Why You Should Never Go Wine Tasting With a Frenchman

Now that my French husband Maxime is into a fitness regime, we don’t go wine touring so often. This was making me a little sad … until I reminded myself what wine tasting with the Frog was actually like.

Back in France, we often took visiting friends and family to one of Maxime’s favourite wineries in Alsace – Domaine Marcel Deiss, situated in the half-timbered medieval wine village of Bergheim near Colmar. My uncle and aunt were among the fortunate first to be taken there. And, as often happens in France, we were greeted not by some black-apronned flunky but by the winemaker. Or in this case, Jean-Michel Deiss’s wife. My aunt and uncle traded pidgin French for pidgin English with Mrs. Deiss and things started well.

Especially since she gave us all a glass of crémant (Alsatian sparkling wine), which went down a treat.

‘Ooh, champagne!’ said my Aunt appreciatively.

‘It’s not champagne,’ began Maxime.

‘Don’t you start!’ I warned him.

Then we tasted a wine made of a blend of different Alsatian grape varieties known as Edelzwicker in Alsatian dialect (just trying saying that after a few glasses of Alsatian champagne). Most Edelzwicker, which means noble mixture, is not very edel at all, (one winemaker once let on it was just all the leftovers the Alsatians pass off on the Germans). But Jean-Michel Deiss, relishing tradition, terroir and trend-bucking, went back to the ancient co-planting ways, and worked hard, employing the most fastidious winemaking methods until he was given a big elephant stamp by critics for his Edelzwicker experiments.

In short, these mixture wines were the pride of the Domaine. Presenting us with the flagship wine, Mrs. Jean-Michel waited expectantly to hear how we liked it. And this was when the wine tasting got dangerous. When asked what I thought of a wine, I usually came out with terrible clunkers:

‘It smells like petrol,’ I would announce to a winemaker.

‘No! It’s got great minerality!’ Maxime would hiss in my ear.

‘Oh right. It’s very minerally. Yeah. And it smells a bit like grass.’

 A small groan beside me.

On the way home in the car, Maxime would explain.

‘You don’t say it’s like grass, you say herbaceous or lively,’ he would scold. ‘If you don’t like the wine, then go ahead. But to say the wine tastes like petrol or grass you’re telling the winemaker you think it has a defect!’

I had been also been known to observe that wines smelt like ham, hessian sack or green capsicum. If what Maxime said was true, the maker of the hessian sack wine no doubt went out the back and shot himself.

Now, holding a glass of Mrs. Deiss’s husband’s pride and joy, I felt a few butterflies. What could I say about it that would not cause Madame Deiss to slit her wrists or keel over in a faint? What did Maxime say I should call petrol wines again? I should have written cheat notes on my hand.

Luckily for me, Madame Deiss turned to my unfortunate uncle for feedback. He went red as he tried to think of something to say.

‘It’s nice ... and ... and ... warm,’ he said finally. He brightened, having thought of something to add. ‘Yes. It’s like sherry!’

There was a silence. Jean-Michel’s wife knitted her brows and cocked her head on one side, waiting for my uncle to elaborate. A wine tasting like sherry may be approaching the asymptote of divine for my parents’ generation, but in winespeak, it was more like saying ‘it’s crap’.

Maxime threw his hands up in the air and was about to harangue my uncle when I tugged him by the sleeve.

‘What do you think of this vintage compared to 2003?’ I asked him hurriedly.

Successfully distracted, Maxime now began a rather lengthy monologue about recent vintages in southern Alsace.

With a bit more sleeve-tugging on my part, we managed to negotiate the rest of the wine tasting. I was quite exhausted by the time we left, the car boot loaded up with crémant and sherry-wine.

