Garlic & Pearls at the Lansdowne Club: Entente Cordiale, a clever Marquess and G&P's findings so far!

[00:00:23] - [Speaker 0]
Good evening. Good evening and welcome to Garlic and Pals, the podcast. Unusually and excitingly broadcasting from the Lansdowne Club in Mayfair, London. And our thanks to the club for having us. It's a great honor and a great pleasure to be here tonight with you.

[00:00:45] - [Speaker 0]
We are Muriel Zager. I'm French. And my friend, Suzanne Rain, who is British. And our podcast, Garnik and Pearls, is a bi cultural podcast about the Frenchness of the French and the Britishness of the British. So I suppose the garlic is slightly on the French side.

[00:01:07] - [Speaker 0]
Pearls, I associate with... Well, you're wearing them actually tonight. But it's more than that. It's also that this podcast examines Frenchness and Britishness from as many angles as we can think of, really. And some of them are very ordinary everyday things like garlic and others are slightly more highfalutin things like pearls, and we hope to provide pearls of wisdom also.

[00:01:33] - [Speaker 0]
Do you want to tell everyone a little bit about yourself, Suzanne? So what's your background?

[00:01:38] - [Speaker 1]
I think we should say something about our friendship, because the reason that we think we're the right people to do this is because we've been friends since university.

[00:01:49] - [Speaker 0]
Yes. In... Just years ago. Just a a years ago.

[00:01:53] - [Speaker 1]
Hardly any time has passed. And we instantly became friends and we have a lot of things in common. But we're also very different because Muriel is French, she's a Parisian, I'm British, I grew up in the North Of England.

[00:02:11] - [Speaker 0]
And

[00:02:11] - [Speaker 1]
so our approach to things is shaped by the fact that we are from fundamentally different cultures. It occurred to us that even though we're separated by 20 something miles of water, the French and the British have always been really different and their approach to things is different. And so a lot of a lot of the things that aren't even now sort of misunderstandings or rivalries come from the fact that we just come at things from different angles. So we said, why don't we explore that a little bit in our podcast because we think we're the people who do it. And my background, I was in the British Foreign Office for twenty five years, but never never in France, and in fact I don't really speak French, because I had a British education, and so...

[00:03:05] - [Speaker 0]
Which does not include French.

[00:03:06] - [Speaker 1]
But then you don't really teach, I mean you don't like to speak English very much in France either, do you?

[00:03:11] - [Speaker 0]
No. You're right. I mean, that's where we're equally guilty. Yeah. And I I suppose originally, I was destined or thought I was destined for an academic career, so I did my degree in English and then American literature in Paris, and I was a Henry James scholar, and I was so already, you know, cultures talking to each other.

[00:03:31] - [Speaker 0]
And then I fell off that completely and decided to become a journalist and met my husband who is British, moved to Britain permanently. I do go back occasionally, but I'm very much based here. I met Suzanne when we were much younger than we are now and we've remained friends all this time and our conversation has often been a series of hilarious surprises at how different we are and how So differently we look at today, because of where we are, because we're here at the Lansdowne Club, which was once Lansdowne House, it occurred to me that given the the register of our podcast and the goals that we've set ourselves, is greater mutual understanding, an understanding of ourselves, that we should perhaps just talk a little bit about the fifth Marquis and the Entente Cordial just to set the scene. So as I'm sure many of you know, he was the star of the family. I mean, there's a lot to be said about the Lansdownes, but he was the giant, wasn't he the fifth Marquis?

[00:04:31] - [Speaker 0]
So that's Henry, Charles, Keith, Petty Fitzmaurice. And why was he so important? And I think it's because a bit like you, he had a foreign office connection. So he was foreign secretary during...

[00:04:44] - [Speaker 1]
So arguably more important than me. But...

[00:04:47] - [Speaker 0]
We don't know what your legacy is going to be yet. It's too early to tell. But in his case, we do know. So interestingly, he had French lineage, didn't he? And he spoke French very well.

[00:04:58] - [Speaker 0]
He was bilingual. And this would have been very useful in negotiating the Entente Cordial with a slightly earnest French... President de Conseil, would have been called... Prime Minister and the French ambassador and then interacting with the French president and so on. He would have been very much at ease.

[00:05:16] - [Speaker 0]
He was educated at Eton and Balliol College Oxford. I know from a very good book about the club by Mariah Perry that as a young man, Henry Charles was at Oxford acquitted himself well in turn and gown fights. And it is said to have amassed a fine collection of other people's door knockers. So clearly, in a Bertie Worcester sort of way, that was one of the dares they had in this. I didn't know this.

[00:05:41] - [Speaker 1]
I hope they're somewhere in the club still. Somewhere.

[00:05:44] - [Speaker 0]
That's in the secret room. Yeah. And so a little bit of a work for the the members here. There is a portrait of him, of Henry Charles, by Philip de Laslow. It's a copy, but it's it was painted in 1920 and it hangs somewhere in the club.

