Sarcasm In France Is Music To My Ears…

Tags

France, French, Humor, Humour, Learning, Life, school, singing

 

Many times have I tried to use sarcasm in France. Many times have I failed.

‘Why do you keep doing it?’ my (French) partner has asked me, again and again ‘Just stop. They don’t get it!’ she always adds.

But I still try.

And fail.

So imagine my delight today, upon finishing singing a traditional English carol to the 8-year-old kids in my English class, to receive what was undoubtedly my second* round of sarcastic applause.

This really has reaffirmed my faith that sarcasm is alive and well in France, and is just waiting to be uncovered with the correct prompt.

Oh and if you doubt the veracity of my claim, please feel free to drop round – any time -and I will ‘treat’ you to ‘Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer’ in its entirety.

You will then agree that anyone applauding this godawful noise must be doing so sarcastically.

(*First time was for singing ‘What’s New Pussycat?’, Hotel San Eloy 1999, Costa Brava)

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Torturing The French 2…

Tags

France, French, fun, Humor, Humour, Language, Learning, Yorkshire

Just got back in from my Yorkshire/English class and I have to say my group of French students did incredibly well and really jumped in with both feet. Stumbling blocks came when their English – as in ‘proper’ English – met Yorkshire English. They had a hard time with:

 

Yorkshire t’ = English to/the

 

Yorkshire wi’ = English with

 

Yorkshire me = English my

 

I thought Pierre’s head was going to explode when I explained that the ‘g’ in ‘maungy’ wasn’t pronounced the same as it was in ‘mingin”.

 

Fabienne really didn’t like having to say the Yorkshire slang for coal cellar in a sentence: ‘They’re in t’ coil oyle Margaret’.

 

And I fear I have damaged relations between Christine and I after I made her repeat ‘Let’s take a shortcut through t’ snicket’ five times, because she kept saying ‘the snicket’.

 

Yes, it did feel strange correcting people’s English, because it was correct English, but not correct Yorkshire English.

 

Next session we will be finishing this off (we only got up to ‘sup’ before time ran out) and delving into the Scottish dialect.

 

A Yorkshire/Scottish cocktail, what could go wrong?

Torturing The French….

Tags

France, French, fun, funny, Humor, Humour, Language, Learning, Teaching, Yorkshire

 

Every third Tuesday I teach a group of mostly retired, lovely French people, whose only goal is to improve their English.

I asked them the last time for suggestions on what they would like to do at the next class.

‘Tell us about England, about the colour, the life’ they said to me.

‘Speak about where you are from, tell us about Yorkshire’ they asked me.

‘We love hearing all the different ways you say things’ they told me.

‘There are so many regional accents in the UK, it’s really quite wonderful’ they opined.

 

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that, can you say it again but slowly this time please?’ they frequently added.

They may regret their requests when they see what I have in store for them tonight. The handouts I provide aren’t just for reading you see, they are also for reading ALOUD.

Bonus points will be awarded for correctly pronouncing ‘sithee’ ‘ey up’ and ‘Eh by gum, tis chuffing cawd enuf t’freeze t’balls off a brass bloody monkey aht theer’

I Was At A Loose End And I Had A Lot Of White Paint So…

Tags

D.I.Y, Decorating, funny, Hobby, Home Improvement, Humor, kids, Painting, stay-at-home Dad

…I decided to do what any normal middle-aged man would do: I painted the inside of one of my dependances and turned it into a ‘chill-out’ area for adults. It’s a literal chill-out zone too – I mean, as in it’s not very warm in there.

For people who don’t know what a dependance is, it’s the French term for outbuildings, so running alongside our house, but not connected to it, we have a garage. Attached to that garage is a separate room that houses the boiler, and this room then connects with the aforementioned dependance that I’ve decorated.

There’s also another dependance at the very end – again, also connected to the others – but that one’s a bit damp and so I didn’t bother with that. Plus the door is set painfully low, and if I bang my head on it one more time I think I might dust off my sledgehammer and set about it in a rather unpleasant manner.

As you can see they had a sale on in one of my local paint stores on white Dulux paint. Having a sale on paint in France occurs with roughly the same frequency as winning the lottery. Or finding a French baker open at 12.45pm.

