THE FRENCH SOLUTION TO THE LOO PROBLEM

Miles Kington attempts

to unravel the logic which divides Britain from France

To celebrate the opening of the Channel Tunnel, the Foreign Office is publishing a glossy brochure full of articles commemorat- ing the links between France and England, cultural, commercial and historical. I was asked to contribute a piece to it, a light- hearted article on the cultural differences between us. I did contribute such a piece, but it was never used; I was given to under- stand that the Foreign Office did not approve of its sentiments. This is the article; if any reader can spot the offensive material, please let me know, as I can't.

I HAVE once, and once only, given an after-dinner speech to a gathering of Frenchmen. It was a very valuable learning experience. The most important thing I learned was that I would never again agree to give an after-dinner speech to a gather- ing of Frenchmen, The event took place last year, at Clar- idge's hotel in London. Some of the direc- tors and executives of Gaz de France, the state-owned gas company, were coming over to London for a big meeting and din- ner, and they wanted someone to give a light-hearted after-dinner speech on some of the cultural differences between France and England. They asked me. The money was generous. I said I would. A few days before the dinner, the organiser rang to inform me that not all the directors and executives of Gaz de France spoke English, so could I do my speech in French?

The money seemed a little less generous suddenly, but I felt I could manage it. I rewrote the speech in French. The day came. I went to Claridge's. I sat between two very senior Gaz de France executives. I tried to make small talk with them. How is your small talk about gas? About French gas especially? Mine neither. But I did my best. I spoke to the man on my left, in French, just in case.

Alors, comment ca va avec le gaz en France?'

He shrugged. Evidently not all was going well with gas in France.

`On a des problernes,' he admitted.

What problems ? I wanted to know. Pour commencer, it n), a pas de gaz en France.' No gas in France. I hadn't thought of that. Apparently they have to buy it all from abroad. It cast a cloud over the evening as far as I was concerned. He seemed quite cheerful. Finally it came to my turn to speak and I did my 20 minutes, and it didn't go too badly. Then the (English) chairman rose and said, 'Et main- tenant M Kington veut accepter des ques- tions en francais.'

This was a lie. I had no wish to accept any questions in whatever language. But I was trapped. The first few were not too bad but then came this one — in French, remember.

`Mr Kington has made the good point in his address that the British have always had a reputation of being more pragmatic and practical, while the French have a reputa- tion for being more intellectual and theo- retical. I get the impression that in recent years this has started to change, and the two nations are exchanging characteristics with each other, with the French becoming more pragmatic and the British more theo- retical, etc., or at least more ideological. Does Mr Kington agree with this and, if so, how does he think that it will affect busi- ness in the 1990s?'

My mouth opened and closed as various possible answers flashed through my mind. ('Je m'en fous' was first. 'Look, mate, I'm a humorist not an economic guru' was the second.) I can't remember now what I did say, if anything, but what struck me was the intense revelation that I had just witnessed a prime example of the cultural differences between the French and the English, It was unthinkable that any Englishman I know could have asked that question seriously it showed an interest in theoretical analysis that is absolutely foreign to us. And if by some terrible miracle an Englishman had wanted to ask that question, he would never have directed it at an after-dinner speaker. Only a Frenchman would imagine that an after-dinner speaker is there to pro- vide information and enlightenment. An Englishman knows that his purpose is sheer amusement. To the Frenchman, sheer amusement can never be a worthy purpose.

If you dispute this, I call one Frenchman as a witness. Some years ago, the famous French scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carriere edited a book called Humour 1900, an anthology of turn-of-the-century French humour, and in his introduction he said that humour hardly existed in France, because its purpose was solely to amuse, and the French mistrusted anything with no useful purpose. The period of the 1890s was one of the few eras in French history when humour had flourished in France, as I came to learn when I did my first book, which was a translation of humorous pieces written by Alphonse Allais. Allais wrote solely to amuse. He was very funny. He might have been English. I find it inexplica- ble that he was not English.

But then Allais found the English inex- plicable. He relates how one day he visited London and discovered to his horror that he couldn't find a public lavatory in Leicester Square. `You would think,' he says, 'that the English with their love of le confort would have public conveniences all over the place. Not a bit of it. And there was I, with eighteen pints of best porter sloshing around inside of me, desperate . . . '

Allais' solution, by the way, was brilliant. He spots a chemist's shop in Tottenham Court Road, goes in and says to the man, I fear I may have diabetes.' `It shouldn't be hard to find out,' says the pharmacist. 'But I'm afraid I shall need a sample of your water.' `No problem,' says Allais, and is ushered into the back room and to intense relief.

This illustrates another great difference between us and the French: the different ways in which we go about problem-solv- ing, whether the problem is finding a lava- tory or building a high-speed rail link to the Tunnel. Whereas the English bumble along, patching up as they go and refusing ever to have an overall strategy, the French believe in the big plan. It was because the French had a big plan, and carried it out, that they now have a boom- ing nuclear energy programme, and we don't. It was because the French conceived their big high-speed plan that they have a TGV network, and we haven't even started to build our fast rail-link to the Tunnel. (And has anyone noticed that the French call it the Eurotunnel and we persist in seeing it as the Channel Tunnel?) At the highest level this manifests itself in the way the French have a constitution, and we don't. The French constitution is the biggest plan they have. Of course, this also explains why they have revolutions and we don't — the revolution is caused by the break-down of the big plan, and the tremors involved in replacing it. And it is at this point that my mind goes back to a meeting I had two or three years back with a man who ran a horse farm in Provence, somewhere near Carpentras, a farm which was about to be cut in two by the projected TGV line from Paris to Marseilles.

`There is nothing I can do to stop it,' he told me. 'We do not have the planning inquiries that you have, none of the demo- cratic checks. They issue the plan, and bang! They build through my place. But I too have a plan. I am writing to Colonel Gaddafi. I am asking his advice on how to make bombs. I am asking him how to make a bomb big enough to blow up a main French railway line. I am very serious about this.'

It was his plan against the government plan. I wish I knew if he ever carried it out. It's not the sort of thing I would ever have done. But, then, I would never have thought of feigning diabetes in a chemist's, and, if I had thought of it, I would never have done it. But, then, I am not French. It will take more than a tunnel to erase dif- ferences like this.