As any good salesperson will tell you, you have to sell the sizzle, not the sausage.

But you can’t be all sizzle no sausage, either. If you ain’t got the sausage to back it up, then sizzle alone will only get you so far.

As you may remember, a we while back, I started a small business in France.

Well, to be fair, my wife started the business, I just sort of turn up and cut the hedges, do the lawns, provide petit bricolage work or whatever the client needs done. Deep tissue massage has recently been added to the long list of services rendered by Kiwi Jardins.

But we have a strict no happy ending’s policy, for tax reasons.

As a marketing push, to get the word out and build the client base, we shamelessly used New Zealand’s untouched image for our own personal commercial gain.

For a very reasonable fee, I will turn your tired patch of abandoned dirt and mauvaises herbes into a little slice of New Zealand.

We’ve been holding a special offer on the Te Awamutu package for the month of July, and for a very palatable ninety-five euro more you can upgrade to the Milford sound experience.

I basically just turn up, plant a fern or two and throw some moss around, but most importantly, I bring the sizzle.

Clients will often hold a New Zealand postcard up beside their new garden with a sceptical look.

C’est pas la même chose? They may say.

I remind them that it took eons to create Aotearoa. You can’t expect to attain it in one day of landscaping, but if they subscribe to the annual package, then I’ll be able to get pretty damn close.

The idea of leaving the corporate world and setting up a landscaping business in the French countryside may sound idyllic, some days it very much is.

Driving to a neighbouring village to work in a French garden, pausing only to sample the local boulangerie, can make for a down right pleasant day.

Though it is not without its challenges.

One of the first hurdles comes with turning up for le devis (the quote).

At first my wife came along to hold my hand. If I was a good boy and it all went well she’d give me a juicebox on the way home.

Luckily my French has reached a level where I can handle liaising with clients and installing enough confidence in them to accept le devis, so I can get to work and start bringing home some serious lardon.

Believe me the devis can turn real pear shaped, real quickly.

Mowing lawns and cutting hedges gets old quickly, so when the opportunity comes along to sink your teeth into something a little juicier, like building a fence, installing an irrigation system or providing some genuine landscaping, you can’t let it slip you by.

It’s a double edged sword, you need to appear competent and be taken seriously, but you also have to carry out a kind of screening of the potential client, searching for signs of insanity. Are they going to actually pay? Can they smell my vulnerability?

It is a funny system, one that the modern world is built upon. Strangers providing services to strangers, using a handshake as a promise that neither is going to screw the other person over. If anything it’s something to take a great deal of optimism in for the human race. That most of the time, everything turns out great. Services are rendered, currencies are exchanged, and the carousel keeps spinning.

My wife will get a call out of the blue, from someone who was recommended our service.

Believe me it’s better this way. I fumble the call almost always.

Most new clients come from bouche a oreille. (Mouth to ear)

l’ll get a name and address, then it’s up to me to turn up, meet the client and arrange le devis.

First of all, the client will arrive to the door, stunned that I’ve not only turned up, but turned up on time. Some see this as desperation, suspicious even and often proceed with caution.

Contrary to popular belief, the French are actually very friendly, when they are not in public. I will be invited into their house or garden, and the dance begins. Small talk is the first challenge.

One client invited me inside, for me to assess changing her entire guttering system. A juicy devis indeed. She lead with:

“Malheureusement, mon mari est décédé récemment, et il faisait généralement ces choses-la.” (Unfortunately, my husband recently passed away and he would usually do these things)

Not entirely understanding every word, as they had mumbled the sentence with an unctuous patois, I went with.

“Bah… Cool, super.”

Devis décliné.

Another client asked:

“Je veux que tu tailles tout l’arbre. Taille-le sévèrement.” (I want you to prune the whole tree. Give it a big cut back.) Once again, mumbled in a thick breton accent where all of the words merge into one beautiful and indecipherable song.

I had thought she wanted me to cut the tree down. She accepted the quote, I drop-started my chainsaw and went to work. With the voracious teeth of my chainsaw millimetres away from its trunk, I felt a delicate hand grasp my arm and a distressed client stood beside me.

Turns out that it had been a tree she had planted when her oldest son was born. My bad.

I wont bore you with all of the titillating misunderstandings but there is an entire novel of them stored away.

My initial business plan was a simple one.

Arrive into the market, undercut the competition, steal work from locals and unbeknownst to me perpetuate the momentum of the far right movement within my local community.

This was shortsighted and foolhardy.

It’s never a good idea to piss off local landscapers anyway, you might just find yourself in a nasty… turf war or end up on the wrong side of the whipper-snipper.

I’ve since learnt a few things about servicing the French.

The French don’t want fast. They don’t want cheap.

They are offended by both of these ideas. They want the exact opposite in fact.

When you order a Big Mac in France, yes it will take ten minutes longer but the pickles won’t be stuck to the lid of the box, the cheese won’t somehow be hanging out the side, and the lettuce will be more or less placed between the buns.

They want you to take the utmost care in your work, they want you to take your time. They expect you to take a cigarette break every forty-five minutes. They want you to join them for lunch, then they want you to send them a generous facture (invoice) that reflects the good work you’ve done.

Lucky for me, there have been no turf wars and no whipper-snippering’s. There is no need to undercut the market, because there is a surplus of work to go round.

This is by and large due to an initiative introduced by the French Government called Le Crédit d’Impot.

To incentivise people to use services and deter service providers from resorting to cashee’s, because let’s face it, who doesn’t love a good cashee? The French government introduced an initiative where they will pay for half of the fee of any service rendered on someone’s home.

This initiative has been the carrot that has kept us in business. People are more than happy to pay for someone to do it for them, knowing that the state will reimburse them for half. At the end of the day, all of the money goes back into the local economy one way or another.

I know what you’re thinking, but hey Nick, that sounds a lot like socialism? And socialism is basically communism? And if that’s the case then why the hell did we fight that war in Vietnam?

Well, it’s socialism light. France, among its flaws, has struck a very good balance of a capitalist system that is delicately seasoned with socialism. The state has a great deal of intervention with your everyday life, but it’s usually positive. Yes, this requires regulation, and that is annoying as all hell, but its well intentioned government over-reach.

The French government is like an overbearing parent. Not a tyrannical parent that wants to control and impose its will, it’s more like the wealthy and smothering parent who can’t resist spoiling their kids. They insist on helping you pay for things and making sure your needs are met.

Being an auto-entrepreneur can be the very best, and the very worst.

When things are good it’s great, it’s days spent in the sun, getting a peak (often through the window) of day to day french life.

However when things are bad it’s the worst.

You can never offload anything up the chain of command for a manager to handle. If and when anything happens, it’s you that needs to fix it.

It’s your van breaking down on the way to the first job of the week and having to get yourself to the nearest Leclerc Location (car hire) to hire a truck. Being two hours late to your first job of the week (which is still early by french standards) because you are dealing with the poor soul at the rental car booth who spends their days handling pissed off customers.

It’s getting to the end of a huge week where you feel like your backs going to give out and realising that after paying for the rental and replacement parts for your broken down van that this thirty eight hour week actually ended up costing you money, and now you need to spend your saturday installing the new alternator.

It’s turning up to a complete stranger’s house and trusting their sanity and good nature. That they’re not going to try and take advantage of any language difficulties and try and squeeze you.

I’ve had to shake down retirees for my cheque more than once.

It’s finishing a two metre high, eighty-metre long, wrap around hedge that’s taken you three days to complete and the elderly client taking a cursory glance at it then requesting you to; ‘cut another five centimeters off the top.’

Once again, I have a novella of these interactions.

Though it’s far more common for a client to insist on you sitting down for a proper lunch with them, than for them to take advantage.

At 90% of the jobs I’m blown away by how decent and hospitable the typical Breton is.

People are more likely to baulk at the price and think that I’ve made a mistake and undercharged them. I’m more likely to be stopped by a client who is concerned if I’ve eaten lunch yet. Most people are nice.

The French have an innate respect for the individual.

I have a lot of time to think while working, and one theory that crossed my mind was that perhaps the revolution is still fresh in their collective memory.

If I’m ever in a position where the client is being difficult, It’s in my interest to try and trigger certain memories. One good technique, to try and delve deep into the subconscious is to park up outside a window, and eat an enormous slice of cake. Or if that is too subtle, taking my pair of hedging shares and slowly sharpening the blade, as if it were a guillotine.

It’s in the upper classes best interests to keep the working class happy, lest history repeat itself.

We picked a quaint little town in the arse end of nowhere to enjoy a week of as much indulgence and debauchery as a ten-month-old baby will allow.

Guantánamo Bay itself cannot recreate the kind of torture that is looking after a stroppy baby whilst hungover, so we had to keep things relatively in check.

Contrary to popular belief, the French work hard, they just vacation a little harder.

It was great to be included among the French in their natural habitat, en vacances.

Since the country basically shuts down for the month of August, I also got the chance to catch up with some kiwi’s.

Magical things happen when kiwi’s meet up after long absences in strange lands.

It’s a great chance to share stories and generally bitch & moan about the daily micro-injustices that we all suffer whilst living under the current regime in French occupied France.

After a few apéritifs, my friend told me an absolute doozy of a recent misadventure.

He was looking after his kids during one of the canicules (heat waves) that have hit our region this summer.

He is a microbiologist working for a Dutch laboratory.

He had to work from home, which of course doesn’t have air-conditioning, as AC is considered to be the work of the devil here.

French people cool themselves the old-fashioned way, by drinking Pastis and making love.

As the mercury outside passed 37 degrees, it became harder & harder to sit back and watch his kids fidgeting in the heat.

He decided to take them to the local piscine (pool).

They paid their fee, and as the kids excitedly race-walked around the edge of the pool he told them that he had to send a couple of emails before joining them in five or ten minutes.

As he finished his second email, he heard an authoritative blast from the lifeguards whistle. It caused the raucousness of the play pool to seise for just a moment.

He looked up from his phone and was surprised to see the flamboyant lifeguard was gesturing for his two boys to come to the side of the pool.

Admittedly he hadn’t been watching them, but they were well-behaved boys, he couldn’t imagine that they had both done something bad in the five minutes he’d left them to swim.

The lifeguard was ordering them to gather their things and leave the pool immediately.

He couldn’t understand what on earth his boys had done.

He had upped his French lessons recently. Subscribing to a twelve-week online boot-camp to give his French a shot in the arm, but for the life of him, none of what the overly-zealous lifeguard was saying made any sense.

No matter how much study and practice you do, everyday life will throw you some verbiage that makes you realise you’re still just a toddler, trying to swim in the big kids pool.

“It’s the tog’s dad, he’s saying they’re illegal,” said his son, who speaks fluent French.

It was upon hearing such a nonsensical phrase, illegal togs, that funnily enough things started to make sense.

He took a look around the public pool and realised that every single male body within the entire complex was dressed in the same kind of speedo-esque togs or un slip as they are known.

As I have alluded to earlier, in New Zealand only triathletes and perverts wear speedo’s so to see an entire community pool wearing nothing but this exact article can take some processing.

Walking into a public pool in France can be intense. It’s like being invited to a Ricky Martin pool party that never ends.

“Ces maillots de bain sont strictement interdits,” (these togs are strictly forbidden) the guard kept repeating, pointing to the boys loose fitting togs and gesturing them towards the door.

“Mais pourquoi?” My friend asked, remembering that while living in France, you must respect the French ways.

“Ce n’est pas hygiénique,” (They’re not hygienic) responded the guard.

“Bah, je suis un microbiologiste?” he tried to say, but in vain.

Good luck arguing with a fired-up French lifeguard. He probably thought he was saying that he had a micro-penis, not that he was a micro-biologist.

Trying to explain bacteria’s indifference to the elasticity of one’s swimming garments is futile while fumbling with a romance language.

He was out of his depth, ironically.

As they were escorted outside the building, the lifeguard appreciated how bizarre the situation might have been for the man with the micro-penis and his two boys, who didn’t realise they were complicit in a biological attack.

He explained that if the health inspector came and saw them not wearing their sanctioned speedo’s that the pool would be closed and a mandatory investigation would be carried out.

My friend re-paid his pool fee and purchased three pairs of slips, and was once again let in through the same gates.

Ever the microbiologist, he racked his brain to think about why they would feel the need to nationally mandate speedo’s to be worn in public pools.

In the nineteen nineties, under the Jenny Shipley government, New Zealand actually tried to ban the wearing of speedo’s in public pools.

The general public opinion was that New Zealanders should be free to attend any public pool without getting a peak into the fruit bowl every time uncle Garry does his tumble-turn.

There must have been just cause. You don’t just pass laws willy-nilly. There must have been long lunches, lobbyists, back door deals, perhaps even a referendum?

There must have been a shitload of incidents to have justified it. French people don’t just roll over without a damn good reason.

The best he came up with, was that the tight-fitting speedo’s, would better contain any and all fecal matter in the event of a catastrophe, or a code brown as it’s officially known.

My own rather puerile musings would conclude that if and when it came to a code brown, in a public pool, the stakes are a little higher in France, than most other countries, given the diet and lifestyle choices.

My friend did a little digging as to how the nationwide sanctioning of speedo’s came about, and he came to learn about an incident which took place in 1989 at a public pool in Pleucadeuc.

The incident is one that will forever live in infamy and is known as Brown Monday.

It was a couple of hours after a notorious gourmand by the name of Hervé Pinot had finished a particularly indulgent full degustation lunch.

It was Monday after all, so he treated himself to an entrée of andouille chaude and for his main course a large portion of Poulet Maroille.

Following this he enjoyed a selection of cheeses including his favourite Roquefort, before slating his sweet tooth with a rich double-cream mousse au chocolate.

After digesting, Hervé thought a nice dip in the Pleucadeuc pool could be just the thing to help with his pesky stomach cramps.

The town is still a somber place to visit and to this day the pool remains closed.

You ask the people about what it used to be like, and they are reluctant to even talk about it.

It’s considered France’s Chernobyl.

Similar instances occurred in Questembert and Montcuq. These kinds of things always seem to happen in threes.

Now I understand why speedo’s are compulsory in all public pools in France and I wear them gladly. Part of me enjoys it even.

In memory of Brown Monday. Pluecadeuc, 1989.

I am happy to say that my French has improved drastically.

It’s the kind of thing that happens so slowly that you don’t notice it in the day to day.

Kind of like getting fat, which has also happened to me, simultaneously.

It’s not until you catch up with someone after a long period of time that they notice.

“Oh la vache, tu as devenu gros, mais ton français est un peu meilleur.” (Holy cow, you’ve gotten fat, but your French is a little bit better)

I can say the correct words, and shit, sometimes I can even say them in the right order.

It’s fair to say that I’ve progressed to being a toddler peeking over the edge of the table with a big dribble patch spreading down my shirt trying to prove to the adults that I'm a serious person, who should be taken seriously.

I am that insufferable person at the dinner party, who talks about the weather, who makes agonising small talk and shares mundane observations in long-winded sentences.

It means that interesting people who you might actually want to speak to, aren’t interested in speaking to you, and the people who seem magnetised to you are the kinds of people who want to talk about the weather and exchange tepid observations.

La situation Catch vingt-deux.

After all my hard fought progress, there isn’t a French person in France that would accuse me of being able to speak French.

As I’ve alluded to earlier, you can either speak French or not speak French. There is no middle ground.

I have entire conversations with locals, covering a broad range of topics, only for them to later ask the question: “Il ne parle toujours pas français?” (He still can’t speak French?)

The missing link is that I still think in English and then speak in French.

In the heat of the conversation, I still consciously endeavour to copy and paste French words onto an English sentence. The problem being, that French is back to front.

Tu peux me passer le saucisson? Word for word translates into: You-can-me-pass the saucisson?

When you think in English, then speak in French, your brain gets plopped into a kind of blender and a bizarre frenglish sludge tumbles from your mouth.

French is also supposed to be effortless, and believe it or not this is the hardest part.

In order to speak like the French, you must think like the French, and this requires at least two glasses of cote de provence rosé (in summer) and at least half a length of saucisson (all year round).

Sometimes this can be impractical.

Though at other times, when the sunshine dances in my glass of wine and I hear the two best words in the French language; a table (go to the table), I have fleeting moments when I get a feel for it.

My white-knuckled grip eases, and it flows of its own volition.

A phrase wafts from within me, unforced, and the only person within earshot will give me a surreptitious wink, before refilling my glass and the dance continues.

I can now understand every word that the attendant at Norauto insults me with; “J’ai du mal à comprendre cet Anglais grossier.” (I don’t understand what this fat Englishman is saying.)

I just can’t form a witty comeback in the heat of the moment.

So I just sort of say: “Pffff, tu es grossi pffff!”

Though my genuine experience is that the majority of French people are friendly. I haven’t taken any official polls but I would say at least 52% of the population are nice.

The remaining 48% can be hard work.

I may have fudged the exact numbers and exaggerated these polls a little, so allow for a fifteen percent adjustment.

It could easily be as much as 65% who are hard work.

Je blague. Je blague. Je suis très coquin.

I am sympathetic, though. The average patriotic French person doesn’t want their belle langue diluted or denigrated, like mixing a fine cognac with Coca-Cola.

I slam back bourbon & cokes while doing donuts over the pristine lawns of Versailles, verbally speaking.

Though it’s not just a matter of language. It’s also learning how long you can absolutely suck, without letting it get the better of you.

Far easier said than done, especially for a guy like me who loves a good pat on the back and a tummy tickle.

You’ve gotta appreciate the comedy, though it can sometimes be tiresome being the punchline.

Speaking a sentence in French is kind of like taking an underground metro across Paris.

Every infinitesimal detail is of absolute importance.

