybody in the Soco was respectful to Paul Lund, a self-styled and proved criminal - he had spent three years in Dartmoor - who was on the run from the English Midlands."
Good book as far as it goes, but one editor, Robert Bidwell, died before publication and the other, his wife Margaret, seems to have lost interest in it and didn't even bother with an index. Surprising, really, in view of the fact that the publishers are the eminent TPP, publishers of such unforgettable works as The French Riviera: A Literary Guide, (ISBN 978-1-84511-455-8).

Fes tivities

We stayed in a riad in the old town. They’re a sort of posh B & B, usually hidden down some dark alley in the Medina, and - even after three days of residence - not easy to find. The Riad Arabesque is a former Andalusian/ Moroccan palace tastefully restored, its sumptuous reception hall looking as if Sydney Greenstreet might stroll in at any moment in a crumpled white suit. The first night they told us that dinner would be “special”. It was held in one of the rooms off the hall: singers and oud players - are they oudists? - wandered in and out as we reclined on low couches and more cushions than John Lewis’s; people plying us with Morrocan delicacies like stuffed aubergines, sun-dried tomatoes, and wild artichokes - thirteen dishes in all; at the end of which we could hardly move. That was the starter. After that came the lamb tajine, with which we coped gamely before falling back exhausted into the cushions. That was when the chicken tajine arrived. I recall vaguely refusing various deserts: dates, fruits, etc., and cheese and as we struggled upstairs the DG saying something about surgical intervention, but it’s all something of a blur. Breakfast turned out to be similar, but with only 12 courses. We gave dinner a miss.

Halfway between Fes and the coast is the Meknes wine territory - mile after mile of flat, sunny vineyards which produce most of Morocco’s wine. We knew some of them beore we got here, (even Windsor has a Moroccan restaurant) but we decided to try our luck down-market - and got as far as the Gerouane - red, white, rosé or gris (a near-rosé) - without problems. One of these would cost you 32dh - a whole £2 - but our favourite red is still the Domaine du Sahari Reserve, costing an outrageous 63dh, or £4. We found the answer to what happens to empty bottles: they go in the poubelle - there are no facilities for recycling them. But it still hurts.

It was like missing an open goal and I blew it. Our American friends who live in an eagle’s nest, high above Villefranche, are often telling us that they’ve seen (100-miles-away) Corsica - while we who spend our lives down in the town haven’t seen it since the mid-eighties. But the other day they mailed to say that they saw Elba.
It was probably the only time in my life I’ll have the opportunity to say “And are you now able?”, and I didn't.

Fes please

We took the comfortable four-hour train trip to Fes. It’s the oldest of the ancient imperial cities - founded in the ninth century by the great-grandson of Mohammed himself, and from what we could see, not much changed.
In fact there are at least two Feses. When the French took over after 1912, the enlightened French Governor, Hubert Lyautey, decided to leave the old medieval Fes untouched and to build the new French colonial city outside of the old town. (Edith Wharton was so taken with Lyautey that she dedicated her book, In Morocco, to him.) There are only three kilometres between the old town and the new, but the difference is striking: one modern, prosperous, with wide, tree-lined boulevards, fountains and pavement cafes; the other the seething Medina, the ancient Arab quarter - the quarter is ancient, not the Arabs - its narrow streets so winding and undulating that it’s impossible, even with a compass and solar navigation, to keep one’s bearings for more than a few minutes. It doesn’t help, either, that the streets and landmarks are hardly ever labelled, or if they are, it’s in some Jackson Pollock-like script like the product of a leaky paint tin. Your only hope is that some ten-year-old kid will take pity on you and ask what you are looking for. Then the challenge is to remember the name of the mosque (of which there are over 400) that you were so confident of remembering when you read about it the previous evening.
Such is the topography of the Medina that the only practicable means of transport is donkey-powered. Sad-looking - but then, what have they got to laugh about? - spindly-legged donkeys and mules squeeze by, almost invisible under their huge loads, while recumbent on top of it all is the animal’s owner. When Napoleon called the English “a nation of shopkeepers”, he obviously hadn’t seen Morocco. The souks consist of miles upon miles of tiny stalls, their size seeming still to fit Mark Twain’s description when he was here in the 1860s: “about that of an ordinary shower-bath in a civilised land” (in Twain's view there was only one civilised land). Every fourth shop seems to be a shoe store - just like the shopping malls at home except that there’s not a chain store in sight.
Among the seething crowds of locals, tourists are comparatively rare - but they’re there, in their M & S chinos and Panama hats, Indian-filing behind their guide like baby ducklings. As a group passed us, someone called out the first English words we'd heard in three weeks: “donkey-poo”. And the warning was passed down the line: “donkey-poo, everybody”.
Most people wear floor-length, hooded djellabahs, the men's woollen, those of the women - in scarves but not veils - lighter-coloured and more decorative, and the girls wear smaller replicas. The young guys wear baseball caps and football shirts bearing names like Beckham and Ronaldinho.
But I never saw anyone wearing a Fez.

