Almost French

......is the title of one of the most engaging books on France, and especially on living in France, that I have come across since making my own move three years ago. Almost French was written by Sarah Turnbull, an Australian who left Sydney with carefully considered plans to write about the change sweeping eastern Europe, but met a Frenchman and settled instead in Paris. Her book - which Almost Everyone, or at least almost everyone to whom I loaned my copy, liked - was excellent on personal relationships, and above all on the business of getting to know the French when you're a foreigner. It was less good when she decided she wanted to be a travel writer and rattled on at length about favoured corners of Paris. But those passages were easy to skip if you felt as I did. Two years or more after I finished the book, the pages I remember best are those that dealt with trying to make friends. Despite the advantage of having a French boyfriend, and ready-made introductions to his circle, she found it a nightmare. People would give her short shrift at parties, visibly disapprove of her Oz ways and tastes (notably her capacity to drink) and generally make it plain that they were out of bounds as far as closer ties were concerned. Even though Turnbull's French was self-evidently up to understanding straightforward conversation, she remembers listening in horror as one girl within earshot asked her boyfriend (words to the effect of): "So how's your little Australian coming along with her French?" A couple of years or so later, the same young woman had at last become a friend. Turnbull quite bluntly asked why she and everyone else had been so horrid at first. The answer was simple: along the lines of "we make all the friends we want at school, college, maybe very early in our careers....we have no need of any more". I have good French friends, but these friendships were acquired via my French wife or forged outside France (perhaps requiring the French person to make an effort he/she wouldn't at home), or developed in close working environments. Those who were particular friends of my wife when she was young put up no barriers that I recall. So in that respect, my experience differed from that of Turnbull. But I do have a clear memory of finding others of lesser acquaintance, and even some in her extended family, very hard work. And as I have observed before, it can be difficult to make a breakthrough in more casual settings, even when common social activity brings you together. At the badminton club I have found here in the Var, everyone is pleasant with lots of bonsoirs and à bientôts and bisous. Between all that, though, they generally peel off to grab a court and stick in the same doubles formation all evening. I may be wrong, but I see it as another aspect of the social phenomenon noted by Turnbull. What, in this specific example, do more seasoned residents of France advise (naturally forgetting that it's badminton; I am sure the same applies to many kinds of sports or social clubs). And have others, wherever their travels have taken them, come up against anything resembling what either of us describe? I realise that I can hardly impose le modèle Anglo-Saxon on them, with boards, name tags and orderly, democratic rotation of players. But how, without coming across as the arrogant expat, do I get them at least to consider the possibility that they'd get an awful lot more out of the club if they treated it, well, like a club and mixed, on court as well as off? The logical extension of the French way is something I have already experienced (at the distinguished Racing Club de France in Paris): arriving on my own at 8pm, as a player of respectable club level standard and - I hope - of a sociable disposition, and slipping away three quarters of an hour later without the least hint of getting a game.

Labels: Australia, badminton, Britain, clubs, France, friends, Sarah Turnbull, sport