[00:05:59] - [Speaker 0]
I'm sure you'll you'll notice it when you see it, where he's wearing military uniform. This is later in life, so after the the entente. He's wearing his very splendid collar and sash of the Order of the Garter. So this is really at the height of his career. There's also a little cartoon of him as a skinny young man, as a skinny young thing, which is also in the club somewhere.

[00:06:21] - [Speaker 0]
And this cartoon appeared in 1874 in Vanity Fair. And he's wearing a top hat and frock coat and grace hats to go with his great trousers and he's got a cane and everything. And the caption in Vanity Fair described him as an excellent good fellow, quite unspoiled, unaffected and simple, who is also fair, generous, enormously rich, which never hurts, and who speaks French admirably. So he was really set for a successful diplomatic career. And then to cap it all, in vanity fair, they also say, he has one of the most charming wives and perhaps on the whole, the most charming house and pictures in London.

[00:06:59] - [Speaker 0]
And how fortunate are we to be sitting in this house tonight? So he's first governor general of Canada, then he becomes viceroy of India, big jobs. And then by 1900, he moves to the foreign office. His task is to preserve peaceful relations with Germany, obviously, Russia, and France. At the time, more of a foe than a friend, really, relationships...

[00:07:21] - [Speaker 1]
At the time, for the preceding...

[00:07:24] - [Speaker 0]
Thousand years. For thousands... Yeah. For hundreds of He also negotiated a treaty of friendship with Japan, so he was super good at negotiations. And then, of course, his great legacy is the Anglo French treaty of nineteen o four, known ever after at the Entente Cordiale.

[00:07:41] - [Speaker 0]
And I just want to read you a tiny little... Again, to set the scene as to what it would have been like then. So the treaty was not signed in this house, but there were splendid dinners, you know, they entertained the French lavishly and he... They got out their sevre porcelain to show that they had beautiful French things. And at the time, this was when, in the early nineteen hundreds, the outside of the house hadn't changed terribly much.

[00:08:05] - [Speaker 0]
So it looked very different from what it looks like today. And there's just a lovely description by Matthew Arnold, who was working as secretary to the third Marquis. He said, it's a back standing lordly mansion where the carriages of Whig ministers roll up and down the gravel forecourt behind a row of lilacs and the lawn, carpeted in spring with crocuses, separates it from the square and the gardens of Devonshire House. So that's what it was like, it was really a different time. And was it was it a sort of lovely hippie ish peace and love moment, the Antendre Cordial between the French and the British, Suzanne, do you know, was it suddenly did we discover each other at that point?

[00:08:48] - [Speaker 1]
Well I think France was kind of in everyone's bad books because of...

[00:08:55] - [Speaker 0]
What had we done now?

[00:08:57] - [Speaker 1]
I think Napoleon has annoyed quite a lot of people and then you started the Franco Prussian war, always a mistake really. And I think people were a bit worried that you might start another one. And we were...

[00:09:09] - [Speaker 0]
The French were worried about the British attacking then. Yes,

[00:09:12] - [Speaker 1]
and I think there was a lot of competition for colonial possessions and there's two ways that could go, essentially fight or negotiate. And so actually most of the Entente Cordial is about us agreeing to back off in Morocco, France agreeing to back off on Egypt, there's an agreement about Newfoundland where the French cede everything except fishing rights, obviously. And lots of smaller articles about Siam, for example, where the dividing line between influence goes. So it's a lot actually about agreeing that there's no point fighting each other over where the colonies are going to be. What it did of course was create a new tension with Germany.

[00:10:06] - [Speaker 1]
And so all the geopolitical historical commentary will say of course that was the turning point. Before that, Britain really didn't... Apart from Japan, we didn't really have any allies. And if we did have allies, it was going to be Germany over France, always. And then he was among the leading figures who said, well, actually, we've got to sort it out with France and in fact France might be a better partner.

[00:10:30] - [Speaker 1]
But of course what that did was tip the Germans in in the wrong direction. So there's there's all sorts of narratives that said...

[00:10:37] - [Speaker 0]
You know, you win some, you lose some. Yeah. To get it absolutely right. But nevertheless, the thing about it is it was perhaps unexpected that the French and the British should ally, become allies, and it's it's held fast. Except that...

[00:10:54] - [Speaker 0]
And this

[00:10:55] - [Speaker 1]
is the heart of the podcast, which is where we segway to talking about what we normally talk about. It shouldn't be unexpected that the French and British are allies because we have been, as we've just seen from the bio tapestry, we've been moving across the channel since forever. And I wonder whether we should just knock the tapestry off now. So when we started, we started to think, well, you know, what are the means by which we can explain to each other our cultures? And we started by looking at particular objects that are unique and and...

[00:11:32] - [Speaker 1]
To our cultures and and why it is that they don't seem to have the same thing in France. And one of the ones that we did quite early on, I did, was Hassacks. Do you know what Hassacks are? Some do so.

