My work placement is over

Hi mates,

ten weeks have already gone up and I'll be soon going back to France, in finer fettle than ever.

First of all, my apologies for not giving news for a while and for the missing mails I should have sent. I was totally surrounded by work and I always carried forward the letters until this last week whereabout I decided to give up with mails.

Second of all, on saturday (7th June) I'll be back and I'm expecting to drink a few at the Liberties if you want to come, your welcome. Maybe will follow a long poker nigth or whatever like this.

Finally, I'm eager to do a barbecue on the beach, we should plan this soon with the Golden Lemon. i still have an exam to sit on Monday and an oral report ten weeks after so it's enable to do something between these to dates if my girlfried want to.


Hope you're all fine,

See Ya !!!

The first half is completed

My apologies to those who`ll read this, I can`t fulfil my promises; I don`t have enough time; thanks to those who called or emailed me.

See Ya Somedays

First week in England

Hi mates!



I feel lazy thinking of send e-mails so I`ll update my blog giving you some news.



I`ve already been in Taunton for a week, that is crazy!

I`m well set up, people here are really nice. The weather was great during this first week, temperatures reached 25 degrees (celsius) but on Sunday we had snow !!!

My landlady speaks "aussie" so I don`t know if I`ll improve my english or my australian indeen. She`s a really nice person, just advicing me to helpmyself.

My workmates are all quite young, two of them are 22 and 23 so environment is nice. Furthermore Chris, a.k.a the Gun, my boss, is really cool, always giving me a lift on the morning to go to work or on the afternoon for the return.

thats where I work

I`ve already tried Ale which is the most famous kind of beer here. I`ve also drunk french champaign and french red wine but that`s a long story.



I feel fine and have not enough time to miss France even if I miss some of you...



See ya !!!!

STRANGE FRUIT

Strange Fruit is a famous sad song, written as a poem released in 1937 by Abel Meeropool (1903-1986) known as Lewis Allan. He was a jewish teacher in the Bronx (back in the 30's) and most of all he was a white defending negroes.

This song was first sung by Billie Hollyday (1915-1959, on the right) on 1939 in the "Cafe Society" (Greenwich Village, New York) and the song The song became a regular part of Holiday's live performances, mainly in the "Cotton Club", a famous jazz club in Harlem (north of Manhattan, New York).
(here is the link for unlearns who don't even know who she was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday )
A french singer, Aaron, recently covered it.

This song, Strange Fruit, is linked to a very sad story happened in the U.S.A. on August 1930, the 7th. Two black men, Thomas Shipp (18 years old) and Abram Smith (19 y.o.), were lynched and hung up to a tree in Marion, Indiana. (true photo on the left)

In fact, you must know from the early 1880's onwards, the Klu-Klux-Klan (founded in 1965) used to lynch black people and used to do what were so sadly called "necktic parties". In fact, people took the law in their own hands. To give an example, on this so sadly famous day, they decided to take those two poor black guyes out of prison and them hanged them in public...
The author, Lewis Allan, declared the photo was its inspiration for the song.

°°° Lyrics : Strange Fruit, Lewis Allan °°°

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs

See Ya !!!

Quick-thinking on cigarettes

Unfortunately I'll have to stop smoking in a few days or weeks somehow or other. What i'm doing here is convincing myself smoking is a bad thing...

Just a little bit of mathematics :
- 4 years of smoking
- 5 to 10 minutes spent smoking per cigarette
- between 4 and 10 cigarettes per day
=> between 8 and 40 days have already gone up in smoke !!

Moreover my health expectancy and my life expectancy are getting lower and lower cig after cig... and risks of contracting lung cancer or heart disease are increased. " Where there's smoke there's fire. "

Smoking smells, dries out skin, turns nails and teeth yellow, tires eyes, increases blood pressure and heart frequency, pollutes lungs, mouth and throat, and repulses non-smokers.

The new french law about pubs and smoking is a great idea :
*** before the law, when I was going to a bar, I used to drink a beer and smoke a cig with a second beer
*** now, I smoke before entering into the pub, I drink half a pint of beer and I don't drink anything else because it makes me yearning for a cig... so I go back to home and smoke in the car...

At the moment, I'm reducing the number of cigarettes I smoke per day in order to stop smoking...

In fact, I took my last cig on February the 6th... and sometimes it's really hard...

I can't say I'll never smoke a good old cigare with a whyskey but... smoking almost ten cigarettes per day and sampling a tasty cigare are two different things !

Good luck to my foreign fellow smokers...

See Ya !!!