By Their Shoes Shall Ye Know Them

When we first met, my French husband Maxime had doubts. But luckily they were only about my shoes. He is always looking at people’s attire and making judgements thereupon. He's unimpressed with us Aussies - the fact that we are prepared to visit our parliament house in shorts, that we don't wear ties on Christmas Day and he's horrified by hoodies. Once on a trip to Tasmania, we came across Senator Bob Brown on the street being interviewed by the media. I tried to listen to what he was saying, but Maxime appeared to be concentrating very hard on the pavement.

‘Uh, Maxime, what are you doing?’ I whispered.

‘His shoes!’ exclaimed Maxime. ‘How can you be a leading politician with such awful shoes?’

It’s clear from French expressions that shoes are important to them. In French, to be beside yourself is to be beside your shoes. You are so upset you are not even wearing shoes. To be out of sorts is to be out of your plate. No shoes, no dinner? No Maxime!

Early on in our relationship, when we were living in France, Maxime announced that we’d be attending a dinner of the Shoe Appreciation Society, of which he was a founding member.

‘That’s nice,’ I said.

‘That means we really need to take action.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes. I can’t see your shoes anymore.’

‘Yes you can, they’re on my feet.’

‘No I mean I don’t like to see them. They’re random and fluffy.’

I was mystified. And not just by Maxime’s choice of adjectives.

We went to Strasbourg on the Saturday of the party to rectify the problem. After a few minutes in a shoe shop, I saw that, although when I buy shoes, it involves a lot of looking, when Maxime buys them, it involves a lot of talking. There was much serious discussion and in depth questioning, with Maxime and the shop people talking about ‘her shoes’ and ‘her feet’, as though I wasn’t there. As time limped by, I began to wish I’d brought a book. One about the length of ‘War and Peace’.

In fact, I’ve spent large swathes of my life waiting for Maxime. I’ve spent mornings staring into space or picking fluff out of my belly button while the sartorial one attended to his toilette. It is weird being with a man who spends more time on his appearance than you do. In the early days in France, we shared a lift to work, and some days, we would be late because of a crisis involving finding the right jacket to match the trousers. On these occasions, I tried really hard to act like I cared, but Maxime always saw right through me and was hurt that I would let him leave the house with a hair out of place. But we both knew no one would notice except him anyway. Then one morning we had a real crisis:

‘My shoelace broke!’ Maxime cried, crouched down at the front door.

‘Well, put on different shoes, then,’ I suggested.

Unhappiness at the thought of ruining the ensemble. He trudged off.

'Mais, putain! Bordel de merde!'

(He made various indecorous comments in French about brothels and prostitutes).

‘Oh, what now?’ I said, frustration starting to build.

‘I broke another shoelace!’

After the third lace I suspected it was just a very creative way to seek attention. OK, we all have many excuses for being late to work – the vacuum ate my homework, et cetera – but.

‘Look, Maxime, even you must see that I can’t be late to work because of a shoelace.’

He didn’t.

And Maxime’s concern naturally extended to my shoelaces as well. One day, on my way to meet him for lunch, I discovered I’d somehow lost a shoelace. Normally this is mildly annoying but not a great cause for concern, except if you’re going to meet Maxime. Maybe he won’t notice? I thought hopefully. I saw him approach, smiling, and then he stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Look at your shoe!’ he cried.

‘I know.’

‘How can you be walking around without a shoelace?’

‘One foot after the other usually does the trick, I find.’

‘Here,’ Maxime said gravely, sidestepping my sarcasm. One doesn’t joke about shoelaces. To my amazement, he fished out a spare lace from his breast pocket. ‘Only you could walk around with a shoelace missing!’ he laughed.

‘Hey!’ I said indignantly, ‘I’m not the weird one here – what sort of person walks around with supplies of spare shoelaces?’

A French one, of course.

The Need to Speed

The other week, my French husband Maxime received his FIFTH speeding fine since moving to Australia. And he is NOT a happy frog. But how is a Frenchman used to driving at 170 kph supposed to cope? The limit on French motorways is 130kph, by the way. Not that this figure ever mattered to Maxime - while he is meticulously careful about things he has respect for, such as cheese or his shoes, he is completely blasé about those he doesn’t, such as speed limits. He considers it a persecution of the population (especially the French population) and has very quickly learned to use the phrase ‘revenue raising’ when spotting a police car on a slope.

