John E. Chick's Blog
January 22, 2017
French-Kissing
There are two types of French kissing. The type whereby the French kiss other people with wild abandon - family, friends, passing acquaintances etc in the street. And then there's the type involving tongues that most people probably prefer. Much like my hopes of French-kissing a certain sixth former back in the glory days of 1978 however (name withheld to protect my marriage), those hoping for the low-down from me on the latter are going to be disappointed.
That said, in 2017 the non-tongue method of French-kissing is more useful to me (and sadly, more regularly employed) these days. Until this week however, I'd never quite figured out when to kiss people that you meet in France - is it on first meeting? Which cheek do you go for first? Do men kiss other men as well as women? My only previous experience of this was with my Colombian sister-in-law who on first meeting me kissed me on the cheek, but I trumped her (that's not a sexual term) by kissing her other cheek, which apparently you don't do in Colombia. I think that that's what the French call a 'fox pass'.
Although kissing in France may not seem like the biggest problem in the world, it did cause me a headache last week. I was at an event with a dozen or so people, few of whom I knew. Following their lead, I shook hands with each new person when we met. When it was time to go though, I thought I'd better ask the hostess, the one person I knew, whether I should give everyone a kiss. At this point I was unaware of the protocol and wanted to avoid a repeat of the previous week's catastrophe when upon meeting a girl I French kissed her (non-tongue version) and, to misquote Katy Perry, she didn't like it.
Unfortunately, the verb 'to kiss' in French is 'baiser'. I say unfortunately, as my recollection from doing French in school was that baiser also means 'to shag'. Yes, really. Sadly, the word didn't crop up in my O level. I was therefore possibly not about to ask the question 'do I have to kiss everyone before I leave?' but instead 'do I have to shag everyone before I leave?' As a newcomer eager to make an impression, this wasn't really how I wanted to be remembered. I explained my predicament to Sal my wife who laughed out loud at me, something she rarely does when I'm fully clothed.
I blame whoever invented French. Deciding it was a good idea to have the same word for 'kiss' and 'shag' is about as sensible as deciding to have the same word for 'like' and 'love'. Actually, come to think of it ...
That said, in 2017 the non-tongue method of French-kissing is more useful to me (and sadly, more regularly employed) these days. Until this week however, I'd never quite figured out when to kiss people that you meet in France - is it on first meeting? Which cheek do you go for first? Do men kiss other men as well as women? My only previous experience of this was with my Colombian sister-in-law who on first meeting me kissed me on the cheek, but I trumped her (that's not a sexual term) by kissing her other cheek, which apparently you don't do in Colombia. I think that that's what the French call a 'fox pass'.
Although kissing in France may not seem like the biggest problem in the world, it did cause me a headache last week. I was at an event with a dozen or so people, few of whom I knew. Following their lead, I shook hands with each new person when we met. When it was time to go though, I thought I'd better ask the hostess, the one person I knew, whether I should give everyone a kiss. At this point I was unaware of the protocol and wanted to avoid a repeat of the previous week's catastrophe when upon meeting a girl I French kissed her (non-tongue version) and, to misquote Katy Perry, she didn't like it.
Unfortunately, the verb 'to kiss' in French is 'baiser'. I say unfortunately, as my recollection from doing French in school was that baiser also means 'to shag'. Yes, really. Sadly, the word didn't crop up in my O level. I was therefore possibly not about to ask the question 'do I have to kiss everyone before I leave?' but instead 'do I have to shag everyone before I leave?' As a newcomer eager to make an impression, this wasn't really how I wanted to be remembered. I explained my predicament to Sal my wife who laughed out loud at me, something she rarely does when I'm fully clothed.
I blame whoever invented French. Deciding it was a good idea to have the same word for 'kiss' and 'shag' is about as sensible as deciding to have the same word for 'like' and 'love'. Actually, come to think of it ...
December 4, 2016
Bureaucrazy
It's months since my last blog update, but I've got a good excuse - I've been filling in some forms. Then filling in some more. Then re-filling the same ones. Then trying to locate ancient documents that haven't seen the light of day since Stock Aitken & Waterman dominated the charts (cue the sound of the under 40s reaching for Google). In short, I've been battling French paperwork (and what speaks volumes about my progress in learning French is that last week I googled the French for 'bureaucracy').
