People Like You

Not having fought at Trafalgar I’ve never felt any of the animosity which is supposed to exist between the English and the French (we fought a much more recent war in Iraq and I don’t hear anyone making jokes about what they eat) and apart from the Brit in Berlin who finished his email, “Punch a Frenchman for me. Love, Giles.” I don’t know anyone else who has either. After I failed in my attempt to describe the Parisians without using the word ‘sophisticated’ in my last entry, I thought I’d open up the floor to find a few more impressions about the French, and see if there was a word the French use to describe the British – there is, but more of that later.

Since The Day12 Project is all about promoting sustainable tourism, we have a fair few travellers on the staff, both in Cambridge and scattered around the world, and I asked them what they thought about my new neighbours. Anna, from Coleridge, reckons they’re, “Cool and unapproachable, like us, but better dressed.” Nick, currently in the Czech Republic, but who used to chef in Bastille, says they're“sophisticated, bohemian, independent, wild, stylish and moody” I think Nick liked it here. And Howard, just back from Barcelona, thinks Parisians go through life “in a world of sophisticated mirrors that blind them to what the world looks like beyond their decadent borders!” (Thank you, Che).

Martin Stevenson

Kate Coles, a Kiwi who’s been living here for the last three and a half years says that for all our opinions on what a Parisian is, we’d actually be hard pushed to find one. “You need to be a third generation arrondissement-dweller,” she says, “to qualify as a card-carrying Parisian.” Given that in 1927 only 17% of the population of the city was found to have been born in Paris, Kate says very few Parisians today can claim to have the requisite four grandparents, born on the banks of the Seine that real Parisians are so proud of.

When I asked my French friends what word they would use to describe the English they said ‘flegmatique’. “COLD AND UNDEMONSTRATIVE?!” I laughed, slamming my fist on the table, which, because it was rather affected looked rather silly. Returning to the room with a French/English dictionary I discovered that, in the eyes of my friends at least, the British are a foppish combination of Louis 14th and Blackadder’s Prince George; cold, distant, well-dressed (which came as something of a shock), a bit silly but with a lot of class. Goodness knows where they get that idea from. Not me certainly (apart from the class bit, obviously).

England was French for about 250 years. France was English for about eight. Maybe that’s the problem, if we dislike them it’s because they got a higher score than us - that’s how it works when we play the Germans at football, after all.