WHY WE’RE NOT BLOODY MOVING TO BLOODY FRANCE
or “In the Chunnel, arguing with the missus”
Buggers, bankrupts, cheated
heirs
Clutching bogus railway
shares;
Bigamists and syphilitics,
Traitors, wastrels, literary
critics;
Mortified, a lord departing
For in the royal presence
farting;
And tortured folk who liked
to try on
Women’s clothes, and Wilde
and Byron –
Escaping bracing common sense
To exquisite irrelevance,
Howsoever they’ve offended
Punished with a life
suspended.
“Je t’aime,” declares their rented
friend,
But how they
grieved to leave Mile End!
**
Cabbies in a Queensway queue
Call politely, “After you!”
In dented vans at Hyde Park
Gate
Builders smile, benignly
wait.
Between its scheduled stops a
bus
Picks up passengers without a
fuss,
And Lycra’d cyclists say
they’re proud
To only go where it’s
allowed.
With shaven heads, tattoos
and scars,
Robbers racing stolen cars
Brake amid their getaway
To cry out, “You first, sir.
I beg you, pray.”
Such kindness Londoners
display!
But most of all an oath of
silence
Sworn on every driver’s
licence
Guarantees their holders know
A motor horn is just for
show.
But zut alors,
Hear those
Paris klaxons roar.
**
In fancy sashes, pince-nez
glasses,
Cummerbunded bow-tied asses,
Prodding peevishly a phrase
At the Académie Française,
Prolong their tongue’s
post-mortem rigor.
Mine is strong on mongrel
vigour.
**
Waterloo
Left the French with nothing
to do
Except to perfect the
vinaigrette,
While we had an empire on
which the sun never set.
**
Pretty Paris saved her skin
Letting Adolf slide right in.
Pardon therefore London town,
Bruised as a boxer who would
not lie down.
**
And This is Us if We Did Bloody Move…
Snobs who snub the British
poor,
To Breton peasants we
declare, ‘Bonjour,’
Daily at our costly hovel
Which they rebuild – while I
attempt a novel.
For we’re convinced my talent
stands no chance
In chilly Britain: but
instead, in France,
In some far corner of a
foreign field
Surely my sulking Muse will
smile and yield.
In turn, our builders think
we’re great
For paying them in cash at rosbif rate.
But that’s not why they’re
working at the double:
Instead they know our house
is built on rubble,
Rubbish, rot, in the town’s
old landfill site.
No wonder – half in greed,
half fright –
They work so fast: forget a
firm foundation,
This building’s base provides
its transportation
To move it through the view
we both adore
On trash from Monoprix and
crap from Carrefour,
Dooming our dwelling to be
mixed with
The very vista we’re transfixed
with.
One morning while they race
to tile our pool,
I dredge up dregs of French
from school
To say, ‘Amis! Tomorrow when
our projet ends,
Je hope that nous will still
be friends,’
And slap their backs, half
shy, half hearty,
And ask them to our opening
poolside party.
‘Mais oui!’ they cry, but
with a smirk
That shows they only value us
for work:
That and your beauty – for
with what furtive glances
They dream and pray and weigh
their chances
Of demonstrating what ‘le
vrai France’ is:
For all have known those
British Madame Bovarys,
Maddened by empty hours and
itchy ovaries,
Who notice that a no-doubt
charming view
Can hardly qualify as things to do,
And that – of wine and sun
and heat and dust –
Boredom’s most of all the
fount of lust.
As for your spouse – that
sorry figure,
Whose every word provokes a
sneer or snigger,
At home perhaps a so-so sort
of okay male
Is here bewildered, creeping,
feeble, pale,
And still forgets the French
for “roofing
nail”.
Thus humbled, I renew my
story – a
Wild romantic phantasmagoria
Of art and thought around a
passionate affair
Between a writer (British,
debonair)
And some bucolic buxom Breton
cutie.
Oh, how I love to annotate
her beauty –
Her dimples, derriere,
deportment, dress
Described to near-adulterous
excess.
At one fence only does my
fancy fall –
The woman has no character at
all.
(For how could I evoke a love
Whose life and lingo I know
nothing of?
My paltry talent could as
well design a
Village beauty in the wilds
of China.)
What ruby lips so ripe for
kissing!
What personality entirely
missing!
