Bienvenue

	WARNING! Ce blog a des vertus dépuratives. Sa première fonction est de purger mon esprit (puissant) et mon imagination (fertile) afin de pouvoir vaquer ensuite à mes occupations de ménagère de presque cinquante ans, apaisee. Par ailleurs, vous, lecteurs, y trouverez sans aucun nul doute un éclairage de premier ordre sur la vie d’une presque quincagenaire loin d’etre sur le retour (dans la mère patrie).
Les informations figurant dans ce blog sont hautement subjectives, c’est tout leur interet. Au fait, blog, c’est la contraction de web et de log (le journal de bord). Je vous le dis, vous n’avez pas fini d’en apprendre!

 La Chronique du mois: 
Britain-France:Bottoms Up to our Cultural Gap!

 

We’d all heard about it, but then the rumour became news, leaving us all …. Well, flabberghasted ( I’ll leave the ‘h’ if you don’t mind, as it sounds ghastlier that way: Marks and Spencer are closing their stores in France!

We sat there for a while, silent. For a while only, of course. Then, as you do at funerals, we started listing all the things we would miss about M + S. They say it is part of the mourning process. Lucy, who apparently has been an M + S fan for years, indignantly said there was no way she could do without Cheddar cheese, although she thought it wasn’t worth sharing her grief on the matter with any French person. All agreed. So do I actually. While my heart goes to her, I must admit that, as a French citizen, I could not help drawing a mental parallel between the pain induced by the Cheddar cheese shortage and the supposed lobbying we all suspect the Brits to lead to finally eradicate all our smelly and thus politically incorrect cheeses from European Community ground. Serves you right!

Then Lucy, who is decidedly most affected by the prospective loss of her favourite shop, went on about the misconception the French have about the stylishness of M + S clothing and recalled a troubling remark from a French lady at a dinner party, referring to such clothes as ‘frumpy’. The atmosphere was getting tense. Deciding we needed some entertainment, I gleefully remarked that given the number of British women buying their underwear from Markies, there soon wouldn’t be any members of the Our Women’s Club wearing knickers. Margaret drily replied that it seemed to her it was much easier to stock up on knickers than on Cheddar cheese…. Serves me right. Then, as the others were listening in horror, she quoted a French woman interviewed by a TV channel who said that ‘such knickers were only fit for the Queen’.

For those of you who do not know France and don’t know yet about the slyness of its inhabitants, I think further information is needed: wearing the same knickers as the Queen is by no means supposed to be a compliment. I’ll come back to the relevance of the Queen’s knickers later on. In the meantime please remember that not so long ago we beheaded Marie-Antoinette. What knickers was she wearing… I wonder.

Linda reprovingly said that in her opinion M + S knickers very sexy were indeed. Well, some of them. It appears Linda and the rest of her family have been known to stock up on M + S knickers to such an extent that each pair had to be marked with strings of different colours so as to avoid sharing underwear. We were unanimously impressed by this display of exquisite thoughtfulness.

In addition to being, well…sexy… it seems M + S underwear is also extremely resilient and therefore long lasting. Resilient it has to be I thought to myself (sorry about this incursion into my perverse psyche)… if it is to be torn apart with tooth and nail on one of those nights…

Don’t be mistaken. I am not criticizing. I am just a long-time observer of the cultural differences between the French and the Brits. And as such, I can testify to the existence of an ‘M + S gap’ syndrome. It means that learning to love shopping at M + S certainly goes a long way towards understanding the way a British brain works. Having long ago bridged that gap -where else can I find those ghastly jelly cubes that make any normal French person shiver with horror?- I can now shamelessly confess to having acquired my first pair of saucy knickers at M + S a few … well decades ago. Now..”decade” does sound very much like “decay”! …. In those days such gear was only available in boutiques in France, the sort of place you wouldn’t even consider going to if you had been brought up in the Catholic faith like me. Anyway, as a then much younger person I did find it most interesting that any British woman could have access to a world of sin almost over a supermarket counter.

So, driven by the audacity you can only experience on foreign ground surrounded by strange, yet lovable islanders -I felt if people could not understand me they could not see me either- I went ahead and bought a pair.Of saucy knickers, I mean. Have M + S made me a better woman? Who knows … but while we’re mourning this piece of Britain in France I might just as well pay them a tribute.

To conclude…let me go back to the Queen’s supposed knickers… To the best of my knowledge the Queen herself -can’t say so much for the rest of her family- has never shown any piece of her knickers on TV. This may leave some of you puzzled about the reason one would think the Queen’s knickers deserve to be laughed at: the logic is, if one wears such ridiculous hats, one is bound to have matching knickers. Our beheaded Marie-Antoinette did not stand comparison.