At every error in conjugation, or gendering, or pluralising or the incorrect use of passé composé, or adding intonations, or just not speaking with the right cadence, is like taking the wrong metro line.

Instead of ending up at Lamarck Caulaincourt eating a clafoutis, you’ll end up under a railway bridge in Rochechouart holding warm andouille, and that’s no place to be.

I am now very used to ending up on the wrong side of the tracks.

The other day I was doing some landscaping work, installing some drainage on a retired couple's petite ferme.

The client walked over for a chat, though she didn’t seem to have much to say, so I led the dance. The verbal equivalent of the blind leading the blind. Perhaps the dumb leading the stupid. Yeah.

This happens more than you’d think. I always seem to stumble into some obscure and inescapable awkward position.

Like a bumblebee trapped in the corner of a window.

As I clutched at straws for things to talk about, a giant bird that was either a duck or a goose, sometimes it can be hard to tell, waddled in front of us, as her grumpy old husband pottered away in the potager (vegetable garden).

“C’est un gros connard?” I asked, nodding toward the bird.

It turns out that the word I was looking for was canard (duck) not connard (arsehole).

She looked over at her dear old husband of forty years, then back at me and she wrestled with conflicting emotions.

The funny thing is that he was kind of an arsehole, and surely she knew that more than anybody.

“Excusez-moi monsieur, c’est mon mari, vous ne parlez pas comme ça,” she said.

I had obviously offended this lady in some way. That was obvious by her tone, by why, I knew not.

By now the enormous duck, or goose, had waddled off and only her husband remained, picking what appeared to be turnips, with a miserly look on his face.

She paid la facture promptly and I haven’t been back.

Another example of trying to catch the metro to Place de Clichy but ending up in La Merde came recently when we had to attend mandatory birthing classes in the lead up to the due date of le bébé.

On a side note- It’s funny how different things in life get prioritised. In France it takes two weeks of full-time study before you can get your permit E to tow a decent sized trailer, but to prepare you for the most important job of your life, being a parent, you have four one hour classes.

Understandably, the people giving the birthing classes need to assume that you are the lowest common denominator. They need to assume that you have the parental intuition of a bull walrus.

I did nothing to disabuse the birth instructors of the walrus status.

When the birthing instructor saw that I was perhaps a little slow in following some of the simple instructions, and that my wife had to often intervene as I fumbled with the life-like baby mannequin, she thought it prudent to take a more hands-on approach with me.

At the end of a long-winded and verbose explanation about something baby related, she saw my vacant expression, and singled me out: “Quand votre bébé sera contrarié, allez-vous secouer le bébé monsieur?” (When your baby is upset, are you going to shake the baby?) She asked me.

Some words in French are the same or similar as English. I call these freebies.

Secure, I believed, was one of them.

I responded: “Bien sur, je vais secouer le bébé?” (Of course I will shake the baby.)

What am I some kind of moron? What kind of idiot wouldn’t secure an upset baby?

I can still see the look of sullen shock on her face, as I responded so casually, as if I was slightly offended at being asked such a simple question.

At such times, you’ve only got to laugh.

Like water off a canard’s back.

At times it’s almost got a nineteen-fifties vibe, without the incessant racism. Well, that’s not strictly true. There’s a great deal of racism, but that’s another bisque entirely.

At first I found the rambling pace oddly infuriating. I’m the kind of person who appreciates a speedy transaction. The idea of holding someone up is something I can’t abide.

It’s fairly common to be three trolleys deep at the Leclerc checkouts, feeling like I'm gonna explode as Cécile has a catch-up with the checkout operator. She would give the line of trolleys behind her a nonchalant glance before the coupons came out.
Twenty euro on chèques vacances, twenty on tickets resto, 30% off the laundry powder with the mailer, 15 euro on her Leclerc loyalty card, and the rest by cheque.

The general French population seems to have the rare superpower of genuinely not giving a fuck. (Putain.)

The other day I pulled up behind a car that was stopped in the middle of the roundabout. Before I could get out and give the guy a hand pushing his broken-down Renault 15 onto the side of the road, I realised that he had just recognised someone he knew driving past—and they stopped to have a chat and a catch-up.

I had my palm poised over the klaxon, ready to give this rude prick a blast, before I took a deep breath and waited. The Renault 15 went into gear, and off he went, and off I went. None the worse for wear for having to wait three extra seconds at the rond-point.

One thing that the Anglos do better than the French is giving a fuck.

We love mortification.

The word mort means death in French, so maybe that explains their aversion to the feeling.
The customer is always right in the Anglo world, and if one’s customer experience has been compromised in any way, it is expected that the sales assistant feels a deep existential mortification for the stranger who has walked in off the street to purchase their half-price tea towels.

If the giant megalithic company makes even the slightest indiscretion with my purchase, then it is expected for the person wearing the T-shirt with the logo to offer a downpayment of mortification.

As a customer, this satisfies my needs.

It is my right.

The French seem impervious to this. In fact, the only way to mortify the French is to put mayonnaise with pâté, or to use any other cheese than raclette… for raclette.

The other day I placed an order with the French Bunnings (Mr Bricolage).

The next day I got the confirmation email saying your order is ready with a big green tick and an order number.

I drove to the Mr Bricolage, said hello to the friendly staff member, and showed them my order number.

He typed it into the computer, then looked blankly back at me and said, “Ce n’est pas prêt.” (It’s not ready.)

No mortification, no heartfelt and personal apology, just a nonchalant stare back at me followed by a sniff.

I immediately felt uncomfortable. This person should be making urgent phone calls—my customer experience is in dire threat of being compromised—and this man doesn’t seem to care.

“Bah, bah, pffff?” I said, raising my hands slightly.

The man said nothing.

“Quand est-ce que c’est prêt ?” (When is it ready?) I said.

“Quoi ?” (What?) he said.

“Quand est-ce que, c’est prêt ?” I repeated.

“Eet, eez, not, raddy,” said Mr Bricolage.

“Oui, j’ai compris, mais, quand ? Quand ?” I said. (I understand. But when?)

“Je sais pas,” (I don’t know) he said casually, and the matter was finished.

I felt the righteous indignation of the all-powerful customer. I wanted flustered faces. I wanted fumbling promises and sweet nothings. I wanted him to take out a damn saxophone and serenade me with Careless Whispers.

He took a relaxed/slightly irritated breath and picked up the phone, where he had a low-energy, mumbled conversation.

“Une heure, peut-être plus,” he said. (One hour, maybe more.)

“Pfffffff, ah la-la-la-la-la,” I said, sounding more French than I ever have.

“À bientôt,” the man said with no feelings of animosity.

He genuinely could not have cared any less. It was a technical issue. A clerical issue of which he had zero power over, and so he felt zero responsibility.

My low blood sugar may have been impacting my mood, and there was a Subway a few shops down.

The French Subways come with a preselected recipe, which has been curated by a sandwich chef so as not to have a clash of flavours or overwhelm the palate.

I, of course, fall into the trap of putting 18 different ingredients into my sandwich so that it turns out tasting like everything and yet also tasting like nothing.

The first time I visited a French Subway, I declined the pre-chosen recipe. It only had three different veggies and one sauce.

When I declined the pre-selection, the person looked at me dubiously and urged caution.

“Attendez monsieur, les poivrons et les jalapeños ? Doucement.”

If there is one thing that I wholeheartedly trust the French on, it’s food. Since arriving, I haven’t put a single thing in my mouth that didn’t bring me le bonheur.

The French simply will not tolerate anything that isn’t delicious.

On this day, I went with the pre-chosen recette.

“Je vais prendre la recette, s’il vous plaît,” I said.

“Quoi ?” the person replied.

“La recette,” I repeated.

“We dant av roast boefe?” he said.

Breathe, repeat.

He made the sandwich slowly. Purposefully.

For one blinking moment, I felt irritation.

Hurry up, can’t you see I’ve got places to be?

Though I really didn’t. I had, une heure, peut-être plus.

It was also lunchtime in the town where I work, and it’s strictly interdit in France to use loud machinery between the hours of twelve and two p.m.

Everyone stops, and the world seems to take a long deep breath.

Plus, my order wouldn’t be ready for most likely two hours, so really I had no place to rush to. Why not take my time?

I remembered watching him through the sneeze guard. His cornichon placement was exquisite. Purposeful. Evenly spaced.

The sandwich artist cared about what he was doing. Perhaps it was his first week on the job, and perhaps it will be only a matter of time before he’s micromanaged into a lean, mean, sandwich (sandwich) making machine—but in that moment, I enjoyed watching this guy care about the placement of the cornichons.

This part of the world seems to live in defiance of the maniacal pace which the modern world demands.

Faster and faster, but faster to what?

You rush through all the little things only to arrive where?

Sooner or later it stops making sense.

I must confess, it was the best Subway I have ever had. It wasn’t a maelstrom of every flavour, culminating in a kind of flavourlessness. It really was a perfectly balanced sandwich.

“C'était délicieux,” (That was delicious) I said to the sandwich artist as I left.

“Quoi ?” (What?) he said.

I arrived back at Mr Bricolage in a better mood. My order still wasn’t ready.

“Désolé monsieur, c’est un problème avec les ordinateurs,” he said. (There’s a problem with the computers.)
Pierre had probably been on the receiving end of thousands of kilowatts of negative energy directed at him from sad people, and earlier I'd just tried to zap him with my own little taser.

He probably had dreams that were far bigger than building supplies.

It’s kind of a strange expectation, really—that the sales assistant should give a little piece of themselves to every customer.

For an individual to prioritise a commercial juggernaut over their own humanity.

“C’est pas grave,” I said.

I was pretty keen to go back and have another sub du jour (sub of the day) anyway. I probably should have taken the footlong in the first place. That’ll kill another half an hour.

Oh life.

I apologize for my abrupt departure. I hate goodbyes. I’ve always preferred the Houdini.

Looking back upon the first season of the bisque, I admit it did become a tad too cynical and self-pitying. I was thinking of changing the name to My Struggle, but I don’t think it would have translated too well in Germany.

The mind is a strange thing indeed. It can make a heaven from hell and a hell from heaven. If your mind is furnished with negative thoughts, then it doesn’t really matter what room you find yourself in—or evidently, what country.

But we all get a little lost sometimes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s how we grow.

Yet it has come to my attention that everyone else’s problems are infinitely worse than my own. Most of my friends in New Zealand are starving, and those conscientious enough to be able to buy a house have been forced into a life of crime and prostitution/OnlyFans to keep up with the extortionate interest rates on their mortgages.

The rest are scraping together enough to pay rent. Some have had to sell their children.

The birth of my son has changed everything.

Suddenly there are no more valid excuses for your own shortcomings. You’re no longer allowed to feel sorry for yourself or to feel like you're an innocent bystander in your own life.

The question is a simple one: do I want my son to think of me as a miserable arsehole or someone who he could one day be proud of?

It’s a pretty easy decision, really. So it’s time to dust off the crampons, strap them onto my shins and climb out of this self-dug rut that I've found myself in.

If you did enjoy the tone of my former bisques, then might I suggest The Diary of Anne Frank or perhaps The Long Walk to Freedom. They should shine a more legitimate light on the depths of human suffering than my own meek musings of someone living in France but feeling hard done by for not being able to speak French—well.

Life used to be simple. Then me and my wife went and co-created a new life.

Admittedly, she did most of the heavy lifting, but I like to think I was a good spotter.

Suddenly, those dreams we had of becoming indie filmmakers? Are looking unlikely.

Those plans to ride a motorbike through South East Asia? Poof. Pushed back by two decades.

You can kiss those Countach Dreams goodbye pal.

It’s a Renault Espace that smells like hot baby sick from here on out.

But it’s time. The party’s over. The barstools have been upturned on the table tops and some kind of ironic song like Closing Time is playing.

I won’t bore you too much about the baby stuff. Or endeavour to put into words the new love that’s entered my life. There really aren’t any that quite manage to capture the feeling.

It’s like hearing every Celine Dion power ballad at once, only it’s even more powerful than that even. There, nailed it.

While I find my own baby absolutely fascinating, I find other people’s babies boring, so I assume you will feel the same. I would, however, love to share with you the surreal experience of having a baby in France.

It seems like a long time ago now, that my wife woke me up at 5:30am on a Tuesday morning, holding a positive pregnancy test.

I’ve never been much of a morning person, so I initially thought that she had Covid.

“You’ve had your boosters,” I muttered, before she whispered those words.

We’re having a baby.

Life’s never really the same after hearing those words.

I felt oddly resistant to the idea of my son being French. It’s said that when French babies are born, they slap the doctor.

I had recurring nightmares of baby Gascogne arriving wearing a beret with a pencil moustache, and of course, to complete the caricature, a tiny baguette was tucked under his chubby little arm. In the dream he would stub his cigarette out in an empty bedpan, give the nurse a wink, then complain about his milk.

I would always wake up at this point sweating, and the only thing that calmed me down was a stiff Pastis.

Reality would, of course, find its way into my delusions—as it has an annoying habit of doing.

We had our first visit with the Sage-Femme one week later. That’s the French name for midwife—only it translates to "Wise Woman."

The term midwife seems a bit Dickensian. Wise Woman is far better.

We walked into the bureau de la sage-femme with the smell of frankincense burning. The walls were painted with colour, there was a potted Bird of Paradise in the corner and several hieroglyphic shapes hung on the walls, along with a state-of-the-art Samsung ultrasound machine.

I was used to spaces associated with health being made up of white and stainless steel surfaces and the cloying smell of disinfectant.

The sage-femme was dressed in loose-fitting hippy pants, a poncho and hemp sandals. She also had three separate degrees hanging on her wall next to a psychedelic spiralling image which seemed to loop back into itself in a perpetual optical illusion.

She invited us to take a seat on the Turkish cushions.

As the chamomile brewed, I looked around the room and thought it was a bit strange. It looked more like a university student’s bedroom. I was half-expecting her to offer us a bong, but in the corner beside the Samsung ultrasound machine was a disinfected patient’s chair with one of those human-sized paper towels covering it. That was the only area that really needed to be sterile I guess, so why not make the rest of the room a space to feel relaxed in?

My wife and I had a myriad of questions and concerns.
Does she need to eat more elderberries?
When should the goat's milk enemas start?
Should I begin Mongolian throat singing to the foetus or is it too soon?

The sage-femme stopped our yammering.

“Calmez-vous. Your body will tell you exactly what it needs, when it needs it. The most important thing is not to stress,” she said (in French).

Sage words from a sage woman.

I felt oddly resistant to the idea. Isn’t stress what life is all about from here on out?

One of the simpler things, you would think, was figuring out what to call the baby.

Names that sound good in English often sound terrible in French, and vice versa.

I liked the idea of Angus. It’s strong and stoic—plus you could call him Gus for short. However, it translates into On-Goose, or Goose for short in French.
Guy, another simple but strong name, translates to Ghee, as in the clarified butter.
Charles becomes Sharl, Richard – Ree-Shar, and on and on it goes.

The same goes the other way.

Names which sound great in French could be somewhat problematic if and when we moved back to New Zealand.

Guillaume is a strong French name, pronounced Gee-ume.
François - Fran-swah.
Jacques - Jhark...

The test was always imagining that person waiting for their fish and chips order to be called out in the suburbs of New Zealand.

“Hotdog, two scoops for… France-qoise?”
“Crabstick, half a scoop for… Jack-keys? Jack-que?”
“Two fish, hot dog, choc donut for… Guy-loume? Goo-Lowm?”

But the name was the least of our concerns.

With both of our mobile devices pinning us as expectant parents, we were bombarded with parenting spam from every direction. Social media is a great resource for learning—it’s also a great source of anxiety.

Nowadays there’s a product for everything. There’s a video illustrating the threat of everything too. It used to be that having a baby-phone was good parenting. Then it was a baby video camera. Now, if you don’t have the latest motion-sensor mattress that detects breathing irregularities in your baby, then you're terrible parents.

I was amazed at how my wife approached what lay before her. After hearing about everything that was likely to happen, everything that could and would go wrong—of the horrors that were waiting for her inside that medieval torture chamber/hospital room—she still faced it all with bravery.

All I could do was hold her hand and stand beside her as she went through it all, and I’ve never been prouder of her.

My full respect goes out to all the sage-femmes too.

I was in a daze for days after being in the delivery room. I’ll never forget staring at my wife's placenta in that stainless steel bowl, her blood splattered over the floor as my newborn son was having a thermometer placed inside his bottom.

The team of sage femmes had created a football stadium type atmosphere, screaming: Allez allez allez! Encore! Allez allez allez!!! As they coaxed our sons grey, alien-like body out of my wifes vagina.

An hour or so later , while I was still wandering around in a daze muttering to myself. I saw the same lady who had delivered the baby seated behind the admin desk eating last night's spaghetti and meatballs as she filled out the necessary paperwork.

I’ve never respected a profession more.

There’s a lot of anti-children rhetoric out there. More and more people are choosing not to have children nowadays and after my month with my baby I can understand these people’s decision.

I envy them even, at four a.m in the morning when my son desperately wants his dummy (tétine), yet every time you try and put it in his mouth, he bats it away with his hand then screams at the endless injustice of this cruel world.

When he takes his third poo in thirty minutes during the middle of winter when he’s wearing four layers of clothing and my sausage fingers clumsily fumble with each of the agonisingly small buttons.

When he’s exhausted and yet the idea of sleep infuriates him.

I was tasked with being a full-time stay-at-home dad for the month of December, with my wife going back to work and our little milk goblin starting full-time at la crèche (daycare) in the second week of January.

Babies get sent off to boarding school early here, at around three months old.

The idea didn’t sit well with me initially, but after one month as a stay at home dad I changed my tune.

It’s heavily subsidised, so it costs barely nothing and we can both work full-time.

