English – know your limits

Well, I have been put in my place good and proper today… again. I’d like to think that I am not so stuck up and full of myself that I need putting in my place very often but it’s been notably more frequent since moving to France. Maybe it’s because of the all the French people here. Read ‘Talk to the Snail’ by Stephen Clarke - his Ten Commandments for understanding the French, the first of which is ‘Thou shalt be wrong (if you’re not French)’. Ohmygod I couldn’t agree more (and then some).

I was forced to accept long ago in my cultural integration/baptism of fire that the French are indeed all perfect and their children are all angels and it is their bounden duty to iron out the kinks in lesser mortals like myself. But it still grates when they loudly point out your faults, insist on having the last word and never, ever admit that they are wrong. Take, for example, Mr Smelly-Bonfire from Tuesday. I forgot to mention in my last post that when I went round there on the rant, it was his female helper who came over, commented on how angry I was and where someone else might have said ‘I’m so sorry’ she simply said ‘well, if it’s been bothering you that much why didn’t you come round sooner?’ Er, what?!! One:love to her and the ball is back in my court. (And the smoke is still in my garden.) It’s very clever.

Given that I now have confidence to do the ranting thing, maybe I should consider going native so I can join in this other national sport. Of course I’d have to jump through the bureaucratic hoops first which I don’t really fancy after my experience with the doggy passport - I’ve heard that hoop number one for naturalisation is to present your grandparents original birth certificates… and the that’s the easy one. Of course I’d need a bit of training on ‘having an answer for everything’ since I am usually left resembling a goldfish seeking the right retort in the heat of the moment and only thinking of the fitting response hours later. For example, when the pushy door-to-door handyman told me I should definitely pay him €400 to spray bleach and weed killer all over the moss on my roof tiles so that in two months time, when ‘the rain had done its work’, I would have a clean, bryophyte-free house, the correct response would have been ‘in 2 months time I’ll just have 8 weeks more moss growth and you’ll be laughing all the way to the Caribbean, so sod off.’ Of course all I managed was ‘I‘ll have to ask my husband.’ Pretty feeble I know. Clearly all those bras were burned in vain when I am cornered by a fanatical Polish doorstep botherer. Then there was the fur-coated estate agent who rang my bell whilst she was on her mobile, broke off her heated conversation to demand to know if I was ‘Mr Ferier’ and when I said ‘no, you have the wrong house’ she started to interrogate me on how long I had lived in this house, who lived there before me and what are the names of all my neighbours, in between berating the person on the other end of the phone for sending her to the wrong place. Did I say ‘look, lady, my name is written on the bell you just rang and you’re being bloody rude now go away’? No, I offered her the phone directory so she could check the name.

It would take some serious work to make me French I think. They’d never let me in. You can take the girl out of England but you can’t take Englishness out of the girl.

So anyway, today I took my new neighbour, let’s call her Lily, to the French school to collect her son who had just spent his first morning in his new class with none other than the Headmistress herself, who we affectionately nickname The Hag. I think I have described her here once before - poodle hair, sunbed tan, vertically challenged, all the charm of a rottweiler and somewhat Anglophobic. During my first meeting with her almost 4 years ago, when I was already suffering from a severe case of Culture Shock and struggling to string a coherent sentence together in my ‘O’ Level French, she told me my children were badly behaved because they wouldn’t sit still for 30 minutes (they were 2 and 3 years old) and basically made me feel about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. I warned Lily before her own enrolment meeting to expect the worst, so when she returned and told me that The Hag had spoken to her in English and had spoken very highly of me I thought perhaps Lily had seen someone else instead. Shirley Temple curls? Check. Head about the right height to rest your pint on? Check. Complexion à la Dale Winton? Check. Maybe she’s warmed to my charms over the years, I thought. So it was with confidence that I followed Lily into the classroom when we collected her son this morning and even chose to show off the improvement in my French and ask the lady herself how it had gone. Apparently he handled it very well although there had been a bit of crying. So I remarked, ‘Ah, do you remember my Pickle was just the same at the start.’ To which she replied, ‘Oh no, your son was much worse, Madame.’

So that told me didn’t it. Luckily said son now love school and has been reminiscing today on what he will do with his life. He told us this evening that he is going to work on a farm and he will also own a restaurant which he will only open on Sundays ‘so the customers won’t get cold.’ ...? Ahem, he meant ‘sunny days’. He’s lived in France most of his life, naturally he is never wrong.