My Vieux Lille Doppelganger

As I walked home from work one evening last week, having hopped off the train as usual at Gare Lille Flandres, I found myself moseying along the narrow pavement of Rue Angleterre, appropriately close to home, metaphorically and literally, for a Brit. It was about 7pm and I’d walked that route many times before at similar times of the evening. Nothing unusual at all.

It was already quite dark and I was tired. Recognising that someone was running towards me from a little way ahead, I sent out my Pavement Waves (see blog Pavement Waves) but, as usual, the runner and I seemed to be heading for the almost inevitable collision but, this time, it was clear that this person was intentionally running specifically towards me. It wasn’t the usual wave-related issue at all.

It was a child, male and probably between 2 and 6 years old. (Having little experience of children, I struggle to know what criteria to weigh so as to make a good guess as to the age of a small child like that but I’m reasonably confident that the young chap was in that bracket). He was a chipper little sort. He had a great big mop of curly hair, a well-balanced running action for a bod so young and a great big wide smile beneath 2 beaming eyes.

He was excitedly repeating a word, over and over, as he approached me….. “Papa! Papa! Papa!”

I quickly dismissed the notion that he might be a small, passing Italian pilgrim who’d mistaken Lille for Rome and me for The Pope and decided that, unlikely as it seemed, the young fellow had probably mistaken me for his Daddy.

As he plonked himself immediately in front of me, leaving me no choice but to stop completely, I was laughing out loud. There he was, by now looking immediately up into my eyes from a metre or so below my somewhat higher eye level, still smiling, still repeating “Papa! Papa!” This was one excited little guy.

For my part, I was extremely amused but quite moved at the same time. As someone who never had kids, being called “Daddy” isn’t something which tends to happen and I found it really sweet. I enjoyed the moment, as much as he’d clearly slipped up. Still, he was so close to me now that I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t sussed that I wasn’t who he thought I was.

I guess none of this seems really unusual on the face of it. These things happen and who knows the thought processes of an excited child? He could just as easily have seen me as being Barney the Dinosaur approaching him on the pavement if I’d happened to arrive into his little World in the middle of a flight of fancy which told him to expect that.

However, there are 2 things about this pleasant and amusing little incident which still stand out as a bit unusual to me.

1) A few weeks earlier, the very same child had made the very same mistake as to my identity in a different place in Lille. As much as I’m not always too hot at distinguishing one child from another, on the earlier occasion, I’d shared the laugh with his real “Papa”, who’d arrived on the scene “out of nowhere” within a few seconds, in fits of giggles. This second time, there he was again, real “Papa”, this time in almost uncontrollable hysterics. Again, we shared the fun of the incident. In my best French, I said to him “You realise that’s the second time he’s made that mistake with me?” “Yes, sir!”, he said, “He’s got himself mixed up again, hasn’t he?” My answer to this was that “It’s clearly because we look so incredibly similar…. Maybe we’re twins who got separated a long time ago”. Real Papa was bent double by this stage, laughing into his knees and I wished each of them a good evening and walked off with a big grin on my face. I could still hear loud laughter behind me.

2) Real Papa is a really nice, friendly guy, (just like me! ;o) ) Physically, however, he's about 25cm shorter than me, has very close-cropped hair (a couple of millimetres at most), he seems to have about twice as many perfect teeth as there are in a standard set and he's probably as black as black people ever get.

Fêtes and Fériés

Blog being written - coming soon

Ravens and Remorse

The next time it's blowing a real storm out there and you're strangely enjoying the wildness of the rain, dashed and thrashed against your window, take an uneasy walk with Edgar through a night of denial, qualified remorse, false hope, fate and ultimate resignation. He was a troubled soul who seems to have moulded his uncertainties into a gripping and incisive expertise in the articulation of notions of compelling, destructive romance, seen in an eerie light through disillusioned, fearful, spiritual and yet all too realistic eyes. I frequently revisit this poem. There's a link to it to your right. Wait until the weather and the time of night are both appropriate!

Pavement Waves

The pavements of Vieux Lille are, like the streets, mainly cobbled. Very quaint and attractive but sometimes narrow and difficult. Even one with all its cobbles in place can be anything but flat and a hazard to an unwarily-placed ankle but, unlike in the case of 600mm paving stones, one missing cobble can be a barely-visible bear-trap. Stick a whole foot down one of those at a brisk walking pace and you’ll be using the end of your tibia as a makeshift heel for the rest of your days. Other hazards include the cyclists who don’t want to be inconvenienced by the fact that the narrowness of it all means that literally everywhere is one-way in the old town so they use the pavements instead and then, of course, there’s the ubiquitous “poo”, far trickier to spot on cobbles than on flags or tarmac.

