Just How Badly Do the French Cope With a Melbourne Winter?

In his spare time, when he’s not looking up restaurants on Urbanspoon, my French husband Maxime is doing something you don’t necessarily associate with Frenchmen. He’s looking up the weather on the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology).

Actually, Maxime used to look up Météo France too, when we lived in France, but that wasn’t half as much fun. It never caused him to throw up his hands in horror and exclaim that the ‘weather is absolute crap’. This is because he considers French weather to be perfectly acceptable. If it was minus 20 and blizzards, he’d say ‘I love snow. It reminds me of my childhood.’

Take, for instance, a particularly cold winter in Alsace. 2006, I think. In February-March, the region was covered in snow for six weeks straight. I was depressed because I was too wary of snow to go outside (I mean, it might be cold!), and I didn’t like having to dress up in so many layers I looked like the Michelin Man in order to do it.

‘What are you complaining about?’ Maxime said one morning. It’s sunny!’

And it was - for once. So to demonstrate to me how perfectly hospitable a metre of snow is, Maxime took a bottle of champagne, went outside and stuck it in the snow. Then he retrieved a couple of glasses and some cheese.

‘We can have a pique-nique,’ he announced.

I ventured outside and moved gingerly towards the champagne. I secured a large glass of it and then retreated inside to have my picnic in front of the fire.

And it wasn’t just me who thought it was cold. When holidaying in the south of France, people would say, ‘it's very cold in Alsace, isn't it?’ and shiver at the very thought of it. Maxime would scowl and say that people in the south of France thought they knew about Alsace based on their preconceived ideas, but really, they had ‘no clue’.

They did have a clue. Winter in Alsace was like living in a chest freezer.

Le Grand Ballon, Alsace

So you can image that one of the things that made it so great to move back home was that in Melbourne, the coldest daytime maximum temperature is 9 or 10 degrees C and not minus 36. Nevertheless, I wondered if Maxime’s neck would be able to make it through our first Melbourne winter. Without me strangling it.

Now that we’re in Melbourne, Maxime takes a rainy day as a sort of personal affront. He’ll protest at the injustice of having his day dampened and wait testily for the clouds to apologise. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to say ‘look, Maxime. It just rains in winter, OK? Get over it!’ And then there's Melbourne's famous changeable weather, or ‘brutal changes of temperature’ upon which Maxime blames all of his colds.

One day he actually said he thought winter was worse in Melbourne than in Alsace. My mouth opened. And then I shut it again. I mean, there are some statements so patently ridiculous you can argue with them.

Maxime’s behaviour put me in mind of a French student I knew back when I was studying at Melbourne Uni. I called him ‘The Sad Grover’, due to his endless complaining and to his resemblance to a certain blue Sesame Street character. He was an avid movie-goer, and I began to relish, in a perverted way, asking him each morning how he liked the film he’d been to the night before. His answer was always the same. ‘It was crrrrap!’ He seemed so perpetually miserable that eventually I took pity on him and invited him to a party. I offered him a cup of cask wine, not realising I may as well have offered him a beaker of horse urine.

‘No thanks,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to lose control.’

Hmm, shame, I thought. And just like Maxime, the temperature was never right for Sad Grover in Melbourne – the restaurants were too cold, he asserted. Why didn’t we take heating seriously? And the girls were also too frigid, Sad Grover thought. Maybe they just didn’t like depressed Muppets.

Our little French kids, at least, have no problem with the weather in Australia. Except that there’s no snow. 'I miss snow’ they would announce over and over last winter.

‘It’s because I was born in the snow,’ Chloé said. (It was snowing in France when she was born.)

'No you weren’t, you were born in a hospital,’ I countered. ‘And anyway, there is snow here. You just have to go to the mountains.'

The kids didn't believe me, and so we took them to Lake Mountain to demonstrate the existence of Australian snow.

Lake Mountain last year. Enough snow if your snowballs aren't too big.

It was - um - not a success. We paid a fortune to enjoy a patch of snow about the size of someone's front lawn, with 500 odd people gamely trying to go sledding on it. 

'It's cold and wet,' remarked Elise.

Well, yes. It's snow.

Maxime and Little Miss I-was-born-in-the-snow were the only ones at ease. Elise was yammering at me about going home, and so we left, after a whole 20 minutes: I had managed to coax Maxime off the mountain with the lure of  lunch in a Yarra Valley winery. Works every time.

And as long as we don't discuss the weather during lunch, everyone's happy.