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.

Postcard from Corsica – Language

The first French I learned at school was the French for ‘a bottle of lemonade, a bottle of milk, a bottle of wine’. Needless to say, this was a state school. If I had been privately educated the first French I would have learned would have been ‘I do not speak French’ and then off for Latin lessons and some light buttered buggery. At the very least it would have been ‘red wine, white wine and a charming little rose please. Milk? Er, no thanks.’

In the 1970s, when a small Macnabbs was parroting this odd grocery list, we were being prepared for life in the Common Market, the town twinning epidemic and exchange visits. I think our teachers thought that we would be a credit to the country, chattering away to the locals in their native tongue. This was very different to their experience of foreign travel, which usually began with an opposed landing on a beach and where all the language training you needed was ‘hands up Fritz’.

In the seventies and eighties of course, Brits didn’t need to speak foreign, we were all visiting the Costa del Sol and they spoke English there, with an amusing accent allowing us to feel superior and get sunburned. No, French was not really useful until later on in the eighties, when the posh kids at school used to go on ski-ing trips. As I listened to them chunter on about how great it was going to be, I hoped that they had learned the French for ‘my friend has been eaten by a yeti’ or ‘the fondu has given me the most terrible shits’.

The French text book I had later on in my ‘education’ was most instructive. This was because some artistically gifted deviant had gone through it adulterating all the illustrations in a way at once amusing and alarming. I remember in particular that ‘Celine goes for a pony ride’ contained images so graphic that it took twenty years and the invention of the internet before I saw anything like that again. I didn’t learn much at all from that book, except that French boys called Xavier wear striped tee shorts and like to suck cock. Apparently.

I was terrified of my French teacher. A gnome like man, he was the deputy headmaster at my school. Jesus, if ever there was a thankless position in teaching, deputy headmaster is it. I bet you have to do all the work and get none of the perks. Even head of house is a better post, at least then you get first pick of the fresh boys. Deputy headmasters have nothing to do except resent the headmaster, simmer in their own bile and take out their frustrations on boys who can’t conjugate. I think those lessons helped contribute to my hatred of the French, although to be honest the French themselves have to bear most of the responsibility for that.

On holiday however, I always like to give the local language a thorough mangling, Corsica was no exception. Except that the Corsicans had beaten me to it. Ruled for a long time by the Genoese, their French had been corrupted by a strong Italian influence. I was easily the best French speaker on the island, which instantly made me a figure of hate so I quickly adapted my schoolboy French to something just this side of ‘Allo ’Allo, with pleasing results. They still laughed at me, but the scoffing had stopped. The great thing about Corsican is that people speak just like schoolchildren. When they say ‘Bonjour’ in the morning, it really is in a sing-song way that makes you smile when you say it.

Mostly I was using my vast linguistic skills in shops (lesson one, at the bakers…now what’s the French for baguette? Loaf?) so while it was great fun to try out the language, the risk of ballsing it up and coming back from a grocery shop with a boules set, a harpoon gun and a budgie was considerable. Luckily, I am a master of the art of pointing, grunting and rubbing my belly. Which is all French is really in any case.