A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  "Right. Brilliant. Un demi." I wrote it down on my list.

  "If you don't know this stuff, if you don't prove to them that you're chez toi here, they'll arnack you."

  "They'll what?"

  "Damn. What do you say? I just said it. Rip you off. It's like carafes."

  "Ah, yeah, for water."

  "Yeah. Every cafe and restaurant will give you a pitcher of tap water if you want it. But you have to ask for 'une carafe d'eau'. You just ask for 'de 1'eau' and they'll sell you mineral water. Carafe is a kind of password you need to stop you getting arnacked. Ripped off. Damn."

  "Et voila." With a spectacular sweep of his arm, the waiter delivered my normal-sized coffee, and a normal-sized bill.

  "Merci," I said. I stirred my two lumps of sugar into the frothy coffee and looked up at my reflection in the glass front of the cafe. Yes, I was looking almost as self-satisfied as a Parisian.

  As Christmas approached, the food shops became even more ceremonial than usual. Some of them looked as if they'd been the scenes of ritual killings. Whole, unskinned hares hung upside down outside butchers' shops, looking as if they'd died from nosebleeds. One day I even saw a wild pig lying on the pavement, apparently enjoying a siesta. When I walked past the shop a couple of hours later, there were large bristly hunks of the animal on display in the window, and its head was grinning down approvingly from the wall.

  Supermarkets set up stands in the street, selling baskets of oysters, mounds of shrimps and huge fillets of salmon, all arrayed on beds of crushed ice. The workers manning these seasonal stands shivered and swore as their hands froze in the chill wind.

  There were similar scenes outside brasseries, many of which specialize in seafood. Even on the coldest winter evenings, I saw rubber-aproned men freezing their bollocks off outside seafood brasseries. Their job, apart from trying to lose all their fingers from frostbite, was to open oysters and disembowel crabs. Why they had to do this in the street rather than in the kitchen I never understood. Maybe crabs taste better with a coating of car pollution, or perhaps the men wanted to give the live lobsters a sporting chance of escaping into the sewers and scuttling back to Brittany.

  This winter feeding frenzy was exactly the right time for a food tasting. My chance to test what people thought of real British food. Except Christmas pudding, of course.

  Jean-Marie and Stéphanie came back from London with everything I'd asked for apart from the tin of corned beef, which I'd ordered as provocation more than anything.

  I bought various British kitchen implements on the web, borrowed a microwave and set up a buffet table one lunchtime in our meeting room. I tried to make it an event. The long meeting table was hidden beneath four paper Union-Jack tablecloths. I'd hired some gleaming white china serving dishes from a caterer. The dishes were also decorated with little flags, and I'd bought a party pack of paper cups, plates and napkins printed with typical London motifs - red double-deckers, black cabs and the mythical smiling policeman.

  No one was going to mistake this for a tasting of German food, put it that way.

  As my French colleagues walked into the room, their nostrils twitched at the smell of grilling sausages. Or maybe it was the sight of my lady-in-underwear apron.

  They were on their guard. Men had hands in pockets, women crossed arms. One or two had slightly fearful expressions as if they were on their way to the dentist's.

  I'd invited all of my team, plus ten of the younger people in the company. The young office crowd was my main target audience.

  They milled about in front of the table, wondering whether my display was to be eaten or simply observed, museum-style. Jean-Marie was late, so the ice was not quite broken.

  I welcomed them with a quick training session in filling out my score cards, and invited them to tuck in.

  Christine and I had spent a whole morning typing out bilingual labels for the various dishes. It's not easy translating things like "jacket potato with a baked-bean and grated cheese filling". Before you get down to finding the appropriate French words, you've got to explain to the French person why one would actually do these things to food.

  Nicole was the first to take the plunge.

  "Mm, sausage rolls," she said, taking a bite. "I remember, mah usband used to ..." She put an abrupt end to her Proustian moment by spitting the sausage roll out into a napkin and spearing a chipolata with a cocktail stick.

