I know what I did last summer

We went on holiday to France back in July; our first proper trip abroad with the kids. We decided on France because it meant that we didn't have to engage with the shrieking nightmare of flying and could just get a ferry over and take the car to our eventual destination. We didn't want to shell out some lavish amount for luxury accommodation, partly because we were hoping to be either out and about doing stuff or hooning around in the pool most of the time, but also because times are hard and I am as tight as a gnat's chuff.

Fortunately France offers plenty of options in this area and we ended up booking in at Le Clarys Plage with Alfresco Holidays, who offer much the same sort of thing as the better-known Eurocamp. Basically this is a big holiday camp with static caravan accommodation of various sizes; pretty much perfect for our kid-centric requirements and with a pretty decent-sized supermarket right next door. It's just outside St. Jean de Monts, which is in the Vendée, which is basically the next bit down from Brittany on the west coast.

Anyway, it suited us very well, Nia in particular had a great time scooting down all of the waterslides a gazillion times a day, the supermarket is very handy, there are laid-on activities for the kids, and the main town beach (a short drive away) is nice and sandy, absolutely massive and has an extremely shallow drop-off which is great for paddling with kids, though slightly frustrating if you want a proper swim, as you have to walk out about half a mile just to get waist-deep.

We didn't get out and about as much as I'd anticipated, and with kids there's little hope of going off exploring the local geography, which is a shame as this part of the Vendée is a fascinating landscape of reclaimed marshland and drainage ditches. For those without tiny children in tow it'd be perfect for a cycling holiday if you didn't want to be bothered by hills. We did get out to a couple of places, though, most notably Le Château des Aventuriers an hour or so away to the south-east which has lots of mainly pirate-themed outdoor adventure quest stuff which was right up Nia's street. We also went out to Parc des Dunes which is a bewildering array of bouncy castles, luge runs, crazy golf, ball pits and waterslides. Again, great fun for the kids, but adults will want to ensure they've got a few litres of wine in to wind down back at the caravan afterwards.

One of the key considerations for British tourists venturing over to France for holidays is the stringent rules some French resorts apply in the trouser department, specifically the edict that a lot of places issue that long baggy board shorts are prohibited in the pool area and skimpy "budgie smugglers" must be worn instead. I completely understand the rationale here - people are inclined to wear board shorts as regular shorts out and about in town, down to the beach, etc., and then trail dust and dirt and shit back into the resort and plunge straight into the pool. So with a mind to complying with the regulations I purchased a pair of skimpy trunks before we left the UK. On arrival in France I noticed on our first trip to the supermarket that short but slightly less eye-wateringly revealing trunks were available for about four Euros, so I bought a pair of these as a backup, thereby ending up in the slightly farcical situation of having three lengths of swimming shorts to choose from.

As it turned out the rule seems to be largely unenforced at Le Clarys Plage, as plenty of people were wearing long shorts, but it's best to be prepared, and I daresay there are places where the shorts police will haul you off to the changing rooms if you transgress. As it happens the cheapo intermediate shorts offer the worst of both worlds, since they're not as baggy as the big shorts but not as stretchy as the skimpy ones and therefore more restrictive than either. I guess you do get what you pay for.

A modest selection of photographs can be found here; as reassurance for the squeamish I should state clearly that none of them feature me in the red shorts. The book I am reading in the comedy beer photo is this one.

Been out at a French amusement park all day, including trying to teach a 6- and 3-year-old how to play crazy golf and stopping a 1-year-old from throwing himself into the pedalo pool. I deserve this beer. #parenthood #frazzled pic.twitter.com/f7kWXBj9d4

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 25, 2018

fuck you and the winged horse you rode in on

Just a quick ugly ill-thought-out splurge to express my revulsion and outrage at the Charlie Hebdo massacre earlier today. I really just have two thoughts:

Firstly: humour is the key marker of a properly civilised society. If your culture is relaxed and self-confident enough to tolerate people taking the piss relentlessly then you're probably on the right track. Conversely, any regime which is hyper-sensitive to criticism, and mockery in particular, just betrays its own lack of confidence in its own rightness. Islam is the canonical example of this: look at the grinding humourless, sexless, life-denying, ritualised childishness of it all. That's my first reaction on hearing of an atrocity like this: oh, you fucking BABIES. You stupid, brainwashed, pathetic, petulant, humourless BABIES.