It’s a little-known fact that France has one of the lowest rates of breastfeeding in the developed world.

The reasons are many, including a feminist movement in the 1970s where mothers manifested sovereignty of their own bodies and endeavoured to share more of the burden with their partner.

It was also known as the: “Je suis une femme, pas une vache,” (I am a woman, not a cow) campaign.

I know what you’re chanting. Breast is best!

If it wasn’t true, then why would it rhyme?

Well, maybe you’re right, but try telling that to the French.

There are moments where I take a look at my son and wonder what kind of world we’ve brought him into.

As a child I was taught I could do anything I dreamt of. I spent long summer days outside playing with my friends without a care in the world, so long as I was home before the streetlights came on.

Today children are taught that the sun will give them cancer, but that probably won’t matter anyway because the world is plummeting into environmental catastrophe and it’s all the boomers fault.

I grew up in a time when cell phones didn’t exist, yet the hospital waiting room was filled with zombified people, bewitched by their phones.

The hospital he was born in used A.I to perform remote surgery, just a few rooms down from his, and yet for some reason, they still had to put that thermometer in his bum moments after he arrived into this mad world?

How accurate of a reading do they really need?

Anyway, that’s enough from me, these carrots won’t purée themselves.

The masses are hungry, with many going for months without fresh fruit and vegetables while the nobility pop bottles of champagne, well, Lindauer Brut, as they bathe in their jacuzzis.

While the working classes starve, they feast.

While poorer families can barely make ends meet, they live a life of pure decadence with the trappings of outrageous wealth dripping down their walls. 

Their opulent trysts are fortified by three foot high buxus hedges and guarded by docile labradors sunning themselves on the porch. 

They would never in a million years imagine that the mollified masses would ever rise up against them. 

Let them eat.. pies. 

I am not talking about 1789 France, as the sweltering winds of revolution blew across the country, causing starving peasants to put down their sickles and sharpen the guillotine.

I am talking about 2024 New Zealand. 

Is New Zealand on the cusp of revolution? 

Are the famished proletariat lining up outside the palaces of supermarket owners, preparing to take heads and manifest equality? 

No, no they are not.

That’s very un-kiwi. 

It had been two years since I had been back home. My nieces, who were in nappies when I last saw them, are now beautiful little girls, mature enough to extort their uncle for lollies and small change. 

My friends all have greying hair, if they have any at all. 

But the unavoidable ageing process of my nearest & dearest was not the change which shocked me. 

What shocked me the most was the rampant weight loss which most of my friends had undergone since I last saw them. Most looked they hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks. 

Taking into account that kiwi’s absolutely loathe whining or complaining, meant that things were infinitely worse than their sharp cheek bones suggested.

After revelling in the alacrity that is reconnecting with an old friend, they would eventually tell a common story. 

“We’ve started this thing called intermittent fasting, we don’t eat every second day and so now we can afford to pay our grocery bill.”

One friend, a mother, told me that she stopped working because she figured out that after subtracting the cost of childcare she netted a grand total of: absolutely fuck all. 

But, by only eating every second day, they were able to get by.

I became unsettled when her vacant eyes became transfixed on my jugular. She looked lustfully at the delicate veins covered my neck. For a moment I thought she was going to give in to the urge. 

I went to New World to buy some groceries and see what all the fuss was about. 

The name New World once upon a time seemed like a completely normal name for a supermarket, now it seems a little dystopian. What the hell are they planning?

A new world filled with starving pilgrims who are at the mercy of their overlords? 

At the tills, the malnourished cashier, who looked like they were on the cusp of scurvy, having subsisted off potatoes and two minute noodles for the previous few months, was barely cognisant enough to finish the transaction. 

When the poor thing whimpered the total amount, I nearly had a heart attack myself. 

It’s become gauche in New Zealand and Australia to repeat price injustices; $9 lettuces, $6 capsicums, $18 blocks of very average cheese, but it truly never ends. 

We’re are the bargains? 

Supermarkets in New Zealand, truly are the monarchy of 1789 France. A minuscule minority, who are becoming magnificently wealthy, while the lower income and working class of the entire country struggle to put a balanced diet on the table. 

What’s even more baffling, is that kiwis are still happier than French people. 

Even though teachers, nurses, builders, farmers and sparkies are currently living paycheck to paycheck, dipping into their savings whenever big expenses arise, like making a salad, they are still the best people, who can’t help but look on the bright side. 

To tell you the truth, I never even really liked vegetables anyway…

The thing that I am most proud of and which I love the most about my country, is also what has led us to be under the thumb of the duopolistic tyrants that are Foodstuffs and Woolworths. 

New Zealand farmers are registering hard times, with the lowest profits in years and many looking for other ways to make a living, all while the price of produce in New Zealand supermarkets is at a record high. 

The supermarkets control the entire country's food supply In a Mafioso way. 

If you don’t like our prices? Just don’t eat. Kapeesh? 

The real answer is to buy from farmers markets, however they are even more expensive… 

New Zealand’s biggest industries are dairy and meat production, so I ask you this question. Why on earth, is a New Zealand leg of lamb, cheaper in France? 

When asked that question, Foodstuffs CEO Chris Quin said the following: 

“Oh well you see the coriolis effect actually makes the prices spin in the other direction.” (Throws smoke bomb on the ground and hastily exits)

My second question? What would happen, if the price of food in France increased at the same rate that it has in New Zealand and the farmers were equally underpaid? 

Hell hath no fury, like a French farmer scorned. 

French farmers protest even harder than French fishermen.

Far be it from me to sit behind my typer and insight public disobedience in a country that i’m currently not even living in, but you have to ask the question, how much can the people of New Zealand take? 

It’s not like we are seeing a 1000% mark up on the cost of imported jet skis or mountain bikes or Champagne. It’s a 1000% mark up on fruit and vegetables.

 It’s forcing working class families to make difficult decisions, like whether diabetes might in fact be a shrewd financial decision or whether childhood obesity may in fact be the move. 

When I had read the endless news articles about New Zealand children going on ram raids, I had automatically assumed that they were trying to steal cigarettes, booze and cash. I had no idea that gangs of underfed children were in fact filling the boots of their parents' station wagons with carrots, tomatoes, beetroot and of course that almost unattainable luxury nowadays, lettuce, before outrunning the cops and meeting up behind the back of their local YMCA and tossing up a salad.

When I talk about New Zealand to French people, they always smile and say to me; “Oh wow, c’est magnifique, it’s the most beautiful country in the world, j’adore The Lord of The Rings.”

The Lord of The Rings reference is becoming more and more accurate. New Zealand is a beautiful place that is filled with some of the best people you will ever meet, but who are under the ever present threat of Sauron (Foodstuffs) who dwells within the fires of Mount Doom (Mount Eden).

Even with the country's food supply under the control of the dark wizard, I have to say that I'm still extremely proud to call NZ home. 

It’s the people that make it such a special place, their good nature and laid back way.  However It’s also these traits that make it the perfect place to exploit. 

A bankrupt orchardist would sooner hang themselves from one of their apple trees than cause a fuss. Protesting is what annoying hippies and French people do. Kiwi’s work hard and expect to be treated fairly in return, they don’t like to cause a fuss. 

Arriving back in France, came with a recalibration of my mentality along with some amazing news. 

We are having a baby. 

In a very short period of time, our priorities have been flipped and my previous thoughts and criticisms of this country have been proven to be perhaps a little premature and immature. 

The social security system, for instance, which I had at first believed to be an un-winnable labyrinth of pointless pontification, is in fact starting to make sense. 

For instance, instead of charging young families $25 per hour for child care, while a parent might earn $35 per hour, the state will cover your childcare costs so you don’t work a forty hour week for… absolutely fuck all. 

The state actually helps you, you just have to ask, quite persistently, but the squeaky wheel does get the grease, eventually. 

The baby hasn’t even been born yet, but with both of us being able to work, when it’s old enough, then we have a real shot at being able to buy the lucky little bugger some vegetables. 

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It’s becoming popular to believe that people are a plague upon this earth. 

Having an optimistic outlook on humanity nowadays is akin to being a heretic. It’s far easier to believe that we are a death-cult, bent on the destruction of this earth. 

I find it difficult to hold onto these ideas whenever I walk through the streets of Rennes or Lille or Paris or any of the beautiful towns and cities in France. 

I find it equally difficult to hold onto these ideas whenever I stop off for a scoop of hokey pokey ice cream in any of the rambling little towns nestled in among the beautiful landscapes of New Zealand. 

It’s usually people who live in crowded cities that believe the world is overpopulated. 

The city is a place of paradoxes. Often people who live in cities are the most anti-social, the loneliest and the most cynical. 

The local farmers around us in Bretagne have a fair bit to complain about nowadays. All of the decisions made by the government, that directly affect their lives, are made by the people who live in cities. 

One thing that these farmers will never complain about is overpopulation. Usually they have a yearning for human contact. You often have to pry yourself away from the conversation.

One of the quickest ways to get pulled into a cynical outlook on life is to sever yourself from the natural world. 

It’s essential to maintain the connection to nature, otherwise you can start believing that this world is an overpopulated hell-hole filled with Parisian, or Parisites, if you will. 

Growing up in New Zealand I was fortunate enough to be imbued within the natural world. Though it makes me an insufferable nature snob. 

It was said that the first waka heard New Zealand before they saw it. You can only imagine what kind of music a nation of birds suffering no natural predators would make. Aotearoa was essentially a giant bird sanctuary. The largest aviary the world has ever known. 

I'm sad to say that nowadays the Waitakere Ranges are crawling with sexual predators. Such is life. 

Most of New Zealand's forests are still a melting pot of biodiversity which all kiwi’s are fortunate enough to have access to. The forests are the property of no one and the property of everyone. 

I of course thought that all of this was normal while growing up. This was just what life was like. It takes moving away to realise how lucky I was. 

Now when I visit the Villaine River all I can notice is its brownish hue and the thick patches of algae coating the rocks where the water reaches the bank. 

My observations are usually followed by a snooty expression of indignation. Like a French person tasting Edam cheese for the first time. 

It’s kind of a foolish mindset to be in, one I'm trying to shake off.

It would be a lot like a French person strolling the streets of Timaru and comparing it to Paris. 

Or rolling their eyes and complaining that the Ohakune carrot doesn’t hold a candle to the Eiffel Tower. 

Boff… C’est pas incroyable.

I’m insufferable and I can’t help it. 

The land in France will never be able to reach that special place within my soul like New Zealand does, but it’s charming in a very different way. 

The rolling hills of the Ile est Villaine region hosts swathes of indigenous oak forests that are enchanting in a different way. 

It’s common to see deer, sanglier, lapin, pheasant, renard, squirrels and jackals roaming around the countryside at the edge of the forest.

I got chatting with our neighbour over the back fence one day. He’s a long-lived Breton man with a red nose who loved to hunt, back in his salad days.

“How do you access the walking tracks in the forests?” I asked. (In broken french)

“Access? C’est privé,” he said, as if I'd asked him how I could access his ensuite bathroom. 

He laughed at me as if I'd asked the most adorable thing. 

Do they not have private property in New Zealand? 

All of the forests around us are privately owned by wealthy families from old French money. 

You will never see these people, you will never meet these people, I have since learnt. 

The forests around us all remain empty. Occasionally you will hear gunshots echo out of them during hunting season, then silence for another 364 days. 

75% of France's forest land is privately owned, for the super wealthy to use or not use.

My wife always finds it amusing when I consider this a grave injustice. Like a child complaining about not being able to go inside the zoo exhibits. 

To quench your thirst for nature in France, you’ve got to look out a little further and find some forestland open to the public. 

The problem is that the remaining 25% of forestland is used by the other 99.9% of the population, the unfortunate majority who are unable to afford their own forest. 

The closest forest open to the public in my neck of the woods was the Broceliande. You may have heard about it in the Arthurian Legends. 

One thing that I didn’t anticipate about the Broceliande was the crowds. It was kind of like visiting a theme park (cue the pugnacious kiwi-in-european-nature face).

It may not have held a candle to the Rimutakas, but there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the Broceliande has the best restaurant that I’ve ever been to in any forest, hands down. 

The forest’s of New Zealand may be better, but they most certainly don’t offer as comprehensive wine list to compliment the seasonal menu. 

It will forever be the void I need to find another way to fill.  

There’s something about getting lost in nature and not seeing any trace of another soul that somehow soothes your own soul. It makes you appreciate people. 

Seeing layered rocky cliffs, each layer representing an epoch in time, that gives you a glimpse into the age of the earth which we walk upon. 

It makes you feel humble, small and appreciative of your time here.

There’s a similar kind of rejuvenation of the soul when you gaze upon the art & architecture of Paris, Toulouse, Rennes, Bordeaux or any of the towns & villages of France.

They let you gauge the depth of human history. Granting you a peak into the journey we have taken to arrive here. A time long gone, which has been eternalised in stone by the hands of long-dead masons and artists.

You really couldn’t have more different works of art than the forests of New Zealand and the cities of France.

The wonder of an untouched world and the wonder of human culture. They each fill a different void. 

If the apocalypse-porn-addicts are right in the end, then I find it difficult to believe that the next inhabitants of this earth will walk through the ruins of Paris and consider us to have been a plague. 

If we are a plague, then we are a damn beautiful one. 

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If I'm honest, I got pretty down about things in the middle of the French winter. There’s an oppressive grimness that the locals are accustomed to. They squirrel away a secret stash of serotonin to get them through. My cupboards were bare.

It had been two years since i’d seen my family. I started to yearn for home. 

Nothing seemed to work for me. I felt like I didn’t and never would fit in. I was misunderstood every time I opened my mouth, if I was lucky. Usually I was simply not understood at all. 

If I asked for a macaron, I was more likely to get slapped in the mouth by pickled mackerel. 

The locals could feel my stress & insecurity and didn’t like it one bit. Stressing is treated with utter contempt in France. It’s such a British thing to do.

Every effort I made to connect added another straw to the camel's back, until my ladened camel’s spine was groaning under the weight. 

I’ve been searching for a word to try and describe it and sure enough Maori came through for me. Turangawaewae, hits the nail on the head. A place to stand. A place where you feel worthy, feel strong. A place where you belong. 

I hadn’t found my place to stand in France just yet. 

It was at about this time, now that I had found a word to tether my feelings too that I received some tough news from home. 

It was time to go back. 

It’s difficult to describe the feeling of going home without sounding like some old Nickleback lyrics.

Every pop song has bastardised it and the truth is that some have come close, but the radio thrashed it too hard and the words have now lost there meaning. 

I had hobbled onto the plane at Charles De Gaulle airport, dragging my carry-on bag and pulling my bloody stumps up onto my seat. 

That might be a bit dramatic, but this was the state of my soul. I’d lost my mana, well, not lost it, but it had been diminished. 

At times it's essential to subject yourself to challenges that may diminish you temporarily but will ultimately make you stronger. 

Before the plane had even landed in New Zealand the flight attendant had nudged me on the shoulder and asked; “You want a cheeky Chardy or a Savvy B love?” 

La gouter madam? La sippage?

There’s no better lightning rod to reconnect you to your own identity than revisiting the place you grew up. There’s a rejuvenation of the soul that is tinged with a sweet kind of sadness. 

It reminds you of a time that has passed, that you had believed was gone forever, but is in fact still there, unchanged. 

I felt my feet touch the ground. I felt the earth beneath my feet. 

The paint has faded a couple of shades with the passing of time under the merciless sun. The tree’s and stones and people are all the same though. It’s me that's forgotten. 

The first cup of coffee back in NZ was an intense experience. I found myself hiding the cup whenever I saw a police officer. It was milky, velvety, liquid cocaine that suddenly compelled me to video call old friends and tell them how much I missed them and that we should start a business.

It’s the funniest things that can trigger the most meaningful of memories. 

It was a week after arriving back home that I received my Madeleine de Proust. 

This is an expression from the French writer Marcel Proust to describe that feeling when you taste or smell something which sends you straight back to childhood.

In his case it was a biscuit called a Madeleine. 

For me it was walking into a public toilet in Hagley Park and smelling the urinal cakes. Perhaps not quite as dignified as the Madeleine biscuit, but just as potent. 

It turns out that those little lozenges are made in New Zealand and have not changed one bit. They got the recipe right the first time, so why change them I guess?

I had ran into those same toilets as a five year old boy to have a nervous pee before my first ever game of tackle rugby at Hagley park. 

I had walked back in there as a thirty three year old man, and gotten blindsided. Weirdly enough I felt a couple of butterflies. 

“Jesus, what the hell did you do in there?” asked my sister in law when I came out, seeing how pensive I was. 

One huff of that public toilet and I remembered everything. 

To see people I had known in a previous life and to see that they have indeed continued with their own lives. 

It’s a difficult decision to make. To let your roots grow deep into the same place you yourself grew up, or to uproot and start anew. To become an oak in a pot plant, for a little while anyway. 

I was stuck behind a Toyota Hilux ute on Moorehouse Ave. A Mitsubishi Triton Ute pulled up beside me and a Ford Ranger ute pulled up behind me. 

Every ute was blasting the same station, The Rock. The song was: The Foo Fighters, The Pretender.

It was the complete opposite of a Madeleine Proust. It was a small taste of a potential future, once upon a time, perhaps.

Growing up I remember friends dropping out of school because they couldn’t take it anymore. They got jobs sweeping up building sites and carrying bags of cement before beginning their trade apprenticeship. 

At the time I thought they were losers. Waking up at 6 a.m. to sweep up saw dust. Their parents must have made some terrible mistakes.

With the passing of a little bit of time, that same drop-out loser is blasting The Foo Fighters, with their own name decaled on the side of their Isuzu D-max ute. With their own shit-head apprentice to sweep up, having recently finished building their own home. 