A refuse you can’t offer

We tend to accumulate - not excessively but on a fairly regular basis - wine bottles. This is not a problem - certainly not in Windsor, where the Council give you a special container and call every Tuesday to empty it; or in France, where you take them to a nearby recyclage. But what to do with them here is a serious and growing problem.
In Morocco, it being a Muslim - and largely boozeless - country, drinks receptacles come in either plastic or cardboard: there's no need for glass bottles, and there are no facilities for recycling them. When it’s only a matter of a honey- or mustard-jar or two, there’s no harm in putting them in with the rubbish. But putting bottles into landfill is something we are now conditioned not to do. We can't leave them for the landlord to dispose of. What to do? Answers on a post card.

As predicted here, Everton beat Manchester City last night and are now back in fourth place, and breathing down the neck of the number three. It’s an over-used word I know, but it really is phenomenal, especially when you think of the money Chelsea and the other big guys spend. I’m surprised that no journalist - as far as I know - has remarked on this phenomenon: though it‘s something Finkelstein may well have done. It seems to me there’s a great story to be written based on the ‘points won per pound spent’ value of our top clubs’ management. When it happens, David Moyes‘s canonization - if not sainthood - should be assured. But there's a cloud on the horizon; a problem more serious than wine bottles. Would this marriage survive both Everton and Liverpool being in the Champions League next year?

Greetings and a message to the faithful reader(s) in Valencia who join us nearly every evening around happy hour and are now north of us for a change: thanks for your interest and support. By the way, what do you do with your empties?
Off to Fès in the morning.

Going places - but not the right ones

Getting around is always a challenge for me. As I tend to get lost easily, I carry a compass and map as if traversing the Gobi desert - even when going to Windsor Post Office. But in Casablanca it’s especially challenging: it’s not only the unfamiliar street names, but the fact that they are in the gradual process of replacing the old French names with Moroccan ones. This means that every street map you get is different depending on when it was printed. Further complications are that not many of the streets are sign-posted anyway, and even the locals do not know the current nomenclature.
The other evening I was having difficulty directing a taxi driver to our street - Bashir Ibrahimi - and, thinking that the problem was my Arabic pronunciation, I asked him what its original name was, so that I could find it on my map. He said. “I don’t know - taxi drivers know only the French names”. (That space under the sign is where the original name - which I now know to be Rue des Quinconces - used to be.)
So the procedure is as follows: find a street that you both know that still has a French name and navigate from there. It‘s a bit like the old Radio Four game, Mornington Crescent:
“Avenue de Londres?”
“No.”
“Rue Foucaud?“
“No.”
“Boulevard de la Resistance.”
“Yes!”.
The other day I had to get to the British Embassy to get something signed. What I had thought was an impeccable pronunciation of “Royaume Uni” was repeated back by the driver as “Roumanie” and off we sped, crammed with our shopping into the back seat of a Fiat Uno, not knowing whether we were on our way to the Roumanian Embassy - or Bucharest.