Secondly: this is what you get when you are too lily-livered to publicly criticise religious lunacy, Islamic or otherwise. You cannot simultaneously hold up freedom of expression as an absolute and then dance around the subject of "blasphemy", as the current UK government has repeatedly done, by saying, yeah, freedom of expression and all, but we should respect others' beliefs and just generally avoid saying anything that might offend. No, fuck that: you either have freedom of expression or you don't, and that includes the right to say things like: fuck the fictional prophet Mohammed, fuck his flying horse and fuck all his followers.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Two things occurred to me on reading this Independent article about French novelist Michel Houellebecq's latest successful trolling of the literary world: firstly, wherever he's been for the last few years he's either been quite ill, putting away a phenomenal quantity of vin rouge and Gauloises and possibly crystal meth, or both, because he looks terrible. I don't know the vintage of the first photo here but I would guess it's no more than 15 years old.

Secondly, on closer examination who he actually looks like is the imaginary unholy bastard lovechild of Will Self and Arthur Scargill, or, to put it more prosaically, Will Self with Arthur Scargill's hair.

tell me Michel Houellebecq does not look EXACTLY like the bastard lovechild of Will Self & Arthur Scargill http://t.co/lTuOciFBq0
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 6, 2015

Having tossed off a quick tweet on the subject earlier I thought I'd turn it into a proper blog post just so I could have a pop at making the Self/Scargill hybrid a reality. My image-mashup skills are rudimentary at best, but I've had a go, just for a laugh. See what you think.

[cetacean needed]

Looks like we've got another potential exploding whale on our hands. This one is stinking up a beach in the Camargue National Park in the south of France. According to this Independent article, authorities are considering various options including "one option of using dynamite to blow it up". WILL THESE PEOPLE NEVER LEARN?

I should imagine that what'll actually happen, much like in the case of the Newfoundland whale back in May, is that eventually the bloated carcass will spring a slow leak and gradually deflate in a disappointingly un-explodey manner. Honestly, those Camargue beaches are pretty remote; this one could almost be left to explode and all that would happen is a few of those white Camargue horses might get a bit spattered.

bravo victor golf uniform

Everyone else is doing their My Favourite Ryder Cup Moments bit at the moment, so I'm going to get in on the act as well. I actually came to the Ryder Cup a bit late; while my earliest live TV golf-watching recollection is of the end of the Duel In The Sun at Turnberry in 1977 (when I was seven), I don't specifically recall watching any live Ryder Cup coverage until 1993, when the USA won 15-13 at the Belfry (their last victory on European soil, as it happens) to retain the cup they'd won back in The War On The Shore at Kiawah Island two years before. My Ryder Cup history since then goes something like this:

• In 1995 I happened to drop into The Ship on Lower Park Row in Bristol on a Sunday evening for a pint on the way back from somewhere (probably on the way up to my flat from the railway station), only to discover that they had the golf coverage on and they were about halfway through the singles. Several hours later I staggered out and home having witnessed Europe come back to win from being behind after the doubles for the first (and, until 2012, only) time in Ryder Cup history. Nick Faldo's nerveless up-and-down from 93 yards to beat Curtis Strange was the key moment (combined with a calamitous sequence of missed putts from Strange), and Philip Walton's nervy stumble over the line a while later clinched it. This is probably my favourite Ryder Cup experience, just for the general happy unexpectedness of it all - firstly getting to see it at all, and then the result.
• I watched the climaxes to the Ryder Cups of 1997, 1999 and 2002 at home, but I couldn't say for certain that I watched any of them strictly live; it might have been the BBC's highlights package a bit later.
• I can certainly say that I watched the highlights package for the 2004 Ryder Cup, having done a bit of Likely Lads-style keeping my head down to avoid finding out the result. Plenty of schadenfreude as it became clear it was going to be a record-breaking rout, but it's never quite the same as a nail-biting finish.
• 2006 saw the first of two occasions where the Ryder Cup weekend coincided with the Swanage weekend; in this case (largely by luck) we'd just got to the pub after the traditional Sunday walk when the key singles matches started finishing, so we were comfortably settled in with a pint when Henrik Stenson holed the match-winning putt. Again, as great as that was it was another rout for Europe (18.5-9.5, the same score as in 2004), so the nail-biting element was lost.
• I honestly can't remember watching in 2008, though since Europe got their arse plated up and handed to them I could just have blotted the experience out. I expect it's more than likely I saw at least some of it.
• In 2010 the Ryder Cup took place at Celtic Manor, a mere mile-and-a-half from our house. Anticipating traffic gridlock and general chaos we decided to go on holiday to Turkey for the week, returning on the Monday, the day after it finished. Inevitably this plan was scuppered by the Welsh weather as the match had to be concluded on the Monday. Swings and roundabouts, though, as we had some hours to kill between checking out of the hotel and getting the coach to the airport and took ourselves plus bags off to the local sports bar, which just happened to be showing the golf. Not only that, but the nail-biting finish to Graeme McDowell's match with Hunter Mahan that delivered the cup back to Europe took place with a few minutes to spare before we had to shoot off and catch the coach. 
• In 2012 the match once again coincided with the Swanage weekend; this time we were back at the campsite having a barbecue when the climactic Sunday action happened, so we had to keep up with events via Andy's smartphone and a rather intermittent mobile signal. The interminable waits for the BBC Sports page to refresh added an element of suspense of their own.