After the wine tasting, we headed off to an architecture exhibition at the open air Alsatian museum, the Ecomusée. My uncle is an architect himself, so at the architecture exhibition, he would enjoy being the knowledgeable one while Maxime would be the novice. Until we came to the house made of bottles, that is.
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The Frog's Predictions For the World Cup 2014

My French husband Maxime has an uncanny ability to predict games and final scores in World Cups. He predicted the Australia-Netherlands 2-3 result, for instance. Deciding he must have magical powers, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind predicting an Oz victory in their next match:

‘OK … 2-1,’ he said. But he looked dubious.

Maxime’s powers desert him where France is concerned, however.

‘Will France win the world cup, do you think?’ I asked him.

‘They might,’ he said. ‘Or they might not.’ Helpful. At least he won’t be wrong! ‘Deschamps is a good coach. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks, he just wants to be the best.’

‘And what about Ribery not playing?’

‘We don’t need prima donnas like that,’ Maxime sniffed. ‘Even without him, we’ll beat the Swiss 4-0.’

I must confess that during some of the match at least he was correct.  France did lead 4-0. Then the Swiss ruined everything by scoring.

Here they come, to ruin French fun!

Maxime looked downcast at this and released a few French expletives such as ‘prostitute!’ and ‘your grandmother in shorts!’, then said, ‘Well, all the Swiss players are from the Balkans anyway.’

Ah yes. I said. ‘And all the French are from France, are they? What about him?’ I pointed at a rather dark-skinned Frenchman.

‘There’s still the French West Indies.’

‘What about him?’ I pointed to another.

‘Oh, a typical Parisian,’ said Maxime cooly.

And a French player with a Polish name entered the fray. I arched my eyebrow at Maxime.

‘A typical Alsatian,’ he replied without missing a beat (there are many people descended from Polish miners in Alsace). Maxime has a tendency to twist and bend logic until it fits what’s best for France. Then he thought for a bit. ‘I think it’s good the Swiss got a goal.’

‘Hey?’

‘It gives our defence some practice. Something to learn from.’ (See what I mean about twisty logic? If he twists it too much more it may snap on him. Would he manage to make a loss for France seem like a win? Actually, he probably would.)

Then there was the controversial last French goal which was not counted. According to Maxime of course, the ref was wrong to blow the whistle in the middle of a passage of play. I know as much about soccer as a dried pea, so I have no idea if he was right, but the commentator seemed to think the ref was right.

‘The commentator is English,’ said Maxime.

Of course, the detested Anglais. How Maxime grinned when he heard they were out of the World Cup!

'Yes, Mummy,' our daughter Chloé joined in. 'The commentator is English. He says the French names wrong. Just like you, Mummy!'

Cheers.

‘Well, France won anyway,’ I said, to get the subject off my French pronunciation. Or lack thereof.

‘Yes! I have to write to André!’ said Maxime.

André is Swiss, and had unwisely commented on LinkedIn that we could all relax in the knowledge that the Swiss would win. Maxime now wrote back that at least the Swiss are world champions in train driving.

‘Train driving?’ I asked.

‘Yes. When Switzerland hosted the World Cup, in the papers, the Swiss said they were ‘Weltmeister im Zugfahren.’

‘I guess you can’t argue with that.’

‘No. Especially given all the strikes of the French rail!’

And probably that’s the safest prediction of all: Swiss trains will arrive on time and French trains will not arrive at all. Oh, and the French will celebrate when the Poms take a pounding.

The MasterChef and the Frog: How Not to Have a French Dinner Party

As I said in my last post, my French husband Maxime often looks over my shoulder when I’m cooking. This, as you can imagine, is bloody annoying – I feel like I’m being judged on MasterChef, Food Network Star or MKR - but what is worse, he’s full of ‘helpful’ comments: ‘The carrot should be cut this way.' 'That’s too thick.' 'Why did you use that cheap wine for the marinade? You must use quality products!’ and so on (and on and on). Being a frog, he just can’t help sticking his nose in where food’s concerned. And then I threaten to apply a cheesegrater to it.

Early in our relationship, when we lived in France, I thought I had had found a solution: Maxime could cook instead!

