Can a Frenchman Love Footy?

Honestly, sometimes I think we're still in France. My French husband Maxime tends to organise our social outings and they involve one (or preferably both) of the following elements:

1. Food

2. French people

But last night's food-and-French-people outing at least had an additional element to interest me - Aussie Rules!

It was the meet-and-greet with the French Aussie Rules team, over from France to contest the International Cup in Melbourne. Over 300 French expats were expected to come along, and maybe the police got wind of it, because the venue was flanked with booze buses. Maxime was even breath-tested on the way in (maybe they also caught wind of his form when it comes to wine). But the police were out of luck - Maxime hadn't had a drop (in fact, the police were keeping him from having some drops). Billy Brownless may have stubbies rolling around in his car (as he announced on Triple M's Rush Hour), but our car is, sadly, a dry area.

As we entered the venue, the French football team was busy giving a rendition of the Marseillaise. So in true footy spirit, I sang 'We Are the Boys From Old Fitzroy' (OK, it was really just to annoy Maxime by messing up his anthem). Then the players introduced themselves to the assembled French expat masses. (We learned that the players included one with the nickname of Asterix, which means the opposition will need to look out for rovers on supplements.) As I listened to the player introductions, I looked about me and noted from the banners that the French team had chosen the name of 'the Coqs' (roosters). A little foolhardy for a competition in Australia, I thought. At any rate, I'm not sure I'll be shouting 'up the Coqs!' when I see them play ...

Singing the Marseillaise

French footy was actually born in Maxime's home region of Alsace. Maxime didn't start it, of course. But he did come across the Alsatian footy team when we lived in France. He had been surfing the net to find information on the microscopic size of Aussie footballers' ... shorts. (Such are the things Maxime looks up on the net). Instead of short footy shorts, he found a footy team - the 'Strasbourg Kangourous', just up the road from us in Alsace, and started by one Marc Jund. Back in the 80s, a couple of games of Aussie Rules were televised in France, and Marc had seen them. Probably it was a slip-up - the network probably meant to show some weird European winter sport involving someone going down a slide in sub zero temperatures dressed in Lycra. Be that as it may, Marc had been hooked and decided to start his own Aussie Rules club. He sought help from the AFL, and received a couple of footies and the rules in English. Which no one spoke. So much for that then, you might think.

Not at all! The dogged Strasbourgeois kept up their club. They did their best trying to nut out the game, watching all the footy replays they could get their hands on. More than ten years later when Maxime and I visited the Strasbourg team, they still hadn't worked out how to bounce the ball. (And so I showed them. 'Ah!' they said, fascinated as though I'd just performed an arcane act.)

And so it was that footy gradually caught on in France despite considerable odds and the inability to drop punt. The reason it does survive in France and other countries in Europe is down to European footy players who are not so much footy mad as footy insane. Like a Czech tigers fan I ran into in Europe whose entire house is festooned in black and gold. 

Last night, I met a case in point: as the French footy meet-and-greet evening wound down, and les Coqs became les Coqs au vin, I was introduced to a tall Toulousien at the bar named Gregoire Patacq. I asked whether his club, the Toulouse Hawks, had had any support from the AFL (some rules in English, perhaps). No, seemed to be the answer.

'When Demetriou said the AFL wasn't interested in expanding the game, I was devastated,' said Gregoire. 'I'd had a hard week at work and then that. It was really tough.'

'Did he really say that?' I said. 'I seem to remember someone telling me the AFL were practically throwing money at the middle east in order to get them to take it up.'

Then I added a few sympathetic things about things not being fair even in Australia - about how poor old Tassie doesn't ever get an AFL team, for instance (despite actually wanting one).

'Well,' said Gregoire defiantly, 'we still have footy. And we're not giving it up!' 

And I understood that if any football authority ever tried prevent them from playing it, the French would be up on the barricades. The French are always so passionate about things. But who would have thought one of those 'things' would be footy? 

Fantastic.

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.

France versus Australia: Who Will Win the Argument?

I was a bit disappointed with the trip away on the weekend. Me and the Frog (my French husband Maxime) and our kids had travelled far, far away from the bright lights of Melbourne, and more importantly, far from the bright lights of its restaurants. I expected that being out country, we’d have some spectacularly dreadful meals and Maxime would say spectacular things about them, seasoning his sentences with French insults concerning people’s grandmothers in shorts - thereby giving me fantastic material for this blog post. But the food was good, damn it! (We were too close to Daylesford, apparently.)

And so, sadly, there was no parmigiana Parmageddon.  But then on Sunday, we stopped at a winery on the way back home and, oh joy! The winery delivered!

The Wintry Way Home, Warmed by a Winery

 It wasn’t the food or the wine – they were fine. Nevertheless …

Maxime and I had made our workmanlike way through the list of wines on offer. And of course, the ciders, due to the Frog’s rather dubious predilection for them). But at first I was worried: during the tasting, Maxime was calm; polite; complimentary. Don’t tell me everything’s OK?! I thought.

Then afterwards, in the car, it all came out. Not the wine - the French rage.

‘I couldn’t stand that guy!’ fumed Maxime (referring to the man serving us in the wine tasting). ‘He only served borderline acceptable amounts in the glass. And he knew nothing, nothing!’ (The hapless winery bloke had told us, ‘I only pour the wine, I don’t know about it.’ Which I think was a joke. But if you’re French, wine is not the stuff of jokes). ‘AND,’ Maxime went on, ‘after the sweet cider, he didn’t give me a new glass for the dry whites!’

‘Serve you right for drinking lolly water!’ I laughed.

‘So I used the Pinot Grigio to wash my glass out.’ (Which Maxime thinks is as good a use as any for Aussie Pinot Grigios. He prefers the French-spelled ones.)

But here’s the interesting thing - Maxime didn’t actually say anything to the winery bloke’s face.

This is something of a first for Maxime. He has – or at least used to have - the Gallic way of venting when something is bothering him. You just yell. And getting yelled at doesn't bother you, because you know not to take it to heart. In short, the French believe in letting off steam instead of stewing, and there’s something to be said for that. Except if you're not used to French culture and you're on the receiving end. For instance, instead of suggesting that perhaps it might not have been such a good idea to leave the foil on the bottle neck, Maxime would cry ‘what the hell are you doing!? You’re completely deranged!’ Then, having screeched at me for ten minutes, he would put his arm around me and suggest trying the wine. I would look at him in amazement. ‘What?’ he’d say in surprise. ‘Are you upset?’ I’d be almost lost for words.

‘Of course I’m upset! You just said I was deranged!’

‘Oh is that all? Of course I didn’t mean that, I was just angry. Why do you take everything so personally?’

‘You called me deranged! How much more bloody personal can you get?!’

I would stick to my guns and insist that Maxime may not have meant to hurt my feelings but he nonetheless had, and demand an apology. To give the Frenchman his due, he always gave me one. But even when I was furious, I was curious. The French way of seeing things was so different. (Curiosity kills the K, I thought.)

The Anglo-Saxon – French differences in argument style were a problem for Maxime at work too, when we lived in France. Anglo-Saxon colleagues sometimes felt he was too harsh.

‘What exactly did you say?’ I asked Maxime on one such occasion. He told me. ‘OK … you know, there are other, gentler ways of telling people they could do better,’ I suggested. ‘You shouldn’t really say to an Anglo-Saxon things like, “this document is a piece of shit and working with you is a complete nightmare.”’

But now that we’re in Australia, it seems the Frog’s French edges have become softened with Anglo-Saxon restraint. Well, that’s all to the good. I won’t get called deranged anymore! Until I run into another Frenchman perhaps.
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