..the French. Who else would give this sensationalist and disturbing book two major awards – it would never have made it onto the short list of the anglospheric Man Booker - and have it leap into best seller status?
Now while I am an unabashed Francophile, but I must confess that they do take intellectualism to quite dizzying heights. It is the ability to accept both Sartre and Walt Disney into the same conversational starting blocks, and probably do the same for Rene Thom’s Catastrophe Theory and Camus. Or similar cross-cultural alliterations.
My interest in all things French started, unsurprisingly for those who know me even slightly, from an interest in wine rather than language. I was actually a somewhat indifferent student of French at school. In fact my French marks had a steep downward trajectory starting at 97% and sliding down to a bare pass in my sixth form. Just like nearly all the other subjects in fact. Nevertheless on the few occasions that I have been in France I seem to get by without too many sneers or hoots of derision. Which is good as the French cherish their language to the point where they cannot understand why everyone else doesn’t speak it and therefore have scant regard for travellers who have no knowledge of their language. And a beautiful language it is - I think even more pleasant than Italian – but others might disagree.
However I do owe and apology to the couple in Monaco who asked me the directions to the Jacques Cousteau Oceanographic museum whom I set off fluently in the direction of Bulgaria.
It is a matter of fact that I gave my first talk on the wines of France, their regions and classifications at the age of fifteen to a class at school whose interest declined as I droned on and on and on and on. As I showed no sign of handing out free samples the twenty-eight scrofulous boys, all of whom were then at least six years under the then New Zealand age, fell asleep. The boarders to imagine the solitary or joint pleasures of the dormitory whilst the day-boys to wonder if it would be dark before they could cycle home to their happily colonial families.
I think that I was delighted by the almost manic incomprehensibility of it, the minute cartographic distinctions, the obscure classifications and the history of vintages. Like some secret society it seemed that you had to spend years studying arcane laws and ancient manuscripts to even find out what grape the wine was made from. Vineyards were divided almost infinitely over the centuries, terroir mapped down to the last pebble and palates and tastes mapped with them. The consumption of wine was part of being civilised; when you have vineyards that have been in continuous production for 800 years or more it was a part of a way of life that I could only envy from the Antipodes.
Whilst our step-father worked for a wine and spirit merchant I doubt whether I had more than a sip of wine to that date but once I saw a wine atlas I was hooked. If I had tasted any wine it would have been French or Australian as New Zealand reds of the 1960’s were capable of taking the enamel of your teeth or powering the Massey Ferguson for five hours ploughing on the rock strewn Canterbury Plains. Not so now for New Zealand wines, like Australian wines, can be things of infinite beauty.
Over the past thirty years the plutocrats, trophy collectors and wealthy wine snobs of the world have put the better wines of France well outside of the reach of the downwardly mobile genteel poor like myself. As once happened in my student days I can no longer wander down to the Gresham Hotel and ask for a bottle of wine and have the bartender give me an old bottle of Château for six dollars. If only because the hotel no longer exists. Try and buy a bottle from your nearest purveyor of plonk now and it would cost you $2,399.99 per bottle for the 2009 vintage. That is more than inflation at work this is insanity. But people will pay as is being demonstrated by Penfolds who have decided that they are a luxury brand and have been increasing the price of even their humblest products at a rate that defies inflation, how good the wine is, and decency.
In China a land where imitation is the sincerest form of piracy unwitting consumers have paid fourteen thousand Yuan Renminbi and more for a Chateau Latour forgery. In a similar vein to Paul Durand-Ruel, Renoir’s art dealer saying ‘The artist painted 4000 works, 5000 of which are in the United States’, Domain Romanée-Conti produces 5400 bottles a year 7000 of which are in China.
So back to the French. Well apart from the wine there is the food, the trains, the roads, the art, the architecture, and the landscape. They have history and various forms of gendarmerie that scare the living daylights out of me. Few people get eaten by sharks. Did I say they have wine?
But would I live there? No, sorry about that bro’

1) I believe that this is could be classified as a neologism
2) Catastrophe theory is a special branch of dynamical systems theory. It studies and classifies phenomena characterized by sudden shifts in behaviour arising from small changes in circumstances. Note that catastrophe in French and catastrophe in English have subtly different meanings.