The pretend peasant (France)

An old (both in terms of age and length of acquaintance) retired-academic friend, Russell, told me I’m “becoming an accomplished peasant”, referring to my French farm adventures.  Knowing him, the “peasant” bit is a play on the other meaning of the word (an uncouth, crude, or ill-bred person; a boor).

I am certainly acquiring the physical attributes of a peasant: chapped hands, dirty-looking fingernails (I say “dirty-looking” because they’re stained from processing quince for jam-making, not from being unwashed), chipped nails (from getting caught in something or other, e.g., the vegetable peeler or the kitchen knife).  

But I’m far from being a peasant, never mind an accomplished one.  Colette, who was brought up on the farm, cannot stand the feel of raw meat, yet she just gets on with it when she has to cook a non-vegetarian meal, which is all the time on the farm — solid (manual-)working people need solid protein-packed meals.  

Yet I, who claim to love the countryside, blanch at the sight of blood, so that when it came to getting the turkeys ready for Xmas (for their own consumption and as gifts for friends and neighbours who had helped out throughout the year), I only entered the fray for the feather-plucking.  Even then, I consciously avoided my eyes roving over the part of the neck where they’d dispatched the bird.

I’m not only squeamish about blood, I’m delicate, too, about the presents (both solid and liquid) the cats leave around the house, for which I get Jeanette to deal with.  I also have to get her when I find a frog or toad in the shower room, although I’m not afraid of them per se.

At least, I don’t inflict long-term damage on the farm being a pretend peasant, unlike pretend academics who teach the wrong grammar and usage of language to students, leaving the students open to being marked down for their course assessments and exams.  No, not “meow”.  Just an observation and comment on irresponsible behaviour.

(France, 2011/2012)

Rice addict (UK)

Jackie must’ve been an Oriental in her previous life, as she loves rice so much that she can eat for the whole of Britain.  I’d once suggested she might want to cook one huge pot of rice so that she could freeze meal-size portions, thus saving herself a lot of work.  She said it wouldn’t complete the journey to the freezer as she’d just scoff the lot in one go.  To curb her passion for rice, she now buys controlled portions only.

We’d gone for a Chinese meal in October, and a few months later she told me, “The rice was so delicious I thought about it for days afterwards!”  Sorry, gentlemen, you’re redundant!

On one of her trips to China, her two travelling companions had ordered a portion of fried rice (to go with the meat and veg dishes), whilst Jackie ordered plain boiled rice (which is the Chinese way of doing it, as one’s doing an injustice to the fried rice and the meat/veg dishes by having both at the same sitting).  Jackie finished her plain boiled rice, and saw that her friends couldn’t finish their mountain of fried rice, so, instead of letting it go to waste, she started tucking in.  “It took me a few hours, but I finished the lot.”

Just can't win (London, UK)

My sad experience in (romantic) relationships is that once the utter fascinated besottedness is over, the fault-finding steps in.

One such experience involved the use of language.  After the honeymoon period (of my being the bee’s knees in Nick’s eyes), nothing I said was right.  If I were to say something like, “You can’t treat people in this appalling way”, e.g., when talking about human behaviour, he’d take it personally and bristle: “I don’t treat people like that!”  I then had to explain that the “you” was a generic universal reference, not to him.

After this had gone on a number of times, I decided to try something different, and switched to the universal “one”, and say, “One can’t treat people in this appalling way.”  As I was, by then, in the post-honeymoon, redundant-bee’s-knees phase, even this apparently neutral reference was deemed objectionable: “Oh!  One, eh??  So we’re now so posh that we’re speaking like the queen, are we?!?  How pretentious!”

(London, UK, 1986)

The true rôle of pain in French dining (France)

Since the writing of my blog entry Pain with everything, the penny’s dropped on the true rôle of pain in French dining.  Or, at least, dining on the farm which I’ve been visiting since 1996.  In that blog entry, I’d made the observation that Serge and Jeanette even have pain with my Chinese fried rice, which is stodge on stodge.  Fair enough, people who engage in manual work need a carb-rich diet.  

On this latest (winter) trip, however, I’ve come up with a new theory.  (My brain’s very slow at working things out, as you’ll have gathered by now…)  

Unless there are special guests, dining within the family only requires one piece of crockery: a concave plate which works well as a soup bowl too.  One generally starts with soup, at the end of which one wipes the plate clean with the pain.  Next comes the main course (meat or fish or whatever, which would generally leave some kind of residue, be it fat, gravy or juice).  Again, the pain wipes the plate clean.  Then the salad, and yet again the pain is there to clean up — in this case, the dressing.  

