20/02/00 A fête worse than death ...

No, neither a spelling mistake nor some sort of Freudian slip, just that last night was the school dine and dance here at Saint Pierre, and we weren't able to get out of it. Locked into a smoky salle des fêtes for at least four hours, surrounded by demented French-things drinking with abandon and smoking - as far as anyone can tell - silage. Attila the Hun and his mobile disco provide the musical ambiance, which is pretty dire.

Actually it wasn't as bad as all that. It was pretty bad, because our table was right up at the head of the room about 3m from the "orchestra", which rather curtailed conversation. On the other hand it wasn't too smoky, which was a pleasant surprise, and we managed to slope off early - about mid-night. Luckily Jeremy had decided earlier in the day that he wasn't going to enjoy himself and so spent his time sulking, which most people interpreted as tiredness and recommended we take him home.

Reminds me that at some time I really must fill him in on the sordid details of exactly what it is I do for a living. At the moment he seems to have it in mind that I make computers and then give them to people, which isn't exactly right.

The weather at the moment is traditional French for the month, aggravated by the usual influx of Parisians and other simple carbon-based life-forms for the winter holidays. Practically speaking this means a couple of days where you start to think about putting away the winter woollies, followed by a week wondering why on earth we chose to live so close to the North Pole when there are so many warmer places around, like Siberia. And the autoroutes are jammed. And I do not even wish to speak about going to Carrefour to do a simple bit of shopping.

On the other hand the birds have been at it - noisily - for weeks up in the eaves and some of their enthusiasm seems to have communicated itself to the vegetable world, as the primroses are in flower and the daffodils and snowdrops are out, looking for a less boring means of reproduction than just splitting their rhizomes. Which means that soon we'll have to look at spreading grass seed on the balder patches of paddock, look at planting out trees if we're going to get that done this year and perhaps even napalming and then rotary-hoeing the patch where the vegetable garden once was.

Tuesday night now, and I'm trying to recover after a day's diarrhoea - not mine, I hasten to add, Jeremy's. Took the morning off to look after him but had to drop him off with Margo in the afternoon as I had the accountant coming up to the office to play "Let's hunt a hundred thousand!" or however much it is we want to pay out to ourselves this year. Starting to be a pain in the proverbial rude parts now that we have a bit of production going on, which means that we have to keep track (vaguely) of stock in hand at the end of the financial year so that it appears in the credit side of the accounts (as stock) as well as the debit side (something we actually, through gritted teeth, paid for). Because otherwise you look at the balance sheet and see 300KF spent buying components and 310KF coming in from the sale of what we made from those components, and you start to worry seriously where your margin is,until you realise that the 100KF you spent in December and billed at 200KF in January appears on the books for '99 only as an expense. This business of trying to manage a small company isn't all it was made out to be at the beginning. No-one warned me that it might start to get complicated!

On the news front - the European Commission has already threatened France with a slap on the wrist for continuing to ban British beef after the relevant European agencies have found it to be safe - or at least edible - and are seriously considering doing the same with Germany. I must admit that the French have played it very nicely: having just created, by some incredible coincidence, an "independent" organisation somewhat along the lines of the FDA, which duly found reason to doubt that Britain's herds were totally free of BSE, they now claim that there is no way they can override the expression of the peoples' will and let mad cow meat into France. An attitude which goes down well not only in France, because most right-thinking people hold the Brussels bureaucrats in the same esteem as cockroaches.

But one of these days the French will have to accept that they're just a second-rate nation (have been for at least 120 years, but never mind that) and can no longer get away with bullying the Germans from a position of weakness. Back in the 60s both the French and the Germans wanted to lock Germany into a peaceful Europe, with the Germans as the economic motor and the French as the political visionaries. The unwritten agreement was that the French led and the Germans backed them up with their economic clout. Now conditions are, if not reversed, at least a bit more equal, and this lot of Germans sees no need to feel guilty and would rather like to have their own place on the world stage. Which leaves the French wondering exactly where their place is. Unfortunately, unlike the English, France has no experience of voluntarily giving up an empire, and so has no idea of how to decline gracefully. (Off the top of my head, I can think of no other country that feels a need to bribe small, corrupt African states to continue using French as the official language.)

