They cheat!

The French have always kept their old ways. They take on the new but keep the old. Why can't we do that?

They still use the 'pound' for weighing - called la livre, for instance. It comes from the same roots as our word - Libra - which we still abbreviate to an L for the pound sign. Look at the Euro sign and notice how it's almost exactly the same as a pound sign! La livre is used nowadays for half a kilo, roughly the same as an English pound. You see, we're not so different after all. Luv 'em!

Clever how they adopt the new - until you find they've fiddled it and kept the old, too. Bit like the EU - fighting for new laws and standards, and then ignoring them themselves. You have to admire them really.

Weird cows

This is a land of cheese and butter. Normandy does cows. They're all pretty but look utterly stoned. Great splodges of brown adorn their bodies and their faces. They look for all the world like you would if you were extremely large, drunk and only had hooves to put your eye make up on with.

Who put these here?

I'm driving the roads looking at the bocage - banked up lines of trees between the fields - that are their special hedges. As I view the pocket handkerchief sized fields I notice that some of these banks have not been maintained - the earth has slumped away leaving the outstretched tiptoes of their roots exposed.

In the war we (OK, and the Americans - they were there too) found it almost impossible to fight across the fields because of these high banks.

Reading about the war is pretty amazing. I know it was full of bravery but it was also jam packed full of stupidity and lack of knowledge. Fantastic planning, for instance, blown apart by not knowing about bocages!

Gallic shrugs

Useful, I've decided, for padding out a response when you basically haven't a clue whether they just complimented your attempted witticism or warned you that a pair of copulating toads were about to ruin the shine on your shoes.

'Crapeau' I later discovered did indeed mean toad and so where I should have shrugged, instead what I did next was probably completely inappropriate. Though, judging by their increased laughter the words I actually used and the actions to which I set them probably unwittingly expanded on their main focus of attention.

Point scoring

I've decided not only to give myself a point whenever I actually get what I thought I ordered, or when the response looks in keeping with what I thought I said - but an extra point if I can fit into the sentence one of those French phrases we actually use in English.

I got 'C'est la vie!' in today. And 'de rigeur'. It's my 'forte'!

Double points are awarded if you use one of their most hated words - that is
English words that they use and which are probably banned. Le weekend is a good one. Le best seller has sneaked in too. Even le shopping. And now 'le email' (now supposed to be 'le courriel'!) because email means enamelling!

To be English in France and to speak French using an imported English word!

That reminds me of two of my favourite Bush-isms. How the guy can deny evolutionary theory when he obviously never went through the process himself! Anyway. Quote "More and more of our imports come from abroad". But back to the blog. Quote "The problem with the French is, they don’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur'"

Wouldn't they love to know that 60% of their language is made up of french words!