The Cheek Of It

Pigs' Cheeks

One of the differences in life here is the status of butchers. In England when I left they were a fast disappearing breed. I knew of only one in the Reading area, a catchment of around a quarter of a million people. Nearly everyone seemed to buy their meat, usually packaged, from supermarkets, as I mostly did, and the only cuts of meat available were those that the supermarket had packaged. In most of the supermarkets there seemed to be little butchery knowledge available; ask a question and I got mostly blank stares or just a “No, we don't have that”. I once got myself a sausage-making attachment to a mincer but could get the skins necessary from only this one butcher in Reading.

The most obvious initial difference here is that if you want beef mince it does not come in a pack, generally even in supermarkets, but is minced before your eyes from meat that you can see. Meat is more expensive in France than in England but the quality, I find, is often correspondingly better; and expertise and advice is freely available. As it happens, the butcher I most often patronise works in a local supermarket. Talking to him the other day I remarked that I had had both pork and pork cheek in very good restaurant dishes but had never seen either on sale in a butchers. My butcher replied that beef cheek was pretty much the same as shin; the mention of pork cheek, however, sent him into ecstacies. I got the whole dramatic display, as only a Latin can do it; eyes, arms, fingers, lips all extolled the virtues of pork cheek, especially with honey and rosemary. He admitted that you wouldn't find it on sale normally, but he could get it and he would and would put it aside for me. I'm expecting to have it by the end of the week. Not only that, I fully expect to get details from him as to how best to prepare, cook and serve it. I have subsequently looked on the Web for recipes (in English) for pork cheek and found only a handful, all of which warn that you will have extreme difficulty getting hold of it. Not in a small village in France, it seems.

Mediaeval Guilds In France

It occurred to me recently to wonder at the French apparent obsession with qualifications. As a principle, I have no objection to the idea that people should be qualified for the job they are doing; on the contrary, it seems obviously a good idea. As so often though, principle and practice are quite different things.

The thought occurred as a result of the realisation that French estate agents have to be qualified to practise as such. No such qualification is required in England, although an honesty test might not come amiss. Given previous observations about house prices here, I wondered what on earth these qualifications were worth. I now know that if a buyer bids the asking price for a house the seller has to accept it, which partly explains the ridiculous initial asking prices for houses here; why not ask for the moon if someone might buy it? However, there are many other examples of qualifications that people have to have in France that do not apply elsewhere. I have noticed also, for instance, that translations from French into English by officially qualified translators frequently express the meaning more or less correctly while being couched in language that no English person would recognise as English English. So what exactly are these qualifications worth and why the obsession with them?

I've come to the conclusion that it is a latter-day manifestation of the Mediaeval guild system. Then, to practise a trade you had to be “qualified” and belong to a guild to which you owed allegiance. A recent example here is when the government proposed that shops should be alllowed to sell minor drugs, aspirin and paracetamol specifically. The instant result was a strike by chemists, who alone, they deemed, should be allowed to dispense any medicinal drug. And the strike was effective in ensuring that the government dropped the prosposal. So chemists are protected and generic aspirin and paracetamol cost around six times what they cost in the UK.

Possibly the most recent example of a closed shop in the UK, albeit nearly 40 years ago, was the print unions. They were initially challenged then by Rupert Murdoch, admittedly not everyone's cup of tea, but would anyway have been blown completely out of the water by the advent of computer printers. This kind of closed shop, I believe, encourages the idea of a right to a job for life in a specific kind of trade, a right that was initially challenged five centuries ago in the Renaissance and certainly has no place now in the global economy or even, in practice, in a national one. However it remains very much as part of the French protectionist attitude towards their own commerce; which, arguably, is costing the country an awful lot of new jobs. There are now no new jobs for qualified lime-tree flower assessors, nor even any jobs at all, however protected by guilds, nor will there ever be in the future.

