La France, mon amour, what happened to you?

There is, when you write about France, always the danger that you will become Swiss Toni, the character from The Fast Show who thinks almost any situation “is very much like making love to a beautiful woman.”

Particularly so if, like me, you fell for her young. There were so many things to say about her. She was beautiful. And mysterious. More importantly, there were always 10 francs to the pound and she would sell you those wooden-handled Opinel fishing knives and bangers without asking, you naughty little boy, what you intended to do with them.

Even better, she had bottles of Pschitt! and didn’t care that you found Perrier’s finest sugary drink endlessly amusing. She was cool and remote for all that she was lovely and, because she was so much older, one admired from afar and could still distract oneself from incipient love with glace pistache which, after all, no English girl could offer you at the time.    

Later, rather oddly, I began to catch up with her and she started to notice and have insouciant topless conversations with me at the beach bar while I drank demis without ever being asked how old I was. And, when it was dark, she would kiss me with a taste of cigarettes and Hollywood citron gum and whisper “t’aime, Patrick, t’aime” in my ear, softly, sibilantly, seductively.

Oh Floyd on France! Walking on the beaches looking at the peaches and à la recherche du temps perdu, Rodney! “Moi aussi, je t’aime.”

I mean, why wouldn’t I? You see, when this affair started, she had so much going for her. Things worked. From the moment you hoped it would be an SNCF ferry to make the crossing rather than the dilapidated Sealink tub that took the spirit of British Rail afloat.  

She had open roads with hardly anyone on them, trains with proper-looking engines that would have you down south overnight. She knew how to do omelettes perfectly, though she struggled with hamburgers, but largely could whip up anything and serve it to you on communal cuisine de grandmère benches or in hushed reverence on white linen. In fact, don’t tell anyone, but she was so good at it she was quite rude about everybody else’s cooking.

Everyone drove one of her cars, granted sometimes with one foot out of the window and a fag in one hand, or one of her big, bull-nosed Berliet trucks. But health and safety was of a piece with political correctness and asking if you could prove you were 18. A strange Anglo obsession best ignored along with their other eccentricities.

France was thought rather intellectual and had world-beating industries from Dassault to Danone, key strategic assets protected by the state from the predations of “les markets”. Not that she would have used that word then. “Le weekend” was about as far as it went. And although she was always quite taken if you could help her work out what Mick Jagger was singing – ooh she had a soft spot for the rebel, the man apart, the outsider – she didn’t care too much about English.

La France protected her music, protected her language, protected her traditions. By law. She was quite strict about it too. La France, la république, le tricolore. A holy trinity. Or rather a secular one. Even among her most famous foreigners, “La légion est mon pays” and the language of that country is French, its flag blue, white and red.

She was to the world like the legend at the start of every Asterix book: “All Gaul is conquered. All? No. One small village holds out against the invader.”

She was just so different, so distinct, while yet so close. And thus it was she finally seduced me. And, like all first loves, one never really gets over it. I kept going back. Even after I was married and had a family. I could never say anything of course but I was looking for her.

I kept trying to find her on her now choked roads, in her dirty dog-turd cities where ugly modernity has intruded in that utilitarian French way that tries to pass itself off as art, and on her expensive express trains or her crowded, violent metro. I looked for her on a bus in Bordeaux but got distracted by a sign saying that, after dark, worried passengers could ring to be let off at the nearest point to home, bus stop or not.

I thought I saw her among a group of soldiers in the same city. A “brick” they would have called them in Belfast or Armagh. Armed and dangerous. As was the bullet-proof vest wearing copper, vigorously patting down a young North African while a soldier covered him from atop a mini roundabout. I asked a waiter if something unusual was going on. “No”, he answered, slightly flummoxed by the question, “it’s normal”.

Banlieue. Bataclan. Je suis Charlie. Les Indigènes. Pont St Michel. Round and round. Round and round.

Meanwhile, De la Croix’s Marianne who stormed the Bastille bare-breasted, was being told off for “offending sensitivities” on the beaches of St Tropez, “Saint Trop”, and the banks of the Seine. Her liberated loucheness slowly surrendered.

I looked among the headlines lamenting “Electricité: enquête sur une débâcle française” and Le Figaro asking why France struggles with deportations. Or Engrenages (Spiral) with its urban police force struggling with violence and exhaustion and the inevitable temptations to corruption both bring. Where are we again?

And then lockdown came and I had to suspend my search. The ones I undertook on family holidays, on business, on road trips and the annual old lags’ pilgrimages to a Top 14 match in one of France’s main and largely southern cities.

In that time and since we were all told – oh so repeatedly – how fat, ugly, lazy, chaotic and useless our own girl back home was that it would have been quite easy to believe that my old love had remained untouched by age and care. Her grass looked greener, a Norman pasture, crème d’Isigny, viewed, as is the English wont, from an idyllic fortnight spot from which you can’t see extreme but mainstream politics or gilets jaunes. A spot from which muck-spreading protests still seem quaint and you can’t smell the tear gas.  

And, while I was away, she offered herself repeatedly to Germany who looked faintly embarrassed by the shamelessness and brushed her off in the hotel lobby, then undid a button for Russia while Danone claimed selling yoghurt in Moscow was a humanitarian mission, those Dassaults stayed firmly grounded and she was kept at the end of a long table till required. Oh Poutine! Oh putain! Oh ma cherie. Je t’en supplie…

So to Montpellier in a last vain search for the joy of ex. And there she was. In the Mitsubishi-driving cab driver and the hotel manager and the endlessly generous welcome France reserves for les rugbymen, in the casual chat with some post-match Stade Français players in the still warm evenings and outdoor dining of the old town. In the modern stadium with its family crowd chanting (to the big bass town drum of Yellow Submarine) “Montpellier! Allez! Allez! Allez!”. In the Sunday morning plane tree-lined antiques market overseen by the Sun King and the Brigitte Bardot waitress who flickered in and out of the café bar at the top of the long steep streets. In the evening promenade, the superb à point steak, aboard the clean, quick trams and the easy welcome in every restaurant.

But she was also there in the rough-arsed estates built for displaced pieds noirs, in the part of town where the drug dealing is undisguised and the drunks howl for coin on the fringe of Place de la Comédie, on the opposite side from where the McDo’s is doing a roaring trade. Where the rooftop grafitti is ugly and ubiquitous and here, in the land of 246 cheeses, in the “poulet tikka aux deux cheddars”.

In the café that kept an elderly German couple waiting nearly an hour to order because of a lack of staff and in the West End prices of a provincial town. In “le gangsta rap”, in the regular army patrols and the gendarmerie, swiftly, effectively shutting down the young, bearded men in fatigues aggressively hunting signatures to a petition from beneath a plethora of fluttering banners. She even crawled out of one of the tents beneath the flyover and muttered down-and-out gibberish about like “le stress” and “le leadership”.

But, of course, we spent that long weekend together anyway. Seeing the ghost of her beauty but in the wrong light how haggard she’d become. Worse, she’d become just like the rest of us. Only a little worse because once she was so lovely. Or perhaps not. Bonjour tristesse. I feel so used.

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