It’s this fact which leads me on to the notion of “Pavement Waves”. Despite certain early successes in avoiding the poo, (see Trains & Turds), I also had some spectacular squelches in the first couple of months. On one occasion, I had a serious and personally-critical meeting with someone quite senior in the organisation and, 20 seconds shy of the entrance doors, on a forecourt with no available grass or leaves etc, I trod ankle deep in a pile of fresh droppings which can only have been extruded by a dog-shaped donkey with a very high calibre arsehole, probably approaching the diameter of (and maybe even resembling) a bisected blood-orange. Having little time and no resources, I chose to give it as good a shake and “kerb-scrape” as possible and press on into reception. The floor was granite. My walk across it would have looked more in keeping if they’d been playing Ravel’s Boléro over the public address. The stench was so potent that……

Sorry! I got side-tracked! This isn’t the offering in which I want to explore the subject of “French Fido’s full English Breakfast”. I’ll get back to that another time.

So where were we? Oh, yes. “Pavement Waves”. I speak of waves of the cerebral kind. A sort of understanding which possibly allows interaction between us as inanimate objects (to wit, dog dung on this occasion) and also, more notably, between us and other humans. In respect of the former, I’ve developed, without much effort, the ability to avoid this particularly unpleasant obstacle uncannily well. The Waves took a few months to “take” but, now, I don’t have to think, I don’t even have to look. Those turdvibes just pulse through me throughout every sortie and I’m convinced that they’re now so honed that I could cartwheel through Battersea at 2 am and still go home and make pastry without washing my hands. If I could transfer this skill from dogshit to landmines I’d be worth a fortune in Africa and Vietnam.

So, yes, that took a few months but my powers eventually became strong. The problem is and has always been in relation to the other kind of Pavement Waves. The ones between human and human. The timing and results have been completely different. My realisation and understanding of the wave situation between me and other pavement users was immediate and my level of mastery of it has improved not one bit in a whole year. I’ll describe it.

For decades before, I’d been used to a situation where, if I found myself walking straight towards some bloke coming the other way along a pavement, then the waves between us, (both of our interacting waves), would silently, invisibly and instantaneously negotiate. Mine would inform his of my likely actions, changes in direction and pace. His would do likewise and then our respective pavement waves would return to each of us, re-entering our bodies through whichever orifices they normally use and, after subliminal, unspoken and unseen corrective action, piloted by our two sets of waves, the gentleman and I would pass each other neatly by. Not a brush of shoulders nor a visible deviation on either part.

Now, however, as much as I’ve made myself as capable as could be expected of communicating with my hosts in terms of messages written or spoken, my PWs have singularly failed to be arsed to learn to communicate on any level whatsoever with the PWs of my opposite numbers here. Every single time I walk the streets of Lille or Roubaix and, frustratingly, along the corridors and up and down the staircases of the offices, I bump into every third person coming the other way. The adjustments made by both sets of PWs just don’t work at all. If he adjusts to his left, my PWs send me to my right and so we bump or, at least, someone needs to stop. Even if we both stop, it’s still no more clear who’s going to dance around which side of whom from a standing, face to face start. If, as I’m walking diagonally across a square in the centre of town, from one corner to another, some woman is crossing between the other two corners (at 90 degrees to my route), it might look, from 50 metres away, as though our collective paths and velocities will see us bump heads in 20 seconds. Again, the PWs go to work between us and the adjustments are made, visibly and clumsily but those adjustments are false and futile and we bump heads all the same.

It’s weird. It’s like the interaction between the poles of magnets. It hasn’t improved one bit over the year and I don’t expect it to. It’s not based in the language as none is exchanged (apart from “after-the-fact” apologies) and it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the idea that we drive on the left and they drive on the right etc. I have as many right-side incidents as left-side ones. No, it’s just that we’re different. We think differently. Our minds are predisposed to calculate and prioritise differently and, as much as it can be a little embarrassing from time to time, I actually really like the fact that this problem exists and persists!

It seems to lend weight to ideas that I’ve long held dear. It seems to endorse the notion of innate differences between peoples and I love that apparent confirmation! It sits well with my ideas of identity and national oneness. The fact that I bump into them and they bump into me is to be celebrated! It indicates that we are different and that embodies much of joy and excitement of travel, adventure and experimentation. Two things are clear to me from these observations.

The first? To my French hosts, whether a jury would decide that I bumped into you or that you bumped into me, It’s always my fault and I accept culpability with good grace! This is your country, not mine and my PWs are the ones getting it wrong, not yours! I’ll always say “sorry” or a translation thereof, irrespective of the specifics of the bump incident!

