To be French

Today is the fête nationale, France's day of national celebration. We are happy to be celebrating, but we remain pretty British - delighted to live in France, happy with our French neighbours, friends and church - involved and contributing foreigners. We've been here seven and a half years, and we did rather think we might be fairly French by now, but a few years ago we took stock and realised that a) we were never going to be French and b) we didn't actually want to be fully French.

Here is a random, subjective list of the things I think make one French. Many of them I admire intensely, some of them I dislike, but nearly all of them are impossible to me given the British character I grew up with. Please realise that this is hardly factual - it's just the way it feels to me!

To be French I think you need to:

• Buy food for quality rather than for economy.
• Hold on to an ideal despite years of apparent proof to its contrary.
• Greet anyone eating anything, anywhere, with a polite: 'Bon appetit'!
• Be prepared to wait for hours without anything to do.
• At best, deeply mistrust foreign cooking.
• Prioritise meal times with the family above any other activity.
• Accept that smoking is a valid way to keep the weight off if you are a woman.
• Listen politely to anyone's ideas, even if you disagree with them.
• 'Shush' your children when they talk in public.
• Wonder if the people who complain about fois gras have actually tasted it.
• Accept the power of the state as a given fact.
• Greet all people politely, at all times, however rushed or stressed you are.
• Be politely surprised and secretly horrified by the idea of eating between meals.
• Wear clothes that make you look good, instead of whatever is fashionable/whatever you feel like.
• Understand grammar.
• Have a pharmacy one third-filled with products to help you loose your 'little tummy'.
• Be confident enough of your masculinity not to have to swear, act agressively or do other macho stuff (assuming you are a man in the first place).
• Think that urban trees look best if violently trimmed every year.
• Wear matching underwear.
• Accept the power of the education system to dictate your/your child's future.
• Live with a superb health-care system (OK, I admit it, this one's easy).
• Sit still and listen to a serious talk without expecting to be 'entertained'.
• Wait at the garden gate to be allowed in, not at the front door.
• Always prepare a starter.
• Believe that Catholicism, whilst totally out-dated and disproved, is still the only way anyone should worship.
• Think that Monica Bellucci is plump but pretty.
• Garden by taming nature, rather than emulating it.
• Be able to pronounce the words: 'grenouille' and 'écureuil'.
• Be unlikely to be able to pronounce the words: 'built' and 'squirrel'.
• Lay a table cloth on your picnic table.
• Know what it means to have 'heavy legs', and know that the pharmacy stocks medicine for this ailment.

I hope I haven't been unfair! The list is random and totally subjective, as I said... do you want to know which two (or maybe two and a half) on that list I have actually achieved? Perhaps I'll tell you tomorrow...