Motorcyclist speeds into trouble and strife

French Motorway
Originally uploaded by mr_bruteforce

A man from the Corrèze region of France is in for a serious dressing-down from his other half after......forgetting her at a motorway service station near Strasbourg and buzzing along quite happily for 120 km before realising his little oubli.

Not unsurpringly, the fellow was then distraught and contacted the police, informing them that she must have fallen off en route. Having retraced his journey and found nothing untoward, like a leather-clad woman on the tarmac, they finally came across the would-be passenger - standing calmly outside the petrol station, holding her helmet.

Bird killer strikes in Haute Savoie

Elvis and Priscilla..............how they looked before our holiday

This post comes under a new heading - Expat Tales. A departure from the news stuff, but a more personal view of life in France, maintaining the unusual and slightly quirky angle. Here goes......

Having a solid five years as an Expat under my belt, I can safely say that upping sticks and parking oneself this side of the Channel comes highly recommended. One of the noted drawbacks, as we approach the holiday season, is that thorny question of what to do with our dear pets while we slope off to the coast for a spot of well-needed R&R. I say thorny because this issue has aroused considerable emotion in the household of The Intrepid Rosbif, for reasons outlined below.

With the benefit of hindsight, entrusting two small budgies to the care of a man who spends his entire life enjoying an apéro (apparently never progressing to any subsequent course), his chain-smoking wife who shaves her eyebrows to relieve persistent depression, and their 2 ton daughter, who, (aged 12) has successfully developed the personality of ‘Uncle’ Jo Stalin, was unwise. From there on in, regrettably, the fate of young Elvis and Priscilla was sealed.

Shortly before our departure, Elvis and Priscilla were in the throws of what can only be described as a blossoming love affair. You would think that faced with a lifetime perched on a stick in a three foot cage, that romance would be inevitable. Incarceration creates the most unlikely couplets, so I am led to believe. However, for a good while beforehand, the bright yellow-breasted Priscilla sat impassive at one end of the stick, appearing to find the blue-breasted Elvis’ noisy flapping antics a real and monotonous irritation. And certainly Priscilla and myself were in perfect accord on that matter, before old Cupid drew back her bow.

With a carefully prepared list of instructions for lovebirds on the kitchen table, (they were quite possibly off their food anyway), we closed the door behind us, imagining that our feathered friends would enjoy a little privacy while we sojourned briefly in Blighty.

So you can imagine our horror as we returned and found that E & P had mutated into fat, grey, man-eating pigeons. A frantic knock at the neighbours door followed, accompanied by a lot of furrying of brows and anxious, questioning looks. Through a haze of Pastis, Monsieur explained that he had accidentally left both the cage door and the window open, allowing E & P to fly off into the sunset together, never to return. Feeling guilty about this turn of events, he hurried to the local bird shop to procure similar-looking animals, to alleviate our inevitable distress. How he thought that these two monstrosities resembled in any way our slick beautiful birds can only be explained by the makers of strong alcoholic beverages. To give you a better idea, the picture below shows what Elvis looked like after our trip:

With the absence of CCTV, the truth of what happenned may never be known. Suffice to say that God may have asked us to love our neighbours, but He never said we should trust their animal-loving instincts.