Well, that was ugly. And perhaps unfortunately timed. Bob Bradley, the first American to coach a team in one of Europe’s biggest five leagues, was fired by Swansea City today — only his 85th day on the job of the English Premier League club. He was a dead man walking since Swansea’s 4-1 home loss […]

[Read more →]

We concluded most of our holiday activities on Christmas Eve, aside from getting a photo of “hanging Santa” (above, info below). So that left me free to eat a lot of turkey and watch NBA December 25th games till tryptophan and hoops overload knocked me out. I saw the whole of the game of the […]

[Read more →]

I like to attend Christmas Eve services. Preferably of the “candlelight” variety. I have attended one every December 24 since I was 13 — aside from one year in Long Beach when we got the starting time of a service wrong and arrived just as everyone was leaving. Options for church-going in this part of […]

[Read more →]

In France, I cannot spell my own name. Not because I have forgotten but because no one here would understand my pronunciation of the letters. Turns out, the French not only have “a different word for everything”, as the comedian Steve Martin put it, they also have quite different pronunciations when naming several of the […]

[Read more →]

For the past seven years, I dreaded the winter solstice. Now, however, I am happy to see it, considering what it represents.

[Read more →]

We left Abu Dhabi a year ago today, and it seems more distant in time than that. Adapting to the south of France, buying a house, getting key renovations made, moving in … that seems like the effort of more than a year. Meantime, lots of things were going on back in the UAE, a […]

[Read more →]

Seems like every little town in this part of France has its own, slightly different holiday traditions. This one puts up lots of lights. That one has a big musical event in the church. The one over there has the Christmas Eve service and the trucked-in kiddie rides in the place. And lots of people […]

[Read more →]

Another Christmas season overseas, another British-themed Christmas service, my seventh in eight years. We have done enough of these now that I even know the music to “Once in Royal David’s City”, which apparently starts every British Christmas service — at least among Protestants. In Abu Dhabi, the Anglican events tended to follow the regular […]

[Read more →]

How quaint. A phone book, left in our mailbox here in the south of France. I thought they had gone the way of the afternoon newspaper. Curiosities remembered by old people. “Back in my day …” But there it was, the pages jaunes bit of it, that is. The yellow pages. Which perhaps remains useful […]

[Read more →]

The sappiest and silliest expression of eternal affection in Paris over the past decade has been the “love lock”. What whispers “be mine” quite as beguilingly as a big, ugly, heavy brass padlock attached to a bridge in Paris? And left behind to become an eyesore as it begins to rust away? But this has […]

[Read more →]