Postcard from Paris - myths to bust, myths to trust

There are many French stereotypes. The famous hatred of hygiene, the ability to surrender in a crisis, a love of wine and bread and a dislike of monarchy or bothering to be polite. There are particular Parisian stereotypes, many of which I was, as something of an amateur bigot, happy to indulge without knowing if they were true or not. So it was interesting to go fact hunting.

French waiters are rude.

Trust it. Friday night: after pitching up at a likely looking place and eventually ordering something that, even with my mangled and offensive French, is unlikely to be gibbon on toast, it’s time for dessert. Cheese please. With wine. Sancerre. The waiter’s face was a mixture of regret and disappointment and it later transpired that one is supposed to order red wine with cheese. Well, sorry about that mate. I was restrained from asking him if I had made the same mistake that german officers probably made, night after night, while his grandfather served them in this very café. I was further restrained from asking him why they had a) snubbed our Queen and b) killed our Princess? Finally I was refrained from reminding him that he can comment on what fucking wine I eat with my fucking cheese when he fucking pays for it.

The coda to this is, of course, that the sancerre with the roqfort was bloody sublime and I oohed and ahhed in appreciation as the flavours mingled in almost pyrotechnic fashion on my palette. This was accompanied by the sound of the entire waiting staff grinding their teeth in impotent rage.

But the gold star for rudeness goes to the waiter at the pizza place who growled, as a welcome, ‘no visa, no card’. ‘Fuck off you french cunt’ I replied as I felled him with the sort of blow normally bestowed on mature hardwoods; ‘I’m trying to spend my way out of a recession and you’ll take my card and like it even if I have to bend you over and use your fat french arse as a swipe mechanism’. Actually, I’d just been to the ATM and was loaded with Euros, but if he had been telepathic, he’d of been fucking quaking.

The french are rude.

Trust it. There is no Parisian term for ‘excuse me’. Apparently.

Dog shit

Actually there’s not that much dog shit and I think I’ve worked out why. Stopping in a café off the Trocadero for a couple of beers, I was treated to the sight of a bloke bringing his dog into the café, being told he should sit on the pavement with it, finding no table, coming back and eventually having a table on the pavement located for him. The dog was up and down like a fiddler’s bitch and you could see the doggie resentment building, which will reach critical mass tonight when he craps all over the polished wooden floors of his apartment, after first eating chicken, leaving the bloke to combine his midnight piss with the sort of frictionless ballet that would get yield a perfect nine from the judges of an ice dance championship – were it not for the screams, flailing arms and eventual collapse backwards into a spreading pool of chien chit. So the dogs are shitting indoors.

Parisians, by the way, all have little dogs, this must add to their sense of inferiority. As they have already got a lot to be inferior about this is not a good thing. An Englishman’s typical dog is something that can either a) retrieve game from a marsh, b) defend his council house against rival crack dealers or c) defend his house against the sort of crack dealers who own dog b. This means that dog a has developed a soft mouth to make sure it doesn’t damage pheasant and dog c has developed the ability to operate a wire-guided missile. Dog b has developed the ability to savage its owner. But the Parisian lives in an apartment and so keeps a small dog in a small room, while the Englishman lives in a sprawling estate, even if it’s a sprawling council/mock-tudor housing estate, and keeps a reasonable sized dog.