French Life-expat France

After years of worrying about our daughters’ potential boyfriends and future boyfriends, the problem is about to come to a head, but not in the way we expected.

Older daughter has a never ending stream of admirers, whispered phonecalls, giggly chats and so on, but apparently none of the contenders meet her demanding requirements. One particularly keen young lad has even had her name embroidered on his jumper, hoping that would win a few points. But no.

To be fair it is a bit hard for her, because she is tall, so choosing from a motley collection of admirers that are all at least six inches shorter than her is perhaps not easy. One poor lad - spurned apparently on the reasonable basis that he was tiny, younger than her, and wore spectacles, as I understand it - ran crying to the toilets after his inevitable rejection.

But anyway, suddenly and unexpectedly, younger-daughter has been ‘asked out’. After hours of negotiation between daughter and Mrs B, the terms have been agreed - playing by the lake is out, etc etc - and any day now she is off on a ‘first date’. Do we need to be concerned? No idea. Should we say no? No idea. But anyway it has led to a lot of excitement in the household, which will presumably now carry on without a break until they both leave home in about 10 years.

Or get thrown out in 11 years.

Apart from that, it is interesting to see that politics is nudging itself to the fore in France, as the question of next years Presidential elections draws closer. In case you aren’t aware, the principle contenders are likely to be Nicolas Sarkozy (he pretends to be a right-wing reformer, but isn’t) and Segolene Royal (she is an old-fashioned socialist who thinks the state should play a larger role - and that’s saying something in France). The spectre of Chirac standing again has not entirely disappeared, and the even greater spectre of very-right-wing Le Pen turning up is still a possibility.

France, like America, seems to delight in selecting candidates from a completely unsuitable selection of possibilities. Britain, at least in recent years, has given the impression of having a real choice between real people who are happy to express their opinions. Yes I know that is an over-simplification, but it is sad to see that France has no prospect of escaping from the wildly expensive bureacratic stranglehold it is in for many years to come.

A couple of examples from the Economist - the Bank of France needs 14,000 staff to do less work than the Bank of England manages with 1,800; the post office in France employs more than twice as many people as Germany per head of population, but letters are less likely to arrive on time; the number of civil servants has increased by 20% to 5 million - including an 8% increase at the Ministry of Agriculture, despite ever falling numbers of farmers.

Anyway, the point is that France is about to embark on months of discussions, opinion polls, and debates, where the almost certain result is that nothing will change, whoever wins. Which hardly makes for gripping entertainment. I sincerely hope that I have misunderstood, I am completely wrong, and a contender able to tackle the problems turns up.

Meanwhile, I can still look on the bright side. The UK is going to get Gordon Brown, and America will keep George Bush. So things aren’t so bad in France after all.