A French Conversation
Big storm last night, couldn’t sleep, got me thinking about a chat I had yesterday with a real live Frenchman.
I was out taking my daily constitutional, and he emerged from a waterlogged field, wearing regulation bleus de travail and wellies, said something unintelligibly guttural to me and we shook hands. He was clearly a perceptive fellow as I was something like two seconds into my introductory sentence when he realised I was English.
Now I’m enjoying the steep linguistic learning curve I’m on at the moment, and I really like trying out my French on French people, but bizarre as it sounds, we haven’t had much chance to do so recently because the weather’s been too rough to venture out, so we end up speaking nonsensical English to each other, and I find myself typing ‘All work and no play, makes Mark a dull boy’ over and over again, and then pursuing Squidge through the house with an axe. However, I digress…
The language thing. I’ve existed in a comfort zone of holiday French for a long time now, confident in my ability to ask for beer, wine, food and accommodation, and then to thank people for providing me with beer, wine, food and accommodation. It got to the stage where I was affording myself the luxury of experimenting with a broad Inspector Clusoe accent for that authentic flavour, an accent I was complimented on by a waiter in Carnac once, incidentally.
But now that we’ve decided to live in France, rather than just take holidays here, everything’s changed and the comfort zone has disappeared. The words for beer, wine, food and accommodation have necessarily been replaced by those for wheel wrench, rawl plug, planning permission and edible dormouse (glis glis). The accent experimentation has gone as I concentrate solely on blurting out all the new vocabulary and verbs, and attempting correct structures. Where previously I only needed to tense everything presently, I now have to talk about things that have happened, and things that are going to happen, if I’m to sound vaguely intelligible.
So anyway, this conversation…
We shook hands and started chatting in the lane. The lanes round my way are used almost exclusively by mangey dogs and aggressive geese, so as long as we each kept a wary eye out for the odd goose, we were in no danger, certainly not from motor cars. It was clear that the Frenchman was in no hurry to go anywhere, having either become bored with checking waterlogged fields, or having checked his last field of the day, and my time isn’t exactly at a premium at the moment, so we lingered….
My new friend, let’s call him Jean-Francois, asked where I was from in England, whether I liked France etc. I told him that we had just bought a house in the Ariege, and would be moving there in a few weeks time, and that part of our employment plan was to run a chambres d’hotes business. JF considered this foolish, bordering on contemptible, but conceded that perhaps with the additional winter season in the mountains it could be just about feasible.
He then asked whether I would apply for French citizenship in order to involve myself fully in the democratic process. I said probably not, hadn’t really thought about it, didn’t know whether Segolene Royale was ‘a good thing’, or whether Sarky would be ‘a bad thing’, but he didn’t hear me mention Sarky. The very mention of Royale sent him recoiling across the lane grimacing. ‘An actress’, ‘bad for ecology’ he asserted. This reference to ecology wasn’t as bafflingly random as it might appear. He’d asked me earlier what I did as a job in England, and I said ‘ecologique’, which is what, a few weeks ago, the YTS boy at Credit Agricole told me I had done as a job in England, once he’d recovered from the shock of the realisation that I was taking approximately a 100% pay cut to come and live and work in his country. I noticed JF’s interest perk up considerably when I added that I had been involved in giving grants to farmers….!
There was then a mildly awkward little lull, and a bit of foot shuffling, so given that we were discussing politicians I blurted out that I considered that Margaret Thatcher had been bad for people who worked in the power stations. I hadn’t meant people who work in power stations, I had probably meant miners though I can’t be sure, but the sentence appeared perfectly formed in my mind before I opened my mouth - an opportunity too good to waste. This seems to be where I’m at on the learning curve. If something comes to me, and my brain reckons it might be grammatically acceptable, I say it, regardless of context or relevance.
So we’d covered politics, accurately and comprehensively, and at this point I announced to him, I know not why and apropos of nothing, that I like buzzards. Again, it just drifted into my head so I said it. He understandably wondered if I’d used the correct word, and if I really meant buzzards, but after a bit of a mime from me (miming the movement of a buzzard in the middle of the countryside wasn’t something I’d ever done in England), he realised I meant what I’d said.
Astutely sensing that the English way of conversing was to lurch uncertainly from one unrelated topic to another, he then asked me if I’d ever been to Puy de Fou. I said no, he told me it was formidable, and we finally stuttered to a halt, shook hands and parted.
A thoroughly enjoyable quarter of an hour. As I walked home, a buzzard flew overhead, eee’ing to its mate perching in a tree in the next field, presumably asking if it had ever been to Puy de Fou. And then the rain returned….
A bientot