Talk to the Snail Read online

  Instead, I have found it useful to go around an apartment with a builder while the agent or seller is present. The builder can then poke at things, measure damp and stare inscrutably into corners, uttering the odd meaningful ‘hmmmm’ and questions like ‘And when exactly was this doorway put in?’ This direct, less administrative, more secretive method can scare the sellers, and helped me negotiate a big discount on my second, larger, apartment. I went into a huddle with the builder and put in a low offer, without explaining why, and it was accepted. Two can play at the secrecy game.

  In small towns, if the seller of a house or land has friends in the town hall, all manner of undesirable facts can be covered up or forgotten. How else would so many houses be sold in flood zones in the Languedoc? And why did Monsieur Dupont get permission to add an extra storey on to his cottage, and the estate agent assure the prospective buyers of the house next door that they would be able to do the same, when permission was refused out of hand once the deal was done? Or, even worse, why did the mairie send you a letter saying that your entire barn conversion was not conforme, and demanding that said barn be demolished, the day after you bought it?

  The answer is an open secret – the best protection against getting caught out is to do your own research. It sounds incredibly obvious, but you have to go and see the property. Even if you know you’re buying a ruin with no electricity, how can you be sure that your pile of stones doesn’t look out over an out-of-town industrial estate? The French are great fans of blighting their countryside with a splattering of furniture warehouses, hypermarkets and roadside restaurants. Then again, there are probably people who dream of a conservatory with an uninterrupted – and very French – view of Conforama, Carrefour and Buffalo Grill.

  If you’re buying in a village, it’s a good idea to go to the mairie and make enquiries about past planning applications for your prospective property, and present ones for the neighbouring houses or fields.

  If you’re buying an apartment, it is essential to delve into the minutes of past owners’ meetings. These compte-rendus des réunions de copropriété will reveal everything the seller and estate agent want to keep quiet.

  Perhaps the owners voted against renovating the facade of the building (known as a ravalement), even though the building’s agents (the syndic) warned them that the city would force them to carry it out the following year, when it would be even more expensive. A ravalement can cost each owner thousands of euros, and this alone will convince some people to sell their apartment, with all its hidden future liabilities.

  Perhaps someone proposed installing a lift, but the city refused to authorize it because the building is over 150 years old and cannot be structurally altered. When you read this in the compte-rendu, the seller’s assurance that the staircase is wide enough for a lift and that the other owners are all in favour counts for nothing.

  Maybe the syndic is so fed up with the owners opposing any outlay on upkeep that it is going to terminate its contract and leave the building without agents to manage its affairs.

  All this will be there in the minutes. Their revelations about a building’s secret life can be absolutely riveting. And can save housebuyers from making total fools of themselves.

  The Paris tourist office provides a unique service for tourists who

  want to take a souvenir home on their shoes.

  THE

  8TH

  COMMANDMENT

  Tu N’aimeras Pas Ton Voisin

  THOU SHALT NOT LOVE

  THY NEIGHBOUR

  THOU SHALT NOT LOVE

  THY NEIGHBOUR

  THE FRENCH ARE PROUD OF BEING INDIVIDUALISTIC. THEY present this as proof that they have caractère, rather than being bland pack animals like English football fans and all Scandinavians. In fact, though, what they’re really trying to do is provide a philosophical justification for not giving up their seat to a pregnant woman on the bus.

  This isn’t entirely fair. France has a greater sense of solidarity than lots of countries around it. The French pay high taxes and social-security contributions, which go to provide high pensions, high unemployment benefits and excellent medical cover. They have a law – non-assistance à personne en danger – that makes it illegal not to help someone who is being mugged or crying for help through the door of their apartment, at least by phoning for assistance. It is illegal to evict a rent-defaulting tenant in winter, or to cut off their electricity. It is almost impossible to write your children out of your will. And, as we saw in the Second Commandment, even in the midst of a long transport strike, workers stick together.

  But inside this comfort blanket, the French enjoy the feeling of being on a solo crusade against the system and everyone else in the world.

  Lycée-faire

  The classic theory is that this individualism comes from their peasant background – practically all French families need go back only two or three generations to find farmers who had to battle not only against cheese buyers and plough salesmen but also against the elements themselves. But that’s a bit like saying that every French person should know how to milk a goat. In fact, they (modern French people, not goats) are rigorously trained in individualism at school. For a start, schools have no uniforms at all, so it’s every brand name for itself. Children can dress how they want (except if they want to wear religious symbols). At the age of eleven, they are thrown into the collège, a junior high school for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds. Few will have the same timetable as their friends as this depends on what subjects they take, and they will often begin and end school at different times every day. Things get even worse for fifteen-year-olds at the lycée, when the school day has virtually no structure. In some schools they can even smoke in the playground. It is total laissez-faire. What’s more, every time there are baccalauréat sessions or mock exams, many schools are emptied and pupils of all ages are thrown out on to the street and left to their own devices.