A flatmate (the stammerer in my blog entry Wrong footed) once told me he’d stayed in a French monastery where the diners ate out of hollows in the dining table instead of plates.  At the end of the meal, they’d tilt the table upright against the wall, and only needed to chuck buckets of water at the table to wash up because each course would be literally wiped out with the ubiquitous pain, so there wasn’t any scrubbing to do.

So the rôle of pain in the French farm’s, and also that particular monastery’s, style of dining is not only as a “filler” (of the stomach) but also an “emptier” (of the plate).  How ecological!  No wonder Colette’s always reassuring me that nothing’s ever wasted on the farm.

(France, 2011/2012)

Bungee jumping from tall buildings (Britain & [most of] The Rest of The World)

Rather like the system of which side of the road one drives on, the floor numbering system almost, if not entirely, comes down to Britain (and its ex-colonies—maybe not all) versus [most of] the rest of the world.  (I’m not going to wander into mezzanine and other half-floor naming territory, as it just gets too complicated.)

The British system is: Ground Floor, First Floor, Second Floor, and so on.

[Most of] The rest of the world is: First Floor, Second Floor, Third Floor, and so on.

You can see at a quick glance that there’s a discrepancy between the two systems, which will make a bit of a splat if you are a bungee jumper and failed to check out which system is in operation in which country…


Update 300112:  Grazie, Valerio, for pointing out that the Italian system is the same as the British.  I've made the relevant amendments now.

Jean-Louis and the little black cat (France)

Jean-Louis is the neighbour who lives one kilometre from the French farm, down by the main road running south to the Pyrénées.  

    He comes up quite regularly to deliver pain (bread) when it’s his turn, as he and farm mistress Jeanette alternate their pain-buying trips, which is very ecological and economical.  (If this was in Britain, I could do another alliteration trick by calling it “saving pounds, petrol and pollution”!)  

    Colette told me before this winter trip of mine that the frisky black cat (mentioned in blog entry Purrfect pals) has taken a particular fancy to him, jumping into his arms the moment he arrives and rubbing herself feverishly against the big man’s big beard.  

    Without meaning to undermine Jean-Louis’s attraction for the furry inhabitants on the farm, I suggested to Colette that the black cat might’ve been nuzzling up to his generously hirsute face for its usefulness as a de-fleaing device.

(France 2011/2012)

Update 270112:  One day, I came back in to the farm house from working outside to find Jean-Louis had arrived but the black cat was not in his arms as usual.  A closer inspection of his face disclosed the fact that he’d had a shave, which might perhaps prove me right about her using his beard for de-fleaing...

(Verbatim from journal entry of 271211) [Belgian builder tenant of Colette's] Martial has replaced J-L tonight in the cat’s affections. Martial has a full beard. Spot the link?

Blog Purrfect pals: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/10/purrfect-pals_20.html 

Let me show you my... (Taiwan)

Student Seb was in Taiwan on a year-long scholarship for learning Chinese and sent back many stories about his experiences there.  

One of them was about him joining a local package tour to Quemoy (金門 / Jīnmén / ”gold gate”), one of Taiwan’s “front-line” islands only about a mile off the coast of Fujian province in S.E. China.  

This missive of his was mainly about the Chinese style of sightseeing:  visit a tourist attraction, a shopping break, visit a tourist attraction, a shopping break, and so on.  

After one of these breaks, during which he had bought a wallet (called píbāo / 皮包 / ”skin wrap” in Chinese), Seb re-joined the group.  

In his characteristically gregarious fashion, Seb wanted to show off his newly-purchased wallet.  

As he bounded up to them, he meant to say, in Chinese, “Come, come, let me show you my wallet,” thrusting his hand into his front trouser pocket at the same time to fish out the said item.  

Unfortunately, as has happened with endless generations of learners of the language, he got the word order of the two sounds in “wallet” wrong, and instead of 皮包 (píbāo / ”skin wrap”), it came out as 包皮 (bāopí / “wrap skin” — btw, only men have this feature).  

Seb’s fellow package-tour mates, all Taiwanese and probably not that young (who below the age of 50 goes on these package tours??), reeled back in horror, thinking that the hand he’d plunged into his front trouser pocket was actually going to produce the item (包皮 / bāopí / “wrap skin”) for public inspection.

(Taiwan, 2002)