  "What in da hell is ze-uss?" Marc was sniffing at a steaming bowl of steak and kidney pudding that had made it through customs. He was playing up to a girl who was also in the IT department to judge by her style-less hair and the hip position of her name badge.

  He read the label in front of the bowl. "A pudding wiz stek? You ave sweet soce wiz yo meat and now meat wiz yo sweet? Oh!" He did a pantomime grimace at his groupie.

  "When you were in the Deep South, I'm sure you explained to all your redneck friends why they should stop eating sweet potatoes with their meat, didn't you, Marc? Not to mention lecturing them on the gastronomic gaffe of drinking Coke at mealtimes?"

  Marc grunted and wandered off to bitch further along the table.

  "Ah, Bernard, help yourself," I said, calling out to my blond walrus friend who had shuffled up to the table.

  "Plosh man lernsh," he replied. This was not a walrus greeting, but his attempt to pronounce "ploughman's lunch", that traditional excuse for English pubs to overcharge for a cheese sandwich by not bothering to put the cheese inside the bread. I'd laid out the ingredients for some more respectable ploughmans (or ploughmen?), offering a choice of cheeses (mature Cheddar or Stilton) and pickles, and a green salad with proper dressing. I'd also managed to order some cottage rolls that looked like a small cowpat on top of a larger cowpat - I thought they would strike a subliminal chord with Parisians. The label explained that the ploughman's was the traditional meal of "vieux fermiers anglais". I could see Bernard wondering how they used to get the salads out into the field without spilling the vinaigrette.

  "Taste some English Stilton cheese," I told him, very slowly. "You'll like it - it tastes just like French Roquefort."

  'OK." He grabbed a half-pound slab of Stilton and wandered away before I could tell him that he was only supposed to cut off a slice for tasting.

  * * *

  The room was pretty full by now, with 20 or so I people pressing against the table. Taller men were reaching over shoulders to get at the serving dishes. There was a gaggle rather than a queue around the tea urn, which amused people when they saw that it spouted brewed tea rather than hot water.

  "Oh, garrot geck!" A young brunette from the sales department with a tight black t-shirt and even tighter trousers was bouncing around in ecstasy in front of the cubes of iced carrot cake. "I ev zis at con tear boory."

  "Right, great." I didn't know what she was talking about, but she was my first satisfied customer.

  "You know con tear boory?" She now had a mouthful of carrot cake, which didn't exactly help me decipher what she was trying to say.

  "No, don't think so. What is it?"

  "It is seaty. Next doovre?"

  "Right. Yes. Pardon?"

  "You know! Next ze tonnel. You go out ze tonnel, you go up. It ez catty drawl. Con tear boory!"

  Something clicked.

  "Ah, Canterbury. The I cathedral, right. You've been there?"

  "Yes, we go wiz my class when Ah was to school. We, comment dire? We steal lots CDs from shop. Was fun. I ev garrot geek in ze cafe. I love!" She was now on her third cube, and her t-shirt was flecked with golden crumbs.

  "Great."

  "Ah love ze English food. I go eat some creeps now."

  The plates of crisps were labelled A, B, C, etc, with a list of flavours to choose from. The game was to guess which was which, and to tick your favourites. My colleagues were reading the translations and laughing at this over-complex way of dressing up potatoes. Who on earth, I could see them asking, would want to eat crisps flavoured with Worcester sauce, pickled onion, or h
edgehog? Christine had explained in her translation that hedgehog was a joke and that those crisps contained an artificial meaty flavour, but this only confirmed French prejudices. Food is not a joke, after all.

  Even so, they were tasting, and enjoying. Soon, the pile of hedgehog had been flattened as if it had tried to cross the motorway.

  "Zis is good," Stéphanie told me as I hovered near my small baked potatoes. I'd made up some miniature jacket spuds with various typical fillings. She'd taken cheese.

  "You like it?"

  "No." She pointed down at the grated cheese. "I mean zis cheese, it is 50 pour cent of hair."

