Petite Anglaise: the difference a year makes

One year ago today, I had the pleasure of launching Petite Anglaise, soon afterwards known also as Catherine Sanderson, on to an unsuspecting world.

In truth, there were two worlds, one less unsuspecting than the other.
Catherine was an extraordinarily successful blogger, with the sort of hit rate that makes even Salut!'s recent spurt seem good enough reason to give up.

There had been no leg-up for her in the process. It was all her own work. She had cleverly applied her amusing, intelligent style of writing to reflections on the everyday life of a young Englishwoman in Paris, and people all over the world* had warmed to her.

But even in that more informed world, relatively little was known in any detail about the person behind the blog. That was where I came in, with my story revealing the case of the bilingual secretary fired by an English firm of accountants in the French capital on the grounds that her site, though anonymous and never identifying her employers, somehow brought them into disrepute.

Of course, I already knew Catherine by the time the article appeared, unleashing an astonishing - to her more than to me - explosion of international publicity. We had met on line, for no other reason than that we both lived in Paris and wrote blogs, and this had led her to confide in me when her world seemed to cave in.

Rather a lot has happened since we first met and I poured white wine down her throat (she suspected at the time that I was trying to loosen her tongue, and I suppose I should be grateful that she didn't suspect worse).

In fact, the bottle was produced a) because journalists must live up to their reputation of needing little excuse to produce bottles and b) to break the ice; I was perfectly happy to wait until Catherine was ready for her story to be told.

In the event, that took a few months. She wanted to be sure of her legal ground, and to see the last of her pay safely into her bank account. Suddenly in mid-July, it all fell into place and the deed was done.

Of course it was not the most important news event I have worked on, not even the most important of 2006. But it was precisely the kind of story people the world over are likely to read, perfectly applicable to the modern age with significant enough implications for freedom of expression. I was repeatedly asked to talk to other parts of the media about the affair and wrote at length at my then Telegraph blog on how the story had come my way.

As it happened, I did not have too long to savour the minor glory of the scoop.

By the time the publishers' bidding war was done, and I had reported the outcome (extremely good news for Catherine), I was within days of being sacked myself; that event also attracted some controversy, though not on quite the same level.

Catherine wrote chamingly about my downfall at her own blog, and in the months that followed we became friends. I hope her book, or books, do famously and I still believe there is material in her story for a very funny film.

But let us not forget the people who fired her: Dixon Wilson. Theirs, necessarily, is much more than a walk-on part. They did not so much refuse to comment as offer to jot down numbers when approached by journalists, and then simply not ring back. That was their right, and should not be held against them.

The firm has been accused of over-reacting to a trivial issue that could have been dealt with easily, without fuss and perhaps with a gentle warning. They chose the sledgehammer instead. The prud'hommes, or labour court, so far sides with Catherine and has awarded her a hefty slice of compensation against Dixon Wilson. They have the right to appeal, so the story could have more legs before it has run its course.

But by the time it has, the woman they fired may well have added successful author to successful blogger on the cv she will probably never again need to produce in order to earn a living.

In fact, Catherine realised some time ago that she had arrived, that life could never be the same again.

Not because of my Telegraph stories, the book deal, the court case, the international reach of her fame. She knew it the day she sent me a text message saying: "Do you remember telling me I'd end up on Richard and Judy's couch? Guess what............."

* A short message of thanks to Catherine for pointing her readers towards Salut!. It is a powerful measure of her Midas-like touch that so many hundreds of people have followed her directions.....if that includes you, I do realise that you are here exclusively because of Petite Anglaise, but please accept my sincere welcome. I hope you enjoy your visit........

Comments

[Roads]

You're right, Colin. Petite Anglaise has changed many things in the blogosphere.

Catherine's story intrigued so many people last July, leading to the arrival of many new blogs (mine amongst them) and the development of other, established writers into independent bloggers, even perhaps yourself as well.

The contradictions were always there - the all-too-easy press billing of this as a sex and saucy secretary story, run in parallel with a refreshingly irreverent and slightly racy new look at life in France along the way.

Catherine also looked right into a classic social battle for our times, revealing and amplifying both the Canute-like technophobic isolation of the old school tie expatriate world, and the cosmopolitan and technologically-skilled and free-thinking qualities of well-educated and underutilised young people within a modern metropolitan workforce, just about anywhere.

Petite's writing strayed consciously and entertainingly into each of those debates. They still go on - and surely the biggest employment lesson of all has been for every boss never again to underestimate the resources hidden within his office, but rather to seek to bring them out and make far better use of such talents to obvious and lasting mutual benefit. And if Catherine's boss had done the same, we wouldn't be here now at all.

