. My question is: have we got it wrong about the French this whole time? 'Your challenge is to get the butcher to be nice you to,' my friend texted at the start of my stay, because she thinks he can be gruff. Anxious about this and determined to prove her wrong, I hovered outside his shop on my first visit, googling 'chicken thigh' in French. 'Une cuisse de poulet, sil-vous-plait,' I told him moments later, and he was all smiles.){kind=link}
A month among the friendly natives of Provence leads me to wonder if it is actually the English who are rude and uptight
Salut. I’ve just returned from a month in Provence (apart from a brief 48-hour dart back to London on several trains to stand in the Queue and pay my respects). My next novel is partly set in a dilapidated hotel down there – a French Fawlty Towers – and I decided this warranted a “research trip” to the area. An extremely kind friend lent me her apartment in the medieval town of Bargemon, at the top of an old chateau where I sat every day writing at my laptop while brushing croissant flakes off my chin.
I was faintly nervous ahead of this trip. I haven’t spent much time in France, my French is diabolical (the GCSE only taught me to say that I enjoy playing tennis in my free time and to ask for directions to the train station), and I assumed, post-Brexit, that we Brits would be less popular than ever – especially given that our prime minister dissed their president in August. I didn’t even put a UK sticker on my car, fearing that French drivers might carve me up if they saw it, or key it. Granted, I was staying in a beautiful rural area full of cypress trees, vineyards and gift shops flogging lavender bags for knicker drawers – hardly Deliverance – but still, I needed to be on my guard and alert for any sign of danger.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I left the chateau on my first morning to walk 900ft to the boulangerie and a stranger greeted me with a chirpy “Bonjour”. What a weirdo, I thought, scowling at him over my shoulder. He must have mistaken me for someone else. But it happened on the way back, too: another stranger greeted me and smiled at me as if I’d just complimented her hair. What was going on?
Many, many years ago, when I worked in a shop, two customers on the same day told me that I looked like the actress Uma Thurman and I have told everyone I’ve ever met since about it. Were the same powers at play here? Did these people perhaps believe that Uma Thurman was holidaying in the area? (Poor old Uma may have looked like she’d let herself go a bit, but age comes for all of us.)