A Year in the Merde

There was a balcony running along the upper floor. On a
fine day you could get out of bed and sit there naked waggling the soles of your feet (or anything else you wanted
to waggle) down across the rooftops of Paris.

No, I'm not a bloody English gentleman, I wanted to tell her. If she meant gentleman in the not-wanting-to-sleep-with-you-immediately sense of the word, the only English gentlemen I knew of were pre-pubescents who were just waiting until their pubic hair started to grow. Christine didn't know that we Brits had come a long way since Jane Austen's heroines could be sure that they wouldn't get a good rogering as soon as they said yes to a walk in the woods. Even Princess Di used to do it up against a tree with her riding instructor, didn't she? And now there was nothing at all gentlemanly going on in my brain or my boxer shorts.
"Pardonne-moi, mon Englishman," she said fondly, and left me standing there in the ladies, alone with yet another useless erection. Lucky hard-ons are bio-degradable, I thought, because I was throwing a lot of them away.
"Fuck you, Mr Darcy," I told the ceiling. "Fuck you, Hugh Grant. How can you expect a Brit to get his end away if you go around being so bloody polite all the time?"

I saw that I was witnessing an important lesson in Parisian life: I mustn't try to make people like me. That's much too English. You've got to show them that you don't give a shit what they think. Only then will you get what you want. I'd been doing it all wrong, trying to win people over. If you smile too much, they think you're retarded.

"As you know, Paul was chief of marketing of the chain of French cafes in England, Voulez-Vous Café Avec Moi. How many cafes have you created, Paul?"
"There were 35 when I left the company. But that was two weeks ago, so who knows how many there are now."
I was joking, but everyone in the room gaped at me, believing totally in this Anglo-American dynamism.
"Yes," Jean-Marie said, bathing vicariously in my reputation. "I saw their success and I wanted their head of marketing, so I went to London and decapitated him. Decapitated?"
"Head-hunted," I said.

A French politician without a mistress is like a
sheriff without a gun – people think he has no firepower.

So I said goodbye to my German boss Andrea (who asked if I had any
friends/children/pets who might want to become English teachers

So parents took their offspring to work

Basically, in France, if you haven't done what you planned to do by April 30, you're in deep merde.

pont", a bridge, when they took the extra Friday off to make a four-day weekend.

May 1 (the ironically named "fкte du travail", as if during a "fкte du vin" you did everything but drink wine