Ca plane pour moi...

French language music has never made it in the UK. Can you think of any? Sacha Distel's "Thank Heavens for Little Girls" was a translation and is probably best not spoken about in polite circles. Apart from that, I can think of three others:

1. Serge Gainsbourg's and Jane Birkin's "Je t'aime, moi non plus",
   
2. Vanessa Paradis' "Joe le Taxi", and,
3. Plastic Bertrand's "Ca Plane pour Moi". This song was really popular at the end of the 70's, surfing on the back-end of the punk wave. Unfortunately, I was pre-pubescent at the time, so by the time my face was covered in spots, it was New Romantic rather than New Wave (although, Wham were seriously under-rated :-) ). However, Plastic's song stuck in the mind of lots of people (at least I think so: maybe I'm the only one who's heard of it?).

It was the "Village Fête" this weekend and imagine my surprise when I saw that Plastic was doing a show in a marquee on the local football pitch! It seems he is doing the rounds with a couple of other singers from the same era. As it's a village (well, OK, a small town), the football pitches are only a few hundred metres from our house and we could hear the music from the garden. It was a lovely afternoon, and we had just finished the annual "City Mountain Biking" tour - up and down the hills of Lyon with the traffic stopped for the cyclists - an excellent day out (but if you've ever been to Lyon you'll know that there are some killer hills).

So a bunch of us are sat in the garden with a beer, and guess what comes on? Oh yes, you've guessed it, Plastic was knocking out his old standard. It was more cabaret than punk, but he got a standing ovation from us at the end. Thanks Plastic, you made my day.
I'm sure he was playing huge venues in the early 80's, and a village fête is not be in the same bracket, but hey, 30 years later and he's still out there, doing what he loves. Not many people can say that about their lives.

Unless of course, he is absolutely sick of being remembered for one song, a stupid name, playing "provincial tent gigs" and is doing it because it because he is broke. Damn, that spoiled my upbeat ending!

A Brian Monologue

This little anecdote from my father made me laugh and I wanted to record it for posterity for my own amusement. It came from his 80-year-old neighbour (who, for the record, hasn't lost his marbles).

I suspect you have to know a bit about the character to find it amusing, but if I ever write a novel, this little monologue will slip in. It's language and style from another era (but firmly rooted in northern England). As an exercise in style, I tried to write it phonetically to capture the accent. Not sure it works, but here goes:

"Y'alright Dave?"
"If thez one thing ah carn't bloody stand, it's cheats"
"Ar've bin watching that program, "The Weakest Link" an' y'know what? The strongest link always gets t'end and then t'others vote 'em off and thee never win!"
"People t'day ave no scruples!"

"An another thing ah can't bloody stand is liars"
"Ah bought these trousers las' week and thee said thee were non-crease"
"Bloody creases everywhere, the lying buggers. Med in Britain too!"
"Y'know whats t'worst in all that Dave? Ah can't bloody stand ironing".

And off he went.

I hope it doesn't come over as mockery, because I know and love the guy (I have known him all my life) and he's never short of an off-the-wall comment. I hope he has many years left if only so I can get some more for the novel...

Customer Service à la Zidane

I love it when a sweeping generalisation is backed up with evidence (Global Warming? Polar ice-caps melting? Hhhmm, might be something in that piece of evidence...)

Anyway, the following relates to my "infamous"article, "3 Things I Dislike About France". Although it didn't figure in the "list of 3", I wrote that the French like "nothing more than a good-old stand-up argument in public". As above, it was a sweeping generalisation, but sometimes there is a grain of truth that leads to the generalisation...

Last Friday lunchtime, I went to the restaurant with a colleague. We work close to the supermarket mentioned in a previous article. They have several restaurants surrounding them and one of them we go to on a regular basis. It's popular: I estimate that there are over 100 people there at any one time every lunchtime: it's not a dodgy backstreet boozer; the food is OK and, until Friday, I thought that the service was good too...

