Saying hello the British way

Now that Francesca is back home in Blighty, she thinks it's time the British people got together in a huddle and worked out some simple rules on how they are going to greet each other from now on. I was at a barbecue (indoors, behind rain-streaked panes, burgers under the grill) yesterday, and had forgotten what an unholy mess this was. It has got even worse over the last couple of years with the invention of hugging for men, only a decade after the invention of hugging for women. Whose idea was this? For a nation most at ease with its arms crossed, this is tantamount to torture. All I had to worry about in France was which cheek to swoop for first (go left, get in there first, the other person will follow).

Handshaking in Britain is too formal for all social situations and has class connotations. The Brits cannot cheek kiss or air kiss without looking pretentious (apart from when they are in France, when it becomes a mark of integration and therefore OK). The hug is way too cheesy - it must have arrived on these shores via an American sitcom. The option favoured by most people is to say 'HELL-O!' really enthusiastically, and give a big happy grin. I found being on the receiving end of one of these a terrifying experience for the first few days - until my French side subsided (yes, it's OK to smile, go on, Francesca, you can do it! Even to someone you don't know!). But I find that you have to be in the right mood to give one of these, otherwise you risk an unpleasant rictus effect, a la Posh Spice.

It's hardly surprising that some people have given up entirely and just pretend to be doing up their shoelace instead.

At the barbecue, kissing being out of the question, I shook people's hands, but realised I should have gone for the hello rictus instead. They were Northerners, and probably thought I was an effete Southern tosser. Fortunately my 4-year-old son, who had followed me into the room, decided to greet everyone the Russian way, as hubski's friends greet him, with a manly shake. 'Pweased to meet you.' he shouted, as he stuck out his arm. 'My name's Ilya. I'm living in England all day long.' That's ma boy.

But seriously, we have to sort this one out, or I'm going to have to buy a pair of shoes with laces.

The Last Post

I sit here among boxes and unspeakable filth (we sold the fridge and the washing machine today and when we moved it and the polite strangers saw What Lay Underneath I couldn't decide whether to nominate myself for France's worst housewife or just make it quick and die of shame on the spot).

From our window I can see the lights of the skyscrapers of La Defense, France's biggest business district. How reassuring that despite the fact it's 15th August, and a national holiday, the lights are still on. It's nice to have company in Paris in August.

This is the last time I will post from France, and all day I've been struggling to muster some feelings. Either it hasn't sunk in or I am just too glad that this chapter in my life is finally over. Maybe as the ferry pulls away from Dunkirk (a strangely appropriate place to sail from) tomorrow I'll squeeze out a tear or two, if I can be bothered. Bof. Shrug.

I came to France expecting to fall in love with the place and be bilingual in two years. It didn't happen, and I ended up living a parallel life, working in English-speaking companies (not by choice but because that was where the work was), socialising with my English-speaking colleagues and hubski's Russian friends. I felt that France, despite the fact I spoke French fluently and wanted to integrate, had its back turned to me. There were few opportunities to get involved in community life - in fact I don't think community life really exists outside villages and small towns (and call me needy, but saying hello to the baker doesn't count). As time went by I stopped expecting to make a French friend (though that item remained on my New Year's Resolution list for years). My contact with the French was limited to shops, banks and government offices. I think even the French will agree that these are not areas where they shine.

By the time my son was born in 2002 I had seen enough. I wanted to go home. But this was impossible - I would have had to leave hubski (who was then boyfriendski, and without an EU passport) behind. So I put it out of my mind. But every time something went wrong, it came back. Again and again. Until one fine day, about a year and a half ago, hubski agreed that I had a point. Getting work was easier in the UK. The smallest thing was not always a battle to achieve. People didn't openly revel in saying 'no'.

I have, however, found things about France that I appreciate and admire, and living in this country has changed me for the better in many ways. There's a tiny part of me that is more French than English. I am not rabidly anti-French and can understand Brits who want to come and live in France. They will have done things the right way round - have a career, make some money, then buy a French farmhouse and relax. Maybe one day I'll do the same.

I haven't properly begun to recount my memories of these years, or my trepidation at taking my family (especially hubski, who at the age of 40 is starting his life again from scratch, as he did in France at age 25) back 'home'.

So watch this space.

The Dead Zone

I can tell from the eerie silence in the streets and the plummeting stats on my little internet pitch that we are now mid-August, in the dead zone. Even Q. Plage ended today, under stormy skies and lashing rain. There is nothing more.

So it's time for the smug little holiday post:

Here in the région Parisienne, I can assure you that even the dog turds have taken a holiday. I haven't seen one for weeks (true, I haven't). The post office workers are practically wearing Hawaian shirts - there was only me in the queue today. I had a choice of three eager faces waiting to serve me, so I chose the most miserable looking one. It was a tough decision to make, but all in a day's work for someone not on holiday.

There are no white children left in the parks, and no nounous. What else...

It's amazing how few people have discovered this little corner of paradise, tucked away between the office blocks. The pavements are all so smooth now that the roadworks have finished, just waiting for the rentrée crowds.

Seriously. Although I would like again to thank my former employers from the bottom of my heart for sacking me and paying dearly for the privilege, I confess that the camping equipment I bought with the lolly is not going to be used this year. Packing up a flat with two small children takes approximately five times longer than the worst-case scenario.

Thank god the weather's been so crap. And promises to be for the next few days.

We sail on 16th August. Of which more later.

Happy holidays everyone!

Were those the days?

Our social life has been revived recently (Clear! whumpf!), as people we never get round to seeing wake up the fact that we are not too long for this world (north of Calais is beyond civilisation, where dragons live. Not to mention baked beans), and we start getting invited to see their new house that they moved into in 2003, etc.