So one evening when I’d had a gutful of little over the shoulder comments, I said, ‘Right! It’s your bloody turn to cook!’ and stormed from the kitchen.

I even began to feel wistful about my ex. We’d had many arguments, but never over how to cut up a carrot.

But the thing is, as painful as it was to cook for Maxime, I soon deeply regretted suggesting he cook for me. Maxime is such a perfectionist. He spent hours in the kitchen enlarging my vocabulary with French swear words as he fretted over not being able to find the correct spatula. He would cut himself and burn himself, set his nosehairs on fire and hop around the kitchen screaming. It looked more like a Masai tribal dance than cooking. We didn’t eat before ten, and this was only pasta, for crying out loud. But Maxime emerged from the flames all bright eyed and enthusiastic from the experience.

‘I know! Let’s cook together!’ He said. ‘We can cook together every night.’

I looked at him in disbelief. ‘Are you completely insane? I’d knife you after five minutes!’

Most of our discussions about domestic issues and social mores tended to end that way. We weren’t angry so much as speechless with amazement. When speech returned, it took the form of ‘are you mad? What planet are you from?’ Or ‘what the hell are you on about?’ And Maxime’s personal favourite, ‘are you deranged?’ He called me mad more often, because I’m more polite. Or more mad.

‘But why not cook together?’ Maxime persisted, a bit hurt.

I thought about how to explain. ‘Well, let’s take a pumpkin. Would you, or would you not, insist on cutting a pumpkin up into perfectly equally sized cubes?’

‘Of course.’

‘No, not of course!’ (This is another frequent conversional exchange we have).  ‘I wouldn’t. I don’t want to lose time over a bloody pumpkin!’

‘Ah,’ Maxime said, imagining with distress some imperfect pumpkin polygons. ‘I see what you mean.’

But what really made me want to end my life was the thought of cooking for Maximes’s parents, my French in-laws. I had a sinking feeling this was expected of me, and I was pretty sure of not coming up to scratch. Not being French and marrying an only son was a sin I didn’t expect to be forgiven in a hurry.

On the night of my first dinner party with the in-laws, my game-plan was to serve three times the number of dishes so that if two didn’t work, I still had a backup. My first salvo was a tarte flambée, a wafer thin Alsatian pizza with sour cream, bacon and onions.

‘It’s nice,’ Maxime said, ‘but it doesn’t taste like tarte flambée.’

Hmmm. Nice, but different to the traditional version. OK, I was on par. I could live with that. I went on to serve tandoori lamb and coconut rice. They won’t know enough about Asian food to know if I mess it up, I thought.

Wrong.

I overheard Maxime’s mother complaining to his Dad that I’d overcooked the rice, thinking I didn’t understand the French.

‘Ça me derange,’ my mother-in-law said.

It was bad enough when I was deranged, but I had a feeling a deranged mother-in-law was much worse.

To top it off, on my way back to the kitchen, Maxime whispered that I put too much food on people’s plates.

‘My mother was offended,’ he said.

‘She doesn’t have to finish it! What’s the problem?’

‘It’s an insult to the host if you don’t finish your plate,’ Maxime explained.

‘What?’

‘In giving people too much food, you force them to be rude and leave some,’ he said. ‘You should give a small amount to start with and re-serve.’

 But I wanted to put a lot on the plate to make sure everyone had enough. ‘Some people feel shy about asking for more,’ I countered. (Even after Maximes’s explanations, I couldn’t really change. My brain seemed to be hardwired. It just seemed too stingy to put only a little on a plate. In the end, Maxime developed a workaround, which was to warn guests beforehand that they would be getting an ‘Australian portion’).

'Australian portion' of tandoori lamb anyone?

And then there was the presentation.

‘There’s not enough white space on the plates,’ said Maxime. ‘It’s not elegant. It doesn’t look appetising.’