The second? There’s probably someone in several loopy local councils in the UK right now who’s considering making bumping into immigrants on the street a “hate crime”! Maybe some no-hoper from a Third World country is suing the council as the rights of his Pavement Waves aren’t being duly taken into account and he’s consistently bruised as a result!

Ah, PW meets PC! What great times we live in! Why doesn’t such a lawsuit seem at all difficult to imagine!?

Forays and Food

I’m determined to get out and about a lot more in 2007 than I did in 2006. I’m actually more than a bit ashamed that I’ve seen so little of my surroundings this last year. For instance, I’ve never seriously contemplated getting myself up to Dunkerque which would only take about 40 minutes on the train or, perhaps, 1 ½ hours to the North East and I could be walking around Antwerp or Bruges as the Belgian border is literally just 15 km or so up the track. If I was to hop on a TGV, a few hours later I could hop back off again in Brittany, Normandy, the foothills of the Alps or, well, practically anywhere in mainland France but, to my shame, I’ve done none of this! I went to Arras (pictured, hoping to dodge being caught on camera as usual - I hate photos of me! The far prettier one in the LR blue duffel is Mum) to see the Christmas Market a few weeks ago whilst my Mother and Brother were over visiting but Arras, 40km to the South West is a far as I’ve managed to get! Yes, I’m ashamed and I’m definitely going to do better!

I also started off last year by getting out and about locally a lot more. Every Sunday morning, just 10 minutes’ walk from my kitchen, there’s a typically-French produce market on a cobbled square known as Place du Concert (pictured). All the stuff you’d expect to be there is there in abundance, from the meats, pâtés and sausages of all shapes, colours and sizes, all manner of fish and shellfish, to more types of breads and cheeses than you can shake a stick at… (I tried… the stick broke). There are flowers of largely familiar types but the fruit and veg stands invariably offer some unidentifiable fare and mushrooms of apparently extra-terrestrial origin. There are bewildering selections of wines, bizarre snacks and biscuits, cakes and honeys whose imperfections mark them out as special and homemade. For a quick bite whilst you shop, perhaps a crepe or waffle, cooked as you watch and washed down, perhaps, by a plastic tumbler of the freshest and most pleasant real, pure orange juice I’ve every tasted (perfect to cut through what ails one on a Sunday morning just 7 hours or so after one’s return from one of the many pleasant bars in Vieux Lille). I’m going to get myself back into the habit of going there again as, as much as the quality and range of foods in Carrefour is generally excellent, it’s all a bit impersonal and uninteresting for someone, like me, who finds food shopping and cooking a real pleasure.

Something which has really struck me about the markets and something which I find a little disappointing, perhaps a disillusionment, is the ever-presence of the lorries which are, in effect, just great big ovens on wheels with sides which, once raised, reveal enormous banks of rotisseries on which are skewered literally hundreds of whole chickens at a time, rotating and roasting in the open air and beneath which, benefiting from the juices, are heaps of potatoes, peeled, cut and sizzling away. These chickens invariably account for the longest queues of customers at any market and the fact that the trucks are back time and again with the same quantities of chickens on board suggests that, even though each lorry appears to have more chickens on it than the country as a whole could eat, they consistently shift them all and countless hundreds of people go home and woof their chicken and roast potatoes for Sunday lunch. It’s clear that the quality of this stuff is good, cleanliness standards seem high enough (they obviously get thoroughly cooked and not many germs could live through that kind of heat – great to stand close to on a winter morning and the smells are incredible) but my sense of disappointment comes from the legends we’ve all grown up with in England about the French and their cuisine. We’ve never questioned the notion that France is a nation of people who, further to their appreciating fine cuisine are, as a general rule, somehow born able to create it themselves. As good as this chicken looks and smells, it is just that – chicken. Not “Chicken-à-la-this” or “Poulet-de-that” or “Coq-en-the-other”. It’s just chicken…made hot and golden. Hardly a high-powered plat. I wonder for how long this has been happening. Lorries didn't always exist. Are we at a point in French history where they no longer crave the dishes which the rest of the World thinks they all love to eat and know how to make? Is our view of the French and their superior culinary prowess no more factual than their view that we Brits eat fish & chips followed by jelly and evaporated milk seven nights a week? Maybe we could attach the same explanation to the fact that the "French" are no longer "all chefs" (if, of course, they ever were) to the fact that fish & chips was long-since overtaken by "something else" as Britain's favourite takeaway. What could be easier to cook than roast chicken? Maybe the general decline in English people’s ability to cook is being mirrored over here. If so, it’s a real shame but I guess that’s just the way of the World. To me, a takeaway meal is not a treat. It's me simply admitting to myself that, this particular evening, I can't be arsed. Further, I very rarely stop at the aisles of ready-made meals in supermarkets as I love cooking and can easily beat anything you can buy ready-made. My stuff always “lives up to the picture on the box”!

