Sogger’s Blog

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.

After 6 years in France, I feel that I am fairly well assimilated into the culture, and am extremely happy to be here. However, sometimes something happens that makes you realise that, in fact, you are a foreigner in a foreign land. Such an event is happening right now outside…

As I drove through town this morning, I pulled into the traffic at the same moment as a beat-up, bright yellow Renault van from at most 1960 pulled in behind me. I had heard loudspeakers from a distance, and now they started again from behind me; from, in fact, the said yellow van. What he was blaring out was that the circus was in town! Excitement from the kids in the back of the car, “Can we go? Please, please, go on dad”.

I’ve never been to a circus, but have been tempted in the past by such things as Cirque du Soleil. However, as we turned the corner and the van blared its way onward, we got to see into a second bright yellow lorry following behind. The back of this lorry had beened turned into a cage. In the cage, looking as forlorn as any decrepit animal that I have ever seen in any run-down zoo, was a lion. This lion was obviously past caring. It didn’t move and stared without seeing at the passers-by, unable to escape the sound of the loudspeakers proclaiming the wonders of the African savannah, right there in front of your eyes.

I am no animal rights activist (I did have a vegetarian phase, brought on mostly by economic realities, fear of mad cow disease and a crush on a vegetarian girl at university), but I was appalled at the sight. I am certain that such a scene would not be tolerated in Britain (and surely by most other countries). It was truly something that I thought (and hoped) belonged to another age. This is obviously tolerated in France, as I can still hear the guy blaring, and the town hall has let them take over the town centre for the event. How can they let this happen? Shame on you France! I am intrigued to know whether it is my anglo-saxon roots that have made me feel this way or if I am just a big old prude. I will run a survey at work next week and let you know the results.

As I am sat here writing, I am fighting the unachievable urge to go out and let the lion out in the hope that it would jump out and turn on the guy. However, I am sure the drugs mean that it has no energy and it would look at me wondering what the hell I was doing before swiping me with its paw with its claws removed. Being a coward, instead, I take out my animosity on the keyboard. Thank you blog.

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.