What do you mean when you say?

One of my bug-bears with the French, or more with common French expressions, is the (mis)use of the words "next" and "last" in a temporal context.

That sounds confusing. Let me explain... In English, or at least British English, we use next and last as follows:

"There's a great film on TV next Friday"
Said on Saturday or Sunday, means Friday in six days' time
Said on any other day, means Friday the following week. If it's Monday and you want to say there's a great film on TV in four days, say "this Friday".

"There was a great film on TV on Friday"
Let's say Friday was the 1st day of the month. This statement works until Saturday the 9th tops. Thereafter, you have to swap "on" for "last".

When the French tell you there's a great film on TV next Friday, they will probably mean Friday this week. Seriously. Today is Wednesday. A French person could say "next Friday" today, and actually mean the day after tomorrow. Weird!

I could concede that, taking the meanings of "next" and "last" at their most pure, the French use is correct. But I'm not letting that get in the way of a good semantics argument.

I had the perfect opportunity to grouse about this linguistic stupidity this very morning. I caught the end of the weather forecast (read "vague guess") and the bimbo presenter (French weather bulletins not presented by actual real live meteorologists) announced that we'd be in for some jolly cold weather next weekend. Bloody amazing!, I thought. Météo France are frequently unable to accurately predict what the weather will be doing in 24 hours' time, and now here they are forecasting a whole ten days ahead! Stunning.

;)

Any other expats out there want to let off steam about the linguistic idiosyncrasies of their host country?

Nobody does it better

Dear Zhu in Canada recently posted a wee list of French activities/customs/products that the Canadians have just never adopted and maybe never will. I did smile on seeing "demos" at the top of the list, Zhu!

Prompted by this, here is a wee list of my own. These maybe aren't the things I miss the most from Blighty, but I do think there's little chance of the spreading to France any time soon!

Cheap, industrial chocolate
I know, I know. It's full of vegetable fat and hardly any cocoa solids, but I'm a true Brit and I love my Cadbury's Dairy Milk (and Fruit & Nut, and Twirls, and Crunchies, and …). The French all like dark chocolate, consumed mostly in the form of tiny miniatures that come with the espresso (or express as the French say) coffee taken after a meal. Yuck. Double yuck in fact. Dark chocolate and coffee. Yuck yuck.


Cheap paperbacks (and hardbacks, for that matter)
I love books and I love to read. My favourite bookseller in the UK is Waterstones. I want to know when Waterstones shops will start providing trolleys so I can really shop! I especially love their ubiquitous 3 for 2 offers. A very clever marketing tool, as you always end up with four books you want, so you shop around for another 2, naturally. When you consider all the offers, probably the average cost per book works out at around £4-5 for a nice paperback, or £10-12 for a lovely hardback. (Aside: who else loves the smell of a brand new hardback? Ooooh, new book smell.)

In France, there is actually a law forbidding retailers to sell books below cost. They can sell them net of VAT (one of the best known bookselling chains, Fnac, does just this), but not below cost. It's something to do with protecting the cultural literary linguistic heritage. Or maybe it's more to do with lining publishers' pockets. Whatever. I reckon your average "nice" paperback (equivalent to a UK paperback, not those scratty poche books) will set you back around €8-9, and a hardback (they call them broché - basically a paperback printed in big typeface and bound with slightly stiffer card-like paper) comes in at about €21. That's nearly £18!

Yes, you do have to wonder at the long-term logic of stores like Tesco selling the latest chicklit paperback for £1.50 (though maybe a lot of these chicklit things are only worth a quid). But I don't care about long-term logic. I just need the books, man. Gimme the books. I couldn't give a stuff about any literary cultural claptrap. I just want cheap books to feed my habit.

Chips from the chippy. With salt & vinegar
What do you crave most when you have consumed maybe slightly more booze than you should have over the course of an evening? What must you have, immediately and right now? It can't wait until you get home can't this craving. You must have thick-cut, fatty chips. Hot from the bubbling oil, nestling in their paper wrapping (which the steam and fat eventually weaken so much that it rips and you risk losing your precious chips). A bag of chips from the chippy. Oh yes. The Scots like them with salt n' saus (salt and sauce to you, pal). The English prefer salt and vinegar. I have to say my English lineage dominates on this matter. But whatever, we're talking artery-encrusting quantities of sat fats plus blood pressure-rocketing volumes of salt.

Now that I'm past-it and mortgaged, I don't much go out on the razz any more. So I don't have these slightly inebriated cravings. But I do miss chippies.

Here in the Nord the locals love chips (is it the proximity to Belgium maybe? Or because main-crop potatoes are one of the main crops grown round here?). And I mean proper chips. Not those silly, skinny French fries. Chips. Thick slices of deep-fried potato. They even have chippies! They are often in the form of little outside catering vans (you know the sort that sell burgers outside football grounds?). But they still look at you funny when you ask for vinegar.