I’ve taught myself heaps of nice French recipes this last year and, after having tried out several preliminary versions on myself, I’m always happy to get the chance to cook them for someone else too. A friend, a Mum etc! Navarin d’Agneau, Boeuf Bourguignon, Noix de Veau Sauce Maroilles, Magret de Canard, Carbonnades, Tartiflette, Cailles aux Cerises and many more besides. (I really must get round to finding the right girl for myself – all that cucking I could do).

Trains and Turds

It takes me about 15 minutes to walk to Gare Lille Flandres to catch my train to work each morning. That walk has been dark, cold and tedious these last few months but, mercifully, I'm finding that I'm almost leaving the apartment in daylight this week. Obviously this was the state of things a year ago when I caught the train for my first day at the French office. I'd given myself a bit of breathing space between my arrival in France on Feb 22 and my starting work on Mar 1 but, with all the stuff that I needed to try to get sorted out, those days went by in a flash and I soon found myself walking hurriedly to the station, not knowing my arse from my elbow as regards from which platform my train would depart, would it be punctual, how long the journey would take, how many stops came before mine, would I be sure to get off at the right place, how long would it take to walk to the office at the other end? Etc. At least it wasn't raining.

Most people suffer the experience of the first day in a new job from time to time. It's rarely a relaxed or entirely pleasant experience and it’s often preceded by a restless night. This was certainly true in my case. Obviously, I've started new jobs before but nothing had ever come close to how I was feeling that morning. I’d been to the offices enough times to know that they were huge. I knew about 6 people of the 2000 in there and, among those 6, there was only one person whom I could claim to know well at all. Then, of course, there was the fact that I’d staked a whole lot on my being able to fit in, get on with the people who matter, understand the job, do the job, understand and communicate entirely in French and, of course, to continue to want to be there (and, of course, in France) indefinitely. As much as I’d thought long enough and hard enough about the decision a couple of months earlier, I think it was only that morning that the first realisation hit home to me in terms of the scale of the gamble I was taking. I didn’t have any reason to be sure I’d succeed in any of these respects, let alone in all of them and many more besides, which was precisely what I’d need to do and, of course, some of these issues would not be entirely in my own hands.

I think I'd given myself about 45 minutes for what I knew was only a 15 minute walk but, on days like that, you can't be too careful. What if I twisted my ankle on the cobbles? What if I witnessed a bank robbery and had to stop to give a statement? What if I had to help an old woman un-wedge her head from between some railings? What if I shat myself out of the sheer anxiety of it all and had to go “home” again? (as much as I liked the apartment, it hadn’t even begun to feel like home yet). No, again, you can't be too careful. As it was, my spare 30 minutes were spent reading and re-reading the screens in the station so as to be absolutely, totally, completely certain that the train I'd decided must be the one for me was not, in fact, going to Venice or Heckmondwike. I smoked 3 cigarettes in that 30 minute period too.

I finally boarded. At least it was quiet and tidy. What I’d heard about local French trains being so much nicer than their UK equivalents seemed to be very true. Seemed to be. Off we went and I switched from “get on the right train” mode to “get off at the right place” mode. I was focused. Even slightly calm. Then, of course, the ticket monkey arrived. I flashed my monthly ticket at him and, as much as my French was a whole year worse than it is now, I think he said something along the general lines of “Sir, I hate to be a stinker but would you mind fucking off out of the 1^st class carriage and into the cattle truck where you belong with all the rest of the plebeians, please? Thank you so much and, by the way, if you think you’re a special case just because you’re an English twat who’s too fucking stupid to read the 40cm-high number 1 which we paid good Euros to have painted onto the side of our lovely carriage, untarnished as it usually is by the presence of any filthy passengers, then think again, me old fruit. Have a nice day, now………. Shite-hawk”. Any ambiguity or hint of understanding which he’d intended to insert into his message was, I suspect, lost in the translation. I thought about embarking on the “It’s my first day…. I’m under a lot of pressure this morning……” kind of sheepish retort but I noticed a bulge in his satchel which was exactly the size and shape of the metal hat worn by John Cleese whilst he taunted King Arthur from the ramparts and, as the last thing I needed that morning was to have someone fart in my general direction etc, I decided to let it go. My calm was shattered, along with any illusions about the qualities of local French trains. As I traversed from one carriage to the next, my face as red as Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen with a nosebleed, it was like stepping off the Orient Express and onto Ivor the fucking Engine, complete with coal stains. The thought of this contrast reminds me. I must remember to revisit the subject of Roubaix College for Building Apprentices at some point as the charming students of that establishment make every morning’s trip on that train a veritable voyage of discovery and, as pacifistic as I am, I suspect that I may well find myself charged with the murders of several of them in the fullness of time so the least I can do is to offer some descriptive prose whilst I still have my liberty.

