FRENCH WITH TEARS

Victoria Kaulback crossed the Channel in

search of glamour and romance, and found a land of humourless conformity

Paris I THINK I have been had. Like someone who has just read one of those magazine articles entitled 'What He Says and What It Means' and has discovered that 'I want to spend loads of time with you' means 'I want to sleep with your best friend'. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the daylight hurts.

Six months ago, I succumbed to a longcherished dream to move to Paris. My image of France was fuelled by diverse but compelling attributes I'd noticed on trips here, and hardly at all by preferring the horoscopes in French Elle and fancying Christophe Lambert. It went something like this.

In my youthful naivety, I'd found England an embarrassing place to live once Mrs Thatcher had let the free market off its leash to scare old people and children. As a teenager I'd kept a Thatchcard in my wallet, a kind of donor card to prevent 'We are a grandmother' from visiting me in the course of any hospital tour should I ever become too infirm to shun her verbally. I remained convinced that Tony would be unable to reverse the damage to education by the time I had children. So I went to work in France, to feel the glow of redistributed wealth and state-funded cinema. Despite the persistent Le Pen minority — no county is perfect — the French are viscerally and constitutionally left-wing, I told myself, and as a result have decent healthcare and education, excellent public transport, and a less yawning chasm between rich and poor than the UK. Add to this their Catholic tradition and food-centric culture (many still go home for family lunch on work days), and you have a sturdy social fabric.

Then there was the glamour. The French are impossibly chic, have a proud tradition of intellectual debate, and feature in universal anecdotes as the planet's greatest lovers. Paris is stuffed to the gunwales — and this is a fact — with unshaven, charismatic men, many of them state-funded film directors. (Every woman's ideal, the non-struggling artist, is a rarer breed in the UK. I think they're all owned by Charles Saatchi and probably fitted out with high-tech alarms.) These men are unafflicted by the Englishman's bed room awkwardness and ever-present urge to nip out to the pub without you. They actually like women. They burn to whisper `.1e t'aime' as you stroll along the Seine arm-in-arm, their gaze heavenward and their tongue in your ear. Their unembarrassed ease will rid you of your AngloSaxon rigidity and make that Brit/American you nearly married look namby-pamby. The French know about sensuality. They embrace life's simple pleasures — pastis, a game of boules, mouthwatering pink slices of duck drowning in sweet orange sauce — innocent of the distance, reserve and sarcasm with which we Brits greet whatever life throws at us.

Kipling's 'If, a hymn to stoical phlegm rarely absent from anthologies of our nation's favourite poems, is incomprehensible to French people I have tried it out on: why on earth would you want to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you? And as for treating triumph and disaster just the same, this evenkeel approach entirely misses the point — to enjoy life's great roller-coaster ride. I longed for this exuberant culture in which a farmer will burn his own lorry to the ground to make a point and long lunches are more important than answering the phone to clients.

Six months on, I am poring over my initial motivations with the same stomachchurning disappointment you feel when someone with whom you were madly in love turns out to be an insensitive jerk who snores. What did I ever see in France?

The left-wing stuff is true. A quarter of the workforce are state employees (the G8 average hovers around 14 per cent), engendering labyrinthine bureaucracy. Just to work as a translator you must register with six authorities. The law seems expressly designed to cause serious cardiovascular problems in anyone trying to set up in business. (But they do have enough doctors to cope with it.) Economic indicators resemble the UK's, except the glaring 10 per cent unemployment level. According to iFrap, a centreright lobby group, job security, surprisingly, is ten times lower in France than in the US, the land of hire and fire. The French complain bitterly that companies batten down the hatches at the slightest gust, 'invest to grow' being a concept they would only recognise on a seed packet.

French friends in London had warned me about a negative attitude to business, but advice has never moved me. It first struck home in my local supermarket. On the fruit and veg scales, the buttons are in completely random rather than alphabetical order. So it takes hours to find poivrons rouges', and I've never yet found the ginger. You are tied by this devious contract to that particular supermarket, unable to go elsewhere for fear of wasting hours re-learning a new random order, like being tied to a miserable marriage for fear of losing the parking space.