Queuing
The Brits love to queue. We adore standing in line. We also love automated queuing systems. You'll notice these in post offices, and in some supermarkets (M&S food) or stores (Boots). Everyone stands in the same line, and an LED number board (sometimes accompanied by a disembodied voice) flashes up the number of the free cashier or till. And the corresponding till also has an LED number, which also flashes. So each customer is served in turn. There are also more sophisticated automated queuing systems in places like railway ticketing offices (you will wait for hours in these places, so the queuing process has to be adapted). A machine distributes numbered tickets to all comers, and you can sit (you'll need to sit) and wait for your number to come up. The older, basic systems just gave you a number. More recent evolutions offer a choice of which service you want (buy a ticket, change a ticket, make a journey enquiry), and you are placed in the appropriate queue accordingly.

And best of all are bus queues. People may sometimes loiter around the bus stop in no particular structured queue. But when the bus comes, there is no desperate surge forward. If there was no orderly line to begin with, the passengers all stand around looking at each other, wondering who was there first, and motioning "no, after you".

The French don't know how to queue. It's an internationally accepted truth. At bus stops, in subway stations and on railway platforms they, too, loiter in a disorganised group. Yet when the bus or train arrives, they form a ruck around the doors, jostling for position and trying desperately to be the first on. It's not so bad on the buses, as most of them have at least two sets of doors. You must get on the bus at the front, so passengers alighting can do so at the other doors and avoid the scrum.

The train is another matter altogether. Especially the TGV. One of the reasons the TGV timetables are so (reasonably) reliable is the strict station stopping times. Before the train arrives in the station, the guard announces how long it will stop for. And you can bet if they said 2 minutes, it's 2 minutes and not 2 minutes 03 seconds! The result is passengers scrambling to get off the train, and more passengers scrambling to get on. Sometimes they don't even let you descend before trying to push on. It's stressful!

The French also like to stand right up close behind you while you conduct your business at the post office, or at the supermarket checkout. I mean close. I mean boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife close. Now, in most banks and post offices, there is a red line on the floor, and customers are asked to wait behind it until a teller is free. This is a step in the right direction.

Tea
As well as loving books, I also love a nice cup of tea. Like most Brits, I like a simple cuppa: black tea, made with boiling water. I take mine quite strong and milky. You can pretty much get a decent cup of tea anywhere in Britain. I mean, it's hardly rocket science is it? Boil some water. Pour it over a a teabag. Leave to brew. Fish teabag out of cup. Add milk and sugar to taste. Use a teapot if you can be bothered.

The French drink coffee. Some of them drink tea. But they like poncy, arty-farty tea like green tea and white tea and herb tea. Made with tepid warm water. When plain old black tea is on offer it's more often than not something called Lipton Yellow Label. I think that this is some sort of phoney tea brand sold the world over as British tea. The world over, that is, apart from in Britain (where we aren't fobbed off by this pale imitation). When I first came to France this stuff made tea that looked like dishwater (and tasted like one would imagine dishwater to taste). Foul. I think it is now a bit of a stronger blend, but still. It's really hard to find satisfying tea in France. I always stock up on plenty fairtrade teabags when back in Scotland. I just wish I could import some nice, soft Scottish water to make it with ;)

I, too, have in mind a couple of expats I'd be interested to hear from one this one:

• Confused Vicky: life in Switzerland for a confused Brit.
• Sugar: another Brit in France, but I bet she'll do a good list
  

What I could happily live without

Continuing in the same vein, and still in the interests of fairness, let's have a look at what I wouldn't miss in France if one day we escaped from here...

