» Cringe!

What's French for "cringe!"
My Collins Pocket French Dictionary says, "avoir une mouvement de recul" but that's too much of a mouthful.

Anyhow. From September 2006 to September 2007 I was living in Paris as part of my degree course and generally enjoying the fact that the euro was cheap at the time and that you could score a slab of Grimbergen (20 bottles) for under ten euros from most supermarkets. I was also enjoying having a lovely big Erasmus grant which I didn't need pay back. And the fact that the French don't believe in tuition fees outside of the ridiculously selective grandes écoles - and even then the only one that charges all that much is HEC, the country's leading graduate school for business and economics. So in short, I was comparatively flush.

Anyhow. One Friday afternoon in December I decided to go for a little wander round the city and in doing so I happened upon, tucked away between the Rue de Rivoli and the Forum des Halles, one of those goth/metal/alternativey type emporia. You know the sort, they're usually overflowing with band shirts and frilly bits and big flappy dresses on hangars and spiky bracers and the sort of huge frilly shirts that you can wander round Italy in trying to get laid. So I wandered in and was greeted by the proprietor.

She was the apotheosis of mutton dressed as lamb. Twice my age but dressed like less than half her own. She had this low-quality black dye job in her hair, a leopard-print top that was far too tight for its own good with a latex corset squeezed round her middle, in an attempt to make her norques seem less terrifying. Far too much cleavage as well; it made her nichons look like Roquefort. Oh, and not to mention trousers of the tight variety with moose knuckle showing.

Worst of all, she seemed to be coming on to me. Alarmingly so. She didn't mind that my French accent sounded like I was a barbarous Englander speaking French (which I was). So, once I'd looked around and so forth, I made some excuses and vanished.

Fast forward to about April, and I'm up the Elysée Montmartre with a mate (English, visiting) queuing to see the frankly ace power metal band Kamelot (an anagram of which is pretty apt to describe this woman) and some other acts. We'd both demolished a few tinnies beforehand, because the drinks prices up the Elysée were ridiculous. So we went in just in time for the support act and who should hove into view but the above-mentioned mutton dressed as lamb woman, only this time she seemed to be doing an impression of Doro Pesch. Who, as you can see, is herself no spring chicken. And she asked me who my "delicious" (her words not mine) friend was. I explained that he was Benedict and he was a friend from England.

She then turned to him, looked him up and down, and said, in broken English, "I'd take him as well."

At this point, j'ai eu un mouvement de recul.

I spent most of the support band's show hiding in the toilets. When I emerged, the hall was full enough that I could more effectively mingle with the crowd without being spotted. Granted, this was made harder by the fact that I'm a ginger and there are very few gingers in France, and especially not six-foot-three ones in big stompy boots. Indeed, throughout the show I saw her trying to find me in the crowd by shuffling through the mass of bodies a few steps, then standing on tiptoes and looking around, like a soon-to-be-decommissioned submarine.

I consider myself lucky to have escaped alive.

Bloody ace concert though.
(Thu 27th Nov 2008, 21:30, More)

» Eccentrics

My uncle.
He won't be named here, but connoisseurs of curry sauce will know his name.

Besides, he's a total fruitloop. He's not only a huge miser, he's a fundamentalist Christian miser as well. Oh, and certain other family members believe him to be a closeted homosexual, but that's beside the point.

He built his own Land Rover!

...using bits he scrounged from skips, tips, and scrapyards. To his credit, he got all the bits together and actually built the thing on the old 109-inch chassis. Except he forgot to put the right gearbox in. It only has a low-range one and as such won't get above 45 and uses more fuel than Al Gore's mansion. The exhaust must have been wonky as well because it was louder than a Manowar concert (for those who don't know, Manowar hold the world record for being the world's loudest live act - in 1995, they averaged 131dB.)

He also built his own glasses. He simply bought the lenses and then cannibalised a pair of safety specs from his work (in the engineering department at Cambridge University) - you know, the ones with the flared sides - to form the frames.

Okay, so you may think he's just a harmless tinkerer, a genial eccentric? Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

In 1981 he signed up to go on this missionary cruise. Basically he and a fellow mound of God Botherers went aboard this ship and sailed to obscure parts of the world with the intent of bringing the good news to remote tribes on Pacific islands. Well, it all went okay until they were sailing somewhere near Polynesia and the engine carked it.

So here they were. Forty or so Christian missionaries on a ship in the middle of nowhere. The nearest piece of dry land had last had Europeans visit it a hundred years before and they'd ended up in the pot. What to do?

Well, where as you or I might suggest, "send up a flare" or "put an SOS or mayday call on the radio" or similar sensible ideas, guess what my Christian, miserly uncle did?

Exorcised it.

Yes. He got his Bible and stood in the engine room and cast the demons of mechanical failure out in the name of Lord Jesus Christ.

It didn't work, so they sent up a flare.

Soon after this trip, he got married and had a son in short order. To be fair, whenever I visited my cousin and his family - my cousin, incidentally, is also a bit of an oddball, he's training to be an undertaker and he's into LARPing - my uncle and aunt's marriage seemed really rather loveless. One theory is that my uncle, being on this ship full of deeply religious young men who were rather desperately lonely was so disgusted at the urges within him that he got married in short order to try to prove to himself that he wasn't unclean or whatever.

Length? I have no idea.

Oh, and it's my first post. *pop*
(Tue 4th Nov 2008, 12:52, More)