'Why is everyone obeying the speed limit?' Maxime asked when he first visited Australia.'How can you bear to go so slowly? It’s outrageous!'

'It’s not that we like driving slowly, it’s just that you’ll get caught,' said Dad. As Maxime has since found out. Often.

Since then, Dad's been trying to teach Maxime how to spot the the cameras. In fact, the other weekend, Maxime spotted his first unmarked car with camera. A proud moment - and hopefully a money-saving one. He’s also programmed his car to beep at him whenever he goes too fast. So now, of course, we drive around in a constantly beeping car.

But Maxime’s not being entirely selfish in wishing the speed limits were raised. 

'Think how much further out from the city people could live and still commute!' he says. 'With a sensible speed limit [i.e., 200kph], commute times would be slashed!'

That way, he could live next to his favourite Red Hill bakery, have a leisurely breakfast with baguette and quality organic-not-from-Denmark butter and make it to the city in time for work.

'Besides,' Maxime persists, 'the faster you drive, the more you are concentrating. It's the too-slow speed limits which are dangerous.'

'Look, it’s not as bad as Switzerland,' I point out to him. 

In Switzerland, they have signs saying 30kph with a snail on it, saying ‘langsam aber sicher’, slow but safe. With limits like that, when we were living in Europe, Maxime understandably had a very bad time on the road in Switzerland. At Swiss intersections, they sometimes place a traffic cop in a what appears to be a compost bin, where he sits directing traffic like a dalek. I’m not sure how, but one day Maxime actually drove into the one of the dalek’s bins. Which is how the Swiss police got hold of his French address. After that, such an endless stream of driving fines came in that Maxime finally announced that he would have to give up driving in Switzerland as it was getting too expensive (the idea of slowing down was not to be thought of).

So what's it like driving in high-speed France? I thought getting accustomed to driving on the right would be my main issue with driving in France. Nope. My main problem driving in France was the French. The French drive like they have a death-wish. And it’s not necessarily for them. All except the most elderly, who drive like a wilted vegetable. The consequence of this is that the speed differential between lanes is enormous on freeways: the limit of 130kph is blithely disregarded by both classes of French driver - the one cruising at 170, the other at 70.  If you try to overtake, say, a bendy carrot, a crazed maniac barrels up behind you, trying to intimidate you into the other lane by flashing his lights, gesticulating and tailgating you intimately.

The French also freely interpret road rules. They reverse over roundabouts, drive on the wrong side of the road (that one actually hit us), or, - a particular favourite - indicate one way and turn the other. That's if they bothered to indicate at all. They either don’t understand the concept of 'give way' or they don’t care. The slow driver, entombed in a clapped-out Peugeot 205, loves nothing better than pulling out in front of you. Neither is it unusual to see him driving up the middle of the road, straddling the median strip, cheerfully oblivious to the presence of any other cars on the road. But my fellow drivers seemed to regard erratic driving as normal and either didn’t react or gave a polite bip on the horn. An Australian would have dished out a long blast and an 'Oi! Where’s the fucking indicator, ya clown?' 

The upshot of this randomness on the road was that all my relatives, of my parents’ generation at least, refused to drive in France at all, much to the mystification of Stéphane and his family.

‘Do we drive this badly in Australia? I can’t remember,' I asked Dad once when he was over visiting us.

‘No,’ he said.

And now that I’m back home, I’m still getting used to the fact that in Australia, the car in front of me will almost certainly behave normally. Bizarre!

The Frog and the Pharmacy

When we were living in France, Maxime became self-appointed doctor to our babies, because half the treatments that were prescribed to our children by French doctors I thought were either unnecessary or medieval and I refused to administer them.