So I settle again, in Ivor, (so to speak) and the train begins to brake. It’s obviously going to make a stop but where? How many are there to go? From my armchair on the Orient Express, I could see clearly, through the pristine, Cristal D’Arq, engraved cut-glass windows, where I was in the World. Now, the hormones and ring tones seemed to provide an opacity which meant that I couldn’t see much at all, inside our outside the cattle truck. I was lucky. A chap behind me correctly interpreted my neck-craning and window-rubbing in my desperate attempt to establish the name of the station at which we’d now stopped. He asked me, in what sounded like the melody of very polite French, whether I needed any help. I asked if this was Roubaix. We’d been stationary for 2 minutes and the train was surely about to set off again. Again, in a soft tone of French, he assured me that Roubaix was the next stop. I thanked him very much and listened for the follow-up of his equivalent of “English Shitpot” or similar but it never came. Nice man.

He was as good as his word. As the train began to stop again, he tapped me on the shoulder and said “Roubaix, Monsieur”. Not wishing to say “Yes, my friend, I understand the complexities of the phenomenon of “the next stop””, I smiled and thanked him again. There I was. Roubaix. Damaged, bruised, emotionally-scarred by a 12-minute rail journey. As I alighted, I felt like Michael Palin, getting off the roof of something transcontinental after four days in the sun and dust. I wasn’t particularly calm any more but at least I was on the desired platform at the required time. Sorted.

Once I got out of the station, Roubaix was familiar enough to me after all the visits in the past. One big difference was that, as a sporadic visitor from England, staying at a nice enough hotel in Lille, nobody expects you to make any real effort or economy in relation to the trip to the office and back. I, like everyone else, used to get a taxi from Lille to Roubaix and the €23 bill, each way, was not an amount of money at all. It was simply a number, written on a receipt by a taxi driver. This is all fine and dandy in those circumstances but you try forking out €46 per day to get to work and back in the real world and, unless you’re paid significantly more than you’re worth, that approach would soon lose its appeal. So, as much as Roubaix was familiar, I’d never sought the offices from the railway station before but, as luck would have it, I asked the right person in the right way and was given clear and easy directions. The walk would only take me another 5 minutes.

That walk through Roubaix, as short as it was, was interesting and challenging. Interesting insomuch as I’d never seen as much canine excreta in one eyeful before and challenging insomuch as I’d never expected to have to do a solo foxtrot through the streets of a small French town so as to avoid presenting myself to a new team with dogshit on my lapels. I was like David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, trundling up and down the rice paper without getting a huge chunk stuck in his instep. I’ll possibly revisit the subject of dogshit in a later offering as its study is, I’m sure you’ll agree, of fairly universal interest.

I arrived at the office half an hour early that first morning……. with clean shoes.

Law & a Frenchman in Trouble

The picture I’ve attached to this message is there as a mark of my huge respect for a truly decent, intelligent, beautiful and pleasant human being who was denied her future and her deserved joy by a despicable, deluded and ignorant savage.

During my first couple of weeks of living in France, I was walking back to my apartment from an evening with my friend, JC, when I came upon an incident. It was one of those times when you think you’re on a film set as, to any decent human being, these situations are normally only ever seen on screen but this was all too real and all too “now”. Amid the crying of a girl in her twenties and the angry shouting of a so-called man, I saw, across the road from me, a guy on the floor being kicked in the head by some savage. Like an idiot, I crossed the road, told the savage “That’s enough” and picked up the guy from the street. I gave neither of them any time to wonder what was happening. I simply took the victim away from that situation and sat him down on a kerb at the earliest safe opportunity. He was bloodied and weeping. I guess I’ll never know whether he was weeping at the fact that he’d lost a fight, the fact that he was physically hurt, the fact that he was in shock, over the woman at the centre of the fracas or at the fact that he’d been hauled out of there by an English git.

I gave him a cigarette and, as best I could a year ago, I talked to him. Gradually, the crying stopped. The fact that he was crying like that was not something I found at all contemptible or shocking. I’m not that shallow. It was quickly clear that he was a decent guy and, like most decent guys, maybe that sort of barbarism didn’t usually invade his existence so why wouldn’t he be shocked and upset? He explained something about a girl but he’d clearly had a shandy or two (to the average Frenchman, the equivalent of 1 ½ bottles of Johnnie Walker 12-yr-old malt) and my understanding of the lingo wasn’t then what is today but, let’s face it, rivalries and conflict in the name of “love” are a universal language in themselves so I didn’t need the details. I asked him how old he was. He was 27. I wish I’d had enough French in my quiver to have been able to find a direct translation for “Fucking hell, Cobber! I don’t even remember 27. Whoever she is, if she’s with a twat like that then she’s beneath you and not worth the pain.” I think he got the drift and, once I knew he wasn’t going to do anything daft (like going back for more) I left him and carried on my merry way, checking beneath the streetlamps that I wasn’t wearing his blood on my clothing as a reward.

