3 things I dislike about France

I like France, and I don't dislike French people any more than any other nationality (I've lived here for 5 years after all). However, there are some traits that seem to be common amongst French people and which drive me mad.

1. Dog shit on the pavements: I live in a city - people living in cities shouldn't be allowed to have dogs (in France anyway). I live in a block of flats with a worryingly clear view of the opposite pavement (how romantic). Every evening you can see them - people walking so slowly along the pavement edge that if you didn't know better you would think that they were searching for fag ends in the gutter. But no. They are waiting for their dog to have it's crap so that they can get back home as quickly as possible. France has some fine architecture. Unfortunately, to enjoy it, you have to look upwards - if I do this, it invariably involves standing in dogshit. Living in a flat with no garden or hosepipe means that you may end up scraping the stuff off your shoes somewhere you shouldn't (for example, the bath -apologies to any visitors that have used our bath) - did you ever see the scene in the Royle Family where Barb is using her cutlery knife to do the same in the kitchen sink? I am also convinced that my bad neck is caused by having to look at the pavement directly in front of me to avoid stepping in the stuff. They're not all bad though - I once saw someone actually picking the stuff up and putting it in the bin - I almost broke into applause.
   
2. Bad driving: The French are terrible drivers: Aggressive and dangerous. It's no wonder that they have almost the most dangerous roads in Europe . It is an unwritten law in France that when the traffic lights turn from green to amber you should speed up - slowing down is considered dangerous to the following cars because of the second unwritten law - when the light turns from amber to red you should speed up.
3. Dropping Litter: Maybe it is me, or my "British-ness", but I find it offensive to see people think nothing of dropping a Coke can or fag packet in the street. I would chase after the smallest piece of paper if I happened to drop it. As a little test, I counted how many times I witnessed this in town this afternoon. Final score: 5 in 2 hours. That doesn't seem so much, but I'm pretty sure that if I walked up a main street in London, I wouldn't count more than one and they would be frowned at by other shoppers (a frown is as far as it would go - English people don't like to cause a scene, as opposed to the French who like nothing more than a good-old stand-up argument in public...).

Why is this? The closest I have got to answers, particularly points 1 and 3 come from the book "60 million Frenchmen can't be wrong" (excellent subtitle "Why we love France but not the French"). This is a semi-serious attempt to explain the French. I think the idea that the French are used to having the state look after them could explain in part what leads them to this behaviour - dropped some litter? Don't worry, someone fom the council will come along shortly and pick it up for you. Dog shat on the pavement in front of the school? Council will take care of that too. You pay your taxes don't you? It' the least you can expect!
When Paris decided to cut down the number of "dog-shit-picker-upper" machines it led to an amazing rise in the amount of soiled pavements and the poor old Parisiens demanded their return.

I will soon write about what I like about France - just give me some time while I try to think of something ;-)

How epilepsy affects me

When I was first diagnosed, I went to different sites to see how people were treated (medically and otherwise) and how they dealt with it. What I soon realised is that no two cases are alike. There are only a handful of treatments, but there are a million different symptoms. I could never seem to find anybody who described the same symptoms as me. For what it's worth, here are mine in "pain-in-the-ass"-order, but bear in mind that I find it extremely difficult to describe exactly what is happening both during and after the seizure

• A slight "blip". In the middle of doing something (even as banal as watching TV), for a brief moment, I get a spell of dizziness which passes with no lasting effects.
  
• Losing the plot in the middle of doing something, talking, listening or reading. This is the most common form. It's "OK" when I'm at home, but in company it can be a nightmare. This has happened to me a few times in front of customers and I have had to come clean. Once I tried to keep going, but couldn't clear my head. I won't do that again. Often, I can feel it coming, and afterwards I often feel tired and often irritable.
  
• Jamais vu. This one is quite off-putting. Imagine being in a place where you've been thousands of times, but not being able to find your way around it. Last week, I came out of the bathroom and could not work out which direction I needed to go in order to get back to the bedroom. Often, I feel like I'm in a place that I've never been before.
• Plain old loss of consciousness. This has only happened to me 3 times in 10 years. The "best" was when I was in Vancouver at a conference. In the morning, I set off for the conference centre. Walking down the main street, I suddenly felt sick in my stomach and then remember waking up with a crowd of people standing around me. Pretty scary. Someone asked me if I wanted them to call an ambulance, so I thought what the hell, I've got travel insurance. In the ambulance, I was completely lucid and got talking to the ambulance driver who it turned out had worked in the same suburb of Brisbane as my uncle. At the hospital I went through the usual hold-your-hands-out, walk-in-a-straight-line tests. They tried to put a drip in me (god knows why), but couldn't get it in: "are you an intra-venous drug user". Err, no but I'm quite tempted if you've got anything on offer...
  

I can't put my finger on any one trigger, alcohol (god forbid), chocolate (surely not), stress (possible), exercise (possible), tiredness (could be), random collection of these and others (undoubtedly).
I've tried several combinations of treatment over the years, none of which have worked. More on these later.

Having Epilepsy

Having epilepsy is no fun wherever you are. I have been (un)fortunate enough to experience treatment approaches in both England and France, so can give an idea of the differences. I'll get to those in a minute, but first some background.

I first realised that something was not quite right in 1995. I mentioned my strange episodes with difficulty of articulation and general "wooziness" to my GP but it was never considered as a problem. In fact, the GP suggested that it was because I was tired and/or stressed - "relax and get some sleep". Excellent advice, but the sort of advice I would expect from my mother, not a doctor.

