As someone who lives in France, where do you think Sarkozy has gone wrong?

Nice piccies, by the way.

Thank you.

I'm only part-time in France (and in England at the moment) and Sarky is highly unpopular in our area - the FN made very few inroads here at the height of Jean-Marie. Lower Normandy has a socialist president, although local mayors are from various parties. One of my neighbours offered to send us Sarkozy as a present. I countered by offering him Thatcher. He demurred...

The kind of politics the locals are interested in is the price of milk (down 30% in 10 years, 50% of dairy farmers out of business), the influence of the big supermarket chains (milk), the distant nature of the government in Paris. They like Europe, liked Tony Blair, like subsidies (they need them), they are genuinely communal.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

I've found Paris fine, as someone who speaks good French (with a bad accent). They always appreciate it.

After a conversation (in French) with a pharmacist in rural mid-France about the best treatment for my child who had cut his knee badly, I was told that it was a good thing my French was ok as her English was not. And then asked what part of Germany I came from. True story.

Mind you, the French teacher I had for several years at school had done her living-in-France year in Alsace-Lorraine.

When buying some trousers from a market stall I was told I sound Belgian. Which is likely, because my first French teacher was. I still have to fight an urge to say septante, octante and nonante...

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

My French is fast, plentiful and highly grammatically inaccurate. Never seems to upset French people, even with what I take to be an Alsatiobritish accent. Except in Channel ports they always seem to understand most of it and to be very happy to reply in French. What's the odd wrong gender and tense (all right, a lot of wrong genders and tenses) between friends? And my Italian involves quite a lot of Latin. It usually works fine, though in Venice last year one bookshop assistant did suggest that I might be better off trying that tack in the Vatican. Har har.

Interesting you say that. I used to know a lass from Kirkcaldy who spent many years teaching English in Germany. She (and her teachers before her) reckoned that a Scottish accent gave a natural advantage (over English) in correct German pronunciation.

I've had the experience of French people presuming that I'm Scandinavian, German, Belgian or Dutch when confronted with my terrible French. Not sure how much that is to do with my accent though. I've been told on more than one occasion that it's because I'm 'having a go in French' rather than shouting English at them which is what they've come to expect from English holidaymakers.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

I get mistaken for a German just walking down the street without even opening my gob. This happened most frequently in Prague, of all places. Suppose I must look sort of big and Teutonic. French people everywhere, I've found, love that I engage them in French. Except for the bloody woman on the bateau mouches booking desk in Paris, who let me ramble on for at least 45 seconds, then ordered me to speak English.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

There was the charming lady in the boulangerie in Creully who spoke no English but that wasn't going to stop her engaging me in chit-chat stretching my half-forgotten O'Level French to breaking point. We camped there for nearly three weeks and it was my routine to stroll up the road every morning for the croissants so there was time to build up a bit of a relationship. Everyday she would enquire about our itinerary for today and question me about what we did yesterday. Half awake and with a Calvados hangover, I'd launch into rambling Franglais descriptions of my impressions of Sword Beach or Bayeaux cathedral or whatever, occasionally dropping into sign language. Sometimes she'd actually applaud when I'd finished. I can only conclude that she must have been very, very bored to have taken such delight in my incoherent wafflings.

Abers - even Germans think I look German, it must be my big square head.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

Perhaps it's your helmet?


Fnarr fnarr........

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Could be. The zip's gone on my lederhosen.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

I was taught to speak French in Yorkshire accent at school, thank goodness forMichel Thomas

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"..The Daily Mail - not so much a newspaper as an idiot's guidebook issued in bite-size daily installments" Charlie Brooker

I had a frustrating time in Salzburg recently when I was itching to practise my German but found that, no matter how hard I tried, everyone I spoke to responded in English. They were obviously right that we were going to get on much faster and more reliably that way, but it would have been nice if just one of them had pretended that their English wasn't necessarily better than my German.

I got a bollocking from a waiter in Antwerp for addressing him in French.
"Why you speak to me in French?"
"I'm sorry, I don't speak Flemish"
"We speak English. I speak English, you are English. What need is to speaking in French? Is better, you agree?"

Each time he said "French" he literally spat and I'm not sure I should have put in a question mark on that last sentence.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...