So what to expect from 2014? Well, I'll be at work on the Friday and at a wedding on the Saturday, but you can rest assured I've cleared out my V+ box in anticipation of recording much of the coverage for later watching. I fully intend to dedicate a big chunk of Sunday to watching the singles, though.

And who'll win? Well, home advantage counts for a lot - only six of the seventeen matches since 1979 have resulted in "away wins", four for Europe and two for USA: USA in 1981, Europe in 1987, USA in 1993 and Europe in 1995, 2004 and 2012. Both teams look very strong, though I suppose there is a question mark over the European wildcards - Westwood and Poulter have both been picked on past Ryder Cup form rather than on having done anything much this year. As for the rookies, Jamie Donaldson is a very solid player these days, Stephen Gallacher is a reserved type who needs to show that he's not intimidated by the raucous atmosphere, and Victor Dubuisson is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a garlic baguette.

There is the Tiger Woods factor, though - the last time he failed to make the team was in 2008 when he was recovering from knee surgery, whereupon a young USA team featuring six rookies won handsomely. The idea that the Ryder Cup format suits neither him nor his team-mates (when he's on the team) is probably an over-simplification, but there seems to be something in it.

A neutral would probably say that another nail-biting finish resulting in a narrow victory for the USA would be the best thing for the long-term health of the competition. To that I'd say: you're probably right, but can we leave that till next time, please?

paris in the the spring

We've been on a couple of trips lately that have generated some photos, so this is mainly just somewhere to hang the links from. A few explanatory notes, though:

• 
  Hazel and I went to Paris on the Eurostar at the beginning of May, a quick 48-hour jaunt organised (and, more importantly, paid for) by Utility Warehouse, who Hazel does some work as a distributor for in addition to her photography activities. I can't give you the promotional spiel for UW, but if you want to have a look at what they have to offer, start here. Anyway, the point is we got a free trip to Paris out of it, staying at the very nice Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile out at Porte Maillot on the north-eastern corner of the Bois de Boulogne. Not much time to do anything out of the ordinary run of touristy stuff, but we did take a twilight river cruise on the Bateaux-Mouches on Friday night, and took advantage of a glorious sunny day on the Saturday to do a walking tour of Paris, starting at the Eiffel Tower and heading out to Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur. Photos can be found here. 
• A couple of weeks later we went off on a family trip (i.e. with Nia this time) to Bluestone in Pembrokeshire. This is a self-contained family holiday village complete with shops, pub (featuring excellent Doom Bar), swimming pool and various sporting activities. The best description I can give you is that it's a little bit like a cross between CenterParcs and The Prisoner, but without all that unpleasantness with the giant beach balls if one should stray beyond the boundaries of the complex. We verified this by venturing out a couple of times, once to cycle around Canaston Woods and once to go to the seaside at Freshwater East, which is lovely and - largely because it's not right next to a town with shops and toilets and amusement arcades and the like - very quiet. We also called into Tenby on the way back home, which is much more in the stereotypical British seaside town vein, but still very nice, and features the Pembrokeshire Pasty & Pie Co.'s excellent shop just a couple of minutes' walk from the beach. Photos can be found here.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

A sporting one for you, featuring one of today's European heroes in the Seve Trophy and current Wales Open champion Grégory Bourdy, and multi-Olympic champion and recent America's Cup miracle worker Sir Ben Ainslie.

meet me on the other side

Here's a cool addition to the list of Interesting Things You Can Do With Google Maps - a little widget that shows you where in the world the exact antipodal opposite point is for any given place you care to select.

You'll soon find, though, that if you select anywhere in the UK the results will be disappointingly watery - for instance Newport is opposite this rather damp location in the South Pacific a few hundred miles south-west of New Zealand. Indeed it's actually quite difficult to pick a land location anywhere that has an antipodal point which is also on land. The reasons for this aren't immediately obvious until you realise that if you pick your central point carefully enough (apparently somewhere in the vicinity of Nantes in France is best) you can divide the Earth up into a land hemisphere (which contains seven-eighths of the world's land) and a water hemisphere, where any point in the former must have an antipodal point in the latter.

