A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

He was like a Dickens character who had gone to a modern clothes shop and not quite understood what some of the garments were for.

It was here, I think, that I learned my lesson about the nature of mixed-race male-female relations in a postfeminist world. It was this: Don’t promise anything as a surprise unless you yourself are 100 percent sure that the surprise will be pleasant.

The Parisians, I realized, might be proud of their antiwar stance, but they didn’t analyze it much. Saying “It’s all about oil” was a kind of fashion statement, like wearing a thong that showed over the top of your jeans. And I’d become like them (except for the thong, of course). I didn’t want war, but I didn’t want to spend my whole life talking about not wanting it. I wanted to dismiss talk of war with one hip statement and get back to serious subjects like sex, holiday plans, and where to get good seafood.

Another difficulty was that I had become allergic to the idea of eating bread bought from a supermarket. How, I wondered, had I and this whole nation survived for so many years without a bakery on every street corner? It now seemed like a basic infringement of human rights.

I 100% agree with this now.

A very typical attitude among highly qualified French people, I’d found. If your company was doing okay, you had practically zero chance of getting fired, so you just hung in there, bored and static but safe, like someone stranded on a desert island with a plentiful supply of dehydrated chicken soup.

Liberté, égalité, vanité.