Category: France

I propose that it might help to understand what makes a country tick by watching, without even necessarily fully understanding, the primetime news bulletin at around 8 or 9pm. The best known news bulletin in France is at 8pm, on the most popular terrestrial TV channel TF1. On of the presenters – and certainly the most famous – is Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, also known affectionately as “PPDA”. He’s the author of about 20 books, known as something of a womaniser, is a marathon runner and does a lot of work for charity. A lot of this work is centered around teenage psychological care — his daughter Solenn died as a result of anorexia at the age of 19, and he won a lot of public sympathy (though he angered some) when he went on air to present the news the very next day. He’s a very well known figure in France, and his silicone puppet presents a daily news parody on a competing channel (Canal+) too!

In France the local news is often of regional interest : agrictulture issues, strikes in ports or on the Parisian public transport network, local festivals and events. France has roughly the same population as England but three times the geographical area, so the news often covers regions quite far apart (by European standards). It always displays maps of the region involved, the main town in that region, and the town being talked about. People outside Paris want to hear about their region, and the diversity in style of each region means there are many events around France that are grouped around the differing agriculture, history or politics of a given place. For example Marseille is known for its football team and ferry port principally serving Corsica – a strike just ended there; the Beaujolais region known for the new wine (Beaujolais nouveau) festival; the suburbs of Paris notorious for their problems with unemployment and the related social tensions.

What I find particularly striking about the news content however is that there are often interviews with people who are invited to the studio to talk about not only the news (politicians, commentators, scientists and the like) but cultural events. Authors, musicians, actors and dancers for example will often be seen appearing on the evening news. Bruce Willis was recently interviewed by PPDA while promoting his new film. Authors are given a good amount of airtime, as are musicians. Concerts, exhibitions and book launches of a reasonably small scale are promoted and their cultural value highlighted.

Aside from local content it is important to note that a minimum of 30-40% of all news bulletins are dedicated to international issues, currently Iraq, Pakistan, and the socio-political situation in the US get a lot of coverage. Often there are special reports which try to understand current affairs from a local point of view, and given the high proportion of French muslims of Arabic descent, the country is well placed to understand – perhaps better than many others in Europe – just how important it is to watch radical fundamentalists closely whilst still trying to present their point of view accurately.

You can probably learn a lot from watching a news bulletin from another country. Compare Fox News to Sky News, the BBC to CBS, and you already have a good take on the UK as compared to the US. Here in France, it’s a good mix of culture, international news, and regional specifics (and a well respected and quite famous presenter) which the news bulletin uses to monitor the country’s pulse.

Who would have thought, 18 years ago when I last witnessed the England cricket team win the Ashes, that I would wait so long to see it happen again. I’d not have believed it if I had known at the time that I would be following the next winning series living in France, listening over streaming radio online, and following the scores on a website. I just managed to see the final presentations on Sky News; images coming to me via my phone line over ADSL. Packet switched transmission technology, computer based algorithms for encoding and decoding all the content : not an analogue transmission in sight.

Fantastic result in analogue or digital. Congratulations England!

Image © copyright Associated Press.

“Staying late at the office” is one of those context sensitive phrases. First of all, it depends what the accepted hour for late is. Do you base lateness on the official working hours – which incidentally you should be able to find as they ought to be displayed somewhere in the office? Do you base lateness on the median hour of departure of your colleagues? Or are you on flexi-time, where such calculations take into account the number of hours you have spent in the office since you arrived?

According to Executive Planet, the American eye view of culture in France is that managers often stay late, until 7pm or later. I can confirm this is the case. Where I get burned is that I’m often the first manager in the office, and hence staying until 6pm is already late according to some of the calculation possibilities cited above. As the arrival of the baby approaches, I am being more and more reasonable about the time I spend after official hours (9am-6pm) at the office because I know I put the hours in. At least I’m not in a position where I’m staying in the office 24 hours a day. It does happen, and there are even people offering tips for you if you have no home to go to, or if you decide this is the only way that you’re going to get all that work done!

The rather more interesting point about “staying late at the office” is that it evokes, as I imagine was the case for you, a darker side of passion and cheating. Let that phrase play out in your subconscious. Might you need to confess such treacherous adventures? Even if they were only in your mind, and never physically consummated?

