Engelbert is back

    I spend so much time rambling on about the weather  that I sometimes think I should be publishing this monthly column in the Gardeners’ Gazette. Well not so much the weather this month, as nature in general, which has just performed the most spiteful deed I think I have ever witnessed. You may recall how I have mentioned that all our plants are so far forward this year. In January, just about everything had been led to believe it was May already, after months and months of dry warm weather through what should have been the winter. It was like watching a child being lured with sweeties, as buds and then flowers started appearing on roses, jasmine and even lilies. And then, like Noah and the great flood, we get the coldest weather for 50 years. Not just one night either, but three weeks with constant days and nights of first snow and then temperatures down as low as -17. As with Noah and his safety-ARC, we at least had a log-burner to keep us warm as long as we could find enough firewood to put on it but, unlike the great flood, no pairs of plants were romantically saved from the tempest, 2-by2. It is still difficult to establish the total extent of the damage but I know we have lost entire climbing rose bushes, wisteria, a whole section of climbing jasmine (which it had taken me 4 years to train around our terrace) and 2 massive oleander trees as well as dozens of younger ones which I had lovingly grown from seed. It wouldn’t be so bad if mother nature had then offered a little Spring weather as a compensation, but instead, as I write, we are now back into a new summer, where the ground is still as dry as it was last autumn and the grass refuses to green-up in case Jack Frost might still be hiding round the corner ready to pounce again. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, at least I have my shorts back on again, but it will take a few years to re-establish much of our garden.

    A couple of years ago the French government introduced a ridiculous ruling that every car must carry at least one high-visibility vest for each person within the car at all times. Being caught without one, or even if yours was in the boot instead of inside the vehicle with you, incurred the death-penalty or a 3 week jail stint while being forced to listen to Johnny Hallyday records. Well, this year, yet another equally stupid law is coming into play in August; that of carrying a breathalyser test in every vehicle. What on earth is that about? Have you been drinking? Yes. Well don’t drive. If you do insist on driving while drunk, will carrying a breathalyser with you deter you? No. And anyway, these things are one-use only. So when you climb into your car after one half-shandy and are unsure whether you are fit to drive, blowing into the kit might give you the green-light, but you would then no longer be carrying a working kit on your journey, for which you will incur a penalty twice that of the drink-driving charge. Surely, it is the job of the police to carry such kits, so why should we be expected to do their job for them? Whatever next? Should we carry full medical kits in case we have a road accident to save the ambulance a trip? Or maybe have snow ploughs fitted to all cars because, as we found out last month, this country doesn’t have any.

    Living in an out-post such as this, we tend to rely on the internet for pretty much everything: from shopping to marketing and social activities to social services. Registering on multiple websites is itself quite tedious and I have to admit, like many others, I tend to stick to one password for all except the most security conscious ones. What really annoys me though, is that irritating little box you have to complete at the end of every registration known as a ‘captcha! For the uninitiated, this is picture of some jumbled up letters and numbers that you have to decipher and then type into the box, in the name of spam security. (If you think spam security is something to do with those little keys fastened to the top of tinned meat, then ignore this paragraph!) The reason that CAPTCHA’s annoy me it that I can never actually read what the damn things say, possibly because it is usually in French and, more recently, Arabic. You see, the internet has now got so clever that it knows exactly where you are. Not just the country either, but the village and house number. As I write, someone out there is going, ‘aha, this person is based in South West France’ and, having mentioned tinned meats a few lines earlier, they will be emailing me about buying some Foie Gras by the end of the afternoon! So when these stupid little pictures present themselves, in French, they expect me to have a French keyboard in order to include the accents and circumflex (eg: café dans la forêt) that are required in this complex language, and I don’t. Thus I am unable to register with many of them without having to go through a proxy-server (it’s complicated) to pretend that I am in UK. Basically, nearly 30 years on from 1984, despite all the denial, Big Brother not only watching us but ensuring that if we are in Rome, we damn well do as the Romans do.

    French news this coming month will be dominated by the forthcoming Presidential elections. Already, Nicolas Zarkozy, our current and flamboyant Premier has had to protect himself from angry voters by hiding in a bar, something that French leaders have possibly done for centuries. But, although much of the French electorate have had enough of his radical policies and tough stance on immigration and are swinging dramatically back towards socialism, there is still substantial support from those who want him back in for another term, just to see what floozy he will have an affair with this time. Ostensibly the French prefer to trust a man who does that sort of thing, which is considered perfectly acceptable behaviour amongst the middle classes, over someone who shares his surname with a neighbouring country. Word on the street is that our Nico will leak the news of an extra-marital affair any day now to help his ailing campaign!

    On the subject of elections, recent news has come to light about the overwhelming re-election of Russia’s president Vladimir (put-the-boot-in) Putin. Allegedly, in many polling stations Mr Putin’s name was on both side of the voting paper making him a sort of Hobson’s choice. The new Premier denies the allegations of course, stating that people were perfectly entitled to vote for the opposition candidate, known simply as AK47, who was more than willing to discuss policies with them at a prearranged time in the Moscovian forests after the hours of darkness.

    Finally, we have to question the validity of that institution that is the Eurovision Song Contest. For England, having won the competition with classics such as Boom-bang-a-bang by the screeching Lulu in 1969 and the unbelievably awful Save all your Kisses from Brotherhood of Man a few years later, it appears that our selection committee have decided to once again delve back to those halcyon days and wheel out Engelbert Humperdink for the job. At the tender age of 104, Bertie will be singing some modern numbers such as Greensleeves, My Old Man’s a Dustman and Roll Out the Barrel in order to woo some of the younger judges. However, he need not bother because Azerbaijan is to be the host nation this year so there will be only one judge, democratically selected by the Russian government.