“Several shops and small businesses, as well as a few private houses, sport half-sized Santa Claus figures shinning up ropes fixed to the gutters. Next year I’ll get one myself, but I also need a stuffed wolf to put at the bottom of the rope to make it more exciting.” Mike Kingdom-Hockings tells of his Joyeux Noël in France.
A review of “Almost French”, the story by Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull of how she came to live in Paris, her struggle to come to terms with a new way of life, and her experiences along the way.
“I’m just getting over a cold. Well, to me, born and bred in the UK, it was a cold. If I were French, I would refer to it as anything but a rhume. It could be an angine, a laryngite, a bronchite, a rhinite, or even a rhinopharyngite but not a common cold.” Emily Button sneezes her way through the French healthcare system…
A thermometer on a snow-covered garden chair in a wintry French garden!
“Writing a city guide for Paris on an amateur travel site is about as useless as attempting to cover London, New York or Tokyo in an article of 1,000 words. Since the arrival of the internet, any such metropolis is the theme of fantastillions (© Hajo) of websites, only exceeded by the huge number of porn sites on the web.” BE’s very own Hajo takes a different approach to describing the French capital – through literature…
“The Independent newspaper reported this morning that 20,000 people die each year in NHS hospitals from bacterial infections caused by super bugs that are almost immune to all known antibiotics. Well, that might be the cause of death as a coroner sees it, but every housewife and retired old-fashioned Matron knows better.” Liz Butterfield laments the primacy of cost-cutting over excellence.