Perhaps, as de Gaulle's myth of the heroic French resistance fades, and Mitterand's generation of techno/bureaucrat collaborators dies out, France will become a normal nation that doesn't have to pretend that it was raped by the Nazis in 1939 but somehow remained pure in spirit. It has started, with the trials of several home-grown war criminals and the reconsideration of the war in Algeria.

Things can only get worse (well, more interesting) as the EU expands to take in the next lot of applicants (six of them, if memory serves, including Cyprus, which is politically delicate) and starts considering the next lot whilst thinking about what to do about Turkey. (Been thinking about Turkey for years. Got nowhere. Blame it on the Greeks.)

Does all that sound a bit dyspeptic? Must be in a bad mood. Probably listened to one ignorant Frog too many, decrying the evils of an "Anglo-Saxon" economy of which he knows sod-all, and moaning about how he doesn't get enough subsidies.

I really am feeling sour. On the bright side, we finally got together all the necessary paperwork and our naturalisation dossier has been sent off to the Préfecture. So in another couple of years we may well become authentic French-persons. While waiting, we have to renew our cartes de résident this year, and as they expire in August I suppose we'd better get a move on, especially as the Préfecture is basically closed for three months starting in June. That gives us three months, which should be enough. Just.

Anyway. For now, it's enought that the Parisians have all gone home (usual traffic jams on the autoroute all day) and the temperature is rising, which can only mean that Spring is coming. Another few months and we can dust off the barbecue!

08/02/00 The brave new dawn of the 3rd millenium?

More like the hung-over awakening of the 2nd millenium's left-overs, but never mind.

Well, three weeks into Y2K we're still here. I'm starting to feel that maybe we can relax a little and venture out of the bunker for an hour a week or so. Although that might be a bit premature, at least until Feb. 30th goes by without a hitch (according to purists it's a double leap-year).

Anyway, time goes by and the primroses are starting to get ready in the garden, and I suppose that in a month or so the daffodils will be poking their heads out as well. Which will be A Sign that the lawnmower needs an oil change if it is to cut grass rather than bludgeon it, and that we'll have to go around spraying fruit trees against mealy-grub, white spot, black spot, greasy patches and mad cow disease (this is France).

But all that's on hold for the moment as it snowed again quite heavily on Saturday and then again last night: 25cm of the stuff this low down at this time of the year isn't bad. Friends came around on Sunday and we all went sledging in the paddock, which the kids loved. Shame the snow was sticky: great for making snowmen, but you wouldn't have wanted to ski on it. Wouldn't have got more than a few metres before bogging down and falling over. Seems that it was good up in the stations - nice snow, if a bit chilly at -15°

26-1-00

The snow is still deep and crisp (soggy, actually, but never mind the details) and even except in those parts where it's been beaten down by the passage of tiny feet, and I've spent all day as one of the great unwashed 'cos there was no hot water this morning. (Central heating was still working, fortunately.) Spent a happy afternoon up in the attic with the hairdryer, thawing out the one pipe that I hadn't bothered to insulate, thinking that there was no point as it wouldn't freeze up there, to wit the cold water pipe into the hot water cylinder. I admit it, I was wrong, on exceedingly cold nights it can in fact freeze up there and it does. Have now insulated absolutely EVERYTHING.

4-2-00

Time does fly, doesn't it? Can't think why, it's not as though anything has actually happened but there you are, it just whips past, some swine hands you the bill and you're left wondering vaguely what the hell you're paying for and rather hoping it was worth it.

But it does feel like the end of winter. Don't know why, there've been no conspicuous signs or even little notices stuffed in the letterbox, just the once-a-year feeling that the worst is over and spring is on its way. The daylight hours are stretching out so it's no longer dark at 16:30, little old ladies come out of hibernation, and the youth of the village commit whistling in public places.

Which reminds me that frightened bats make a noise like someone sucking their teeth. At least, the one I woke up from its hibernating in the woodpile made a noise like that. Of course, it may not have appreciated being tossed into the wood basket and having another couple of logs thrown in on top - luckily it didn't seem to be hurt and scuttled off happily enough into a dark crack when I picked it up.

