ACZ                        A personal assessment of the French

The Brits and the French have been at each other's throats for years.  It probably started when King Harold got a Norman arrow in his eye.  That really put him off the Frogs.  And we Brits haven't forgiven them ever since.  But I am the odd man out.  I admire much of what France has to offer, and I think I understand the thinking in Paris of some of the things that divide us.

The way to learn and understand people is to live with them for a while.  I did this in Syria in 1980 and came away with an entirely different attitude towards the Arabs to the one that I arrived with.  As regards the French, I worked at a military airfield just south of Paris for three months in 1965 and picked up the little French that I know.  And I learned a bit about the way that the French do things.

Our little group of Plessey-ites found a small family hotel in Barbizon.  The village is not far from Fontainebleau.  Our site manager hired a car  and we used it daily to commute from the hotel to the airfield.  We used to buy bread, cheese, butter et cetera at a local shop and  and make our own lunch.  Occasionally we visited the works canteen at the airfield and sampled the local fare there.  It was the first canteen that I have met that served wine, but this was France!

Being a military establishment, security was fairly serious.  My name (Colin Campbell) was not too much of a problem, but our Taffy member caused a few difficulties.  "Aneurin Glendyer (spelling?) Thomas" caused all sorts of difficulties.  They knew "Thomas" as a first name, but the other two monikers just failed to register.  My French is more than a little limited, but listening to the two chaps look at Taffy's passport and then try to pronounce the names, it amused even Taffy.  When our chap pronounced his name in a broad Welsh accent, it helped not one little bit.

There is a big town near Fontainebleau called "Ris Orange". I try to pronounce foreign words correctly although I often fail.  Taffy made no attempt and he always referred to the place as "Riss Oranges".  Between the hotel and the air force site was a little farming village named "Bondouf".  There was a huge silo of something that stunk to high heaven.  How the locals survived the stench is a miracle of human endurance.  As technicians we decided to take the village name as a unit of stench.  But we decided that "a Bondouf" was far too large a unit for normal usage, a bit like the  bel or the farad.  It is too large for normal use and the decibel or microfarad is the normal unit being one tenth of a bel or millionth of a farad.  We chose a milli-bondouf as our common unit for stench.

I visited Ris Orange on one occasion and had a language problem at a shop counter.  Fontainebleau was then the HQ of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and had a lot of Americans posted there.  A Yankee woman got me out of trouble at this counter as she seemed to speak good French.  I also visited Paris and got as far as the top-but-one landing of the Eiffel Tower before I chickened out.

My later experiences of France was when I had several motoring holidays there.  It seems that if you have a try at their language, they respect you and often answer on good English because they immediately recognise the accent.  I had this a couple of times in Paris when I visited the place for Plessey who bought several lots of electronic equipment that was to be shipped direct to Saudi after I had passed it at the French factory

Visiting little towns and their market places is a wonderful experience.  The local stall holders seem to delight in the fact that an Englishman stops and looks at their wares.

In Syria I became friendly with a French electrical engineer who was working at one of the large sub-stations in Damascus.  A tough cookie I wouldn't have wanted to cross.  The  retired paratrooper-commando showed me his small arsenal of weapons that he kept "just in case".  There was a continual rumour of a coup against the government, and Claude said that if the balloon ever went up he had worked out how to get to Jordan via a set of back roads.  He explained to me how he would get a machine-gun from one of the many boys who carried them as part of the Syrian army setup in the city.  The explanation is a bit long-winded, but I could see no flaw in his method, but the poor lad that had carried the machine gun would have a headache for weeks afterwards.

Claude played chess much better than I did, and had a good stock of superb brandy.  I had to accept that he was "a better man than I am Gunga Din."  He was a little younger and a lot fitter than me too.

A final plaudit for the French.   England buys a lot of electricity from France using a cross-channel cable.  It's a bit of a strange system as the two National Grids are not frequency-locked, and they have to ship the juice as DC and we have to convert it back to AC.  (Details available to any interested reader).  The Frogs have a lot of nuclear generation, but I have never heard of any slip-up that caused a problem.  The Yanks had their Three Mile Island saga.  The Ruskies had Chernobyl.  We had Windscale.  The Japs had one of their own cockups that killed about ten technicians.  The Frogs have yet to have a serious leak.  And look at their railways, they put ours to shame.

The French, besides providing us with words that we use as high status commodities;  words like "cuisine" and "haut couture", leased the manufacturing rights to Plessey of a clever device that converted a radar PPI scan to a raster scan.  I helped install a number of units at West Drayton (near Heathrow) and Manchester.  I was impressed.  A raster scan has many advantages over PPI-scan when it comes to putting alpha-numerics against an aircraft blob on a controller's screen.  An invention that the French can be proud of.  I wish I could speak their language a bit better.

The French Health Service seems to be ahead of ours too.  And I understand why they are so reluctant to change the Common Agricultural Policy that funds a lot of small unproductive farms around the country.  Just imagine that these small farms had to compete on equal terms with the larger and efficient units in other countries.  The tiny 'two cows and a few pigs' type of farm would go bust,  And then what?  The government would have to support the families in another way, or the people would emigrate to the big towns and the French countryside would become a barren wilderness.  It is 'welfare' by a different method.

Vive le Grenouille (I had to look up the spelling of 'frog' in my English - French dictionary))