I was lucky in the sense that I worked with doctors. In fact I was part of a university department that was linked to the radiology lab. In 1995 I went to NY for a conference. Probably because of jetlag, I had lots of small seizures (nothing like what happened a year later in Vancouver when I ended up in A&E, but that's another story). Luckily I was able to tell a colleague when it was happening as it happened. His informal diagnosis: you have migraines, go and see your doctor. This was intriguing because I have suffered from migraines all my life.
Anyway, I preferred to ask another radiologist who referred me to a consultant neurologist for an MRI scan. The scan showed no brain tumour, but armed with a letter from the consultant, my GP referred me to another specialist who gave me the full range of tests.

I got the results immediately "I have some bad news - not for your longevity - but I can confirm that you do have temporal lobe epilepsy". Great, I liked the bit, quickly added, "not for your longevity". "Here's a prescription, take it to the pharmacy department, get a first dose and then go back to see your GP". Lamictal was prescribed - a small dosage according to the consultant. The pharmacists obviously didn't have much experience with this drug because they went back to the consultant because they thought he had prescribed an unusually large dose. He hadn't, but you can only be happy that the pharmacists worry about this type of thing.

I'll get to the symptons in a moment...

Arriving in France

We always had a difficult relationship with my father-in-law; he tolerated, rather than enjoyed our visits. It was exacerbated by what we saw as his detachment during the time that my wife's mother was dying from breast cancer and his subsequent relationship with a neighbour. There is nothing inherently wrong in this, but my wife found it difficult to accept (and still does). So it was a great surprise when he told us that he would be moving into his partner's house, allowing us to take over his house while we found our feet in France. Thus our transition to French life was eased by his generosity. It was the summer of 2002, so I decided to make it an extended holiday, enjoying the sun, the World Cup and improving my French.

Our stuff arrived a few weeks later on a lorry direct from Sheffield. The stress of seeing it all arriving and being transferred to to another garage proved too much and I had my first French seizure (we don't call them "fits" any more didn't you know? And don't worry, a "French seizure" does not involve use of the tongue). My most common fits, sorry, seizures, involve an inability to speak, dizziness, nausea, jamais vu (a feeling that you have never been in a place when you are somewhere you know very well) and, bizarrely, recurring memories - these memories are extremely vivid. They are of some incident in my past, but when the seizure is over, I am unable to recall the memory. Generally a seizure lasts a few minutes, but in this case it was more extreme and caused some worry amongst family members and bemusement in the removal men.

It was quite fitting (no pun intended) that I should be in a state of dizziness when we were finally installed because most of the time I had spent in France prior to this was on holiday, most of which were passed in a state of dizziness brought on by an excess of Burgundy red...

Why France?

It's 2001 and we live in Skipton. Before that, we lived in Ramsbottom and had the time of our lives with great friends and our own little house - our first. The situation is that my company moved to Skipton, I lost my driving licence because of my epilepsy (see later) and we have just had a second baby so our little house was just a little too little. Commuting is out of the question (unless I fancy a 60 mile walk each day).

I liked Skipton: I earned a decent wage and was in the ideal location for mountain-biking. However, the startup company I joined at its conception was bought by an American company and was turning into a "proper" company (selling things for God's sake!) - the buzz wasn't the same, I had a new-found confidence in my professional abilities and was ready for a new challenge.

My wife saw it differently: people were unfriendly - it was difficult to make lasting friends (a problem that is not inherently part of her personality); one of our kids had some "relationship difficulties" with other children (...maybe that accounted for the lack of friends...); it rained a lot and she had difficulties accepting that sometimes you need to turn on the central-heating in mid-summer (can't think why).

Basically we were ready for a change. Given that my wife had stuck out 12 years in England, France seemed a decent choice. It overcame the climate problem at least.

In May 2002, a lorry pulled up, all our things were packed into a container and disappeared to a lockup somewhere in Sheffield for the next 2 months. We sold our car to a colleague's wife on a pub car-park and drove our hire car to Stansted airport before flying to Dijon to move into my father-in-law's house.

Into the fray

A bit of pre-amble: From an English northern working-class background, I had the luck to have enough intelligence to get me good exam results and a degree from Manchester University (gained mostly by hanging onto the shirt-tails of someone far brighter than me). This led me to a career in IT at which I was, at best, average. I ran away to Australia for 7.5 months, screwed up another job when I got back (I still cringe about the time I tried to blag my way through a presentation on C++ to the rest of the company - it was on my CV, so I must know about it, right?).

Mostly through lack of options, I went back to Uni at Manchester to do a PhD ("A test of endurance rather than intelligence" so it suited me fine). During this time, what I thought were recurrent, lapses brought on by stress and tiredness turned out to be temporal lobe epilepsy. At the end of my PhD, I blagged my way into a job with colleagues from university. This turned out to be a turning point for me career-wise as I finally twigged what software development is all about and became, if I may be so bold, rather proficient (more later and again, throughout).

I got married during this time to a French girl, we have 2 children and 5 years ago moved to France. Now living in Lyon, I have carved a career in software development management and integrated pretty well into French society (although I have plenty of things to say about France and the French).

That's about it really. The rest of this will elaborate on these themes until I run out of thoughts and motivation...here I go...