The main areas which do have a land-to-land correspondence are:

• while most of North and Central America are in the Indian Ocean, various bits of South America are in Indonesia, and quite a big chunk of southern Chile and Argentine is in China, and at the other end a fair bit of Nunavut is in Antarctica;
• in an ironic echo of the UK/Argentina dispute, the Falkland Islands lie slap bang on the border between China and Russia;
• most of Europe, Asia and Africa are in the Pacific - the only significant exception being the big overlap between Spain and New Zealand, and between bits of northern Siberia and Antarctica.

asterix and the germans

While gingerly making my way through the slush on the way to work this morning I listened to an interesting segment on the Today programme about eccentric German novelist W.G. Sebald. One of the people they'd wheeled in was ubiquitous literary interviewee and talking head Will Self, who is due to deliver the annual W. G. Sebald Lecture this very evening at 7pm at Kings Place (which is just round the corner from King's Cross, here).

One of the things that was mentioned during the interview was that the later Sebald books (most famously Austerlitz) were translated from the original German by Anthea Bell (the earlier ones, including the two I've read, The Rings Of Saturn and Vertigo, were translated by Michael Hulse). It turns out, rather pleasingly, that this is the same Anthea Bell that co-translated (with Derek Hockridge) the Asterix books; clearly a woman of diverse talents. Wikipedia tells me that she is also Martin Bell's older sister.

pretenzioso? me?

I had to do a quick run down to Tesco to pick up some lunch supplies earlier, and happened therefore to be in the car with Radio 4 on between 11:30 and 12 o'clock. This enabled me to catch a few brief snippets of a programme about Oulipo, the French experimental literature group (it's a portmanteau word formed from "ouvroir de littérature potentielle").

I'm vaguely familiar with Oulipo through having read a couple of novels by two of its more well-known members:

• If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino. You can gauge quite quickly whether you're going to enjoy this or not by deciding whether you're intrigued or enraged by this opening paragraph:
  

  You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice - they won't hear you otherwise - "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

  If you just want a Proper Ruddy Story with no authorial intervention and general post-modern dicking about, then you might be best advised to look elsewhere. That would be a shame, though, as it's great. I also notice that Sting's new album has a title which is a nod to this novel. Pretentious? Lui?


• Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec. Back when I used to have a summer job in the Town Bookseller bookshop in Newbury (on the canal bridge in the town centre, here) I recall conducting a lengthy search on behalf of a customer for this book, which I'd never previously heard of. We did eventually manage to locate a copy for him, which I had a sneaky flick through before handing it over. Incidentally the Town Bookseller later became a branch of Ottakar's (who, as you'll discover if you click on the link, were themselves later taken over by Waterstone's), and is now a Cornish pasty shop (apparently it was a Costa coffee shop for a while as well).
  
  Anyway, my point, such as it is, is that when I eventually decided I wanted to read L:AUM it was a great deal easier to find as there were handy things like Amazon around to help me out. And a strange and mysterious book it is too (though also sad, funny and all sorts of other stuff). On the surface a series of eccentric and occasionally interlinked tales concerning the residents of a fictional Paris apartment block (and therefore less obviously experimental than the Calvino novel), the novel's underlying architecture is built according to an extraordinarily involved and complex set of rules and constraints, of which the Wikipedia article has a good summary.
  
  It's very entertaining, though the hoops Perec has to jump through to obey his own self-imposed rules make some of the chapters a bit odd (some are just long lists of the contents of a room, for example). I strongly recommend giving it a go, though.
  
  Perec's other experimental literary exploits include writing an entire novel without using the letter "e", and constructing the world's longest palindrome (a mind-melting 5000+ letters long). And that hair/beard combo was pretty extraordinary, too.

a million shrugging garlicky frenchmen can't be wrong...or can they?

The bottle of Highland Park I bought back in early June finally bit the dust the other day, so I had half an eye out for another one while I was in Tesco earlier, and sure enough my eye was mysteriously drawn to the bottle of 10-year old Aberlour they were practically giving away for £18.

Bit of background: Aberlour is a Speyside whisky, Speyside being by far the most distillery-rich of the whisky-producing regions with something like fifty distilleries. It's fair to say Aberlour is not one of the big Speyside glamour boys like Macallan, Glenlivet or Glenfiddich, though it is apparently the biggest-selling single malt in France; this is probably down to its being owned by French drink-based gigantocorp Pernod Ricard. According to this page, the biggest seller in Spain is Cardhu, and the biggest seller in Italy is Glen Grant. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, you'd expect certain things from a Speyside whisky - heavy on the fruit, light on the smoke, sweetish, darkish, etc., and Aberlour ticks all those boxes. It's lighter and less intense than the Macallan, though, which is a real slap around the chops with a sherry-soaked Madeira cake (but in a good way). I'm tempted to quote the Paul Giamatti character from Sideways and call it "quaffable but....far from transcendent", though that would be a bit harsh, as it's perfectly nice. No danger of it not getting, consumed, anyway.

