Salut and Salam

Until I was 22, my foreign travel was limited to a couple of holidays in the Irish Republic, though I had been to Colwyn Bay and Clacton as well as to several towns dotted around the country visited by Sunderland AFC.

Despite a few trips to France to be presented to and get to know la belle famille - a.k.a the sceptical prospective in-laws - this essentially sheltered life continued for a while.

Slowly, work and holidays began to take me further afield. My world has not shrunk to the extent that I can claim to have seen all or even a great part of it, but I suppose the list has become reasonably varied: most of Europe, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, US, Canada, Peru, much of the Caribbean, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Singapore, Oman, Bahrain and other bits I've doubtless overlooked.

And in the past three years and a bit, I have come to consider myself a resident of France.

On Sunday, I fly to my fresh life in Abu Dhabi, and the challenge of helping to launch a new daily newspaper is an exciting one.

I will not feel remotely sad about leaving Britain behind again. I have family, friends and football team here and all are important to me. But there is nothing else that makes me want to stay here a moment longer than necessary.

It has nothing, or at least not that much, to do with my struggles with BT and other UK bodies with an aversion to providing a decent public service.

My experiences with that company have, incidentally, reminded me that escalators go downwards as well as up. Maybe I should not really be quite so cross that despite BT pledges to "escalate" my order, in fact no service will be installed before I leave, whereas it was originally promised for October 3.

Memo to self: do not confuse escalate with expedite.

Call centres and sluggish or stationary automated phone queuing systems are indeed a curse of modern life, and I have found this to be several times worse in Britain than in the supposedly stifling and ultra-bureaucratic atmosphere of France. Others may well have different stories to tell, but dealing with such people - or, more often, machines - has been a peculiarly stressful part of my 17 or 18 days back "home".

Ripoff1Nor will I miss being charged £5.20 for a hot dog - one moist sausage in a dry bun, drink (not Cristal champagne) thrown in but no trace of an onion - at the Arsenal football stadium, which bears the name of the country in which I am to make my home.

But it runs deeper. I have simply become more and more attached to France, and especially to the sunny, outdoor, not-far-from-the-sea life of my most recent few months there (I do not especially miss Paris). There will be no shortage of sunshine where I am going, but I know I will think often of the Var.

So farewell to London, leafy and grandLeafy_2 in parts but infuriating as a whole.

Salut!, as I have already promised, will continue. The exact form is still a matter for reflection, but I have more or less decided for the time being to keep the title of the site unchanged.

My next posting will come from the Emirates - and I don't mean the one near Highbury -and will fall into the new category of Salut! Salam, but I do not feel it is necessary to go further and mess around with the banner (beyond tweaking the description of my site).

I hope you all feel inclined to follow me. When I say "all", I am not sure what I mean. The hit rate for Salut! is a constant source of mystery to me.

It is not hard to understand why the number of visits to my more specific sites, Salut! Live and Salut! Sunderland, should soar from time to time. It is invariably the result of a reference to one or other of them appearing elsewhere, prompting new people to take a peek.

Salut!'s figures move in less fathomable ways. I do little active promotion of the site, yet the numbers will sometimes stretch to several hundred "hits" in one day for no more apparent reason than when they dip to 100-150.

But I am profoundly grateful to everyone who did follow me here from that Other Place, where massive resources have not translated into unfailingly impressive results for individual bloggers.

It was rather gratifying to learn the other day that interest in my "archived" Telegraph blog - that is shunted to one side and not at all easy to locate - was somewhat greater than that shown in the "live" blog of the man who fired me (his was quickly "archived", too, after he found it impossible even to honour a commitment to post some new thoughts once a week).

So Salut! and Salam, and another au revoir. Enjoy this sporting weekend - momentous for those who adore rugby and international football, less so for those of us who don't - and come back this way in the coming days and weeks.