You only really realise how British you are when you go to live in France. And I don’t mean a weekend in Paris, I mean the real France, the bit you can’t see from the Eiffel Tower. I’ve spent the past summer cooking for a family in a hilltop village near Nice. I opted to drive, since it gives you a sense of the place that flying glosses over.
Chef Jack Burke
I came through the Eurotunnel, was spat out into a scrub of countryside that looks an awful lot like Kent, and continued south until I reached my home for the next three months: Tourrettes-sur-Loup, a medieval walled village of winding alleys and crooked stone houses in the hills above the Riviera.
Because I was by myself, aged 30, and the village contained roughly three other young people – two of whom were related – I became an observer. An observer of the culture around me and, more pointedly, of the one I had left behind.
Living in another country holds a mirror up to where you’ve come from. The peculiarities I noticed, as a lifelong Londoner, were not grand cultural gulfs but everyday quirks. Take greetings, for instance. You don’t realise how under-greeted we are in Britain until you are regularly forced into effusive bonjour/merci, au revoir refrains. There is a ritualised choreography to all shopkeeper-customer interactions. It soon becomes comforting, polite, almost addictive. To return to London was like plunging back into a society that seemed practically mute.
The French are also creatures of habit, and fiercely protective of their routines. I once stopped for lunch in a neighbouring village and unwittingly blocked a local man’s favourite parking space. On my return, a battered 2CV rolled up, a scowl emerged through a plume of smoke, and, before I could move on, the scowl’s owner leaned on his horn, swore at me in French and flicked a cigarette in my direction. Bienvenue, monsieur.
Then there is the absence of embarrassment. As I spent my evenings with old men playing pétanque, staggering through schoolboy French while they cackled into their fourth unmarked carafe of rosé, I realised how embarrassment is baked into being English. At home, I’d sooner cut my tongue out than mispronounce. In France I blundered, was witheringly corrected and carried on.
Even the cars tell you something. The French love theirs just as much as the Brits do. But while Brits coddle their bodywork to the point of paranoia, the French take the term ‘bumper’ literally. Parking is a contact sport. Cars proudly wear their battle scars, evidence of being shunted into spaces too small. At first I bristled but soon treated scratches like wrinkles: proof of a life lived.
The dining table, though, is where the contrast is most pronounced. There’s a languidness about France that Britain doesn’t have. Lunch is less a meal; more a civic duty. Wine-soaked, hours long, shutters drawn on shops.
In Britain, we have allowed lunch to become a meal deal inhaled over a keyboard. Eating is sacred in France. In one village, I watched a group of workmen fold out a table in the street, adorn it with a checked cloth, unpack and tuck into their pre-prepared three-course lunch and two bottles of wine, then return to work in their overalls.
Both countries drink, of course, but the approach is different. France paces itself with a bottle stretched out over an evening, while Britain sprints to the finish and wakes up the next morning wearing a traffic cone.
The village of Tourrettes-Sur-Loup clings to a cliff above the riviera
However, what I missed most about home was an indefinable sense of character. Humour, sarcasm – whatever you want to call it. That’s not to say the French aren’t funny, but theirs is a caustic wit. At the market, when I asked for cheese in clumsy French, the stallholder didn’t miss a beat: ‘For you, monsieur, I recommend the Babybel.’ I craved the background radiation of British sarcasm. In this, I learned that absence does make the heart grow fonder. The things that suffocate me in London – the expense, the crush, the noise – melted away in the heat of what I missed: home.
And yet I fell in love with France in the most obvious way. My days off spent cruising along the Riviera at sunset, the roof down on my old VW Golf. The corners of France you have to work for also stole my heart. A hot fish bap and a 10am demi of Pelforth in a fishing-port bar in Cagnes-sur-Mer, grizzled men in white wellies drinking the night shift away. The hilltop church in Peillon converted into a restaurant, plaster peeling, wine served in chipped enamel mugs. The village bar owner who, after many weeks of patronage, offered to take me canyoning in the jaw-dropping Gorges du Loup.
The things I love about France exist in Britain, too: the hidden seafood shack, the eccentric pub, the stunning coastline. You just tend not to notice them at home; they’re dismissed as merely ‘nice for a weekend’.
What my three months in France gave me was not so much escape as perspective: a reminder that home is no less extraordinary for being familiar. Growing up in the age of budget airlines, we were taught to treat Britain as a departure lounge rather than a destination. But leave it for long enough and you realise it’s the place you yearn to return to.