There there were other interesting issues raised here, too - the freedom of individuals to communicate freely with others during work time was one that the court case centred on, but questions aired themselves also around the incautious release of personal emotions (if never of intimate details) into cyberspace.

Petite had the good luck, and deep misfortune, to write about a crossroads in her life. That may have been exactly why she wrote, of course, and so her emotional rollercoaster was played out across the internet to a far wider audience than she could ever have possibly imagined, back in 2004.

Billed all too naively, perhaps as a French version of 'Sex in the City', then, Petite's story has been about so much more than that. She looks with insight at the issues faced by unhappy partners within relationships, and the hard lessons and challenges known so well to single parents everywhere.

And that is not even to mention her most sensitive description of the overwhelming joys, frustrations and sense of responsibility which any parent feels as their toddler grows up beside them. To me, she has managed to do this by making her own experience both every day and universal, without easily becoming trite, cute or overtly mumsy,

That's a lot of ground to cover within one blog, and perhaps it is exactly that multi-layered texture and the quality of her writing which makes Petite Anglaise such a really cracking read.

Petite will have her critics, both personal and literary, for sure. We all make mistakes, and we all get hurt, sometimes. And not every domestic incident nor lover's anguished indecision deserves the gravity or durability of Dickens.

But so be it - her new book may, just like JK Rowling's, not strictly be literature in the classic mould, and hooray for that, I hear you cry.

And yet, for all of that, I'm really not so sure, since way beyond the obvious typecasting and simplistic comparisons, Petite really is a gifted writer and a vivid storyteller, too.

Whatever happens next, it would certainly be an error to underestimate Catherine Sanderson at this stage - and not least because that's been done once too often, once before..

[pierre l]

After a comment like this, there is nothing I could add except to say thank you to Colin for helping me discover Petite (the first blog I ever read, and still read avidly), and for such an interesting post, also to "Roads" for an excellent comment.

[Philip H]

I haven’t followed the details of this story but naturally my instinct tends to favour David against Goliath. However, if the blog was completed during worktime as Roads seems to suggest, I find myself very much at odds with the ruling in Catherine’s favour.

When I was in business I paid people to work for me, not to spend their days chatting on the telephone or writing personal letters (Telecom Gold was then in its infancy). Today, my wife, a Teaching Assistant, can’t break away from her commitment to a statemented child to make personal calls or send emails let alone maintain a blog and her telephone remains off during the school day.

I see no distinction between stealing money
from the petty cash and stealing time from one’s employer and if those were the grounds on which Catherine’s firm fired her I think they were right.

[Thomas R]

Philip H,

I am guilty. Is is my lunch break but I am writing this on a computer that belongs to the [french] company I work for and it will wing its way into the blogosphere on a network they pay for. I am a thief.

But, I also carry a mobile phone, get called at home when there's a problem, and use the network that I pay for at home to send and receive urgent emails.

The world of work has changed, almost as much as when our forefathers left the fields for the factories, to live by the clock rather than the sun and the seasons.

The boundaries between work and non-work are, for many of us, much less clear. We are expected to be available "24/7" [sorry - horrible phrase]. So is my employer stealing from me too?

[Bill Taylor]

I agree. My working hours/days/weeks are almost infinitely flexible and, by the very nature of the beast, there are occasions when I have a lot of down-time. At the same time, like Thomas, there are times when I work from home, use my own BlackBerry on company business and occasionally put in extremely long and uncomfortable hours. On a recent assignment, I went 38 hours without sleep. Obviously, you have to know where the limits are -- work, when it's there to be done, must always take priority -- but this is a world of shifting shades of grey, not black and white.

[Colin Randall]

And the prud'hommes seem to have accepted Catherine's arguments that people at the firm were never discouraged from reading books or looking things up on the internet during slack periods.

[Sandy B]

It seems to me that the Prud'hommes ruled in Catherine's favour because her bosses overreacted.
Instant dismissal was inappropriate where a warning should have been sufficient.

[Diane]

Catherine's sacking caused much pondering about what was fair, private and not so. It made me wonder how much privacy we all truly had and how much this had to affect her life beyond the obvious financial turmoil of loosing her job.

What we decide to share with others is one thing, but having our identities revealed in public is quite another.

[Sedulia]

Hi Colin,

I'm in L.A. for a while (will be back to Paris eventually) and haven't come to visit for a while. Congratulations on your new life, and thanks for helping Petite last year when she needed it.

I can't help thinking that her being a minor public figure now will change her blog, which drew me exactly because it was so daringly candid. Will she still dare?