Je n'egret rien. The DG complains that I am obsessing on storks. There seems to be some controversy about whether they're storks or egrets: can anyone help? But who was it gave me the camera?

Back last December I posted that Everton were fourth in the table. I did it in a hurry because I thought it wouldn't last out the day. Well, they are still fourth, even if - unless they’re playing one of the top three - they continue to appear last on Match of the Day. You can guess why I’m posting this now: Liverpool play Middlesborough later today.
(OK, so now you know I didn’t manage to post this in time. The Reds beat 'boro and we’ve now swapped places with them. But we play Man City tonight...)

Blessed are the pizza makers

They make great pizzas in Rabat, thin and crispy and not smothered in tasteless cheese. All the food is good in fact - I only highlight pizzas because I liked the title - but the best bit is the bill. Salad, sole and filet steak, a good bottle of wine and coffee for two people (that’s one bottle of course) with tip, set us back £24.
Rabat is about 100 kilometres north of Casablanca, but a universe away if measured in terms of civic pride. Wider boulevards, cleaner streets, shallower potholes, clearer air, quieter traffic and more discreet calls to prayer. Perhaps the last two are linked: Oxford City Council is currently debating whether to allow one of the city’s mosques to do its muezzin over loudspeakers. If they do, let it be along the lines of Rabat. Casablancan worshippers are summoned by something along the lines of a Brazilian football commentator on steroids – a noise level that I guess is necessary to compete with all the other street sounds. The DG asked a guy yesterday if they’d ever thought of bells. He smiled indulgently - it’s a national characteristic that no one admits voluntarily that they don’t have something.
The menu last night listed about a dozen items of fish:
“I’ll have the turbot aux fines herbes.”
Shrug. “Sorry, we don’t have turbot.”
“OK. I’ll have the St. Pierre aux champignons.”
“Sorry, no St. Pierre.”
“What kinds of fish do you have?”
“Sole.”
At the newsstands, it goes:
“Do you have The Times?” The answer is either “It didn’t come today” or “There are none left”. In three days, we never saw an English paper - which after all isn’t surprising: we haven’t seen a Brit or American, or heard an Anglo-Saxon word since we’ve been in Morocco. It’s doing wonders for our French, if not our Arabic.

That's the 12th century gate to the Kasbah in Rabat. We went to Rabat on Edith Wharton’s recommendation. She was right. New monuments can be impressive, beautiful even: old ones are also moving. The walled town of Chellah, just outside Rabat, for example: first - from 20BC for three centuries - the Romans, then in the 12thC everyone left and it has remained uninhabited ever since. (Well that’s what it says in the guidebooks, but a security man pointed out the house, half-covered in foliage, and garden where the first French Governor, (from 1912) Marshall Hubert Lyautey, had lived - clearly derelict, but far from a 2,000- or 900-year-old ruin.) Edith was very impressed by Chellah; and apparently also by Hubert, whom she knew when she was here in 1917.
But there are other inhabitants who hardly get a mention: hundreds of them. They’re everywhere you look, occupying every height and mating, with a call that’s a strange rattle like a North American woodpecker in low gear. Yes, storks. All that's missing is the hoarse whisperer, David Attenborough.

Isn't she lovely

Everyone asks if we’ve seen the Grand Mosque. We went there yesterday. It’s big - I mean BIG. The nave would comfortably house Wembley and the Giants Stadia and still leave room for Goodison Park, (though perhaps the Emirates would be more apt). It’s also exceptional in that non- Muslims are allowed in, except on Fridays - and I’m glad to say one is allowed, exceptionally, to carry one’s shoes in a bag rather than leave them at the door - much more sensible, (especially during Ramadan, when it can house 25,000 worshippers) than coming outside to find a 50,000-shoe mountain. Especially if you’ve just bought a pair of Bally’s and you aren’t the first out.