And of course the winter sales started (almost finished now) and I succumbed to the temptation of a new scanner and bubble-jet printer for only 800F the pair. (Well, I succumbed and Upstart paid, seemed justifiable to me at the time.) I also have no real excuse not to buy the kids a decent computer as I can pick up the necessary bits for about 1500F (that's motherboard with everything integrated, 500MHz Celeron and a bit of RAM) so at some point this year I must get around to doing that.

But before doing that we have to get Jeremy's bedroom ready for him, now that Margo has removed all her sewing junk from there into the playroom. Which is suddenly about a quarter of the size it used to be. There's the old sink to be taken out, tiles to be removed from the walls (we're assuming he doesn't want to sleep in the Municipal Baths) and the electricity to be redone, after which it can be quickly bodged up and wallpapered.

Just at the moment I'm trying to work out just how the electricity gets around in this house. Yes, I know the theory - electrons (about the size of a small pea, but faster) move in wires and when they come to the end of a wire they fall out and, thanks to gravity, make the little paddle-things in electric motors turn around thus generating rotational motion which can be converted to a linear ie useful movement by a gearbox. Which does not completely explain the transistor radio.

But what I am actually trying to do is work out just where in the house the wires go. The old heating system is fairly easy to pick out, being relatively recent, and I think I've found the lighting circuit. But I'm damned if I can work out where the 3-phase goes. I'll find it, there aren't that many places it can hide.

Anyway, I rather think I won't do any more work tonight so before shutting down the machine I'll send this off. Have a happy (late) New Year

05/01/00 New Year's Dribble

I really must start keeping a diary on the Palm V: it does sterling service for the shopping list and business notes, I don't see why it shouldn't serve for me to keep track of what I've been doing as well.

Christmas went well, if quietly - probably just as well, we're all tired (especially Jeremy) and were quite happy just to sit around and eat and enjoy being warm. Tess has other problems on her mind (such as it is) - there's a mouse in the house and she can smell it but can't get at it. The little sod (or family thereof) seems to have a thing for rice - two packets of Basmati I've had to throw out so far after finding the plastic packets chewed open and little black not-rice grains in there. (Could always collect them and try to pass them off as wild rice to ecologically-minded acquaintances - NOT friends, please note ... haven't dared up to now)

Invited Joc & Hervé around on Sunday night as I was feeling luxurious and decided to make a filet de boeuf Rossini, as it turned out only Joc turned up as Hervé managed to put his back out and spent three or four days immobilised on the bed. Anyway, Jeremy decided that he wanted to sleep at their house with his friend Caroline and we'll pick him up tomorrow or in 16 years time, depending.

Turned out well really as today we had to go off to a funeral - Jacques' wife Anne-Marie died on Christmas Day after five years of degenerative nerve disease and then cancer. Nothing like a good funeral to get all the family together and bitching about one another but personally I always get extremely depressed and have absolutely no idea of what sort of consoling thing one should say on such occasions, and to top it off it's been snowing on and off all day, the church was unheated, and the vicar evidently had thermal underwear on and was in no particular hurry.

I've always wondered how they organise the seating arrangements, actually. Obviously the bereaved family sit up at the top, but do all the rest get shunted onto one side or another depending on whether they're "defunct" or "survivor"? Whatever.

Quite odd really as there were all these grown-up people there - Jacques' children - that we first met twelve years ago and have seen grow up. Saw Claire grow from a gawky, awkward, spotty 8-year old to a rather pretty and reasonably self-assured woman of 20. Vincent is no longer a pimply adolescent but a much head-hunted waiter at 5-star hotels in Geneva. Went to Catherine's wedding, come to that, and would've gone to Xavier's last year (except that it was in Spain, and we didn't have the time). Tim R. Mortiss is definitely catching up with me.

