Day 1757 (Thursday) 31st March 2022

It was lovely and sunny this morning bit still a bit chilly on Kisbee. Huw dropped me off at International House but I didn’t have time to go to Parc Mozart as I was running a little bit late. Jennifer arrived at the same time as me and I was pleased to see that there was a room for us. She has used her free hours so now we are working on a private basis so Romain doesn’t have to give us a room, but he and Jennifer are friends so he’s doing it as a favour for us. We had a five-minute break and sat in the sun in the Parc, which was as lovely as ever.

Jennifer kindly gave me a lift to Ipag so I had time to eat my sandwich before starting with the group of 24. She used the GPS to get us there and I was very impressed by how calm she drives and finds her way around – it’s hard to believe she’s Italian sometimes.

In the garden I recognised a lot of my old students from before Christmas and when I got to my room (Berlin) today it was lovely to see so many familiar faces. There should have been 24 students but only 22 turned up. We have to follow a syllabus this term to prepare them to go out into the world of employment. I remembered most of their names but there are five tall beautiful young women who all have long, straight black hair and I keep mixing them up – I’m sure I’ll get them right next week.

 

 

Yesterday my post was about things the French find most annoying about the Brits so today, thanks to Quora, I’m going to talk about what the Brits really think about the French…

 

Michel Gehin – lived in France 1970 – 1991 Quora

What do most British people think of the French?

I am going to gatecrash the party and provide an answer despite not being British. I have, however, lived in the UK for over 10 years and have had numerous comments thrown my way!

Someone else said that the British, by and large, like France and the French more than what the French would think - and I think that’s true. French people who haven’t been to Britain probably imagine that the Brits do not particularly like us, seeing that we are rivals (and have been for a long time), that a significant part of British humour is to poke and deride the French, and that our press often gleefully reproduce headlines from the less savoury side of the British press (the Sun etc) that often doesn’t hold back in crudely mocking and disrespecting foreigners.

But I think this misconception is due to a very British trait that we do not really understand unless we go and live there for a while: British humour. You see, it is different from French humour. British humour will mock mercilessly what it holds dear. Starting with themselves (the Brits are champions at laughing at themselves). It ensues that if the Brits mock the French, they must somehow like them. But French humour is quite different, we tend to mock things/people that are different from us, or what we consider to be “us”. We love Belgian jokes, we mock the rich if we’re poor and vice-versa, we mock regions other than ours. (we also love wordplay and things like contrepeteries but that is different, the British equivalent would be double-entendre jokes). But anyway, there is not a lot of self-mockery. The best-known and popular British humour in France is not that self-mocking, but rather the absurd humour of the Monty Python.

Definition of contrepeteries:

Inversion of the order of syllables, letters or words which, modifying the meaning, produces burlesque or saucy sentences. (Thus, an actor who was to say: Sound, trumpets!, exclaimed: Deceive, sound bells!)

But back to what the Brits think of the French. In my interactions with Brits while living there as the “token frog”, beyond the “cheese-eating surrender monkey” and “white flag factory” banter, there was quite a lot of things my Brit friends and colleagues liked: the food of course, the wine, the sense of a more “dolce vita” type of life, the natural environment, the architecture, the literature and arts (not modern music though), the importance of family life, our government-guaranteed protections (health service, welfare, workers’ rights), the language and the welcome they (usually) get. I thought there was also a sense that in a world with lots of polarisation and ignorance-filled hate, the fact that Brits and Frogs share a lot of common history should mean that we know each other very well, and this familiarity is quite reassuring and should make us allies. The best analogy I can come up with is that the Brits and French are like brothers: squabbling a lot, vying for attention, but often not far from each other, and when the chips are down: united.

Well, we have been on the same sides for over 100 years now: quite a long time in our common history.

Having said that, I also noticed a few things the Brits genuinely do not like much about France, some of which I agree with, some I don’t: the petty bureaucracy (fair enough), the electrical wiring (fair enough too), the driving (not sure that’s fair but there you go), the lack of orderly queueing (ha!), the beer (OK), the fact that we diss English cheese (of course!), our politicians (OK, but are yours much better?), our tradesmen (I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand why), our music (of which they usually only know a superficial amount). I probably forget a few things.

But we all agreed that it is great that France and Britain are indeed quite different cultures. I for one hope that it remains that way, as the joy of visiting and discovery comes from exploring the differences.

Today’s false friends…

 

une déception - disappointment, disillusion
deception - une tromperie, une supercherie

décevoir - to disappoint
to deceive - tromper, duper

demander - to ask
to demand - exiger

une douche - shower
douche - une poire ou douche vaginale

dramatique - terrible, tragic
dramatic - théâtral(e), spectaculaire

engagé(e) - committed, involved
engaged - fiancé(e)

une entrée - starter, first course [US]
entrée [US] - le plat principal, le plat de résistance

éventuellement - possibly, potentially
eventually - finalement, pour finir

une évidence - forgone conclusion, obvious
evidence - un indice, une preuve