Now heres a funny thing...

...now here is a funny thing, What ? Eddie Izzard ? Yes, yes, he's funny,
But thats not what I'm talking about...

See, I was listening to the Michael Parkinson show on Ray-dee-oh Tooo-woo-ooh, yesterday and he had in the studio Roy Hudd, yes Roy Hudd the radio comedian, tv comedian, tv actor, President of the Music Hall Association or something , and Roy Hudd was talking about the music hall traditions and in particular he mentioned Sandy Powell.

Now Sandy Powell was an old fashioned stand-up comedian who had worked through the music hall into radio before, during and after WWII - and he was fooking funny.

No I don't remember him, cheeky bas'tad, ok I do, just a bit, comedians in the 1960's used to take this piss out of his style of comedy but what does Jimmy fooking Tarbuck know about comedy eh ?

So Roy Hudd is talking about Sandy Powell doing a ventriloquist act in the music hall and I'm reminded of this day when I slagged off ventriloquists and I realise now that its not just me, Sandy Powell thought they were crap in the 1940's - his act consisted of him drunk on stage trying to control a ventriloquist's dummy and the act ends with the dummy's head falling off while Sandy Powell isn't looking and he keeps talking to his fingers sticking out of the dummy's neck while the head rolls across the stage, and when he realises what has happened he flusters and confides in the front row of the audience "have I given the game away now ?"

Maybe you had to be there.
No, for the second time, I'm not old enough to have been there.

So while I'm looking for Sandy Powelll and the ventriloquists dummy on YouTube I find Eddie Izzard instead, I don't know, it just came up in the search, and he's talking about learning French, which is fortuitous after yesterdays heavy defeat of Wigan by the Catalan Dragons in the rugby league challenge cup and my fellow blogger, RLFan, and all round jewish-looking-bas'tad friend John_d of the blog John_d fame just happens to be closely linked with the Catalan Dragons...

You just think these are random thoughts don't you ?
No, there is a link, wait...

OK, his link to the Catalans is just that he goes to a lot of their UK games and blags free tickets for their games dans le sud de France, well actually its his wife that does the blagging seeing as she flirted with le president de club once, but all of that is by the by...

...where were we...

Ah yes, Eddie Izzard learning French...

I can speak French, I can speak enough French for me to actually survive unharmed in France, I will not starve nor will I die of thirst whilst in France and I will probably, with some drawing and charades, be able to place a roof over my head - I'm good at French, me.

But only when I'm in France.

When I'm in England my French is as good as the day I left school, that is it's a CSE grade 4 which for those not of an English persuasion and for those of an English persuasion but younger that 45 years old translates to "this child is fooking crap at French and should that country ever find itself invaded by Germans again then this child should not be considered for for spying duties", which is exactly what Pansy Smith my French teacher wrote on my school leaving report, nearly.

But Pansy Smith had never seen me in France, when I'm in France I am as fluent as, erm, fluent as a man, erm, who is French, that didn't come out very well, I'll edit that when I can think of something French-ier - this blog is only practice for my biography web site anyway.

For example, or as we French (when in France) say, par example, (see - fluent), par example the last time I was in Perpignan for a rugby match I ordered, in a cafe, "une cafe noir est un cognac s'il vous plait" just like that I said it and the waiter looked at me and raised one eyebrow in recognition at fellow fluent French speaker, he was impressed I could tell, and so he should have been, it was only 7.30am and that was breakfast, or petit dejeuner as we French say.

And later on during the same trip as I was dining in a small and quaint Catalan restaurant with the chap who is Drago the Dragon the Les Catalans mascot, and his rather stunning girlfriend, and we were eating a dish of twenty different cuts of animal meat (for the Catalans like their meat) we were joined at the table by a strolling gypsy minstrel in the Gypsy Kings stylee, a rugged looking man who reminded me remarkably of Trampus Shaw a German teacher of my youth, and this here gypsy minstrel puts one foot up on my chair in the space between my legs and leans forward to woo Drago the Dragon and his rather lucious girlfriend whilst I sit there looking at his gypsy arse with the back of his guitar shoved in my face while he strums it faster than a fiddlers elbow - a quite good choice of metaphor if I may say so.

And its when I lean over to the Gypsy King and whisper in his ear that he should fook off out of my face that I realise that once again, my French accent must have been perfect for he threw a curse at me and left the table, and I didn't even have to use any French words that time, so perfect was my accent.

But the pee-esse de reistance came during a holiday in Brittany (north France) during the heatwave of 2003 when I booked the vacances de famille into a golf club apartment for 14 days - hey I didn't know it wa a golf club at the time - ok - and I only took my clubs on the off chance that there may be a club nearby, not because I knew that our apartment door would be a matter of yards from the first tee, honest.

So mon famille spoke not one word to me for the rest of the vacances and because they refused to learn any Frenchy words no-one spoke back to them, they hated that holiday whereas I, well, I played a lot of golf and on the days when I wasn't playing golf - wait, I have to mention this, that august the temperatures topped 100c every day for fourteen days and the golf course was closed most afternoons as it was "tres dangereux" they told me, but still I managed to book a 2pm tee time one afternoon and turned up to find that the course was deserted with all of the cowardly froggie golfers sheltering in the shady clubhouse balcony, with beer, so they weren't the stupid ones after all, maybe that was me, hence the Noel Coward song "Mad dogs and Englishmen"

So the golf club pro didn't know how to tell me that I couldn't play that afternoon and he followed me outside to watch me pick up my bag and walk to the first tee, on my own, mon famille est ne pas parlez avec moi remember ?