Today, something was different - there was a guy, in his 40's, not the brightest looking to be honest, but so what, a customer all the same. Anyway, I didn't see how it started, but evidently he wasn't happy with the plate of cheese that had been served to him and was rather vociferously "explaining" this to the serving staff. He entered into a bit of an argument with the manager. Eventually, the manager took off his apron before wandering off into the kitchen. During this time, the guy kept pointing at his cheese (sorry, I really don't know what he was complaining about - it was loud and I was looking over someone's shoulder).

He made his final point by picking up the plate, pointing at it once more for effect, before throwing it on the floor, smashing it and evoking cries of "eh, ô,ô" from the customers (I don't know what effect an ^ has on an ordinary 'o', but it makes it look foreign). At this point, the manager, having removed his apron, returned from the kitchen. He arrived behind the indignant customer who was still remonstrating with the waiters. He calmly tapped the man on the back of the shoulder, and, as he turned round, gave him a swift head-butt. Silence. Problem solved, no ugly shoving out onto the street, no calling the police.

"Got a problem customer? No sweat, a swift smack on the head will soon sort that out".

Nobody, including the buttee knew what to make of this (is buttee a word?- if not, remember that you saw it here first! "buttee" = "one who has been butted". We use "butty" in the north of England to signify "sandwich". A double-butty is far more appetising than a double-buttee. But I digress.).

After a few seconds, he regained his indignation and continued to insult everybody, all the while retreating towards the door as he saw that he might receive another for his troubles. He left, the mess was cleared, and the boss continued to collect orders as before. Problem solved...

Not for me though. We had only just started our meal and I think it shows how paranoid we are because for the rest of the meal, I expected the guy to come back, maybe, god forbid, with a weapon. I am sure that I am not the only one in there that was thinking this, even though there were nervous laughs all round. As Morrissey said "I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible. Oh mamma, let me go". Actually the "Oh mamma let me go" is nothing to do with this article and is a story in itself.

Anyway, my original point that there are very few places in the world where you would see something like this happen, especially in a family restaurant. I checked this story with my French colleagues this morning, who were equally as shocked as me, so my "evidence-of-a-grain-of-truth-in-a-sweeping-generalisation" theory is not exactly vindicated, but its an interesting little interlude in itself.

What doe all this mean though?

1. I will never go there again, and probably neither will many of the other customers present
2. If I do go there again, I won't order the cheese
3. If I don't like the service, I will be very careful about how I complain.
   

I wondered what I would do if I had been the owner watching this? I can't go into French employment law because there is only a limited amount of disk-space in the world. However, putting that aside, I would think I would take one of four options:

1. Send the boss home for the day to keep him out of sight of the remaining customers and then give him a written warning when he comes back, or,
2. Send him on a course on how to treat customers
   
3. Sack him on the spot
4. Recommend him as a bouncer to any night-club-owning /debt-collecting friends.
   

To me, it doesn't seem to be something you should allow your staff to do, even with the most difficult customers...what would you do? Comments welcome.


As a complete aside
In case you don't understand the title of this article. Zinedine Zidane is the 2nd best player I have ever seen (after Maradona). My kids are young and love playing football, but, if you mention Zidane, they follow it up with a "coup de boule" gesture (see the video). If they grow up as football/soccer fans, then it would be a great shame if this is all he is remembered for.

Like the paint, I cracked...

The article I am most proud of on this site was written about my dad. Writing it allowed me to express something that I hope one day, before it is too late, I will be able to say (to him!) out loud (or let him read, as we would probably both die of embarrassment).

As I mentioned in the article, he was coming to visit us. Well, now he's here. We've been through the ice-breaking Manchester City performance conversation (surprisingly good) and the weather (surprisingly bad - did I say he'd had a run of bad luck?).

However, there was something hanging in the air between us...we both knew what it was (reading the original article will give you a clue if you can't wait for another line or so), but neither of us could bring ourselves to mention it.

After 2 days we cracked: I dropped in references to the difficulty of painting the fascia around the outside of the house before winter set in, and he pointed out that the walls were a bit dirty above the radiators and where the paintings of the previous owner had hung.

