Those bastard French again
Not that I have a pathological loathing of them or anything (ok well, maybe a bit...but that's another story)...

I've already told part of the story of how at school, we were taken to France for a few days (seeing sheep's brain on your plate after you've just taken a bite is pretty horrific to start with).

As part of that visit, we spent a day wandering around Rouen doing 'activities' in pairs -- looking at the architecture, going into shops and seeing how much things cost, that sort of thing.

Anyway, eventually the time came to head for the rendezvous (see? Je speakie Frenchish, moi) point. We had to cross a wide, busy road so we found a zebra crossing, waited for a lull in traffic -- since no-one seemed to be taking much notice of us -- and crossed.

As we neared the other side of the road I noticed an old lady crossing, painfully slowly, in the other direction. Then, I glanced to the side and saw a car approaching at fairly high speed. He got closer and closer and I began to get worried because he wasn't slowing down. He must've seen her -- she was right in the middle of his lane -- but he just ploughed on without slowing at all and ran her down. She rolled over the bonnet (I can still recall the sound of her head hitting the windscreen) and landed in a heap in the road.

The guy screeched to a halt, leaped out of the car, ran over...and started swearing at the woman as she lay bleeding in the road.

I learned later that stopping for a zebra crossing is (or at least, was at that time) 'optional' in France. So presumably he was blaming her for the incident and the damage to his car.

We were mightily cheered up a few minutes later, though, when we told our (not well-liked) French teacher, who was French himself, about what had happened. He misheard us and for some reason thought that it was his son (who was also on the trip) who'd been hit. The sight of him running off yelling "Melveeen!" and waving his arms in distress still makes me chuckle, to this day.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Fri 22 Jun 2007, 12:29, Reply)