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Call of France
Category:
Humor
Publisher: Barry A. Whittingham
ISBN-10: B01N0UBZVY
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 257
Copyright: 24/12/2016
ISBN-13: 9791097201029
Price: FREE! (eBook)
A potpourri of serious, humorous and seriously humorous reflections on the French and English viewed through the eyes of a split-identity and occasionally demented Frenglishman.
Dreaming of moving to France? Planning to spend a holiday there? Or would you simply like to know more about French customs and lifestyle? In this book you'll find more than 100 articles to help you understand the French. They're based on the author's own experiences, observations (and mistakes) during more than 4( years of cohabitation.
Excerpt
1.The Puritan Factor
1.1 A Dash of Hypocrisy
Our inner Frenchman often imagines he can hear the souls of Calvin, Wesley, Luther and Cromwell laughing their heads off on high (where they were pre-destined to be) at having managed for so many years to terrorize an entire nation into believing that life was far too serious a business to indulge in the sinful vanities of ostentatious display and frivolous pleasure, and that any deviation from the straight and narrow path of strict sobriety and unflinching Sabbatarianism was tantamount to signing your own warrant to be skewered and barbecued in the fires of hell. But what our Frenchman finds particularly deplorable in you English is that a country whose literary heritage includes writers unashamedly vaunting the subtle plays, indeed sensual pleasures of heterosexual love should have allowed itself to be influenced by a mixed bunch of self-righteous prudes to the point of producing a reign – almost a century long - which undertook a ubiquitous, in-depth, long-term operation to convince our planet it would be a far more decent place to live on if a way were found to perpetuate the species without the slightest contact between male and female. For what other judgement can we have on an era where matters of the flesh were viewed as being so shockingly improper that chairs, tables and pianos were guilty of indecent exposure if their legs were not hidden beneath long woollen socks? Even the most innocent display of heterosexual affection was considered shamefully offensive. As a child, I (we use the pronoun ‘I’ as this was well before we developed into the Frenglishman we now are) I remember Grandad often telling the story about Grandma and himself when, one spring afternoon, shortly after becoming officially engaged, they were strolling arm-in-arm in the local park. Suddenly they saw Grandma’s father striding resolutely towards them. ‘What’s up wi’ thee, lass? Is tha lame?’ was his dour reaction to such unbridled debauchery*.
So profound and far-reaching was this rigid sexual morality that even the most innocent reference to the natural consequences of the procreative act was still considered shamefully taboo. The young English boy I then was used to spend a week of the summer holidays with Grandma and Grandad who lived in a small coalmining village in the heart of the then West Riding of Yorkshire. Perhaps it was the influence of the burgeoning Frenchie within (I’d already started learning French at school) which, one Sunday lunch over roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding, prompted him to remark - with only the vaguest of notions as to what it meant - that their next-door neighbour, Mrs Shufflebottom, was pregnant. Now, as Mr and Mrs Shufflebottom had been united in holy wedlock for well over a year, and nothing went to indicate that the inseminator was anyone but her husband, Mrs Shufflebottom’s condition was above all moral reproach. But, while any French parent would have seized on this heaven-sent opportunity to give a first lesson on the birds and the bees, something in Grandma made the word unmentionably indecent, especially in the mouth of an eleven-year-old, and he was told with grim firmness never ever to be heard using that word again.
However, Grandma’s condemnation of all things remotely sexual never put into question her own systematic, protracted and, as the growing boy later came to suspect, delectable post-prandial perusal of the pages of a Sunday newspaper, popularly referred to as the ‘News of the Screws’, the main articles of which involved the repetitive narration of illicit encounters of the flesh, going at that time (to his utter mystification) under the term intimacy, and usually spiced with vaguely perverse details: ‘They had their four o’clock Sunday tea, and intimacy then took place on the lambs’ wool hearth rug in front of a roaring fire,’ or: ‘She was in the habit of sucking a piece of Cinder toffee while they were being intimate.’ But, as our Frenchman often points out, what more can we expect from drinkers of tea with milk that this strong Puritanical brew should have been served up with a good dash of hypocrisy.
* The Englishman in us is of Yorkshire extraction. For the benefit of readers unaccustomed to the esoteric vernacular of this northern part of England, the Queen’s English rendition would be: ‘What’s the matter with you, my girl? Have you hurt your leg?’
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