My Jet-Setting Lifestyle

Well, there won't be any updates here for a couple of weeks. There's work to be done on campsites, you see. So, upon my return, perhaps I'll throw up some more about France, but perhaps I won't. Perhaps I'll take a similar format for the events of the next fortnight, but perhaps I won't.

The tension is killing you. I can tell.

Yesterday's France Story: Proposed Slogans For The French Tourist Board

"France: C'est France!"
"France: Pour Tous Vos Besoins De France."
"France: C'est Plus Grande Que Vous!"
"France: Tenez Dessus Sur Vos Perruques Et Clefs!"
"France: Ce N'est Pas La Fromage Et Le Vin Seulement!"
"France: C'est En France!"
"France: C'est La Plus Grande France Au Monde!"
"France: Ce N'est Pas L'Espagne."
"France: Parce Que Nous Sommes Francais!"

Yesterday's France Story: Guttered

The bowling alley in Cherbourg doesn't open until the afternoons. That's fine. We just went and looked round La Cité De La Mer, which was remarkably interesting and features, among other things, 33cm thick Plexiglass fishtanks, a nuclear submarine, and seahorses. Still, we managed to pull ourselves away and headed off to throw heavy things at less heavy things, a pastime as noble as any on Earth.

Once a lane freed up and we'd been handed our shoes, one of the very few downsides to sandals hit me. Bowling shoes aren't very comfortable without socks (or, indeed, with them, but I'm sure you get the point). This is Thing I Blame My Terrible Game On #1. After a brief period of confusion when my dad tried to bowl with a ball one of the people in the next lane had brought with him, we got down to it.

After I'd lost my first three balls down the same gutter, it occurred to me that I was far worse than I remembered. That said, it had been a good few years since I had last bowled, and this is Thing I Blame My Terrible Game On #2. The next ball caught a few pins, and things continued in this vein for a little while.

A few frames later, Mum went for drinks, as is the place of the person not taking part. While she was up, I went from terrible to mediocre, scoring a respectable spare. It became clear to me at this point that she is some kind of bowling jinx, and so she became Thing I Blame My Terrible Game On #3. This was confirmed when she came back and my balls rekindled their brief romance with the right gutter.

This was shaping up to be my worst bowling game ever by quite a distance, so I started glancing about the screens to find someone, anyone, who I wasn't doing worse than and who didn't appear to be half my age and height. There was only one, one faint beacon of hope, and for me, the rest of the game was about beating Anelise, whoever she was.

I failed. A spare in the last frame and I could have done it, but that just wouldn't have been in the style of the game. Overall, I lost eleven balls down the right-hand gutter. Eleven. That's a one followed by another one. That's more than half the balls I bowled. That's absolutely ridiculous.

Today's France Story: Better Than All The Rest

I got back from France last Saturday. Unless something really interesting happens to me, I plan on updating this every day I'm home with something that happened while I was there, because that way I can create the illusion of frequent updates without having to find something interesting to write about.

Now, in France, shortly before the TV packed in, we caught a sublime French game show called Interville. Now, Interville was sort of like It's A Knockout, or Jeux Sans Frontier, only crazier (insofar as that's possible). The British version, Simply The Best, started the day I came home, in fact, so if you live over here you can catch that. But it won't be as good.

Now, whenever the logo came up in Interville, there was an animated bull running around. We weren't sure why. But then the last round came, and the contestants walked into a bullring. "Ah," I said, "That's why the logo's a bull. They're in a bullring!"

Close, but no cigar.

The real reason wasn't that the contestants were in a bullring. The real reason was that the contestants were in a bullring with a live bull, playing a game as silly ever before. And that is why Simply The Best simply isn't: it doesn't have a bull. We never get bulls over here. It's simply not fair.

Timing Is Everything

I rather suspect that I may have left school too early. You see, there are often Tango or Robinsons vans parked up in our bus bay, there to stock up the vending machines and school-dinner drinks cabinets. Today, however, when I showed my face briefly to hand in some textbooks, there was something a little different. Placed with the minimum possible subtlety in the middle of the bus bay, just next to the "Woodkirk High School" sign, was a Carlsberg lorry (along with a small crowd of people wondering whose damn stupid idea it was to park a Carlsberg lorry in front of a school).

And to think the most we ever got at the end of term was a fun-size packet of Starburst.

Shelf, Bracket, Word, Letter, Alphabet

I always thought that it was impossible to actually enjoy the word association game. Indeed, I'm pretty sure I've voiced this opinion to various people, and would now like to apologise to them unreservedly. I have, for the first time in my life, enjoyed playing the word association game, and it was like my own personal Lipton Ice Tea advert.

Speaking of which, why are the new ones so much worse than the old ones?