Now this is what I think of when I remember that Come Fly with Me is 50 years old

Flickr has some great vintage French tourist shots.
Thanks to Olen Steinhauer.


And here's some Calais now, thanks also to Flickr.

France: How to Live There in Print

How to live in France just by reading Picture from Treviso

"Francophile porn: Living the ex-pat fantasy

Before I had the inspiration of writing posts on the geography of different regions as a way of learning about France, I considered another option: reading books about relocating to various parts of the country. Thanks to Peter Mayle, it's almost a sub-genre in itself, which I'm tempted to call ex-pat porn. So to match Craig McGinty's invitation last week of doing a virtual blog tour of France, here's a selected list of books by people who moved there, and what they found."

Boris Johnson, MP, becomes minor Jules Verne via John Lennon, suggests invasion

On the first day of Nicholas Sarkozy's France, a Daily Telegraph visionary has the solution to South East England's property madness.

You may say I'm a dreamer, in the words of the poet Lennon, but I'm not the only one. It was back in the 1980s that EuroRoute proposed a magnificent scheme to the British and French governments, backed by such names as Barclays and Trafalgar House. The EuroRoute involved both a road and a rail link, and it strikes me as tragic that we didn't choose it. Dial it up now, and you will see how the motorist goes out to sea on a big bridge, though no bigger than many already in existence. You then arrive at an island seven miles out, like a gigantic Fisher-Price kiddy kar park, and you descend a short spiral ramp to the sea-bed.

There will be a lot of Jules Verne over the coming weeks, and probably not so much Boris Johnson - who strikes me as a Coryat kind of figure. I pity the traveller 400 years on who tries to follow in Boris's footsteps. Or cycle-tracks.

Meanwhile, another view of invasion - the other way around.

And the National Review discovers an entirely new Kent

The Kent Corridor from London to Dover is known ironically as “France’s Silicon Valley.”