[00:11:46] - [Speaker 0]
Sometimes called kneelers,

[00:11:48] - [Speaker 1]
Embroidered

[00:11:48] - [Speaker 0]
they're

[00:11:48] - [Speaker 1]
like in church kneelers. And I told the story of those, which is a very sort of... I mean I tried to do really British things, but this is a particularly English and Welsh story actually. It was a flourishing quite in time terms, relatively recently, so from the 1930s onwards, of real sort of local crafts and community embroidery, which then had a big flourishing after the Second World War as well, where a lot of injured service personnel did embroidery in churches and things. And the story about Hassacks for me is particularly British because these are items to be used in the process of Sunday worship.

[00:12:33] - [Speaker 1]
You kneel on them. And yet if you go into a church in The UK and you look at the Hassacks, there'll be pictures of tractors, pictures of... And there's a fantastic set in the cathedral in Ripon, which is all about some invasion from Scotland at some time, which involved loads of people being executed. And there's this little embroidery of everyone hanging from a ding. And a man is a monk.

[00:13:00] - [Speaker 1]
There's a man dressed in a monk's outfit with a wheelbarrow carrying all the heads away. And so our kind of attitude, it's that crossover between the Anglican Church of England just doesn't have iconography. It's really prosaic and it's about community and place and if you want to embroider tractors on your Hassock...

[00:13:23] - [Speaker 0]
Or nuclear

[00:13:24] - [Speaker 1]
power station. There were some wonderful Hassocks and Winchester Cathedral which were all of the docks in Southampton.

[00:13:33] - [Speaker 0]
And no sign of Jesus. No, Jesus But is in the course of that episode.

[00:13:39] - [Speaker 1]
We ended up talking about the bio tapestry because I said, you know, of course, Mirelle, you'll be interested because this is something you do and and...

[00:13:48] - [Speaker 0]
Well, so I said confidently in that recording, because I had been prepared, you know, we prepare obviously for those things. And even though Suzanne was going to present, I had looked up a lot of the things you... I knew you were going to talk about. I looked at a lot of French sources. And as a result of that, I said to you confidently that obviously the Beiotepestree had been made in France by French people and was a French artifact.

[00:14:12] - [Speaker 0]
And you said, what would you say if I told you that actually it was probably made in Kent? And that to me, I mean the ground just rocked beneath my feet. But we've had many such moments. So I think we are bathing at the moment because of the Bayotapestry, which I now accept was possibly made in England but I still think should be returned after this, I think most imprudent.

[00:14:35] - [Speaker 1]
I've got a question for Yes. Whose idea was it to send the biotapestry to...

[00:14:42] - [Speaker 0]
To bring it here? Well, presumably it was our glorious leader, President Macron's idea, wasn't

[00:14:47] - [Speaker 1]
it? Yes. Yeah. So that's interesting,

[00:14:50] - [Speaker 0]
I think. It is interesting because I think he is very much in the tradition... He would call it now, I think. We're we're going up a few notches. It's not just cordial, which involves, you know, respectful reserve.

[00:15:03] - [Speaker 0]
It's now, so we're friends. So I think it was his way of making friends with the king, he really wants to be friends with the king.

[00:15:09] - [Speaker 1]
It's really interesting. So badly. It's really interesting because I think he had to overcome a lot of opposition in France. Oh yeah. And he kept going, and I want to send it.

[00:15:19] - [Speaker 0]
So there we are and I think it's making people very happy and it's great because it's cementing what we, in our very soft power sort of way, are trying to promote, which is better understanding. So you mentioned just now, when we started, we started with some very basic everyday objects. We started in fact, my first French episode was about this pen. You know, is the four color bake pen, which is a masterpiece of French engineering and design, so that's why I wanted to talk about it. And your first British episode was about?

[00:15:51] - [Speaker 1]
Pickled onions.

[00:15:52] - [Speaker 0]
Right. So I think from the beginning we were coming at things from a slightly different... But you

[00:15:58] - [Speaker 1]
learn, so you start off and I thought I'm gonna... Nurelle had never eaten a pickled onion and I thought, she's French, she'd love an onion.

[00:16:07] - [Speaker 0]
I love onions.

[00:16:08] - [Speaker 1]
And this is a British onion and we do it differently, but the thing where you just keep thinking, so why do we eat pickled onions and what is a pickled onion? Well, actually it's an onion in malt vinegar. So then I started looking into malt vinegar and I learnt that we are unique in the world as being a country that Pickles things in malt. Brews malt vinegar. So we make vinegar out of beer basically, whereas in Europe you make it out of

[00:16:37] - [Speaker 0]
Out of wine.

[00:16:38] - [Speaker 1]
Wine or potatoes or something, you know, something else, whatever else you make vinegar. And the other country that is big on vinegar are the Japanese, who has rice vinegars and things like this. But we're the only place which makes our vinegar from beer. So that makes our pickled onion story really unique. And so you look in the history of all the vinegar breweries, which were huge thing.

[00:17:03] - [Speaker 1]
We were making and consuming millions of barrels of vinegar, malt vinegar every year. Know it is enough. Anyway, and at the end of it, I made Mirelle eat one and...

