Still with the trawlers this morning, where I come across the following: 'Va donc voir à la cuisine si j'y suis, Julie...'. This from the café owner to the bar maid, before starting a confidential chat with Maigret, in a near empty café.
Which, literally, seems to mean 'go and see if I am in the kitchen'. Which I then think might be some funny French idiom for 'buzz off, I want a private word with Maigret'. I then go to reference 1, where I get confused between the first person singular of être and suivre. Is the owner saying 'get on into the kitchen and I'll follow you in a moment'. Eventually I settle for the first interpretation.
Along the way learning from Larousse that 'sierra' is the Spanish for a saw, also for a chain of mountains. Whereas I had thought from Clint Eastwood films that the high sierra was more or less a synonym for the high plains, say the Colorado or the Columbia plateau, rather than the mountains themselves. Cold in the winter and hot in the summer.
PS: or possibly a Belgian idiom. A bit of Liégeois slang, that being where Simenon came from.
Reference 1: http://www.linguee.fr/francais-anglais/search?source=auto&query=suis.
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