Author: merocet

Ahhh that it should come to this…

Still you can make a difference…

Yes it’s that time again…

“We regret to inform you…”. Do you? Do you really? Do you care at all? Probably not, I’d guess to be the correct answer to that one. Yup, we’re back in an airport departure lounge my friends and Avion-Facile are up to their usual tricks. Half an hour delay announced so far so what’s our guess as to what that really means? Place your bets ladies and gentlemen, round and round she goes, whether we will ever get to London? God knows.

Things you get in departure lounges that you rarely get anywhere else;

1. Men in linen casual suits and straw hats with unkempt hair, who look like the old artistic eccentric character from some half-assed Sunday night pseudo-drama like Heartbeat.

2. Women who’ve had too many cheap skin peeling treatments flouncing around in Hermes while about to get on an EasyJet flight. Yup, live it up luv, we all paid 30 quid for our tickets to the sun too you know.

3. Generic Daily Mail reader couples. You know the ones. Fly to France on the cheap for the laid back Mediterranean lifestyle but don’t really like the natives. They don’t really like anybody or anything much, other than “people like us” and “our way of life”. They’re easily identifiable by their use of phrases like “what it means to be British” and “I’m not usually one to complain”, and can be brought dangerously close to cardiac arrest simply by slipping the topics of “asylum seekers” or “unmarried mothers” into your casual and polite conversation with them. The men look uncomfortable in casual clothes and the women wear polite pastels. All look like they’ve spent their lives sucking on lemons.

4. Me, being grumpy because my 3 months in the Independent Peoples Republic of St Mandrier has come to an end.

Oh yes, bye bye Chaton (kitten). Little 9 year old Margot being brave when she says goodbye because she doesn’t want Tonton John to feel bad. Little 4 year old Loic not quite grasping the situation, stopping to give me a very serious faced cuddle goodbye and then brightening up and telling me what we’re going to do together tomorrow (make paper planes and boats pretty much like every other day). A blur of kind faces, and kisses and hugs from all of the characters of the last 3 months of my life’s soap opera. And all asking how soon I’ll be back and I fob them all off with “well I hope soon, but I’m not sure because the money is going to be tight” until little Margot tells me that I have to come back for Christmas because me being there is the only Christmas present she wants, so I crack and have to promise, while trying not to cry like a baby. And as I’m typing that in the departure lounge, Rufus Wainwright is on my headphones just reaching the crescendo of one of his more emotional and epic numbers from “Want One”, “Go or Go Ahead”, and it takes a mansize swallow to stop the tears from coming again.

>sniff<

You really should listen to Rufus Wainwright. He’s very good you know.

>sniff<

So what am I going to do next?
>sniff<
I have an idea.
>sniff<
I’ll tell you about it next time maybe.

But before that, I’m on a plane now. If you bothered to guess how long I’d be delayed, it was 30 minutes. EasyJet in “we don’t lie about delays” shocker.

Just had a FANTASTIC Terry and June-esque minute. I had bought my International jet-set Scotch and Coke (You should always have a jet-set drink on a plane, it’s the law, just the same as even on the most scabrous ferry you must have Martini’s on deck which you drink with your finger cocked just so.). Anyway, quelle horreur, I dropped the 4 quid little bottle of Johnnie Walker down the side of my seat. After spending a few awkward minutes trying to retrieve it, I looked disconsolately at the nice lady sitting next to me with her husband/ lover/ son who had nipped to the loo, explained my plight and asked her if she might budge up a second so I could get a better angle to reach under my seat. “No, no” she replied “I’m smaller, let me try”, (she is Australian you see and, as such, genetically much nicer than most of the population of Britain). So down on her knees she went next to my seat, head bobbing up and down over my lap just as the gentleman accompanying her returned from the toilet…

It’s getting harder to write stuff on here. My head is buzzing and popping like I’ve poured 10 packets of SpaceDust in my ears and then opened the top of my skull and poured in a big, fizzy glass of Tizer. Back to the lovely UK again; so much stuff to organise in my thoughts; a million things to do; a whole new life to start; money to get… Boommmmfffiiizzzzzz! there goes another shooting star out of my brain on its way to Jupiter!

Every time i start to write something it comes over as overblown and trite.

So i’ll try to make my sentences shorter.

Less ideas in each.

Say little.

Shhhh.

…

As well as all his other crimes against humanity, this man stole £600 pounds from me, and other stuff…

Thanks Cliff and Sky News…

A kitten was horrified today on waking up to find that the sky had changed colour. “For my entire life which is a whole month long now, the ‘above-the-hard-underneath-me-thing’ as I have named it, has been a rich deep blue with a bright yellow ball that moves slowly across it providing a most agreeable warmth.” He opined from the safety of his fluffy towel lined, cardboard box residence on the Corniche D’Or.