[00:17:14] - [Speaker 0]
You made me eat one. And that that remains, I think, the only one I've ever eaten. But it was... It's a box I can tick. And now I...

[00:17:21] - [Speaker 0]
And I do understand how it might combine well with cheese, you know, we've talked about this. So at the time when we were talking about the pen and the onions, we really didn't know where this was going to lead. We were experimenting really and trying to think of ideas, so we had a little list of ideas each. And we've now been doing this podcast for two years. We have a 100 and maybe 20 by now, a 120 episodes...

[00:17:44] - [Speaker 0]
Just like a train... Train every week, every Friday, a new episode, and this is because the ideas keep coming. And so the ideas come to us. We didn't start out with a preconceived theory. You know, didn't say to you, well, I think this podcast should explore this this difference, that difference, you know, the fact that the French are like this and the British are like that.

[00:18:07] - [Speaker 0]
We really kept going and making more episodes and then more ideas would come and I suppose patterns? I mean now two years in we can see patterns and themes have emerged and been confirmed.

[00:18:23] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. We've got themes for you. Shall we start with the measurements thing?

[00:18:28] - [Speaker 0]
Well, yes. Okay. So because you should perhaps declare what your bete noir is, what is the thing that you hate most in the entire world?

[00:18:36] - [Speaker 1]
Metric systems. I'm of an age that I was the wrong side of all of it, so I'm too young to really understand the kind of imperial weights and measures and I'm too old to have been taught the metric thing. So it's just every time I buy something online, it's either very small or very big. And it's just a horror. I can't do it.

[00:19:01] - [Speaker 1]
And... But I realised actually that a deeper thing is about what our old weights and measures were, which is something quite organic and human and identifiable with. And so we started to explore... That.

[00:19:20] - [Speaker 0]
That. And so I explained the metric system to you and to myself, actually trying to work out. The metric system comes really out of the French revolution. So so many things. One of the themes that recurs is the French Revolution inevitably, because it's one of those pivotal moments in French history for many, many reasons, but also in terms of sensibility and the way we perceive things.

[00:19:43] - [Speaker 0]
So we looked at the metric system, the idea that very enlightenment idea, that we're going to systematise things and make them more scientific and more regular, so we're going to make everything decimal and everything is going to end with a zero and it will be much much better. And and there we are moving away from, as you say, a more organic way of doing things. Then later on, and we can return to measurements, but just as I'm following my train of thought, we did an episode about French gardens, the Jardin A La Francaise, which many of us would have been to Versailles, for example, and you you know these extraordinary geometric gardens designed by Le Notre, and that is still very much the French style. So I looked into this notion, which actually is an Ancien Regime idea, this is before the revolution. This is to do with absolute monarchy and wanting to control everything, including nature, including every blade of grass has to be tamed into submission, so that when you look out of your window at Versailles, what you see is a sort of geometric composition ad infinitum, it's wonderful.

[00:20:47] - [Speaker 0]
Whereas the English garden, which is no less artful, and I'm sure there will there will be some gardeners among us tonight. If you want to make a beautiful English garden, it takes a lot of work because it's composed. But it's composed to look slightly disheveled and relaxed and more like nature.

[00:21:05] - [Speaker 1]
Rambling roses.

[00:21:06] - [Speaker 0]
Rambling roses at its best, whereas the French to this day, Versailles is of course an extreme example. But I think... I I'm from Paris when not very many people have gardens, obviously. We have little balconies and things. But if you live outside of Paris, there's a sort of fetish of the orderly garden, even in small private gardens, know, the French will say, everything has to be clean.

[00:21:29] - [Speaker 0]
So the idea that you'll have, you know, a bit of this and a bit of that marrying with that, it's not very French. You want a parterre all the same things so that it looks pleasing and neat. Mhmm. And then we're back to the metric system Yeah. And having things regular.

[00:21:43] - [Speaker 0]
We kept coming back to that, to order...

[00:21:45] - [Speaker 1]
The episode on that, the French side was the revolutionary calendar.

[00:21:50] - [Speaker 0]
Oh, you're completely mad story. Which I hadn't... I mean, I'm sure a lot of people knew about it. But you wanted to know a bit more about that. The revolutionary calendar is one of those things that didn't survive the revolution.

[00:22:02] - [Speaker 0]
We have the metric system, we've adopted it, it's great. We have...

[00:22:06] - [Speaker 1]
Say on the metric system, because when the French invented it

[00:22:09] - [Speaker 0]
Oh, yeah.

[00:22:10] - [Speaker 1]
And they said we divided everything into 10. And they wrote to, you know, court of Saint James and said, we've had this brilliant idea, you've got to change everything. And this is, you know, in late eighteenth century. Yes. And now you have to divide everything by 10.

[00:22:25] - [Speaker 1]
The British response even then was...

[00:22:29] - [Speaker 0]
Well, was silence actually.

[00:22:30] - [Speaker 1]
Yes, you just didn't reply. Because twice didn't reply. No.