Forget French office culture, or watching the clock and counting that theoretical overtime that you’ll never get paid for. Maybe we should stop and think about euphemisms a little bit more. For indeed, as the article linked rightly states, we are no longer “fired” but “laid off”; we have “collateral damage” instead of “civilian casualties”. Governments now have “public relations” departments. From the same linked article the conclusion about the state of disbelief between many a public and their government :

…fostering good relations with the public appears to require telling it unpleasant truths in ways that appear to satisfy its need to know. Yes, this is very much like a dysfunctional marriage where nobody wants to admit that “staying late at the office” is actually a euphemism for “getting it on with the secretary”.

Living in France, there are a few things I really miss. Market differences mean that certain food is not available in supermarkets or restaurants here : salt and vinegar crisps, baked beans, HP sauce, McVities digestives and my favourite Indian spices (although if you know a good convenience store managed by an Indian you can find these) to name a few. The lack of favourite Indian spices extends to Indian restaurants: there are restaurants especially around Paris, but their menus are a far cry from an average English town Indian restaurant. Even Chinese restaurants, available in abundance here, don’t have the same range of meals. It would seem that here a lot of Asian restaurants are owned by the old French colony nationals : Vietnamese in particular. So when I go back to England a trip to my local Chinese and Indian is always a pleasure. I think that this shows that Asian food has evolved within England for English tastebuds, because I’m convinced that in India and China the food is totally different too.

Then there’s sport : Cricket is almost unknown, and I am yet to meet a Frenchman who knows even the basics of the game. “You can play a game which lasts five days?” is a familiar response to my initial attempts at explaining this very British sport. Snooker fares a little better, mainly due to the popularity of pool. I even got to see some of the Embassy world snooker championship on French Eurosport so it’s tentatively forming a niche here. Finally, Darts. A few cafés have an electronic dartboard with automatic scoring and those crappy plastic darts, but it’s not something that you’d see on TV. It’s usually an excuse for drunken lobbing of pointy things at a board which will flash if you’re lucky enough to score a few points. If I take the oche, I get strange looks for my stance and aiming technique. Sadly I don’t do very well, can’t throw those plastic darts. The worst of all this is that I am having difficulty following England in their current ashes series. I have to settle to listening to “Five Live” when I’m near an Internet connection.

If you’re looking to define what is quinetessentially British, you could do a lot worse than starting with those things that other nations do not have available in commerce due to a lack of demand. Don’t moan about the lack of pet tastes though – what is most interesting when travelling is the challenge to find new things that open your mind and your tastebuds. How boring it would be if everything was the same.

I occasionally feel inspired enough (or silly enough) to run a psychological experiment at work. Everyone knows I’m pretty much bilingual (English/French) and they are often reluctant to speak to me in my native English. So I’ll speak English with a French accent, and I observe the difference. Once I start speaking in this way, the likelihood that I will be replied to in English is massively increased. Indeed, it is in these circumstances that I have heard colleagues speak English for the first time. It seems to break down a psychological barrier based on their school experience.

Perhaps because at school when they are learning, they are with others who all have appalling accents to begin with, and in my experiment they rediscover that security of being just like their peers and all speaking poorly. Perhaps the situation also subconsciously takes them back a few years, and they can better remember simple vocabulary, that which is the most embarassing to not have at your fingertips and which often blocks phrase formation. So conversation flow improves.

Incidentally, when I started to improve my accent in school at about 14-15 years old, I was often teased by others in the class. Perhaps one thing they didn’t like was the security they had hiding behind the poor accent standard that everyone had set, allowing them to not have to make too much of an effort. Perhaps they just thought I was a bit of a language nerd.

It doesn’t work the other way : speaking French with an English accent can sometimes cause those who have little language learning under their belt to misunderstand what is otherwise a syntactically correct sentence. Such as l’Oiseau found from what sounds to me to be a very snobbish and ignorant waiter. It’s a lot harder to understand someone with a foreign accent, but people should make the effort a bit more often. That’s what language learning is all about, and that’s what makes it so interesting.

My experiment is great fun, but finally when I revert to regular English I lose everyone again. It never helps that they know I understand exactly what they’re saying in French as it makes them incredibly lazy. Then again, maybe they feel too much pressure to speak my language as well as I speak theirs, but that’s just a “bloquage” in their minds even though it’s a thought that’s far from mine. Sadly, I’m not in a position to catalyse their language learning. The people you learn most about a language from are those that leave you in a situation where you have no choice but to communicate on their terms.