French holiday pix
Click here for some pictures of our holiday in France last month (July 2005) — not of special interest or quality but perhaps worth a glance for those who know us!
Jane, Alan and Denise at the market
(By the way, the captions to the pictures which claim to have been taken at Rennes are wrong: we were at Dinan.)
Brian
I’d love to see your snaps – especially if they include Sir Barder himself, once known at the Quai d’Orsay as the subtlest and most devious emissary of Perfide Albion – but when I click on ‘French Holiday pix’ I just get the same page back again. Is it my software or yours?
Sorry about that, Tim. It seems to work all right for me – but if not for you, click on Family > Photos > Holiday pix France July 2005. Or simply click —
http://tinyurl.com/7tcw2
— which I hope will work!
But the pix are nothing special.
And what’s all this about the Quai d’Orsay, anyway? [g,d,r]
Brian
Sorry – isn’t/wasn’t that the location of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? I strongly accociate it with diplomacy, anyway, though I can’t not explain why.
Tim,
I do know what the Quai is: I’ve even been there once or twice. I was merely seeking to cast doubt on your flattering suggestion that those savvy French diplomats, the second best in the world, have ever taken any interest in my talent for deviousness (or lack of it), or even in my existence.
On your problem with the link to my French holiday pictures in my original post, I now find that it works OK in Mozilla Firefox, a far better browser than Internet Explorer, but on one of our three computers it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer — although bizarrely, if you copy the URL in the hyperlink and paste it into the Address box, it works, even in Internet Explorer. I can’t explain that. Anyway, it does seem to work if you hit http://tinyurl.com/7tcw2. (Whether after all that the pix are sufficiently interesting to warrant going to all this trouble is of course another matter.)
Funny things, computers….
Brian
PS: I have just realised what the problem with these links is. Because most of my hyperlinks are configured to open in a new window (to save readers having to keep using the Back button to return to my post), in some browsers opening the new window involves a pop-up: and generally in Windows XP pop-ups are turned off. To make it work, you need either to allow pop-ups (by clicking in the bar above the text which says pop-ups have been blocked, and exercising the option to allow them), or else right-click on the link and choose ‘Open in new window’, which ought to work.
What did we all do to pass the time before there were computers?
Brian
Thanks, that http link did it. Nice pictures – digital camera? I know now what I had at the back of my mind: it was Sir Sampson Courtenay (who you’ll remember was H.M Ambassdor to Azania in the Thirties – see ‘Black Mischief’) for whose powers of intrigue his French colleague M. Ballon had unwarranted respect. Sorry, I know that’s not at all flattering to you – you were undoubtedly a much more distinguished Ambassador and a credit to the Service!
Yes, a digital camera — no more messing about with tatty old rolls of film and waiting for weeks to get them developed, thanks. Black Mischief: required reading, especially for a British or French diplomat serving in Ethiopia (I was for four years one of Sir S. Courtenay’s successors, living in the very house where much of the action of BM takes place, and I knew the model for Waugh’s ‘Prudence’ well). But Sir Sampson wasn’t actually an ambassador: in those days the status of our mission in Addis Ababa was a Legation, headed by a Minister. One of the sharpest and funniest books written in English: a total and most improper delight.
Brian