Mad Darby Diaries

 I lived in Khartoum for 3 years, not an easy place to live and work but we survived.  Now it is being attacked by 2 military men, who want to be all powerful at the expense of the ordinary citizens who endure a harsh life at the best of times.  They are being killed in their hundreds by their own military leaders and even if one manages to defeat the other, the winner will be in military control of the country.  Russia, especially the Wagner group, have their hand in it.  They have provided weapons in return for gold and other precious commodities.  Russia has exchanged weapons for the right to build their own port at Port Sudan where they are probably sitting back and watching with glee the death and destruction being inflicted on the Sudanese people. In Tunisia, the President is in the process of turning the country back to a dictatorship.  In Ukraine the Russia continue their relentless assault of their neighbour, and China threatens the future of ...

 In the US dozens of children are killed every month by guns and hundreds of people in total, and yet lawmakers, mainly Republicans, doggedly stick to their mantra of their right to bear arms.  When the Constitution was written there were no rapid fire rifles, machine guns and the myriad of other weapons that are now to be found everywhere in the States.  In addition, the right to bear arms was intended for men to come to the help of law enforcers and even military, in time  of need.  It's intention was not for every person in the country to hold multiple weapons in their homes or for the children to be the targets.  A Senator this morning said that it is the fault of people with mental health problems, get them identified and the killing will stop.  When they can't accept their own mental incapacity to see that they are aiding and abetting the killers by refusing to take the necessary steps to curb gun ownership, then how are they any better than the ...

 Will he, won't he?  I am not that bothered if Trump is indicted in New York or not,  although it would grieve me if, having been indicted he was then found not guilty.  I am waiting for him to be charged on the major cases, trying to change the results of the election, sedition and mishandling of official documents.  I am tired of hearing that he is a special case because he is a former president.  No he is not.  He is a criminal and should be treated like anyone else, although so far, the law seems to have tip-toed round him.   If you look at the UK newspaper headlines you would think that the whole of France is suffering from burning cars, riots, piles of stinking rubbish and of course, strikes.  In Paris this would be sort of accurate, although not the whole of Paris is under siege.  Here in Saumur we have a weekly protest, noisy, banner waving, nothing else.  Is that why the centre is being dug up by the council do you thi...

I have just spent 10 days in the UK.  It rained every day for five days and then it snowed.  After the snow came the sleet and the day I left it was warm and sunny.  On one of the snowy days I brushed 3 inches off the car of my daughter in law and went to collect my grandson from school.  The narrow,  country roads where my son lives, has thousands of potholes and on that particular day the snow had covered them, drawing unsuspecting drivers into them.  Bang went the car in a concealed pothole.  Immediately I knew that the exhaust had been knocked off but I had to drive another 60 metres in order to pull off the narrow road.  Clanging along I thought of that Beatle's song, there are 12,000 holes in Lancashire, or something like that.  Try Buckinghamshire!   I spent some time travelling by underground and train and was intrigued by the number of young people 18 to 40, male and female, who spend there journey time looking at themselve...

 Running uphill, racing and playing tag at high speed is all part of looking after an exuberant 7year old.  Yesterday I took my grandson to the field to play football, which was competitive with no allowances made for age, on either side.  At one point I went in to tackle the ball but somehow our feet became tangled up and there I was crashing face down in the mud.  With neither of us being able to control our fall, my grandson  landed on top of me.  As he rolled off we looked at each other and burst out laughing.   I was covered in mud from head to foot.  We went on playing for a while before heading for home.  My son opened the door and exclaimed 'what have you two been up to?'  Oh dear, I remember asking him and his brothers the same thing when they were children. Boris Johnson has recommended his father for a knighthood.  Which planet does he live on and didn't his father move to France to escape Brexit? Electioneering has ...