Today being Thursday we all hopped in the big car and headed off to Lyon. First stop M&S to pick up emergency supplies of chocolate-chip biscuits and gingernuts, and to get some cheese to take along for tomorrow night. Got Stilton, red Leicester and three varieties of Cheddar - should be enough to frighten the Frogs. Then we did our usual "escape Lyon by going round and round and round until you get to escape velocity" trick and actually got onto the right road, so went into Ikea to get ideas for doing up the kitchen. Came out with quite a few - one of them being that it's going to take a lot of time and money to get it transformed into something reasonable but then we were expecting that.

Had a slight delay getting to Lyon, of course - we started off later than hoped as we all of us wanted to sleep in, and then going through the tunnel at Chambery the car ahead of us - about 200m ahead, luckily - did a fairly spectacular pinball act bouncing off the right wall, left wall, then the right wall again. Must have hit a patch of ice on the road, I suppose. No-one as hurt though, and we just had to hang around until the firemen came and took the driver off our hands before going on.

The mice have definitely got to go. They may not actually be living IN the toaster, but they're certainly living off the crumbs in it. Tess is about as much use as a limp rag - you say "Tess! Kill!" and she looks around a bit in an  interested manner before sidling up to her food bowl to see what's on the menu. Apparently not self-service mouse.

Those of you who've seen the footage of houses blown over and whatever can rest easy, we haven't so much as a slate out of place on the roof (not more than usual, anyway). By the time the storms got down here they'd more or less blown over and so we had a couple of extremely windy nights (I was worried about the old apple tree in the garden, but it seems to have weathered it) but nothing like the damage further north. And the electricity only cut off twice, for about a minute each time, and each time I'd just backed up what I was working on. Stroke of luck there.

On the other hand, it has snowed again. Woke up yesterday morning at some ungodly hour to the sound of the snowplough rumbling its way up the street, so thought rude words until I got back to sleep. Only 10 cm or so down this low anyway, and with all the rain we've had the earth is quite warm (relatively speaking) and so the roads are clear.

Now Jan 1st, and the world has not - apparently - stopped turning, and the electricity didn't even shut off for a second. We headed off to Renaud & Sophie's after a fairly frenetic hour getting rid of mice - nabbed one in the toaster, and another under the grill of the bread-board. Tess got the first one, but only by a miracle - it actually ran under her bum before she knew what was happening, and I don't know whether she suffocated it or what, but she wanted to come inside five minutes later but as she had mouse-tail dribbling out one side of her mouth we declined to let her in.

Anyway, we had quite a restrained New Year's Eve. In theory there were to have been four couples and we were taking dessert, but there was a minor cock-up on the communication front so there were just six of us and we brought the cheese (hence the fore-mentioned trip to Lyon and we got rid of:

• three bottles of champagne for the aperitif
• two halves of Sauternes with the foie gras and truffles
• one bottle of white with the smoked salmon
• two bottles of Burgundy with the venison
• a quarter of port with the cheese
• two more bottles of (good) champagne with dessert
  

Quite proud of ourselves for not over-indulging.

At about 3am R & S and Bruno & Patty decided to go off night-clubbing but we were rather knackered and headed off to bed, where we stayed until 10:30. Renaud and Sophie surfaced about midday (with eyes, as the French say, 'en trou de pine', which, for those of you who don't have a Frog slang dictionary close to hand, is a vulgar but accurate way of saying 'small, bloodshot and watery'), so we had a leisurely breakfast before heading homewards to let Tess in. After which we have not, I regret to say, done a great deal. How was it with you? I gather that the fireworks in Auckland were worth watching - at least from what was shown on TV here.

Good luck against Dennis Conner, by the way.

25/12/99 Warm & Happy Xmas

Those of you who don't watch the international news roundup on TV, or read major investigative papers like the Taihape District Herald, may still be unaware of the fact that we've had our central heating in and running for the past week. Still a few minor problems - a joint in the fuel circuit which wasn't properly tightened, meaning diesel was pissing everywhere in the cellar, air bubbles everywhere in the radiators which means that when the thing starts up at 5 am it sounds as though there's a small waterfall in the room with you, stuff like that - but the place is WARM! And we don't have sheet ice forming down the bathroom walls either.

