Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

Living in Chamonix during the inter season can be quiet. It can be a little madness inducing, but one positive side is that I’ve had the time to re-notice that I live in France. The French locals don’t come to a complete halt in May and November andneither do I.

Driving my bling new van down to Sallanches this morning to go to one of the bigger supermarkets I was listening to a local French radio program. It was a phone in show and they were having a quiz. The interesting thing was that quiz questions were about the local area. Testing obscure local knowledge to see how paysanne the caller was.

It reminded me first of Sarah Turnbull’s book, Almost French. Sarah, an Aussie journalist moved to Paris with a man nearly a decade ago and wrote this book to explain the cultural seismic shift she went through to be accepted living here in France. Even if she is only accepted as a foreigner.

It also made me think of the word Typical.
It’s the same word in English and French, but it seems to have a slightly different meaning in French.
In English the word typical is used to express frustration. If a train is late, if you miss your bus, it’s ‘bloody typical’. It sums up the slightlysuperiors attitude of the English that if only there was a dictatorship with them in charge, things would run much better.

In France, the word typical means more like ‘how things should be’. ‘Cette charcuterie, c’est tres typique de Savoie‘ would roughly translate as ‘This cold meat cut is made by a traditional Savoyard method, in the alps by farmers who care about their produce. In short. It’s how things should be.

Laissez-faire. Ca marche plus bien comme ca.

well. the chamonix-valley site has to undergo some emergency repair. er… so that’s what’s happened to that. In other news…. A certain girl’s group’s combined weight is apparently significantly less than a normal person’s big toe. Feed ‘em up I say. Make em put on a stone and say:

“Oi don’t understaaaaand it. I were doing that much ching, I fort I’d never put on weight. But I tells ya. Goin on tour is like…. well bad for your diet man.”

what else?

Tony Blair. That’s the big news. Big news is he has done the impossible. Stepped down with dignity, leaving a horde of squabbling masses. If that were me, I’d have fucked it right up. So yeh. Well done there.

So France has a new president. The boy Sarko pulled in in front of that woman (whose name I’ve already forgotten). Amazingly 85% of registered voters turned out to vote. That’s got to be the highest turn out in any flabby western democracy in recent generations surely?

OK, so the geezer is a bit of a fascist bastard, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The first thing he’s said is that he’s going to ‘create a country where hard work is valued’. Good luck with that. It’s certainly not valued here in France at the moment. The 35 hour working week maximum has GOT to go.

I don’t think working hard was respected in the UK in the years prior to Thatcher getting her borderline-psychotic hands on power. I grew up in that era, one of Thatchers Children. I didn’t have any choice in that fact, but I can’t see that it’s done me any harm and I’m confident that if Sarko does what he has in mind then small French children will grow up in a stronger, healthier, more respected France then they would have had the people decided to go with the wishy-washy-leftie option.

Heil Sarko

I was in Carrefour yesterday after work. I kind of went in for a fridge, but ended up with a strimmer. I decided to sort the garden out at the back of the office. It’s a fair size - big enough for having a barbecue, but spring has sprung and the garden is growing out of control.

The strimmer I bought is the story here. It cost 15 Euro-Dollars. What kind of strimmer would you get for £10 I wondered. Turns out a really shit one. But hey, it’s doing the job and the grass, dandelion clumps and various trees are looking a lot tidier.

Pants, condom wrappers, tennis balls and a disintergrated mass of old hammock were also found. And thrown into next door’s garden which is rented by a bank, so no one uses it. The don’t mind medoin’ a bit of gardening I found out last summer. Or having the odd party. C’est for a certain salop raciste upstairs but I haven’t seen her in a while. Perhaps she died.