• French driving. Here's a tip if you're ever driving round these parts: don't stop at the lights unless they are red. Do not stop at orange. Or, if you do, check your mirrors first. If there's a car behind you, keep going, because if you stop you'll be rear-ended. I think part of the problem is that the lights stay on orange for too long, instead of passing almost immediately to red. Many other gripes about French driving include: lane discipline (an unknown concept), indicators (too confusing), headlights (not required in town because there are street lights so you can see where you're going), and don't get me started on roundabouts...
• French TV. It is quite awful. The TV licence costs about £80, admittedly cheaper than in the UK. But in France, public service channels have commercial advertising. Lots of it. And all the programming is bought, either from the US or Germany. I suppose that's why it's cheaper than the BBC, no expensive programme-making here! And the "private" channels are like ITV on a particularly bad day.
• strikes. Especially by railway workers. They are possibly the most molly-coddled public sector workers in the world. They work for three years then retire on full salary (paid for by me!), but like to go on strike often and inconvenience lots of the people who pay for their pensions in order to claim the right to retire after just two and half years working.
• taxes. I am especially intrigued by the fact that, the salary I must declare on my tax return is actually about €720 greater than what I actually got paid. How does that work? That's a clever system, though, getting people to pay tax on money they never had. Cunning.
• diesel cars. In France, nearly everyone has a diesel. They are all driving around in their diesel cars, pumping out sulphur and black soot particles, giving us all brain cancer and asthma. Diesel cars sound like tractors, smell like something very smelly and foul, and are just generally bad. Yes yes, modern diesel cars emit less carbon than modern petrol cars. OK. But the French don't have modern diesel cars. They have ancient Peugeot 405s that have never been serviced and pump out huge clouds of black smoke at all times. I also love the myth peddled in these parts that diesel cars are cheaper. No they are not. They cost more to buy and more to service. Apparently it takes ten years (at average mileage of 12 000km a year) for the initial extra investment of buying a diesel car to start paying off in cheaper running costs. Think I'll stick to petrol.
• the Académie Française. This is a sort of old farts club that holds sway over the French language, deciding whether a word is "French" or not. Whenever a new word comes on the scene (like start-up, or e-mail, or web [as in, the interweb]), the academy sets about finding a suitably French equivalent. So we have contrived words like "courriel" or "mél" for e-mail, and the "ouaib" (I kid you not) for the interweb. Most people, naturally, speak of sending a "mail" and surfing the "web". If a language is allowed to evolve and grow, it will stay alive. If some stuffy group of academics try to keep out any "new" or (worse) "foreign" words, the language will die. Think on, academiciens.
• nuclear power. The French think they have the answer to meeting Kyoto targets and beyond in generating their electricity from nuclear power. It is hailed as a "clean" energy of the "future". Personally, I find nuclear power is a bit like crapping in a shoebox and leaving it to your grandchildren. It generates highly toxic waste, and we have no idea what to do with this. So we bury it far underground and hope it will go away. I'm sure our children's children will thank us very much for this gift to them.
• people speaking about "England" and the "English" when in fact they mean "Britain" and the "British". That really, *really* winds me up.
  

Still, it ain't all bad. I have Hubby and Doggy to help me through :)

You miss the little things the most ...

If you have always lived in the same place (be it same county, same town, same country, whatever), you end up taking many things for granted. You also probably end up noticing the negatives about where you are rather than the positives.

Being an expat (oh no, I said it, does that mean I am one??), I have learned that it is only when one leaves one's home country that one truly appreciates little aspects of the way of life that one now pines for. I appreciate this is not the case for everyone, but it generally is for me.

The little things I miss about the UK / Scotland are, in absolutely no order at all:

• newspapers. Yeah, you can get newspapers here too, but they are either very regional (and a bit parochial if I may say), or far too serious (national dailies like Le Monde or Le Figaro are unreadable for a poor foreigner like myself). I miss The Scotsman (er, what was I saying about being parochial?), The Independent. I miss Sunday papers that have so many supplements it takes you until the following Sunday to read them all.
• curry. Love curry. Love going out for a curry. Cannot be done in France. At least, not in the part of France where I am. And the rare French Indian restaurants (OK, 2 then) I have visited don't serve Cobra beer. How I am supposed to enjoy my jalfrezi if there's no Cobra? Note to Matt - you need to find a good curry place in Rotheram!
  
• my family.
• hilly countryside. I grew up in a fairly hilly place. I spent many summers in the Lake District. I like gradient in my landscape. Here the countryside is flat. It's a bit boring. But I guess living in the Alps would solve that one.
• being able to get a decent cup of tea in cafés/restaurants.
• Sainsbury's (how sad am I??). I can't explain it, but the Sainsbury's supermarket experience is just different from the Auchan supermarket experience. Not the same at all.
• Waterstone's. This one is self-explanatory. But I'll explain it anyway. French books are rubbish. Even ones translated from English. They are written in some 13th century tense called the past historic and it's offensive. Imagine having to read everything in Chaucer's English. Would be tiresome. Also, French paperbacks are unattractive. The typeface is too small and the covers never look enticing. And they are expensive.
• bacon. Cooked breakfast. Baked beans.
• the long summer evenings. When the weather is good, where better than Scotland in June? The evenings last forever. And the twilight barely has time to fade in the north west before daybreak creeps over the eastern horizon.
  
• the M&Ms (they know who they are), boy Nicklas...
• M&S food to go. Good thing I don't have access to their salads because my bank manager would be demanding I give my money card back immediately.
• people knowing how to queue properly. I think anyone who has spent any time in France will appreciate this.
• men in kilts!
• childhood "references" - school friends (well, those I still see), the house where I grew up, even grotty Dalkeith! No actually I don't really miss Dalkeith. Not much.
  
• John Lewis (big consumer theme going on here!!)

I'm sure there are many more of the little things, Hubby should keep a list! But it can't be all that bad because I'm still here after all these years.

In the interests of fairness and equality, and if you can be bothered to decipher my French, I've done a corresponding list of French things I would miss here.