[Update after drinking a proper-sized glass while watching the rivetingly awful League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen on TV tonight: it's got a really interesting marzipan-y nose which you don't get with the Macallan and the other Speysiders, followed by the usual sherry stuff afterwards. Second impressions were better than first, anyway, if that helps at all.]

une femme-frappeur, s'il vous plaît

I'll tell you what annoys me about those Stella Artois 4 adverts, since you ask. It's not the general content of the adverts themselves, which is as excellent as ever - whoever came up with the whole "reassuringly expensive" thing back in the day was a genius - it's the name of the product and the way it's presented in the adverts.

In both of the adverts I've seen (which you can have a look at here and here) there's some hilarious French Riviera-set action, culminating in the main character sauntering nonchalantly into a bar and saying "une Stella Artois Four, s'il vous plaît", followed by the obligatory product shot and seductive female voice-over (in English, this time, just in case we hadn't worked out what he was talking about).

Trouble is, the four doesn't really work when you're delivering the rest of the sentence in French, since of course the French word would be quatre. I guess Stella Artois must have concluded that the English-speaking public couldn't cope with that, although interestingly Beck's seem to have come to a different conclusion with their lower-alcohol product Beck's Vier.

It gets worse, though, because they pronounce the four with a proper rolled "r" (because they're French - why do you think they have this outrageous accent?). This makes it sound like the French word fort, which could conceivably be applied to beer, because it just means "strong". Trouble is, the whole point of SA4 is that it's less strong than the standard wife-beating brew. Confusing, isn't it? Even worse, SA4 is marketed in Canada as Stella Artois Légère, and légère means "light", i.e. just the opposite of fort. Phew. Now I need a drink.

Two other things to note before we move on: firstly that Google's language tools offer the following translations of légère: slight, feathery, promiscuous. I suppose there might be a connection with the use of words like "flighty" or "loose" in English to denote the same thing, if you're a 70-year-old Daily Mail reader anyway. Secondly, note that the InBev SA4 web page describes the beer as "a good pallet cleanser". I assume that what they meant was "a good palate cleanser"; if they really did mean it was good for removing stubborn stains from these then I might give it a miss, to be honest.

What I won't be doing instead is going and having a pint of Carling, for reasons that their latest series of beermats make clear, in what I assume is an unintentional way. I've enlarged the slogan below the main picture, just in case you can't make it out: no way will the Advertising Standards guys be on their backs about this one; that's one claim that I'm pretty positive is accurate.

youtube clip of the day

It's Claude Lelouch's notorious 1976 short film C'était un rendez-vous, which is essentially a berserk 8-minute drive through Paris from somewhere out on the Périphérique to the Basilique du Sacré Cœur in Montmartre at hideously unsafe speeds. Apparently it was filmed in the early hours of the morning to avoid most of the traffic, though as you'll see there are a few near-misses with delivery vans, pedestrians and other cars. The opening titles make the claim that no camera trickery or speeding-up of the footage was done, on that basis some people have tried to calculate the actual speeds involved. It's emerged since that while the footage is real, the car involved was one of these (driven by Lelouch himself), while the manual gear-shift noises on the soundtrack were dubbed in later from one of these. The route taken is mapped here. Anyway, here it is:



In similar vein, here's London to Brighton in three-and-a-half minutes.

now I just need to practice my petanque and Gallic shrugging skills

Continuing my garlic-crazed immersion in French artistic culture, I watched the DVD of Caché last night. I've had it for a while - picked up for a fiver or so in a sale at either Virgin (who seem to have strangely mutated into Zavvi these days) or HMV in Bristol - but never got round to watching it before. And very good it is too - not much in the way of conventional "action" most of the way through, which makes the one brief scene where something unspeakably violent and shocking does happen all the more, well, shocking. Excellent acting from Daniel Auteuil and the divine Juliette Binoche, who manages to pull off looking drab and dowdy in a series of sack-like dresses for much of the movie - a pretty remarkable acting job, considering.

A central theme here is giving smug white bourgeois French intellectualism a good kicking - Platform has some fun doing the same thing.

One of the interesting things about fictional works, be they films, novels or whatever is the oblique light they throw on real-world places and events. A case in point here is the reference in this film to the massacre by the Parisian police of a couple of hundred Algerian demonstrators in Paris in October 1961, something I was unaware of until yesterday. The flipside of that observation is that one of the interesting things about startling or traumatic real-world events is the artistic works they inspire. The Algerian conflict, for example, gave Albert Camus plenty of material, as well as providing the background for The Day Of The Jackal. Looking back through the last few book reviews, you've also got the sinking of the Titanic, the Prague Spring, the Cold War and the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands.