So he shouts something at me and gestures for me to wait in the burning sun which even now was setting fire to some of the dryer trees down the far end of the course and I wait while he runs back inside the club shop and then returns with the key to one of the buggys that you normally had to pay for in blood, he handed me the key with a "gratis" and then unzipped my bag and popped a bottle of water into it, also "gratis", he was worried for my safety god bless his little froggy heart and for the rest of the afternoon I kept hearing the electric whiring of another golf buggy on distant fairways and I'd look up from a shot to find him peering through binoculars from 500 yards away through trees, checking that i was still alive and not burned to a crisp on a green somewhere.

Anyway,

So we're in Brittany for two weeks and no-one is talking to me and when I wasn't playing golf I took myself off in the car on little painting expeditions and it was whilst on one of those painting trips that I found myself in Pont-Aven, an artists colony, and thenceforth into a studio shop browsing for prints,which they had in abundance, it being an art shop and all. Having selected a few I joined a queue at the counter where some pesky kids were messing with a display stand for which the shopowner gave them a right bollacking then looked up at me and said something to me, angrily.

20 seconds passed before I finally acknowledged to myself that I recognised not one word of what he had said and so I shrugged my shoulders in a very gallic stylee and offered "je ne comprends pas" to which he apologised in French and informed me that he thought I was Italian, and the strange thing is that by now, the second week into the holiday, I understood every single word he said.

It came to be my turn to get served and we exchanged pleasanatries about the prints I was purchasing and I told him that the pen of my aunt was on the table, which was interesting, and then he said something in return which I didn't understand and so I said something like "je ne comprends pas" again - for why waste a good phrase when you've got it right - and then "je suis anglais" at which he looked shocked and apologised again, in English this time - that bas'tad could speak four languages - and told me he thought I was Parisien this time, fook me, I'd been three nationalities within a matter of two minute.

I was quite proud of my subterfuge when I left the shop, posing as an art loving Italian and then a sophisticated Parisien, until later I found that the word "Parisien" is often accompanied by gobbing at the Parisien's feet...

But still,

I done better than what Pansy Smith thought I ever would...

Oh yes, I cycled a bit you know...

Today the Tour de France starts in Trafalgar Square in that there London.

Wait a minute you foreign people shout, London isn't in France, why would the worlds most famous cycle race which, as its name suggests, tours France, start in London ?

Publicity, money and some more publicity is the answer, its not unusual for the Tour de France to spend a day or so in another country, they came to England once before a few years ago ("a few years ago meaning I can't remember when).

For anyone who has not seen a professional cycle race in the flesh then I recommend the experience if you ever get the chance - we've seen the Tour de France in France many years ago but we also used to attend the South Yorkshire stages of the Kellogs Tour of Britain - the steepest climbs on that section were in the Penines (Englands highest hills), doing Holme Moss and Snake Pass on two circuits, we decided to take up a vantage point at the top of Snake Pass reasoning that the riders would be knackered by then having previously done Holme Moss too - we saw the entourage of cars advancing up the long winding pass before usand I thought that they seemed to be travelling quite fast, within seconds they and the cycle peloton had zoomed past us riding faster uphill then I dared to ride downhill, and then half an hour later after another circuit the same thing happened - amazing.

But of course I've done a bit of cycling myself, oh yes, I still have my Dawes Tourer in the garage, lying where I threw it when we moved in here.

The tales of my cycling exploits are many and usually involve pubs halfway along the route and include the annual 70 mile ride from Wetherby to Scarborough when one year I fell asleep on a roadside grass verge outside a pub and I finished 1492 out of 1500 .

Or the time that Ned and I went on a cycling/camping holiday to France and he forgot his passport, rode through four passport checks without it and I was the one who got stopped by a gendarme when Ned had my passport 50 yards down the road and peddling fast.

Or the time that I did a sponsored cycle relay ride from Leeds to Copenhagen (Denmark) with a team of West Yorkshire's finest police officers and on the first day in Holland we lost two of them, when I say lost them I really mean lost them - they were found dossing down in a police station outside Rotterdam in the early hours of the next morning by which time we had crossed over into Germany and someone had to drive back for five hours to collect them.

But the funniest thing that happened was when a group of us were heading out in the Yorkshire Dales to spend a night in a pub way out in the back of nowhere, heading down a very steep hill (very slowly for me, I never liked going downhill) the rest of the group passed me at high speed until they came across a sharp turn to the right halfway down the hill - later they all confessed that they had all shit themselves when they saw the bend and all admitted that they'd only just made the turn - except Pete.

Pete never saw the bend at all, he was slipstreaming someone else and just staring at their back tyre, as you do when you are one inch away from the bike in front and travelling at 40mph - when the bike in front suddenly veered sideways Pete looked up to see not the road that he had expected to see, but a dry stone wall coming up very fast at him.

Fortunately for him the council had dumped a big pile of roadsalt halfway down the hill for winter use, right on the bend and as I slowly made my way down the hill, brake pads burning under the strain of keeping my speed down to scardey-cat range, I had a perfect view of Pete riding up the mound of salt and then becoming airborne, clearing the top of the dry stone wall by a good four feet.

The next few seconds took hours to complete and resembled the final scene from ET as Pete flew ever upwards, crying in fear but for some strange and still unknown reason, still peddling.

The field in which he landed banked steeply downwards from the wall and he landed in a crumpled heap some 30 or 40 yards into the field, cycle wall jumping should be an olympic sport, it looks hilarious when viewed from behind but more importantly Pete would bring all the medals home for Gt Britain.

It was't very funny for Pete though as he received concussion and dislocated his shoulder and had to spend two days in hospital, but what the hell, it was still funny watching it from behind no matter what anyone else says.