Strikes, strikes, strikes (try saying that one fast). You’d think that at a time when redundancy is the order of the day the rail unions would be doing all they could to keep their members’ jobs safe.

But no. Drivers on East Midlands Trains are striking for six days, on three consecutive Fridays and Mondays, making for some nice long summer weekends (funny how it never seems to happen in the winter) because the above inflation pay rise they were offered wasn’t good enough.

Did you get that? Above inflation.

How can that not be good enough?

And on my line, too, there are eight days of strikes on the cards for National Express. Everything went suspiciously quiet for a while, but today the rail company put up a page on its site explaining that it still looked likely to happen, and that if it did then they ‘would not expect to be able to run any train services’.

Again, an above inflation pay offer was rejected and, to seal the deal, the unions demanded better conditions, too.

A statement on one of the union sites succinctly summed up its position: ‘This company [National Express] has made half a billion in profits out of our members over the past decade, it’s a scandal that they are offering their staff peanuts in return.’

The point they seem to be missing is that pay rises have to be met by us, the travelling public, many of whom have had their pay frozen this year. And the effects of strikes, too, are felt by… yes, us, the travelling public, so we lose either way.

As such, the best the travelling public can hope for is that the train operators call the unions’ bluff and refuse to give in. I’ll happily put up with the disruption until the union members realise that there is another way.

National Express is a publicly-listed company and, as such, the workers can buy some of the stock and share in the benefits of the company that has made half a billion in profits out of the union members’ hard work. Perhaps then they’d be happy to moderate the pay rises and avoid the kind of strike action that could lead to financial penalties that will impact their dividend payouts.

Oh, and yes, the company may have made a profit out of its workers, but those workers have also made a profit out of selling their labour to the company. You don’t see the company going on strike on account of the profits that its workers have made by selling their time and skills.

What a week for technology. And not a good one.

First, my iMac. Up pops Time Machine with a warning that it hadn’t done a backup in 11 days. It would have been nice if it had told me sooner. Anyhow, it seems the power supply on my external drive had died, so that needs replacing. Not sure if it’s still under warranty.

Then my camera couldn’t read memory cards any more. That was new – a gift – so it could be swapped out, but inconvenient nonetheless. Particularly as I’d just bought an 8GB card for it.

The printer is still out of ink, which means not only can’t we print, but we also can’t copy or even scan and send faxes, despite the fact that neither of those last two jobs actually needs ink.

And to cap it all, Mabel, my trusty MacBook quite spectacularly died on Wednesday morning. Not just a little glitch or anything: she simply lost all of her long-term memory. Just like that. One moment she was happily chugging along, the next she couldn’t see the hard drive. She wouldn’t reboot, even from a DVD, so that drive was clearly out of bounds, too.

The only solution I could think of was to install OS X on an external drive and boot from that, which worked fine… until I rebooted, at which point that drive was corrupted, too.

The upshot, then, is that I’m now writing this on Mabel the Second. A quite strokable aluminium MacBook. Refurb, but it comes with a guarantee, and spec-wise is barely short of a MacBook Pro.

Very nice.

No dents, no scratches, and by all accounts just a few weeks old. So new that the battery has only been charged three times, and one of those times was me.

Not sure what to do with Mabel the First yet. Perhaps take out the drive just to be sure and then sell her for spares and repair.

From BBC News:

The bride and groom had hired a small plane to fly past and throw the bouquet to a line of women guests, Corriere della Sera reported.

However, the flowers were sucked into the plane’s engine causing it to catch fire and explode.

The aircraft plunged into a hostel.

I’m not convinced by the whole living artwork idea of putting people up on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth for an hour at a time. Or at least I wasn’t, until yesterday when the project went live, along with the video stream that lets you watch what’s going on.

Best view of today must have been the poor woman who got the 17h – 18h slot, which coincided with the heaviest, noisiest thunderstorm I’ve seen in ages.

And there she cowered, squatting down on the plinth as the rain bounced up around her ankles, oblivious to the fact that the highest point, after Nelson’s Column and the dome of the National Gallery was the point of her umbrella. In a storm. With lightning.

I was surprised. Genuinely. I saw Justin Timberlake in concert six or seven years ago and it felt like he was plodding through the numbers. I didn’t get much out of it, but the pre-pubescent girls down below seemed to like it.

Madonna is such a big star, and she’s been recording and touring for so long that I thought it might have been along the same lines – moves and motions to get the job done.