France however does have something of a reputation for being 'en amour' with bureaucracy which is only to be expected as they invented the word. That said, England invented football and no-one could claim they're any good at that. What goes with loving the country though is embracing the paperwork. And that's been tough, even speaking as a civil servant who earlier this year got a form returned because my autograph crept outside the miniscule signature box.
The start of my French ordeal came with deciding to have a stall on the local market. You can't just rock up on the day like Dell Boy would, you need to formally register as a small business in advance. Which I guess is fair enough.
So, I tackled the painfully complicated language of the application form with the help of a sympathetic French speaker, who herself gave up before the end of the saga. Three weeks of work saw it finally finished, but I somehow suspected that submitting the form would end the process in much the way that the Brexit vote has settled the question of EU membership. That is, not at all.
When a fat wadge of papers and forms came back from the town hall, what I wasn't expecting was that they would need to see a copy of my marriage certificate (BIFF!), a copy of my wife's birth certificate (SPLATT!!), confirmation of how sickness and insurance costs would be met (BAM!!!), and require my attendance at an obligatory, week-long course in how to run a business (KAPOW!!!!). The fact that I have a Business degree counted for nothing.
Like Brexit, this process is going to run and run, but for possibly longer. I suspect that by the time the paperwork to-ing and fro-ing finishes, I'll have forgotten what it was I was trying to do in the first place.
Aside from my problems in registering as a business, French bureaucracy has also produced some other unusual quirks. For example, on my attempt to join a fitness class, I was told that I needed to have a GP assessment and a note confirming that I was unlikely to collapse / die at the class. Either I must be looking a lot worse than I thought, or that gentle yoga wasn't so gentle after all. SNCF demanding the full names, gender and ages of all people for whom I was booking train tickets seems like smooth efficiency after that.
That said, I was chatting to a musician who wanted to busk around the local bars. He trumped my frustrations about registering as a business by pointing out that he was told that he had to submit the set-list of songs that he was going to play in advance. Yes, really. When asked why, he was given an explanation that was more complicated than anything Ted Rogers came up with on 3-2-1 (cue more juvenile googling).
Change is in the air though. Francois Fillon, the red hot favourite to become the new French President next May has promised to lay off 500,000 civil servants (in Grandstand tele-printer fashion, that's 'half a million'). The country will surely grind to a halt.
France does not have a monopoly on bureaucracy though. When my son first had a paper round, he had a contract of employment (!) that stretched to 20-odd pages (!!). That is longer than the contract of employment for permanent work with the National Assembly for Wales. Further afield, up until the 1970s, if you wanted to join the Chinese civil service, you were invited into a room containing a desk, chair, paper and pencil and told to write down everything you know. Wow, as interview questions go that's a toughie.
I guess that the lesson here is that deep down people just love bureaucracy as it brings order, structure, consistency and stability. What is doesn't bring is stalls on French markets and buskers in pubs.
France however does have something of a reputation for being 'en amour' with bureaucracy which is only to be expected as they invented the word. That said, England invented football and no-one could claim they're any good at that. What goes with loving the country though is embracing the paperwork. And that's been tough, even speaking as a civil servant who earlier this year got a form returned because my autograph crept outside the miniscule signature box.
The start of my French ordeal came with deciding to have a stall on the local market. You can't just rock up on the day like Dell Boy would, you need to formally register as a small business in advance. Which I guess is fair enough.
So, I tackled the painfully complicated language of the application form with the help of a sympathetic French speaker, who herself gave up before the end of the saga. Three weeks of work saw it finally finished, but I somehow suspected that submitting the form would end the process in much the way that the Brexit vote has settled the question of EU membership. That is, not at all.
When a fat wadge of papers and forms came back from the town hall, what I wasn't expecting was that they would need to see a copy of my marriage certificate (BIFF!), a copy of my wife's birth certificate (SPLATT!!), confirmation of how sickness and insurance costs would be met (BAM!!!), and require my attendance at an obligatory, week-long course in how to run a business (KAPOW!!!!). The fact that I have a Business degree counted for nothing.
Like Brexit, this process is going to run and run, but for possibly longer. I suspect that by the time the paperwork to-ing and fro-ing finishes, I'll have forgotten what it was I was trying to do in the first place.
