Sogger’s Blog

As the only native English-speaker in a French company dealing with customers outside of France, I often get asked to review flyers, white-papers, release notes etc. before they are sent to customers. I am happy to do so, but loathed to be too critical because I know that my written French is appalling and I am no Shakespeare in English. I have somehow become the defender of the English language in my corner of France (albeit, a very small corner and purely because there is no-one more qualified). On several occasions however, I have had to rewrite large tracts of a document before I can allow it to be released to the outside world.

One of the errors I constantly feel the need to correct comes from the incorrect or missing use of the hyphen; I will systematically change the wording to add or remove them as I see fit. It is only since I have been in France that I have understood its importance and how it can change the meaning of a written statement dramatically.  The French don’t seem to place so much emphasis on the hyphen, and invariably don’t use it at all in English documents.

Often, after having received my reviewed document, the author is none-the-wiser and comes back for a more detailed explanation. My guiding principle is that it is used to clarify that a group of words are tightly-bound in the current context (although I use it interchangeably with the colon and semi-colon to link together two ideas in the same sentence - but that’s not important in this post). This is a bit dry as an explanation so I always explain how to use it via examples.

Most recently an engineer asked why I moved a hyphen (purely in the spirit of learning to speak proper English like wot I does). To explain (in a non-patronising way, obviously), I asked him if he saw the difference between the phrases, “I work with twenty odd engineers” and “I work with twenty-odd engineers”. Sadly, he didn’t. Someone from marketing came to see me for an explanation of a similar modification. A religious kind of guy, I showed him that “pre marital-sex” could be considered as foreplay between husband and wife, whereas “pre-marital sex” was forbidden by his religious principles. He didn’t get it either.

It looks like I’m going to have to find a different way of getting the message across. If you don’t get it either (or think that I don’t get it), and are as pedantic as me, you can refer to “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” for a more correct, complete and humourous definition of how to use the hyphen.

You may have followed the ongoing saga that is the reparation of my shot pre-molars (shamelessly self-referenced here). About a month ago I started to get pain again in a tooth that had supposedly been deadened - how could this be? Was my trust in dentist 2 misplaced? No messing around, this time I called the dentist straight away only to be told that he was on holiday for the next 3 weeks (don’t you just love long French holidays?). So again, a long wait, whinging to anybody willing to listen (nobody in fact). But a date was at least fixed. Eating in the meantime was a painful experience; food seemed to get trapped everywhere and my favourite, steak and chips, was off the menu.

“Steak and Chips”, the combo long championed in player profiles in Shoot magazine (a football magazine for pre-adolescents rather than a lowbrow gay porn magazine. Although having said that, A picture of Kevin Keegan on the front page in his 80’s footballer shorts might lead to some confusion). The player profiles were always the same: same questions, same answers. “So, Mister Beattie, what is your favourite food?”, “Steak and chips”. “Who was the biggest influence on your career?”, “My Dad”, and other such insights. I am reminded of the Kevin Keegan cover, not because it roused some long-repressed adolescent angst, but because I still have this issue (of the magazine, not one related to Kevin-Keegan-in tight-shorts-causing-issues-with-my-sexuality). It is the seminal (don’t confuse the meaning of this word either) issue where my question was published in the “Ask The Expert” section.

Soggers from Cumbria asks,

“Dear Sir, please can you tell me how Sheffield Wednesday came to get their rather unusual name?”.

Incidentally, my question was, “Please can you tell me how Sheffield Wednesday got their name?”. They probably added the “Dear Sir” and “rather unusual” to make me sound like less of an illiterate working-class northerner, son of a coal miner etc. Anyway, you can go find out the answer for yourself - if you can’t be bothered to “Ask the Expert” yourself, why should I help you?

Back to the dentist…

Funnily enough, I hadn’t seen the dentist from scoop 1 since that day, even though his surgery/butcher’s slab was only a few hundred metres from my house - I tended to keep my head down as we passed in the car, or look the other way in case he came out and harangued me about unpaid bills. The morning of scoop 5, I had to walk to the bus-stop which took me past his surgery, and as I did so, he appeared on the doorstep (sad to say, not with a blood-covered cloak and a dripping scalpel). He saw me. He didn’t say anything, just turned on his heels and disappeared inside. This could either mean that he was embarrassed or was off to find his blunderbuss (if you remember the description of his antique surgery you may know what this is. Alright, so it’s a big gun). Anyway, I was glad to see that he didn’t accost me directly and wasn’t going to wait around to see if he was going to run me through with a rusty drill-bit.