  "Hair?"

  "Yes, foo foo," She made breathing-out motions.

  "On, air. It just melts better when it's grated."

  "Yes, Is good economy to sell hair, no?"

  Ratbag. But the ratbag was right. Cheap grated cheese in a cheap microwaved potato was a very profitable thing to sell.

  I spotted a riot at the other end of the table and excused myself. Christine was sending me help messages with her eyes as she grappled with what looked like a tribe of cannibals bustling around her trying to tear off chunks of her flesh.

  She was in charge of a sandwich-toasting machine that had turned into the biggest hit of the tasting. She was trying to slice up toasted cheese sandwiches into bite-size pieces, but they were being stolen whole as soon as they came out of the machine.

  "You seem a bit more enthusiastic about English food now, Marc?" I bravely placed my hand between a cheese and ham toastie and Marc's scrabbling fingers.

  "English? Dis is French. Y'all nevuh erd of croque monsieur?"

  For someone so disdainful of my cuisine, he was surprisingly brave about dodging Christine's knife and grabbing the whole toastie.

  Afterwards, Christine and I surveyed the leftovers, which any chef will tell you are more important than what's actually been eaten.

  Steak and kidney pudding was a non-non. Virtually untouched. Well, it was English beef, after all. Pork pie? Few takers, and I could see why. From a French perspective, it was a crudely sliced, anaemic imitation of French cold meats. The baked potatoes hadn't been very popular, but that might have been my fault - not a very practical dish at a finger buffet.

  Still, the rows of empty plates and the much-stained pile of score cards seemed to prove that the tasting had been a success. They loved British cuisine despite themselves.

  I gave Christine a hearty hug and a wet thank-you kiss on the cheek.

  "Oh! You are becoming so French," she told me in French. "For you, food and sex are the same thing!"

  It was probably the first time in human history that anyone had called hedgehog-flavoured crisps sexy.

  Jean-Marie didn't turn up for the tasting, but when I told him how well it had gone he was enthusiastic, in a bored sort of way.

  He scanned the approval ratings and my suggestions for making typically English food more acceptable for French consumers. He was looking even smarter than usual, if that was possible. Shimmering purple shirt with monogrammed gold cufflinks, a suit so well cut it was almost liquid. Sunlamp tan faultlessly even. He sat in his huge leather desk chair, his framed knighthood certificate apparently hovering by his shoulder, as if he was posing for a portrait.

  "This is good." He put the list aside and smiled at me vacantly.

  "Problems? Another demonstration?" I asked.

  "Oh no. The farmers will not trouble us again."

  "I expect they were convinced by your interviews on TV?"

  "No, I gave them a list of fast-food restaurants that do not buy French beef from us. They are going to make sure that these people do not buy foreign beef." The noble old French tradition of collaborating with the enemy, it seemed. "And I will send Stéphanie to make some more photos with their French cows."

  "That should make them happy."

  "Uh?" He seemed to be preoccupied. Though it sounded as if everything was under control. I wondered why the gloom.

  "Anyway, Paul, you are going home for a family Christmas?"

  "Yes, tonight." Now it was my turn to look gloomy. Five days sitting in my parents' over-tidy living room eating dry turkey and pretending to bond with my dad over satellite football matches. Alexa and I had planned to go away to her parents' holiday home in the Alps for a few days of log fires and snuggling up under the duvet, but she'd cancelled at the last minute. Her dad had broken up with yet another boyfriend, and didn't want to be alone at this family-oriented time of year. Her mum, meanwhile, was apparently shacking up with a Ukrainian DVD pirate.

  "I've just sent you an email giving you a rundown of progress on the project so far," I told Jean-Marie.

  "Ah, yes, good."

  "It's very short."

  "Ah."

  "I did warn you, Jean-Marie. My team is not exactly a working unit. More a weekly English conversation class. We're going to have to make radical changes after Christmas, don't you think?"

