Should Marks and Spencer announce it has fallen short of its targets this financial year, I fear I may be called to account for my inadvertent contribution to this downturn. I will attend the An...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/06/marks-spencer-my-part-in-its-downfall.html
We had been in Brussels for a metaphorical five minutes and you could have knocked me over with a copy of Libération . A driver stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let us cross. And there wasn't...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/06/taking-le-mannekin-pis.html
We were invited to La Fille's school for her "evaluation report". I often hear parents in Britain moaning about the number of tests their young children have to take, but I believe formal assessm...
Of course it was too good to be true. We've gone, oh I would say a few months without any water leaking in or on our apartment but experience has told us never to become too complacent. This time...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/06/mean-old-boiler.html
My ongoing campaign to ensure that La Fille speaks English has taken a blow. Central to my mission, conducted with the zeal of a religious convert, is the great God of expatriate parents, Uncle W...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/06/channel-hopping.html
British people are the fattest in Europe but also, we are told, the happiest with our weight; the French would say we are "bien dans notre peau" or happy in our skin. Sure. And secretly I'm a sk...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/05/kate-mosss-bottom.html
If one of my old editors were alive today I suspect he might write the following memo to his staff. "It is inevitable that the words 'MPs', 'expenses' and 'scandal' may, from time to time and qu...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/05/fiddle-de-dee.html
Over the last couple of weeks the French papers have carried pictures of a dark-haired woman in large glasses whose face is etched with unimaginable pain. She is Ruth Halimi, the mother of Ilan H...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/05/mans-inhumanity-to-man.html
La Fille and I have been spending the holidays in the UK. We had a lovely time until halfway through the last evening when someone stole my brand new iPhone from a zipped handbag that hadn't left...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/04/iphone-uphone-nophone.html
I am turning native. I ate frogs' legs yesterday. They were sautéed with a lot of garlic and served warm as an apéritif. This is the French experience, eh? Not much to it really, psychological...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/04/rosbif-and-frogs.html
France's political incorrectness can sometimes provoke quite sharp intakes of shocked breath. Like the chocolate coated meringues some people still call a "Tete de Nègre" or "Nigger's Head" . L...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/04/ant-grasshopper-and-immigrant.html
I want an iPhone . I am not a vacuous follower of fashion - or Steve Jobs - I just want a phone that doubles as a mini-computer when I am working away from home and that talks the same language ...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/03/crisis-what-crisis-episode-2.html
I went for a little manifest yesterday because I am more than a little peed off with the French government this week. We returned from holiday to discover that the mother of one of La Fille's cl...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/03/jumped-up-justice.html
Having joked about the perils of skiing in my last post, I thought I would add that I feel terribly sad for the family of the lovely Natasha Richardson , especially her two young sons. Reading t...
We went skiing last week. The following was supposed to be posted when I pressed the post button minutes before we left. For some reason, possibly not unconnected to me fiddling with the Post O...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/03/pass-crystal-ball.html
I am not allowed to give blood in France because I could have 'Mad Cow' disease. This rule applies to anyone who lived in Britain during the 1980s. But now my dental surgeon wants to transplant a...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/03/trust-me-trust-meim-doctor.html
We went to the Salon International d'Agriculture in Paris last week. It's taken me until now to recover. The French, as we all know, are big on farming and food and this is a massive and huge...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/03/old-macdonald.html
I have been trying to instill in La Fille a sense of the value and cost of things. It started when I remonstrated with her for breaking a toy. It was a small, inexpensive object broken carelessly...
The French do go on about their "cultural exception" and how erudite and educated they are while we Philistine Britons sneer and joke about how pretentious it is and how we just don't get the Gal...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/02/uncle-walt-and-cold-war-mole.html
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to." With this epigram, published in 1930, the Italian-born ...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/02/twist-and-shout.html
Why is it that people in Britain are so quick to assume they always have the pooey end of the stick and that life is so much better elsewhere? It's a mystery to me. I know the economic situatio...
A few months ago President Nicolas Sarkozy was telling the French they needed to be emulating the successful Anglo-Saxon economic model. This, he insisted, was the way forward. Last night Presid...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/02/monsieurs-not-for-turning.html
You cannot keep a good half-French protester down. La Fille returned from our foray into the mass demonstration and General Strike on Friday and made herself a placard. It even had writing on i...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/02/life-of-constant-triumph.html
I took La Fille to her first 'manifestation' yesterday. It was not a huge effort as the demonstration passed the end of our road and I thought she might like it - all the noise and hullabaloo -...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/01/communist-and-chocolate-factory.html
La Fille took a pair of scissors and hacked off her hair while I was on the telephone and not paying attention. This sentence probably says much about my parenting skills, none of it good. Scisso...
http://redwhiteandbleu.blogspot.com/2009/01/short-back-and-sides.html