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.