It wasn’t until I recounted this tale to a few French bods at the office that I became truly aware of the situation in Law here. As much as it might have been dangerous to do what I did that night, it wasn’t brave or ill-thought-out on my part at all. It was an instantaneous reaction based on a combination of anger at what I was seeing before me and standards which were either always in me as an individual or which were added to my being by parents with good standards themselves. I NEVER court confrontation, partly because I’m not very good at it these days and partly because I’m wise enough to know how futile and unnecessary it almost always is. My French colleagues put me wise to something I’d never even been remotely aware of in that, had I not done what I did that night, I’d have been breaking the law myself! I can’t claim to tell you precisely what the law says as I haven’t yet researched it in detail (I will check it out some time) but the nuts and bolts of it seem to be that, if you’re in France (nb – maybe it’s only “if you’re French”……I’ll check) and you see that someone is in peril and needs help, you are legally obliged to assist. Therefore, that night, it might be the case that, in doing what I did, I was simply doing what I was legally obliged to do, as much as I had no idea of any such obligation at the time.

Is this a “good law”? On the face of it, it seems to be a very “good law”. Something which might also be a “good law” in other countries but………. wait a second……. doesn’t the very need to have a law of that nature constitute something extremely bad in itself? Doesn’t the successful insertion of a law such as this into a “Constitution” say something along the lines of “Without a legal compulsion to act, our citizens will stand by and allow any person to suffer whatever attack or misfortune they may be facing and so we need to make their duty to act a matter of law”?

Would I, now suspecting that I’m subject to obligations under the law, react differently tomorrow to a situation effectively identical to the one which befell on that night a year or so ago? The answer is, of course, a resounding “No, I wouldn’t”. I didn’t NEED to be legally obliged to act. But ask that question of others and you might well find various groups of people, distinct by the nature of their replies. There will be those who, ignorant of the law, would do nothing, keep walking but who, once aware of the law, would feel a duty to act. Well, it’s something, I suppose. There would certainly be a group who, irrespective of their knowledge or ignorance of the laws applicable, would always do nothing to help. (I hope that, when I’m attacked, I’m not surrounded by a group of these!) Then, of course, there will be the ones who, when faced with the same situation, would concentrate on the attacker in the all too predictable style of “mine’s bigger than yours”. These people are far more a part of the problem than of the solution. Of course, I’m very happy to say that I’m not alone in being someone who doesn’t need to be compelled to do the right thing. There are always others but, amidst the violence, lethargy, selfishness and paranoia of our lives today, I’m sad to say that we are, with each passing month, year and generation, rarer.

Laws. What are they? Why are they there? Why are they necessary? What would life be like without them? The very existence of laws is born of the existence of selfish, ignorant scum like the guy doing the kicking that night. By “sheer coincidence”, (not!), I seem to have an understanding of what’s right and acceptable and, of course, what’s not. Not everybody has this understanding and, dear reader, these dregs of humanity are costing you dear in many ways, not just financially. I’ll blog on the true cost of crime in the near future.

In the meantime, in true Nick Ross style, “don’t have nightmares, do sleep well”.

First Things First

Ok. Let’s go. Some kind of an introduction to my situation follows… just in case you found me by accident. I might be several years behind the trends in starting a blog but that’s pretty normal for me. Considering that I work almost solely in relation to the internet these days, I’m still a quivering technophobe in many respects. I sometimes have an irrational fear of trying totally new things with computers. I think it’s mainly the perfectionist in me which gets in the way! If I recognise that I’m not master of a subject, I can easily fall into the trap of leaving that subject alone but, in this case, I recognised that blogging and I were simply made for each other so I’ve forced myself into it.