Life imitating art imitating life. Imitating art. Etcetera. Watching us, watching you, watching us, watching you. No, hang on, that was something else.

the last book I read

Platform by Michel Houellebecq.

I'll start by offering you a couple of metaphors: firstly, stuffing yourself with sweets and chocolate - you know it's bad for you in the long run, but you can't resist the brief, transient thrill it gives you. Secondly, getting cornered at a party, or perhaps in a railway carriage, by an obviously intelligent and articulate bloke, but one who's perhaps had a couple of sherbets too many and goes ON and ON relentlessly at high volume, possibly getting more animated and grabbing you by the shirt as he gets into his stride. Both of those are appropriate to this book, I think. Here's the first couple of paragraphs:

Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker...’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.

So you get the idea, I hope. The story continues as follows: the narrator (also called Michel) inherits a considerable sum upon his father's death (it later transpires that he had been having an affair with his Muslim housekeeper and was murdered to avenge her "honour" by her brother), which he uses to go on a holiday to south-east Asia and consort with numerous prostitutes in massage parlours. He also meets a Frenchwoman, Valérie, with whom he begins a relationship back in France. Valérie works for a travel company, and the couple cook up a scheme whereby they offer sex tourism holidays at various locations around the world. In the course of a research trip to Thailand after the launch the couple are caught up in a bombing (in a spooky echo of the real-life Bali bombing of 2002, a year or so after Platform was published) carried out by Muslim terrorists, partly (it is suggested) in retaliation for the exploitation of their country and people by decadent Westerners. Valérie is killed; Michel survives to reflect on the conflict between East and West, between free enterprise and exploitation, and of course between puritanical Islam and sexual freedom.

It was the last of these which caused a certain amount of controversy when the book was originally published, but it's hard now to see what all the fuss is about - although it is of course a characteristic of Islamic fundamentalists to find offence at the tiniest perceived slight. Certainly there is some intemperate talk of rejoicing on hearing the news of Palestinian civilians being gunned down in Gaza, and some flippant asides about buggering camels, but Islam doesn't really come off any worse than European women, men in general, the Germans, pretty much everyone in fact. The only people who seem normal and well-adjusted amid this torrent of vitriolic misanthropy are the Thai prostitutes Michel frequents so enthusiastically.

Other criticisms could be made with a bit more justification, though. Lengthy passages read like the feverish panting fantasies of a 15-year-old: Michel and Valérie's sexual exploits are described with pornographic relish, and their initiation into threesomes happens a little more easily than (I suspect) these things actually happen in real life - a Cuban chambermaid interrupts the couple in mid-foreplay and instead of making an embarrassed retreat, strips off and joins in. Great! The whole thing (see my second metaphor) reads like it was tossed off (so to speak) in one extended rant without much reflection, or indeed editing. Some of the later passages where reckless hedonism collides with violent death read a bit like some of JG Ballard's later novels like Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, though not nearly as intelligently written. The sheer reckless energy of it all is very bracing, though. To illustrate my first metaphor, though, I read Houellebecq's previous (award-winning) novel Atomised a couple of years back, but I couldn't honestly tell you a thing about it now. It's like literary MSG: delicious, but not very nutritious.

Oh, and a belated note on pronunciation: try "Wellbeck" and you won't be too far off.

anyone hungry?

Well, you may not be after reading this interesting article. Maggot-infested cheese anyone?

There's a couple more which may be of interest as well - think of them as possible accompaniments to the stuff the guy at Weird Meat eats. "Hermaphrodite frog guts" is the latest one, if you're interested. Get a load of these:

• Surströmming - yes, it's those crazy Scandinavians and their fish-fermenting antics again. These are herring.
• Sannakji - more seafood, this time baby octopus from Korea. Chopped up and stuck in a bowl, still twitching, and then dunked in a bit of sauce and eaten. Check out these videos.
• Ortolan - cute little birdies. Look at their pretty yellow feathers. Then - as the French do - catch one, take it home, poke out its eyes, force-feed it, drown it in armagnac, and then eat it. Whole. Technically this is just a little bit illegal these days, but the French still do it. Oh, and so does Jeremy Clarkson.
• Huitlacoche - what's for tea, ma? Why, it's hideously infected fungally tumourous sweetcorn, little Johnny - your favourite. You can gnaw it directly off the plant, or you can get it in tins down your local Mexican supermarket. Great!