Not so.

She was on stage for a good two hours – no interval – and at no point in that marathon run did she let up. She swung around poles, skipped with ropes, put herself in impossible positions where the average punter wouldn’t be able to breathe, let alone belt out a non-stop stream of songs. It was nothing short of a phenomenon.

She held the crowd like nobody I have ever seen before, as she took us on a whirlwind tour of rock, cheesy pop, dance (remember Felix?), and a great Gipsy routine with a reworking of La Isla Bonita fiddled out by a violinist that Rich briefly convinced me was Tom Jones.

And we were so close. We were at the O2, which holds 20,000 in rows that reach up to the bulbous roof of the old Millennium Dome, but we were right down by the stage, eight or so rows back from the catwalk. You could see her shiny white teeth and every taught muscle in her legs. You’d swear she was 15 years younger than her 50 years.

What surprised me, though, was that I didn’t know about a third of the songs, and that even the ones I did were so re-worked that they sounded nothing like the album versions.

It was well worth the hideous dash across London to get there, particularly as our very expensive tickets (four times the price of Kylie) were courtesy of Adobe, whose software was responsible for the impressive graphics. We did miss the behind-the-scenes tour, having queued for 35 minutes for a taxi after getting off the Eurostar with less than an hour to spare, but that didn’t dull the evening one bit.

It was a fantastic end to a great week away.

Les Baux de Provence

Arles is not that nice, it turns out. I’d forgotten that. All I could remember was the market that went on for miles, and all the olives.

Well I was right about the market. It stretches right along one side of the city walls and you can buy pretty much anything you want. Bags, hats, cheeses, jams. Chickens, live and dead. In fact, I think the dead ones got the better deal as the live ones were crammed into crates and gasping for breath in the 35-degree-plus heat. Poor things. Ducks, quails and guinea fowl, too. I don’t think I could buy dinner when it was still capable of making a run for it, so I’m assuming they’ll crack its neck for you before you take it home.

It’s all very interesting and full of great smells, but once you get away from the market – where you could easily spend 90 minutes looking, poking and tasting – the rest of the town is a bit grubby. There’s the Roman ampitheatre and the matching Roman theatre, and of course there are city walls (this is Provence, after all) and a river to walk along, but none of it can be said to be very ‘nice’. Probably the worst bit, though, was the crappy service we got in a street-side cafe where they repeated the order wrong and, when we followed them inside to check they’d got it right they got all shirty and insisted they had.

Except when it came they hadn’t.

Ho-hum.

So we spent half a day there and then headed over to Les Baux, the little medieval town perched on top of a rocky hilltop. It gets hideously busy in high season when the seven car parks that scale one face of the hill get filled to overflowing, but today it was actually pretty quiet, leaving us plenty of space to wander around and look out across the valley views.

22 people live there.

Anyhow, it’s a nice place to spend an hour, but we didn’t stop for drinks or shops. The best thing to take back with you is photos, which is what we did – both from within the village and looking back at it from the other side of the valley where we had a very informative discussion about the forest fire risk with a student guarding the road, whose English once again put my pitiful grasp of French to shame.

Nimes Roman Arena

Today we went to Nimes to see where dad is thinking of buying a flat. He goes there a couple of times a week to dance, and as it’s a 45 minute journey and most of his friends live there it makes sense to move.

Like Avignon, Arles and many other towns around Provence, it has Roman roots and buildings several thousand years old around which the rest of the town is built. There is a well preserved Roman arena and, opposite a modern library and arts centre designed by Richard Rogers, a column-clad building called the Maison Carree, which used to be free until they put an exhibition about Roman history in it and started charging for entry.

Maison Carree

I’d never been before, but it seems a nice place. There’s a great indoor market where you can buy just about any food you could imagine, with much of it so beautifully produced that you could serve it up right away if you had friends coming round to dinner. Beyond the market, the city is split into wide boulevards and narrow, older streets that sit in shadow and offer respite from the sun.

We passed by the estate agents to pick up leaflets and looked at the streets where dad would like to buy. There’s one particular quarter with a grocer, a good paper shop and a small restaurant, its leafy streets bordered by some notable landmarks that give it a villagey feel within the city that he’s picked out as his preferred location, and it is certainly nice.

