Franglais Encore

I’ve just come across another blog post I wrote while living in France, illustrating that however hard it tries, the Académie Française can’t stop the inexorable march of English words into the French language. Which are your favourites?

Franglais

February 4th 2010

There we all were, at Laroque Chorale last week, singing away, when our Director begged us to sing with ‘plus de feeling’. I tried not to laugh, then realised everyone else was taking her words to heart, and agreeing a bit more ‘feeling’ wouldn’t come amiss.

It sometimes feels as if there really is no need to learn French – so many English words are an everyday part of life here now.

So let’s just imagine……what if, instead of being a retired Englishwoman of a certain age, I were instead a thrusting young 30-something French business woman? What if, instead of being curled up with a gardening magazine, I preferred something more like ‘OK’, with stories of some C list celeb. – ‘un people’? Perhaps my life might be more like this……

‘I always struggle to get up in the morning from the comfort of my kingsize. But it has to be done. I dress quickly, pulling on my teeshirt, my shorts, and my pull, to take the 5 dogs out. Didn’t you know I like dogs? I’ve got a fox terrier, a labrador, a pointer, a setter, a york shire (sic) and a border colley (sic), all pedigree, of course. We go jogging every day, with me plugged into my walkman. At the week-end, when we have more time, I do a bit of cross country.

After a shower, there’s only time for a quick bite: toast, corn flakes, something like that. Just occasionally, for a treat, I’ll have a cooked breakfast, like the English do.

Then I have to get to work. I’m a businesswoman, specialising in marketing, and first thing every morning, I have a briefing with the boss. We’re not doing so well in the recession, and we’re no longer a blue chip company.

I’ve got a very short deadline for an interesting new deal, but we’ve got awful IT problems. E-mail, the internet, we can’t log in or download properly- you name it. IT support’s always here trying to debug things.

We’ve just done a publicity drive via a mailing, but the feedback was awful, and my manager’s not pleased. She’s the one stuck with the cash-flow problems. We all had a meeting, a real brainstorming session, and we’re working on a new business plan with a view to downsizing. I find it hard to offer leadership: I’ve no killer instinct. Frankly, I think I’m a bit of a has-been…..

Towards 12.00, I really need to relax. So off to the gym for a spot of fitness training: stretching, and a bit of a work-out with a punching ball.

I’m starving after that. I ring my manager to ask her to join me at a snack bar, but she’s a snob, and won’t come. But I love fast food! Hamburgers, hot dogs, nuggets – even a sandwich – bring them on! And after that, an ice cream or a banana split, all washed down with a milk-shake. No diet for me!

Le hamburger.
Amirali Mirhashemian, Unsplash

I hardly have time to get to the shopping centre. But I prefer self service and luckily the shops here don’t shut at lunchtime – they do non-stop shopping. Sometimes I go to the hard discount stores too, like Aldi, but not today.

Back to work for more of the same, then home for a well-earned break. A cup of tea, some cake, and half an hour with my book, the new science fiction, a best seller.

Then my mobile rings. It’s Marianne! She’s got tickets for the new one man show this evening: she must have been making eyes at the man in the box office. Me, I’d prefer a film, a thriller, or something with a happy end. Or even a night club with a spot of dancing…… Still, a night out’s a night out.

Marianne’ll be looking gorgeous as usual, with her look designer. I get out my vanity case, and put my make-up on, the blush, the eye liner, the lipstick. What to wear with my blue-jean? And I’m not even clean yet. Too much to think about! I can’t stay here to chat to you any longer. Bye-bye.’

‘Comment Shoppez-Vous?’ revisited

It’s that time of the month again, when I re-blog something from our years in France. This one’s probably an odd choice, when shopping for anything but the bare essentials of life is pretty much denied us, but … learning something new is one of those educational opportunities we’re meant to make use of during Lockdown. Though eight-years-old fashion vocabulary may not be all that helpful.

‘Comment shoppez-vous?’

May 18th, 2012

Stuck in a waiting room with a pile of magazines between me and my appointment time, my idea of hell is a choice between fashion mags and ones about cars.

Less so in France, at least as far as the fashion ones are concerned. It’s not that I’m more interested in being stylish and chic here. I simply have fun reading the articles and noting the ‘English’ words and phrases on almost every line.

Are you a sophisticated lady? Cool? Relax et sexy? Show-off? Perhaps you aim for le twist sporty-glam, or like le mix et le match, le style ‘street’, or le fun et le trash.