A bus and a tram ride, and 1-hour later (I really went to great physical lengths to get away from the original dentist), I was back in the chair from scoops 2, 3 and 4. A quick description of the symptoms and a quick look in my mouth and the dentist was able to tell me the problem: part of the tooth he recently deadened had broken off, leaving a hole into which food would be trapped, causing irritation of the gums which was in fact the cause of the pain. So in he went. Again.

Wriggling about inside with some shiny white equipment he was able to fix the damage quickly. All very neat and professional. However, just as I made to stand up, he said, “Hhhmmm, a lot of tartar in there, I think we’ll get rid of that”. I’ve never had this done before, which probably accounts for the ensuing pain as he fought to chip the stuff off the back of my teeth. It was probably the worse moment of all the work I had done. At any moment, I felt that he was going to touch a nerve ending and cause my feet to touch my nose as they shot involuntarily into the air and my head did likewise.

But hey, what a difference! I could actually feel that I have individual teeth, not just a silver and yellow strip that makes it look like I have a small, over-ripe banana skin behind my lips. That was 1 week ago, and touch wood everything is OK. No reaction so far, so hopefully Scoop 6 will be the Unstarted Symphony.

I know that I promised that scoop 5 would be the end of any description on my oral tribulations (don’t get me back onto Kevin Keegan), but this time, I promise it is the case.

My kids are learning English at school. Although they already speak perfect English, when they are in class they speak English (”Ingleesh”) with a French accent. The only explanation I have for this is that they don’t want to stand out.

One of the ways they learn English is through song. It’s usually of the type, “The wheels on the bus go round and round” or “Happy Birthday”, that sort of thing. However, this week, in the run-up to the summer holidays, they have been learning the aptly named, “School’s Out”. I guess this comes from High School Musical or some such sugary show, but I know that it’s origins are darker as I’m sure you can guess if you read the lyrics. In fact, it was first sung in the 70’s by Alice Cooper, the scary-looking bloke who adopted a girl’s name.

Few people know this, and of those who do, none believe me, but I met Alice Cooper in a video-shop in Manchester in 1989. I believe he was playing the Manchester Apollo at the time. I lived in Rusholme - the curry capital of the north-west. In the heart of Rusholme was a video shop and I went along one Saturday afternoon. While I was choosing, in walked a middle-aged Goth. Dressed in black, drainpipe trousers, wrinkled face, deep black eye-liner, it was obviously Alice Cooper. I was the only other customer in the shop and was completely gobsmacked.

Alice didn’t spend time browsing - he was obviously a man in a hurry. Instead, he walked straight to the counter, asking in his American accent, “Hey, you got any’a those Splatter Movies”. The answer was obviously yes, because the owner disappeared into the backroom, coming back with a small selection. I wondered why they weren’t on general display, but I guess it’s best not to ask. As Alice chose, I left, in such a state of disbelief that I didn’t even stop to ask him why he had a girl’s name. I hope he found something with enough splatter to fire him up for a top performance that night.

I need to explain a bizarre law in France that maybe you are already aware of, but has several subtle side-effects, which, if you have not driven in France, may be new to you. The law I am talking about is the “priorité à droite” (priority to the right) law.

Priorité à droite basically means that any car pulling out from the right onto the road you are driving on takes priority over you. To explain, imagine you are driving down a straight road, you can see for miles in front of you, but, to your right, a road joins yours. A person arrives at the junction and you see him in plenty of time. However, what you don’t know is that this person has right-of-way over you, so can pull out in front of you and you have to stop to let them in, even though, for you, there are no road markings that suggest that it is a junction.

But unfortunately, its not as simple as that, because you should notice two things:

1. Some towns don’t apply this law
2. Not all junctions follow this rule even in towns that do apply the law

The only way you can know if the person arriving from the right has right of way over you is that there will be a Give Way sign and road markings. However, this is not always visible, so you are required to watch each junction as you approach it.
Lyon is a town where this law does not seem to be applied; let’s say that I haven’t come across such a junction in any case. Here’s the catch though: I live in a town, which, although on the outkirts, is part of the city. However, the town which is 100m down that road is not part of Lyon, which means that, guess what, it does apply the priorité à droite law. But not everywhere.

So yesterday I was driving to the tip (who doesn’t make a few trips to the tip on a rare day off work?), when, I realised that the law applied as I was nearly - but luckily not quite - shunted from the side - the side that my son happened to be sitting on. Another catch in the law is that, if you are French, the only way to pull out blind onto a main road is to studiously avoid looking at what is approaching from your left. This means for me, as an untrusting person, I look at the person pulling out in order to guess whether they will chicken out or not. In most cases though, they don’t even bother to look left for fear of getting into some kind of standoff.