Aside from my problems in registering as a business, French bureaucracy has also produced some other unusual quirks. For example, on my attempt to join a fitness class, I was told that I needed to have a GP assessment and a note confirming that I was unlikely to collapse / die at the class. Either I must be looking a lot worse than I thought, or that gentle yoga wasn't so gentle after all. SNCF demanding the full names, gender and ages of all people for whom I was booking train tickets seems like smooth efficiency after that.
That said, I was chatting to a musician who wanted to busk around the local bars. He trumped my frustrations about registering as a business by pointing out that he was told that he had to submit the set-list of songs that he was going to play in advance. Yes, really. When asked why, he was given an explanation that was more complicated than anything Ted Rogers came up with on 3-2-1 (cue more juvenile googling).
Change is in the air though. Francois Fillon, the red hot favourite to become the new French President next May has promised to lay off 500,000 civil servants (in Grandstand tele-printer fashion, that's 'half a million'). The country will surely grind to a halt.
France does not have a monopoly on bureaucracy though. When my son first had a paper round, he had a contract of employment (!) that stretched to 20-odd pages (!!). That is longer than the contract of employment for permanent work with the National Assembly for Wales. Further afield, up until the 1970s, if you wanted to join the Chinese civil service, you were invited into a room containing a desk, chair, paper and pencil and told to write down everything you know. Wow, as interview questions go that's a toughie.
I guess that the lesson here is that deep down people just love bureaucracy as it brings order, structure, consistency and stability. What is doesn't bring is stalls on French markets and buskers in pubs.
October 30, 2016
Mushroom Roulette
As someone once observed, rich people are just poor people with money. By that logic, poor people must be rich people without money. I should let my bank manager know.
One of the many drawbacks about not having any job or income is, of course, being broke. Not that I'm complaining. As a house-sitter in the south of France I'm in the strange but undoubtedly wonderful position of living in a beautiful, modern, well-equipped residence in the middle of the Bordeaux countryside, but with the spending power of a teenager. A teenager who can't get a paper round. Hence the sudden interest in all that free food growing in the forest.
Identifying most edible stuff is easy but mushrooms pose an obvious problem - is it worth gambling on getting a tasty side-dish, at the risk of possible hospitalisation, or even death?
Luckily in France, you don't have to play mushroom roulette. If you are in any doubt about the edibility (I made up one of the words in this sentence), you just take them along to the local pharmacy who will let you know what's what - a brilliant arrangement. Being quite partial to staying alive, I decided to nip down to the local chemists with my assortment of wild fungi to try out this fab, free service.
The first hurdle was successfully negotiated as it was actually open (random opening hours are a characteristic of all French retailers - my pharmacy closes Tues mornings, Weds afternoons and all day Sat). Disappointingly though, the two staff on duty looked younger than my kids, but at least they confirmed that the fungus-checking service was good to go.
I produced the five varieties of mushroom that I had found. The two assistants looked sheepishly at each other in a way that suggested that they and mushrooms were strangers whose paths rarely crossed.
The more senior of the two, she was about twenty and newly qualified I decided, disappeared to find the under-employed mushroom chart. The other, in a move that was as disconcerting as it was surprising, roped in a customer to help out. I found myself losing my appetite. The customer was a very nice, rather ancient lady who looked puzzled and swiftly departed. She returned shortly later however with her older husband, an apparent mushroom expert. What were the chances of that, I wondered. The husband pointed at each of my five mushrooms and said 'oui, oui, non, non, oui.' Sorted then, two killers but I was ok with the other three.
I took my edible mushrooms home, persuaded Sal that all was fine, and prepared a bowl of mushrooms/ killer toadstools cooked in a mustard and garlic sauce. We sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, forks poised, in a scene reminiscent of the deer-hunter. Being a dedicated coward, I suggested that she should go first. The rationale being that as my French was better than hers, if we needed the emergency services, it would be better if It was me that was still alive to explain the problem. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a winning argument.
I, chivalrously I like to think, swallowed a large spoonful and sat there for a moment, basically waiting to see if I died. Sal was an interested observer, slyly paying me rather more attention than I usually get, but not actually eating at all.
As you are reading my subsequent blog however, and it wasn't dictated from an emergency ward, clearly I enjoyed a better ending than (*spoiler-alert*) Christopher Walken suffered in the Deer Hunter. There are however many other varieties of mushroom growing in the forest and crucially, it's not my turn to go first next.