The light turned green. 

Life’s funny. The high school dropouts are the most successful people today. 

But success itself is a difficult thing to truly define. 

To some people it’s having a brand new ute. To some people it’s being understood at the boulangerie. To some people it’s being able to put one foot in front of the other. 

One thing is for sure though, coming home rejuvenates the soul. One beer at a time, one hug at a time, one steak & cheese pie at a time. 

After being left at the lights in a plume of diesel smoke, the old Alfa Romeo that I was driving wouldn’t go into gear. I put my hazard lights on and pushed it to the side of the road.

“Shame c**t!” was shouted from a passing Toyota Surf filled with men in bright orange fluro vests.

It was strangely comforting to be insulted by the fully grown children in extremely bright clothing.

I had idealised home to the point that home itself couldn’t even live up to my idea of it. I had created a eutopia where the people are perfect, like some nineteen fifties television show. Happy Day’s or something.

Perhaps it was because the memories I had were that of a child’s. Rose tinted and dipped in gold.

After reconnecting with family, with friends, with the place that raised me, the strangest of all feelings came to me. The feeling of missing France. Of missing my wife, my dog and my belles familles. Of missing aggressive drivers and passive aggressive waiters. Of missing paywalled public toilets, nonchalant sales assistants and terrible coffee.

Evidently, where ever you go, their you are. Sometimes it takes leaving home and returning, to recalibrate your perspective.

Hopefully this time, when I get back to le republic I can pull myself up by my bottes and stand on my feet.  

So there we were, sitting across the polished oak desk of le notaire, buying our very first home in France. 

Le notaire is an administrative office found in every town which handles the buying and selling of properties, among other things.

Monsieur Pinot gave us a grave expression (expression grave) and leaned forward in his chair. He wanted us both to understand, as young(ish) first home buyers, that we were entering into murky waters.  

Buying a house in the country meant we were in fact wading into a brackish marsh, where lores and hand shake agreements between the long-lived locals still held sway within the small rural community that we wished to join.

In this neck of the woods, the old ways remain to a certain extent and modernity must bend to them. 

The house was built shortly after the revolution. It’s not a transient place, where someone might live for six months before moving on.

It’s a Canadian amateur film maker's wet dream. You could make endless ghost documentaries, with cameras set up to capture every reactionary quiver, whenever a beam twitches or a mouse farts in the attic.

As someone who tackled the horror genre, the setting excites me greatly. A secluded hamlet surrounded by rolling hills, where the houses are made of old stone, thick fog regularly rolls in and some of the trees in certain corners of the forest seem to grow at strange angles.

The first thing Monsieur Pinot brought to our attention was SAFER - Société d'Aménagement Foncier et d'Etablissement Rural. 

The way he said the word SAFER was like a hyena saying Mufasa. It was intended to demonstrate It’s power. 

The agricultural land attached at the back of the house was one of the reasons why we fell for the place. When we were priced out of the battery farm apartments in the city, the idea of having some space was, for dirt cheap, was appealing.  

We could dig a hole, or start a cult. It gave us options.  

SAFER is an agency that works in conjunction with the French government. They regulate the buying and selling of agricultural land in France. 

SAFER have the power to decide whether or not you are using your land productively, or whether it could be put to better use. If a neighbour or local farmer believes that you are not using your land to its potential, then they can ask for SAFER to intervene. 

They have the power to seize the land and sell it to an interested party at market rate, usually a local farmer who has expressed an interest and offered a better alternative use ie; maize for pig feed. 

“You better show that you're serious about using the land, because they can take it from you,” said Monsieur Pinot, as if warning us that the boulangerie was closing in fifteen minutes. “They have the power to do it. It is very common,” he said.

I had ideas of my wife and I standing our ground, holding a pitch fork & sickle as Gros Ferme (Big Farmer) brought in the combine harvester to grow more corn on our little slice of grassy possibilities.

I immediately felt the spirit to revolt. 

Viva la France! 

Following this a legal document was brought to our attention. Written up between neighbours, a few years back, in 1919, shortly after The Great War. 

It stated that the person who had occupied our future home (back in 1919) gave the neighbouring property right of way in our driveway, in perpetuity. 

Le notaire informed us that even though the agreement was written on hemp parchment using a feather, it still held up.

Above all of the litigious trip wires, what Monsieur Pinot wanted to get across, was that in this little crevice of rural France, handshake agreements still hold up. It was on us to be accepted into the community. 

He informed us that if a local farmer has been using the land for five years or more then it was legally theirs, if they wished to claim it. 

Since the real estate agent was selling a deceased estate, he had no way of knowing. We would just have to find out.

He also warned us to make sure that we visit the land regularly while the paperwork was being processed, which usually took around two to three months, for once squatters lay down their tents, they have the right to be there too.

On verra…

When the final papers were signed, counter-signed and accepted, our real estate agent uncorked a bottle of French Passion Pop and as that cork soared over the chicken coupe, it was official. 

The first night in our new/old house was a bit surreal. The stench of the previous owner was trapped in the paint. She had lived her entire life there and evidently had a love of asparagus, goats cheese and salted cod. 

Apparently she had lived there with her family once, then it was just her. Now it was our turn.

My wife and I were hunkered around the fireplace trying to stay warm, thinking; what have we just done? 

In the freezing cold of the night, over the swirling Atlantic winds, we heard shuffling footsteps outside, getting closer, then there was a knock at the door.

I instinctively grasped my pitchfork and prepared to thwart off SAFER.

Luckily my wife opened the door. 

Our new neighbours were standing in the cold, holding a jar of raspberry confiture and a plate of freshly made crepes, with a checkered tea towel draped over them to keep them warm. 

I leaned the pitchfork back against the fridge and suddenly felt a little silly. 

“Bienvenue! Nous sommes vos nouveaux voisins, enchantés,” the genial couple said.

They extended us a warm invitation to come to their house for an apero-dinatoire, (an apero that never ends) that weekend, which we gratefully accepted.

That night I rested easy, knowing that we had gotten off to a good start with the locals.

The next morning, I heard the deep hum of a diesel tractor pull up outside our house. It simmered down to an idle, then an authoritative knock came to the front door.

A buxom Breton lady with a rosy-cheeked face greeted me with a smile.

“Bonjour monsieur!” She said, “Je vends des pommes de terre. Fraiches et de la meilleure qualitée,” she said.” (I’m selling potatoes, fresh and the best quality.)

“Tu est avec SAFER?” I said.

She looked at me as if I’d posed a particularly slippery riddle.

“J’ai des pommes de terre à rôtir, à sauter, à vapeur, à purée, à frite. Comme tu veux,” she said. " (I have potatoes for roasting, steaming, making fries or purée, up too you)

I saw the piles of spuds on the back of the tractor and joined the dots. I love pommes de terre, but I didn’t have any cash on me.

After explaining my position, terribly, the lady shrugged her shoulders, not seeing where the problem was.

“C’est pas grave,” she said, and informed me that she could come back later in the week to collect the ten euros for the ten kilo assortment of locally grown potatoes.

Over the next two weeks we were invited to each of houses on our street for an apero, which in most cases turned into an apero-dinatoire where wine would inevitably turn to eau de vie.

The family down the street gave us the address of a farm that sold the best poule for laying eggs, for five euro each.

With the exception of the mandatory misérable batard down the road, Monsieur Connard, the locals have been warm and welcoming. 

There have of course been moments when my wife and I have wondered if they’re perhaps a little too nice.

That maybe they’re preparing for the la purge, or that we are being primed to be the guests of honour for this year's blood moon harvest celebration. 

Or maybe I’ve watched one too many horror movies and le fromage est tombé de ma tartine.

I have had one or two slightly unsettling experiences in the house, I’ll have to admit. The bedsheets have been known to levitate on certain evenings, usually following raclette and some of the more sedentary locals have attempted to speak in tongues with me on occasion. 

A lot of the dyed in the wool locals have never heard a kiwi accent before, and they speak with an unctuous patois.

On one walk through the dirt lanes criss-crossing the surrounding pâtures bordering the ancient oak forests, a particularly thick fog rolled in and I learned the hard way what sound a fox makes.

I swore that just beyond the fog a child was being murdered, and I’m ashamed to say, that I was not about to run into the mist and save them.

The only real-life peril, for the moment, seems to be not succumbing to alcoholism or getting type two diabetes.  

I’ve been embracing the simplicity of the country lifestyle. My new favourite activity, at the end of the day, is feeding the chickens and enjoying a well deserved beer as I gaze out onto the field, thinking about all the possibilities.

On one particularly grey & dreary day, a Massey Ferguson tractor pulled into our field, and begun tilling the soil.

It was time to meet the farmer.

Buy Me a Croissant

Even as a man-child I miss the smell of my mum's Christmas lilies wafting down the hallway, carried by the summer breeze leaking through the window. 

This year I’ll be lucky enough to experience my second polar opposite (quite literally) Christmas with my belle famille in Bretagne. 

Where the double-glazed windows are welded shut by the cold and the cheese doesn’t need to be kept in the frigo, you can just leave it on a shelf in the garage, along with the champagne and oysters. 

Christmas in the Atlantic has a different spirit. Finally the Christmas marketing makes sense. Nat King Cole harping on about a White Christmas and sleigh bells in the snow didn’t quite hit the same while your suffering tar burns on your bare-feet, trying to hop & skip your way to the dairy.

The only snow to speak of could be found at the bottom of the Tip Top chest freezers. The Fruju Tropical Snow, which were too expensive anyway, so you couldn’t really go past a Jelly Tip, for bang for your buck.

The big day in France, is in fact a grande soirée on Christmas eve night.

Seven courses are served over the evening with presents at midnight, where the living room is filled with heartfelt Joyeux Noels!

The evening seems to fly by in a matter of minutes. 

One moment you're sitting down to some salmon gravlax in the early evening, the next you're wondering how on earth the buttons on your shirt can withstand this kind of tension. 

Maybe this year lycra might be a better option?

At around nine p.m. It’s time to step away from the table and call my family in New Zealand. I take a glass of rouge with me for the inter-hemispheric journey. 

I never truly appreciate how drunk I am, until I'm speaking to my spritely and sober mum at nine a.m (her time). She’s fresh off a cup of coffee. 

Only then, when I see my own mugshot in the little square in the corner of the screen, do I realise just how festive I am. 

The barbecue is smoking behind her.

My nieces are playing with their new gadget in the backyard, both are wearing sun hats, their faces lathered thick with enough SPF 50 to withstand a solar flare. 

In a couple of hours the turkey will come out of the oven and everyone will spend a few hours around the table pulling crackers and telling shit jokes. 

Usually after the third serving of trifle, everyone starts to drop off, like some 1980’s cult that just drunk the kool aid. 

During that phone call, I’m transported back there, though my only contribution to the day will of course be my closed-eyed, dumb-smiled face on the screen. 

Presence, is the real gift, at the end of the day. All the trinkets will become obsolete and be thrown away. Only the memories will remain.

It’s hard to miss Christmas with your family, but it’s hard to feel hard done by when the sixth course is about to be served up.

I miss my laid-back kiwi Christmas, but I’m fortunate to be able to experience my grande french soirée too.

Christmas morning in France is when it becomes an endurance event. 

Once upon a time I bounced out of bed. Nowadays, following an evening of frivolity, loud noises startle me and I find myself staring at paintings on the walls for several minutes at a time then immediately forgetting what they looked like.

Wherever you find yourself. I hope you’re present with the people you love, whether that is bung-eyed on a cellphone screen or sitting across the table from them.

Above all, don’t mix your cheeses. 

Meri Kirihimete et Bonne Année!

About a year ago we began the process of trying to find our own place in the land of France. As I have alluded to, it is exceedingly difficult to rent a place here. 

The reasons are many. As an old nation that's seen tyranny and revolution, there are hard fought laws in place to guard the liberties of the individual.

Once you're on the lease, your rental apartment becomes your Versaille. You basically have to start up a human trafficking ring in your living room in order to be evicted. 

Real estate agents will subject applicants to a gruelling vetting process to see if you are fit to live indoors, in perpetuity. 

We kept trying nonetheless and after dozens of merci, mais non merci’s, we got a phone call from the real estate agent who suggested a change of tact. 

He asked if we would be open to buy an old fixer-upper in the country? 

The idea of actually being able to ever afford to buy a house was an abstract concept, having watched NZ house prices skyrocket since reaching working age.

Instead I read books on esotericism and metaphysics, adopting ideas around the futility of ever truly being able to own something, given that we are ourselves only renting our bodies on this temporary plane of existence. 

This was actually written in a brochure which my mortgage broker gave to me while leaving our rather brief meeting. 

However, It turns out that in certain parts of France, house prices fall off a cliff, if you're prepared to live more than forty minutes from the nearest city and more than fifteen minutes from the nearest boulangerie. 

Following our two year incarceration in Melbourne the city had lost some of its allure. With its crowds of indifferent people, its overpriced rent and overpriced coffee. With its diffusion of responsibility to be good to one another.

My roaring twenties are now behind me and the idea of living in the country excites me.

We said pourquoi pas (why not) to the agent and booked an appointment. 

On the drive the road was wet with autumn rain. The passing cars In the eternal Le Mans race (French motorway) all sprayed up tails behind them.

We found our turn off into the Ille et Vilaine region and drove onto quieter roads bordered with oak forests. 

We met the agent in a carpark outside an old church. 

It was a beautiful little village made with stone houses all adjoining one another. 

On the corner was a quaint little tabac with a couple of locals sitting out the front enjoying a glass of cider and some saucisson. 

An old french farmer with a pot belly and a cap on his bald head putted past in an ancient Massey Ferguson tractor. 

He gave the ladies sitting outside the tabac a friendly tip of the cap, as he passed by with his trailer full of hay. 

The agent was a thin and wiry man with keen features and the ability to snap into a smile, quick-smart, like turning a light switch off and on. 

He shook both of our hands as if we were old friends. 

We got in our cars and he led the way to the house. This is custom in France. They will not reveal the address of a property, even in an advertisement. I’m not sure exactly why this is, perhaps so people won’t squat in the property? Je ne sais pas. 

The agent parked in the driveway of an old villa made of grey stone and ancient oak. 

“This can’t be the place surely?” I said. “How much did he say the rent was?” 

“I told you. It’s not for rent. It’s for sale,” she said, parking the car behind the agent's beamer. “It’s within our price range too.”

“Okay, well, shit honey, game faces on. Let’s not let him know if we actually want it,” I said.

We started in the garden where autumn leaves were scattered over the lawn, gathering around in the gutters like leftover corn flakes in a breakfast bowl. 

He led us down a mossy pathway where an old chicken coup stood and where I suspected some farmland began. 

“Le pature,” he said, placing an awkward foot on the bottom wire of the fence. He nearly lost balance, and was out of breath by the time he placed his foot back on the ground. 

“Ça vient avec la maison?” (It comes with the house?) Asked my my wife.

“Bah, oui,” he said.

Suddenly, it became hard to keep my poker face. The idea of having a couple of chickens and some sheep excites me in a way I could have never believed as a younger man. Esoteric ideas be damned. The first thing I'd need to buy is an enormous hat.

The agent and my wife began to parle de dinde, I played the part of the silent partner. I figured maybe this could work in our favour. 

I could follow along to a certain extent, then i’d hear the words Dolly Parton and I swore I heard him say Ballsack too. From there on in I was baffled as to what they could possibly be talking about. Sales lingo, perhaps.

The house was built in 1825. It needed a new septic system, a new heating system, it had no insulation and all of the electrical wiring needed to be replaced. 

Everything inside was falling apart and the interior was styled during the creative holocaust of the nineteen eighties. 

There were rails in the shower and toilet, thirty five different statues of Jesus, in all his many forms of glory, as well as twenty six crucifixes, a stuffed cat, a stuffed fox, a stuffed badger and what appeared to be a stuffed weasel. 

The entire cast of The Wind & The Willows stood above the mantle. 

But I didn’t let the mustelids obscure the bigger picture. It was a house with spirit, not some commercial apartment built to make a property developer as much profit as possible. 

It was a house built a long time ago, by stone masons who cared about their work.  

We would have to burn an ungodly amount of sage to try and vanquish whatever spirits still lingered in the house, since it’s illegal to evict the un-dead under French tenancy law.  

I noticed the beady little eyes of the agent looking at me like a starving man might look at a pork chop. He knew, he could smell it on us. 

The asking price was within our budget with a little left over to tackle the heating, re-wiring and septic system. 

It was time to put our very first offer together and endeavour to buy our first home in France. 

How hard could that be? 

Buy Me a Croissant

If you thought this was going to be some more light-reading, then perhaps this isn’t the one for you. 

Today's instalment is a serious one. 

I intend to ask the question that will perhaps shine a new light on the human condition itself… 

Why don’t French people fart in front of each other?

I’ll let you take a moment to gather your faculties and appreciate the gravitas. 

I came to this realisation by first hand experience and in the most embarrassing way possible. 

At the beginning of this year I worked on the oyster boats on the stunningly beautiful coastline of the Morbihan on the West Coast of France. 

Working outside, with ocean breezes and seagulls surrounding us was certainly nothing to complain about. 

My French wasn’t at a conversational level yet, so I had to get a little more creative in order to bond with my co-workers. Some were friendly, others not, but as we sat on the long hulled boat, having finished our lunch, I felt the beginnings of a fart coming and thought that it might be my shot at making my colleagues laugh. 

It was a Hail Mary, I admit, but I didn’t want to let our language barrier get in the way of a good laugh and a good fart is just as funny in any language, I thought. 

I pulled it off. It was perfectly executed, reverberating through the hull of the boat. Even the seagulls seemed to momentarily fall silent. 

Before even waiting for my colleagues' reaction I had started cracking up. 

