What Do the French Hate About the French?

Last night, my French husband Maxime went out for a night on the town with fellow French engineers. They went, predictably, to a European beer bar. Maxime said he had chicken parmigiana.

‘To be safe,’ he said.

Safe? I wondered. How can a chicken parma be safe? It won’t blow up on your plate?

‘It was pub food,’ Maxime explained.

Meaning there was danger of the food being sub-frog standard, but, Maxime thought, no chef can stuff up a parma. Actually, I think they can. One day, Maxime will have a rude parma awakening in some godforsaken pub in the back of beyond (and I want to be there to take a pic when it happens).

It might happen sooner rather than later too: this weekend, we’re heading up Bendigo way and staying in some tiny town we’ve never heard of (which Maxime complains is in the ‘arsehole of nowhere’. So refined, my Frog.) We are going to try some ‘safe’ parma at its pub tomorrow night.

Anyway, back to the French engineers' boysy night out. Maxime was a bit doubtful about the first fellow frog he talked to, he said.

‘I thought Olivier was a bit of a wanker,’ Maxime said (he’s really got the Aussie lingo down now) ‘too French.’

‘French people are wankers?’

‘The Franco-French,’ Maxime precised – people who are ultra-French. ‘The ones who think they are owed everything,’ (oh no, not entitlement again. Thoroughly sick of that word at the moment), ‘who are afraid of everything and never go out of their comfort zone, and they have the pensée unique.’

Maxime often brings up this pensée unique thing when he bags his countrymen. He doesn’t mean they have a unique thought – rather the opposite. He means these deplorable Franco-Français think there is only one way to do things. And that’s the French way of course! I wonder what the Aussie version of Franco-French is? Ocker? Someone in thongs holding a beer can who believes in mateship and thinks the establishment can get stuffed? Wikipedia says Ocker means an ‘Australian who speaks and acts in an uncultured manner’ which I reckon is a little harsh.

Anyway, Olivier wasn’t a wanker as it turned out. He and Maxime soon bonded over bitching about England (both had lived there for a year). Olivier told Maxime how he’d moved from Normandy to St. Albans as a teenager, and went to the local bakery to get something to eat and find accommodation. I really can’t say why he thought the baker would give him a bed. Must be a Norman thing. Whatever, the thing was … there WAS no bakery. Olivier ended up without decent bread and in an attic being sublet by a Pakistani. Before moving into a share house with a muslim fundamentalist who insisted on reading the Koran to him every morning over brekkie.

Maxime had things a little better during his stint in London. He shared with an Italian who stayed in bed most of the day and who cooked fabulous pasta. He and Maxime even invented a dessert together, a regular Escoffier and Carème:

Maxime and Guiseppe’s Killer Dessert

1 container of yoghurt (large)

5 spoons of honey

1 bottle of rum (large)

1 aspirin (for later)

After Maxime and Olivier had reminisced about their time in Old England, they moved on to having a dig at those wankerish ‘Franco-French’: Olivier had had a short stint in Oz four years ago and then had had to return to Paris. In January. It wasn’t warm and it wasn’t fun. The Parisians got up his nose (the way they clamber up the nose of all provincial French) with their cold hoity toityness. So when Olivier got offered a permanent job in Australia, he booked the tickets the same day.

‘Oh you’re so lucky!’ Everyone said to him. ‘I’d love to live in Australia but I don’t speak English.’

But according to Olivier and Maxime, moving to Australia wasn’t luck, it was hard work (getting engineering degrees and learning English, for example), and if their French countrymen got off their ‘entitled’ bums, they could move to Australia too. Hmm, just think of all the new French bakeries we could have then! Even a few Normandy-style bakery-hotels perhaps.

It’s funny, though, hearing Maxime talk like that. Now that he’s moved here, Maxime talks about moving to Oz as the most sensible, natural step for him to have taken, and is not above looking down at those who have stayed put in Frogland. He has conveniently expunged from his memory the fact that I had to threaten, cajole, emotionally blackmail – use every trick in the book – to get him to even consider moving to Australia. We suffered through years and years of rows and cried buckets of tears (actually those were just my buckets) before he agreed. And now, if someone asks him if it was hard to move to Australia, he’ll just say ‘of course not.’

Arrrrrgh!!!!!!!!!!

OK, OK. I’ll chill. I mean, we’re here now. Even if it’s only thanks to a piece of cheese.
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