And a Merry Christmas to all of you, even if it is a bit late (for you. It's still Christmas day here, although not for long). Malyon rang this morning to let us know (amongst other things) that the weather was traditionally grotty: well, it was the same here too. Cold and wet, maybe some snow tomorrow. Better that than the oil slick currently washing up on the Britanny coast.

Traditionally in France the big feast is in fact on Christmas Eve (followed by another garguantuan one on Christmas day, but that's another matter) and so when Anne-Laure turned up last night to check something up on the Net with her mother Maryse in tow, I thought I'd better check on what they were having. Just a snack, really - salade composée with smoked salmon, snails, venison, vegetables and the bûche de Noël. Our leg of lamb crawled off into the kitchen and hid itself in shame.

Never mind, we'll make up for it on New Year's Eve, when we go around for a small party at Renaud & Sophie's (they have their central heating in and working too!). Just four couples, everyone brings a plate, and just to give you an idea, we have four desserts to bring - pavlova, brandysnaps, cassata and I can't remember what else. I think we might sleep over the night.

Anyway, Merry Christmas again, and think of us laggards when you're washing down the year 2000 with whatever it is you drink on occasions like that, andwe're still sitting around the remains of lunch waiting for 1999 to go away.

14/12/99 Frozen Frogs On Sticks

No, not a new type of iced dairy dessert, just a moan about the fact that it's snowed again today. Forget about the sticks, that's just in the subject to add a bit of local colour. They're not very nice on sticks anyway - trust me. Green, and crunchy (too many teeny-weeny bones. Like vertebrate shrimp).

Well, as far as we're concerned the big news is that the central heating system has finally been installed. Boris Yeltsin may have said unmentionable things about Clinton's willy (can't remember which way it twists, personally), Tony Blair and Lionel Jospin may no longer be friends, for all I care the world may have ended three hours ago, but the thing is done. Now all that remains is to start it up. The fuel gets delivered on Monday and on theory the technician should be around sometime in the week to push the button - only six months after I started organising things, a clear condemnation either of the French way of life or of my personal organisational skills, personally I prefer the first option.

Anyway, we woke up this morning to find it snowing again. A right royal pain. I had to follow a snowplough into Chambery to go to the market, a long slow trip. And of course I forgot to take the umbrella, so I got soaked. Then this afternon we all went down to Grenoble to get our Christmas shopping up to date and pick up a few necessities like Golden Syrup, good thing that the roads were clear as the BMW is a right cow on snow. Even with 80 kg of bricks in the boot.

Work is going well, perhaps a bit too well - just manage to almost get one job finished and another pops its head up. Renaud has almost finished the Nestlé breast-feeding site, and now there's an entire intranet-based document-control and publication system to set up for an insurance company: I may have to start learning about some of the technology behind all this if I'm not careful. Never mind, a couple of days reading and I can pass for an expert - bullshit baffles brains, as usual. And I'm still polishing the rough edges on my inventory-control system: reports to be created, usual problems with Microsoft products that don't respect their own guidelines on internationalisation, general teething problems ... the usual.

Tuesday night now, and I'm completely knackered as usual. Spent all day trying to track down a bug in my stock-control system only to find that it wasn't a bug in my program at all, but a bug in the Microsoft ADO library. I don't know why I'm surprised at this. Happily, the guy who's paying for the system is a developer's dream who notes everything he does, so I was able to reproduce it on my system and track it down - turned out to be the contents of a read-only recordset being modified by updates to another recordset on the same SQL connection. This completely irrational behaviour is doubtless by design.

The snow's stopped - for the moment - and the rain has set in, so the stream is running high just now. Good thing too, with a bit of luck all the crud that the peasants have chucked in (straw from rabbit cages, half-digested pumpkins, rotten tomatoes and stuff like that) will get washed down to the Isère and it won't look quite so much like a sewage station for a while. More snow forecast for tomorrow though, and the temperature has indeed dropped noticeably - at least the technician comes to push the button on the central heating on Friday!

We have a vertically-challenged Christmas tree in the hall - a real live one, with roots and all, so if we look after it it'll do for next year too - and Jeremy has spent all evening decorating it. It's very pretty, but perhaps a bit lopsided, with decorations only at the front, at Jeremy-height. He enjoyed himself. Perhaps Margo will be able to tactfully rearrange it a bit tomorrow.

