Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Having discovered that in fact we had the gender wrong for at least two of the beasts, we de-
cided that it was, by now, time to name them properly and naturally the French have a system
for the naming of animals. The reasoning behind this has been traced to the Gallic require-
ment that everything, without exception, must carry some form of bureaucratic burden. The
system is this: animals born in a given year must all have names that begin with the same
letter - so, for instance, the letter for the year 2011 is 'G'. What is the point?! Nobody stops
you in the street and says, 'Oh what a lovely dog, what's he called? Aristotle? Oh, he must be
five years old!' I don't understand the need for this unnecessary uniformity. It stifles creativ-
ity; unless of course it's the year of the letter 'F' - and then there's endless fun!
'Fart!' Maurice giggled repeatedly.
'Which one, though?' Samuel would say.
'We're not having a cat called Fart!' I'd say, attempting some form of parental control.
'All of them!' they'd both shout. And round and round it went in an endless cycle of giggling
and the word 'fart', until eventually, after a few choice 'F' words of my own, we settled on
Fox, Flame and er, Vespa. Vespa, of course doesn't actually begin with an 'F', but because
Natalie has a fear of scooters and motorbikes (and because I'm a technical dunce) it was poin-
ted out that having a cat called Vespa is as close as I'm actually going to get to owning the
real thing, so the name stayed.
It was a small victory, but a precious one and it feels good now and then to be able to put
two fingers up to bureaucratic restriction. France is seen from the outside as both heavily reg-
ulated and almost constantly on the verge of anarchy, but I think that they're very much two
sides of the same coin. Like a teenager who feels hemmed in by parental control, just occa-
sionally French society needs to let it's hair down and rebel; sometimes it's a grandiose ges-
ture like a general strike, but mostly it's the small victories that keep the community together
in a kind of 'them and us' way. Naming one of the cats 'Vespa' as opposed to 'Fespa' may seem
like a pitifully minute gesture in the grand scheme of things, but to me it represented that we
were in fact becoming 'French'. We'd taken your laws, Madame La République, and blown a
very Gallic raspberry at them.
Of course, that's as lawless as I get. I suffer from a certain level of OCD; I need the cutlery
in the correct part of the cutlery drawer, tins on the shelf should be facing forward, as should
creases on trousers. DVDs should be in alphabetical order, pens need lids and pasta varieties
shouldn't be mixed. I don't like chaos or surprise or anarchy. I'm obviously in the wrong fam-
ily.
Before travelling to the South I'd been in London, where there were reports of fuel shortages
in France, but I was sceptical. This is just another example of anti-French bias from the UK
media, I thought, another opportunity for a bit of Frog-bashing what with their quaint, anti-
quated values like workers' rights and community; bloody cheese-eating communists. I was
wrong though, there really was no fuel. Panic-buying, a peculiar human condition that leads
