Parlez-vous français?

Non? Moi non plus ...

You may have noticed that we have been caught by the Rabbids bug. The trouble is Meccano seem to have removed all the franchised sets from the website. No Rabbids, no Gears of War, no Tintin and no Sonic - Take a look for yourself HERE. Multimodels, Evolution, Turbo and that is it as far as metal Meccano is concerned. Build and Play and Construction plastic sets and nothing else.

Bonjour, bonjour bonjour ... Qu'avons-nous donc ici?
It is the remote control for your car, It came from Amazon.fr. Do you speak English?

Looking around both the High Street and on-line retailers, here in the UK, it seems that a lot of the more popular models have been snapped up. This being the twenty-first century and the world being a smaller place, I decided to have a look beyond these shores. My attention was drawn to Amazon France where I found the sets I was looking for. Great I'll order them. The trouble is the whole site is in French. Typical, fancy not having a English translation just for me!

Looking at the form, my schoolboy French all came flooding back... All six words of it. With brave heart I decided to have a go. How hard could it be? Most of it is obvious and Google Translate might come in handy. I started to fill in the form. Name, I can manage that, address seemed simple enough.When it came to country there is a drop-down menu to chose from. These are bad enough in English as some list us as United Kingdom others as Great Britain or even England.   Hmmm... So what do the French call the island I live on? Do you think I could find anything on the menu that looks remotely possible. I was on the point of throwing in the towel when I tried tapping United Kingdom into the aforementioned Google Translate - Bingo! It came up with something that was on the list: Royaume-Uni. I am sure lots of you reading this already know that this is French for United Kingdom, but It got me going for a bit. Am I the only person in the UK that didn't know that!

Two more from France - one came in a blue plastic egg! Very strange!

With that hurdle over the rest was plain sailing, as my mate Tony Brown said it's like playing Russian Roulette with your credit card, but what the heck, you only live once! so copy a bit, paste it into GT and see what it says, input a bit more information and eventually something that looks like a confirmation appears on the screen... 

For the next three days I got intelligible e-mails from Amazon.fr informing me of all sorts. At one point I think I even got a proposal of marriage, or was that a confirmation of dispatch?

A few days later the goods arrived, so I did do it correctly. 

Ralph.