My presentation was not à la Française, it was à la rubbish heap. This was beginning to feel more like a maths exam than a dinner.

The other problem was that in striving to impress, I tended to trip over my own creativity. Maxime urged me to keep it simple, to put the product first, letting it sing the melody instead of drowning it out with a chorus of tandoori spices.

‘It’s a matter of balance,’ he said, yogi-like: ‘spicy/bland, crunchy/mushy, carbs/protein, acid/sugar.’

Right. Then you put a tiny smudge on the plate and sculpt it into a replica of the Pietà. Easy.

At least the cheese course was problem free. I’d made Maxime buy the cheese, because he’d know the ‘right’ shop to buy it from, and let them warm to room temperature before serving to ensure appropriate smelliness. The dessert course went down well too – I had wisely chosen a summer champagne and fruit soup, something not even I could mess up. And the alcohol went down a treat by this time, let me tell you.

After about a year of French dinner party purgatory, I hit upon a marvellous idea to save me from dressing plates and stressing over serving sizes: I began to serve dinners in communal platters, so people could serve themselves as much or as little as they chose. This means that the food isn’t kept warm in the meantime, and I’ve been waiting for some frog to point this out, but no one has. Woo-hoo!

But I still always make too much food. Which leaves me with the issue of leftovers. The bit of Scottish heritage I have from my mother's side is not enough generations distant (and the French heritage several centuries too distant) to allow me to throw out leftovers. But I live in fear and trepidation of serving them to a Frenchman, despite the Auld Alliance. The result is that I have to keep them in the fridge until they are sufficiently inedible for my conscience to allow me to throw them out. The fridge takes on an appearance sadder than Culloden. Hmm. I’ll have to figure out a way to disguise leftovers in a pie or something.

Then I’ll let Maxine cut French sized pieces while I recover from the stress with an Australian sized wine.
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When Should You Lie To Your Husband?

Is it ever appropriate to lie to your partner? 

Yes: when he’s a French cleaning maniac.

For instance, when I’m cooking, my French husband Maxime will often appear at my shoulder, and ask me a loaded question such as: 'did you wash that pot? It doesn't look very clean!' or ‘where did you buy that meat?’ or ‘is it meant to have that uncooked texture?'

Lie, lie, always lie (and then banish your husband from the kitchen). White lies are your friends. This is my maxim for Maxime, and it helps me to refrain from strangling him.

I learnt the inestimable value of the white lie the (very) hard way, however. I went through years of domestic discord with Maxime in France: there are all sorts of aspects to cleaning I had been blissfully unaware of until I met him - and they are all aspects to which he attaches critical importance. For instance, Maxime is very particular about the washing, sorting clothes into five separate piles to be washed at different temperatures and speeds. I had never heard of anyone doing that before, and in a moment of madness, I amalgamated two of Maxime’s piles to wash. Worse, when he asked if that’s what I had done, I was honest and confessed. Oh, the histrionics that followed! Maxime squawked with outrage and disbelief and flapped his arms as if he was doing a seagull impression. Then he lectured me extensively about washing machines (a topic in which I have only minimal interest), every now and again bursting out with exclamations like ‘I can’t believe you did that!’ and finally finished with a series of dramatic sighs that would’ve done a Bell Shakespeare actor proud.

Although I have to say I was not altogether unhappy with the final outcome: I was promptly sacked as clothes washer.

Nevertheless, it would have saved a great deal of heartache (and time) if I’d just said ‘of course I washed your five piles of clothes separately, Maxime.’ But as I've said, it took me a while to learn my lesson, and my domestic misery after Washing-machine-gate continued:

I thought I would be safe doing the dishes. I mean, we have a dishwasher and I don’t have to wash dishes myself! But no. When a piece broke off our salad bowl, I glued it back on and continued to use the bowl as normal – and wash it as normal. One day, Maxime saw me unloading the dishwasher. The salad bowl was on the bench nearby, looking suspiciously like it had been recently unloaded.

