Mad Darby Diaries

 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'...