Strange things happen in taxis: if there’s an empty seat, people will stop you and - - if you’re going their way - hop in. Very eco-friendly, and presumably helps keeps the price down: the most we’ve paid so far was still less than £2 - for a 5-kilometre trip. Kids approach you at traffic lights, selling roses or paper tissues - and today a guy stopped the car, waited until the driver wound his window down, and said, ‘Madame, Monsieur, I would like to sing you a little song.’ - and bursts into it, accompanied by cab driver on Arabic obscenities. As we speed away, the Casablancan Stevie Wonder just manages to extricate head from taxi in time to prevent it departing therewith. Off to Rabat tomorrow, for, we’re told, a bit of sanity.

The Quick or the Dead

We’re still trying to get the hang of the Casablanca traffic and hoping we get it before it gets us. It reminds you of the old Irish joke about switching from left- to right-hand drive in stages - cars only for the first year, then trucks and busses. The Casablancan Highway Code as I read it is: cars stop on red lights, bikes and scooters never. Pedestrians have no idea what‘s going on, because, to add to the excitement, the colour of the lights is a secret to all except drivers approaching the crossing. Thus ‘cars still’ means you can cross, but only until the lights change, an event that you do not become aware of until three lanes of bikes and Peugeot 106s are hurtling towards you, horns a-braying. There are traffic cops, but their function is unclear: sometimes they’re pro-lights, sometimes they’re anti. When in anti-lights mode you can’t tell which stance means Stop - profile or full frontal? - until he's approaching wielding a wad of tickets.
It sure keeps your weight down, but I can’t help wondering how many lives might be saved by a few Run like Hell!/Don’t Run signs

I’m not complaining - honest. We don’t have a word for depaysagement - unfamiliarity I guess - the thrill of not being at home - of expecting the unexpected. It’s more fun than being in Florida or Grand Canary - or even Windsor - where everyone speaks English and you can’t get lost. We have a super apartment, in which, although we can't both be online at the same time (one of us is XP and the other Vista, and each system jealously demands the deinstallation of the other's driver!) we have so far coexisted amicably. Just watch this space...

Another try at looking at you

When Murray Burnett was sitting in the Grand Hotel du Cap on Cap Ferrat writing Everybody Comes to Ricks – later to be given the much sexier name Casablanca – I suspect he may never have been to Casablanca. If so, as well as telling us about the corrupt police chief rounding up the usual suspects, he would have mentioned Air Quality. The AQ reminds you of LA on a bad day – with added dust. Construction and deconstruction seem to be Casablancas cottage industry, and the guys who aren’t knocking something down or building something are watching others do it. If doing any of these, youre allowed to block whole pavements, leaving the rest – ie. tourists and women – to dance pasadobles with the traffic.
Ah yes, the traffic. Tahir Shah, in his otherwise excellent book, The Caliphs House: A Year in Casablanca, fails to mention it. When a Casablancan checks out a new car, he must test the horn first, for noise level and durability. The average motorist has one hand permanently on the horn, one on the mobile phone, one on the gear stick and one on the wheel – using them in that order of priority. OK, so that’s four: I guess the horn must be foot-operated. The first result is double-glazing -defying, ear-plug-penetrating, noise, 24/7. The second result is that other drivers don’t notice it any more, thus causing klaxoneurs to klaxon, not less, but more, in the hope of even being noticed.
I should explain why this post is apostrophe-bereft: I cant find it. Its bad enough learning to use a French/Arabic AZERTY keyboard and having to go through afterwards changing the qs to as, but now I live in fear of Lynne Truss reading it. (The DG did have the presence of mind to bring her laptop but the ADSL line isn’t – hey! An apostrophe – what did I do? – Vista-compatible). That’s (another one!) enough for today. Ill tell you something about Casablanca later.

