Nizas and Nice

I am still commuting between my home in Nizas, the idyllic small village near the Mediterranean protected by the hills of the Herault valley in Languedoc, and Nice - the hard working and hard living city next door to Italy, the Gotham City of the Cote d'Azur (Nizas is more like Smallville).

I come over each week by train, but the wonders of the TGV which only takes just over 3 hours to Paris are lost on this 19th century track along the Mediterranean coast, the trip is over 4 hours and a couple of weeks ago it took me 12 hours thanks to a rail strike and repairs on the line. I could drive it in 3 hours, but you haven't seen our car!

I came to Nice to set up a new office with the promise of high speed fiber-optic lines and a whole city of super efficient programmers and computer technicians. In 6 weeks so far I have not found a single person who understands how to configure a server, the speed of the lines here is slower than in the rural town of Pezenas and fiber optics only serves one small community miles from Nice. But the choice of restaurants and the bustle of the streets is great. I could even get a meal at 3am in the morning here where I cannot even get a drink in Pezenas after 10 pm.

Anyway, the delay in setting up the server means I can now consider Windows 2003 now so maybe this will turn out OK in the end.

It also means I have the pleasure of returning home to the peace of the Languedoc countryside, even our neighbours cockerel wakes up at 7am, whereas my colleague Dawn, over in the Charente, has hers in the tree outside her window waking her at 5am and she says she has to drive 15 km for a coffee and croissant - so civilization is what you make it I guess.

I have so far avoided talking about the fighting in Iraq in this newsletter - until now, I am from the UK, I chose to live in France, I have spent a lot of time and have lived a while in the USA, I have also spent a lot of time in the Middle East and Africa.

As a Brit. living in France, I am not allowed to vote for Bush, Blair or Chirac and in fact I would not vote for any of them even if I could. However we have had a lot of what can only be called hate mail from visitors to our sites. Some was infantile, some was highly personal and abusive and some was sad and pitiable. All of it was uneducated, inaccurate and ridiculous, but the writers must have felt strongly about the things they believed in to take the trouble to write to me.

It seems to be in the nature of humans to fight and I have seen many violent things on my travels. I know I would shed my last drop of blood to protect my family But I do find it hard to believe the "news" I read from different countries is talking about the same events. I absolutely agree that anyone fixing elections, breaking International laws and killing people should be condemned, but from what I read, I am not sure which side I am talking about

The first casualty of war is the truth I am told.