When you go to the doctor in Oz, you get a script for a drug. When you go to the doctor in France you get a prescription for at least six. I had read that the French were a nation of hypochondriacs and popped the most pills per person in the world. But when I moved to France, I didn’t know what they popped and where they popped it. Here are some examples: when poor baby Chloé had a touch of constipation, the remedy was glycerine suppositories. And up we go! One up the bum for the little poppet. If a baby had a runny nose, Maxime had just the thing: a mouche-bébé (fly-baby, so named as it flies up the baby’s nose). A tube is inserted into the baby nostril, a mouthpiece fitted into your mouth and you suck. Just remember, the French like eating slimy things like snails so it’s probably not so bad for them if any baby nostril content gets in their mouth. In fact, snail extract (Hélicidine) is the preferred remedy for cough. The route is oral, although quite frankly I didn't want it by any route.

The problem was that if our babies had a cold, I was usually the one staying home to look after them. 

Maxime would return from work in the evening and ask, 'How many times did you clear Chloé's nose today with the mouche-bébé?'

'Umm, er, none,' I would say. 'It's too gross!'

Maxime would look upset and sigh heavily and perform the task himself, to the accompaniment of howls from the baby. I was sure there must be a better way to treat runny nose than the mouche-bébé. I asked Mum next time I talked to her on the phone.

'What did you do when we were babies and had a runny nose?' I asked Mum. 

'I wiped it,' she said.

'Right.'

Our kids seemed to get sick an awful lot, especially in winter, but they seem to cope well for the most part, thanks to or perhaps in spite of the treatments. In fact when we all came down with gastro when Chloé was one, she handled it the best. She was dancing and singing virtually seconds after being sick, while Maxime and I lay groaning like beached walruses. I got better after a couple of days, and was soon back at work head-butting the grindstone. But Maxime recuperated very slowly, probably owing to his treatment strategy: he invented his own personal cure for upset stomach of duck pickled in fat followed by chocolate. He didn’t have much success with it but he kept trying.

Now we are in Australia, a land without mouche-bébés, snail juice, suppositories and duck pickled in fat. How will we cope??? Really well, I reckon!

The Frog and the Footy

One of the first things concerned Australian friends asked my French husband Maxime when we moved here was, 'What footy team are you going to barrack for?'

'Collingwood,' he said.

'Oh my God!' everyone cried (apart from certain tasteless individuals crowing in the background). 'Why?!'

'Well, everyone seems to hate Collingwood, so I thought it would be the way I could annoy the largest number of people,' said Maxime, looking very pleased with himself.

'Well, you've certainly succeeded,' I said. 'Don't expect me to go to any games with you. We're only going to see Essendon.'

'Oh, don't be mean!' said the friends.

'Look, if he'd picked the Bulldogs or something I wouldn't have minded. But Collingwood? I don't think so!' I said.

I've stood my ground and so far: Maxime has been to one Essendon game with me and two Carlton games with other friends. But he revenges himself upon me by following the results each week and making a special point of informing me when Essendon loses and by singing 'Good Old Collingwood Forever' whenever he feels like being irritating. Which is often. What's worse, our seven year-old Elise sings along with him because she says she feels sorry for 'poor Papa' because Mummy hates his team!

'He is not poor Papa, he is bloody annoying Papa,' I tell her, and Maxime laughs. (Yes, I know, I know, I'm a disgraceful parent.)

Maxime mostly behaves at games - claps at the right times and drinks his beer (although he has been known to drink cider instead. When he does that, I just explain to the people around us 'he's a Collingwood supporter'.) But Maxime doesn't touch the suspicious looking pies and has yet to learn how to yell at the umpire. He also complains the matches are too long.

'With all the getting to Melbourne, parking, finding your seats, the whole afternoon's gone,' he says. 'They have too many breaks.'

Maxime would probably think differently about the breaks if he ever had to play a full quarter of football himself, I tell him. And I have played footy myself - for Melbourne Uni women's team. I talk from time to time about playing again. But Maxime is against it.

'You'll get hurt,' he says.

'Yes,' I reply.

In my career, I averaged one broken bone a year. Of those, probably the broken nose was the easiest to cope with. Except when I sneezed (oh my God, that was a special sensation!). But I loved playing footy. Being from a nation of hypochondriacs, Maxime finds this lack of concern for one's health hard to fathom. But Maxime and his very French attitude to healthcare is the subject for another post ...

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