Foxes, cheese, all that

This is not a French-bashing post.  A French-bashing post is, as any scholar of social history will tell you, a pole that existed in many villages during the Napoleonic wars to which suspected French spies or sympathisers (anyone smelling of garlic), was tied for their beating.  Today only a few exist as relics, historical curiosities and gallows for foreigners with beards.  Or for passing historians who cannot explain why the Napoleonic wars are called the Napoleonic wars when we sodding won!

Today, Britain has a much healthier relationship with the Continent, so good in fact that when teachers run off with under-age schoolgirls, France is the country they choose to flee to.  Amazing that you can get to 30 years of age, be a teacher and yet still not capable of basic research such as Googling ‘what do they do to peados in prison?’ followed by ‘What countries do not have an extradition treaty with Britain?’.  Of course, not everyone can afford the ferry fare to Equador and, to be fair, Mr Forrest may have Googled ‘Equador’ after Googling ‘what do they do to peados in prison?’ and made an informed choice.

My favourite quote about the Continent comes from Peter Mandleson, who once remarked ‘don’t talk to me about the French social model…the whole country’s in flames’.  Glossing over the events of last summer, Lord M had a good point – maybe it’s because as we are always being told fuel is so much cheaper on the Continent, but bloody hell do they love a riot and petrol bombs!

Possibly then the ‘rather a lot’ tax on fuel is intended to make rioting too expensive for the classes that want to riot, traditionally, ‘working’ and ‘under’.  Rarely do you see a couple wearing Hunter wellies on the forecourt filling up milk bottles with four star because they are upset about something.  This is because the middle classes are not upset enough to riot…yet, and because if you can pay a hundred quid for fucking wellies, then your sense of values are so totally warped you can pretty much put up with anything.

Britain does a lot of things very, very, well.  War and sport (which is just war with rules), that’s what we do.  And magnificent food.

Pardon?

Oh yes we do.  And here’s why – a popular myth has grown up that somehow or other Britain was less able than other countries in the cooking Department up until a few years ago.  Let me raise a point here – rationing.  We were an island cut off by Nazis.  Underwater Nazis.  Nazis in submarines.  No wonder we learned to do interesting things with offal. 

Also, we love offal. 

But I have to say fair play to Jamie Oliver (the man who taught me to love cooking as well as food).  What ignited, with his help, around the turn of the century was a passion for cooking. 

The passion for food had always been here because, with rationing people never got enough of it, and in the seventies prawn cocktail and Angel Delight were just scrummie.  They burned your mouth with chemicals, but what the hey.

Now, things are very serious indeed.  Austerity is biting and there are flaming riots in Spain, where people are annoyed, possibly at being charged so much for sun loungers because Christ knows that always annoyed me.

Luckily, France is currently exempt from this sort of thing.  I know this, because recently I was in a French restaurant (in England, obviously, what do you take me for?) and saw the delightful advertising that decorates this post, a fox and a crow advertising camenbert cheese.

Now, it’s obvious that there is some kind of story here. The fox wants the cheese, the crow wants the cheese, they share the cheese, the fox craps cheese, I have no idea.

All I know is this.  I had an excellent coffee in the French place but I had my dinner at Jamie’s.  It wasn’t (I hope) snobbery or xenophobia, or even that foxes are more likely to crap in my garden than plunder my cheese, it’s just that the Brits do food better than the French.

Epecially the paella.

This, by the way, is what a fox really looks like.

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.

Plenty of nose

In a recent presentation (powerpoint, natch) to the French President, the impact of global warming was illustrated, not with images of stricken Banglideshi children flooded out of their Nike factories, but by the movement of the optimum weather for growing champagne grapes away from France and over to SE England.

Sacre Blu! Say the French.

Formidable, say I. I was especially tickled because I learned of this the week after planning a vine in my very own back garden.

Jeremy is now firmly embedded and, I hope, thriving. Indeed my next mission is to source some poles and stuff for him to climb along.

In the meantime, I am occupying myself by daydreaming about bottling my first run of Château Macnabbs and doodling logos for my ‘vineyard’. So far the leading designs are a stylised bunch of grapes or a Ford Transit bearing the words ‘Van Ordinaire’.

Something tells me that the combination of clay soil, together with contamination from cat pee and creosote from the nearby shed, will ensure my vintage will be rather ‘vin de table’ but, as long as none is actually spilled on the varnish of the table in question, I trust we’ll be okay.

Don’t know if I’ll actually get a crop this year but this has not stopped me from starting to look at wine making kits and preparing to say at parties that ‘I’m into wine production, in a small way’. Bloody small in fact. Indeed, I’ve promise a few friends a bottle of the Château Macnabbs ’08 and even then I think I’m pushing my luck although, thinking about it, maybe the answer is to go with those miniature bottles you get on aeroplanes.

HUmmmn, wonder if I can get a hop plant from somewhere? If I put my mind to it, I might become self-sufficient in booze!