 'Did you put the salad bowl in the dishwasher?' Maxime shrieked.

‘Yes,' I said (stupidly).

'No wonder it broke.'

'But that’s not how it broke!'

'Yes it was. It broke due to accumulated stress,' said Maxime.

I know how it feels, I thought.

Then Maxime gave me a series of complicated instructions about dishwashers which I would henceforth forget.

But the question I really wish I’d lied about was when Maxime said, ‘Do you know how to iron?’

A very contentious object

‘Yes,’ I said, and plunged into a reverie about ironing handkerchiefs while watching the cricket back home in Australia.

'I don’t know how to iron,’ said Maxime. ‘Could you iron this shirt for me please?’

‘Oh, OK.’

A little while later, I brought the ironed shirt in to him.

‘Oh,’ he said (instead of thank you), and he gave the shirt a puzzled frown. ‘So … for you, that’s ironed?’

I made it clear from now on he could learn to iron himself or employ an ironing lady, or I would iron his face. After all, we were both working full time, and I did the cooking, which thanks to a certain frog was far more work than it needed to be (I'll deal with that issue in another post).

The cleaning crises got to the point where a visiting friend said he thought that if we didn’t hire a cleaning lady, we’d break up. I thought it would be a bit foolish to break up over a sponge, and so I began to think about it. Especially since Maxime was saying with increasing frequency that 'the house looks like nothing'.  Maxime often talks about stuff being invisible. I know by now that if something’s invisible, it’s bad. I did clean the house of course, but as you can imagine, my efforts at cleaning were not up to scratch - I used the wrong product with the wrong sponge on the wrong surface (my crimes were legion). But when Maxime cleaned anything himself, it would take the whole day, with him emitting more of those angry squawks or long-suffering sighs. I couldn’t bear it.

Eventually we trialled a cleaning lady and I thought we were saved. Wrong. After the cleaning lady had finished, Maxime was even fuller of complaints than when I cleaned the house (I could be seen leaping for joy in the background. I wasn't the worst cleaner in the world after all!).

'I could clean better myself,' Maxime concluded after a tour of the house.

'Yes but you don’t, that’s the point.' I said.

'It seems to me that the cleaning lady doesn’t have a sense of vocation - she’s not dedicated.'

'Er, Maxime, how many people do you think say they want to be a cleaner when they grow up? I hate to break it to you, but we are not going to find someone with a PhD in cleaning.'

Thus the cleaning lady solution fell through. But Maxime and I are still together. How did we manage it? Well, for one, Maxime, due to the sheer exhaustion of having to maintain his level of cleaning rage has sort of burnt out. He’s lowered his standards and allows me to vacuum. As for me, I learnt the value of the white lie of course. Now if Maxime asks if I know how to wash cars, for instance, I say no. (It’s remarkable, the number of things I suddenly don’t know how to clean.) I don’t know how to sew on buttons (actually that’s true) or darn socks and, if I hadn’t been sacked as clothes washer, I would tell Maxime that I always always sort the washing into five piles. The result is that Maxime and I now live in semi-messy domestic harmony.

Except for the day I got a particular email from Mum. ‘Maxime’s parents say they do his ironing for him,’ she wrote. ‘They are wondering why you don’t do it?’

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Hollande Causes an Upset

It appears Président Hollande has grand plans for merging regions, such as Alsace with Lorraine (and Champagne-Ardennes too perhaps).

'Alsace has nothing in common with Lorraine!' My French husband Maxime cried when he heard. 'Hollande is trying to destroy our culture!'

This is all salt in a longstanding wound for Maxime: the rest of France seems not to understand Alsace very well, from what he says, and nothing is apt to drive him out of his tree so much as when French politicians lump Alsace together with Lorraine. 

'It's because the politicians don't know their history. They think the Germans occupied Alsace-Lorraine!' Maxime will shout (referring to the German occupation of 1870-1914). 'It was Alsace-Moselle that was occupied, not Lorraine!'