It was one of the funniest farts of all time in my opinion. 

It’s a fool's errand to try and describe a fart, but I'll do my best. It sounded like a confused duck. It was exactly what I had aimed for. Cheeky, fun and light-hearted. 

However, what followed was not what I expected. 

By the time I had stopped laughing and composed myself, I noticed that half of the deck had stood up and started putting their waders back on and the other half were shaking their heads in disappointment. 

“Putain, c’est dégueulasse,” said one of the oystermen. 

Maybe I had misjudged my colleagues. I had thought that bobbing and swaying on an oyster boat in the middle of the ocean with a steady breeze blowing by might be as gooder place as any for such frivolity?

It posed a philosophical question. If a Frenchman farts in the forest? Can it still be funny? 

In an eerie moment of realisation, a somewhat chilling thought came to me. Since arriving in France, I hadn’t heard a single person fart…

That night I was a little distant and my wife picked up on it. 

“What’s wrong?” She asked.

“You fart in front of your family, right?” I said.

There was a loaded pause, as she prepared herself to have a difficult conversion. Perhaps she’d planned for it. Perhaps she knew this day would come. 

“No, we don’t,” she said. 

I don’t remember much after that. I lay on my side, pulled the covers up and I think I lay there until morning.

I didn’t want to go to work the next day. Part of me felt embarrassed, part of me felt hurt. 

When I arrived at the docs at six-thirty the next morning, some of my more austere colleagues treated me a little differently. As if I was some kind of skunk that might just give them a nasty spray with my noxious fumes.

I understand that there are rules and that certain guidelines need to be put in place.

For instance it is unforgivable to fart in a hot car, or when anyone around you is eating. 

I have tried to figure out why, but at this stage it is pure speculation. I’m open to any and all ideas or explanations. 

The closest I've come, has been that perhaps the French diet might have something to do with it, with most of France's famous delicacies containing several permutations of dairy. 

It's common practice for a selection of cheeses to be brought to the table at the end of every meal too, so it’s fair to assume that perhaps throughout history there have been farts that have ruined marriages, broken up families and even started wars. 

Maybe France needs someone to lead this renaissance? Into a future filled with laughter and the appreciation of a well timed prout. 

Share Stirring the Bisque

Most of my jobs are cutting people's hedges. Believe it or not, this can get old fairly quickly. 

Some days you see the roses, other days you just count the thorns. 

Maybe it has something to do with the northern European winter arriving and learning the hard way why this region of France has a name for every specific type of drizzle, including the ultra-light drizzle that floats on the breeze; le crachin.

It’s said that le crachin only wets people who are stupid, and I’ve been getting drenched by the stuff recently. Maybe it’s because only fools chose to become gardeners in a place where it rains nearly every day. 

But every so often my cynicism gets interrupted.

It usually happens when I least expect it, as if the universe itself is giving me a little nudge, to jog my memory. Reminding me that life is just fine. It’s my own vision that’s gotten foggy.

Last week I got called to another hedge job. 

It was a modest old miners cottage that had become run-down.

The client was an older gentleman with grey hair and a bent back. He looked like a grumpy old prick. You wouldn’t want to kick your ball over this guy's fence, based on the look of him. 

When I spoke to him, there was a softness to his voice which I hadn’t expected. There was a deep sadness around his eyes. Etched by a kind of pain I would probably never truly understand.

Shadow had overwhelmed the secluded garden and Ivy had free run of the place, smothering anything it could reach. 

It was dark, damp and depressing. I would need a beurre camembert sandwich after this job. Maybe even a tartiflette. 

The client, Monsieur Renard, seemed to tread lightly down the path, which was barely visible beneath the ronces, (blackberry brambles) ivy and weeds that grew over everything. Only the occasional tenacious flowers fought their way through the mauvaises herbes (weeds)

He delicately parted branches and took great care not to snap a single twig in the overgrown wasteland that once upon a time may have been a cute little French garden. 

There was a high stone wall on one side which perhaps hundreds of years ago kept out invaders. Today, it only kept out the sun. A cedar with long reaching branches cast further shade and the surrounding overgrown hedges obscured the remaining light which leaked in. 

All the plants grew at an unnatural angle. They all slanted sideways. 

Plants are like people. They reach for the light. When they can’t get to it they wither and they die. 

“Voila,” the man said, showing me the hedge. 

Time was a wasting and part of me wanted to get out of the dark and dreary space as quickly as I could so I could hit the boulangerie before all the good sandwiches we’re taken. 

I drop-started my two stroke hedge-trimmer and took that puppy to the red-line.

I needed to use the chainsaw attachment to cut through the thick branches of the cypress hedge. It hadn’t been touched in five years.

I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Doucement, monsieur. Doucement,” (Gently, gently) he said.

Monsieur Renard had a deep affection for every half-dead leaf, for every weed in the garden that had been kept in the dark for years. 

“C’est le jardin de ma femme,” (It’s my wife’s garden) he said. 

Well I love what she's done with the place… 

He then told me that she had passed away five years earlier and that he hadn’t been able to touch a single thing in it after her passing. 

Suddenly, everything made sense. 

I suggested that perhaps he should go inside and put some music on, because it’s going to sound like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre out here for the next few hours. 

I’m not the most sympathetic gardener. I’ll prune roses at seven thousand rpm, if the client isn’t watching, but this job was different.

The garden had a spirit to it. You could feel it once you’d looked past the weeds. You just had to look a little closer.

I saw the old seat, now barely visible underneath the weeds. Perhaps they had spent their best moments together here. In their garden. A place where it felt like they had a little piece of the world to themselves for a while.

Perhaps they had spent summer nights out here, drinking pastis and waving away wasps. 

Perhaps they had argued about stupid shit that had seemed important at the time, never imagining that she would get the news and be told that she wouldn’t get to see the winter flowers. 

The more time I spent in it, the more I could see.

I finished the hedge, taking special care, out of respect. I took two metres off the top to let the light back in.

Monsieur Renard poured two glasses of red wine without asking if I wanted one. 

Luckily I'll never turn down a glass of wine when offered in France. It’s foolish to do so. 

We watched the late afternoon sunshine slanting over the top of the hedge and touching the sickly plants for the first time in years. 

Monsieur Renard gave a silent toast. 

By the time we had finished our glasses le crachin had arrived and I left Mr Renard alone. 

Buy Me A Croissant

It was nearly three years ago when my girlfriend (at the time) booked an appointment with the ANZ mortgage broker in Northcote, Melbourne, to sit down and discuss the prospect of buying our very first home together.

I had held down a job for two years, she had held down a slightly higher-paying job for slightly longer. Two young people, employed full time with no kids.

She’d worn a pantsuit for the big meeting. A power move.

I walked out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, hair combed, suited and booted. I saw her perfecting her make-up in the mirror and I took a moment to admire her attire.

Wow, I thought. She looks powerful, intimidating even.

I took a leaf out of her book and considered what look would serve me. What look would purvey a kind of trustworthiness?

I’m the kind of person you should give a trailer load of cash to kind of look.

I settled for a pair of latté chinos and a navy blue corduroy shirt.

We even made sure the car was clean, the outside anyway. Just in case the bank manager caught sight of our dusty little hatchback and realised that he’d been roused. That he’d been mystified by the chinos and the pantsuit.

I still remember the look on the bank manager's face when we asked him that most rhapsodic of questions.

“What kind of house will we be able to afford?”

I knew we wouldn’t be making the front cover of House & Garden straight off the bat. We would have to compromise on the condition of the house and the size and the location, but it was our first move. The all-important skin in the game.

Our bank manager in Melbourne, Mr Bourke, had to cramp his chin in an attempt not to laugh. All things considered, he had done rather well, but eventually the levy broke and he burst into a hearty giggle.

“I am so sorry,” he eventually said. It had tickled him deeply. By the time he composed himself, he was pink around the gills.

“Honestly, let me put it to you this way. The Freemantle Dockers have got a better chance at making the Grand Final than you do of buying a house,” he went with before the second wave inevitably hit him and he returned to his giggling.

He picked up the phone and called his friend.

“Hey Darryl, I had to call you. Got a couple here, yeah, I think she's German or something and this joker is a dead-set Kiwi. Waltzed in here, asking what kind of house they could buy,” (he paused for Darryl’s reaction.) “Maybe if they put down the crack pipe they might be able to save a bit more for a deposit?” (Pause for laughter) “We still catching up for a parma on Thursday? Yeah, beauty.”

He remembered that we were sitting on the other side of his desk, but having learnt our combined incomes and the amount that we had in savings, we might as well not have existed.

“Look, I gotta be honest. You guys are dreaming. The best we could offer you right now is $300,000,” he said.

I remembered my heartbeat increasing and a tsunami of dopamine flooded my system.

$300,000 is a massive amount of money. That’s a Lamborghini or a Ferrari, I had thought at the time.

While I might have been right about being able to afford an Italian SuperCar, it was, however, nowhere near being able to afford a house to park it in.

After Mr Burke had come to terms with the situation, of two people with sub-one hundred k annual salaries seriously believing that they might be able to purchase a house in Melbourne, his steely resolve won and he changed tact.

He decided to focus on the positive and see if we can’t come to a compromise.

“Okay, do you have a family member who can lend you say, five hundy K?” He said.

When we informed him that we don’t have anyone who can slide us a cool half a million dollars he placed a file on the table and opened it.

“Okay, you're going to have to be smarter then,” he said. “What you can afford, that will help you get into your first home, eventually, is one of these,” he said, turning the page around for us to look at.

It was a picture of an inner city skyscraper, which perked my optimism.

“You can afford to buy a parking space in this building,” he said.

“A parking space?” I said.

“You can purchase one all out for one hundred and seventy grand. In two years that’ll be worth north of two hundred thousand, If we don’t have any more lockdowns,” he added. “But this is absolutely within your price range.”

There were several more lengthy lockdowns following that conversation, so thank god we didn’t buy the commercial parking space.

It is a sad state of affairs in New Zealand and Australia, that to purchase a first home, you need to be an exceptional person or come from an exceptionally wealthy family.

After nine months in France, we booked the same appointment, minus the pantsuit, this time with the local bank manager at BNP Paribas.

My wardrobe was limited and I’m sad to say that in the last ditch effort to offload all of our worldly possessions when we moved, my wife had donated the pantsuit to one of the many op shops in Brunswick.

Luckily for her, I had a power move of my own. As it turns out, cheques are the current in-thing for payment of services in France and with Kiwi Jardins having been up and running for two weeks and every single client had chosen to pay by cheque, I had accumulated a small stack of different bank cheques of varying value, all which needed to be cashed.

I had the idea of being able to use them as a powerful gesture, to demonstrate just how safe of a bet we were.

We sat down with Gilles, our new bank manager and the dance began.

I could feel the cheques burning a hole in my pocket. I needed to be patient and wait for the perfect moment. I knew I couldn’t just whip them out and start fanning myself with them. I needed to be composed, casual even. The cheques were no big deal, plenty more where that came from. If anything It’s me who’s seeing whether this bank should be trusted with processing my infinite cheques.

There was no sprint to find out the two pieces of information that he really wanted to know; how much do you have for a deposit? And how much do you earn? He was more curious to know every other detail about us.

I of course let my lemon meringue shorts and the bulge in my pocket do the talking for me, but as he and ma femme discussed the details with more and more acuity, I began to notice a few of the details of our new bank manager too.

He had some of the cleanest, most immaculate cuticles that I had ever had the pleasure of sitting across a desk from.

His desktop too, was a thing of beauty. A space where order met elegance.

He had a pen holder, with a fountain pen poised, ready to be swept up in his primed fingers to seal the fate of yet another cherished customer.

He had a mahogany paper tray which held every relevant document that a customer might need.

I found myself becoming mollified by his voice, by everything about him. I noticed his tie clasp, his teddy bear cufflinks, and his shoes polished like mirrors.

Time began to melt. Dripping through Gilles's manicured fingers like warm honey.

When I looked at the brass-handed clock on his wall I was staggered to see that an hour and a half had passed, and still we hadn’t talked turkey, or parlé de dinde as it were.

Eventually, the rumbling of my tummy, thundering through the small office, like a wrathful Old Testament god, prompted the closest thing to urgency for Gilles.

Gilles checked his gold wristwatch and realised it was getting dangerously close to apéro time.

As we passed the two-hour mark in our meeting, he cleared his throat, flattened out his crimson tie, expertly adjusting the clamp with his nimble fingers in the same motion and prepared to break the news to us and inform us about what we could borrow.

Before he could give us the number, I pounced on my moment. I reached inside my pocket and placed the pile of cheques on the table.

Credit to Gilles, he kept his poker face. He even seemed complacent about them, as if my admiral pile of cheques was no big deal at all.

“Vous pouvez les placer dans la petite boite pres de la porte monsieur,” he said with a smile. Nodding towards a little box beside the door which said, Cheques.

I took my time in putting them back in my pocket, giving him ample opportunity to take a look.

With Gilles’ polished and understated demeanour, he recalled every possible fact and figure of our current situation, before summarising, in several long sentences, that we were entitled to borrow… absolutely fuck all.

He didn’t say it with his mouth, that's unbecoming. He instead wrote it down on a piece of paper for us to take away with us.

We took our piece of paper, with our number written on it in Gilles’ beautiful calligraphy, shook his supple hand and wished him a bon soirée as we walked into the night.

I was beginning to get on speaking terms with reality.

After cleaning up the shards of glass where the local neighbourhood children ride their bikes, I started my trusty old camionette and headed off to my first job. 

I’d had morbid ideas about being on the receiving end of some snooty customers who would interrupt me in my whipper-snipping and ask me if I could turn it down. This happened fairly often in Australia. You’d see a figure in your periphery, with their mouth moving and an irritated expression on their face. I’d turn my two-stroke engine off, remove my ear muffs, pinch my AirPods out, which were usually blasting AC/DC and then catch the tail end of the irate neighbours' monologue.

It was usually in a whiney B-minor tone of voice. They’d talk about how they have an important Zoom meeting with the model planes, trains and automobile association, of which they were the chairmen, and that he’d appreciate it if I stopped my whipper-snipping for the next two to three hours, as the this weeks MPT&A meeting was scheduled to compare the five best Super Glue’s for under $10.

I’d always tell this person, whose name was usually Bruce or Graeme, that the best I could do was put my whipper-snipper on quiet mode. Which would often be a compromise they were happy to make. More often than not they were just lonely, and wanted someone to complain to.

So far, in my two weeks as the proprietor of Kiwi Jardins I have had just as many people appear in my periphery, whilst taking my whipper-snipper to the red line, only instead of berating me with a whiny speech about how important their zoom meeting is, they have instead asked me: Voulez-vous boire quelque chose? (Would you like something to drink?) 

Thé? café? eau de vie? (Eau de Vie, which means Water of Life is a type of French moonshine that will make your siblings appear attractive should you consume more than two standard drinks.) 

I have had one old man gently grasp my elbow, as I was putting the finishing touches on a privet hedge, and inform me in a decent and friendly manner that it’s almost noon, and they will be serving up the apéro shortly. He then extended an offer to join them for a drink and some finger foods, which I respectfully declined. I’m not sure how my client would feel about me getting paid by the hour, then seeing me over the neighbours' fence enjoying a glass of Pastis and some saucisson. I don’t want to push it in my first couple of weeks. 

I do believe that my clients have been overwhelmed with my service too. Quite a few people have remarked not just upon my work, but also my work ethic and my efficiency. I’ve had people come out of their front doors with a surprised look on their faces when my petite transite has turned up five minutes before scheduled, and I've seen several retiree’s staring through their blinds and curtains in awe at my ability to go for longer than one hour without a cigarette break. 

You’d be amazed at what you can put into a day when you don’t take a 7-minute durry break every hour or so. You can fit roughly 45 minutes more work in over the course of the day, and you get to work with your respiratory system non-impeded. 

In the eyes of my clients, as they watch on from inside their stone houses, I’m like Lance Armstrong on steroids.

My very first job went something like this. Madam Pinot reached out and inquired whether I would be able to tailler sa haie (trim her hedge). I replied saying bien sur! (of course!) So she sent through her address, and I promised I’d give her a quote before starting the two-stroke symphony. 

There was an ornate church at the tallest point of the hill in which the village of my first client was built upon. Fresh flowers hung in baskets attached to the fortified brick walls surrounding much of the village. 

The pace was slow. A Citroen 2 CV made its way along the narrow lane on its way home from the town market.

I tried not to disturb the peaceful community, though I knew it wouldn’t be long till I was drop-starting my machine and taking it to the redline. Then any hope of peace would be simply impossible, for the next two to three hours anyway.

The customer was a retired lady in her seventies who I imagine was quite the heartbreaker in her day, but, a lot like her unkempt hedges and lawns, time had had its way, though she still had a twinkle in her eye and was ripe and ready to flirt with her new foreign gardener. 

I played my part, making sure I’d worn a pair of shorts which accentuated my calves. 

When you don’t have a mastery of the language, you have to rely on what god gave you. 

Before starting, it was important that I was the recipient of her full hospitality. She offered me un thé, café, Eau de Vie (as a joke) and insisted that I take a seat at the table. 

I gratefully accepted un café and watched her prepare an assortment of different pastries which she had collected from the boulangerie earlier that morning. Pain au chocolat, beignet, Paris Brest and a kind of platted delicacy that I’d never seen before. 

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” (What is this?) I ask, pointing to the unidentified pastry.

“C’est un Pépito, c’est trés bon,” she said, placing one on my plate, next to my cup of truly terrible coffee. 

The pastries were breathtaking. You get the impression that it has taken hundreds of years of artisan bakers steadily perfecting every detail of the recipe until it is second-cousins with perfection. 

