NOW this may come as a surprise to you, but some foreigners, and even some Brits who really should know better, think the French are self-satisfied, arrogant and smugly derisive of all absurd pretensions except their own. But that’s not a view that I feel able to subscribe to myself, and nobody here’s ever had to tell me there’s a Condor out in the morning, either.
I put it down to envy. France is not the world’s top tourist destination for nothing and 85 million visitors a year can’t all be wrong now, can they? Mind you, even I have to confess to being made to feel like an iffy piece of cheese by the occasional waiter. So I did have some sympathy for the Vancouver restaurant that’s just sacked a French serveur for being impolite, aggressive and disrespectful to customers and colleagues alike. But he’s seeking compensation for unfair dismissal – he says he was merely being direct, honest and professional and displaying the impeccable standards he’d learned in the hotel and catering industry back home. Non mais…
Sometimes the customer’s only reaping what they’ve sown, though, which may explain the chalkboard price list that Mme Masstairmann and I spotted in a pavement bistro in Paris this Easter weekend – Un café: €6, Un café s’il vous plait: €4, Bonjour un café s’il vous plait: €2.50.
We’d nipped up to the Ville Lumière to see daughter Fleur on the new high-speed rail line they’ve not long opened. Only 90 minutes it takes from Rennes to the Gare Montparnasse now, or two hours from St Malo. You get on, settle in with your coffee, croissant and Le Monde and before you can say Bob est ton oncle, you’re strolling arm-in-arm along the banks of the Seine, humming I Love Paris in the Springtime.
We bumped into Catherine Bouënard on the train, too. She’s the lady who delivers Ouest-France, our morning paper, and she was on her way to the French speed knitting championships, which, we only discovered later on page seven, she’d won for the last five years on the trot.
And she retained her title again this year, too, with 258 stitches in three minutes in the final round. It was six short of her record, but one flick of the fingers ahead of Isabelle Stieger, the Parisian occupational therapist who’s been the runner-up throughout her reign. So if our Cathy’s the Neymar of the Needles, Isabelle is her Raymond Poulidor.
One of cycling’s greats, the 82-year-old ‘Pou-Pou’ is still one of France’s all-time favourite sportsmen, a bit like ’enry Cooper say, mainly because he was ‘l’éternel second’ to Jacques Anquetil and then Eddie Merckx in the Sixties and Seventies – an ever-valiant loser who never won so much as a single yellow jersey.
While Cath’ was clicking away, the Patronne and I trudged round the obligatory exhibition or two, enjoying their ever-soaring ticket prices, interminable queues, long crossed-legged lines leading to distant loos and wall-to-wall tourists playing sardines in front of the more iconic stuff – not that the Patronne and I could ever be called tourists ourselves, you understand. Hell is the other people.
As for the exhibitions, well, ‘ventre affamé n’a pas d’oreilles’, a hungry stomach has no ears, the old proverb says, and when your feet are aching and you’re dying for a cuppa, it’s not so easy to savour genius through a jostling sea of bobbing heads, either.
Now France has 1,200 museums and art galleries, but most of them are chronically under-visited, funnily enough, unlike the Louvre, Orsay, Centre Pompidou and Versailles, which attract zillions of visitors and corner 40% of the national market.
Some courageous innovative thinkers are now crying Haro!, though. Far too many people go to the Big Four for anyone’s good and the capital’s art galleries have far more fabulous stuff than they can possibly exhibit at any one time anyway, so why not send some of their treasures out on loan to regional galleries, eh? But the very idea provokes a sharp intake of breath from the Paristocratic art establishment. And if you thought the French could be haughty…
So Mme M and I had to suffer for our art, again, but it was soon time to board the bullet train back to darkest Brittany, wondering how Cathy the paper-lady had got on. I think I might give her some wire wool and get her to knit me a bike. Wouldn’t take her a minute, eh?
Kenavo!