I spent a fair bit of time on the prep, cleaning it up and getting it ready, but unfortunately neglected to take any ‘before’ pictures, so you will have to use your imagination and picture a grim, grubby, grey box of a room.

My main aim doing this – apart from the previously mentioned relaxation area for adults – was to highlight some of the features that the prior owners had neglected: the wooden beams. I cleaned each beam and then painted between them to really make them ‘pop’ – if beams can do that? I’ve never written anything like this so I don’t know if they can.

Apart from the paint I used only existing materials with the exception of a few bits and bobs I bought from Aldi, in the reduced section. It seems nobody wanted to buy their ‘nautical-themed’ items, so they had reduced them to clear and shoved them in their ‘shit aisle’ (you know what I’m talking about). I also picked up a couple of coloured bottles and a rather garish pinky-orangy candle-holder/big glass jar thingy (hanging from the ceiling at the end next to the bottles). This was also from Aldi, and I bought it to give a bit of colour to the room and – even though you can’t see it – there is a flamingo on the reverse.

Total expenditure on ‘objets d’art’ (ooh I will pay for using that term) : 22 Euros.

I also added a bit of blue paint here and there – the door, window frame etc – as I realised that if I painted everything white it would stop looking like a chill-out area for adults, and start looking like a holding-facility for adults with mental-health issues.

I’ve curtained off the other part of this dependance, where the boiler is, as it’s not quite as neat and tidy as this one is – yet. This will be the next part of the ‘project’. For the time being the family refers to this as ‘Monica’s Closet’, which should be familiar to fans of the TV show ‘Friends’, but if you aren’t familiar with that term, it basically means it’s where I’ve shoved all the crap for the time being.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed the presence of toys in the room. These appeared approximately 25 seconds after I revealed my secret project to my family and explained what it was I had wanted to achieve with it. This is an unfortunate side-effect when you try to create a space to get away from children: they follow you. They have now commandeered our all-new dependance with cries of ‘Thank you daddy’ and ‘Thank you for building us a play-house daddy, can you close the door on you way out, please?’.

Still I’m not begrudging them stealing our new area, because if they are in there, we can have the actual house all to ourselves.

Win-win, eh?

The Honesty Of Kids…

Tags

children, English, French, fun, funny, Humor, kids, languages, school, Teaching

 

Teaching English today.

Little girl looks at me quizzically.

‘You talk English?’ she says, sat in my English class, blinking her eyes in confusion.

‘Yes, because I am English’ I reply.

‘But you talk French too’ she continues (blink, blink).

‘Yes, but I speak better English than I do French’ I counter.

(Blink, blink) ‘But you speak French well’ she says, making my day.

‘Thanks, I try my best’ I reply, feeling quite pleased with myself.

‘But not too well’ she adds (blink, blink).

I don’t think there’s anything quite as honest as a 7 year-old child.

I Don’t Care What Time Of Day It Is, I Hate Clowns….

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Clowns, Family, fear, food, funny, Humor, Life, Phobia, Scary

They all bloat down here…especially if they have TWO Big Macs

We go to McDonald’s now and again. I might have mentioned it. People will frown about that. They will say things like ‘Consumerism’ ‘Frankenstein food’ and ‘I hate McDonald’s’. And to them I say ‘Yes, but have you tried the bacon double cheeseburger?’.

Now I have the kids full time on a Wednesday (thanks to French president Mr Macron, and I really do mean that) we often head there, especially if it’s raining.

It was raining on this grey and miserable Wednesday, so guess where we ended up?

Our trip to McDonald’s today was made more memorable as we were ‘entertained’ by the real-life, in the flesh, French Ronald McDonald, walking around saying bonjour, cava etc.

In case you didn’t notice the picture at the top of the page, he looked liked this:

Note suspicious glare from kid in bottom right of pic

He was walking around chatting away, smiling/grimacing at and cuddling people, with a balloon person accompanying him, making balloon animals for the kids, as if this would in some way alleviate the sheer terror that his form brought out in them and the adults as well. Especially adults like me.

It’s broad daylight, in a busy restaurant, yet this clown, squeaking around in his big red shoes, has got me quaking in mine. I hate clowns, yet have a perverse fascination with them, and have watched every horror film featuring them.

