For 2.5 years I sat across from an Englishman who detested Ashley Cole, who at the time was a left back with Chelsea.

My coworker inevitably would get around to paraphrasing the quotes from Cole’s biography, My Defence, in which the player said he was “trembling with anger” in the summer of 2006 when his English club, Arsenal, offered him 55,000 pounds per week (about $80,000, at today’s exchange rates) instead of the 60,000 pounds per week he wanted.

Cole from that moment on became the English Premier League poster boy for greed, especially after he jumped from the only club he had known, Arsenal, to crosstown rivals Chelsea — which is egregious even by European soccer standards.

And that is the guy the Galaxy is bringing in to play left back, leaving onlookers to wonder if the club believes a 35-year-old player can change his spots and become a good teammate — and not one overwhelmed by a sense of entitlement.

Especially if $80,000 a week in 2006 left him so angry.

Because the Galaxy apparently is going to be giving him $5,800 a week.

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I must first have noticed the city of Sete on the map, where the Languedoc region of southern France creeps down to the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

Sete is near the southern end of a confused stretch of French coastline, where land gives way to water and back again from west of Marseille almost to Narbonne.

Sete is possible because of a 400-foot hill that juts out of the sea, with a huge bay on one side and the Mediterranean on the other, allowing the population of 42,000 or so to cluster on the mountain’s slopes and take its living from the water below.

Sete was to come up again in Abu Dhabi, when The National was referring to an interesting midfielder/forward named Gregory Dufrennes, who scored lots of goals for two second-tier teams, Dubai Club and Ittihad Kalba.

Dufrennes is French, and his previous professional stop, before making the leap over to the UAE, was FC Sete 34 — which wikipedia later informed me was twice champion of France. Which is astonishing, considering how small the city is.

And we drove over there today to have a look around and to try to get a sense of a city that must be the smallest to win a French top-flight soccer championship, let alone two of them.

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A great thing about staying in the greater Pezenas area, north of Beziers and southwest of Montpellier … are the walks from one little town to another.

The town we are in (year-round population of less than 600), is about 45 minutes from another little town in a variety of directions.

I have done two of the walks, with the help of Google Maps for the latter — which showed how a dirt path behind the home where we are staying led almost directly to a town north of us. Thanks, GM!

The same website seems to suggest I could walk over a ridge and to the town to the west of us, but I am beginning to think the Google Maps people are promulgating a fictional path.

So far?

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I have been fascinated/haunted by the death last week of an Englishman named Henry Worsley, who succumbed to an infection the day after he was air-lifted by a rescue team after giving up his attempt — 30 miles from success — to cross Antarctica alone.

He had begun his quest back on November 14, dragging a sledge that weighed 148 kilograms (325.6) — almost twice the body weight of the 55-year-old military veteran — that carried all the supplies he believed he would need to make the solo crossing, by way of the South Pole.

That included two satellite phones so that he could call in a report each day during the brutal trip in sub-freezing temperatures across the coldest, highest and driest continent.

Those phones produced daily podcasts posted on the shackletonsolo.org website, which chronicled the attempt, as well as the photos posted daily.

The audio from Day 70, when he concedes he does not have the strength to cover the final 30 miles and will call to be picked up, is like listening to the final words of someone who has nothing left to give.

Two lines of thought on this:

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This entry has nothing to do with sports, journalism or sports journalism. Not that it has been, daily, since 2008.

It’s just plain astonishment at the natural world, and sharks in particular, and a piece of video that perhaps you have not yet seen.

A shark eating a shark.

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I’d heard about this. Vines that suffer and struggle to survive … seem to provide the grapes that make the best wine.

If so, it’s amazing the Languedoc wasn’t given more attention earlier for fine wines.

The ground here is awful. Rocks everywhere. I doubt a vintner could stick a shovel in the ground anywhere in this part of the Languedoc and not turn over a rock or 20.

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I have noted, more than once, that the French are not crazy about team sports. Paris is by far the least sports-interested major city I have encountered.

That partly explains why I have not seen a live sports event — of any sort — since January 3, when I stumbled across the late stages of a French Cup match between Toulouse and Frejus-Saint-Raphael.

Toulouse beat the lower-division Cote d’Azur team 3-2.

Since then? Nothing. Which has to be some sort of personal record, over the past 50 years.

The key issue?

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Wherever we go in France, I make a hash of the French language. And it’s not just my comprehension, which is probably about 10 on a scale of 100. It’s my pronunciation, which is about a 0.5.

I might be able to figure out a topic of conversation around me by identifying a handful of nouns, and I understand a bit more if I can see it written.

But when it comes to pronouncing anything, reading it aloud … disastre! I know nearly zero of the rules of pronunciation.

So, today, it was with some satisfaction that I stumbled across a story listing several English words the French cannot pronounce.

To wit:

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The mobile ride request company Uber has changed the face of transportation in many cities and perhaps none as radically as Paris.

For decades, Paris’s taxi system, and its drivers, had no competition.

Uber changed all that, for the better, in the opinion of thousands of Uber customers, and the old guard doesn’t like it — as demonstrated in the Paris taxi strike today.

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Some travelers, Americans among them, would prefer not to announce their nationality, when overseas.

The world is a judgmental place, sometimes a dangerous one, and why should visitors make it clear what sort of passport they are carrying when it hasn’t even come out of their pockets?

That famously has led some Americans to wear backpacks with Canadian maple-leaf flags on them — figuring that most of the rest of the world has no idea when a Yank is impersonating a Canuck.

Some, however, would suggest that Americans also “out” themselves by the volume of their speech (11 on a scale of 10), by being overly familiar, by tipping in countries where tipping is not encouraged.

But the biggest “tell” of all, in my opinion?

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