  At university, life gets even more survivalist. In a spirit of so-called democracy, universities accept anyone with the baccalauréat who wants to sign up (and whose mum is prepared to stand in line for hours on registration day). So classrooms, or amphitheatres, are overfull, and students have to fight for a seat or stand at the back. The tutor, meanwhile, if he or she is not on strike or absent doing better-paid research, will turn up, talk into a microphone and then disappear.30 And that’s pretty well all the guidance new students get for at least the first year, when half of them will be kicked out for failing their exams because they didn’t get enough guidance. Darwin himself could not have invented a more efficient way of turning young French people into lone rangers.

  This system does have one major advantage, though. Because school life is so unstructured, young people spend much more time concentrating on their extracurricular life. In the gaps in their school timetable, they will have had hours to talk about and practise seduction. They will have learned how to smoke convincingly and hang out in cafés just like the grown-ups. And because they generally stay at home with mummy and daddy till they’re at least twenty-five, they can practise living the adult lifestyle without the actual stress of finding a job and somewhere to live. They can lie back on their comfort blanket and concentrate on moi.

  Je Fume, Moi Non Plus

  I once read a novel set in France where the author had a character walk past a Parisian café and smell the coffee. But generally, if you can smell anything it is smoke. In some places, the no-smoking area is only a table away from the smokers, or consists of a few tables near the bar, where everyone stands and smokes.

  If you are eating next to a table of smokers, you might as well order the tabac salad, the ash du jour and a Gauloise brûlée for dessert, because some people smoke one cigarette with their aperitif and light up again as soon as they finish each course. And if you try to tell them that you would quite like to taste your meal rather than their cigarette, you will often get a gruff reply about how they have the right to live the way they want to live and t
he rest is your problem. I know Americans in Paris who have major difficulties putting up with this kind of atmosphere. Smoking has been banned in so many places for so long back home that passive smoking is as outrageous to them as someone spitting on your plate.

  One Californian occasionally tries the UN-sanction approach. ‘You’re not going to smoke any more!’ he tells baffled French smokers, who wonder what he is going to do about it. Invade their table, maybe? This frontal attack never works. At best it causes a colonial war.

  A New Yorker tries a more surreal approach. With his wonderfully American accent and a friendly smile, he tells cigar smokers, ‘Thank you so much for smoking that near me. Now I can tell everyone back home that Europeans smoke donkey merde.’ This method is satisfying, but equally pointless, because a Frenchman in a café does not give a donkey merde what Americans think of him.

  The best method is to smile politely, say ‘bonjour’ and tell the smoker that although they of course have the right to smoke and live the way they please, you would greatly appreciate it if they could try to direct their smoke away from you because you would like to enjoy your meal, and your life, undisturbed by their cigarette. A friendly-sounding appeal to respect your lifestyle is the only way to get things done.

  France is heading for an existential crisis over smoking. Women and young people are cutting back, but the hardcore of heavy smokers are hanging steadfastly on to their habit, which is cheap, cool and still not frowned upon by the general public.

  This might soon change, though. Smoking is already forbidden in aeroplanes, buses, many trains and metro stations, and there are plans afoot to ban it in all public places. If this should happen, the new law will almost certainly be ignored. Petty French laws are usually considered to be for other people, not for moi. What’s more, any ban will cause the buralistes, the people who sell cigarettes, to go on strike and demand compensation for their lost income. There will almost certainly be protest marches in the streets (very slow marches, of course, so the demonstrators don’t get out of breath). So there’s a good chance the government will back down, or make the law so fuzzy that no one has to obey it if they don’t want to.

  But this habit of smoking in restaurants begs a very simple question: the French claim to love fine food, but how on earth do they taste it? Perhaps that’s why they say that British and American food is so bland – there’s no nicotine in it.

  Not Waiting for Godot

  The French think that queues are for people who have time to waste, whose lives are so boring that they have nothing better to do. Waiting in line is an admission of defeat.

  At bus stops, taxi ranks, cafés or almost anywhere where queueing is not imposed by barriers, the French will not wait patiently. Queueing barriers have only been introduced in the past few years, and the depressed look on the faces of Parisians who are obliged by little plastic posts and lengths of polyester to wait their turn proves how tough it is for them to give up their habit of pushing in.

  I remember the first time I saw this system in operation in Paris. It was in the food hall of the old Marks & Spencer shop at Châtelet. There were three or four tills, and customers simply chose the shortest queue. Then one evening, when I went to buy my digestive biscuits and raspberry trifle, there was a kind of corral where we all had to wait for the first till to be free. The Brits adopted the system instantly, especially because there was a notice on a little stand saying ‘Queue here’, and we expats are usually pretty disciplined, old-school folk. The French, though, were totally lost. You could see it in their eyes as they read the sign. They were thinking, ‘Why should I wait back there behind that man holding the biscuits and that ridiculous English dessert when there is a till in front of me that is going to be free in ten seconds?’ Some of them simply ignored the system and pushed in (accompanied by much British huffing and cries of ‘That’s not cricket,’ of course). Others surrendered, shamefacedly went to the back of the line and tried not to look French.