Spent Sunday evening cleaning out the pantry cupboard - now that winter's well and truly in a family of mice have aparently decided to look for easy pickings, and they'd worked thir way through a packet of pistachio nuts, the stock of Basmati rice, some spaceman pasta and half a packet of egg noodles. I got suspicious when the rice (which I'd planned on cooking) turned out to have some black grains in it, which is a bit out of the ordinary. Tess obviously needs to sharpen up her act.

I can see that if we decide to treat ourselves out to dinner this year it'll be a good one - Renaud's eyes lit up when one of our friends from a company just downstairs described their little do at Bocuse the other night. The menu starts at 750 FF (for eight of them) and the first bottle of wine, an 87 Cheval Blanc, set them back 1500F. It's tempting, but I must admit the the thought of the 300 km round trip is a bit discouraging. Suppose we could always stay over the night - godnose what breakfast costs though.

Anyway, that's enough for now, and in case I don't get time to write again soon, Happy Christmas to the lot of you.

05/11/99 Ohmigod I'm really for it now ...

I can see that the coming week is going to be a difficult one: virtually everyone I know is going to assume that, for some bizarre reason, I really care, and they're going to try to rub my unshapely nose in the fact that the All Blacks lost humiliatingly to the French today. We have three choices:

• pretend that we bet heavily on the French to win, knowing that the All Blacks were going to pull the game
• say that we expected it all along, as being 90% Labourites they didn'twant to help Jenny Shipley
• admire how well the French played
  

Can't say that any of them are particularly appealing.

On top of that daylight saving has just ended, which means that it's night at about 6pm now - at bit too early for my taste. Still, we did get an extra hour's lazing in bed this morning, which was much appreciated - especially as Jeremy wasn't here, having spent the night with neighbours up the road after a kids' Halloween party.

The plumbers have been through the place and by the end of next week the central heating will be all installed, with the notable exception of the radiators, which is a bit of a shame. Seems they're having production problems in the factory, which fails to impress me. Too bad. We've got two tonnes of wood arriving in two week's time, which ought to tide us over if necessary. But I'm still looking forward to the time when we'll be able to go into the bathroom in the morning without putting on an overcoat. (Makes showering such a messy business.)

And after looking through the neighbours' place last night (when dropping Jeremy off) we came to the conclusion that turning our third cellar into a party room wouldn't be such a bad idea. Just needs decent wiring and a concrete floor put down and we could hand it over to the kids as their very own. An appealing thought.

Monday night now - All Saints Day over here - and we've had a regular procession all afternoon down to the cemetery to drop flowers off on especially loved-one's graves. (Or, in some cases, rearrange existing flowers that some thoughtful person brought down but inexplicably forgot to put on the right tombstone.) If I'd thought ahead I'd have set up a small drinks and hot-dog stand at the entrance, would've done good trade.

Been another lovely day, bright and sunny, and first Brian Lovell (ex-pat NZ) dropped by on his bike for a drink and a bit of a rest before heading back the 20km or so to St Baldoph, then Jean-Christophe & Babette popped around for the afternoon. All very nice and relaxing (even if their eldest son, at 11 years old, is headed into some sort of adolescent-cusp crisis which is raising merry hell around their place).

Well, it's Friday now after all that - sorry, been too busy too keep this up - and I gather that the All Blacks lost again. A sad state of affairs, no? Not that we care too much - come to that, I've not even had too many remarks about the French debâcle and all of those were sympathetic, so I'm really counting my blessings.

Anyway, there's a hard week of SQL coding over (with not too much to show for it, apart from the ability to import the existing database with no glaringly apparent errors, which isn't too bad for a start) and the major Frog news is the sudden disarray in the ranks of the government, occasioned by Dominique Strauss-Kahn's quitting. He (call him DSK from now on, the French all do and it's so much shorter) almost overnight got involved in a party finance scandal when some unspeakable little git from the biggest students' mutual insurance society accused him of taking large sums of money for undisclosed (and apparently non-existent) "consulting" services, accusations which have since resulted in some upstart investigating magistrate taking considerable interest in the affair.  DSK and a number of other persons, more or less prominent, have been "invited to help the police with their enquiries", as the phrase goes - all good for a laugh.