Some of the kids lapped it up, but some reacted like me and so there were plenty of scenes like this one:

I can say, with hand on heart, that he was at least 200% more sinister than the already-creepy-as-fuck UK ones that I used to see from time to time. I can also say that I have never seen my daughter turn away from something as quickly as she did when he approached our table today and tried to engage her in conversation, she was having none of him, his red shoes, his balloon animals or his ghastly painted face.

It was a pity, as the kids really did want one of the balloon animals – my son specified a dog, any colour but pink – but they were not prepared to endure having this painted creature interacting with them in order to get one.

He left half-way through our meal, probably had other venues to terrorise. We did not mourn his passing, and are not looking forward to him being there again.

Shame about the balloon animals though.

The Fog Of Awwwwww…

Tags

Family, France, French, fun, funny, Humor, Humour, photography, stay-at-home Dad

I’m taking a gamble today trying the kids out at a new place. Always a risky choice with kids, deviating from the norm. Plus I wasn’t sure if the village I’d decided to visit had a park. I knew what would happen if I didn’t find one. That would be all I would hear about for a week. I saw promising signs on the way into the village, and pulled up at the local lake. Parks and lakes go together like fish and chips, right?

The kids were not initially impressed by my risky gamble…

Me: ‘Look at this, what a great view, all that fog’

Him: ‘It’s all white daddy, look! Everything is white!’

Me: ‘Yes, this is a reaction caused by the cold weather’

Him: (a rare moment of parental concern) ‘Will you be warm enough daddy? You don’t have a thick coat like us on, yours is thin, you might be too cold’

Me: (tear rolls gently down face and almost freezes on cheek) ‘It’s OK son, I’ll be fine, thanks for asking though’

Her: ‘Awwww….there’s no park here’

Me: ‘Yes, but there might be one on the other side, and look at all this fog, doesn’t it look great?’

Her: Blows air out of her mouth and makes a negative ‘Pfffffft’ noise that you would  expect to hear from someone in their forties. This ‘Pfffffft’ effortlessly conveys and encapsulates her disappointment with the location, the scenery, the weather and me.

Me: (Looking up at the chateaux shrouded in fog and pointing it out to the kids) ‘What a great castle eh? Look at the height of the walls, I bet this was a good place to defend and look (pointing at ditch that runs along the base of the wall) I bet there was a moat here once too, what do you think?’

Her: ‘There’s no park here’

Him: ‘What’s that daddy?’

Me: ‘It’s where we put naughty kids’

Him: ‘Can you open it?’

Me: ‘No’

Him: ‘Ha, ha! Daddy can’t put us in there, he doesn’t have any keys. Ha, ha!’

Him: ‘Why are you taking pictures of a toilet? Why daddy? Why?’

Me: ‘It’s just in such a great location, look at it, surrounded by all the trees and leaves’

Him: ‘Weecee, it’s a Weecee’

Me: ‘No, it’s a ‘WC’

Him: ‘What’s that mean’

Me: ‘I don’t know’ (I’ve remembered now, without the aid of Wikipedia, and I think it means ‘Water Closet’)

Me: ‘Come on, I’ll take a picture of you both under this little house’

Her: ‘There’s no park here’

Me: ‘There’ll be one round here I’m sure. Now why don’t you both get under the house for a nice photo for mummy?’

Him: ‘No, I want to hug a tree instead’ (Hugs tree)

Her: ‘Weeee! A park!’

Him: (disappears in a puff of air and reappears on the see-saw)

Me: (thinking: ‘Everything looks wet – where are the swings?’)

Me: (Now bored of the park – quickly done) ‘Let’s have a look over here kids, I think I can see something’

Both: ‘What is it?’

Me: ‘I think it’s….

Me: ….another toilet! And look, it’s got a little heart-shaped hole, how romantic’

Him: ‘I am getting really annoyed at you daddy, why do you keep taking pictures of toilets? Stop taking pictures of toilets daddy!’

After venturing inside and using the ‘facilities’

Me: ‘Why is the lock on the outside? How strange…and a little bit worrying’

Her: ‘Can we go back to the park now?’

Me: ‘Let’s have a look over here, I think I can hear something, can you hear the water?’

Both: ‘Yes!’

Me: ‘Maybe it’s a waterfall?’

It’s NOT a waterfall….

