Just A Voyeur
‘One of the things we quite like is the sort of strange mix of people here, because there are some very alternative people and some very respectable-looking people, and they all seem to rub shoulders quite happily most of the time.’ Rosie didn’t raise her eyebrows when I explained that I was based near Massat, nor did she comment on what a strange place it was.
I’d arrived late at the house of Rosie and Glyn, overheated and apologetic as I confessed that I’d underestimated the time it would take to get there by bike. They’d sent directions but the existence of more than one garage on the route meant that I’d become confused by which one to turn right at. But eventually I found the potholed lane with its 50kph speed limit sign that was, as Rosie said, “a complete joke”. Soon thereafter I spotted the British-registered car that was parked at a precarious angle on the almost vertical track leading down to their house.
Rosie and Glyn graciously accepted my apologies, more concerned than annoyed about my breaking the first rule of interviewing – never be late! Glyn made his excuses, leaving me with sun-hatted Rosie to seat ourselves around a table shaded by a kiwi tree. Compared with Elaine’s “English house” and John’s “former wreck”, this house had barely been renovated or altered by the couple. The floor tiles, the faded paint and the woodwork were all old, the kind of thing that most of the other incomers would have gleefully ripped out and replaced, but I found it charming and of course it was perfectly serviceable. As I made my way though the ground floor to find the bathroom, I sensed the decades of rustic simplicity.
Rosie and her husband had based their decision on where to live with an unusual degree of logic. They’d lived in France in their youth and had family living elsewhere in the country, and had discovered the area whilst on holiday. ‘We liked the people. They seemed friendly and more open to people from other places. And we liked the things that went on round here,’ said Rosie. ‘And of course the walking’s wonderful.’
What’s more, I thought they’d chosen their house in the best possible way. ‘One day we were out walking along the track you came in on and we saw this house down here. We’d seen it in the agents but I’d never been able to place it.’ I found it hard not to smile, feeling a sense of appreciation at hearing someone, at last, give a rational reason for choosing their home. It was less a focus on finding the actual house – where the house was – and more about what was available in the place where they wanted to be.
I asked Rosie what she thought about people moving here without having visited the area beforehand. ‘I’ve no idea why anyone would do that. It seems very odd to me,’ she said. Like me, she found the forum posts interesting to read. ‘I’m just a voyeur,’ she laughed, ‘I can’t remember how I found the forum but I was just fascinated. Some people don’t seem to have any idea what they’re coming to. I did wonder if it’s been on a television programme or something,’ she mused.
I confessed that my own absorption with the forum had triggered the whole idea of this study. She nodded in understanding. ‘It’s like a soap opera, isn’t it?’ she laughed. ‘Someone recently asked a question about noisy creatures in the loft, so another member tells them that they’re loirs, or edible dormice. And the person asking said oh yes, the neighbours said they thought they were loirs but we weren’t sure what they were. I thought, hold on a minute, you’re on the internet, you could have looked it up. I suppose they thought edible dormouse was something out of Alice and not real, so they had to ask somebody English to have it confirmed. I thought it was really sweet actually.’ She laughed. ‘So I think there are whole stories in there, aren’t there?’ I nodded. There were indeed whole stories to be interpreted from just a simple question and answer. It was a charming anecdote to support the idea of pulling up the drawbridge – that the Brits are more reassured by asking each other things, even when a native expert is on hand.
As for loirs, they were indeed a noisy menace, and that autumn I’d been kept awake many nights by them running around above my head, playing ball with the nuts and small apples they were hoarding in the enclosed beam space. The couple next door had complained about them when they first moved in, but they’d now moved across into my house. Perhaps they’d been disturbed by Claude’s banging and hammering, and the stream of “fucky fuck fuck” when things weren’t going so well – all the more startling as it was the only English word I’d ever heard him utter. I didn’t fancy my chances with Vincent’s blowpipe, as I never actually saw any loirs – just heard the racket every night – but eventually I invested in a plug-in ultrasonic rodent remover, and the noise disappeared. I envisioned them decamping back to next door, carrying their apples and nuts.
Like some of the others, Rosie brought up the idea that life in the Ariège was inevitably simpler, comparing it with the UK but also elsewhere in France. Although she had family members living in France, they’d visited and declared the Ariège to be “the back of beyond”. ‘I think you’ve got to like a fairly simple life to live here. If you ever get invited into people’s houses or peer into them, they haven’t got lots of new sofas and things, they’ve got the French one that was passed down to them. They’re not always out buying stuff and all that kind of thing, so it’s a much simpler life in material terms.’ Nor was it a place for those whose idea of a better life included evening socialising. ‘Round here they seem to have a pretty short day; they get up when the sun comes up and more or less go to bed when the sun goes down. The bars here shut at 8 in the evening.’