The first time Maxime shouted this, I rather cluelessly said, 'Isn’t Moselle in Germany?'

(And he still married me despite this!)

'Moselle is a département of Lorraine. But the rest of the Lorraine was not occupied,’ he explained.

To be honest, (which I luckily wasn’t), as an Australian, I was still coming to terms with the fact that Lorraine was a place and not just a quiche.You would think that the Moselle was a purely French river from the way Maxime spoke of it. I subsequently rushed to Wikipedia just to check that The Moselle River flows into Germany too. It does, of course, and many fine Rieslings are made there, but for the sake of domestic harmony we try not to mention this.

And what is worse about this whole merging of regions is that Maxime suspects Hollande of wanting to copy the Germans. Like many Alsatians, Maxime is rather sensitive about the German thing: the history of the Alsace is perhaps best summed up in the joke by the Alsatian cartoonist Tomi Ungerer:

Q. Why is Alsace like a toilet?

          

A. It’s always occupied.

The history of the region is often sad. Alsace was decimated during the thirty years war, and in 1870, it was the Prussians’ turn to invade. They didn’t quite see themselves as invading though. On entering Alsace, they assumed they would be welcomed as liberators by their 'German' brothers. The Alsatians unfortunately didn’t share this point of view:  the people of Alsace may not have been French for long (since Louis XIV or Napoleon’s time depending on the town), but they weren’t German either. They were Alsatian, having previously been largely independent as part of the loosely bound hotch potch that was the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans kept at it and forbade the speaking of French, and forced the Alsatians to fight as Germans in the wars. These soldiers were called the ‘malgré nous’, fighting the Allies ‘despite ourselves’, since it was made clear to them that their family back home would suffer if they did not comply.

So you can imagine how incensed Maxime gets when the French, even worse than lumping Alsace in with Lorraine, lump them in with Germany! 

The French misunderstanding of Alsace was illustrated to me by a Vietnamese lady we met when we were living in France, who told us how she’d come to Paris as a refugee. Trouble was, she didn’t warm to Paris. Being from the country, she wanted to seek out a more pastoral corner of France, and putting her finger randomly on a map of France, she hit Colmar, capital of Southern Alsace.

'Oh la la!'  the Parisians had cried, 'you can’t go there! They don’t speak French!'

'That’s OK,' she replied, 'neither do I!'

                                                                              

A couple of weeks later, she got off the train to find she had debunked a Parisian myth - the Alsatians all addressed her in French. Oops. 

Perhaps it's best not to ask Hollande what language he thinks they speak in Alsace while Maxime is in earshot - just in case!

What Does a Frenchman Love More Than Wine and Cheese?

So, what does a Frenchman love more than wine and cheese?

French. Yep, a Frenchman literally loves to hear himself speak. Which is all very well - the problems set in when he hears someone else speak French.

On Saturday night, I watched a Spicks and Specks rerun with our daughter Chloé, who is 9 years old and a native French speaker. We'd have a nice, peaceful evening in front of the telly, I thought. Wrongly.

‘Who wrote the music for the opera “Carmen”?’ asked quiz host Adam Hills.

‘Bizet,’ someone probably famous replied.

‘Georges Bizet,’ confirmed Adam Hills.

Chloé was incensed: 'They got it wrong!'

'No they didn’t,' I said

'Yes they did, Mummy! Adam Hills said it wrong! That’s not the answer. He didn’t say it properly.’

Chloé was gesticulating at the TV in a small person version of Gallic outrage. ‘It’s Georges Bizet!’ she cried, saying Georges with a big and throaty ‘r’.

'Oh for goodness' sake, you're as bad as your bloody dad!' I laughed. 