 I have never taken much notice of my age, partly because my birthday is rarely acknowledged and partly because it seems largely irrelevant.  That's fine for me.  I am an ordinary person, jogging along with life.  My age is irrelevant, not only  to me but to everyone else I imagine.  However, in some walks of life, it is important to know how old someone is and there has been much discussion about Biden's and Trump's ages, although where Trump is concerned, he has barely moved on from infancy.  Yesterday an aide, who looked as though he was just out of short trousers, was asked the age of the new President elect of Nigeria.  'He's older than me,' came the quick response.  'Age is just a number.'  The reporter, becoming very close to discriminating against someone said, 'What about his shaking hands?  He may have Parkinson's.'  Bad move on the journalist's part.  I have shaky hands, I don't have Parkinson's and my brain is ...

 I don't want to hear another person  say that women should be equal to men.  There is no 'should' about it, women ARE equal to men but they are not treated equally.  It has never occurred to me that I am  not equal to any man.  Am I treated equally?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  It requires a step change in the way women think of themselves as being equal before we can hope for attitudes, legislation, economics to  follow and that is my rant for the day. Ever since I have lived in France I have noticed a stark difference between the French and the British sense of humour.  The dry, irreverent humour of the British is completely wasted on the French, and the Dutch and the Americans sometimes for that matter.  Clearly the British humour is unique.  Yesterday I gave an article to a French friend to read.  It was a humorous piece, self deprecating about a woman suffering an attack by an insect on her face with hideous result...

I am the fifth of six children.  My oldest brother and I thought the same, worked and travelled overseas, shared the same sense of humour.  My three sisters,  on the other hand were stay at homes,  scared of travelling, even on a train in case they got lost, and to this day have not been persuaded that technology can be useful.  They are proud of the fact that they don't have mobile phones, computers and that they pay all their bills with cheques or cash.  One  sister received a letter from a utility company informing her that they would no longer accept cheques and all bills must be paid by direct debit or via bank transfer online.  She telephoned the company and said that either they accept her cheques, delivered by normal post, or she wouldn't pay.  They backed down.  They are a sister clique, of which I have never been part, because we are like chalk and cheese and because I have never really lived in the UK.  In January a siste...

 It seems that never a day goes by without a list of disasters happening in the world.  I was watching the news covering the earthquake in Syria and Turkey.  A journalist was showing the survivors sleeping outside in below zero temperatures, with no food  or water, trying to survive with not even a tent.  Another journalist then reported on the thousands of bodies being recovered and taken to a sports hall.  Do you see where I am going with this?  Why oh why are bodies being kept safely sheltered in a sports hall while the living are trying to survive out in the open? Supermarkets don't seem to work on my logic either.  I go to, for example 'baking products', only to find that half the things I need are scattered at illogical places across the store.  In  Sainsburys in the UK I was looking for gluten  free sausages so I looked at the sausage  shelf, then a gluten free section, but nothing.  I asked someone who led me to wh...

 I want to change my Will, or at least update it, so I wrote out what I wanted in French, with an English version for my children with explicit instructions.  My wish is to keep it as simple as possible so that my children don't have to jump over too many hurdles in France.  I made an appointment with the Notaire and duly turned up at the appointed time.  I explained what I wanted and showed him my French version.  'I don't know much about making Wills,' he said.  Slightly nonplussed, I asked why we were there as I had made it quite clear that I wished to change my Will when I made the appointment.  'I know something about French Wills', he said, but nothing about English ones.  'This is a French Will,' I replied.  He then told me that anyway I can't make a new Will unless I produce a copy of the old Will, which has to be torn up  in front of a witness.  I pointed out that I had written that this Will supersedes all previous Wills, ...

Does anyone get mail these days?  I have received one letter since the beginning of the year and that was a request for me to prove that I was still  alive.  I am.   When I lived in Sudan there was no telephone network,  no postal service and of course it was before the age of the internet.  The newspapers were in Arabic, which I couldn't read and the one English language publication seemed to concentrate on haboobs (dust storms) and when the next cloud of locusts was going to arrive.  At work we had an old telex machine.  Anyone remember those?  Frankly life was so hard there, survival replaced the need to know what was going on in the rest of the world.   One night I went to the airport to collect someone.  Flights always arrived in the middle of the night because the heat during the day melted the tarmac.  The man I was meeting came down the steps of the British Airways flight waving a British newspaper.  'We'...