Trés intéressant, n'est-ce-pas?
This man formidable, Sarko, desires to follow the example British and render his country a seven-day zone Shopping et Sport, and I do wish he wouldn't, as do many of his own countrymen and women, who are rising up en masse to protect the traditional French Sunday - mornings spent discharging cartridges from lethal weapons at small animals a-nibbling of the verdant meadows or at passing charabancs a-packed with English tourists a-nibbling at their butties, and then a well-earned four-hour luncheon featuring some, if not all, of the morning's targets (though luckily the Geneva Convention forbids the consumption of English tourists, en croûte or otherwise, even in France, where they would eat a brick wall if it was properly cooked and served with a sauce appropriate, but rabbits and hares and small songbirds do not, at least as far as I am aware, receive mention in said Convention), not to mention several litres of the wine home-brewed.
I blame it all on his missis, who is absolutely gorgeous and not a bad singist in the popular vein, but she is of course Italian, and in Italy anything goes.
I mean, can you imagine Carla Bruni hitting it off with Konrad Adenaur or Willy Brandt? For heaven's sake, in Germany the shops close at lunchtime on Saturday and don't open again until Monday morning, for everyone will be at prayer in their cold northern-Europeanly manner. No wonder she opted for Sarko - he's young, he's a bit of a rebel, and he is wickedly French.
I don't know what it is about the English and the French that makes them dislike each other so much, apart from Agincourt, of course, which was a bit unfair, the French lot being led by a dolphin, by all accounts, so what chance did they have? I mean, we English don't have to look across the Channel to find aliens who talk funny to poke fun at - for most of us Wales is a lot nearer. We profess to hate the French and the Welsh, and we tell very funny (and racist, if you want to be pompous and humourless) jokes against them, but we want to buy retirement houses there, as though they will all say "Oh, you English with your sense of humour funny, how nice that you desire to live amongst us, is it not that it is, look you?"
But if Sarko thinks he can legislate against the traditional French Sunday, he is in for a surprise. He leads the awkwardest, most stubborn nation on earth, with the most beautiful and musical language on earth, where everybody is a philosopher from birth and the only shops that open on a Sunday are the ones that sell bread unless they are a restaurant. And after all, French Sundays are so spiritually inspiring that museums and art galleries have to have Mondays off to recover.
We don't want France, or Italy, or Germany, or Austria, or Belgium, or even Poland, to lose their outrageous differences in a synthetic, amorphous grey glob of conforming Europeanism, do we? I know I don't, me.
So I do wish that the utterly delectable and probably fragrant Carla would have a word in Sarko's oreilles shell-like. I mean, she's Italian. She probably takes two hours to dress up and put the slap on in order to ride the Vespa to the shop next door for a packet of fags. The Entente Cordiale doesn't mean that France has to do the same moronic things that the English do of a Sunday, both of which begin with an f - football, and effing shopping.
Vive la France! Vive la différence! And especially vivent M. le Président et Mme Carla, phwoar.
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