The plan after Nimes had been to head for the Pont du Gard, the three-level aqueduct that carries water to the city from Uzes, skirting a large hill along the way. But as we left Nimes, the clouds rolled in and heavy drops of rain hit the windscreen, and so we cut straight to Uzes and sheltered in the colonnades along the edge of its large town square. It didn’t last long, and was more of a shower than a storm, and so we pressed on to the Pont after an hour or so, parked up and walked across it as the puddles evaporated and turned the air humid.

It doesn’t matter how many times you see it: the Pont du Gard is an impressive feat of civil engineering. It’s stood for centuries longer than the half bridge at Avignon, and yet it looks not much older than a hundred years or so. Only the graffiti confirms that it’s actually much older, as for millennia tourists and travellers have been scratching their names into the soft orange rock from which it’s constructed.

The amazing thing is that it was still a working road bridge until earlier this decade. Now, of course, you can only walk across it (it is a Unesco World Heritage site, after all), and only on the lower level. Dad remembers walking across the very top 40-odd years ago, but that’s no longer possible.

Pont du Gard

The Gard river is calm below the Pont, and a lot of people swim there, jumping in from the rocks to cool down. It’s obviously fairly safe or they wouldn’t let you do it, except that while we were walking along the furthest bank, having passed over the bridge and set off along the other side we noticed two ambulances pull up. They another. And some more, followed by blue-suited medics, who ran down to the river with stretchers.

Leave it to the Americans to leap to wild conclusions, which ranged from a kind jumping in and breaking his back to some sort of mass suicide event. They were even stepping over the safety ropes strung along the edge of the bridge to keep us all back so they could get a better look.

We never did find out what happened, of course, because we didn’t hang around to gawp, but plenty did. Instead, we headed home and, finally, made it to the Cafe Des Arts to toast Rich’s new tenant. A day late thanks to the storm.

Avignon rooftops

Wednesday is market day in St Remy. So that’s what we did. We spent the morning close to home, wandering through the winding streets looking at the fruit and veg and the cheese and fish stalls that shame our market at home, and at the photos, paintings and carved wooden trinkets laid out to tempt the tourists.

The market is a stream of stalls that cuts a twisted path through the tightly-packed buildings that have stood there for hundreds of years. They pick up close to one of the many plaques that mark a spot where Van Gogh painted one of his pictures of the town, sweep past the fountain that commemorates Nostadamus’ birth in the town and ends up by the carousel opposite the church.

It’s a lively way to kill a couple of hours, after which we headed back to the house empty handed – as we’d expected – and made plans to spend the rest of the day in Avignon.

This was to be our first link with home since arriving in France: it’s twinned with Colchester, just a few miles up the A12 from where we live. It’s a small city with a glorious past. Like so many Provencal towns it has impressive walls, but its most notable features are undoubtedly its incomplete bridge and the Pope’s palace.

The bridge did once stretch right across the river, but seemingly nobody could quite work out the currents, and the furthest half was always being washed away. Eventually someone had the bright idea of just giving up on it and leaving it like that, looking like a great stone pier to nowhere that was eventually immortalised in song (Sur Le Pont d’Avignon) and now that’s what most people associate the town with.

Whatever the reason for building the bridge, it’s a shame that this, rather than the Pope’s Palace has become its symbol. I’ve not been inside, and we didn’t venture in today, either – just walked up behind it so that we could look out over the terracotta roofs – but the grand palace that lines one side of the main square at the head of the town was the centre of the Christian faith in the 14th century, when the pope and his entourage fled unrest in Rome and settled in Provence. From here, seven ‘official’ popes guided their global flock until it was safe to return to Rome and build the Vatican as it stands today.

The only trouble is, when the last official pope left and subsequently died, rival popes carried on in Avignon, which must have led to no end of confusion over the years as each camp fought for supremacy over the other.

Anyway, there is no pope there any more, and after the French Revolution the palace was seized by the state so it’s not papal territory, either. It does look good, though, but if you have seen the Vatican in real life then it doesn’t even come close. It must have been impressive when it was first built.

It’s not actually that curved and Disney-esque in real life: that’s just the way the panorama got stitched.

So we kicked around there for a while, watching the world pass by on various scooters and street trains as the kids of the town span around on their heads and knees to the music they were blasting across the square, then headed back home to eat, with plans to head into town for a drink.

You know what they say about best-laid plans, though and, inevitably they came to nothing as the clouds rolled across and we were treated to a spectacular thunder storm that barely pierced the muggy night air.