Reality Versus Fantasy, French Attitudes

OK

There's a French expression often used during games of boules that got me thinking. The expression is “elle est là”, said of a shot that is neither very good nor very bad. I got to thinking about the expression because I wondered how I would translate it into English. The literal translation “the boule is there” clearly wouldn't do. So I decided on OK; the shot is OK. But the expression was ringing bells in my mind and I suddenly realised that the Ouolof in Senegal have a directly analogous construction. Greetings among the Ouolof tend to be a lengthy ritual. After the opening “assalam malakum” and response you enquire after the well-being of members in the extended family in turn, husband/wife, grandfather, grandmother, children, in-laws, etc, by asking “ana sa”(family member). The standard response to all these enquiries is “munga fa”, which literally means he/she is there. Again the translation into English would be OK; he she is OK. Ah well, I thought it was interesting.

Another Very French Attitude

Friends Claudine and Jacques from St Malo arrived in the village last week for their summer sojourn and we duly got together to chat at the pizza evening. Claudine said Jacques didn't agree with what I had written about the ELSE clause in my other blog (www.theelseclauseonline.blogspot.com). I have the utmost respect for Jacques' intelligence and his IT knowledge so wondered what his objection was. He said that the IF THEN construction worked perfectly well without the ELSE clause; you simply listed the conditions that were of interest (IF) and what should happen (THEN) if each occurred. But, I objected, what if a condition occurred that you hadn't listed? Ah well then, he replied, you have a problem. Indeed, it is exactly that problem that I was addressing. But what Jacques couldn't see was that it was a problem that needed to be addressed. His point was that you should list all the conditions that could occur and, if you did, the ELSE clause wouldn't be necessary. True but……..in reality people make mistakes; that was my point; his point was that they shouldn't make mistakes. And so we went round in circles.

This theory versus practice/reality argument seems to crop up time and again in discussions with French friends. If friend Steve or I criticise something the EU has done the attitude of our French friends seems always to be that the English don't want to be in the EU unless changes are made to better suit Britain; whereas the French are fully committed. As it happens, both Steve and I think the EU has achieved a lot that is good and are in favour of Britain remaining in the EU; but not come what may nor at any price so, yes, we do want changes; we want a dose of reality to leaven the fantasy in Brussels. So, as it happens, do our French friends; they want changes that would favour France. So where's the difference? I think the difference is essentially that the French cannot conceive of a situation where the EU would make decisions that were so against French interests that France would contemplate leaving the EU. And I think that is realistic. If the EU went strongly against French interests the French would not opt out, they would simply ignore or break the offending EU regulations, almost certainly with impunity, as they are currently doing at their Spanish and German borders. Britain, on the other hand, sees opting out as an alternative and can't seem to contemplate simply ignoring unfavourable EU decisions. But maybe we should take the same stance as the French; why see EU directives as binding if other countries don't?  Why not regard them as fantasy rather than reality?

There's a football analogy, for what it's worth, that suggests these differences may resolve themselves over time. The English have traditionally always placed more emphasis on the physical side of the game and the French on the technical side. Nowadays that difference in emphasis is far less pronounced. I remember from playing for Garches in France that although the French eschewed the aggressive and sometimes dangerous tackling that was very much part of the English game they would happily body-check players, obstruct them one way or another, without any intention of playing the ball. A dangerous tackle was a foul in France, obstruction was not, and vice-versa in England. That was fifty years ago; now both dangerous tackles and obstruction are deemed fouls on both sides of the Channel.

House Prices

I read that house prices in London are reaching ridiculous levels and there is a degree of ridiculousness about house prices here. Here it's not the high scale of the prices but the degree of variability that is ridiculous. When I was in England I seem to remember that estate agents would give you valuations of a house that were within 5-10% of one another and generally would not accept taking on the sale much outside that margin. A couple of years ago a house opposite me went on the market, with an agent, at a very optimistic 640, 000 euros. Within 18 months that price had come down to below 400,000 euros and it eventually sold for 280,000 euros. There have been numerous examples of sales around here with similar, if not quite as dramatic, variations in the initial asking price and eventual sale price. I don't understand how that degree of variation can happen if estate agents know their job but initial asking prices here undoubtedly have a touch of fantasy about them. Friends Steve and Jo are currently looking for a house nearer the centre of the village so I hope for their sakes that realism strikes sooner rather than later.