So why choose to start now? I moved to Lille, in North Eastern France, from my native UK on 22 February 2006 and so, of course, I’m rapidly approaching the milestone of my having been an immigrant for a complete year. We all know that there are lots of Brits living in France and so, of course, I don’t claim to be any kind of a special case on that level. However, for the most part, the Brits who live here are in categories quite distinct from mine. There are oodles of retired Brits here. Why die in rain when you can die in the sunshine? Many of these people choose Southern or otherwise coastal locations and are motivated by, of course, the weather but also, typically, by a notion that France represents an opportunity to step back into a softer, simpler, slower, altogether nicer place than they view today’s Britain as being. Are they right to see things in this way? I’ll get back to that one as I add to this blog in time. There are, necessarily, loads of British students who’ve chosen to sleep in France rather than to sleep in Britain although I’ve yet to meet one myself. I suspect that we keep very different hours and I imagine that they’re more likely to be found in places far sexier than the North East. There are also the “Gites brigades” who come here and buy a big old farmhouse for £6.50, do it up, add 5 bathrooms and can then accommodate other Brits in a usually rural idyll. Again, not much of that is in evidence in this area as, quite simply, it’s not far enough away, geographically speaking, to be of great interest to most Brits and I’ve encountered several people who equate this area to the North East of England…. Not perfect for all types of holiday! Then there are those Brits who seem to want to import a bit of Britain all over the place. They open shops selling HP baked beans or bars which are intended to be like pubs back home. Again, this type of thing is not common in this area. Don’t get the idea that Lille and its environs are of no interest at all to British Tourists. The architecture is, in places, extremely impressive and the two World Wars were busy times around here so there are reasons for Brits to be interested. In the summer and at Christmas, Lille cringes to the sound of British attempts at “sivoo-play” and, of course, cringes still more to the sound of those idiots who don’t even have the respect or social skill to attempt even to say “please” or “thank you” in French. (These people then wonder where the contemptuous air of the waiter comes from). I avoid British tourists like the plague. On many occasions, I’ve sat on a bar terrace in silence beside a table of Brit tourists, making sure I’ve nothing on my table to give myself away as being British. (I bought a new glasses case from a local optician so that I wouldn’t have my old “Specsavers” one on the table by accident. If I’m heard speaking in French by the average Brit, they’d not have the ear to realise what would be obvious to any French bod).

So there are all these types of Brits here in France and many more types besides but none of these categories includes me. I’m in a category which seems to be infinitesimally small. People who simply happen to work for a French company and live here as a result. To put the numbers into context, there are 2000 people working in the headquarters of the company near Lille and I’m the only Brit amongst them. Furthermore, I use internet contact sites which enable me to chat online etc with people all over France and, in the last year, I’ve encountered just 3 people whose circumstances are even close to mine.

