les Davey de France

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4887560.stm I have certain reservation over this article, but it is food for thought - and for prayer.

A friend of Catrin's came to stay overnight, so we took a picnic lunch to St. Emilion. Emilian was from Brittany, one of those Celtic church planter s, and his name exists in Welsh as Emlyn. So St. Emilion = Llanemlyn! These big walls were marked on our tourist map as the grands murailles or big walls.

 

 

You would have thought that I would have learned by now, after a decade working in computing and nearly thirty years using them, to read the manual . I had been baffled why Pat's Gmail screen had the chat feature (MSN messenger like) while mine didn't. The answer is on the help pages - it's only available in US English at the moment. MSN Messenger has been really helpful from time to time. I guess maybe the Gmail one will be kinda neat, too.

In History on Thursday we were talking about the apogee of De Gaulle's public life - 1967 - when the French exploded their atom bomb, when he pulled France out of the NATO common command structure and sent the American servicemen home, and when he vetoed Britain's entry to the EEC (again?) I remember the headlines about those things from when I was little. The papers had "Non!" on their front pages, and in a British poll to decide the most evil man of the 20th century, De Gaulle came second - behind Hitler but worse than Stalin! De Gaulle's vision was, apparently, for a Europe of cooperating sovereign nation-states. In the class discussion ranged onto the old franc, the new franc and the euro. The French feel that they lost out when they went euro. So do the Germans and the Italians. The Spanish feel they lost out, too. "On a tous perdu" said the lecturer (we all lost out). One student asked why Britain doesn't have the euro.