red rose because he knows that one day the right girl is going to fall off her bicycle at his feet, the French wait for the Charles Trénet, Edith Piaf-zeitgeist thing to come around and bathe them again in rightness. In the meantime there is French rap to be avoided.
Being from the gauche side of the channel, I should of course spend a moment in sniggering glee at the precipitous decline in French culture. What is left is now a rootless and meritless French arrogance, which simply makes them funnier and more pathetic, like paunchy men standing in Europeâs drawing room, dressed only in their Speedos. I should giggle, drain my cup of schadenfreude, but really I canât.
France was always our idea of heaven. Paris was the city I yearned to be transported to as an art student. My lust still remains caught on the sulky, petite, smokewreathed women of the New Wave. I will ever be drawn to French art and French style. I hope to go out in a surfeit of foie gras and cassoulet. Itâs my age. France has always been the model of sophistication for men like me, and Iâm too old to find some new fantasy.
But not my children. They will only read Camus if they have to sit him for some exam. They want to eat burgers and curry. They think that Angelina Jolie is the sexiest thing on celluloid. Fashion is an international scrum of strange, exotic branding. Art is Brit and Jap. Their cultural world doesnât even have a hole in it where France used to be. France has the same cultural standing for the young as Finland does. (Possibly less than Finland; Finland has Nokia.)
France is now a museum for the old. It is a great open-plan retirement home for the Englishmen who canât wear shorts and are still meaning to read Proust under a peach tree. The rather glorious truth about Franceâs extinct culture is that it died out for good Darwinian principles. It had reached a point of almost perfect equilibrium, and a change in the balance of suavity, manners and impetuosity, intellect and flirtation wouldâve been to diminish the whole, so they waited for the world to regret its bad taste and come back to le vie Française. But they didnât, of course. Except us portly Englishmen, and a handful of aesthetically fine-tuned American gays, which is rather galling for the French. But theyâre right. Better to die an unmodified, unrepentant, ridiculous Frenchman than to live on as some Eurotrash ersatz mongrel.
Song sung blue
Weâve got an inane ditty for birthdays, so why not bless other noteworthy occasions with a similarly discordant sentiment?
I walked across a beach, and in 30 seconds, I knew it was the worst beach in Minorca. The sea was fine, the sand was okay, the view was lovely, it was clean and sheltered. I got off it as soon as I could. People occasionally ask, where are the best beaches in the world? And I always reply, it depends on who youâre with. But I can tell you how to tell the worst beaches in the world: theyâre the ones with the bare-naked people on them. Not bare naked because they donât own clothes, though if you do find yourself on a beach with committed lifetime 24-hour naked chaps, itâs probably in the Nicobar Islands and theyâre about to kill you with barbed spears. No, I mean people who live and work all wrapped up and who come to the beach specifically to get utterly and butterly naked. In short, Germans. Proto-spiritual Germans.
There is a seaside global truth that says the worst bodies wear the smallest trunks, and the very worst wear none at all. Itâs the aesthetic horror of people who think that being nude will show the rest of the world what beautiful people they are on the inside. Their nakedness is a billboard not for nubility or sensuality, but for rigorous ethical housekeeping and moral mountaineering. And if that were all, we could just laugh at them. But the fact is that naturist beaches are the most bad-tempered radiantly sociophobic
Being from the gauche side of the channel, I should of course spend a moment in sniggering glee at the precipitous decline in French culture. What is left is now a rootless and meritless French arrogance, which simply makes them funnier and more pathetic, like paunchy men standing in Europeâs drawing room, dressed only in their Speedos. I should giggle, drain my cup of schadenfreude, but really I canât.
France was always our idea of heaven. Paris was the city I yearned to be transported to as an art student. My lust still remains caught on the sulky, petite, smokewreathed women of the New Wave. I will ever be drawn to French art and French style. I hope to go out in a surfeit of foie gras and cassoulet. Itâs my age. France has always been the model of sophistication for men like me, and Iâm too old to find some new fantasy.
But not my children. They will only read Camus if they have to sit him for some exam. They want to eat burgers and curry. They think that Angelina Jolie is the sexiest thing on celluloid. Fashion is an international scrum of strange, exotic branding. Art is Brit and Jap. Their cultural world doesnât even have a hole in it where France used to be. France has the same cultural standing for the young as Finland does. (Possibly less than Finland; Finland has Nokia.)
France is now a museum for the old. It is a great open-plan retirement home for the Englishmen who canât wear shorts and are still meaning to read Proust under a peach tree. The rather glorious truth about Franceâs extinct culture is that it died out for good Darwinian principles. It had reached a point of almost perfect equilibrium, and a change in the balance of suavity, manners and impetuosity, intellect and flirtation wouldâve been to diminish the whole, so they waited for the world to regret its bad taste and come back to le vie Française. But they didnât, of course. Except us portly Englishmen, and a handful of aesthetically fine-tuned American gays, which is rather galling for the French. But theyâre right. Better to die an unmodified, unrepentant, ridiculous Frenchman than to live on as some Eurotrash ersatz mongrel.
Song sung blue
Weâve got an inane ditty for birthdays, so why not bless other noteworthy occasions with a similarly discordant sentiment?
I walked across a beach, and in 30 seconds, I knew it was the worst beach in Minorca. The sea was fine, the sand was okay, the view was lovely, it was clean and sheltered. I got off it as soon as I could. People occasionally ask, where are the best beaches in the world? And I always reply, it depends on who youâre with. But I can tell you how to tell the worst beaches in the world: theyâre the ones with the bare-naked people on them. Not bare naked because they donât own clothes, though if you do find yourself on a beach with committed lifetime 24-hour naked chaps, itâs probably in the Nicobar Islands and theyâre about to kill you with barbed spears. No, I mean people who live and work all wrapped up and who come to the beach specifically to get utterly and butterly naked. In short, Germans. Proto-spiritual Germans.
There is a seaside global truth that says the worst bodies wear the smallest trunks, and the very worst wear none at all. Itâs the aesthetic horror of people who think that being nude will show the rest of the world what beautiful people they are on the inside. Their nakedness is a billboard not for nubility or sensuality, but for rigorous ethical housekeeping and moral mountaineering. And if that were all, we could just laugh at them. But the fact is that naturist beaches are the most bad-tempered radiantly sociophobic
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