Me: ‘Well, it’s not a waterfall, but it’s close’

Her: ‘No it isn’t’

Me: ‘Let me take a picture of you in front of the foggy lake, and promise not to stick your tongue out’

Him: ‘OK daddy, I promise’

Me: (takes photo knowing exactly what will happen)

Him: (is seven-year-old boy, therefore sticks tongue out anyway)

Both: ‘What’s that daddy?’

Me: ‘It’s a little island, do you want to live on it for a couple of weeks and give me and your mum some peace?’

Him: ‘No!’

Her: (launches a series of physical attacks upon my person, primarily focused on the groin-area)

Him: ‘What are you doing daddy?’

Me: ‘Just taking a nice photo’

Him: ‘Shall we play a game? It’s where the first person to speak loses, so everybody has to be quiet’

Me: (nodding so eagerly that I develop neck ache later in the day) ‘Yes that sounds like a good game’

 

This is now my favourite game and one that is unfortunately short-lived, but lasts just long enough too get us back to the car, whereupon it’s business as usual and I drive home with what appears to the casual observer  – and sounds exactly like – two wild animals in the back of the car.

It could have been worse though.

At least there was a park eh?

Excerpts From The Front Line…

Tags

education, France, French, funny, Humor, Language, Learning, school, Teaching

 

I’ve started teaching* English in my village to a group of French retirees. The lady who usually does it is the town-planner, so she’s often called into meetings, and for this reason my services were offered – not by me, but by one of her students – so I now take on her duties once every three weeks. Tuesday night was my first time in charge, here are a few excerpts from that evening.

 

I asked the group to tell me something they had done that week that they didn’t like. Three people said the same thing:

Denis: ‘I had to make some jam, but I didn’t like it’

Michelle: ‘I made jam, but I didn’t like doing it’

Francoise: ‘I made jam, 50 pots, but I didn’t like it’

Me: ‘Do you sell this jam?’

All: ‘No’

Me: ‘If you don’t like doing it, why don’t you just stop?’

All: ‘But the fruit will go bad’

Me: ‘So give the fruit to the animals, or people’

All: *blank stares*

 

On my teaching methods

‘Can you talk slower’

‘I can’t understand you, can you talk slower’

After saying a lengthy passage of text out loud

‘Can you write that on the board?’ (I do)

‘What is that? Is that a Russian character?’ (I’ve written my ‘h’s with a sloping bridge)

‘You keep dropping your ‘t’s, pronounce your ‘t’s’

‘Has he started talking slower?’

 

On my accent

Francoise: ‘Is he American? Are you American?’

Me: ‘No I’m from Yorkshire’

Francoise (frowning, turning to her friend Martine): ‘Is he American?’

Martine: ‘No, he’s from Yorkshire’

Francoise: ‘Oh yes, like the dogs, Yorkshire Terriers’

 

Apropos of nothing

Christine: ‘We had to get a new ram. It was having too much sex with the other sheep and would have messed up the gene pool. We bought another one’

On being asked what she did with the old one

Christine: ‘We killed it and ate it. Well, not all of it, most of it is in the freezer’

 

That’s just a snippet of the many things that were said that night. I loved doing it. Hopefully they did too. Can’t wait for the next class.

 

*The term teaching is used here in its loosest possible sense

French Bureaucracy: The Board Game!

Tags

Bureacracy, France, French, funny, games, Humor

 

I’m going to make a board game based on French bureaucracy. You can choose from exciting categories such as ‘Driving licence’ ‘Bank account application’ ‘Change of address’ and (the choice for extreme players) ‘CPAM application’.

The game will annoy you even before you start to play it. This is because the game’s box will come wrapped in 6 layers of that plastic stuff that they put headphones/cables/Micro SD cards in,  you know that stuff that’s responsible for 30% of all visits to A+E due to self-inflicted knife-injuries.

The only instructions provided will be in Japanese and ancient Mayan. They will also dissolve on contact with oxygen.

All playing pieces will be identical so that nobody knows whereabouts they actually are in the game. Even if they try and remember the board will come with a ‘shake’ feature that rearranges all pieces, at random points during the game.

The game will come with a free six foot by four foot section of brick wall for the participants to punch. And every time you hit it a French voice will say “‘Désolé mais vous avez oublié de signer le bas du formulaire'”

Every third roll of the dice will result in you starting again and having to resend all your original documentation.