[00:22:34] - [Speaker 0]
And they

[00:22:34] - [Speaker 1]
were like, please can you do our thing? No. And then what happened then, but it's quite interesting over... The French were so persistent. And they just persisted across Europe saying, please can you have our better way of measuring?

[00:22:46] - [Speaker 0]
It's so much neater.

[00:22:47] - [Speaker 1]
So much neater, and of course then eventually

[00:22:50] - [Speaker 0]
all those dominance... With the calendar, the idea was in this kind of Utopian way, we now have got rid of the monarchy and it's a new time, it's a new era, we're making a new humanity, so what would be really great is to measure time in a new way. So we're going to do away with the old ways of measuring time, we're going to have a new calendar, and this new calendar will be without any reference to religion, because of course the Catholic church was also an enemy of the revolution, And we're going to change the way we measure time. So we're going to have months all of the same length, thirty days each, and then we're going to rename all the days, so no saints days, but instead the day of the cherry or the day of the plow or whatever it may be. All things to do with nature.

[00:23:41] - [Speaker 0]
Again, very enlightenment, romantic ideas about nature. But eventually, and it was Napoleon who is one of the recurring characters who, you know, he comes he comes up often, Louis the fourteenth and Napoleon on the French side, and of course Victoria and and and Elizabeth the first on your side, and other people. And Hugh Grant as well on your side.

[00:24:03] - [Speaker 1]
She brings him up.

[00:24:06] - [Speaker 0]
Napoleon eventually said once he was in power, this is not working because we had this calendar which is very odd and doesn't work for anyone else, and we are completely out of sync with the rest of the world. So we're going to go back to the Gregorian calendar and we'll say no more about this ridiculous experiment of reinventing the way we measure time.

[00:24:25] - [Speaker 1]
But it's interesting because we... So as we explored this, it makes you think, because you think, well why do why do we still like pints? Why do I still... You know, why do we still measure horses in hands? And the one that we've just recorded, I realized that the thing that's really still the British way of doing things that is still used by the rest of the world is the Beaufort scale, which measures wind speed.

[00:24:52] - [Speaker 1]
And that was conceived by Beaufort, who was a captain in the Royal Navy and he became... Mean, he... Because until... This was in the early nineteenth century. But until then, the only way that they had for describing the weather or the wind was to make up the words that they thought described how windy it was.

[00:25:14] - [Speaker 1]
And he said, you can't just, you know, is it breezy? Is it is it very windy? And so he was the one who categorized it. But he did it extremely poetically and he did it according to the the size of the waves and the ripples and the leaves. And well, was the sails.

[00:25:33] - [Speaker 1]
So it was the effect of the wind on the sails and and it stayed the same to this day actually.

[00:25:41] - [Speaker 0]
And it's like the French have adopted it.

[00:25:42] - [Speaker 1]
Yes, because you don't really realise what you're, you know, where it came from I think.

[00:25:46] - [Speaker 0]
Probably, don't tell them, don't tell the French, otherwise they'll get crossed.

[00:25:51] - [Speaker 1]
Because we've... Because obviously it goes to 12. Yeah. Well, it actually goes to 13 because it counts zero as well. And you know, you can imagine you'd want it to go to 10.

[00:26:00] - [Speaker 0]
Obviously, because it would make more sense. In terms of big themes, again, we're compressing enormously because we have lots and lots of episodes. But in terms of big themes, another thing I think that came up is a certain earnestness of the French and a sense of fun on the British side. That I think to the British, fun is tremendously important. And to the French, it's nice to have fun, but you know, only after you've done the thing correctly.

[00:26:25] - [Speaker 0]
So one example would be brilliant episode fronted by you about rhyming Cockney slang, Cockney rhyming slang is called. Yeah. Cockney rhyming slang, where you explained it to me, not very familiar with it. We have different kinds of slang in French, but we don't have anything quite like that. And it was just a hilarious episode because it's very playful.

[00:26:47] - [Speaker 0]
And you made me feel how playful the whole thing is, this attitude to language and bending language experimentally for fun. Whereas we have the Academie Francaise, which is a group of very eminent people who know about language being correct, and we are extremely nervous of bending French, chain... Changing the spelling of any word. We like the old archaic difficult spellings, we cleave to those, and new words are viewed with suspicion, whereas I think the Oxford English Dictionary goes, well, if people use this word, it's a word now, it's part of the language. And it's it's more...

[00:27:24] - [Speaker 0]
You're more supple, I think, and also you you are... Fun is a priority to the British is one of the things I learned from the...

[00:27:32] - [Speaker 1]
Well, it's an attitudinal thing. And actually, again, we've just we've just recorded one on the Scarlet Pimpernel. I don't know if you're familiar with the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel, but he's, you know, the...

[00:27:42] - [Speaker 0]
Perhaps you should just remind people...