The coffee on the other hand tastes like the contents of one of those spittoons that you see in the corner of every cowboy bar in old western movies. Filled with the tobacco spit from whatever riff-raff had ridden into town and dismounted from their saddle that day.

The coffee tasted like someone had taken one of these spittoons at the end of a busy day at the saloon, then placed it on a gas stove for five minutes and voila. French coffee.

“Tu aimes le café?” My most gracious of hosts, and my very first client asked. 

I was left floundering, far from sanguine.

I still do not possess the ability, the French superpower, of being able to tell the truth, without making it anyway personal. 

If I was French, my answer would have been. 

“Non, c’est degueulasse.” (No, it’s disgusting).

My French self would then not drink it, light a cigarette, blow a plume of smoke into the air and continue with my life. She’d probably then crack a bottle of rouge, and we would gently complain about life. 

Instead, I have my Kiwi conditioning, where it's better to be nice, to be polite, and to lie. 

It’s a timely tradition, one every Kiwi is taught at an early age when Aunty Janette hands you a slice of her famous bacon and egg pie. 

When Aunty Janette offers you a slice, you say, yes please. 

When Aunty Janette drops the hefty slice of B&E pie on your plate, landing with a thump, shaking the table, you say thank you very much Aunty Janette, and you pray that there's enough tomato sauce to drown the pie. 

When you take your first bite and hit a pocket of baking powder, which sends a puff of white powder up and onto your face, and she asks you if it’s as good as usual, you say yes Aunty Janette, you’ve done it again. 

One day, perhaps, I will gain the superpower of being able to tell the truth instead of being nice, but I’m still in basic training. 

Thankfully I’m able to wash the hot cowboy spittoon juice from my mouth with the truly formidable pastries. 

I chat in my broken French with my new customer. At times she looks at me fondly as I do my very best to navigate certain vowel sounds that before moving to France I didn't know existed. 

At other times she looks at me like a drunk waiter who is handling a tray of priceless crystal. A kind of drawn-out wince, waiting for the finery to be placed safely back on the table. 

She apologises for not speaking better English, and I generously accept her apology. 

“C’est pas trop tard pour apprendre,” (It’s not too late to learn) I jibe. “Non, non, non. On est en France, on parle Francais.” (We are in France, we speak French.)

I look at the clock and notice that it’s nearly ten o’clock and I haven’t started. I got the impression that her neighbours might withhold a strict noon débroussailleuse-off policy, which means I’m racing the clock. 

 On the other hand, I wonder how long I might be able to draw this out for.  

At ten a.m, I insist that I need to start, and she understands. She shows me where the salle de bain (toilet) is, and lets me know that I can come in and help myself to water, or that there's jus de pomme dans le frigo (apple juice in the fridge).

This is not a one-off incident of this kind of hospitality and friendliness. In the region that I have been fortunate to find myself in, Bretagne, this is normal. 

The people here are renowned in France for, Avoir le bonheur. (Having the happiness)

At the absolute minimum customers have offered me tea and coffee on a cooler day, and water or jus du pomme on a hot day, and my experiences with the locals has left me feeling lucky to have been adopted into a region which prides itself in it’s kindness and hospitality.

My only other point of comparison to my new clients was my stint working in East Melbourne. The majority of my jobs were over in the Eastern suburbs, where the richest people in Melbourne live. Every day I would leave the artistic and hipster hub of North Melbourne, and head east, way east until the tattooed and grizzly-looking hipsters waiting at grungy cafes for their soy flat-whites were replaced by Range Rover driving, yoga pant-wearing millionaires waiting for their flat-whites with Normal Milk. 

It wasn’t uncommon for a customer in East Melbourne to come out during a 38-degree Australian day, with a cool glass of celery juice in one hand, having finished their Bikram yoga session, and tell you that they’d like you to trim their hedge an inch higher than you’d already done, before downing their cool beverage and walking back inside their air-conditioned home. 

Perhaps it's a matter of money, for it seemed the richer the Eastern Melbournian clients, the worse people they were.

One time I turned up to one of my old company's wealthiest clients, a family who owned a popular chain of retirement villages. 

The lady of the house came out of their McMansion, yelling that I'd killed all of her plants. 

“I don’t know what the hell that you’ve done, but you’ve killed everything!” she yelled in her; too-rich-to-need-manners tone of voice. 

I looked around, puzzled to see a perfectly healthy autumnal garden. 

“What’s the problem?” I had said.

“What's the problem? Everything's dying! That’s the problem!” she had said. 

I was puzzled, gobsmacked, looking at the orange and red leaves on the lawn, before the penny dropped.

“Ohh, no-no-no, these trees aren’t dying, it’s just autumn,” I had said.

“Look at this, they're losing all their leaves! This isn’t normal! You're going to have to replace them all,” she said, the anger still hot on her breath. 

I took a long, deep, calming breath, and prepared to be the bearer of what would potentially be earth-shattering information. I was tasked with the duty of educating this person about winter. 

It was almost impossible to do so without sounding condescending. 

“They're not dying, though I know it certainly seems like they are. But they are just losing their leaves and then they’re going to go to sleep in winter, before coming back to life again next year in spring,” I had said.

I still remember the look on her face. She had thought that I was trying to mystify her with an apocryphal tale. A myth. She had thought I was trying to pull the wool over her eyes. Tree’s, sleeping. It sounds like something out of a Tolkien novel. 

It turns out that she had spent most of the winters of her life holidaying in Greece.

That year co-vid had cancelled those plans, and she was faced with the cold hard realities of Winter and it’s younger brother, Autumn.

I have to say that the people of France, or more specifically the people of Bretagne, have left me feeling grateful to be here. 

There is a respect for the worker, for the individual, that is palpable and it compels you to do the best work possible. 

A delicious biscuit and a truly horrendous cup of coffee goes a long way.

I’m a hyperbolic boy. Just ask my mum and she’ll tell you that I use hyperbole at least a million times a day. 

However, in the following instalment, I will not use a single hyperbole, and this Is a promise. 

After my short and rather inglorious stint on the oyster boats on the beautiful coastlines of the Morbihan, I was faced with the cold hard realities of my situation. If I didn’t possess the communication skills to empty oyster bags into oyster bins, then getting into real estate or sales in France was unlikely. 

I was forcing a great deal of financial burden on my wife, who shouldered my rather hefty weight like a mighty Clydesdale and marched on without complaint. 

There’s nothing sexy about a thirty two year old mute toddler, and the strain eventually broke the proverbial Clydesdales back. 

I fell into the position of a modern day, nineteen-fifties house husband. Making sure that the breadwinners dinner was cooked, just so, and that the linens were laundered and pressed, just so. I would make sure that my wife’s drink was mixed to her liking, and waiting for her, as soon as the whistle blew at the end of the day, and in between keeping on top of all of the little things which keep a household running, I did my best to look nice for her. 

There were times, of course, when this big blabbermouth of mine got me into trouble, but my wife has a way of keeping me in line at such times. She has a lot of stress at work, you know, and sometimes she doesn’t mean to let her temper get the best of her. But she's an excellent provider, and so she deserves to come home to a clean and ordered home. 

As I’ve mentioned in previous chapters, I'm an unpublished writer, which is a fancy way of saying that I'm a highly experienced gardener. 

I sat down for a string of job interviews at rival oyster outlets and greens-keeping positions at golf courses, and I learnt that it is in fact quite difficult to get a full time position in France.

The reason for this, is that once you gain employment in France, it is basically impossible for your company to fire you.

In Australia, if you turn up to work on a Monday, and your footy team beat the bosses footy team, then they may fire you on the spot, without incident. 

In France, pedophilia, is NOT a fireable offence. Even pedophilia in the workplace will require ‘performance & behavioural management’ but not termination of employment. It was for this reason, that when my prospective employers got the slightest whiff that something wasn’t quite right about me, that they leaned on the side of caution, and got back to me with a; Merci, mais, non-merci…

Now that I look back, I wonder if they did in fact suspect that I might have been a pedo? There were several questions which I didn’t fully understand, so i’d taken my chances and just answered yes. Who knows what they actually asked me? It doesn’t really bare thinking about, now.

After successive, non-successful job interviews, I had the idea of cutting out the middle man ‘A Boss’ and decided to create my own job. 

In Bretagne, it rains almost every day, and the sun shines in between showers. It’s also warm, and often humid. It is renowned for its pastures, which is why it's such a prosperous agricultural zone in France.

For this reason, I decided to start up a business cutting these lush pastures, as well as the hedges which line most of the houses which make up the villages around this beautiful part of France. 

There isn’t a great deal of start-up costs to a gardening company. If you have a second hand van, a lawn mower, a whipper-snipper, and a can-do attitude, then you're able to get to work. 

We figured that it would be a great way to get me out into the public, mingle with the locals, bring in some money and work on my french. 

Doucement, mon pote. 

If I worked at a bar I'd drive my colleagues insane and I’d drive the customers insane, if I didn’t go insane myself first. Within a week of working there I’d no doubt be involved in a physical altercation, perhaps battering a customer into a stupor with a stale baguette, and I’d be on the next flight back home. 

But dealing with two or three clients per day, with my wife being able to have a chat with them on the phone beforehand, was a good way to slowly but surely build my confidence and skills. 

Doucement - doucement - doucement, mon pote.

On top of this. The Mac Daddy, aka Emmanuel Macron, had proclaimed himself to be the Start Up President. 

I decided to put his name to the test, and start up a small business. That was nearly four months ago now…

In Melbourne, Australia. To start a business, you are required to register online and be allocated an IBN number. I had actually done this when I was bored one day. I’d figured that there wasn’t any harm in it. It was free, and it would mean that if I ever did have a genius business idea then I'd be able to start cashing in immediately. 

The process involved going onto the Australian Government website, entering your full name name, your postal address, your email address and the name of your business. 

I immediately received an email in my inbox with my new IBN number and my imaginary business was officially open, for business. I just had to think about what the business would actually be, which unfortunately never came to me, but it was exciting nonetheless, and I could there after refer to myself as a business owner.  

My amazing wife had to take the lead on the paperwork, in the land of France. I tried to ease her burden, but at the end of the day, having to backtrack on my own paperwork, trying to find the exact point where I had gone so desperately off track caused her more of a headache than just doing the necessary paperwork herself. 

The most beautiful part about the business was, without a doubt, its simplicity. Just one man, one lawn mower, one dream. To cut grass, and trim bush. It’s something a child could do, and in fact many children do, do.

 I believe I mowed my first lawn when I was eight years old, and I still remember that sweet feeling when my mum dropped that pile of coins in my hand. It was off to the dairy with me. Where I had the kind of capital to walk out of there with a Bubble O’ Bill, a Sherbert Fizz Roll and a pack of grape flavoured Hubba Bubba, and I still had some change rattling in my back pocket. 

I felt like a damn millionaire. 

I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since, though now I do it for the big bucks. 

Perhaps I’m naive, or idealistic, in thinking that this kind of business would be fairly straight forward. Once upon a time I would wheel my dads Masport down the road, and the biggest struggle in servicing my customers was getting the damn thing up the steps that ran beside Mrs Wentworth’s house so I could reach the back lawn. 

You’ve just got to take it easy, one step at a time, back wheels, front wheels, and try not to dent the blade. It’s a lot like learning french.

Doucement…

We found a second-hand mini-Transit van or la petite-transite for dirt cheap. I ordered a second hand whipper-snipper, or débroussailleuse, that had a hedge trimmer attachment, for dirt cheap, and I bought a half price display model lawnmower, for dirt cheap. 

I was ready to start trimming that George W, all I needed was the green light from the Mac Daddy. 

My wife informed me of the necessary documents which I would need to get together and send to the Ursaff. We did so, along with what I thought were my rather humble intentions of starting up a small gardening business. 

Three weeks later we received our response, informing us that it’s not that simple. If you want to start an auto-enterprise (small business) then you have to provide a secondary service, one which has absolutely nothing to do with gardening. 

We assembled the necessary paperwork, and replied. Stating that we will be a gardening company, who also does window cleaning as a secondary business. 

Three weeks later we received our reply, saying that this will potentially be possible, but that I will of course have to pay the secondary business taxes on the window cleaning business, and that it will fall into a higher tax bracket. 

In addition, they asked for me to send through three years worth of payslips from a previous employer, proving that I had been employed as a full-time gardener for three years. If I was unable to do this, then I could only spend a maximum of one billable hour at one specific client at a time… 

Bearing in mind that my wife is holding down a stressful job with her company in Paris, while also shouldering the burden of getting these pesky ducks in a row, we persevered onward, grabbing those canards by their necks, yanking them into line, then stuffing them into yet another big brown envelope, and sending them off to the powers that be.

When we heard nothing for a month, my wife was engaged in a number of spirited conversations with the representative on the other end of the phone. We submitted two further envelopes, before they realised just how serious I was about cutting grass, and  they came back to us with a compromise, a little under four months after first submitting our application to start cutting said grass. 

The region of Ille et Vilaine, came back with the following proposition:

 I am allowed to cut grass using a lawn mower that is push powered. I am not allowed to operate loud machinery before nine a.m, between the hours of twelve and two p.m (apero & lunch time) or after 7 p.m (apero & dinner time). I was actually quite happy with this. I enjoy an apero as much as the next person.

I am not allowed to apply any chemicals to the gardens, and I am by law not allowed to charge for anything other than cutting grass, or cutting what for legal reasons will be hereby referred to as a ‘shrub’. I am however permitted to remove mauvais herbes (weeds) of which I thought was rather generous. 

My only billable service is an hourly rate for work. If my client requests for me to plant flowers or ‘shrubs’ into their garden, then I am legally not permitted to do so. 

 If I would like to dig a small hole, and place said shrub inside the ground, here-in known as ‘planting’ then I will have my auto-entreprise terminated and incur possible legal action. 

In order to dig said hole, and place said ‘shrub’ into the ground, I am by law required to gain a full paysagiste diploma from a French institution, which takes approximately three years to complete.

I won’t bore you with the full list of requirements, but I had a hearty chuckle at a few of them. 

There was a three page legal document around my rights on using a garden hose. Including that it shall not exceed forty metres in length, and that I cannot use it for any longer than one hour at a time or else I will technically be an ‘irrigationist’ and this requires a three year degree in horticulture from a French institution. 

I am of course bound to uphold the strict French arborist laws, established in 1649, where I am unable to trim a branch that exceeds 35mm in width, without an arborist degree from a French institution. 

I am not allowed to operate a chainsaw without a permit, and of course, I have mentioned the rather strict laws regarding the use of a trailer. 

The only thing that the French love more than their liberty, are their rules. 

But that’s neither here nor there. After fifteen weeks we had finally gotten the green light on Kiwi Jardins. 

We had machete’d our way through a forest of bureaucracy, and now a forest of overgrown lawns and hedges awaits me. 

After getting those pesky canards in a row, we put a message up on the local Facebook group, saying that I've mixed my two stroke, sharpened my secateurs (not that i’m allowed to use them) and primed my whipper-snipper and that i'm ready to besmirch the peace and quiet of  regional Bretagne, and get on top of the grass that never stops growing here.  

It’s time for me to go out into the world, not as a timid, snivelling little boy, but as the owner and operator of Kiwi Jardins, my very own business. 

I’ll be sure to let you know how this goes. 

She works remotely, doing teletravail, from our little old fixer-upper in the pays de la vache of Bretagne on the West Coast of France.

She said it was a team building exercise, and she was excited to get to meet her entire company for the first time. 

She had mentioned to me, as she always did, about having to do a food shop on Saturday, for everything would be closed on Sunday, but as per usual, I thought that she was just being dramatic. 

I dropped her off at the train station at 5.35am on Friday morning. By the time I got back to the house it was still dark outside and I had to use my headlights to navigate the narrow country lanes.

Somehow Saturday got away on me, as they do. By the time I realised that the baguette was hardening, it was after seven p.m, and everything was shut. 

When I awoke on Sunday morning, the light entered the room at a high angle. I didn’t have to look at the clock to know it was late morning. 

Everything was beyond quiet. There wasn’t a lawnmower, a car, a dog barking in the distance. Then a strange realisation came to me. There weren’t any birds chirping. Most mornings it was deafening. From five thirty in the morning you had Dominique from down the roads rooster crowing and the full chorus of the local birdlife in full song, but today, on this Sunday morning, there was genuine, unbesmirched silence. The only thing close to it had been the first night of the lockdowns in Melbourne after the strict 9pm curfew had been enacted. 

Maybe the birds take Sunday off too?

The only sound I heard was the rolling gurgle of my empty stomach. 

I made my way into the kitchen which was drenched in sun light. I flicked the kettle on but nothing happened. I tried it again, but the LED thermostat on the side remained black. 

I looked at the clock on the oven, and it too was blank. I walked over to the light switch and flicked it on, the light bulbs above the kitchen counters stayed dark.

Don’t tell me even the power shuts down on Sundays? 

I walked back up the hallway to my phone to call my wife. I unplugged my cellphone but the screen remained black, the battery was dead. 

“Okay. Good. C’est pas grave,” I said out loud. 

A bit of time away from technology might be healthy? 

I decided that I needed to get out of the village. I was starting to get paranoid. I needed fresh air, open spaces. I found the keys to our secondhand Renault Clio and slipped it into the ignition. The engine didn’t so much as make a sound, no dash lights illuminated, nothing.

What are the odds? 

I’ll just charge the battery, I thought, before remembering that I needed power. I’ll just, before remembering that I needed power.

I took the jumper cables out of the boot and knocked on the door of our next door neighbours place. 

I banged on the door, more like a policeman than a neighbour-in-need but no one would come. A Peugeot and a Citroen were parked in the driveway, yet I knew without question that no one was home. It wasn’t because the curtains were drawn, or no lights were on, or no sounds of shuffling feet came closer. I knew in the same way that you know that someone is watching you. That indescribable feeling, where psychology meets its murky boundaries and moves into the unknowable. 