This typifies an utter contempt for the customer that seems universal: travel agents, banks, utility companies, restau

rants, hi-fi stores. You are preventing them from chatting to their mates, which provokes a version of Tourette's syndrome, where they make 'Out. Madame' sound like something much worse than 'You shameless hussy, how dare you sully our neighbourhood coming in here with your service needs. Watch out — we know where you live.' I've been trying to return a mobile phone for three months. In response, I get long letters in florid, mediaeval French — 'We pray you, Madame, to agree our distinguished salutations' — failing to answer my question. I was told about all of this before I came, but I was seduced by the fact that you could get a really good salad in the Gare du Nord.

After the supermarket epiphany, the revelations came thick and fast.

Social cohesion: try it for two days and you'll know the meaning of claustrophobia. I used to find it quaint that everyone took their holidays in August. In fact, you escape from your neighbours in Paris to find the whole street has rented cottages in the same Normandy village. For English people who have spent a lifetime maintaining that crucial distance from each other in a crowded bus, this togetherness is not easy.

According to the Dutch sociologist G.H. Hofstede, whose 'Dimensions of National Culture' survey, heavily used in marketing, seeks to define national characteristics. France is a collectivist rather than individualist society, and is highly risk-averse compared with the UK. Which is why every other television ad is for an insurance company, and why originality is frowned upon. I had always found English society ramshackle, disconnected, lacking in some of the support systems I mention above in relation to France. I have since come to cherish its haphazardness as the price entirely worth paying for freedom of self-expression in all its forms.

Which brings us to chic. I now see that chic is not cool. It springs from rigid conformism and a bourgeois obsession with what the neighbours think. How I long to see badly dressed people. Taste suffocates creativity in many domains. French fashion (continuing influx of Brits and Yanks to overhaul flagging brands), TV (I challenge you to spot the differences between today's schedules and those of 1980), food (rabbit is served with mustard, ask for anything else and you're a deviant: it's defending old habits to the hilt that keeps the food so good here), films (they may be state-funded but most are identikit lovetriangle dramas). This last point convinces me, though I am loath to admit it, that subsidised art is not necessarily the best. Similarly, English researchers are between three and ten times more productive than French researchers in terms of work produced and patents registered, on less than half the budget.

Turning to the great intellectual tradition, the French have a genuine respect for education, which sadly leads to the use of

over-complex arguments and a kind of academic name-dropping that no one in the UK would be seen dead doing. As for education standards, people ask me for French spelling advice. I had entertained the vague notion gleaned from French films that couples discussed philosophy in-between snogging on mopeds. They just snog on mopeds.

So surely I was right about the sex? you ask. I can't tell you for sure. I'm bombarded with kissy-kissy endearments that have become meaningless: 'Bisous, je eembrasse: I now long for strong silent types who never use a word they don't mean. Just as naturism kills sex appeal, it is cloying to see a constant public mating ritual. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that embarrassment is what separates man from other animals. One longs for a little awkwardness, hesitation. This is something Parisians simply don't do. That's why they find those scenes with Hugh Grant in Four Weddings so charmingly absurd. They do chat you up here, but all is formula. Even their renowned sexual experimentation tends to happen firmly within the confines of the husband-wife-mistress institution: menage a trois, cinq a sept. I may be wrong, French men may well he amazing in bed. But frankly, given that their daily cigarette quota allows them only two-minute breaks between each fag, it's hard to see how they'd find the time.

And, finally, spontaneity. A dreadful realisation: I've learnt it's the antithesis of everything that makes me irremediably English. How can I put this? Lack of reserve means speaking before thinking. And lack of distance means no irony.

The lack of irony — or should I say differently abled humour — is a total killer. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain the comedy in everyday throwaway expressions like *Oh, I'm so dumb!' (To which the Parisian response is an entirely humourless, 'No you're not, you must have more confidence in yourself — have you considered psychoanalysis?') Or, for that matter, 'Don't bring me solutions, bring me problems!' or 'Speaking to him is like trying to explain thermodynamics to a goat.' Every time I am looked at as though I've come to the office in chain mail. Not a hint of comprehension.

There is only one solution. I shall have myself dubbed. The translation will be so wildly inaccurate, and the voice so brimful of emotion, that I'll be sure to fit right into the action.