Once, I was driving along a straight road and slowed down for the driver approaching from my right. However, the driver refused to pull out in front of me and we both inched forward, me not wanting to break the law, he not wanting to get shunted by me. Why didn’t I drive on? Well because I have even heard of cases where in a similar standoff position, the person arriving from the right gave the impression that they were waiting, only to pull out as the other car started to move forward. Why? Because the car arriving from the right is in the right (if you see what I mean) and they can use this if they want to get a bit of money out of the insurance company. But this might be an apocryphal story.

A friend summed it up: it’s as if every junction should be treated as a roundabout. That is correct, however, in France, on a roundabout you give way to the left!

Go figure.

I mentioned a long time ago that my son had got himself elected to the local council, campaigning on a green agenda (OK, that’s over-blowing it a bit, but he did ask for bigger recycling bins). His enthusiasm has waned a bit in the meantime as he’s called to various events when he would rather be outside kicking a football. However, last weekend, as a member of the “Environment” sub-committee, he was required to take part in an organised litter-picking exercise. This involved taking black bin-liners and picking up the litter on the street, weighing it and publicising the results. All very worthy, so I decided to help out.

This post will describe the event - not only those directly related, but something that happened as a result of my participation. Intrigued? Not really? Well, read on anyway.

It was last Saturday morning and it was pouring down - not a steady drizzle, but a real downpour. This dissuaded many people from taking part (either that or apathy). So there were 5 parents with 30 children to manage. We were allocated parts of town to target and to set off at 9AM (”Don’t pick up any syringes”), meeting back at 11:30AM for the weigh-in. I was allocated a group of 6 children (not including my son), and off we went. One of the children (10 years old) proudly informed me that last year he had found a condom and a bottle of urine, so I was on my guard. Our town is not a particularly scruffy one (probably quite the opposite) but we were soon on the way to filling 3 large bin-liners, mostly with beer bottles and Coke cans (thankfully no condoms, but a bottle of water with contents that did look suspiciously like urine). By 10:00, everybody was soaked and enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I managed to get them to go down a couple more streets, promising that we would get back to the town hall where no doubt we would be greeted with wine and Coke (obviously placing the empty bottles in the recycling bin afterwards rather than throwing them in a ditch at the side of the road).

It’s 10:30 and we arrive back at the town-hall - nobody is there, the doors are locked, we are all soaked and my back is killing me from all the bending over. What should I do? Four kids moaning (the 2 others were friends who tagged along for the ride and had long since gone home) and still one hour to go before we are due back. Next door to the town hall is a theatre, but that is locked, but at least it has a bit of shelter in front of the main door. There’s nothing for it: if in doubt call your wife to help out. She suggested that we bring them back to the house and let them play on the Wii for half an hour or so while they dried off. An excellent idea, so along she came and we were soon back in the house.

However, in the meantime, unbeknownst to me, the parents of one of the children in the group had called the organisers to see where their son was so that they could take him home and get him dried before the lunch that was organised for afterwards (any event in France is always followed by a meal and wine of some kind). In order to help them, they also wanted to know which area of town he was in. Unfortunately, the response of the organiser was, “erm, I don’t know who they were with, but it was a man that I don’t know and I don’t have his contact details”. Put yourself in their position now: you don’t know where or with whom your son is and when he might be coming back. What do you do? Their reaction, perfectly understandably, was to call the parents of all the other children in the group and follow up with a call to the police, engendering mass panic.

So now a posse is forming, anxiously looking for any sign of the children around town. We, of course, are holed up in my house, playing Mario Kart. Because they are having such a good time, we don’t manage to get away in order to arrive exactly at 11:30, so arrive back at the meeting point at 11:40. I fail to understand the gasps as I arrive back with the children and have to explain myself, feeling more and more uncomfortable as I explain to a large group of parents that I had taken their children back to my house “to dry off”. In fact I felt sick as I said the words. The only thing that made the story less paedophilic was that my wife had been with me, but even that might not wash.

Anyway, having seen me, and seeing that my son was there (and wasn’t denying that he was my child), my explanation was accepted and the tension lowered. The organiser then realised that in fact, silly me, of course they were with Monsieur Soggers! This, as you can imagine did not make me feel any better at all, knowing what, unwittingly, I had put the parents through.

I was due to stay for lunch and to join them in the afternoon for a walk, but I admit that I felt slightly sick, made my excuses and left. I think that it must have taken some time for the organiser to realise the impact of her words, because it was only this morning that she sent me an email, asking me to accept her heartfelt apologies and hoping that she hadn’t caused too much embarrassment. Well, actually, yes you did, but I’ll get over it.

And so, you might be asking, how much litter did we collect: I haven’t got a bloody clue.