The Strike

Vive l’Air France. But it’s easy for me to wax lyrical about Air Food because I’m on the ground in Paris and not due to be flying somewhere.

The air stewards and stewardesses have been on strike of late. Of late are the school holidays, which started on Friday in the Paris region.

My sympathies go out to the thousands disrupted by the industrial action over pay and conditions but the movement has left me feeling relieved that we went to America 10 days before the holiday.

At least that way we got a holiday rather than spending our holiday at an airport waiting to go on holiday.

The timing of the strike was gruesomely appropriate — a bit like the RER B train strike on the day of the rugby world cup final.

I thought being inconvenienced for about 30 minutes at Charles de Gaulle airport on our back to Paris was difficult, but I really wouldn’t like to imagine the horror of trying to fill the void with three children if a flight were delayed.

It would have been worse for us as we were due to see my grandfather. But in the end this is all projection.

We were fortunate. Which is not the case with the football team at the moment. Travelled miles on Saturday morning to Mantes la Jolie to be annihilated 7-4.

We’re ravaged by injuries and having to get up early to travel to Mantes didn’t sit too well with my constitution nor anyone else’s it seems Maybe the trip to our home ground will have the same effect on the opponents.

Anyway after four games we’re second from bottom. We’ve played a couple of the top teams so I guess the season starts from after the half-term holidays.

By then I might be getting uninterrupted nights of sleep. The boy has not been well. In fact neither has his mother nor his elder sister.

I had to scrap the Sunday trip to London to stay and tend the flock. What a good shepherd I am.

Remaining here has given me the chance to catch up with episodes on the Rockford Files DVD.

When the Rockford Files were first on back in the early 70s, our TV didn’t have BBC2 so all I had to go on — as they say on the show — was my mate Eddie Flanagan telling me that it was fantastically successful.

I saw the repeats — though for me they were new — while at university and once I got my video tape recorder I faithfully recorded them off the BBC for posterity.

What’s great about the videos is seeing the tacky adverts from 1988. The DVD however provides me with one long extravaganza. Something to fall asleep to even as the sickly crew cough, splutter and wheeze their ways through the night.

I’ll probably be infected fairly soon for now I’m nursing a bruised toe from Saturday morning’s exertions. Somebody trod on it.

Maybe they didn’t like my joy at scoring our third, which I have to say it was classily dispatched.

I said to my eldest this morning that I scored a goal. She asked me if I was going to the world cup.

I said I was far too old and not good enough.

“You’re not that old daddy,” was her reply.

I might be scuffling around in the veteran’s top flight but I’ve got a Premier League daughter.