At that moment I had the opposite feeling to being watched. I had the absolutely unmistakable feeling of being completely alone. 

I found an old bicycle in the shed out the back of our house. It was cloaked in dust and old spider webs. There was no air in the tyres, but I figured it would still get me to the nearest village quicker than walking. 

A dry sound came from the wheels and pedals as I sent the ancient bike into motion for the first time in several years. It winced and squealed as rusted metal rubbed against rusted metal. 

I retraced the narrow road ways back toward the village where we had met with the agent only a few weeks before. It ordinarily would have been a pleasant Sunday bike-ride, if it weren’t for the feeling of existential terror that was percolating upward through my chakras.

Thick grey clouds blanketed the sky above, some glowed a bright white, some silver. A warm wind blew across the hay fields around me as I trundled my bike over the country lane. 

I remembered most of the landmarks the moment I saw them. The old stone house on the corner with the red shutters and hydrangeas growing beside the front door, but no one was home.   

I turned left and continued toward Ercée on Lamé. 

After fifteen minutes of hobbling along on my flat tyres I reached the village. It was desolate. There wasn’t a single soul around. You could feel the absence.

Not a single shop was open, not a single car was on the street. Not a single person was in sight, and I was forced to face the facts. Something beyond my reasoning has happened here. All the people have gone and I'm somehow the last person on earth. 

At least the language barrier won’t be so prevalent…

I’ll be quite honest with you, I considered looting immediately. I saw precious food on the other side of the polished windows; tinned foie gras, sardines and paté at the delicatessen, just sitting there. All of the sudden glass became an absurd concept. A transparent and famously brittle material which can’t stand up to a stone thrown by a toddler. Glass is the foundation of civility, the embodiment of civilisation, something which allows you to look inside, and requires very little effort to shatter into a thousand pieces. The only thing stopping you is civility.

Well the age of glass was well behind me now, civility was now something etched into the pages of history, back when it still existed, before the end times had arrived to regional France.

I found a rock in the raised garden bed, and walked back to the shop window. I pulled my hand back, and just as I was about to throw it through the window and take all the tinned goods in sight, a second thought arrived. Rationing. Don’t take all the best stuff right now, and what's the rush for taking the non-perishables first anyway? The tinned goods will last forever, it's the fresh produce that you want. 

I walked back down the empty street in the midday heat. Never in my life have I wanted to hear a car coming, a dog barking, the high pitched screaming of a whipper snipper at full throttle, anything, any sign of human life. 

You really do take everything for granted. It’s not until it’s taken away that you realise. 

By the time I got to the butcher's shop, rock in hand, I remembered that electricity didn’t exist either so the meat would be spoiled anyway. 

Tinned fish would have to do. As I walked back down the pristine village lane, my rock in hand, poised to shatter the front window once again, I remembered that we had a cupboard full of tins back at the house. But it wasn’t the fact that I had a few tins that kept me from launching that rock. It was the delicate handy work of the window framing that made me pause. The frame was handcrafted out of a single piece of wood. It was fashioned into a twist, like a length of wooden licorice running all the way around the edge where the glass met the frame. 

It really was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Now that all the craftspeople were gone. Now that all the artisans had perished, I figured that it was important to preserve their work. It was my duty, as the last person alive on earth. 

I noticed a ripe apple tree at the end of a long driveway. The tree was full of bright red apples, and a few had even fallen on the ground and started to rot. I walked up the driveway, looking into the windows of the old stone house as I did, but that same feeling came. 

Now that everyone was gone, it seemed important to preserve their memory. 

Their houses would serve as their mausoleums, and they needed to be respected. 

I ransacked the mature apple tree. Taking enough to fill half of my backpack.

I noticed that the neighbour had a healthy looking vege patch. There were courgettes, cherry tomatoes and one ripe aubergine. Enough to make ratatouille, for one. 

As I harvested the season's produce, I heard the first sign of life coming from behind me and it made me brim with hope. It wasn’t birdsong, but it was close. The croon of an old hen, coming from the chicken coupe in the back corner of the garden. 

I opened the coupe door, and inside were three Poules Bresse hens. They all stood up and ran out the coupe door when I entered. In among the straw were three fresh eggs. I took them all and wrapped them up in my jersey, they would serve me well for a dinner later that night. 

I ate my three eggs in silence, using the gas stove to cook them.

I remembered that my wife’s train was scheduled to arrive tomorrow morning. I thought about her, about my family, about all the people that I wouldn’t ever see again, and as I dragged the stiff piece of baguette through the yolk of my egg, I started to cry. It would be the last fresh baguette I'd ever eat. It was a recipe known only by the local artisans, and their secrets had gone with them.

I fell asleep in silence that night, desperate to hear any sign of human life. 

 I awoke the next morning to a high pitched buzzing sound in the distance. It sounded like a mosquito, an extremely pissed-off mosquito that was getting angrier as it got closer. 

I ran outside, and there at the end of the street, was the scooter that was making the noise. A young teenage boy was riding it. Even from a distance I could see the apathetic look on his pimpled face. The noise of the low-powered, high decibel engine rattled my ear drums as the two-stroke motor buzzed through the country air. It sounded like music. I’d never heard anything quite so sweet. It was too beautiful to describe. Like a two cylinder opera. 

I ran toward the teenager as his scooter maxed out at forty five kms. I could feel tears wetting my cheeks as I ran straight at him, my arms outstretched. His tyres squealed and puffs of bluish smoke rose up off the tarmac as he skidded to a stop. 

My arms clamped around his puffer vest as the smell of burnt rubber mingled with his Axe deodorant. 

“Are there any other survivors?” I said.

“Qu-est-ce que tu fais?” he said, puzzled. 

I noticed the cars coming around the corner behind him, now forming a line. The faces behind the steering wheels were angry, having been trapped behind the scooter for god knows how long. I could have kissed every one of them.

The line of cars were all filled with professionals on their way to work in the neighbouring towns and villages. They all shared a similar expression on their faces as they smoked their breakfast cigarettes and ate their breakfast croissants. 

“Putain!” Yelled one car. 

“Partage la route trou du cul!” yelled another. 

I’d never been happier to see so many angry faces. 

I let the teenager go, and he took his little scooter to the red line as he sped off. It looked like he might have exceeded fifty kilometres per hour, aided by a tail wind. 

All the power was back on in the house. 

Still coming to terms with the surrealism of it all, I took the same jumper cables out of the boot of the car, and walked over to my neighbours house. 

I knew immediately they were home. I could feel it when I knocked on the door. 

Didier opened the door with a warm smile.

“Ca va Nique!” he said. 

I held up the jumper cables, hoping they were a strong enough prop to carry the plot of my story. 

“Ma voiture. C’est nas charge pas. Je besoin l’aide?” I said. 

“Ah oui! Bien sur, attend, j’arrive,” he said, fetching his car keys. 

He drove his Citroen around to our driveway and parked it nose to nose with our second hard Renault Clio.

I plugged my phone into the socket and was relieved to see the lightning bolt illuminate my screen, along with eight missed calls from my wife and even more messages. 

When Didier hooked up the jumper cables, I turned the key, and noticed the headlights were in the on position. I flicked them off.

I was forty five minutes late to pick my wife up from the train station. She was pissed off at me, but she forgave me when she saw how happy I was to see her. I hugged her like she had returned from the dead. In many ways she had.

“I heard there was a big power cut here yesterday?” said my wife. “Must have been a bit strange by yourself?” 

“Na it was chilled. Whipped up some ratatouille, poached some eggs,” I said. 

She wouldn’t understand. Nobody would truly understand. 

One of these days I will reveal the beauty of this country. There’s surely no scarcity, and there's scarcely no shortage of people who have done so before me. 

There’s enough stories about the joie de vivre, or the French love affair, but there aren’t many people who notice the plaque in Mona Lisa’s teeth with as much playful eloquence.

Besides, all the best love affairs start with resentment, and if this is true, then I fear that I'm falling for old Lady France. At first I was revolted by her cloying perfume, but now I've become rather fond of it.

Am I suffering from Stockholm syndrome? Where my captors have turned me, using a deft mind control strategy involving impeccable hospitality and general decency? The bastards…

I was lucky enough to be invited to a French wedding a couple of weeks ago. 

The venue was nestled among the rolling hills just north of Toulouse, in a town called Maleville.

My belle soeur & frere’s & I stayed at an old farm cottage down the road, which had been brought by two British men who turned it into something quite charming indeed. 

After some home-toasted muesli and fresh stone fruits, we decided to jump in the jacuzzi, before suiting up for the big day. 

As I sat among the bubbles, I had a knot in my stomach, which had no business being there, given how tranquil our surroundings were. 

I was apprehensive about walking into yet another social setting. As per usual I felt like I was walking into a knife fight, armed with a rubber dildo. It’s a feeling most kiwi’s experience when trying to wrap their mouths around the french language, so I’m no stranger to the sensation. 

I am able to wield my big rubber phallus with enough dexterity to get by most run of the mill interactions, but it brings my conversation partner a great deal of discomfort being on the receiving end. 

Wedding ceremonies can be tiresome and trite affairs. A moment when life-long atheists hold hands inside a church and pretend to be devout christians for a couple of hours before besmirching every christian value in the subsequent celebrations.

It was a breath of fresh air to attend a wedding without any perfunctory piety. Instead, it was a wedding where the closest friends & family of the bride & groom took the reins, and did not restrict themselves with any kinds of fustian traditions. 

From the moment The Office intro tune serenaded the groomsmen and bridal party into the open-air marque overlooking the valleys, the atmosphere was one of love & fun. 

There were no stuffy speeches, where the word love is battered and abused and loses all meaning.  

By the end of the ceremony there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Mostly from laughter, some from being reminded that life is in fact a beautiful thing, and it is possible to be optimistic about it.  

The most poignant moments were of course difficult to truly grasp for me, as I sat back clutching Big Jim, but as I've alluded to in previous articles, something interesting can happen when you don’t get lost in the words. 

You pick up on where the words are coming from, and to see friends and family of the celebrated couple try and put their love into words, using the language of love itself, was something special to be a part of. 

You could feel it in the air. It was like being trapped inside an Elton John song. 

From a purely selfish perspective, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would have to start waving my french around, to the detriment of any innocent bystanders which found themselves within conversation range. 

After the ceremony, when those present were intoxicated on young love, it was time to get intoxicated on aged wine. 

Luckily for me there exists a scale, of which I would like to coin the term, the Bisquetto Principal, in which one's French improves commensurate to how much wine they have drunk. 

This is a real and measurable thing, as anyone who has dived into the deep end of the French language, without wearing their water wings or having had any previous swimming lessons can attest' to. 

In Vino Veritas.

Wine number one:

I think about what I want to say in english, then make the necessary calculations considering whether I need to use the past participle, passé composé, feminine/masculine, correct conjugation, whether I am using an auxiliary or infinitive verb, whether I know the person well enough to not speak in informal french, or whether the person will in fact be slightly offended and feel like i’m distancing myself from them by using the traditional vous. At the same time I don’t want to be too forward and presumptuous and address them with non-formal french. 

I will then translate the necessary words from English into French, before flipping the sentence from back to front, where the adjective comes after the noun, in which time the conversation has continued onward several sentences and the entire subject has changed. 

My words will be delivered rife with timidity. This, plus the fact that I'm four sentences behind, can make me tedious company and I find the conversations I’m in to be rather brief. 

Wine number three:

I’m still wound tight and my conversation partner can smell my weakness. Like I've said, the French can forgive all the seven sins, but not stupidity. They will respond to my French with broken English. Instead of me working on my broken french, we are caught up in an uncoordinated dance. We’re a native French speaker is improving their broken English, instead of me improving my broken french. 

There is something unforgivable about pushing English, at a French wedding, and I know this. 

Wine number five:

 I figure that there's absolutely no harm in making mistakes. 

You ain’t got nothin but nothin Toulouse. 

I say to myself in the bathroom mirror, before hearing a toilet flush beside me. A man I have seen many times during the day, who I’ve even made eye contact with, exits the cubicle and stands at the basin beside me. 

I stop the brain-blender routine, which I mentioned in wine number one, and instead I try and go with the flow. I try and speak without thinking. Just let it happen. Shoot from the hip. Remember your training. If you force it it sounds forced, so I just let it flow like the Cote du Rhone evaporating inside my glass. 

“Je suis tres excité pour la plat du jour, et toi?” I say.  

A misconception that I am yet to shake is that you can’t just translate English sayings into French. “I am very excited;” (Je suis tres excité) seems innocuous, but a lot gets lost in translation. Je suis tres excité, is in fact a good way of telling someone that you are very horny. 

The man looked at me curiously, wondering whether I was insane, or just a serious foody. He had just heard me talking to myself in the bathroom mirror in a foreign language, and now I’m asking him if he’s as horny for the main course as I am?

I do believe that he exited the bathroom without washing his hands, and we did not speak for the remainder of the evening. 

Lemoncello number one:

I’m finding myself bringing up World War Two a lot more than I would if I were in full command of my inhibitions. More specifically I’m critical of how easily France rolled over to the Germans. Luckily the only people who are old enough to be truly touched by those dark times have gone to bed or have turned their hearing aids down, and they probably wouldn’t be able to cut through my accent anyway, so there's no harm done, I tell myself.

“Vous avez de la chance, si ce n’etait pas pour les Britanniques, vous mangeriez un buffet de saucisses ce soir,” (You guys are lucky, if it wasn’t for the British then you’d be eating a sausage buffet tonight).  I ruminate, as I savour the tartness of my Lemoncello. 

I become gobsmacked at how good my French has become, while simultaneously becoming drunk enough to ignore the dribble in which I am vomiting into the ears of whoever is standing next to me. I’ve got months of repressed frustration, just waiting to be sprayed about in a glorious fountain of nonsensical nonsense. 

Lemoncello number three.

I bring up the Rainbow Warrior… 

Get31 number one.

I’m engaged in a fiery debate about French politics. Holding court on current foreign policy and what France needs to do to maintain the spot as the world's only remaining cultural superpower. The USA and China are in decline, Russia is Russia, Germany is burning brown coal in an attempt to improve the environment, but France has stood the test of time and still has its reputation intact. It has been the jewel in the crown of Europe for nearly one thousand years, and continues to be the western world's cultural role model. 

Strangely enough it is my conversation partner who is arguing the opposite position. That France is beyond fucked and has been since Napoleon the third was defeated by Prussia, seeing the end of the second empire, but I will not let this stranger speak ill of my step-mother country. I will fight for France’s reputation, to the death if need be. 

Get 31 number three. 

I make a passionate request for the DJ to play Lady Marmalade, with that crowd pleasing chorus; Voulez-vous-coucher-avec-moi? A little something everyone can get into.

I’m not entirely sure where my shirt is, but it's not important. All of my focus is on giving the groom the most comprehensive and heartfelt lapdance of his young life. It’s time to put the French language, the English language or any kind of verbally spoken language to bed and instead use the most powerful language of them all. Body language. 

The next day I awoke feeling like perhaps I had survived a hearty slice of Victorian Beef Wellington Pie and also sustained a severe head injury, no doubt by one of the unfortunate people caught in the crossfire of my incendiary monologues scalding the French military generals of World War Two. 

Where was this kind of tactile aggression in the nineteen forties when they needed it? 

The words spoken are all forgotten. They are like the breath that they were carried on, caught in the wind, now miles away, as if they never happened. 

Barry’s toasted muesli and stone fruits would not cut the mustard today. I needed galette saucisse, with mustard, to remedy my hellacious hangover. 

As I nursed myself, I pondered an interesting thought; Is it worth using the proven benefits of wine in everyday life? Perhaps its the missing piece of the puzzle? I’m not the problem after all, I just need a little help from the grape juice and theres certainly no shortage of it.  

Would it be worth heading down to the local Tabac before sitting my visa exam? Is it worth cracking a bottle of rouge before my next job interview? If it makes me a more functional member of French society, then can you really call it alcoholism? And can you really be called an alcoholic if you're drinking french wine? Alcoholic’s drink methylated spirits and cheap polish vodka, not Cote du Rhone for four euro eighty per bottle. 

Is it any different to those cyclists in the Tour de France all using steroids back in the day? When Lance Armstrong would pedal with white knuckles grasping the handle bars? Pumping his legs in a rage, angry at the road before him, as if every bit of concrete in front of him had insulted his mother? 

As far as I'm concerned, so long as the grapes are grown locally and I don’t operate a vehicle, even if it is a Peugeot, then perhaps going through life three wines deep might be best for everyone? 

I will experiment with this technique, and get back to you in due course. 

I let the bisque simmer down, but in my opinion its one of those dishes that are best served cold anyway.

In my time away I had an epiphany. Somehow this little bit of writing horse-play turned into literary high-horsing. So I figured its’s time to climb down off my high horse and get my feet firmly back on the ground. 

The point of writing these had once been to be open and honest about my journey into the depths of France. Trying to find my feet, or find the correct word for feet (which is pied) and try to meaningfully contribute to a culture that speaks a different language than mine. 

Somewhere along the way my foot found the stirrups and I climbed up on my aforementioned high horse. The result was indulging in the nonsensical endeavour of trying to define an entire culture, in one thousand words or less. 

Truly pointless pontification.

I will endeavour to stop trying to define something as lucid and abstract as an entire culture, and instead go back to basics.

It’s been a year since arriving, and you will be pleased to hear that I can now talk french. I am still several years off being able to speak french, but I remain hopeful. 

The battle of learning French has not necessarily been a matter of words and their meaning. A great deal of the battle has been internal. 

