Ben Non Bar None

No-one can really say they’ve really lived in France until they’ve experienced the French health care system, so to this end, I’ve spent the last two months carefully nurturing a kidney stone. Its origins are unclear, but could possibly be due to an excess of dairy in the diet; as Ben says, “when a French doctor says you’ve been eating too much cheese, you’ve probably been eating too much cheese…“.

The first diagnosis was stress-related colopathie spasmodique, which my bulging-eyed Dr. Marceau explained by viciously wringing out an invisible sausage. This represented my colon in a moment of panic, such as when attempting to conjugate an irregular verb in the subjunctive. When a couple of weeks of healthy salads, deep breathing and talking completely in the present tense failed to straighten me out, a big expensive machine called a scanner (DWISOTT) finally found an insy-winsy kidney stone jammed down some tiny internal uro-tunnel. At this point I was referred to a urologue, which disappointingly turned out to be a urologist and not a steampunk urine-powered Victorian timepiece.

It was only then I realised my terrible error - I had become malade during les vacances ! Every self-respecting Parisian medical practitioner was sipping pastis on the Mediterranean coast, leaving the hospitals and clinics staffed by foreigners and other social unfortunates who hadn’t yet realised that no-one does any kind of work between August 1st and September 3rd. I duly took the first available post-rentrée appointment (the end of September), and I’d probably still be sleeping bolt upright and twitching if it wasn’t for one of my work colleagues reminding me that we had a “super bonne mutuelle” (a kind of work-provided private health plan), and I could book myself in with a private doctor and get all the money reimbursed.

So to cut a long story short, I forced my way ahead of all those suckers without cushy office jobs (demonstrating that famous queue-respecting English sense of fair play) and got myself an operation.

It all went very smoothly, I’m glad to report. In and out of hospital so quick I didn’t even get to properly explore the bed controls. (”Head… up! Feet… down! It’s like a chair… but it’s a bed!”) I’m now loafing at home, spaced on insurance-reimbursed painkillers, with a little tube rattling round somewhere in me that will eventually permit me to pass (or, more explicitly, piss) the little calcium munter out. Then they pull out the tube, and I can carry on where I left off packing my face with the stinkiest, crustiest, proudly pustular cheeses that France can lay at my hospital-slippered feet.

NEXT!

Grnnk nnnnng BLOG!

So what have I been up to in the last… five months, sweet lord. Has it really been that long? Memory of time is such a strange, bendy-twisty thing. It feels like I only left Brighton last week, but it also feels like I’ve been living here forever. I also feel like I have had a hangover forever, but that’s more likely the happys hours cocktails. It’s a French bank holiday today, so I’m not working - which means, of course, I drank a little too much last night and am suffering a gueule de bois or a boîte de gueule. I can never remember which way round the words go, or at least, not when I have one. If I get it wrong, I end up saying something like “ugly face box”, which probably conveys the sentiment anyway.

The reason I’m observing French holidays is that I am no longer remote-working for Magpie in Brighton - I have found myself a (mostly) French-speaking job here in Paris. I say “mostly” as almost everyone in my new office speaks English - but they prefer not to unless necessary. I can’t say I blame them, if it makes their head hurt to speak English the same way it makes mine hurt to speak French. (And to write sentences like that. Note to self: do not drink anything with a glowstick in it. Ever. Also do not attempt to drink the glowstick.)

I’ve stopped going to the French classes, as I think I’m getting more than my recommended daily dose at work - but the pain is paying off. My level (of French, if not alcohol tolerance) seems to be improving - I can now have reasonable conversations with idiots, small children, and programmers. I have occasional success with normal adult humans, too, which is heartening. I’m still quite capable of talking at ridiculous cross-purposes with people, usually in shops - like on Saturday when I tried to buy a cake but was understood to be be complaining about an overcooked croissant - but in general I can now accomplish simple tasks with a modicum of preparation and assistance.

This morning, I remembered I had a cameraphone, and uploaded a bunch of photos from it to Flickr. They are in chronological order, and I think they tell a story in a funny kind of way. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then these are worth… 67,000 words.

Other than changing jobs, I have been making and recording electronic and analogue noises and giving them names. It’s quite a strange thing to do if you think about it.

Until next time, folks. Hopefully it won’t take another five months…

Bob sent me “the most fucking terrifying instance of the ‘uncanny valley’ ever” which is, as advertised, fucking terrifying. But it’s this Wikipedia entry, combined with a mildly disagreeable encounter with an old harpie in the pharmacie, that has got me thinking: am I on the cusp of the “foreigner’s Uncanny Valley”?

(I think that sounded quite Sex In The City. I should buy more shoes.)

Wikipedia:

At first, when the foreign person acts significantly differently enough from native people, the foreigner will be praised for trying to fit in (e.g., he or she will be at the top of the first curve), and when the foreigner has adapted to the native culture completely, he or she will fit in. But, before that time, there is an awkward area in which the native people expect the foreigner to act like them, but the foreigner is not yet completely able to do that: the uncanny valley.