Heres looking at Casablanca - through the haze

To Erm is Human

After England’s pedestrian performance against Switzerland last night – literally so, since much of it was played at walking pace – the BBC selected two Scousers for interview, and we saw Rooney and Gerrard competing to see how many “erm”s you can get into a single interview, I think Gerrard won by 47 to Rooney’s mere 35. But to be fair, Gerrard was asked more – erm – questions than – erm – Rooney. And they couldn’t interview the coach because they don’t have an “erm” in Italian.

Road to Morocco When you look in the London Library catalogue for books about Morocco you get 249 responses. But don’t get too excited, because in half the cases it’s a reference to the binding. Like Hope, Crosby and Shakespeare’s 1623 folio of “The Tragedie of Julius Caesar”, we’re Morocco-bound. We’re Casablanca-bound to be precise: I’ve had the trench-coat dry-cleaned and am learning not to grit my teeth when friends put on funny accents and say “Play it Sam” or “Here's looking at you, kid”.
Having spent some time in Marrakech a couple of years ago, we decided that this year we would spurn the tourist traps and see out the last of the winter in a real working city.
But we’re beginning to have misgivings, whatever they are, because we fear we may gone too far. Sandford’s, London’s leading map shop, can sell you maps and guide books on Marrakech, Fez and Meknes, but not of Casablanca. The Moroccan Tourist Board produces a glossy brochure called “The Imperial Cities”, which recommends doing a 1,047-kilometre road trip that takes them all in: Marrakech, Fez, Meknes and Rabat. Casablanca, although it’s on the route and is bigger than all four of them put together, does not get a mention. Casablanca is literally not on the tourist map.
But as I said to the - erm - DG, “It don’t amount to a hill o’ beans. We'll always have Marrakech".

Fœtal attraction

There’s a story in today’s paper about a woman who is about to become the UK record-holder in surrogate motherhood. She planned to get out of the womb-rental business after number seven, but has now decided she doesn’t like not being pregnant, so is going for the record. Phil Wallis, chairman of something called the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Committee said, “We have to make sure women are not psychologically damaged as a result of surrogacy.” The mass-producing Mum, who doesn’t want children but charges £12,000 a pop to hatch them, said, “I wish I was ten years younger so I could fit more in”. Looks like it’s too late, Mr Wallis.

It’s crisis time in Jones Towers. No, I’m not blogging again, honest. I just had to publish this while it’s still true: after their win at Wigan yesterday, Everton are now FOURTH. More importantly, that puts them above Liverpool! You’ll appreciate the urgency when I tell you that Liverpool play Aston Villa in 2½ hours’ time. So what’s the crisis, you ask.
The crisis is that the DG supports Liverpool.

Hello, goodbye

It hasn’t been a good year so far: Everton were put out of the FA Cup yesterday – by a team 62 places below them.

The more perceptive will have noticed – but don’t feel inadequate if you didn't - that the word ‘photograph’ in the previous post is the 100,000th word of this blog. It’s a milestone of sorts: it also marks the second anniversary of the start of the blog – on Twelfth Night, 2006. More significantly, it’s about the length of the average novel, which means that if I had decided two years ago to put the same amount of effort into a book, it would be ready to go right now – whereas in fact I don't have a book, and have made negative progress on the one I was working on. By “negative” I don’t mean zilch; I mean worse than zilch: I’m further away than I was two years ago because a lot of the earlier research has gone stale and will have to be done again.
The review of my 2006 resolutions to see how actual performance compared hasn't exactly been cheering either. I make it 100%: 100% failure. Failed to improve on score rate against the formidable Moll at Scrabble; didn’t get weight down (though it isn’t up either); but the most abject failure of all was Resolution One: to produce 2,500 usable, sellable words a week. I didn’t reach that many in the year. Hence the goodbye – but I hope it’s au revoir as I’ve made the same resolution for 2008, and if I make it, I'll be back.
So this New Year’s Resolution One is to have another try at giving up the blog. If, after 100,653 words, 6,537 visits and 10,096 page views, I had had anything blogworthy to say and still haven’t said it, then it isn’t worth saying. So that’s it – cold turkey. Finish. Regrets? (I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention.) Yes, lots of them – it has been great fun and I’ve met some wonderful people. Do I hear you say, "dilettante bloggers, they never last - but he'll be back?" I hope you're right. Till then have a great year.