Except for this: an
appetite
To hear her lover’s wisdom,
wit, insight –
For tirelessly I drone for
endless pages
With well-worn thoughts on
loving through the ages
While the poor shadow’s
conversation
Confines itself to
admiration:
“Oh mon amour, so wise, so
kind, and so
Wise and kind, and oh, so,
oh! – ”
For at this point the beau
she so admires
Inflames her with insatiable
desires.
No girl was ever sweeter,
neater, wetter:
No wretch like me, of course,
could ever get her –
For though such Breton belles
be ne’er so many,
British scribblers here are
ten a penny.
Then you, inflamed by some
young navvys’ torso,
His t-shirt tight, his
trousers more so,
Appear beside me with that
snack for codgers –
My milky tea and (rationed)
jammy dodgers –
As, with a hurried
button-push,
I quit my scribbles with a
guilty blush.
Thus, at our poolside do in
gloomy chats,
Trapped with a pack of
sad-sack Brit expats,
We flee our dreams but see
our all-too-real fate –
What malice, moaning,
melanomas wait!
See where the husbands clump,
already stewed,
In one undifferentiated lump
to wolf our food
(For, monolingual to the end,
French comestibles are all
they comprehend),
Airing their only source of
conversation –
The wisdom of their Gallic
relocation,
For clearly such disruption
and expense
Demands its own proportionate
defence:
Bureaucracy, banlieues, a brutal mistral breeze,
A smug sommelier, unpleasant
peasant, wines with anti-freeze
Seem almost charming in the
feckless Frogs;
Benighted Blighty, though, is
“going to the dogs”.
Their dried-up wives,
meanwhile, with thirty summers
Shrivelled here, detest
newcomers.
It’s true they hate their men
likewise,
Resent the French, and
tourists too despise,
But understandably their
chief disdain
Is used on fools whose move
repeats their pain –
So constantly through
rat-trap mouths they sneer,
‘Doubtless your local friends
will soon appear.’
Indeed our builders,
bladdered, land at last at ten –
And drink what’s left, and
reel away again,
For even these mechanicals
refused
To hear the tongue of Moliere
so abused
By us appalling Anglo-Saxons,
Our skin like lepers’, and
our voice like klaxons.
And from that night, with
curdling hope
You in increasing irritation
mope
Around the house (both kiln
and fridge)
Or blankly gaze at ridge on
empty ridge –
A vista once so dear to us
(Though surely growing yet
more near to us)
And note around the house,
disaster
Writ in proliferating
fissures down the plaster,
While I in turn observe my
still-born tale
From blatant lack of talent
turning stale.
In desperation, in a cheap
café
I plug the laptop in and sit
all day,
Fiddling with fonts, the
screen, the keyboard,
Bored, and double-bored, and
over-bored, and re-bored.
The owner meanwhile thinks,
“One thé. My power socket,”
Does the maths, suspects he’s
out of
pocket
And sweeps me out amid the
Gittaine stubs.
“No problem,” you’d suppose,
“there’s pubs.”
But no: this proud provincial
town
By eight o’clock is all
closed down.
Roaming the lonely streets
I’m seized with fear:
Blocked in Britain, now I’m
blocked out here.
I stand in darkness in the
empty square:
I’ve failed in France, as
first I failed back there.
But then the town clock
strikes – and with it inspiration.
Of course! The problem with
my novel is location.
That’s it. We’ve been away
too long.
I’ve lost the lustre from my
native tongue.
For surely, to compose
convincing fiction,
A Brit must daily hear the
British diction –
To write, he
Must have contact constantly
with Blighty.
We pack within a day;
Within a week we’re on our
way,
Aboard a budget airline
taking wing
The house for rent, for sale,
for anything;
Within a fortnight at an arty
party
I stammer out, half shy, half
hearty,
‘Yes, really – such
tremendous luck –
That move abroad to finish
off the book.’
A fellow guest attends, looks
thoughtful, he’s
Felt just the same. He
frowns, agrees,
Hesitates, then says, ‘You
know,
In England, always, somehow,
one’s so…’
The deal is done, no time to
waste,
For fools that follow fools
proceed in haste,
An endless witless cycle
treading round,
For fools to follow fools
indeed abound
And chase that futile fakery,
The New
–
Tarnished when touched, a
bride at once
untrue,
Whose status symbols join the
status quo
Like thrilling summits
stretched to dull plateaux.
And hence my settled stance:
I will not
countenance,
For all its vaunted elegance,
Insouciance, romance –
Any bloody move to bloody
France.