Admit it, the French are better than us

John Sturgis

The French, according to the enshrined belief system that I grew up with, are work-shy layabouts. They never turn up for a job on time as they’re too busy drinking wine for breakfast. And once they do finally start, they break off almost immediately for a two-hour lunch with more wine before dithering about a bit and then finishing early. If anyone threatens these unproductive practices, they blockade ports or set fire to lorries full of lambs.

We British, by contrast, have work ethic running through our veins. We fill every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, as Kipling put it. They ridicule us as a nation of shopkeepers, but this is mere jealousy – we are strivers while they are hopelessly lazy shirkers.

I can’t recall a plumbing job in the UK costing anything less than £200

Although this inherited mindset didn’t prevent me from becoming a great francophile – I think I’ve visited France at least once annually for more than 40 years – it clung on. And it’s only very recently that it’s changed. My epiphany came a couple of weeks ago, during a stay in the Languedoc, after an episode with a toilet. I noticed that the pipe which joined the cistern to the water supply was leaking. I texted a suggested workman in Franglais: ‘J’ai une petite problème avec nos toilettes’ etc. He said he’d come the following morning at 8.

He actually turned up ten minutes early. I offered him coffee, expecting him to want to sit around aimlessly for a bit, probably smoking, but he preferred to crack on. By 8.35 a.m. he had found the stopcock – this alone would have taken me hours – disengaged it, replaced the rusty old part with a gleaming new one, reengaged the water supply, tested his repair, and even mopped up. It was impressive stuff. But surely the sting was still to come. And so it was with cringing fear that I asked ‘…et c’est combien?’

‘Vingt Euro,’ he said.

I was so shocked I could barely process what he was saying: there was no call-out fee – even though we were miles from anywhere – no charge for that gleaming replacement part, just £17 for the whole job. I tried to force a tip on him. He refused it.

I can’t recall a plumbing job in the UK costing anything less than £200. On one memorable occasion a London plumber charged me this for pointing out within moments of arriving that the reason our hot water wasn’t running was that someone had unplugged the boiler. Could it be that the French workforce was not only not lazy – but that the protectionism around their work culture we’d so long mocked might also serve to protect consumers against rip-off pricing?

I began to reflect on other points of difference between British expectation and French reality. And few of the examples that came to mind favoured the UK. A couple of days later we visited Orleans. Its centre historique is a model for how these things should be done: medieval buildings sensitively repointed but not remodelled, no plastic window frames, no garish signage, no chain stores; even the bins were visually harmonious. Whereas on a recent trip to York, an English city of perhaps comparable historic interest, I found things very different: clustered close by the Minster were a Tesco Extra, a Five Guys, a McDonald’s, and a multi-story car park.

Bath, I read, has been ruined by drug addicts, Brighton by the Greens’ inability to collect rubbish. We seem to have abandoned the notion of civic pride. On a recent visit to Hampton Court, I found that all along the palace’s extensive Thames waterfront were plastic barriers to prevent people from leaning on the older and more picturesque wooden railings which, presumably, might give way and cause them to in. Plastic barriers directly outside Hampton Court! The temporary had become permanent. The French simply don’t do things like this.

John Lewis-Stempel, in his La Vie: A year in rural France, addresses the French psyche: ‘Free trade in France is a chimaera; effectively the country operates a cultural tariff system.’ This extends from the terroir of the food and wine through entrenched consumer support of a still functional national car manufacturing industry to the way the country’s towns are run – by Maires who are imbued with local pride and respond to things like older wooden fences accordingly.

Every municipality advertises itself to passing visitors with those brown cultural heritage signs and each diversion these signs suggest tends to be a good idea. You can go from Calais to the Mediterranean and back at 85mph with no traffic jams and no sighting of litter for 1,200 miles – and even enjoy a decent meal at a motorway service station.

Bath, I read, has been ruined by drug addicts, Brighton by the Greens’ inability to collect rubbish

There’s graffiti, yes, and the larger cities can be moody in places. And the gilets jaunes may have set fire to the bins to protest against something – but it now occurs to me that the motivation behind some such actions may be to protect the very things that I’m describing.

So as your two weeks of French bliss come to an end, you, the weary British holidaymaker, find yourself forced to leave this charming world to return to the UK, where within minutes you’ll find yourself trapped by barriers put up to accommodate queuing lorries on the M20, which means being plunged into a lengthy ‘50mph average speed check zone’; a zone so jammed, that actually reaching an average speed as high as 50mph will be practically impossible.

And then it’s back to work, where you’ll have a sandwich from Pret, a pallid impression of the boulanger’s baguette you’ve become used to during your vacances, which will cost you £5 and which you will be expected to eat at your desk – because we no longer have a lunch hour, let alone two; accompanying wine now unthinkable.

Here we allowed our retirement age to be raised and raised – with barely a raised voice: it’s now 68. In France, a million people took to the streets and there were riots at attempts to push it above 62. I remember laughing at the residents of Hampstead for opposing a McDonald’s as anachronistic snobs. But perhaps they were simply being a bit French. And perhaps I should have set fire to the plastic stanchions outside Hampton Court in protest at their ugliness.

John Sturgis is a freelance journalist who has worked across Fleet Street for almost 30 years as both reporter and news editor

John Sturgis

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