Life in France

A juvenile observation for you today: the wax you put on your skis is known as "fart" ... ;-)  Sorry. I was genuinely pleased to see New Beaujolais on the shelves of my local corner store yesterday.  What's not to love about a young, fruity wine eh? Best of all - it's only 12% proof, so you can drink it without passing out after two glasses (which is the effect most 14-15% wines have on me).

So how exactly am I supposed to pay for anything online if TSB consistently block me from making online payments? You'd think things like click-safe, double-password protected cards would get processed without much ado by your bank - seeing as the secondary "clicksafe" password is there to ensure you are who you say you are when you attempt to pay for something? Alas, it seems that many banks have a safety algorithm programmed into their systems that says something along the lines of: If this payment is taking place from outside the UK - there must be a Nigerian/Bulgarian gangster holding our client at gunpoint and therefore approving this sale would not be a safe thing to do. Reject. Reject. Reject! Why a Bulgarian gangster would want to buy a TFL oyster card or a music CD worth 12.99GBP is neither here nor there, obviously. Gone are the days when I used to get a call from the bank saying "Someone just tried to use your card from France!" - to which I almost always answered "Yes it was [...]

There are many Anglicisms that have made their way into the French vernacular. I have already mentioned the 'F' word - which the French seem to think is no more offensive than saying 'bottom'.  My latest find in this regard is a digital radio station self-baptised "Fuckin' Good Radio" or Radio FG for short on which they play "Fuckin' Good Music" - apparently.  But if you ask me, the only time the F-word should feature in the same sentence as this music station is in the word "fuckwit" - which no doubt epitomises the individual who came up with the name. On NRJ a few weeks back we heard an advert for a new party service called "Myfuckingbirzday" - who, one presumes, organise club-nights for fuckwits. Anyway, the word I wanted to bring to your attention is actually far less offensive: stop. Yes, the verb "to stop". In French this means precisely what it means in English. I stop, you stop, they stop, we stop, he/she stops.  In it's infinitive form it is written "stopper" (pronounced stoeppay). The French [...]

You may have noticed a slight down-shift in the number of blog posts here over the past two years. This is because I have been somewhat busy doing a Masters at the University of Strasbourg during this time.  It is over now however, so I can finally find time to bring AEIS back to life. Indeed, writing for pleasure is once again a possibility.  Over these past 24 months I have been regularly putting a thing called a "pen" onto sheets of "paper" in order to complete these things called "assignments".  Much to the protestations of the muscles in my writing hand - who'd forgotten what it was like to move a pen across a page for hours on end.  I've also had to take "exams" and write "dissertations".  (What made the latter of these particularly taxing was that I had to do so in French.) I've had to read countless books and articles and have spent many days sitting resolutely in the languages library pawing through pages and pages of research.  I've had to get my spoken and [...]

I first stumbled across the World Music section in Tower Records in my late teens. This, I thought, is where all the hippies must come to buy their whale and pan-pipe music. Considering it was supposed to represent the musical capacity of the majority of planet earth - it was pathetically small. [...]

The French are rather fond of their acronyms.  If you've spent any significant amount of time in the country you'll already know SMIC (minimum wage), CAF (family allowance), CMU (basic health cover) and maybe FFF (French football federation). Unlike these 'official' acronyms VDM is more likely to be discovered in posts on Facebook, in emails and on blogs - and like all acronyms there's no way to know what it means without a little explanation. A French friend recently tried to explain it to me: It's basically French for FML. What? FML. F*ck my life. It was here that I had to point out that no Anglophone I knew said FML or F*ck my life. Shome mishtake shurely? In order to convince me that FML was standard English - I was directed to a website forum where people shared stories about how crappy their lives were. It's title: FMylife.com. However, it turns out that this website is in fact created by a not-so-clever Frenchman under the illusion that English folk wander around saying FML at every opportunity. I cannot [...]