  Shortly afterwards, M&S pulled out of France. The newspapers said it was for group strategy reasons, but I’m sure it had something to do with trying to introduce obligatory queueing in Paris too soon.

  The barriers have now been put up in most large post offices, which is a good thing, because the most spectacular piece of queue-jumping I have ever seen happened in a Paris post office without barriers.

  It was at the 24/7 office in the rue du Louvre. I was there on a Sunday morning with a trolleyload of books to send off. Stupidly, I’d had a lie-in, and when I got across town at eleven a.m., there was a long, winding line of about twenty people waiting to go up to one of only two open windows. They were standing slightly back from the counter, as if to make it clear that the person at the front had the option of moving left or right according to which window became free first. Things were moving very slowly, and everyone was itching with impatience. The air was thick with expectation, eyes flicking around as people looked for an opportunity to push in or stop someone else doing so.

  Then a woman walked in, a chic type with a leather jacket, high heels and a black ponytail. She took one look at the line of losers and marched straight up to stand behind the person getting served at one of the windows. A howl of protest went up.

  ‘What are you all doing standing there?’ she asked scornfully. ‘I come here all the time and no one ever queues like that. We just go to stand in front of one of the windows.’ She turned her back on the protesters, and three seconds later the long queue had self-destructed and there were two lines, one at each window. The social experiment had failed.

  The post-office workers didn’t intervene, of course. It wasn’t their problem. And anyway, French officials are too concerned with looking cool to enforce petty regulations.

  This is also true at airports. At a French airport, if the airline announces that a flight will begin boarding by rows 40–57, absolutely everyone goes forward to board. And the ground staff will often let everyone through. So if you are trying to reach your seat in row 57, when you finally get on the plane you’ll be held up by a couple blocking the aisle in row 12 as they try to ram their over-sized hand luggage into the overhead compartment, a man laying out his newspapers, computer and palm pilot in row 16 ready for his work session after take-off, and similarly infuriating queue-jumpers in rows 21, 25, 30, and 34.

  If you try this trick at an American airport, though, you’ll be turned back and told to wait until your row is called. I once watched a semi-organized line degenerate into a rugby scrum as French passengers came up against American ground staff when boarding an Air France Miami–Paris flight. People with boarding cards for the unannounced rows shoved forward, were turned back and then loitered at the front of the line so that they would be first on board when their time came, or even earlier if they saw the people checking row numbers give in to the pressure and let just one passenger on prematurely. The queue spread out and broke up rather like a tide of Tour de France cyclists ramming into the back of a crashed truck. Soon the whole section of departure lounge had been turned into an impenetrable jam. Thanks to the French passengers, a technique to make boarding smoother had produced total anarchy.

  Again, it’s all about moi, my life, my lifestyle. If yours were important, you would be trying to push in front of me instead of standing like a cow waiting for its turn at the abattoir. France’s real motto is Liberté, Egalité, Get out of My Way.

  Drive Me Crazy

  Red lights are, of course, just another form of queue. So the French attitude to them is simple – they are only there to keep me from doing my really important stuff. And French drivers have two other philosophical reasons to ignore red lights. First, like condoms, they were invented by some fusspot who thinks I don’t know how to look after myself. Second, if I decide it’s safe to run the light, it’s safe – I’m French, so I know best.

  All this makes driving in France a hair-raising business.

  I once had to drive from Siena to Florence airport (yes, geography fans,
I’ve switched to Italy now). I was nervous about this, partly because I was alone and this was before there were little satellite devices in cars to tell you when to turn left and right, but mostly because I’d been fed the myth that Italians are the worst drivers in Europe.

  The myth, I soon realized, was just that. I got hopelessly lost in Florence, swerved and weaved my way across lanes and junctions, drove the wrong way down a one-way street, stalled while trying to read my map in the middle of a roundabout, and yet I survived unscathed. The Italians seemed to be prepared for other drivers to behave like lunatics, and happy to let them get on with it.

  In France (or Paris, anyway) I would have ended up in hospital and/or the wreckers’ yard.

  Parisian drivers not only drive like lunatics, they are also completely intolerant of other lunatics. I recently took a taxi from Charles de Gaulle airport into Paris, and the driver was a living example of this double lunacy. The traffic was heavy, and as we passed a turn-off for Le Bourget exhibition centre, cars were zig-zagging across the lanes like drunken puppies.

  ‘Look, one of these people is going to cause an accident,’ my driver said, accelerating straight into the path of a car that was clearly determined to cut him up. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked when I awoke from my dead faint. ‘He nearly caused an accident.’