I don't usually refer to my French husband Maxime as 'bloody', but I did have some reason to feel a bit miffed with him. Earlier that day, I'd gotten an email from the conductor of a choir I'm in, asking if I could make a recording of the lyrics of some French songs we’d be singing, so that the other choir members could hear the correct pronunciation. Hmm, I thought. I do speak French, but was it good enough? I sought out Maxime.

‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said to him. ‘I mean, my pronunciation isn’t the best.’

(My 'r's are not so much rolled as stationary.)

‘Oh yes, your pronunciation is terrible!’ said Maxime. ‘I don’t understand why it’s so bad.’

Ouch. Why do Frenchmen have to be so bloody honest? (I’ll tackle this issue in my next post.) Well, at least things were clear: Maxime would do the recording of the French for the choir instead of me. I rang the conductor and told her.

‘But you don’t need to bother your husband. I’m sure you’ll do it fine,’ said the conductor.

‘Well, it's just that Maxime thinks I might not do it up to his standards. It’s better if he does it. Otherwise, when he sees the concert – ’

‘Ah! He’ll say it wasn’t up to scratch and it’ll be your fault!’

‘Exactly!’

He would have seen me as the perpetrator of an en masse, public mauling of his beloved language.

At least I can pronounce half of this book ...

So the lyrics issue was sorted. And even if Maxime was harsh, at least Chloé hasn't criticised my French yet - she seems to save that for other people (and TV personalities). In fact it’s really not advisable to try out your rusty French on our French kids. When visitors do try, the kids usually burst out laughing, much to the surprise and bruised pride of the visitor.

‘Well, I didn’t think I was that bad,’ said a rather miffed Aunt on one such occasion.

On another day, a friend foolishly said something about an ‘arbre vert’, beaming with pride at having fished out the words for ‘green tree’ from a dusty corner of his memory.

‘No, no!’ said Chloé. ‘Not Abwe vair. Arrrrbrrrre vairrrrrrr.’ The friend was then made to practice saying ‘arbre vert’ until Chloé finally ran out of patience. ‘You’re still not saying it right. You must say the French “r”. Not the English one. The “r” in English is pronounced “w”,' Chloé informed our friend, who was beginning to look very confused. 

(Our flimsy Australian 'r's sound like 'w's to Chloé. It took me an age to get Chloe to say three instead of fwee. 'Come on, Chloé, you can say '“r”,' I'd said. 'I'm the one who can't say “r”!' Now Chloé says thrrrrrrrrrrrrrree.)

The French believe in speaking languages with absolute correctness. Which, incidentally, is why they don’t like speaking other languages. (See 'Les Français sont vraiment nul en anglais' The French are Really Bad at English). They want to be able to do it well, or not at all. This also means that Maxime has been quite stressed over the kids’ French, and whether it will deteriorate now we’re in Australia. ‘I want the kids to speak correct French. I don’t want them to be laughed at,’ he says. Hmm, so it’s normal for the French to laugh at people for messing up French then? I only got laughed at the once when we lived in France, and I had thought that the bloke who had laughed at me was rude (and annoying). Maybe he was normal? I’d been applying for French citizenship, and a flunky behind a desk called me in to see him. As we went through my application, my accent and choice of words amused the guy no end. He would repeat them to himself and giggle. He even called his secretary in for a listen, for God’s sake. I should do shows, I thought.

When I actually got granted French citizenship, I felt like such a fraud. And I sounded it too. Not good when you’re stopped by the police for cutting a corner while driving:

'Your documents, please,' the police asked me, in French.

I started extracting cards from my bag: 'Oops, not that one, oops, not that ...'

The gendarmes regarded me with curiosity as cards of various hues and nationalities flicked before their eyes.

'Voilà,' I said finally and handed over my ID.

'Vous-êtes Australienne, Madame?'

'Oui. Oh wait - et Française.'

'Française?!' (With that accent? I could see them thinking.)

Oh no, they’re going to revoke my citizenship because I speak crap French! I thought. But they didn’t revoke it. They even let me go with just a warning. Although, now I come to think of it … they laughed.
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