If You Drink Wine and Drive, You're a Bloody Frenchman?

I never saw a booze-bus in Europe, and now that we're in Australia, we see them every other weekend. My French husband Maxime shakes his head in wonder at them. He got tested twice the other day on one of his forty minute Odysseys in search of decent bread. But it doesn't stop him enjoying wine when we go out if he wants to. He knows his limits. Although ... Maxime's limits seem to be quite large.

In more than twenty years, Maxime's only been stopped and breathtested twice in France. On the first occasion, we were in the pretty village of Villefranche de Conflent. At dinner, Maxime ordered a bottle of wine as usual, seeming to overlook the fact that I was pregnant and wouldn’t be drinking half of it. I nursed a token glass while he made his workmanlike way through the rest. 

'Orrrgh, your breath reeks of alcohol!' I complained when he tried to kiss me after dinner. 

My sense of smell got hypersensitive when I was pregnant (it’s the closest I've ever come to having super powers). I coughed and waved away the last of Maxime's alcohol fumes and then we got in the car and started the half hour drive back to our hotel.

Just a few hundred metres from the restaurant, however, we spotted some flashing blue lights.

'Oh. I don’t have my driving documents with me,' remarked Maxime.

 'Oh Maxime,' I sighed as the gendarme signalled to us to pull over.

'You’ve just come from the restaurant?' asked the gendarme. 'What did you have, a beer or two?' 

'Err, something like that,' said Maxime, trying to sound offhand. I strove to make the pregnant nature of my form more obvious in a bid for sympathy.

'Please breathe in here,' he said. Maxime did so. 'Hmm,' mused the gendarme.

Oh God, I thought. I’m pregnant, it’s late at night, and now I’m going to have to walk home from Villefranche de Conflent.

‘It’s zero,' said the gendarme. ‘OK, you can go.'

I don’t know how that happened. If the gendarme’d used my nose instead of the breathalyser, Maxime’d probably just be getting out of jail now.

The second breathtest occurred in the Doubs, after Maxime had consumed half a bottle of wine, a beer and a drinking glass full of farmer’s homemade absinthe at a local farm. Again, Maxime was exonerated by the breathalyser. The conclusion we came to is that Maxime must carry a special French version of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene giving him super alcohol metabolising powers.

But despite the fact that drink driving laws cause Maxime no particular problem personally, he is still very upset about the ‘police terrorism’ in France as are many of Maxime's friends, especially a winemaker friend of ours called Seppi (short for Joseph). Seppi told us he'd written to the government to complain about the drink driving laws. 

'The state is systematically destroying French culture, strangling the French wine industry,' he explained. 'They stake out village wine fetes with gendarmes. And what happens as a result of the persecution of wine? The young people get drunk on alcopops and beer!' 

Just like those culturally retarded Anglo-Saxons across the Channel, he was implying. Maxime is in wholehearted agreement with Seppi. The wine lake, according to Maxime, is a problem not because there are too many producers in France making bad wine, but because Sarkozy cracked down on drink driving. Friends in the restaurant industry agree, upset because people don’t order a bottle of wine with lunch anymore.

But despite all this, now that we're in Australia, the Aussie police would be unlikely to catch Maxime over the limit irregardless of the battalions of booze buses, since not only is he the fastest metaboliser in the West, but, he’s been inspired by his new life in Australia to start a health kick: he's started to cut down on wine and chocolate. He splashes out on a Mount Mary or visits wineries and terrorises tasting room staff less often than he did. Mind you, there's a limit to everything: the Bruny Island cheese parcels keep on arriving on our doorstep with a a surprising frequency.

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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!