After all that, I could do with a nice cup of coffee. Ideally one made with beans that have been eaten and then shat out by a small tree-climbing mammal. Mmmmm.

World Cupdate

Just watched the France-Ireland match in Pool D - not a great game, but very exciting, and a comprehensive enough victory for the French in the end. Nice to actually get to watch a game, the last couple having been on ITV3 which my two-bit chickenshit digibox doesn't seem to be able to pick up at the moment. Here's a few random nuggets gleaned from the first fortnight's action:

• Underrated player alert number 2 - Damien Traille of France. Seems to have been around for years, but his howitzer right boot gives the French a whole world of options at inside centre, not least because they are a bit flaky at outside-half, and I'm thinking of Freddie Michalak in particular here. Gavin Henson fulfils a very similar rôle for Wales, when he isn't either injured or out of favour with the selectors. Then again you can understand the whole Charlotte Church thing being a bit of a distraction.
• Speaking of Michalak, he can be a nightmare at outside-half, but he does have his moments; the try that broke the Ireland game wide open was a moment of utter genius. I still think David Skrela might induce less heart attacks among the French supporters, and possibly be more effective overall, though.
• Ireland have been strangely terrible so far, and I've no idea why. Nonetheless French supporters will be cheering them on against Argentina next week, since an Irish victory might just allow the French to win the group and thereby avoid the All Blacks in the quarter-finals.
• The All Blacks are undoubtedly awesome. But I wonder how much of them having been the pre-tournament favourites before every World Cup so far is a result of them having the best playing strip colour? There's something ineffably cool about black, after all.
  
• England were terrible against South Africa last week; the Springboks won at a canter without really having to get out of second gear. England are unforgivably stodgy and unimaginative behind the scrum at the moment. Josh Lewsey and Jason Robinson have been the only guys who have looked capable of breaking the line - Wilkinson and Barkley may help against Samoa, though neither of them are exactly Barry John, but if their passing isn't spot on the Samoans, and Brian Lima in particular, will rearrange some ribcages, and could even win.
• Mike Phillips of Wales has been a revelation both as Dwayne Peel's understudy and when he got a chance to start a game against Japan this week. He reminds me very much of Terry Holmes - almost like an extra flanker, though hopefully not as chronically injury-prone as Holmes was.
• Stephen Jones and James Hook still pose a selection problem for Gareth Jenkins. I reckon the best arrangement is probably Jones at outside-half, Hook at inside centre, Shanklin at outside centre.
• My quarter-final predictions: Argentina v Scotland, France v New Zealand, South Africa v Wales, England v Australia.
• Based on that, my semi-final predictions: Australia v New Zealand, Argentina v South Africa.
• And my final prediction, as in the last post: New Zealand to beat South Africa.

I never drink......wine. Oh go on then

Wine. Sometimes a bottle just isn't enough.

That's an advertising slogan that I think could be a winner for the wine industry, though I'd be wanting a cut of any profits accruing from its use. They could pay me in wine, as a gesture of goodwill.

Anyway, if you do decide, in advance of making any oenophilic purchases, that a standard 75cl bottle just won't do the trick, your usual obvious course of action is to buy a box. 3 litres (i.e. four bottles' worth), and because there's no glass involved you can convince yourself that you're saving the planet into the bargain. Plus, you can, once it's finished, remove the internal foil bag, inflate it by blowing into the tap and use it as an emergency camping pillow.

Or....you can avail yourself of one of these (see below). This is a 5-litre box of Côtes du Ventoux from the excellent Cave de Sylla in Apt, which I bought when we were in Provence back in June. See how its bulging beefy majesty dwarfs the puny 3-litre box of Banrock Station Shiraz Mataro which I've included for comparison purposes. Also - the Aussie wine was a very reasonable £12.99 from my local Sainsbury's, but this one was a mere 14 euros, which, at today's exchange rate, works out at £9.38. So that's £1.88 a litre (£1.41 a bottle), compared with £4.33 a litre or £3.25 a bottle for the Aussie one. All depends on the quality of the wine as well, of course, but the Cave de Sylla allow you to do a bit of pre-emptive tasting before you buy, and this was definitely the best of the boxed ones.


Incidentally the legend on the left-hand side reads "un chant plein de lumière et fraternité", which I would translate as "a song full of light and brotherhood". Which is all well and good, though "a big box full of cheap booze" would probably have done just as well. There is a slogan on the other side as well, and it reads "il faut se rendre à ce palais magique" which I think broadly translates as "you must go to the magic palace". I've no idea what that means, but I suspect necking 5 litres of wine at one sitting might grant you some sort of insight. I'll let you know how it goes.

flog erections, as they say in China

Much has been written, by, among others, me, about the French elections. Needless to say things didn't go quite as I'd hoped they would, as Nicolas Sarkozy defeated Ségolène Royal fairly comfortably in the second round run-off - though the age-group breakdown of how the votes were cast is interesting.