This raddled old crow, all fur and fallen facelift, had butted in front of us in the queue dribbling pills of all colours and sizes from her filthy, blooded claws. Feeling the Great British Spirit Of Fair-Play and Queue-Abiding Righteousness well strong within me, my chest swelled, I grew a head taller, flexed the suddenly swollen biceps in all four arms, and cleared my throat. Quite loudly, in fact.

She turned around, glared, and spat incomprehensible chips of fire, instantly shredding my face and hands. As a tiny, crimson, mouse, I squeaked “D’accord“. She stared a moment longer to make sure I was thoroughly crushed, and turned back to continue her business with the smirking cashier.

As I’d absolutely no idea what she had said, a snappy response had been out of the question. And even if I had understood, I really should master “stammering” and “sluggish” before trying to work “cutting” into my verbal French armoury. The worst part is, I was at least semi-in-the-wrong - it’s not uncommon here to consider it poor form to show resentment when honestly bettered in the race to the shop till. I went looking for trouble, and found it at the bottom of the étranger’s Uncanny Valley - too foreign to be out the other side and fighting back, but not foreign enough to keep my mouth shut and eyes wide when something falls a hairsbreadth outside of my familiar social norms.

My next trick: tutting loudly next time some young blade with dead-fish eyes spits near my feet in the street. Stay tuned!

Who told me about the meat sweats? It was years ago, I didn’t believe a word of it, and am now paying for my hubris - after putting away more than my fair share of a Côte de bœuf last night, urban myth has become 4am trembling sheet-soaked reality. Since arriving in Paris, I have come to enjoy huge bloody chunks of cowflesh beyond what is sane and, it seems, healthy. It’s one easily observable manifestation of my all-permeating hypocrisy that I’m convinced vegetarianism is ethically and environmentally spot-on the right thing, yet I still persist in consuming the deceased flesh of pretty much any animal I can get my filthy couverts on. And above all others, beef. Beef. Beef.

Thinking back, this isn’t the first time I’ve been stung by excessive beef consumption. Last winter in Brighton, a beef fondue evening developed into a red wine frenzy and I ended up redecorating my hallway, bathroom and parts of Toby with Beaujolais Village and partially digested chunks of raw beef. I could have taken this as a warning.

I’m beginning to think my innards just aren’t cut out for this kind of raw-meat abuse. Maybe it’s an English thing. You remember last summer’s toilet-bowl-referencing barbeque safety advert? Here, they have an ad for a particular brand of steak haché (a kind of burger that looks and tastes like it’s actually made out of minced beef - strange concept, I agree), in which a young boy takes said raw-meat product out of the freezer and gives it a hearty lick before passing it over to mum to cook. For this act of mishygiene, roughly equivalent in English food-safety terms to smearing your chicken drumsticks in human faeces, he recieves the sort of gentle chiding I’d expect for dipping a finger in the pasta sauce.

All this talk is making me feel rather peculiar. Please excuse me. I may have an urgent appointment with the téléphone de porcelaine.

It’s a rum do, this learning French.

I can be sitting there silent for six, seven, eight minutes in a row, understanding everything that’s going on in the conversation, nodding like Churchill, until… someone asks me A Direct Question, and on cue everyone switches to Russian, the connards. There must be something loaded, some physiological weaponry housed in the Gallic shoulders, because as soon as I’m addressed directly, and all eyes are swivelling in my direction (”ah oui, it sometimes talks!”), my mind is flushed of all knowledge of the French language and I’m left gasping and mouthing like a stranded whale.

I had my first (French) French (in France) class last week. I surprised myself by managing to string several sentences together (possibly even comprehensibly), spurred into action by the total disengagement and embarassed desk-staring of my fellow “learners”. After about five minutes of nobody saying anything, I wanted to break the noses of each and every one of them. “We’re not kids any more, damnit! We’re even paying to be here! Why not at least try and take part?” So I sat and simmered some more, listening in turn to absolute silence and the elderly Brooklynite trying to explain about soy production in the weird patois of Noo Yoik English and Argentinian Spanish he seemed to think passed for French. Eventually, it got so bad I was compelled to open my mouth and slop out some vaguely Francophonic syllables, and it turns out it’s easier to talk in a class, when everyone takes it in turn and says one. Word. At. A.

Time.

Ve-ry slow-ly.

Tonight, we’re going for an apéritif dînatoire, which apparently is where you go for drinks at someone’s house and eat food at the same time but it’s not like a proper meal with an entrée and a plat and a dessert, because there’s no proper delineation between courses and you’re allowed to stand up and walk around if you like. Yes, I thought, we have these in England, with crisps and lager and pubs, but I have a feeling this may be slightly different. What’s certain is that I am going along (with my finest tin-foil hat for the Russian rays), and I will talk French with some French people. Here. In France.