No such thing as a free lunch

It’s nearly time to say farewell to Wiltshire. It’s such a beautiful part of the country that I feel like a traitor, but let’s face it, we’re fair weather Wiltshirians and in just two weeks we’re out of here. As a young airman I spent the coldest winter of the last century just a few miles from here more than six decades ago - the camp’s entire plumbing system (with the fortunate exception of the cookhouse) froze solid and no-one washed for 10 days. It’s no place to spend a winter.
But, as you may recall from previous posts, we’ll have many happy memories of this county. We’ll miss the cottage, the cosy fireplace, country walks, the changing seasons, the pubs, the wild life, and above all the quiet – despite the occasional crunch of heavy artillery practising on Salisbury Plain.
Not all the memories will be happy ones: the Wiltshire Police, for example. We set off one day in late summer to meet with former father-in-law and dear step-mother-in-law in Winchester. We had a very pleasant lunch in that fascinating city with its beautiful cathedral – inspiration to Keats and Austen. (Did you know that Winchester is the home of England’s first library, cricket club, and lawn mower racing circuit? Neither did I.)
We had a very pleasant day before going our separate ways – they back to Spain and we to France. It was only marred about two weeks later when in the mail came a photo of the back of my car, with some numbers on the bottom saying I was accused of speeding in a 30mph zone, and if convicted could be fined up to £1000 or go to jail.
However, if I cared to give them £60 and take three points on my license, they would forget the whole thing.
I explained politely that, although I may have been distracted because I was on a strange, badly-signposted country road trying to find a cross-country route to Winchester, I would be surprised to have missed a speed limit sign,(adding the usual stuff: 50 years accident-free driving blah blah blah). They informed me that a speed limit sign is not necessary if the street lamp poles are closer together than 200 metres!
I resisted the temptation to point out that I don't normally carry a 200-metre tape measure, or to make the cheque payable to Winchester Police Revenue Enhancement Scam, but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference – they’re so awash with money that they haven’t bothered to present it yet. The most galling part of it all is that I’ve never seen Wiltshire Police doing anything that police are supposed to do. They’re probably too busy buying more cameras.
I'm sure we'll be back in the spring – but perhaps not in a Jag.

I've been quiet about Everton lately for fear of putting a jinx on them, but this headline from last week's Sunday Times says it all: ten games without defeat. It's out of date. It's now eleven.

5.15pm West Ham 0, Everton 2. Better make that twelve.

Remember Pearl Bailey

It's the day on which, on 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution. Did it call itself the United State?
The date also reminds me of a story Ronnie Scott used to tell about a Japanese racist who, every 7th December, attacked Pearl Bailey. Jazzmen can be funny. Humphrey Lyttelton, at 86, still chairs one of the funniest quiz shows on radio. Benny Green, who used often to play alongside Ronnie, said he knew an Indian cloakroom attendant named Mahatma Coat. Benny used to do a Sunday afternoon record programme, in which he was known to talk about my late brother Walter. That’s fame for you - I had a brother who was mentioned by Benny Green on a radio show. You can’t get much more famous than that: they’ll probably want me on I’m a Celebrity now. It was also Benny who said, bemoaning the disappearance of live jazz clubs, "Now is the winter of our discotheque". They're not writing them like that any more.