Down at the shops are you looking for un look color block, le style boyish ou girly, arty-trendy, crazy doll, grungy girl? If you’ve any sense, you’ll have made a shopping list, to make sure you come home with le jean, le blazer, le trench, le legging, les shoes (with kitten-heel perhaps), and perhaps one or two it pièces. Then you could really get to show off and expect le red carpet treatment.

When it comes to make-up, I hope you don’t like le make-up too much. Light is so much more subtle. If you’re a beauty addict perhaps you should be looking for un effet sixties, or un twist, using liner and shadowing your eyelids en smoky or flashy to achieve le total-look of your choice. Then you’d look a real star.

It’s pretty exhausting really. That’s why keeping up with fashion isn’t very high on my to do list.

Six Circles for a Lockdown Saturday

Potting shed at Gurukula, Kerala, India

El Clot metro station, Barcelona.

Street Art, Valencia.

Yayo Kusana’s The Passing Winter (2005) in Tate Liverpool

Look up in Liverpool Central Library and this is what you’ll see …

A trip round the harbour in Alicante.

PFTW#67

Six Word Saturday

Click on any image to see it full size.

A Grey Day? Or Perhaps Not.

I chose Tuesday as a day to record the changing conditions outside the kitchen window from sunrise to sunset, for Jude’s 2020 Photo Challenge in which she invites us to observe a single view throughout the day. As the day wore on, I wondered why I’d bothered. It was a dull, somewhat gloomy day. Just grey and rather cold, nearly all day. But when I downloaded the pictures and looked at them, I discovered far more had been going on than I had realised. You take a look too.

6.40 a.m.

8.00 a.m.

10.00 a.m.

Midday

2.00 p.m.

4.00 p,.m.

6.00 p.m.

8.00 p.m.

9.45 p.m.

A favourite? Maybe 8.00 in the evening. The weather’s picked up and the light has softened as the evening draws in. And finally, I’ll show you some of the lilac that features in every shot.

# 2020 Photo Challenge 19: Light.

You asked for 6 photos, Jude. Sorry, you’ve got ten. Plus one.

A Foodie Childhood?

When I was a small girl in London food was a big part of my life. I don’t mean eating, but shopping for food and cooking it – I’d made my first Christmas cake when I was four after all. It’s possible I had some help. And I certainly licked the bowl.

This Sainsbury in 1950’s Streatham is a close cousin of the one we visited in Victoria (sainsburyarchive.org.uk)

Because my mother taught all week, weekends meant a Saturday morning trip to Sainsbury’s in Victoria. I would watch as the shop girls reduced large yellow slabs of butter to half pound blocks using large wooden butter paddles – look, we still have some domestic-sized ones –

while others weighed sugar into dark blue paper bags. I looked on impressed as the man on the bacon counter turned the whining, shining wheel of his slicing machine – ‘Thick or thin madam?’. After she’d bought all we needed, my mother joined the queue for the cashier’s window and fumbled in her purse to find the right change.

This is the kind of sight that greeted us as we shopped for groceries – counter service only (sainsburyarchive.org.uk)

It was the greengrocer’s stall on the market next. I liked collecting the decorated tissue squares that oranges and tangerines were wrapped in.

This is a market stall in Cádiz 2020, not London in 1950-something. But you get the idea.

I liked helping to choose the weekly vegetables, and learnt when to expect the different apples coming into season. Discoveries came first, even before the autumn term started. Then James Grieve, Worcester Pearmain, Laxtons (Supreme and Superb), and round about Bonfire Night, the brown-skinned Russett. Oranges and tangerines were for Christmas time. I always hoped that there might be enough money left to buy a seasonal treat – perhaps a single peach.

Ellison’s Orange (all three photos were taken at Harloww Carr Gardens Harrogate, where they have a splendid collection of traditional English apple trees).

Lord Lambourne.

Red Falstaff.

Best of all was the delicatessen. This shop wasn’t at all the preserve of the moneyed middle classes, reviving holiday memories by buying exotic food stuffs. Instead it was a refuge for the stateless, rather rudderless foreign populations of shabby 1950s Britain. There were huge numbers of Poles who’d served out the war in the UK – my father was one; Italian ex POWs; Hungarian Jews – all the flotsam of Europe.

