From the desk of Rupert Wright: For you, best price

The first sensible car I ever bought was a BMW. I was delighted by its enormous engine and rack of speakers that made it sound as though the Gallagher brothers were playing in the back seat. But what I remember most was the expression on the face of the man who sold it to me.

His wife had just had a baby and he had been ordered to trade in the BMW for a people carrier, so that she could park the pram in the back without dismantling it. As I drove out of the lot where we had met to conclude the deal, he looked at the car with a mixture of sadness and longing, as if I was driving away with his youth.

To help make the parting easier, he said he had sold it to me rather than somebody that he didn't like for £500 (Dh2,928) more. I don't know whether this was a clever ploy on his part, but it made me feel good about the deal. In a similar fashion, when we bought our house in France, the sellers said that they wanted us in particular to have it. It is only now, as I am contemplating selling it, that I wonder if they said that to encourage us to buy it.

We are selling the place only because my wife has fallen in love with another house, this time in another part of France, and after two years of pursuit, the owner has relented.

"I will only sell it to you," she said.

Half of me thinks this is because we are so charming, but the other half is beginning to wonder whether it is because we are the only people willing to buy these places. So, who wants to buy a beautiful farmhouse in the Languedoc? I want you to have it.

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France might be a curious place to buy a property. First, will the currency hold up? Second, will the country stay together? Listening to all the European leaders gathering in Cannes, I was struck by one thing. They all talked about "us", the implication being that we are all in this together. However, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said "nous"; Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said "wir" and the Greeks said nothing for fear of being shouted at.

It's clear that monetary union is impossible without political union, but before either of those can happen, there is something else that must change. I think they should cancel the summit - after a good lunch, of course - then head back to their own countries and come back when they can all speak the same language. That way when they say "we", they will mean it.

The French will plump for French as the lingua franca, but I would suggest that it be either English, because the Germans speak it so well - and let's face it, they're the only people in Europe with any money - or Latin, because hardly anybody can speak it now, so it would be a while before we had another European summit. Surely I'm not the only one, apart from the oyster sellers and sommeliers, who is sick of them.

The people who must be most sick of these meetings must be the Germans. As the story goes, an Irishman, Italian and Greek go into a cafe. Who buys the coffees? The German.

rwright@thenational.ae

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