Reservoir Gods

After the success of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, which has spent many months in the best-seller lists and has elicited so far no fewer than 657 customer reviews on Amazon, I thought it might be a good idea to piggyback on his theme and write a book about dog worship: The Dog Delusion.
The thought came on after a few months in Nice, where it seems that every sweet old lady sitting opposite you on the bus has, peering from a basket on her knee, the face of a tiny ferret-like creature.
Doggy faces on the bus and doggy faeces in the streets. The dogs of Nice are the least continent in the continent. Paul Theroux got excited about them in Pillars of Hercules. The municipal powers place plastic bags and special containers in the streets so that the animal on one end of the lead can collect the droppings of the animal on the other. In some villages the residents hang brightly-painted brushes and shovels on their walls as a hint – but sadly too high for the dogs to reach.
There are many parallels between the two forms of worship: the anthropomorphism, or the way even some non-believers think there’s nothing wrong with belief because it gave us great works of art and, well, it doesn’t do anyone any harm. (Try telling that to someone in Belfast, Iraq or Palestine.)
I know this guy who’s a magazine editor. Lovely chap, but he is to dogs what I am to cheese, (as my cardiologist once wrote to my GP: "This man’s problem is that he is inordinately fond of cheese".)
Well this guy is inordinately fond of dogs. No matter how hard you try to divert his attention, conversations with him will inevitably get around to dogs. If they don’t, he brings the subject into focus with some subtle, oblique reference – like "Do you have a dog?"
He did it the other day. I said, "Why do you ask?"
He said, "It’s just that I find that people who like dogs tend to be nicer people than those who don’t".
I said, "I guess I fail then, I just don’t like them."
He frowned. So I said, "But Hitler did".
He’ll never plug my book now.

Last weekend Nice celebrated the return of the tram after 50 years’ absence. They called it a Fête du Tramway and it was great fun. The “new” mode of transport was free for the weekend and – such is the public passion for freebies – packed. The streets were equally packed and there was a genuine air of celebration.
You bet there was – we’ve had four years of traffic chaos for this.

It’s launched!

Exclamation marks and sighs all around. The signings up and down the Riviera – from Cannes to Monaco - were fun, with the occasional funny moment. Like the American lady who came across me signing books in a Valbonne store and said, “What’s it about?” Drawing myself up to the full 1.70, I said it was about the lives of writers.
“I’ll take one”, she said, “I love trivia.”
Five years of research encapsulated in three words.

Curried pronoun We’re expecting guests for lunch and she’s in the shower. The oven timer goes off. So I shout “The timer’s gone off”.
“Just turn it off”, shouts shimmering shape from shower.
So I turn off the timer.
Some time later, there’s a scream from the kitchen. “Eeeek! You didn’t turn it off. The lunch is ruined!”
“Yes I did,” I say.
Things were tense. My attempts to point out that according to such distinguished authorities as Strunk and White, Lynn Truss and Fowler, a pronoun always replaces its most adjacent noun, did nothing to calm the situation. We got ready in chilly silence.

Among the many great curries that she has made, I would have to say that this was by far the most memorable. Jamie Oliver would slaver in envy. Michael Winner would have called it ‘historic’.
I swear it was those few extra minutes cooking time...

White lies, damn lies… Statistics - you either love them or hate them. I’m addicted. I don’t mean statistics the way politicians use them: Tony Blair’s famous ’45 minutes’, for example. Or the way they use them to get out of embarrassing corners, adding in a decimal point or two to give them an air of authenticity.
No, statistics can be used for useful things, like proving that the signs of the zodiac are a load of cobblers – or that John Terry passes back to the goalie 3.6 times more frequently when playing for England than he does when playing for Chelsea - or that Alan Shearer shouldn’t be a candidate for England manager just because he scored a lot of goals, since 62.4% of them were from the penalty spot.
Or the fact that the percentage of left-handed people being born in the world increases every year and if it continues we’ll eventually all be left-handed. Or that the percentage of boys to girls being born to Inuit mothers is decreasing every year, so that there’ll soon be no male Inuits.
Yesterday, The Times, as if to prove my point, ran a story about a Mr Beane who has taken some hickie baseball team, Oakland A, to victory against major league teams – with statistics. They’re the new steroids – and they’re legal.