Hibernating with Miss France

When winter arrives we all tend to shut ourselves up inside for a couple of months. This does mean there is a bit less excitement to report here in the blog. Excitement being a relative term for our rural outpost in southern France, where someone crossing the road without looking both ways first counts as excitement and gets talked about for days afterwards.

However yesterday we emerged into the cold to go to a music concert in a nearby town. Our younger daughter has been playing the saxophone for a year or so, and although she has performed in a concert before, this time she was ‘going solo’.

To say the least, this made for a nerve-wracking day – more for us than her, I think – but it all went very well. The downside, predictably, is that you need to sit through an hour of very small children making unrecognisable noises first, or singing so quietly that if you hum along to the soung you drown out the noise of the choir.

Funnily enough, it’s more the speed of the music that is strange than the quality of play. If you take any song at all, and play it at half speed, it becomes a sort of hypnotic, sleep-inducing noise. Fans of ambient music should turn off their Steve Reich and Brian Eno records and pop along to their local primary school recitals at every opportunity. I promise, you’ll thank me afterwards. Hee Hee Hee.

Anyway, enough rudeness, it was all very impressive. After we came home, our elder daughter announced that her ‘favourite programme of the year’ was on televison so we all had to watch it, whether we wanted to or not.

I was expecting a teenage, Mary-Kate and Ashley, school romance type thing but no, she had much worse lined up for us than that. Her favourite programme is, in fact, the Miss France competition.

Now, I haven’t watched a Miss anything programme for a long time, but can confirm it hasn’t changed much. Lots of young ladies start off parading around in clothes that would be acceptable in a Jane Austen novel, then at each stage of the performance they reappear wearing slightly less clothing. By about 10.30 they are looking a bit chilly and by 11.30 they are down to three bits of string and a cut-up handkerchief.

I’m not one to comment on whether it’s demeaning to women or whatever other criticisms are levelled at such events, because I don’t especially have a strong opinion either way. Although I wouldn’t want my own daughters to take part, it all looked pretty harmless fun, the girls seemed to be enjoying themselves, and didn’t look as if they were going to suffer long-lasting mental wounds as a result. And I’ll delete your comments if you disagree with me…

The only mystery was how the jury were selected. I am surprised that the main criteria for judging Miss France are that you must be: old, unattractive, intellectual. Any two of these will do, you don’t need to be all three. So the main time the jury perked up a bit was towards the end when they had to ask each candidate a question.

Instead of ‘what is your favourite charity?’ or ‘do you like helping old people across the road?’ they preferred to ask great drawn out philosophical questions about who knows what, with the questions being so long that most of the candidates had slipped into a semi-comatose state before the questions were finished, and then could barely manage a ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘of course’ as a response.

To which the audience cheered enthusiastically, grateful that the answer was more brief than the question and they would still be it out in time to get the last bus home.