The hardest adversary that I've had to face has been my ego. A truly formidable foe. Far fiercer than the most terrifying dragon, and more cunning than any fox. 

French is difficult enough, without placing yourself in your own way.

So much of the resistance comes from not wanting to look like a fool. When they talk about getting out of your comfort zone, this is what they’re talking about. Placing the ego out in the open, where it’s exposed to the elements. 

 It’s having to take a deep breath before asking a shop assistant a question; “Vendez-vous ces preservatifs en tres petit?”  Knowing that you're leaving your ego open for attack. 

It’s missing out in the joke with the old geezer while in the line at the post office. It’s not being able to respond to the lady who reached out with a one-liner while waiting for the bus on a Tuesday afternoon.

It’s wanting to share something nuanced with your belle mere, trying to show the mother of your wife that you are capable of abstract thought, but instead fumbling on the pavement with a crayon, barely managing to draw a stick figure of you, standing beside a horse, but she mistakes it as a car… 

Six out of ten people at the shop will be sympathetic to your position, but those four people can really give your ego a good kick in the teeth. 

You eventually forge armour to build around yourself, and this is ultimately a good thing, and helps you grow, but by god it's extremely uncomfortable at the time, and getting angry makes you look a darker shade of dumber. 

I hadn’t really known this, but my ego had spent its previous years in a day spa, with cucumbers over its eyes. Nowadays it looks like a meth addict after coming up second best in a physical altercation.

Even harder than the afflictions on the ego is the feeling of leaving your home and leaving your family. 

The decision did not come lightly to leave home. I love New Zealand, and I love my family. There are times when I'll see videos of my nieces speaking in full sentences, or riding their bikes with my brother and sister in-law standing beside them, my parents proudly watching in the distance, and I'll feel a swelling in my heart. Followed by a sinking feeling, that I've made a huge mistake, and that I need to return home, to where I'm meant to be.

This feeling will linger, and turn to a punching in the guts as I butcher my next interaction with a member of the new community of which I'm still an outsider of, and will be until such a time that I crack the code. 

Sometimes you need to move away to realise just how lucky you are. 

Instead of progressing on to being an adult in my own culture, a role model in my family, a pillar in my community, I have slipped back to the position of a child, learning and growing, in my eternal efforts to speak, and in doing so truly experience a culture that is outside of my own. 

This not only requires a sacrifice and a sadness, it also poses a rather curious unforeseen challenge. The challenge of holding onto your own sense of identity, while respecting and assimilating into your adopted culture.

This may seem simple but when your a grown adult it can become unexpectedly fickle. To try and be true to yourself, while simultaneously respecting the new culture. My own assimilation isn’t even that dramatic, I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be for someone moving from a culture that has polar opposite ideals and practices.

Whether it’s the small things, like taking a beer from the fridge at 6pm, when your present company have a strict 7pm aperitif policy. Whether it’s wearing bare feet for the short walk down to the shops, and realising that you’ve genuinely offended the shopkeeper.

How does one strike the balance between immersing yourself in the new, without losing the self?

The high rope balancing act of living a french life, while still holding onto your kiwiness, when it feels that everything around you is trying to show you the error in your savage ways and bring you into the light. 

You are in their country, so maybe its only right that you start doing everything differently?

Yesterday the neighbours kids were outside playing on the road. They’re great kids, they’re always laughing and smiling and they wave and say bonjour whenever they see me. I’m not like the others, their parents have no doubt told them. I’m not British or American or even Australian, I am Neo-Zelandais, and that means i’m special, apparently. 

Every now and then they’ll bang on the door selling raffle tickets for their school. First prize is usually a set of tea-towels, second prize a cell phone charger, third prize a litre of sunscreen. Truly terrible prizes, but I’ll always buy one or two tickets. You can never have too many tea towels.

They’re happy to see me and I them, but once the smiles and the salut’s and ca va’s have passed I feel that familiar feeling. When the thoughts inside your head need to be pruned back, and I feel myself reaching for the crayon. 

There inevitably comes a moment when I'm fumbling for my words, trying to adjust my thoughts to my reality, when I'm forced to abandon any hope of expressing the joke, and I’ll have to settle for asking a simple question about school or sports or their dog, which I'll still butcher, slightly. 

There's always a moment when their puerile faces show a look of minor confusion. 

Why can’t this adult speak yet? Is he stupid?

My nonsensical mumbling and fumbling in an attempt to form simple sentences has lead people to believing that I am in fact extremely stupid. 

I’m curious to know if everyone experiences this rather peculiar sensation when assimilating into French culture? 

People don’t believe that it's an issue of language, they believe it’s a matter of me being particularly dim-witted as a person, and I sure as shit don’t do myself any favours in disabusing my new found countrymen of their opinions by opening my mouth. 

Every time I do, my IQ plummets a few more points in the opinions of those present. 

I can’t count how many times I’ve been told to put down the knife and step away from the paté, or how many times someone has shown me how to use a sliding door. I think they genuinely believe that I'd push and pull until I wrenched it off its rails with my idiot strength. 

If you can’t speak perfect french (and there is of coarse no other type of french) then how the hell can you be trusted to operate a blender? You’ll no doubt try and lick the blades while they’re still spinning and clog up the public health system. 

I can’t imagine how infuriating it must be for the Engineer from Mauritius who now works as an Uber driver in Toulouse and gets spoken to like a petulant child for turning right instead of going straight. 

The word for straight in french is; droit. 

The word for right in french is… droite. 

But, sixty four percent of people are nice, which is why they’ll usually discretely unplug the blender and distract you with some kind of delicious finger foods and maybe hand you a colouring in book to keep you busy for a while.  

The French can forgive rudeness, arrogance, pretentiousness, envy, jealousy, basically all of the seven deadly sins, (in fact sometimes it seems like they celebrate them) but the one thing they will not forgive, is stupidity. 

Stupidity is the highest sin of all. 

Last week I sat my A2 test for my visa. The result of which will determine how long I can stay in the country. 

There was a moment, three questions deep, as I sweated and shifted in my seat, negotiating my way through the blizzard of strange symbols and trying to retain any numbers or figures in the voice recordings that make up the oral comprehension aspect of the exam, when i considered the thought that perhaps the french government are trying to repel stupid people? 

The oral part was the most difficult, but what I didn’t anticipate was that there was a brain-teaser element built into the questions. Something designed to trip you up and measure your capacity for problem solving. 

One question started with; “Un coq se tient au sommet d’une montagne.” (A rooster is standing on top of a mountain.)

Quatre-vinght-dix-neuf (99) came up, so I took a mental note, and missed the beginning of the next sentence in doing so. Riddles have never been my strong suit, when these riddles are in french, they become almost unfair.

I memorised the names and dates and numbers and figures before the question ultimately asked. 

“Dans quelle direction tombe l’oeuf?” (what direction did the egg fall?)

The correct answer was of course: 

D, Les coqs ne pondent pas d'oeufs. (roosters don’t lay eggs)

An important part of the French immigration system is keeping stupid people out. 

If this is in fact true, and I've found myself floundering in the idiot-filter, then what does that say about my own intelligence? 

Depending upon the results of my exam, my incessant complaining and high-horsing around France may be cut short in an inglorious exit. I wonder what that would feel like?  To be asked to leave from the country that i’ve been so critical of? I suppose it would be kind of poetic, and perhaps thats what it would take for me to truly appreciate my adopted home. 

I wonder if I'd arrive back home to New Zealand and actively try and participate in all aspects of the community? Really appreciate what it means to be able to express and connect with my community? Or will I just start complaining about the price of groceries, the lack of complexity in the pinot noir’s and the predictability of the local brie? 

I suppose it doesn’t matter where you park your camper van, until you empty the septic tank, you're just gonna be carting your own shit around where ever you go. 

It’s one the big hurdles that you face in life. Pointing the mirror away from the outside world, and turning it upon yourself, without slipping and falling into the dangerous pit of self-loathing. 

The eternal efforts continue.

Though the struggle to learn a new language has ultimately been positive. You don’t realise just how mind-blowingly sophisticated our communication is, until it is taken away. 

I have a new found appreciation for language. I think of it completely differently now. What I once thought of merely as symbols and there meanings, I now think of as a kind of telepathy achieved through sound. 

When you are speaking with someone openly and honestly, usually after a couple of drinks, you can find yourself in a place where you transcend beyond words and their meanings and into somewhere within touching distance of the mystical. 

Words are are a vehicle. Take them away, and you're a hitchhiker standing on the side of the road. 

The next time that you see someone fumbling and failing in whatever new language they are trying to learn, remember, you are an idiot in their native tongue. 

In this instalment, I intend to do the impossible.

I will de-caricaturize the French.

The French are the most stereo-typed nation on planet earth. If you handed any person, in any country, a box of crayons and told them to paint you a picture of a French person, they would draw the following: 

A person wearing a blue and white striped shirt and a red beret. They would have a cigarette in their mouth and a baguette, or five, tucked under their arm. They would either have a smile, or a snooty expression on their face and they would probably be riding a bicycle. Inside the basket of this bicycle, for it would most certainly have a basket, would be a quarter wheel of cheese, a bottle of red wine and maybe some grapes. 

If you were to take the crayons away, and ask them to describe this person, they would tell you the following: 

This beret wearing, baguette wielding bicyclist will be elegant and arrogant. They will stand too closely to you when they speak, and you will smell a hint of tobacco, wine and some kind of obscure charcuterie on their breath. They will be shamelessly extroverted in speech, yet poignantly philosophical in thought. They are romantic. They will almost certainly have a slight body odour similar to onion soup, complimented by a deftly chosen scent which they applied too much of. They will be strangely charming, but you will be happy the moment they leave. You will think about them later that day, and while you wish them well, you also wish that you never see them again. You will probably tell your friends about this person.

Voila.

Having lived in France for a year now, I am still yet to meet this person. Of course I've met some dickheads while I've been here. There isn’t a country on earth that is dickhead-free, unfortunately.

It would be convenient if you could accurately measure this, and deduce some kind of percentage ratio, but alas, we are not equipped with an dickhead meter, yet.

The truth is that the vast majority of the people I have met in France have been generous, hospitable and welcoming. I haven’t seen many of the snooty and arrogant people that I had previously been led to believe made up the majority of the population. 

I’ve speculated as to where these stereotypes have come from, and one that sticks, is that it's been curated by people who have visited France, or perhaps more specifically Paris, and been mistaken for thinking they were in fact visiting DisneyLand Paris, where the stubborn staff (Parisian’s) don’t seem to realise that the customer is always king and sometimes don’t even speak the correct language, which is of course American. 

French waiters can be rude, yes, but it usually means the food is going to be amazing. 

If you walk into a brasserie in Paris and vomit your order in the waiter's face: 

“Give me a cup of coffee, milk & two.” 

Then you will probably be charged five euro for your revolting coffee, and you won’t get one of those tiny dry biscuit things on the side to wash the taste out after. 

One aspect of the French culture that has not been stereotyped, and which I had not anticipated before arriving, is how environmentally conscious they are. They will insist on buying locally, and most of the fruit and veg suppliers of even the biggest supermarket chains will insist on stocking French produce and strive to have the coveted and hard-won BIO label attached. 

The one exception to this was brought to the nation's attention last year, when France learnt that the majority of the mustard seeds used to make dijon are not from the famed region of Dijon, but from the Ukraine. The country felt the full extent of the Ukraine war during those dark times where the mustard isles only offered American and English.

 It was a time that the French don’t like to talk about. The closest this generation has come to war rationing. The Great Mustard Shortage of 2022.

I had to pull some strings, and do things that i'm not proud of to procure a half jar of un-cut dijon during those days. Thank god my beau grand-pére kept a secret cachette for such times, which he was generous enough to share with the family. 

A half a jar of un-cut dijon had a street price upward of thirty euro during that time. 

Another obscured stereotype of the French is their peculiar reverence for cyclists. They are in fact celebrated here. In New Zealand cyclists are second class citizens who need to be stopped. They are masochists in obscenely tight clothing that take up way too much space and risk potentially scuffing the paint of one's Toyota Hilux should they come in contact. 

Kiwi’s will wind down their windows and yell at cyclists if they believe they’re taking up too much room, which they are by their mere presence on the road. We'll cut them off if they try to roll passed the cue in traffic. We’ll break glass beside the gutters to try and deflate their pumped up tires and ego’s. Serves them right for rubbing their superior cardio and carbon neutral transportation in the rest of our faces. 

 Cyclists are treated with contempt in New Zealand, but in France they are celebrated. Towns will happily shut down for hours if a local bike race wishes to pass through. The locals will cancel their plans and camp out in front of their houses with tranchettes in perpetual motion, slicing up courgettes and aubergines, which will be placed on scorching hot planches. Tins of moussed-fish will be spread on thin slices of baguette before being sprinkled with cornichons, and endless bottles of fine wine will be drunk as they eagerly anticipate their arrival. When the peloton passes, they will zip through a lingering plume of apero-vapour and cigarette smoke which has accumulated during the course of the day, testing the lungs of the athletes to the brink. 

On the roads, French motorists are aggressive and treat each other terribly. But their atavistic rage will be mollified the moment they see someone in lycra peddling up ahead of them. Cars will slow down to a crawling speed, backing up traffic for miles if need be. While the lone cyclist pumps their tiny little legs and takes up the entire road.  

No abuse will be yelled from behind the steering wheel. Instead a passionate:

“Aller le blue!” will be belted from inside the car. 

I’ve seen passengers hand bicyclists paper cups of water through their open windows as they pass, then throw rocks at passing motorists. 

Another unexpected stereotype I’ve since learnt, is that French parents do not coddle their babies. Where I come from, a good parent will keep both eyes on a baby at all times, and will endeavour to pre-empt any cries. If your baby is crying, then you are a terrible parent. C’est ça.

They have a strict regime for their baby, in which the entire world will bend to. 

The French think a little differently. If your baby's nap time is 1.30pm, and you are still at the brasserie on that particularly beautiful spring day, then the baby will take a nap in its stroller beside the table while its parents finish their Get 31’s and contemplate whether perhaps a Cognac is in order. 

If the babies bedtime is 7.30pm, and its parents are still at the same brasserie, having decided to order an apéro and take a look at the dinner menu, then perhaps on this particularly clear and wonderful night, the baby might stay up half an hour past its bedtime, and shockingly the baby survives.

The parents will almost certainly drive home, and the baby will not be put in a car seat, but kept in the boot or ‘baby carrier’ as it’s called in France. 

Babies in France mix their own formulas when they are hungry, reach for their own tissues, and dry their own tears when they cry. They change their own nappies if they are too stupid to use the toilet yet. Well, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. 

This philosophy, of a child becoming a part of your life, instead of it becoming the centre of yours, is a very french idea and its intended to create a child who does not believe itself to be the centre of the universe. Once this earth shattering idea is realised, they can continue past this and perhaps shape a more interesting world view, now that they have realised that there is a vast and expansive universe that exists beyond themselves. 

Could this explain how France has been the philosophical thought leader in Europe since the renaissance? Or is it just an excuse for neglectful parenting? Comme tu veux. 

My final petite-morsel to consider when de-caracaturizing the French is to take into account their rich history. I won’t bore you with too much detail as to how the nation which we now know of as France was conceived.

If you’d like a detailed guide to France's inception, I’d suggest reading the current gold standard which is Asterix & Obelix. 

I’ll skip a few centuries to when Charlemagne or Charles The Great unified the Frankish tribes, into what would eventually become known as France, and a new language was born. French.

 This exciting new language was a slightly more confusing version of Latin, that was rumoured to have been purposely made to be so confusing to prevent stupid people from being able to pick it up easily. However the plan backfired, and it has since become revered as one of the most beautiful languages in the world. 

 France has experienced the kind of history that one would expect, when they are wedged in between Germany and Great Britain, and to the north lets not forget that little country named Russia.  

Since France's inception, all their neighbours had one thing in common, the rapacious desire to have the enviable micro-climates of Bordeaux, Champagne and the Loire region for themselves, as well as a nice little stretch of the Mediterranean sea in the south of France. 

With this taken into consideration, it’s no surprise that the French are patriotic and possess an indomitable will to win and defend themselves. They can be arrogant and snooty, yes, but you would be too if you kept the Germans and the British out for six hundred years. When you really think about it, it’s not a bad effort. 

After the two world wars, both of which France hosted, the real competition began, in the form of commerce within Europe and the rest of the world. 

In order to survive in France, you must be smart, think fast, be innovative, and uphold your reputation. Perhaps this is why they can take themselves a little too seriously at times?

In my little Waka floating in the arse end of the south pacific ocean we didn’t grow up with the same intensity surrounding us. We had time, we had space and we didn’t share a border with Germany. Our border was a vast coastline of beaches and rocky bluffs, boasting foreshores and seabeds from the treacherous rip-tides of Piha to the calm bays of Kaiteriteri all the way down to the oyster-rich coastline of Bluff. 

The only things that threatened our borders were particularly territorial Albatrosses.

How much of those centuries of constant conflict and invasion from all sides remains in the French psyche to this day? 

In conclusion, I have found that it may in fact be impossible to de-caricaturize the french.

If you are going to run into a French person, they very well may in fact be riding a bicycle. They will probably be on their way to an apéro or lunch somewhere, and so they will most likely have one or five baguettes on their person. The ride, and the fact they didn’t shower that day, will most likely give them an onion soup-esque odour, and the mingling of the pre-bike-ride wine and cigarette (which is something of a ritual) will leave their breath with a decidedly rustique smell. They will most likely be rude to you, but do not take umbrage at this, for it is simply because they are far more intelligent than you and you are cutting into their precious apéro-time. They will also possibly still be dealing with the trauma of having not been cared for by their parents as a baby.