[00:27:44] - [Speaker 1]
Well, he's the original kind of masked superhero in a way, because you know he's a member of the British aristocracy who's incredible at going over with his group and rescuing French aristocrats from the grip of the guillotine. And then... And it starts off and there's there's a scene in a pub, the fisherman's rest in Dover at night. And two young aristocrats come in with a French family that they've just brought over. And the French contest is saying, well, you know, thank you so much, but also why are you doing this?

[00:28:22] - [Speaker 1]
And they say, well, we do it because it's amusing and it's a bit of fun, isn't it? I mean, it's a bit of risk. The book was written by a lady called Baroness Otzi who was Hungarian who who came and became British. So she's observing the English aristocracy from a distance like you would observe them. But at the same time, that sense of, well, let's just see.

[00:28:47] - [Speaker 1]
Let's just go to France and rescue some aristocrats, is still there. And you can see that it's there every time. It's there in Count Bin's face. It's it's that...

[00:28:56] - [Speaker 0]
Yes.

[00:28:56] - [Speaker 1]
It's this sort of irreverent side to us, which has a positive and a negative. So the positive is life is amusing because we are up for stuff and we're amateur but it's creative. And then of course the negative side is perhaps we should take more things a bit more seriously.

[00:29:18] - [Speaker 0]
No, but secretly you do take things seriously, I mean I think that's probably where it's an attitude. Yeah. One example of the fun thing and of intervention on the British part, So you know recently the programme Ski Sunday has been axed by BBC....

[00:29:35] - [Speaker 1]
A fan of Ski Sunday.

[00:29:37] - [Speaker 0]
Does anyone know... Okay. Oh, my goodness. You need to listen to the episode. Okay.

[00:29:42] - [Speaker 0]
So Ski Sunday was a weekly program about snow sports, mountain sports. And in telling me about it, I'd never heard of it. Like you, I I was not familiar with it. But a lot of people loved it. And you told me about it.

[00:29:54] - [Speaker 0]
It has an amazingly catch y theme tune apart from anything else. You told me a little bit about the story of skiing from the British point of view and how the British took to skiing because of course Britain isn't... There aren't... There's... It's not very mountainous.

[00:30:07] - [Speaker 0]
It's not like Switzerland. And yet the British took to skiing in a big way, Conan Doyle.

[00:30:14] - [Speaker 1]
Yes.

[00:30:14] - [Speaker 0]
Who was really really a big fan of skiing and one of the early adopters. And what the British did, and this is what I would call a thread that runs through a lot of Cezanne's episodes, is the British going somewhere else and saying to the people, you're doing it wrong. So in the case of skiing, they went to Norway, where of course, because of the nature of the climate in Norway, people move around on skis on a flat surface just to get places. They went there and said, why are you skiing horizontally where you could be skiing vertically like a mad thing? We'll show you how to do it.

[00:30:55] - [Speaker 0]
And then we could have competitions. This is it. Mean, Norwegians were so flabbergasted by this because it would not have occurred to them. It's the British who bring that spirit.

[00:31:05] - [Speaker 1]
And the weird thing in Switzerland, because the whole Swiss downhill skiing industry wouldn't be like it is were it not for the Alpine Ski Club, which used to meet in the cafe And...

[00:31:19] - [Speaker 0]
And was an

[00:31:21] - [Speaker 1]
interesting mix because it was again, it was Anglicans who wanted to go for restorative holidays in the Alps combined with people who really liked sticking wood on their feet and throwing themselves off a mountain at high speed. And and so the the big British tour companies that then became, like Hog Robinson and things, that then became, on Lunpoly, our great tourist industry, emerged from a desire on the part of the late Victorians to go to Switzerland, often bunches of Anglicans, and then have a skiing holiday. And it was through that that then the first slalom races started to be held in just after the first world war. So we wouldn't... The Austrians and the Swiss and the Italians, they wouldn't be doing all those slalom races were it not for a bunch of slightly mad British people who said it'd be much more fun if you did it vertically.

[00:32:26] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. So... And there

[00:32:28] - [Speaker 0]
are so many examples of that spirit, and as you said, Count Bin Fait, it's still with us today. Let's do a few little questions to each other just to bring out a few iconic episodes that

[00:32:41] - [Speaker 1]
we like. So... So Muriel, what was for you the most surprising French episode?

[00:32:49] - [Speaker 0]
So the most surprising French episode was probably the one we did about French school canteens. This is actually in the news always at this time of year because it's back to school, you know, we call it in French. I always see articles in the press about French school dinners and how delicious they are, and how can it be so complex and so gastronomical and look at the menus of these schools, this is primary, state primary schools, not not posh private schools, but state primary schools. Why are they being given all this food when school dinners in Britain are usually... I mean, people have survived them, you know, it's more something you survive and then it it equips you for life's hardships, like if you ever go to prison, for example, you'll be fine because you were fed at an English school.

[00:33:37] - [Speaker 0]
So we looked... I looked at that and I was thinking of my own memories of the the canteen, la canteen, and the food we were given, which was good. And I looked into how the menus are composed, I suppose. So we start with something quite basic, which is a child eating a plate of grated carrot salad in a carrot trapeze. And then digging into it and working out what the history is behind it.