The business of phantom jobs (ie large salaries and fees for work which is never actually carried out) as an arm of political party finance (and, of course, personal enrichment) has been receiving quite a bit of attention here ever since the revelations that the City of Paris, first under Jacques Chirac (now president, last time anyone bothered to check) and since him, Jacques Tiberi, has had about 10000 full-time employees who never showed up: all of whom, coincidentally, held full-time posts at the RPR (who wasn't paying them). It became juicier when it came out that the Mayor's wife had been paid 200000F for a 50-page report full of elementary spelling mistakes and no research other than what could have been performed by a semi-competent Labrador on a bad day. Didn't help, either, that Alain Juppé's family benefited from rent-free apartments (in the 16th arrondissement yet - we're talking Embassy Row here, none of your Khandallah slum district stuff) thanks to the Paris housing agency, headed at the time by one Alain Juppé (ex Prime Minister).

At the time, the RPR cried foul: everyone was doing it, it was legal at the time (true, I think) and why blame them? There was even wild talk of indicting Chirac, but the constitutional issues involved get rather thorny (and besides, everyone WAS doing it, so why rock the boat?). But the Socialists, of course, were Mr. Clean personified, and so now the RPR are sticking the boot in with some pleasure. Bit of a shame really, as ministers of finance go DSK wasn't that bad - had almost Anglo-Saxon tendencies really, wanted to improve labour flexibility and reduce the tax burden on companies, stuff like that - godnose who they'll drag in to replace him. So long as it's not Martine Aubry, Mother of the 35-hour working week.

Chatting with the accountant the other day and his opinion was that the major problem with the French economy (apart from minor sectors being able to hold everyone else to ransom by blocking roads, ports and toilets, or burning McDonalds restaurants - can understand that last bit) is that there is no finance market for small companies. The ENArques (think MBA, but high-class) who still supply the government with its technocrats are trained to go through government and then collect directorships at big companies, and of course the French tradition, ever since Colbert, is state corporatism, so basically if you're a big company that doesn't need cash you get it thrown at you by the bucket-load, whereas small companies (1-10 employees) can maybe get a 20000F loan and an overdraft facility after signing over the owner's wife as collateral.

Speaking of minor sectors holding the rest of the economy to ransom, there was a nice bit on the news last night: Breton poultry farmers are demanding subsidies because exports have plummetted to about 30% of their normal level, thanks to revelations that European poultry is often nourished on a diet containing 30% refined shit (literally) with added dioxin. Not only do they want to kill us all, they want us to pay for the privilege!

Damn, spleen's working overtime tonight. Usually does at the end of the week, before I have time to wind down. Sorry. Better than on Tuesday nght anyway, when I looked up a particularly irritating bug on MSDN and found this reassuring line from the fairies of Redmond "Error 80000e23: SQL Server crashes with GPF after INSERT involving a JOINed table. This behaviour is by design."

Okay, that's it for this week (and last week too, sorry about that).

24/11/99 Humble Pie & Other Subjects

Well, the big news over here was that the French team lost against the Australians. On the other hand, they weren't actually expecting to win against the All Blacks, so it wasn't too much of a let-down (and rugby is definitely a minority sport here anyway, played only by garlic-munching thugs from the South) and they didn't feel obliged to lynch the coach and cut the players into small bits with blunt rusty axes, which is, as far as I've been able to gather, more or less what happened in NZ. And Massey University set up a grief counselling crisis cell for depressed students during their finals? Get a life!

Winter's come in about a week earlier than usual - at least by our rather primitive measure, which is whether or not it snows down where we are. Started yesterday and kept up quite heavily today, so there's about 15cm of snow down in the garden, the trees occasionally go "Whoosh! Slither!" as a branch gets tired of holding up so much snow, and right now it's stopped and there's a glacial wind fresh from Siberia which means that the slush on the road will be nicely frozen for tomorrow morning. As if I didn't have enough problems getting home tonight. (As, let it be said, did Margo - the BMW is a right pig on snow. Needs a couple of 40kg sacks of cement in the boot.)