One of the many drawbacks about not having any job or income is, of course, being broke. Not that I'm complaining. As a house-sitter in the south of France I'm in the strange but undoubtedly wonderful position of living in a beautiful, modern, well-equipped residence in the middle of the Bordeaux countryside, but with the spending power of a teenager. A teenager who can't get a paper round. Hence the sudden interest in all that free food growing in the forest.
Identifying most edible stuff is easy but mushrooms pose an obvious problem - is it worth gambling on getting a tasty side-dish, at the risk of possible hospitalisation, or even death?
Luckily in France, you don't have to play mushroom roulette. If you are in any doubt about the edibility (I made up one of the words in this sentence), you just take them along to the local pharmacy who will let you know what's what - a brilliant arrangement. Being quite partial to staying alive, I decided to nip down to the local chemists with my assortment of wild fungi to try out this fab, free service.
The first hurdle was successfully negotiated as it was actually open (random opening hours are a characteristic of all French retailers - my pharmacy closes Tues mornings, Weds afternoons and all day Sat). Disappointingly though, the two staff on duty looked younger than my kids, but at least they confirmed that the fungus-checking service was good to go.
I produced the five varieties of mushroom that I had found. The two assistants looked sheepishly at each other in a way that suggested that they and mushrooms were strangers whose paths rarely crossed.
The more senior of the two, she was about twenty and newly qualified I decided, disappeared to find the under-employed mushroom chart. The other, in a move that was as disconcerting as it was surprising, roped in a customer to help out. I found myself losing my appetite. The customer was a very nice, rather ancient lady who looked puzzled and swiftly departed. She returned shortly later however with her older husband, an apparent mushroom expert. What were the chances of that, I wondered. The husband pointed at each of my five mushrooms and said 'oui, oui, non, non, oui.' Sorted then, two killers but I was ok with the other three.
I took my edible mushrooms home, persuaded Sal that all was fine, and prepared a bowl of mushrooms/ killer toadstools cooked in a mustard and garlic sauce. We sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, forks poised, in a scene reminiscent of the deer-hunter. Being a dedicated coward, I suggested that she should go first. The rationale being that as my French was better than hers, if we needed the emergency services, it would be better if It was me that was still alive to explain the problem. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a winning argument.
I, chivalrously I like to think, swallowed a large spoonful and sat there for a moment, basically waiting to see if I died. Sal was an interested observer, slyly paying me rather more attention than I usually get, but not actually eating at all.
As you are reading my subsequent blog however, and it wasn't dictated from an emergency ward, clearly I enjoyed a better ending than (*spoiler-alert*) Christopher Walken suffered in the Deer Hunter. There are however many other varieties of mushroom growing in the forest and crucially, it's not my turn to go first next.
October 15, 2016
Me & Celine Dion
Write a blog my son urged adding, in complete earnestness, ' ... because you know lots of words'. Owain, I should point out, is 24 and a half. And a teacher.
So, I woke this morning to a typical Welsh deluge, rain hammering on the roof, discouraging all but the most hardy from getting out of bed. It looked like the real deal, none of this light, misty rain you can get but the proper wet stuff, falling from a sea of grey, not a sky in the clouds. Which was as unexpected as it was unfair as I'm in the south of France and frankly I was hoping for a bit better from my weather. Drenchings are par for the course in the Welsh valleys and I'd kinda hoped that moving this far south meant that I'd seen the back of them.
At least the rain gave me an excuse to stay indoors and concentrate on improving my French (which to my ear still often sounds like a series of passionate grunts). My main source of learning the language is the wonderful world of French radio. Local French stations for some unfathomable reason tend to have a policy of playing the same three or four songs on heavy rotation. Any by heavy rotation, I mean that you could hear the same song a dozen times during the day. The handful of records that a station seems to possess are presumably a mixture of the Controller's favourites along with a new release from whatever label has greased his palm. It is no exaggeration to say that I must've heard the new Celine Dion single forty times - and as its Celine Dion, you know what it sounds like already. It made the dizzy heights of no.92 in her native Canada, it's unlikely to trouble chart-compilers in the UK.
The station's chosen three records are interrupted by the host conducting a phone-in with a chef/ gardener/ lawyer (that's three different people, not a talented all-rounder), adverts (90% of which are for supermarkets), and news bulletins (generally local news, occasionally national, never international).
