Talk to a Frenchman about the English and he may well refer disparagingly to les anglo saxons who are trying to destroy his way of life, to a country that can’t cook a decent meal or serve a decent cup of coffee and to a capital city that is fog-bound most of the year. The fact that London won the Olympics was in itself evidence of cheating.
Speak to an Englishman about the French, and he may well moan about rude shopkeepers and supercilious wine waiters and you will find a surprising number who still think that the French eat nothing but frogs legs, snails and garlic. Having come through their Thatcher revolution, the English look smugly over the Channel towards the French who still endure apparently endless strikes and high taxes.
Hopping between two countries as I do can be quite tiring, when you are trying to defend each to the other.
So it was with some mixed emotions that I read recently that Reader’s Digest has carried out a survey to test the levels of common courtesy in 35 cities. Their researchers scored London and Paris as equal fifteenth.
The fact that both cities were down there with Buenos Aires and Johannesburg, below Sao Paolo, Zagreb, Warsaw and Budapest for goodness sake, was a blow, but what was great is that they were equal. They could have been equal top or equal bottom, it wouldn’t have mattered. The joy for me was that they were equal.