Rosie and Glyn’s experience with the local tourist board provided a neat illustration of the Ariège approach to marketing. ‘They have an English version of their website but they were using some automatic translator and it was coming out with utter nonsense; not just bad English, it was nonsense. So we offered to do it, and Glyn sent quite a few pages through but they never did anything with them. So he’s given up. Somebody offers you free translation and you don’t take it,’ she laughed. As I’d noted, the global status of English, and its perceived economic value, had some way to go here in the Ariège. ‘These sites need to have proper English, because it’s not just for English and American people, is it?’ said Rosie. ‘It’s also for Japanese and other people who use English as an international language. If they have another language here, it seems to be Spanish, which I can understand. But I’ve been amazed at how few people have wanted to try out their English.’
I asked Rosie whether she knew many other Brits around, and she admitted that she’d come across a few but had not had any contact with them. That wasn’t entirely deliberate. ‘When we first came I said I don’t want anything to do with English people, but I’ve relapsed on that now,’ she admitted. ‘I just think they’re people like any other people. If we meet them, they might be nice, and they might not, and we may have nothing in common.’ Rosie and Glyn had seen the brilliant family in the tourist office, noticing how they’d seemed to be struggling with their limited French, and, like me, wondering how they managed with running a business. ‘It would be a tremendous disadvantage,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you’d ever find out what was going on. The local paper’s very good but even for us it’s quite challenging, as it’s always full of acronyms and I’ve no idea what they are. But for people over here trying to run businesses with no French or very little, I don’t know how you do that, because the red tape is massive.’
Both Rosie and Glyn had studied French to degree level and considered themselves to be proficient in the language. But she supported my observation that it wasn’t always about the language itself; confidence and personality were also significant factors. I’d noted how Pat and John were confident enough to go to every local event, despite having very basic French, and even when people didn’t understand them, it was the fault of the French. Yet Rosie found some situations difficult, not because of the language itself, but more from how she saw herself reflected back in the interaction. ‘I’m not very confident. It d
epends on the person I’m speaking to. As soon as anyone slightly doesn’t like me because I’m a foreigner or something then I start stammering and stuttering all over the place, which is crazy.’
I found it interesting that she included being foreign as a possible reason for dislike. It linked back to the idea of identity and how it’s a two-way process – not just how we see ourselves, but how we perceive others see us, reflected back as in a mirror. All of this can affect our sense of belonging, self-respect and self-esteem. In foreign-language situations it can be exacerbated, to the point that researchers have termed the phenomenon Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) – a feeling of tension and apprehension when trying to speak and be understood in another language. For the Brits in France, with that shadow of the stereotype hanging over them, it could go beyond anxiety about simply being understood. Who would want to be seen as the monolingual Brit caricature?
According to academic Dr Gianfranco Conti, it’s down to the way that anxiety affects our working memory. When we’re working out what to say, we store what we’ve already said while also processing the next bits. Working memory also plays a role in learning vocabulary, as it notices and encodes new words. Words and sounds are held within our working memory by something called the “phonological loop”, but when we get anxious, our inner “thinking” voice takes up too much of our sound storage resources, hampering our ability to store and process what we’re hearing.
So I could understand Rosie’s reasoning, although whether it was based on a real or imagined dislike of her foreignness was difficult to know. It was nevertheless down to how she perceived herself as being seen, that idea of a mirror in interaction; if you feel others perceive you negatively, you become flustered. I now understood better why my own French turned into rambling repetition when talking to officials or friends, because these were higher-stake situations where I was anxious about not being seen as an idiot, or that Brits in France stereotype. Yet the same mediocre French would come to life in random conversations with strangers where I was just a foreigner out for a walk.
I got up to go but sat down again when Rosie invited me to stay for lunch. Glyn had kept out of the way during the interview, but he became much more garrulous once my notebook was out of the way. We sat around the table and chatted like friends as we pored over maps of the area, with them recommending routes around Coumebière, and me pointing out the routes up to Goutets. Eventually I got back on the bike, freewheeling around the potholes back down to the main road where I was grateful for the shaded valley that kept the sun away. It was hotter than ever.
The Online Amusement Arcade
Ever since that first interview with Gerald, I’d been contemplating his idea of a particularly English sense of humour here in France. It wasn’t just his claim that the French tend to expect us to be humorous and eccentric, but also the anthropologists’ assertion that humour has a central importance when the English interact. Rosie’s reference to observing the forum as like watching a soap opera sent me back to it to gauge the centrality of wit in the online interactions. What I found was, indeed, a natural undercurrent of humour throughout the posts.
As in conversation, the English trait of not taking oneself too seriously cropped up, although, as always, not everyone understood the intended irony. One discussion focused on the complications of French bureaucracy when setting up small enterprises, and it invited a comment At least it keeps the competition to a minimum!!!!. One member missed the irony and replied, in seriousness, That might be ok for some people, so that the original poster felt obliged to explain: You took me toooooo seriously… I was only having a laugh… no one in their right mind would start up a small business.