Wish me luck.

Captain Beefheart says:

Like the idea of you keeping a frog blog - sorry, that one was just sitting there (Crouching there? Ribbiting there?).

Can’t believe I missed it.

I wrote something on Magpie’s blog about working from home. I didn’t mention anything about the psychotic drilling clowns living upstairs. “When you live outside the law, you have to be honest”, and I’ve failed. I think that’s a nail through the ceiling.

A week and a half after moving in, our phone line started working. It was supposed to be ready for when we moved in, but France Telecom had apparently neglected to do something important and highly technical that required three line checks and a visit from The Mumbling Engineer to remedy.

I’m a bit of a mumbler myself (when not ranting loudly and incoherently), or at least, I was - I hereby pledge that henceforth, I will talk clearly and with a fully open mouth at all times, especially to non-native English speakers. Even if it means they must suffer my English teeth, I will at least give them a fighting chance to understand what the mothering nuts is tumbling from my chiphole. I think Mumbling Engineer was trying to tell me that a clown with a test-tube had done something extremely unsavoury to a difficult red wine, but I’m not 100% sure I got my tenses right. It may have been a threat. He was clutching that screwdriver very tightly, now I think about it. I didn’t get a good look at his shoes.

Yesterday, our ADSL equipment (the excitingly, if inaccurately, named “Freebox” - it costs 29.99€ a month) finally arrived, after trauma with ColiPoste that is still too painful to recount - a mere 11 days after the line was activated. And guess what? After plugging it in, it appears we need to wait another 48 hours before it will actually work. I am currently using (shamefully, without their knowledge) a mystery neighbour’s unsecured wifi connection (pronounced “wee-fee” here), and my conscience can’t stick it for long. Not to mention it gets crap in the evenings when they must be using it too - selfish so-and-sos.

And it appears that the neighbours upstairs (possibly in revenge) are killing things with hammers and drills, and generally just having big-booted construction-worker fun. The near-constant drilling and hammering nicely complements the roadworks outside - Cacophany in Brain-Mash Minor. Trying to hold a thought (in any language) is proving even more difficult than usual.

But these are minor gripes. Two nights ago, we saw ex-Ride (and Animalhouse!) shoegazer-turned-space-rocker Mark Gardener at a venue just down the road from us. When, about half-way through the set, he and his new backing band (who I think are all called Jerome) dropped the folk and let fall a massive slab of instrumental wall! of! noise!, I was transported. Since leaving Brighton and the Republic of Heaven two weeks ago, I’ve had less opportunity than I’d like to experience high-amplitude noises in a combination of frequencies that interests and thrills - there is work to be done here.

I will remedy this!

Three days ago, I saw the “Arte” channel for the first time. Six young, attractive men and women danced, swayed and groped in a sunny courtyard. Then they were on a beach in white cotton, delicately moving to some shared and fearsome rhythm. I cackled in surprise, and with the pure joy of watching stupid foreigners doing something clearly ridiculous. Enjoying dance! Without irony!

But of course, I am the stupid foreigner. Today, my eighth day in Paris, my television has shown me Sean Lennon, Lily Allen (how did I miss she was the demon-child of Keith?) and art-rock-post-whatever-bores The Rakes attempting (Sean passably, Lily endearingly, The Rakes laughably) to conduct an interview in French. When they struggle, our host (a kind of malevolant non-ginger Chris Evans) switches to English - except with Sean Lennon, who he appeared to have taken a dislike to. The “bonus” section of the program shows the acts rehearsing before the show is filmed - cut to Sean forlornly strumming his guitar in the corridor, trying to shake out a lost pick for about seven minutes, screwing up the chords on a busked Hendrix song.

Then we have The Blur Pistols Asyl, with their new single “Intérieur Extérieur“ (or “Song 2” followed by “Girls and Boys“ with the chorus from “Anarchy In The UK“). I’m getting old. Everything I hear sounds like something else. Oh, for those teenage days when Green Day sounded so new and fresh.

I need to see something live, something with energy and couilles (get me, a French word). That is my next goal, having mastered the art of French staircases, doors, lightswitches and toilets (remarkably similar to their English counterparts) and basic purchasing of goods (except if anything more involved is required than grunts and handing over of money). But first, tonight, it’s the cinema for “A Scanner Darkly” (version originale, of course). Everyone told me the first few weeks make you tired, as your brain tries to deal with all the words being different - and it’s true. I go to bed at 10.30, more tired than after a bank holiday weekend at Legends Of The Dark Black. I need a rest. Watching French subtitles, I tell myself, will still be beneficial. I need to sign up for the French course. I need to have a study timetable. I need to start reading French blogs.

Demain, ladies and gents. Good night from Paris.