France versus Albion is always good sport. The latest instalment of the rivalry was settled conclusively with PSG’s recent victory over Arsenal. As for the wider comparisons, strewn with titanic clashes – the Hundred Years’ War, the Battle of Trafalgar, Liquorice Allsorts versus Carambar – I’m no expert but I did live in Paris for a couple of years and was intoxicated by it from the very first evening there, a January Saturday in foul weather with the normally placid Seine a broiling mess. But after moving back home I hadn’t returned until this year. Inevitably, the first thing you do upon rolling off the Dover to Calais ferry is start declaiming how much better the French do things than us. This, then, is a criminally unscientific list of the good points and bad points gleaned after seeing a beloved old friend again.
Let’s kick off with roads. Theirs are a complete delight: not a pothole in sight. Not to mention the huge service stations replete with stellar facilities that are light years ahead of our shanty town dumps that cling to the side of our motorways like barnacles on a rusting trawler. If anyone wants to understand why our record with capital projects is so awful, a quick trip to the Bridgwater services on the M5 suffices; if we can’t handle modernising that, then what chance HS2, the Heathrow third runway or Hammersmith Bridge? The pay as you go tolls the French pay for motorway use is the fairest form of taxation: you can’t begrudge it in the slightest and boy, does it deliver.
The next thing that strikes me is how much bigger France is. A cursory glance at a map tricks you into thinking the UK and France are the same size because they’re the same height but you ignore France’s sheer bulk, the hexagon to our isosceles triangle. Their land mass is 843,801 km2 to our 244,276. This combines with roughly the same population as ours to make a population density of 122 people per km2 to our 285. The last time we had that population density in the UK was in 1871. Consequently, the countryside just feels larger, the skies and fields bigger, the woods quieter, grander, your connection with the land more intimate somehow, with more air to breathe.
I cede to no one in my dislike of wind turbines scattered over Britain’s countryside but in France, you don’t really mind it. There are so many of them that they batter you into submission and manage to give the impression of being wholly plugged into the grid; I always feel that with half the turbines in the UK no one has bothered to link them up to anything yet. The tiny things also impress one. Traffic lights at roadworks count down the time until green is displayed, instantly taking the annoyance out of waiting. The supermarkets, even the smaller ones, have a brilliant range, with their boxed wine unbelievably good value and delicious too. The formality of everyday conversation, the use of vous, the old-world nature of every village seeming to take its civic events and infrastructure way more seriously than we do.
But then, of course, there are things on the minus column. The lavatorial situation is breathtakingly awful. You’ll all have had it; the stomach-churning gloom of going into a restaurant loo to find that medieval bare hole in the ground, a portal to Hades, corrugated foot stands on either side calling to mind a vastly unpleasant imminent medical procedure. This rustic barbarity doesn’t necessarily surprise in the depths of the south-west – la France profonde – but on the Normandy coast, with Blighty just over the horizon, it’s a blow.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the Sundays, public holidays and siesta hours when everywhere is closed, with random Mondays and Wednesdays thrown in for good measure by some shops and restaurants. I don’t find this charming but very annoying. The titles of books are written the wrong way on book spines, too. And then, the suits. Dear God, the suits. I spent my two years in Paris working with colleagues who seemed to have sewn themselves into their suits that morning, always made from material that was just slightly too blue. The tightness bestowed a corporeal immobility that gave them the unfortunate effect of walking as though they had a carrot up their bottom. The French, as we know, also strike at the drop of a hat. We may think ASLEF and the RMT are bad, but they are mere puny Roman centurions to the French unions’ Obelix. Equally, their nationwide love – even just their acceptance of – tripe makes me queasy just writing it. And I will never not dread the petrol pumps where you pre-pay on a screen; a cold sweat every time.
We’re strange neighbours, the French and us, but it’s an ever-entertaining relationship. Vive la France, vive le Royaume Uni, vive la différence!
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