A cheese counter, probably in present-day Germany. (Waldemar Brandt Unsplash)

Here we’d buy Polish boiling ring, cooked simply in water and eaten with buttery mashed potatoes and sauerkraut or cabbage. I loved the wizened dried sticks of kabanos, a thin sausage that my school friends assured me was made from donkey meat. There was Polish rye bread, speckled with caraway. It was at the delicatessen that my mother learnt about pasta. We started eating spaghetti bolognese in about 1954, long before it became a British standard. We bought Samsoe from Denmark which makes the best toasted cheese in the whole world. My school friends found our food odd. That was alright. I found theirs odd too.

A selection of sausage, quite possibly from Argentina (Edi Libedinski, Unsplash)

Very occasionally on Saturday afternoon we would catch the tube all the way to Trafalgar Square and walk into Soho and the Italian store there. Those impossibly long packets of spaghetti! Those solid piles of Italian sausage: pink fat-studded mortadella; Neapolitan salamis the colour of dried blood! A great wheel of parmesan from which some cheery Italian with lots of smiles but little English would hack crumbly fragrant slices with a seriously stout and heavy knife! Aromatic roasted coffee beans clattered into special scales used for nothing but weighing coffee! And Italian voices, laughing, chatting, shouting and thoroughly at home. I don’t think we ever bought a great deal here. We were there for a spot of sensory overload, and a few small treats.

Impossibly exotic in the 1950s: pasta neither hoop-shaped nor in a tin with tomato gloop (Markus Spiske, Unsplash)

Many of my childhood memories centre around preparing the food that we bought. But that’s a story for another day.

One More Walk in the Woods

Greensitt Batts

Heslett Wood

Coal Bank Wood

Piccadilly

Five Ponds Wood

Mickley Barrass

I walk in the woods daily.

Join me just one more time.

Light shafting downwards through the trees.

Loamy paths, wild garlic, bluebells, campion.

Silence: except for birdsong, purling streams.

The tang of sap, earth, flowers.

#Six Word Saturday

Jo’s Monday Walk

It’s All Wet

I’ve been hunting through the archive for pictures that are All Wet. It’s easy enough to find souvenirs of days out in the rain: this is England after all; and of riverside and seaside shots. But my eye kept being drawn to these photos, ones taken when I was reluctantly imprisoned inside during a rainstorm, or otherwise messing about in the wet. What do you think?

A soggy weekend in Cumbria.

The car had to tackle some seriously deep puddles as we came home from our Cumbrian weekend.

Cherry blossom drifting onto a sunlit pond.

The carwash.

Edinburgh in the rain, as seen from the National Museum of Scotland.

Busan, South Korea after a heavy rain storm.

Lens-Artists Challenge #95 – All Wet

Look for Shadows

‘Look for shadows’, says Jude. So I have. William did too, and he was sure he could catch his shadow if he tried just a little bit harder.

I went out catching shadows too: on roadways, in fields, on the bedroom wall. Sometimes they were crisp silhouettes of the objects themselves, and at other times bafflingly indistinct, or satisfyingly abstract.

Last year, in Northumberland: our intrepid band of hikers pinned against a drystone wall.

A selection of legs – human, probably – at Masham Sheep Fair.

Self-portrait as shadow.

Climbers growing outside the window reflected on the wall and ceiling.

Plant life on the roadside.

A pretty accurate portrait of an oak tree painted by the sun on a recently harrowed field last week.

# 2020 Photo Challenge 18

Walking Every Single Day During Lockdown

I’ve made discoveries on my doorstep:

Woodland

Farmland

River bank

Lakeside

Pasture

Wildlife

A new walk, every single day.

Six Word Saturday

A composite walk for Jo’s Monday Walk

I’m Behind the Curve

I woke up this morning to realise it’s already May: though without the accompanying balmy weather. And I hadn’t yet done Jude’s April Photo Challenge. I wonder if she’ll notice if I squeeze it in today?

She wants us to explore curved lines. I’ve found this the most difficult of her challenges, so let’s see what I’ve come up with.

I’ve begun on one of my daily walks near the house: An oak tree providing a natural arching frame over a field of rape, horizontal as the horizon.

Let’s go on a virtual journey to the Yorkshire Dales where in normal times, we love to walk: streams, rolling hills, drystone walls, snaking ahead of us on our path.

Angram Reservoir, leading the eye to the viaduct at the back of the picture

A drystone wall near Grassington picks out our route.

More scenery on the moors above Grassington.

And at our nearby nature reserve, Nosterfield, brambles frame the local landscape in the autumn.

Lastly, let’s make a trip to Gateshead, and look at the Millennium Bridge framing the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

2020 Photo Challenge #17