..
communist plot. It was always so though never so pathetically blatant as now.
In fact, if you took the events of the past month: the shooting down of the
Air Malaysia aircraft, the events in Gaza, and the outbreak of the Ebola virus
you might find good reason to be a tad depressed. But at my vast age and with
my increasing decrepitude I think that depression just isn’t very productive
– there must be some reasons to still be cheerful. After all I have my
health, a few remaining bottles in the cellar, a dentist who uncomplainingly
sticks the shards of my teeth back together in his biannual ‘walletctomy’,
some good friends, a beautiful and intelligent daughter and a wife whom I actually
quite like.
One reason for good cheer is that I have started to go to French conversation
classes, which would cheer anybody except a Frenchman as their beautiful language
gets mangled by yours truly to an astounding degree. But the French, whom I
quite admire, cannot understand why the world doesn’t speak French rather
than English as they, masquerading as Normans, did conquer England and the elite
of England spoke French for a century or two. Yet it didn’t stick to those
stout Anglo-Saxon denizens of field and forest who preferred their own glottal
pejoratives to a language that probably already had the word quiche and langoustine
being bandied about between Lord Beaufort and Count Montague.
Now those of you who have travelled to the cultivated soils of France will realise
that the French speak their language all the time and they speak it quite quickly,
eliding and gliding words and phrases together with contemptuous ease ……………
in between exuding noxious billows of unfiltered cigarette smoke, gulping down
haute cuisine, defining fashion, dodging dog pooh, building fast trains and
driving efficiently at vast speed speeds on country roads whilst gesticulating
with both hands. Well cliché is a French word defined superbly well in
the New Roberts Collins French Dictionary, a weighty tome of over 2,000 pages,
as cliché. You can’t argue with facts like that.
Now I learnt French at school, or rather over the years I went to a number of
classrooms where the language was taught by presumably competent teachers to
other eager-beavers in the class whilst I doodled spaceships in my exercise
book, quietly unscrewed the desk lid or thought of something more interesting
for an hour or so. Possibly the girls of nearby St Margaret’s Anglican
School for Young Ladies of hopefully uncertain virtue. I must have been vaguely
attentive at first but the years revealed a decline in marks that mirrored a
black diamond ski run, a slippery slope of ineptitude that saw me just scrape
through my university entrance exam with the barest minimum.
But having been briefly to France to peer at several hectares of “Art”
I thought that I might just be able to get the hang of the language given that
I had had some rough proximity to it for a number of years even as I have confessed
it was obvious that I hadn’t been paying much attention. I mean that it
sounded damned sexy, they made wine, and some of the words seemed vaguely recognisable
- and they seemed slightly touched when I mumbled a few carefully rehearsed
schoolboy phrases in their own language. But I did learn that actually saying
a phrase too well is not a good idea as they then assume that you might have
some deeper familiarity with the language as they usually proceeded to enrol
you into a vast one-sided conversation that I usually assumed was about Sartre,
their mother in law - or the state of French politicians – the latter
apparently being with ladies of flexible virtue in a largely horizontal positions.
Though none of those horizontales, I am sure, ever went to St Margaret’s.
But one of the advantages of the mud-brick jumper suburb where I live amongst
the gum trees and four-wheel drives is that it is quite community minded so
there are lots of clubs and art societies. Given any subject where the components
could be found in that bible of the 1970s, The Whole Earth Catalogue, n there
will be a class for it within a stone’s throw. So it is with French conversation:
my friend Terry and I turn up and, in the company of some ladies of a certain
age, speak French. Well everybody else speaks French but I seem to know even
less than I ever did before so I mumble what might be Franglais, Urdu or Tibetan
for all they seem to know. But like the French they are patient and graceful
and hopeful that the massacre of the innocents will only be temporary. Or I
that I will leave.
However at the moment I am quite cheerful in my ignorance. I can only improve
as there is no way that I could be worse. It is quite liberating to realise
that you don’t have to be good at anything before you start doing it.
Vouloir, c'est pouvoir! Which apparently means ‘Where there’s a
will, there’s a way”