Adieu, JJSS

Popped over to Paris for a few days of R&R this week. Stayed with my friend Simon from Disney days and his lovely family; we often swop daughters in the cause of language learning. We went to a Charlelie Couture concert, an old exponent of what is known as the 'Baba Cool' school of music. His name is one of those false friends that you think says something else, like the Jupiler beer I used to drink in Belgium that I only realised years later was not named after a planet of the solar system.

The main event of the week was the death of Simon's uncle. The initials above don't mean anything to us Brits but in France it is on a par with JFK. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber was a scion of the French intelligentsia (funny how those two words trip off the tongue. Try the phrase 'British intellegentsia' instead), the founder of L'Express magazine and a short lived minister of the Giscard presidency. He was the spokesman for the modernising of France after the war, exposing French torture in Algeria and exhorting the French to rise to the 'Defi Americain' (the American challenge). The extended family includes numerous famous journalists, writers, broadcasters and the odd entrepreneur like Simon.