There's always Paris

This post has been delayed from 6th June
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"Allez Richard, Allez Richard, Allez Richard"

Court Suzanne Longlen was packed and rocking; 9995 French supporters were roaring on Richard Gasquet against Stanislas Wawrinka, the famous pub quiz answer ("Name any male Swiss tennis player apart from Roger Federer").

We were sitting in front of the three Swiss supporters in the crowd who were gamely yelling "Komm on Stani"whenever the French chanting began. We were being British and neutral, admiring the great shots from both sides as Stani fought back from two sets down to take the game into a fifth set.

The day of fourth round matches had started with a comedy outing between Tommy Haas and Mikhail Youzney. Haas, formerly the number 2 ranked player who had slipped to 372 in the world and in 2012 was in advanced negotiations with the BBC to retire and act as a pundit for their Wimbledon coverage. In the event he got a wildcard for Wimbledon and despite losing in the first round he staged a Lazarus like resurgence in the rankings to make 12th seed for Roland Garros. Youzney started badly in the warmup and got worse. The highlight was his racket smashing exploits - see here on youtube - although it was a measure of how badly he was playing that it took nine smacks to break his racket.

The scoring system in tennis makes individual points really critical - Bethanie Mattock-Sands found that out at 3-1 30-15 in the first set when she missed a shot into an empty court to get two points for a 4-1 lead and ended up losing the game, the set and eventually the match to Maria Kirilenko.

And, despite the 9995, Stani finally beat Richard 8-6 in the fifth set to go through to the quarter finals having hit 92 winners over the five sets.

Lost in Translation

In Paris for the tennis we went to a restaurant called "Sur le Fil" in Montparnasse.

Helpfully the menu in the window had a translation in English, these days I only read the English to identify amusing translation but on this occasion my French wasn't up to "Cannette de Barbary" so I read on to the English version underneath.

Not much more helpful as the translation was "A can of Barbarisms".

Thanks Bing or Google Translate or whoever was responsible for that.

Actually it's Barbary Duck - and it and the restaurant were fantastic.

Déja Vu

There's a great song by John Fogerty called "Déja Vu All Over Again" - I think the title's irony is unconcious.

So no surprise that, lumbering back with the trailer and car fully laden I was again pulled into customs at Portsmouth last week ....

"Any guns, explosives, knives or other sharp objects sir?"

No, just a washing machine, a dryer, 300kg of imported Japanese sculptured granite, a twenty year old lawnmower recently fully renovated, a fifty year old oak desk, a ladder, four boxes of Christmas decorations, a huge four lane Scalextric layout and boxes and boxes of stuff we hadn't seen for three years.

All things from the house in Fleet - funny the things you leave behind when you move and then decide you still want!