[00:34:03] - [Speaker 0]
So this is another big turning point of French history is the third republic, so the eighteen eighties to early, twentieth century, where a lot of the great social reforms were introduced, instruction for example, but also as part of that. So instruction for all and secular and free and compulsory, and as part of that, food for children, which teaches them about food and also makes them into little Republicans. So you start from something, and this is still with us because now there are there are complications because the demographic of France, the demographic profile of France is changing, and there are families who have food exclusions that they would like to see observed. And in France, it's actually against the law to offer special menus. So it's a sort of looking glass situation where I made me realize that our way of being inclusive in France is to exclude differences so that everyone has the same thing together.

[00:35:05] - [Speaker 0]
Whereas here, of course, it's the other way around. Yeah. And again, that sort of...

[00:35:07] - [Speaker 1]
To embrace

[00:35:08] - [Speaker 0]
the difference.... And relaxed attitude of British school where people say, oh, well, you know, my son is a Jedi, so he can only eat, you know, green food. And the school would go, oh, well, we could probably make him a plate of green food. It'll be fine. Whereas a French school would say, no.

[00:35:23] - [Speaker 0]
You just have to eat the same as as everyone else, which is where we are rigid, but it comes from a place of...

[00:35:29] - [Speaker 1]
Also, I... Because we we had a French school menu that we had found on the wall outside a school in the South Of France.

[00:35:36] - [Speaker 0]
In actual France?

[00:35:37] - [Speaker 1]
In actual France, so this was just happened to be on the wall, and Wednesday lunch was rabbit. We just said, Lapa. Yeah. And again, I think that wouldn't work so well here.

[00:35:47] - [Speaker 0]
I think if you tried to serve rabbit at an ordinary, you know, I mean, people there would be a riot. So that to me that was a very surprising because I'd never thought about it. And it made me realize that the republic is there all the time actually, invisibly. The

[00:36:02] - [Speaker 1]
thing that I learned from that was that in The UK, lunch is the time that you don't have to have your lessons and you just go off and, you know, eat whatever you've got. In France, the school lunch is a part of your educational day. Yeah. That's true. So lunch is a lesson.

[00:36:19] - [Speaker 0]
It is. It's a lesson that you learn. I mean, the menus are devised from above, so it's very much top down. They're devised from above in order to introduce every possible food to children, and very deliberately serving things. So you know spinach, for example, classically, a lot of children don't like spinach.

[00:36:37] - [Speaker 0]
So there will be meetings, there's a committee in the school that discusses these things for hours and says, well, the spinach is not going down well, maybe we serve it with rice. Because a lot of children like rice, so we put a little bit of spinach in the rice. And the motto underlying all this is, eventually they will grow to like it. And they have to taste everything. So fussiness...

[00:37:00] - [Speaker 0]
And you know that's the key to a lot of the differences I've observed here, that a lot of British children or children who are brought up in Britain become fussy because we make accommodations that heartless, fascistic French parents and schools don't. And you end up with people who eat everything. So I don't know, I'm not saying it's better, but, you know, depends what result you're after. What about you? What was the...

[00:37:28] - [Speaker 1]
Most surprising But, I mean, there's so many, but I think the one I found I just hadn't expected was the one where you told me about the French obsession with being underwater.

[00:37:39] - [Speaker 0]
Oh, yeah.

[00:37:40] - [Speaker 1]
And it started with the film, The Big Blue. I don't know whether any of you saw that, which was French diving film.

[00:37:48] - [Speaker 0]
Is it called free diving? What's it called?

[00:37:51] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. And he falls in love with a dolphin or a porpoise or something.

[00:37:54] - [Speaker 0]
It's a very strange film actually. It's strange that it was such a hit because it's very odd. Yeah. So anyway, it's about that.

[00:38:00] - [Speaker 1]
But it started about that and then and then Muriel took me, it was very cleverly structured because we started on that film and then we went back in time as we went deeper into the ocean. And we talked a lot about, oh God, Cocktoe, Cousso. There's a problem...

[00:38:20] - [Speaker 0]
Themes. One thing that's come up again and again is Cousso is incapable of distinguishing between Jacques Cousso, the oceanographer who I talked about in that episode about the deep because obviously he, so he's a submarine guy. Yeah. Jean Couteau, who is a writer and filmmaker of this kind of surrealist, the vein, and Inspector Cluso. Several times, I tested you and you panicked and simply couldn't remember.

[00:38:52] - [Speaker 1]
So who's the oceanographer guy? The cocktail?

[00:38:55] - [Speaker 0]
No. No. It's Kusto. Kusto. Kusto.

[00:39:02] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. And he went, I mean, this kind of amazing way that he did, he created these extraordinary kind of underwater worlds.

[00:39:10] - [Speaker 0]
Stations, really.

[00:39:11] - [Speaker 1]
With armchairs and cigarettes. And where

[00:39:13] - [Speaker 0]
they're making goulouse underwater and recreating a normal sort of French lifestyle. And then we went down to Jules Verne and 20,000 leagues under the sea. So you liked that one?