One thing which is, perhaps, a cause for optimism is Sarkozy's relative youth. France is a country which has been governed by old men for the last quarter of a century - Jacques Chirac, the outgoing president, is 74, while his predecessor François Mitterrand was 78 when he stepped down. In fact the last man to become president while younger than Sarkozy was Valéry Giscard d'Estaing who was 48 (Sarkozy is 52) when he was elected in 1974. Giscard d'Estaing is also interesting for having a name that sounds like someone twanging a woman's knicker elastic - the pull-back with the index finger on the "Giscaaaaaaard" and the release on the "D'EstAING"!

Sarkozy is clearly playing on his perceived youthful virility by being photographed going out jogging in the Bois De Boulogne with his new Prime Minister, François Fillon. Whose wife, interestingly, is from Llanover near Abergavenny, about 20 miles from where my parents live.

And speaking of spouses, one of the unspoken issues of the election has been the relationships between the two protagonists and their respective spouses. Sarkozy's story is the more juicy and interesting: his wife Cécilia having a very high-profile affair with another man a couple of years ago, a reconciliation, then another apparent split during the last stages of the election campaign, only for her to turn up at his shoulder for his acceptance speech the other day.

Now you might argue that this is all tittle-tattle and irrelevant to the serious issues affecting the presidential campaign, but it's interesting to note, as the article above does, that Sarkozy's language became notably more confrontational and intolerant during his wife's absences; the infamous remarks about clearing young criminals off the streets of the banlieues with a Kärcher pressure-washer were made during her absence. I'm not sure the personal and the political can be divorced (so to speak) that easily (as the stringent French privacy laws seem to assume); life is a bit more messy and inconvenient than that.

Ségolène Royal's home life is of interest as well, since her long-term partner (and father of her four children) is Socialist party chairman François Hollande. There were rumours of conflict after the election campaign was over, hardly surprisingly since Hollande himself could very well have put himself forward as a Socialist candidate, but decided to step aside in favour of his partner. The late-night chats over a mug of cocoa after the elction defeat must have been interesting.

the triumph of democracy over apathy

....is a slightly grandiose title for a blog post, but there it is. I'm referring to the results of the first round of the French presidential election yesterday. It seems that either the French voting public was genuinely engaged and energised by the candidates on offer this time round, or that they were keen to avoid the debacle of 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round of voting at the expense of the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin.

Whatever the reason, voter turnout was a startling 84.6% compared with 71.6% in 2002, and what most neutral-ish observers would consider the "right" pair of candidates, Nicloas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, qualified for the run-off on 6th May. At least this way there'll be a meaningful second round, unlike last time where Jacques Chirac was guaranteed a landslide victory as soon as Le Pen qualified alongside him.

It'll be interesting to see where the unsuccessful candidates' votes go in the second round; you would assume that the Le Pen vote will largely gravitate to Sarkozy, despite the two men's mutual personal loathing. Where the Bayrou vote might go is a bit trickier. Not to mention the significant numbers (16% of the turnout) who voted for the various other candidates, including José Bové and his comedy moustache. Here's a picture (above) so you can compare it with Dick Strawbridge's from a few posts back. I think his startling resemblance to Asterix (also above) might have won him a few votes, as well.

Personally I hope Ségolène Royal wins, just because it would give the chauvinistic conservative status quo an almighty hoof in the family jewels, which would be quite amusing. There may be an element of me quite fancying her, in a quintessentially French older woman kind of way, as well, but I'm not prepared to comment on that.

This might be a good moment, also, to revive the hoary old quote which I've just looked up and seen attributed to Gore Vidal: "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so." Or, for French consumption: "N'importe quel français qui est disposé à courir pour le président devrait automatiquement, par définition, être éliminé de faire jamais ainsi." Well, "courir pour le président" probably isn't the right idiom, but it'll have to do. Sarkozy really really wants to be president; you can see it in his eyes. Some people might find this a bit alarming.

It's instructive to contrast the turnout with the turnout at the last two UK general elections - 61.3% in 2005 and 59.2% in 2001. That's what you get in a system (i.e. the French one) where every person casting a vote knows that their vote is going to count. Admittedly electing 650 MPs is a bit more complex than electing a single President, but the same principles apply. More here, if you want it.

On a completely unrelated note, this is my 147th blog post, and the World Snooker Championship started this week. Spooky, huh?