  Before Jean-Marie could answer, Christine poked her head round the door and announced that "l'inspecteur" was down in reception.

  "A policeman? So they're not on strike any more?" I asked.

  "No, no." The worried look had returned to Jean-Marie's eyes. "An inspector from the Ministry of Agriculture."

  "Ah, yes? Come to congratulate you for ..." I nodded towards the certificate. Jean-Marie's expression told me that the answer was no. I wondered if his hypocrisy might actually be coming back to haunt him like a half-digested bit of boeuf anglais.

  He stood up and tightened his already tight tie.

  "Anyway, Paul, thank you. Do not worry about your progress. Why don't you go and get your train?"

  We walked towards the door. I was being expelled.

  "OK, I'll see you after Christmas, Jean-Marie."

  "Er, yes."

  "Have a joyeux Noel. I'll bring you back some Christmas pudding."

  "Yes. Thank you."

  That proved he wasn't listening. He smiled wanly, shook my hand and turned back towards his desk.

  Was it wise, I wondered, to have booked a return ticket?

  JANVIER

  A maison in the country

  Not many people outside France know the true story behind the creation of the European Union.

  Apparently, Charles de Gaulle's family had a house in the country near a tiny farm that made the wrinkliest sausages in France. These were what the French call "saucissons secs" - long, thin, misshapen salamis that are hung to dry until they become as hard as a wine bottle. So hard that there are shops devoted entirely to selling the murderous clasp knives you need to cut the saucisson into edibly thin slices.

  Anyway, De Gaulle was a big saucisson man. After World War Two, things were relatively peaceful for France (apart from a few colonial wars), so the Général managed to pop down into the country several times a year for weekends. Whenever he did so, he always insisted on having slices of this local delicacy with his aperitif.

  But one Friday night when he arrived, quelle horreur, no sausage. "Pourquoi pas?" the Général demanded, and he was told that the farm was in financial trouble and had stopped making sausages.

  De Gaulle leapt into action. He proposed a bill in parliament to create a system of subsidies for small farmers. However, the industrial unions had the government under their thumb, and the bill didn't get through. So De Gaulle hit on a brilliant idea. Why not, he thought, create a pan-European government to subsidize his sausages? He couldn't reveal his true motives, so he shopped around the vague concept of protecting European producers against global competition to the heads of state of Italy, Germany and Spain (all renowned for their sausage, you'll notice), and hey presto, the Common Market was born. Pretty soon the General's local pig farm was swimming in euro-cash and producing so much sausage that half of it had to be fed back to the pigs.

  Well, that may not be entirely true, but it's the only way I can explain Britain's deep-seated antagonism to Europe - our sausages are pathetically pale and limp compared to s
alami, Wurst, chorizo and saucisson sec.

  Today, of course, the Union is much more to France than a source of subsidies for pig farmers. These days, it's also a source of subsidies for French cattle farmers, fruit farmers, cheesemakers, wine-growers, olive oil producers and every type of peasant activity you can imagine.

  I have no real argument with that. It's what makes the French countryside such a fantastic place to visit. Just a few kilometres outside Paris, you can find bits of real rural France, populated by tractor-driving folk who think that Dior is a word you use to shoo stray dogs out of your garden. Allez! Dior!

  By the time January came around, I wanted to join the great Parisian tradition of buying myself a piece of this rural time capsule - a maison in the country. Mad, you might think, for someone on a one-year contract. But I was now receiving all my salary, and paying almost zero rent, and you can buy a small chateau up in Normandy for about the price Londoners pay for a semi-detached ants' nest.

  My motives were basically the same as the native Parisians. For a start I was getting a bit sick of the sheer urban density of the city. Compared to London, there's hardly a square inch of greenery in Paris, especially where I was living, in the Marais.

  I was also sick of my neighbours, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. Seven AM, alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea diver's boots and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs on to the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede to the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, 50 times per drop of urine expelled. Finally there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at eight-fifteen on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.