One such visit was to our Russian friend P., who famously left her husband for a pompier. This ended happily, and she is now respectably married to him with a baby daughter. Disappointingly, Mr Pompier (his real name is Jean hyphen something), was at work when we came by. P. handed me the pompier calendar. 'Here he is'. For a moment I was confused, then I twigged. She actually married the model for the fireman calender. Talk about getting straight to the crux of the matter.

P. now lives in suburban seclusion not far from Meaux, east of Paris. In the car on the way out, as we zoomed past the Gare d'Austerlitz on the right bank of the Seine, I started to get a strange feeling of jigsaw pieces falling into place. I looked across at hubski, who had a broad, almost paternal, grin on his face as he looked around him. 'Remember?'

Yes. We hadn't driven along that road for seven years. I remembered the station, the neon signs, the Chinese restaurant done up as a huge plastic pavillion. The bit of the River Seine that you never see on postcards.

That was the road we used to take when returning from Paris to Disneyland, in 'starushka' (the old lady), husbki's grey Opel (RIP). I haven't gone into the significance of Mickey Mouse in our lives. Disneyland Paris provided hubski's first steady job in France, after years of working for dodgy Russian start-ups (one of which was called, without a trace of irony, 'Igor International' after its venerable founder, whose first name was Igor). This was interspersed with odd jobs teaching Russian (in the course of hawking his CV around for one of these our paths first crossed), fruit picking, and studying for a BTS in 'Commerce International' which got him and most of the others on his course, especially the non-French ones, precisely nowhere.

Hubski arrived in France in 1991, with a language degree from a Russian university (highlights of which included 'History of the Communist Party' and 'Marxist-Leninist Economic Theory'), in the same way as I arrived in 1998, with a language degree from a British university (which also featured 'History of the Communist Party' and 'Marxist-Leninist Economic Theory', but from a rather different viewpoint). But jobs for Russians, even with working papers and first-hand experience of monolithic bureaucracies, were hard to come by. Every French company he applied for turned him down flat, a few openly stating their policy of only employing French or EC nationals. He finally got the Disneyland job, as a hotel bell-boy in 1997, a few months after we met. Even this lowly position was impossible to get through the official route. He was helped in through a friend of a friend.

I still have a photograph he sent me of himself on his first day at work. Achingly young and handsome, with unmistakably Slavic features looking out from under the brim of a top hat... made out of an American flag. He was also wearing a matching 'stars and stripes' waistcoat. The photo could have been captioned 'Don't mention the (Cold) War'. As one of my friends observed at the time 'It's tragicomic'.

Although hubski professes to depise nostalgia, he swung the car off at the usual exit, Marne la Vallée. 'Just to say goodbye'.

The village where we had lived, which hosted the 'cast members' accomodation, had changed beyond recognition, and was now a town. We got lost amongst the new houses, which were more than a little twee. You almost expected to see the Mouse himself skip out of one and wave across to Donald Duck, busy electro-strimming his hedge in the next-door garden.

We finally came across the residence, then new, now looking down-at-heel. I grinned as I remembered how uneasy I had been as a squatter there, as I didn't work at Disney and wasn't paying rent. Breaking a rule! In France! What a delicate little flower I had been back then.

I heard hubski mutter 'thank you Mickey', as we sped away. It's funny how he had forgotten the bad bits - the night shifts, the humiliating uniform, the room mates, the almost unbelievably poor wage. Every time I give a tip, I remember those days and add anther euro. But I said nothing. It was our first ever home after all.

Your muzzer was an 'amster, and your fazzer smelled of elderberries

It's not often I meet virulently anti-Anglosaxon (to use their pet term) French people, but I did last night, at a party given by my American friend B. Most of the French I meet on social occasions are, whatever they think privately, scrupulously polite in a way that seems old-fashioned back in the UK, where modern English men are now too petrified of women to as much as hold a door open for them. By the way, I'm generalising about French men here as I have almost never been able to hold the attention of a French woman in company, unless we're both sitting down and the chairs are in a configuration that means she would have to climb over me in order to escape.

I have a theory the French save their rudeness up for public places and people they are never likely to see again, which might explain, for example, Parisians' legendary emnity with tourists.

This guy, however, was an exception. I had met him before, as I was leaving another party at B.'s house. We were talking in the hall, when he swayed out of the kitchen, and he calmly informed me that he hated all the f**king English. Er, bye then.

This occasion started promisingly enough, as he cooed over my daughter. 'Ah, what a beautiful child.' But then - 'She is English though, oh, what a shame. A real tragedy.' The humour was unconvincing. Later, having realised that we about to emigrate back to the UK, we fell into the category of people he was never likely to see again, and the gloves came off. The English food 'joke' rate went up to about one every five minutes, until it began to dominate the whole evening and I silently willed a giant tin of golden syrup to fall out of the sky (we were sitting outside) onto his head.

Having taught English to business drones like him, I think I know where the roots of this almost comical hatred lie. There comes a point in the lives of all young French movers and shakers when they realise that they can pass all the concours the state can throw at them, they can use their connections to shoehorn their way into any number of stages-to-die-for, if they can't speak English, zey are doomed! And, although they swallow their pride (image of a python swallowing a goat comes to mind), go to the lessons and learn ze bloody language and use it to get on and fulfill their destiny, they never quite come to terms with the indignity of it. So they seek solace in sad, outdated jibes about English food.

I realised, 24 hours too late, who that guy reminded me of, and what I should have said to him. For those of you scratching your heads over the title of this post, I suggest you rent the DVD of Monty Python's 'The Search for the Holy Grail' at your earliest convenience.