Stephen Clarke’s “Merde, Actually!”
Someone is going to say I’m really taking the piss out of the French right now, but that’s honestly not my goal. I’m sure Stephen Clarke wasn’t doing that (too much) either, or else he wouldn’t have been published in the Hexagon and allowed to live.
His character is an English guy (Paul West) who moves to France after being offered a job in Paris. He makes it through his first year (the horrors of which he has depicted in a book called A Year in the Merde and that I haven’t read) and then decides to open his own salon de the in the French capital.
The adventures of this initiative, his romantic problems and dilemmas – oscillating between two French women (some would say there’s no problem there), and the nightmare of returning to London for a while are the delicacies of Merde, Actually!, several excerpts of which I have allowed myself to write here, copyrights in mind and all.
- while playing le footie (table football) in a team with a French guy. The French remarks: “We will be the most fair-play team. We have an Englishman”.
- on the architect who was supposed to arrange things at his salon de the but who was blissfully oblivious of his responsibilities (a French trait, I dare add): “…Nicolas finally poked his refined nose through the open door. I’d expected him to be late – for people like him, punctuality is a sign of weakness”.
- conversing with this architect: “…but we’re in France, Nicolas. If you don’t get angry, nothing happens”. I’ve tested it in practice and it’s true.
- on the girl he’s got a crush on: “Her hair was a bit punkier – the English influence, I guessed. English women can never leave their hair alone like French women do. It has to be ’styled’”. Yeah, they might actually need to do something about it actually: it rains 365 days per year.
- on jumping the queue at the Louvre: “In a country where queue-jumping is a sport, we’d just won Olympic gold”.
- on calculating payment estimates in France: “The French for estimate is ‘devis’, which seems to be related to ‘deviner’, meaning guess. They’re very honest about it”.
- on invading France: “The best time to invade France is at noon on the first Wednesday of every month. At midday on the dot, the air-raid sirens start howling, and the French totally ignore them”. That must have been when the Germans attacked during WW2.
- on French services: “I wanted my customers to feel that the staff were potential friends, and not enemies, as the French service sector often tries to make you think”. The stories I have to tell of the Gare Paredieu…
- on royalty: “The French will tell you that ‘le client est roi’. The customer is king. But we all know what they did to their kings. Louis XVI’s guillotined head ended up bouncing across the Place de la Concorde …”.
- an English – French dispute about who should be declared the inventor of the sandwich: [The Inspector]: “We French have been eating sandwiches for much longer than you [English]. The traditional baguette is the perfect bread for a sandwich”. I interrupt: In your dreams, inspector! [Paul West] “No, it’s not. It’s the worst bread in the world for a sandwich. You can’t get it in your mouth … And when you squeeze it, all the ingredients fall out the other end of the sandwich on to your trousers”. My advice: wear a napkie. My point is with the first accusation: you can’t get it in your mouth. Point taken. And two: how the hell are you supposed to take a bit when fresh French baguettes resemble cement and stale ones could be displayed in the Ancient history sections in museums? I’ve been waiting for five months to get this one out.
- on French satisfaction: “As the glass door clanged shut behind him, I’m sure both of us were feeling that peculiarly French sense of satisfaction at having created mutual outrage”.
- on French ghettos: “You have to give it to the French, I decided. If you’ve got to pick a place for a ghetto, South Kensington is not a bad spot”.
- on the French love of life: “All the things about the French that drive other people crazy can be explained by a love of lifestyle, she said. When they run a red light, they’re not just showing total indifference to the danger of killing someone – they just think that life is too short to spend precious minutes waiting for a life to decide what colour it wants to be”. This must generate some pretty interesting explanations for the police officers.
- on English chastity: “No one over twelve in England is a virgin”. Or lack of it.
- on le guichet (my personal fave): “Don’t forget that l’employ au guichet is the most powerful person in France. Any guichet! Vive le guichet!” Yeah, the hell with La Marseillaise, this should be the name of the new national anthem.
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