There will be a battery-operated phone provided that, when you roll a six twice, you have to use to contact customer services. Nobody ever answers.

In a bid to reflect the way French life runs the board will shut down for two hours every day at 12pm prompt (or 11.48 sometimes). It will then stay closed for two hours and reopen at 2pm prompt (or 2.35 sometimes). It will close quickly but open glacially slowly and making a deep sighing noise as it opens, and then tut at you for ten minutes while you try to remember what you were doing before it closed.

Some people that I have shared my idea with have likened it to Monopoly. I disagreed with them however, as Monopoly only takes 8 months to complete, whereas this game will only end when all participants have died.

It’s going to be a bit like Jumanji but with less rhinos and monkeys and more paper and screaming at walls and pleas of ‘WHY GOD WHY? WHY CAN’T THEY COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER? WHYYYYYYYYY???’. 

There will be no arguments after the game because nobody ever wins. Nobody ever wins because the game can never be finished.

Doing Your Bit To Help Out With The Local School 2. The Museum Visit…

Tags

children, education, Farming, France, French, History, Humor, Humour, kids, Learning, Museums, school

 

I get asked to help the school chaperone the kids on a visit to the museum in a local town. ‘This will be a doddle’ I think ‘Just walking around with the teacher making sure we don’t lose anyone’. I am of course wrong in thinking this.

The day of the visit arrives. It is beautiful, it is sunny.

Let’s all go inside a stuffy building full of agricultural tools then. So we do.

There are another couple of parents there. ‘Oh good’ I think ‘Safety in numbers and all that’. The other parents start taking the kids off in groups. I realise that the teacher is dividing the kids up into groups of seven and eight. The implications of this are hammered home as I see eight children – my son amongst them – being herded my way.

‘Oh well’ I think ‘It won’t be that hard will it? walking round an old museum full of tools’. The teacher then starts giving out quiz sheets to myself and each child.

I look at the sheet. It is full of strange words – which is nothing new for me as all words at the moment are a bit strange (it is French after all) but these are really strange –  as well as room numbers that correspond to the confusing words.

We head off into the first room. There are tools here that I have never seen before, and whose names I do not know in English. Apparently I am supposed to search in this room for the correct implement as listed by its bizarre name on the quiz sheet, and then take one of the letters from that name, and then do this in every room till we have a full set of letters which we will then have to rearrange to form the name of something else.

‘This is going to be a long morning’ I think to myself.

Coupled with this headache-inducing quiz is the fact that children – funnily enough – do not seem all that interested in looking at 200-year-old farming tools, and so have started acting up.

Have you ever shouted at a child in a museum? How about eight children? I have. I would prefer not to have to do it again. I would have preferred to not have had to do it 36 times, but that’s agricultural museums for you – they bring out the worst in kids.

Realising that this quiz is a non-starter for me and my limited grasp of ancient-agricultural-implements-French, I corner the teacher. ‘I don’t get this’ I tell her ‘I’ve never seen these things in England, let alone France – how do you win this game?’. Evidently you win this game by cheating, because she whispers the answer in my ear.

Then she looks at the expression on my face and writes it down on a piece of paper and hands it to me.

The seven kids (one of them has been removed for constantly disrupting the group, not my son by the way, he’s still stuck to me like glue) and I continue on our way, now mysteriously being able to identify each clue in each room with alarming rapidity.

We do it so quickly that we arrive in the reception room on the ground floor of the museum, where we are met by another parent and her seven wards (‘Why did I get eight?’ I think to myself ‘Teacher mustn’t like me’ I answer myself, pondering if this is the first sign of madness). She looks at me, resignation written large on her face, and then pulls out the timetable. We have finished the quiz with plenty of time to spare. In fact looking at the timetable it appears that we have another hour to wait before we have anything else to do.

I look at the 14 kids milling around a room full of glass cases with farming books inside them, thinking this is going to be a long hour. I look at the other parent, inquiring as to how she got down here so quickly. She pulls out a piece of paper, the teacher’s scrawled answer unmistakable.  ‘Oh well’ I think to myself ‘At least I’m not the only one who isn’t au fait with ancient French agricultural tools’.