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I’m not saying that I want ‘She played bridge for England’ on my tombstone — but then again… Last weekend, due to the freakish weather at the beginning of March, my team was selected to play the second weekend of the Camrose Trophy in Dublin, as the Allfrey team, who won the place to represent England against the other home countries, couldn’t make the rearranged date. The Hinden team, who played first, had left us in the lead and as my first teacher, David Parry, said in his meltingly sweet email to me, ‘Don’t screw up. Nobody remembers who came second.’ We all played our hearts out under the wonderful captaincy of Alan Mould, and won the Trophy back for England! More exciting than that I haven’t experienced.

On Wednesday, two striking events happened in France. The first was that the President of the Republic led the nation’s mourning for Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame, the policeman who swopped himself for a hostage at the siege at a supermarket in Trèbes last week. Elsewhere in Paris on the same day there was a silent march past the flat of Mireille Knoll. As a girl, in 1942, Mme Knoll narrowly escaped being rounded up by the French police and put on a train to Auschwitz. Last weekend, at the age of 85, the remains of her wheelchair-bound body were found in her Paris flat. Her body had been stabbed and burned. Mme Knoll, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease had apparently previously told police about a neighbour who had threatened to ‘burn her’.

During the past three years I have spent quite a bit of time in a rented house in Provence. Volets Bleus is a rectangular breeze-block bungalow perched on the side of a hill. In front of it is a tiled south-facing terrace resting on concrete pillars. The terrace looks over the tops of the trees that grow out of the valley floor, and further out over a commercial vineyard, and then to a distant line of oak-forested hills. Our nearest neighbours are a Dutch couple who live in a pretty old property a quarter of a mile away and high above us, currently on the market for €1.2 million. Kukor and Ezzard refer to our breeze-block shack as ‘the ugliest house in the Var’.

Is Allah gay? The eventuality – as Jeeves might say – would seem to be a remote one. If such a being as Allah did exist and was gay then no harm could come from stating the fact. If such a being as Allah exists and is not gay then Allah would presumably be big enough to shrug off such insinuations. And if – and I only mention the possibility – such a being as Allah does not exist at all, then it really is neither here nor there whether he, she, they, ze or zir is alleged to be gay, bi, trans or anything else. Certainly none of this should be cause for being banned from the country. Yet that is what happened last week when a Canadian journalist-activist called Lauren Southern got turned away at the UK border and refused permission to enter the country.

My objection to Steve Bell, the Guardian cartoonist, is not that he is risqué. Nor is it that he’s rabidly anti-Tory. It’s that his cartoons are often unfunny to the point of being humourless. I’m not exactly his target audience, though, so I would say that.  But a friend has pointed out that his drawing this week on the May-Russia story takes direct and obvious inspiration from Nazi propaganda:  https://twitter.com/guardianopinion/status/973982860917944322?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw [caption id="attachment_10057942" align="aligncenter" width="365"] An anti-communist poster from 1940[/caption] Now, let’s not be all inverse-Owen Jones. Let’s try not to scream ‘offensive’ before we’ve understood the joke.

The flight from Gatwick to France was cancelled and there was no prospect of another for three days. Paddington station was closed and the road to the south-west of England and home was impassable. Gatwick airport railway station was in chaos as train after train in both directions was cancelled due to snow. Then a friend came to the rescue and offered her flat in south London until I could book another flight. A train to Clapham Junction then a bus would get me there. The keys were in a key safe attached to the rear of the porter’s lodge. A rogue northbound train arrived and everyone jumped on irrespective of its destination, as though it were the last train out of Berlin before the Russians turned up.

My name’s Polly and I work for RT (yes, so shoot me). I’m a reporter in the London bureau, and like many of my RT colleagues I woke up this morning not sure if I'd still have a job in the afternoon. We had heard the pre-statement leaks: diplomatic expulsions. No royals or dignitaries attending the World Cup. But no word as yet about our fate. Just existential uncertainty as to whether RT will be closed down by the British state. Ever since the Prime Minister pointed the finger of blame for the Skripal poisoning at the Kremlin, talk of her closing down RT has been rife.

Gstaad The muffled sound of falling snow is ever-present. It makes the dreary beautiful and turns the bleak into magic. Happiness is waking up to a winter wonderland. From where I am, I can’t hear the shrieks of children sledding nearby but I can see the odd off-piste skier and the traces they leave. I can no longer handle deep snow, just powder. But I can still shoot down any piste once I’ve had a drink or two. For amusement I listen to the news: flights grounded, trains cancelled, cars backed up on motorways, people stocking up on food and drink as if an atom bomb had been detonated over the Midlands. In Norway it snows every day of the winter and half of the days of autumn and spring. The last time a train was cancelled there was during the German invasion in 1940.