I swore (in writing to a whole community of readers - I know of at least 3 now!) that I would never, ever, under any circumstances ask him to do any decorating for me - after 45 years he deserved a break.

But he offered, honestly, I swear, I never asked. OK, I dropped subtle hints: I bought a pot of paint and some brushes, looked at the price of ladders (damned expensive) and left the catalogues lying around, but surely he would never pick up on this? You don't believe me? You know me too well already...

I'm selfish, lazy, exploitative and currently feeling extremely guilty, but, on the bright side, I have a very nicely painted interior.

Now, I just need to get that fascia painted before winter sets in...

Organised-Panic buying

Like any country, the French have some laws that may appear stupid viewed from outside. For example, 70% of the music played on French radio must be in French (an edict from l'Académie Française which aims to protect the purity of the French language - which anyway they are currently losing because of the pace of expansion of the web and IT technology in general). Another one I like is that it is forbidden to wear shorts in public swimming pools. No, you cannot go naked before you ask; you must wear "correct attire", or, as we say in the north of England, "skimpers" or "Speedos". Apparently this was because too many young scamps were diving in with cut-off jeans.

Anyway, at the weekend, I learnt a new silly law. Apparently, the law stipulates that there cannot be more than a given number of supermarkets per capita (i.e. you can't have a town with 1000 inhabitants with, say, 10 supermarkets). Unfortunately, the law doesn't stipulate the size of the supermarkets, which has led to the concept of hyper-markets. You just don't have supermarkets this big in the UK and you can buy anything in them (last week, my "local" supermarket was selling motor-bikes).

Last weekend, this supermarket had what they call a braderie; literally, a clearance sale - except that it wasn't quite that: it was an well-planned exercise in marketing and selling and gave me an excellent opportunity to observe mass hysteria.

What they did was set up a huge tent in front of the shop. Everything in there was piled into roughly arranged bins and sellers with loudspeakers were continually announcing "Only 1 minute left for the knock-down price of 2€ instead of the marked 10€ for any old crap" (Actually, I added the "any old crap" bit myself). And the people lapped it up. The loudspeaker bearers moved around the tent. Anything that looked like it wasn't shifting fast enough was put on a 2 minute "flash sale". People were following the loud-speaking loudspeakers around the tent from "bargain to bargain". The noise, the carefully organised impression of anarchy, all served to raise the excitement and stress level of the people who no doubt already regret buying most of the stuff they bought. Perfect selling.

Once, a long time ago, I was on Oxford Street in London, and went into a "shop" that, on the face of it, was an auction. Interest was garnered by projecting the voice of the auctioneer onto the street outside and having human gorillas limiting entry to the room. The place was crowded and the "bargains" were flowing from the auctioneer. It shows how long ago it was, because he was selling the original Nintendo GameBoys for £1 or whatever. However, I stood at the back and watched. I noticed after a while that the people getting the bargains were actually part of the scam (because that is what it was) as they invariably headed out of the shop, only to re-appear a few minutes later to make their way back to the front of the crowd. The thing worked perfectly because I watched people being cajoled into buying "lucky-dip" bags, with the promise that they may have the said GameBoys inside. These bags cost £50 because there was "much, much more" inside. However, my guess is that those bags contained nothing but a load of tat (and no, it wasn't me who bought any of the lucky-dip bags - it is pure supposition on my part).

This scam was a revelation to me at the time as I know I am naive, but it was nowhere near the scale of hysteria that I witnessed this weekend - people fighting to get the last low-voltage light-bulb or whatever. I didn't buy anything inside the tent - I couldn't stand more than a few minutes and went into the relatively calm shop where I bought a desk-lamp for 5€, reduced from 10€ - a bargain (and for the record, I was actually planning to buy one before I went there).

The thought hit me that maybe I could have got it for 2€ in the braderie, so, out of interest, I went back to look for it. Sure enough, there it was, at the bargain, knock-down price of...5€. Maybe I should have followed the loudspeaker people around, hoping to get it for 4€ or something?

The outcome of all this? I got home, plugged it in and the damned thing doesn't work. So I guess I'll be back there next week. At least the braderie has finished.