The importance of not taking oneself too seriously was strongly reinforced against one particular forum member who just seemed to be permanently angry. There was no humour in his own rants, but the other members made up for it by drawing on their own wit to deflate his self-importance. He had harangued against what he saw as the British drop-outs, claiming that he and his wife work f***ing hard at living and working with the French. He’d gone into detail about their struggles, mentioning how they’d worked at cleaning stairs and offices and toilets; they’d done unpaid work experience and at one point one of them had been in a wheelchair. All of this had been addressed to another member – a sad person who does nothing to move on in life – whose “crime” was to have merely said how difficult she’d found it to gain employment in the Ariège. The other members replied with irony: I trust that you do not work in the customer service industry? as well as a parody of a parody from a classic Monty Python sketch: Please cease with the “our father used to wake us up an hour before we went to bed and feed us cold gravel for breakfast” routine. And when the same angry member listed his local involvement and asked what everyone else put back into the community, the immediate response was Well said, Mother Theresa of Ariège.
But was all this humour merely a national characteristic of the English, a default mode to be funny and ironic, or was there something else going on? So many examples drew on things that were familiar to people from the UK that I began to see it as a kind of in-group solidarity, using humour to sustain an emotional connection with each other here in France by referring to things that were peculiarly British. A member who’d ranted about French business practices – the mangy corpse of French retailing – had subsequently tried to temper his criticism by claiming I’m not for painting the Ariège B&Q orange either, a wry metaphor on the homogeneous state of English out-of-town centres. Another member asked about where to buy furniture and received the response Don’t forget IKEA down at Toulouse. I know that they’re the furniture equivalent of Ryanair (obloquy be upon them). This led to a stream of jokes ranging around English cities: I get the weirdest feeling when I’m walking round Ikea in Toulouse. After I’ve been in there about 45 minutes, I swear when I walk through the exit I’m going to find myself in the car park of its Bristol branch.
The humour continued when the angry member raised his head in yet another criticism of the UKers, stating: You lot will never learn. If they don’t speak English you are all lost sheep in a huge field. Presumably he saw the references to IKEA as yet more evidence that the Brits were reliant on English-speaking services, despite IKEA being Swedish of course. His comment received the best kind of snub: an almost total disregard apart from one indirect response: I was in IKEA Bristol on Thursday and noticed everyone was speaking English! I showed this example of English irony to a French friend, who shook her head, saying ‘I don’t understand why that’s funny.’
Yet the Brits generally avoided using humour on the forum to poke gentle fun at the French. The one extended rant that I saw against French business customs generated a stream of protests from the other members. It started out with black humour about the inability to go shopping during the two-hour midday break: At 12:00 prompt I would like to be in the car park outside the Carcassonne branch of Darty, whereupon I would hurl a brick through its window. I’d then crunch my way into the shop across the debris, put a couple of batteries in my pocket, slap the money on the counter and crunch out bellowing a cheery “thank you” over my shoulder. After this exaggerated opening, the member explained the reasoning behind it: How in the hell can a business afford to keep the lights on with all that working capital on the shelves and human capital on the payroll when willing customers have their noses pressed up against the glass from 12:00 to 14:00? More criticism followed about the fact that prices were often absent or incorrect. Where’s the bloody manager? What do you do all day apart from prepare for and recover from your two-hour lunch break? Get a bloody clue!!!!
Despite the attempt to lighten the tirade with sarcasm and hyperbole, the underlying grievance was quickly and firmly stamped upon, with other members unanimous in their support for the French way of life. I came to the Ariège because it was slow, laid-back… a bit behind the times. I wanted to get away from the mad 24/7 existence I hav
e in the UK. And if the Brits didn’t like it, well, it wasn’t down to the French to change, but the incomers: I MUST LEARN TO CHANGE, I do not want the Ariège to change. I guessed that people were aware of how easy it was to become hypocritical, something highlighted in the Britlands of Périgord by the journalist Fralon, who noted how incomers would claim that they’d left England for the French way of life and the leisurely lunch break, yet still expect a shopkeeper to leave his lunch table and serve them if they were in a hurry.
Gently satirising the French is often seen in the relocation literature, such as Mayle’s likening of the Provençal physical welcome to an airport frisking. Yet I came across very little mockery of the French on the forum, and none during my chats with the English. It didn’t seem that surprising, since the incomers were only too aware that they were guests of the French. What’s more, few would want to be seen as that British stereotype, acting like a colonial, coming in and changing things to suit what they were used to. The very existence of the stereotype is a threat to the incomers, since none of them wants to be aligned to it. It was therefore understandable that humour was used more often to try and neutralise that threat by making fun of the dependent Brits.
A House at the End of the Track Page 19