Great whoopee next week as the radiators finally arrive on Monday: on Tuesday the plumbers actually put them in and finish off the last little bits of the installation. With any luck the central heating will be functional in December. It'd better be.

It's now Monday next week - when the radiators were supposed to arrive - and as you can of course guess they haven't. Friday, they're now promising. The snow is deep (about 35 cm) and crisp and even, and looks like hanging around a while as it's definitely not the sort of weather you'd want your pet brass monkey to go out in ie bloody cold. Tonight there are no clouds in the sky, a full moon and it must be about -10 out there. More snow forecast for tomorrow.

Of course there's the usual chaos on the roads, mostly caused by the freight lorries which try to go through mountain passes before the snowploughs have had a chance to clean them up a bit, then of course they jack-knife on the snow and then the snowploughs CAN'T get through - then we have the edifying spectacle on the evening news of truck drivers moaning about how they can't get through to Italy or wherever because people haven't been doing their jobs and keeping the roads clear. Having been overtaken by at least 40 lorries doing 110 on Thursday night, when I was lumbering along at 80 due to the snow, I can't say I have much sympathy for them.

A handy tip, incidentally, for winter driving in the continent - do NOT take the autoroute when it's snowing. It is usually clearer than the nationales, but IF there's an accident and you get stuck there's no way you can get out - just have to wait until it's cleared up. And that could take some time - they're still working on the A7 from Chambery to Marseilles, which was blocked by snow last night.

Succumbed to temptation and bought a Palm V (two, in fact, one for Renaud, one for me) today. About two weeks back Renaud said he WANTED ONE as a NEW toy, so I thought I'd better check the things out. I must admit that I thought it'd probably turn out to be some sort of executive fiddle beads, but I borrowed an old one from Jean-Gilles and after a week I was hooked. The address book is handy - it's all in the mobile anyway, but when someone rings me and asks for so-and-so's phone number I can't give it to them 'cos I'm already using the phone. So it's nice to have the numbers somewhere else. What'd be good would be able to synchronise the two lists, what's in the mobile and what's in the Palm.

The calculator doesn't have a hexadecimal function so it's of no earthly use whatever, and I haven't yet figured out how to make the e-mail work, although when I finally get the proxy server at the office working correctly that will doubtless be no problem.

But what really makes it useful is the notepad. Once you get the hang of writing on the little beast it really is simple, and it saves me an enormous amount of time bringing out the big notebook, flicking through it to find an empty page, writing my notes ... and then, back at the office, trying to find all the notes in my big notebook concerning some particular contract. If only for that, it's worth the money.

Now I just have to overcome my aversion to spending money long enough to buy two portables with 17" screens, sufficiently equipped for Windows NT, decent-sized keyboards and built-in ISDN modems, and I'll really be able to work anywhere. At the moment I'm still lugging the office machine back and forwards between office and home, as there's no way I'm going to pollute the home machine (which is working nicely, thank you, and will probably do so as long as I don't install any more Microsoft crud on it) with SQL Server and as at any rate it's only a poor 133MHz Pentium I it'd take me at least an hour to execute a query.

Anyway, we're all well, if a bit on the chilly side. Tess rufuses to go outside unless she absolutely has to (ie is kicked out) and I can't say that I blame her. Margo is much the same. Jeremy doens't seem to worry too much about the temperature so long as he can play with Lego - or watch the cartoon series of Godzilla. Great way, incidentally, to get him showered and clean - "You can't watch Godzilla until you've had a shower. Godzilla is on in 5 minutes." 4 minutes, 30 seconds later, he's clean, damp and sweet-smelling and sitting in front of the TV.

As for Malyon, it seems that she's settled in very well - got her yellow belt in judo so I expect that when she gets back here corporal punishment will no longer be an option - I've no wish to find myself lying on my back with her elbow in my throat. It's bad enough sitting in the armchair with Jeremy bouncing on my lap.