Killing time with a gratuitous kick at vino-loving francophiles

Bordeaux airport, Merignac

More time to kill, so as I am increasingly doing and lacking anyone to talk at, I have decided to post yet another blog entry, which would be my third in just a week. There’s not a great deal to write about, but as my prime intention is to pass the time, that might worry you rather more than it would worry me. Traffic on the motorway and Bordeaux ring road (rocade, my French is coming along nicely, and it isn’t an encouragement to play music as loud as possible) was average, so there’s nothing to report there, and I shan’t do so.

There was the usual rigmarole here at the airport in security checks, but I seem to be getting more used to it. Maybe it’s the wisdom of age. Maybe it’s just that I can no longer even be arsed getting uptight about something I can do nothing about. I should have discovered that years ago.

On the last two full days staying with my aunt I have taken off in the household car (and managing to scrape the left wind on the garage wall parking it last night). I set off on Tuesday to see a photographic exhibition in Langon, but contrary to promises that it was open from every day until the end of September, it wasn’t. It was shut. So I took off into town after I spotted a poster for another exhibition – water and places/towns in South Bordeaux – and eventually found it. It was as exciting as its title promised, i.e. not much, and furthermore everything was in French.

Now just as waiting for a bus or a train not due for another 30 minutes you are apt to read pretty much any and every poster available, from admonishments to keep the platform clean to suggestions about what to do if you ever find yourself at a loose end in Paignton or Blackpool or Chester or pretty much anywhere, I set about trying to decipher the exhibition. I can follow some written French to a certain extent, but after about ten minutes ‘reading’ the first exhibit, I gave up. Had I carried on in that manner throughout the whole exhibition, I would still be there next Tuesday (and on a practical note, would have missed my flight).

Earls Court, later

Back in Old Blighty after a relatively painless journey from Bordeaux airport (I started this entry in the Billi terminal café). There was something akin to controlled chaose at the airport, when for whatever reason, and with three flights setting off at the same time, passengers for all three flights were channelled into the same two passport control booths.

At 12.40 and with just ten minutes to go before our scheduled departure, there was a crowd of at least 250 people queuing up to show their passports and I did wonder whether the flight would leave without us. As it was it left just under 20 minutes late, which is pretty much par for the course for any short haul flight leaving later than 10am from pretty much anywhere. As it was we flew out to Bordeaux from Gatwick about 20 minutes late and boarding had seemed to go completely smoothly. Ah, the tribulations we jet-setters have to put up with.

. . .

Over the past 52 years I reckon I have visited about 20/25, perhaps a few times more, but can honestly say I don’t know the country at all well. My father was stationed in Paris for five years from 1968 on, but in those five years I probably only went home about eight times, every Christmas and then once or twice at Easter. My parents marriage was disintegrating (and my father had a mistress on the side back in London whom he married when my mother died suddenly at 60 after suffering a huge heart attack) and the atmosphere wasn’t very nice.

After that it was once or twice on holiday in the early 1980s (quite recent for me, the distant past for anyone under 30 (I often remind myself that 1986 to me, the year I joined the South Wales Echo, would have been 1959 to my father, the year he and his family went to live in Berlin, but anyone of my age and a little younger will know exactly what I am talking about). Ironically, with one exception when by brother and I spent two weeks in an out-of-season sky chalet apartment near Morzine in the Haut-Something or other Alps, every other visit, including to with my then girlfriend, Sian, was to the same area, Gironde. And to be frank the countryside there is nothing special.

So I know very little of France and unlike my brother and sister, who both attended a French school for five years while my father was working there, don’t speak any French. I mention the countryside because a little later today I shall be leaving La Pappardella here in Earls Court, where I am enjoying a class of wine, I shall be jumping into my car and schlepping all the way home for the next four and a half hours. And in doing so I shall be passing through some very lovely countryside. I know parts of Germany and I know a small part of France, yet – and I don’t think I am at all biased – English countryside, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and then Cornwall – knocks it into a cocked hat.

It’s not just all the bloody rain we get here, but there seems more variation. I really no claiming that France, Germany and the rest don’t also have nice countryside, just that vast swathes of those two countries – Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) in Germany, for example – are awfully flat and dull.

. . .

Many Brits have a peculiar dog-in-the-manger attitude to France. I am not talking of all Brits, but those, for example, who might refer to wine as vino and sniff the cork when opening a bottle. Question their patriotism and they might be apt to reply that they ‘love the Queen’ and would certainly ‘die for their country’, but in many ways they seem to regard France as simply a better place, a leader in so many areas where, in their view, Britain lags well behind. ‘The French,’ they will announce, ‘know how to live,’ to which you would be quite entitled to respond ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ But your response will be met by an air of queit disdain that you don’t know what you are talking about.

The French ‘know wine’, ‘eat well’, are ‘superbly chic’ they will tell you, and although such men - it is always men - would be the first, if the occasion arose, to resort to that hoary old cliche that ‘to be born English is to win the first prize in the lottery of life’ (with Scots and Welsh men substituting ‘British’ for English), their gushing over France and all things French would make it seem they actually believe otherwise.

I, who likes food a great deal, am the first to admit that I prefer the French attitude to food and drink and would disagree fundamentally with such self-decribed francophiles. A visit to any supermarket or a stroll in any city, town

and village in France will inform you that your average Frenchman and woman know as little about fashion and chic as our average Brit. As for the conviction of the French that they are ‘a nation of thinkers’, I also beg to differ. Certainly, they seem to argue a lot more with each other and certainly they will discuss pretty much anything at length and then some, but that falls well short of somehow being intellectually in the avant garde.

As for food and drink, the French do seem to value quality more than the Brits, but I as someone who likes cooking, know that it is the attitude to food which differs, not the food itself. (I wish to God many of the items available in French supermarkets were available to us here in Britain. That they are not merely means that there is no call for it. If the Brits wanted it, you can bet your bottom dollar Asda, Morrison, Tesco, and Sainsbury would supply a far wider selection of cheeses and pate far, far better than the slush they offer at the moment. But, as I say, the Brits just aren’t interested.)

A meal is not something to be wolfed down in three or four minutes, but something to be enjoyed. Any meal eaten on any day in France is essentially as simple as one eaten in Britain. It is most certainly not all haut cuisine, but it is also most certainly not the unhealthy stodge that passes for food in Britain.

As for wine, well, there is plenty of the cheap rotgut stuff available in France and there are plenty of takers for it. If you like wine, and I do, you can get perfectly good wine in any supermarket in Britain, just don’t go for the very cheap stuff, bearing in mind that with with the production costs and tax imposed on it, it will be very cheap stuff indeed. Still, if you are one of those ‘j’aime le vin’ Brits who beetles off to France every year to enjoy life as the French do, you’ll still be thinking I haven’t a bloody clue what I am talking about.