520 days ago
I am still using some of the chillies we grew and dried last year, despite giving away pots and pots of them as gifts last Christmas. And this is despite the Mrs and her family using quite a lot of chillies in their cooking and me using a good few in the various stews I make. And guess what: we have had a pretty big harvest this year too.
1209 days ago
We are good Europeans, the Mrs and I. We live in Greece as much as we can and love the place. The Mrs is a fluent Swedish speaker and she would, I suspect, live there again. We speak to each other in French when we do not want Joshua to understand and we happily toasted our freedom at 11 PM on December 31 with Metaxa, greek brandy. We love Europe, we detest the EU. The toast was to three great Eurosceptics not there to witness this great day: Ronald Bell, father of my friend despite the day’s earlier humiliation Andrew*, my uncle Christopher Booker and my Grandfather Sir John Winnifrith.
1714 days ago
My sister T spent her entire school career coming home from exams insisting that she had screwed up. It would subsequently emerge that she had finished top of the class every time. Okay my hard working younger sister did not get into Oxford but she gained entrance to a place in the Fens which is, I gather, almost as good.
2028 days ago
I do not think for a second that the French hard right leader Marine Le Pen is insane. She may well be bad and dangerous, I tend to think that she is, but she is not mad. But right now the French and European elites are doing their best to rebuild her career and make her a martyr by suggesting she is clinically insane and to try and lock her up. To recap..
2414 days ago
This has to be one of the sillier ideas of the Mrs. Instead of politically correct nursery rhymes or sing and sign, which is even more PC, my son and heir and I are off to French lessons for babies.
2434 days ago
It has emerged that in the three months since being elected French President, Emmanuel Macron has spent 26,000 Euro of taxpayers 'cash on his make-up. As it was revealed that over-taxed Froggie citizens had coughed up two bills to a personal makeup artist called Natacha M; one for €10,000 and another for €16,000 Macron's aides said that her services hads been needed as “a matter of urgency”. Hmmm. Really? What emergency does the odious little Queen imagine that might be?
2618 days ago
Though the candidates ranged against Madame Le Pen in the French Presidential election are truly dreadful, I must still hope that one of them triumphs. I just cannot support a member of the Le Pen family or of the Front National. The polls indicate that Madame Le Pen will win the first round easily but will almost certainly lose the second round, a playoff between the top two candidates for the first contest. But as each day goes by Le Pen's poll ratings improve. She keeps doing things that just cause her opponents to look silly. She skewers the elitists of the liberal left on their own double standards and the sans culottes applaud her again and again.
2838 days ago
I was sitting on the train the other day and on the other side of the carriage a couple of seats away and facing me was a rather foxy woman of perhaps 45 years. She sat next to a lad who was perhaps 25 and looked sufficiently like the woman that I am confident that he was her son, rather than her young lover. They spoke in French and she was reading a booklet in English with a title something like "50 ways to look better naked". I could see enough to notice that it contained pictures although I am too short sighted to see what the pictures were.