Assuming that a direct move from Britain into a mainstream job in France from a “standing start” would be difficult, my take on these numbers, based on my experiences within the company, is that, to find oneself in my situation, there are 3 boxes that need to be ticked. The first is simple enough. It requires a certain level of “seniority”. By this, I don’t imply that I’m anyone particularly important within the organisation – my position is modest – but, at the time when this opportunity came my way, I already had 3 years behind me in the same company’s offices in Bradford so I was seemingly viewed as being able to tick the “Seniority” box well enough and the nature of my work in the UK was eminently compatible with openings resulting from changes in the French headquarters. It’s certainly the case that nobody very new to the organisation or particularly young would have been offered a similar opening. The second box is the “Practicalities and Commitments” box. How many people who could tick the “Seniority” box would also be able to say that they had no mortgage (I rented), no car (I bussed), no wife or girlfriend (with their attendant career needs or personal preferences), no kids (settled in schools, reluctant to leave circles of friends or simply reluctant to “become French” as they grew up). In fact, I had no prohibitive commitments whatsoever. My very limited circle of family and friends are all mobile enough to be able to come here from time to time if they choose to. I discussed my impending decision with my Mother before the final “yes” but the conversation was frank, honest and pragmatic and it was accepted that my decision would be just that – mine – and that, as considerate as I like to think that I am, had my Mother, or anyone else, been dead against the move I was contemplating, this would not necessarily have prevented me from going ahead with it. As it was, she was completely supportive and my subsequent move resulted in her being able to visit France no fewer than 5 times in 2006, clocking up about 30 days in total. As for friends, the changes and incidents my life has seen in the last 15 years have left me in the situation of having relatively few friends. Those I have are very good friends on whom I know I can count but, even whilst still in the UK, I’d evolved into someone who very rarely spent time in the company of others. My friends are nowhere near as culpable for this as I am myself and the passage of weeks, months or even years between contacts doesn’t detract from their value to me nor from our ability to pick up where we left off each time our paths cross. I’ll no doubt get back to all that another time but the potted version was that, if my moving to France was going to mean that I would rarely see or speak to my UK friends, then this would hardly be anything new to me. Further, the idea of my living in isolation held no fear for me at all. I was already well-accustomed to that. My limited circle of friends also includes several people who still work in the UK office of the French company and this gives me the pleasure of needing to exchange with them on a fairly regular basis. So there we are, the “Practicalities and Commitments” box was far easier for me to tick than it would have been for (quite literally) anyone I’ve ever met. The third box is a little more difficult to put a short label on. I’ll call it the “Preparedness” box but it could equally be called the “Britishness” box. It’s the box which relates to a certain British “reluctance” to change, to adapt, to experiment and to be socially-adventurous. It’s the stuff which drives countless thousands of British dross to move to the Costa del Twathead (yes, I know they’re not all dross by any means – two of the nicest people I’ve ever met have a place in Spain! Generalisation just saves a bit of time now and then!) where fish and chips are served in the sun (or is that “The Sun”?) It’s the stuff which sees them dying in the same hospital which saw their birth, 70 conservative, safe and dull years before. It’s the stuff which sees millions of Brits unable to speak a single word in a foreign language (and they’re happy to recognise the fact that their life in today’s World means that they don’t need to). Many Brits still live by a notion that Britain is “us” and everyone else is “not us”. They believe that everyone over the water in any direction belongs to this enormous group of “not-us-ians” whose strongest common trait is not being “us”. The not-us-ians are subdivided into levels of worthiness of British contempt, based on whether or not they’re “nearly us” or, perhaps, “used to be us”. By this rationale, Australians would be “used-to-be-us-ians” and, therefore, worthy of less British contempt than, for instance, the French (who can’t even be bothered to use (a kind of) English to communicate with each other like the Australians do). In turn, those Brits would deem, for example, the Chinese to be at a still more contemptible level as not only do people in China seem to want to talk “foreign”, but a walk through Peking will quickly reveal that they don’t even bother to look like British people either! How dare they?! Anyone who knows me is well aware that I have vehement opinions on multicultural issues but afraid or xenophobic I am certainly not. I knew full well that living in France would constitute a massive change for me but I was not put off in the least. Contrary to the innate British unwillingness to make the significant effort required to adapt to a host nation, I set myself rules before I left the UK. My apartment would not be a small corner of England in France. No Union Flag hangs over the cobbled streets of Vieux Lille from my balcony and I wouldn’t be seen dead here in an English football shirt (or any other football shirt, for that matter). My life would not be that of an Englishman, uneasily superimposed onto a foreign backcloth. I would be, for the most part, an invisible immigrant. Necessarily, this would mean mastering the language. I’ve still a long way to go on that front but my rule, broken for one person only, is that I speak only in French. If someone tries to practice their English on me, I stop them. For 9 hours each day, I work and interact only in French (calls and mails to colleagues in other countries occasionally have to be in English to suit their needs) and, outside working hours, if I’m talking to someone, socially or to change my phone contract or whatever, that conversation is in French. (The exception I mentioned is JC – for those who don’t know him, he’s a Frenchman who studied in the US and worked with me in England but who has now returned to France and lives 10 minutes’ walk away from my place. His level of English is extraordinarily high and he says that he fears losing this level if he doesn’t get the chance to practice on a regular basis… I think the truth is much more that he’s “homesick” for England! It’s JC’s preference that we continue to speak English and so we do). When I say “invisible”, I mean that I was always prepared to make the changes needed to integrate myself in a very whole sense. Obviously, I’m not seeking to “be French”. I could live here for 20 more years and I could swap my passport for a French one but I’d no more “be French” then than I am today. An Englishman cannot become French any more than a Bangladeshi can become English. It’s simply not possible but, in either case, it’s a duty, as a grateful guest of a country, to integrate, to pull in the same direction as my gracious hosts, to accept the fact that, in the main, it’s far better that I leave manifestations of Britishness at the door. Were I to have children here with a French woman, those children would be more French than me. “Genetically”, they would be “half French” but, socially, they would be as French as possible under the circumstances. It would, of course, be my responsibility, as an immigrant parent, to ensure that their upbringing was as much in keeping with that of a genuinely “French” child as possible so that neither they, nor anyone with whom they might come into contact in their lives, would see them as being anything other than just another “French” child. This is to the general benefit of all and it’s the abdication of that parental responsibility which leads 2^nd and 3^rd generation immigrants all over the World to be viewed as outsiders, irrespective of where they might have been born and how long ago. I wouldn’t want to inflict that on a child but it is an all too common failing (abuse) on the part of immigrant parents which is hugely divisive, destructive, ignorant and downright dangerous. I used a lot of quotation marks in this paragraph as there are historical, legal, geopolitical and philosophical questions surrounding a word like “French” but, for this time at least, I’ll assume a general understanding on your part of what I might mean by the word “French”.

So there we have it, some kind of a potted history of where I am and why, along with an indication as to the nature of the “Preparedness” box which needed to be ticked and which, as far as I was concerned, posed no problem for me.

1, 2, 3 … “Seniority”, “Practicalities and Commitments” and, finally, “Preparedness”. Tick, tick, tick. The decision was made and some of the “rules of engagement” established. So here I am in France, readying myself to meet the first anniversary of the move and geared up to share the experience by means of this blog along with, I’m sure, many a miscellaneous ramble or rant.