The phone-ins are great though, especially the political ones. Callers get so passionate and excited, especially about politics, in a way that people in the UK, well, don't. There's not much on Trump and Clinton but hours devoted to the race to be the French Republican party's nomination for the Presidential election in May 2017. I've got six months of excitable, political discourse to look forward to then.
That means that by next year my mastery of French should enable me to debate the finer points of the two-round voting system and the policies of Alain Juppe. But it probably still won't stretch to being able to buy a loaf of bread. I may allegedly know a lot of words but at the moment, they're in the wrong language.
So, I woke this morning to a typical Welsh deluge, rain hammering on the roof, discouraging all but the most hardy from getting out of bed. It looked like the real deal, none of this light, misty rain you can get but the proper wet stuff, falling from a sea of grey, not a sky in the clouds. Which was as unexpected as it was unfair as I'm in the south of France and frankly I was hoping for a bit better from my weather. Drenchings are par for the course in the Welsh valleys and I'd kinda hoped that moving this far south meant that I'd seen the back of them.
At least the rain gave me an excuse to stay indoors and concentrate on improving my French (which to my ear still often sounds like a series of passionate grunts). My main source of learning the language is the wonderful world of French radio. Local French stations for some unfathomable reason tend to have a policy of playing the same three or four songs on heavy rotation. Any by heavy rotation, I mean that you could hear the same song a dozen times during the day. The handful of records that a station seems to possess are presumably a mixture of the Controller's favourites along with a new release from whatever label has greased his palm. It is no exaggeration to say that I must've heard the new Celine Dion single forty times - and as its Celine Dion, you know what it sounds like already. It made the dizzy heights of no.92 in her native Canada, it's unlikely to trouble chart-compilers in the UK.
The station's chosen three records are interrupted by the host conducting a phone-in with a chef/ gardener/ lawyer (that's three different people, not a talented all-rounder), adverts (90% of which are for supermarkets), and news bulletins (generally local news, occasionally national, never international).
The phone-ins are great though, especially the political ones. Callers get so passionate and excited, especially about politics, in a way that people in the UK, well, don't. There's not much on Trump and Clinton but hours devoted to the race to be the French Republican party's nomination for the Presidential election in May 2017. I've got six months of excitable, political discourse to look forward to then.
That means that by next year my mastery of French should enable me to debate the finer points of the two-round voting system and the policies of Alain Juppe. But it probably still won't stretch to being able to buy a loaf of bread. I may allegedly know a lot of words but at the moment, they're in the wrong language.
October 8, 2016
Faffing Around France
The 10,000k Challenge: ...faffing across Europe on a bike!
Having published a book last year with the word 'faffing' in the title, I thought it may be a good idea to actually check what the word meant. The ever-reliable Urban Dictionary concisely defines 'faffing' as 'fecking around'. I think that probably sums it up quite nicely.
If pressed for my own definition, I would say that it is the art of finding pointless distractions that delay you doing important stuff. Given that we are currently hanging out in the south of France on an unpaid gap-year when any sane person would still be in work, we're definitely faffing around in France.
House-sitting for a year is a kind of pre-tirement, but without the pension, bringing its own pros and cons. The main pro is, as Morrissey nearly sang, 'Every day is like Saturday'. The main con is of course no disposable income which has generated a sudden and unprecedented interest in the timely harvest season.
If a slacker can be identified as someone who never knows what day it is, then despite appearances, we definitely aren't slackers as we always know that its Saturday.
Having published a book last year with the word 'faffing' in the title, I thought it may be a good idea to actually check what the word meant. The ever-reliable Urban Dictionary concisely defines 'faffing' as 'fecking around'. I think that probably sums it up quite nicely.
If pressed for my own definition, I would say that it is the art of finding pointless distractions that delay you doing important stuff. Given that we are currently hanging out in the south of France on an unpaid gap-year when any sane person would still be in work, we're definitely faffing around in France.
House-sitting for a year is a kind of pre-tirement, but without the pension, bringing its own pros and cons. The main pro is, as Morrissey nearly sang, 'Every day is like Saturday'. The main con is of course no disposable income which has generated a sudden and unprecedented interest in the timely harvest season.
If a slacker can be identified as someone who never knows what day it is, then despite appearances, we definitely aren't slackers as we always know that its Saturday.
