If you have five dollars and Chuck Norris has five dollars, Chuck Norris has more money than you.

It's probably just coincidence rather than Italian legislation, but every time I've turned on our TV a Chuck Norris movie is showing on one of our six channels.


Off topic today but I've just started Graham Robb's The Discovery of France which I've been anticipating since reading a review of it eighteen months ago that included mention and photograph of the Landes shepherds on 8 foot stilts who could run as fast as horses.

I picked up a copy of the new paperback edition before leaving the UK and am trying to limit myself to a few pages a day so as to savour it. The first half dozen pages are croppings from adulatory reviews, so it turns out its not my little secret. I shan't let that spoil it for me though.

Anyway Graham Robb's starting point is that the France we know today and assume to have existed for a good while is the result of

...the metropolitan view of writers like Balzac and Baudelaire, for whom the outer boulevards of Paris marked the edge of the civilised world...

and that even a hundred years ago most people in France would not be able to speak or understand French.

So he's spent years cycling around rural France noting, I hope, mind-blowing customs and facts; I'll be dropping these in to postings here when I'm short of other things to say.

To start off from the first page when talking of Le Gerbier de Jonc, the mountain at the source of the Loire and, from the top of which, one-thirteenth of France's land surface is visible:

...phonolithic rock [is] so called because of the xylophonic sound the stones make as they slide away under a climber's foot...