There'a an old French saying ...

... to the effect that "il faut etre vu pour etre connu" - which roughly translated means that "you have to be seen in order that people will recognise you" and this is what I keep telling people. You need to get out and about and visit all kinds of events possible and make sure that people recognise you, so that you stick in their memories.

I take it to extremes of course - I drive a yellow-and-black van and all the clothes that I wear are yellow and black - corporate clothing. And it works too. Some people came up to me in LIDL today - "you're Eric, aren't you? From the Anglo-French group. We recognised your van on the car park". And of course, being colour-coded, they knew whose van it was. Works every time.

But with the idea of being out and about, and going to all of the events possible, some times you come up trumps as well.

Francois, our local environmental activist, was having another one of his events and he's asked me to go along. I like Francois very much and his friends are quite friendly too and interested in what I'm doing, and so I went along with pleasure. But I never expected the French television chain TF3 to have a camera and a reporter there.

Luckily Caliburn is sign-written and so I parked him in a strategic place. But I've learnt something of a little lesson here ahd what I'm now going to do is have a banner made - one that I can keep in the back of Caliburn together with a few bits and pieces of samples just in case anything like this happens again. You live and learn.

And so it just goes to show - you need to be prepared for all eventualities and have everything to hand. You never know who you are going to meet when you are out. Nothing like this would ever happen if you stayed indoors brooding and sulking.

Interestingly, one of the guys at this meeting was talking about building his own wind turbine. Even more interestingly, this American company I was talking to yesterday sells all of the complicated machinery that you need that you can't manufacture yourself when you are building your own wind turbine.

I have a feeling that I might well be on to something here.