“Imagine my horror when I cutely looked out of the ‘hard-see-through-bit-of-wall’ this morning, to find that the golden disc had seemingly disappeared and that the ‘above-the-hard-underneath-me-thing’ had become an unpleasant grey colour.” He continued while preparing for a day of slipping endearingly across the tiled floor of the living room and tail chasing.

“The ‘invisible-breathey-stuff’ also seems to have become full of big drops of ‘clear-drinky-stuff’ that make a bad noise against the ‘hard-see-through-bit-of-wall’ and makes my fur sticky-together and cold.” He added from under a pile of newspapers.

Current kitten suspicions for the change in the way the entire world works are centred on the eight-legged-furry-monster that arrived in the garden a couple of days ago. “Too many eyes” He explained wisely while looking to see if the world looked better the other way up.

Vile

Read that. Is it not horrendous? Am I missing the point? Is this womans voice not like some little, Republican, money-obsessed gnat buzzing around peoples ears trying to distract them from what’s important?

“If you are considering donating a used vehicle, keep in mind the rules got much stricter this year. If you volunteer your time and services, these are never deductible. However, any travel, food, or lodging expenses you incur because of your volunteer work are deductible, so save these receipts.”

Save those receipts? What hell planet does she live on? Before you give to charity as a gut response to images of horror and suffering on the news and out of compassion for your fellow human beings, have a good think about how it can affect your tax deductibles at year end?

The US authorities lack of response to what G W Bush on Thursday called a “Temporary disruption that is being addressed by the government and by the private sector” is a direct effect of the 20 year old “Starve The Beast” policy. Reduce the money available to the public sector to reduce governments involvement in peoples everyday lives and to allow the private sector to fill that role… Sounds good until it erodes the infrastructure including the flood protection around New Orleans. Sounds good until that infrastructure finally cracks after years of underfunding in the face of a disaster that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency),a US Government department predicted in 2001, and a million people really need the government to get involved in their everyday lives. Shall we wait for the private sectors response? Let’s not all begin holding our breath until Halliburton start handing out food parcels shall we?

Don’t let them make you think like they do.

5 things to know about French television;

1. Kojak is on every night. (Literally) “Qui T’aime Bebe?”

French Telly… (smirk!)

2. Dallas is on every morning but has different title music which is more martial than the familiar, wah-wah guitar drenched, disco classic, and, seems to feature the Village People or a Russian male voice choir singing “DAARRL-ARRRRRSE” with great gusto. They’ve given JR a REALLY evil French voice in the overdub too.

3. The French LOVE a chat show. They love a chat show that goes on for a marathon 6 hours every Saturday. Same host, millions of guests. The only ones I’ve recognised so far were Grace Jones (who speaks very good French) and Natalie Imbruglia (who doesn’t).

4. France has 6 free-to-air, normal, old fashioned, terrestrial channels. 5 of them constantly broadcast absolute dross. 1 of them (Arte) is excellent and shows either excruciatingly long, black-and-white, strange camera angle, moody, no talking, no plot, films, or, totally impenetrable, four hour documentaries about people who make excruciatingly long, black-and-white, strange camera angle, moody, no talking, no plot, films. I’m a big fan of excruciatingly long, black-and-white, strange camera angle, moody, no talking, no plot, films by the way.

5. There is a 7th channel that you can get through your normal telly but it seems to be scrambled to varying degrees. The daytime cookery programs are just a bit scrambled (eggs) so it looks like your aerial needs a bit of a nudge, evening movies are a bit more scrambled so it feels like your eyes have gone a bit wonky and your ears could do with a good dig around with a cotton bud, then after midnight it goes into full blurred-o-vision and a soundtrack of insect speech as they switch to France’s nightly dose of hardcore pornography.

I have an idea for a way to earn money on my return to the UK (21st September, Jet-Facile to Gatwick) which involves possibly not working for a company. It involves using a laptop computer. I’m working on it in my office here…

The view from my office “window” is this…

French for “That really pisses me off” seems to be “gener mar”. Probably best if you assume that that’s spelt wrong. This is pronounced “Johnny Marr” and the French think it’s REALLY funny when you follow them saying this with “And Morrissey too”, especially the younger ones who have no idea who, or indeed what, you are on about. Want another picture of the kitten? Oh, go on then…

1. Never put a new cooker upright in the back of a van and then drive along a very bendy road. Thud, crash.

2. Continue to not smoke. It’s good, and that strange feeling I’m having increasingly regularly feels like it might be health.

3. Continue to do exercise in the morning. Still religiously doing 8 Minute Abs DVD which has turned into about 15 minutes with the groundbreaking and clever use of the pause button, followed by 25, count ’em, press ups (which are called Pompes in France). Stomach is disappearing. Bye bye, layers of congealing American Corn Syrup, that used to live blancmange-like around my belt area.

4. Wonder where the word Blancmange came from. You’d guess it was French wouldn’t you given that translated it means “White Eat” but my confident assertion of it’s Frenchness was met with Blancstares (he he!) from French people.

5. Put a picture on this website… Vero took this… I like to call it, “You Can Count On Me-ow”