[00:39:27] - [Speaker 1]
I didn't like that one because I learnt from that one that the original, you know, the story behind what had made him

[00:39:33] - [Speaker 0]
Captain Nemo.

[00:39:34] - [Speaker 1]
Captain Nemo...

[00:39:35] - [Speaker 0]
Into a strange sort of misanthrope.

[00:39:38] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. Something to do with Britain.

[00:39:40] - [Speaker 0]
Originally, yes, it's a trauma at the hands of the British. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that was the detail, but at the same time it was significant.

[00:39:46] - [Speaker 1]
But I think I just, we talked about it at length, all... Both nations are sort of aquatic, we've both got a lot of coastline, we both do sailing, but actually in Britain we tend to focus more on being above the water. And in France, you just love a submarine, don't you?

[00:40:06] - [Speaker 0]
Yes, we like to go under the water. So that is interesting. I'm sure there are psychological reasons for it, I don't know what they are, but I have observed it. I suppose again, if I were going to talk about surprises, one thing we discovered in your episode about hedgerows is that Britain has the most hedgerows of anywhere in the world, and then we discovered in an episode I did about roundabouts Yes. That France has the most roundabouts out of everywhere in the world.

[00:40:37] - [Speaker 1]
So... Two. I think you've got twice as much roundabouts Yes.

[00:40:40] - [Speaker 0]
As anyone You have lots, you come second. Yes. But we have 42,000 or something and you have only 25,000. So you discover these things and then you dig into them and and with the roundabouts thing. I think that was one where I completely wowed you with my...

[00:40:59] - [Speaker 1]
You completely wowed me with your roundabout and then I said, but of course we've got the magic roundabout, which was originally a French...

[00:41:07] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah, even that was... TV programme,

[00:41:11] - [Speaker 1]
the magic roundabout came from France and it was Emma Thompson's father who had done it and gave them all the names and apparently the French hated what we'd done with it because the dog, the little shag pile dog was called Dugald, and the French thought that it was the British being rude about de Gaulle. And that's really interesting actually, because there was a proper cultural misunderstanding. They really didn't like it, whereas actually we were saying we really like your roundabout thing and...

[00:41:45] - [Speaker 0]
But again, we're back to the French being a little bit humorous. Yeah. Have to admit. So, yes, roundabouts, we continue to look at things, don't we? Continue look at things and we discover every time that the closer you look at something quite small, the more it turns out to be the tip of the iceberg of Frenchness or Britishness.

[00:42:07] - [Speaker 0]
And so we keep going. Yeah. And we have a very long list of ideas, so there's a lot more to come. And the feedback we've been getting from our listeners is that a lot of British people are fascinated to learn more about the French, but equally they like to be reminded or to have explained to them things about their own upbringing or experience that they've never particularly questioned because, you know, it's always been like this. We've always had roundabouts or lots of hedgerows and we don't know.

[00:42:37] - [Speaker 1]
Well, like the one, and we are going to ask, but the one I think that opened both of our eyes, because I just said to myself, why does the British tax year start on the April 6? Does anyone know?

[00:42:51] - [Speaker 0]
Yes. There's a gentleman who knows. Was it the quarter day plus the eleven days of the Gregorian calendar?

[00:42:59] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Very good. Because when everybody else adopted the Gregorian calendar in the mid sixteenth century... Because the problem was that the calendar with the Julian calendar just wasn't accurate, so we were losing... All of us were losing days.

[00:43:15] - [Speaker 1]
And so the Pope Gregory had this brilliant idea to have the Gregorian calendar and lots of other European countries said, well, that's that's a really good idea. We'll do that. Elizabeth the first was on the throne and we were invited to participate and we said, don't really like your idea. Well, it was because the Pope was Catholic and Elizabeth Elizabeth the queen...

[00:43:40] - [Speaker 0]
She was tempted.

[00:43:41] - [Speaker 1]
She liked

[00:43:42] - [Speaker 0]
this newfangled idea. Was tempted. But then all her bishops and people said, no, absolutely cannot accept the pope do what he wants.

[00:43:50] - [Speaker 1]
So for nearly two hundred years, not quite, I mean, it's astonishing to think of it. For nearly two hundred years, Britain operated a completely different calendar from Continental Europe. And it's kind of... You don't notice it in the history books because they've sort of evened out all the dates, but merchants had to try and reconcile different dates all the time...

[00:44:11] - [Speaker 0]
A nightmare...

[00:44:12] - [Speaker 1]
By 1752, we were eleven days behind the rest of Europe. And the other thing that... And this was the one that blew your mind

[00:44:21] - [Speaker 0]
Oh, yes.

[00:44:22] - [Speaker 1]
Was not only that, because it was about the quarter days, but in... Not in Scotland. So in Scotland, New Year's Day was the January 1. But in England, New Year's Day was the March 25. And so I made you say, so so say it is 2025 and it's the 12/31/2025 on the old system, what would be the next day?

[00:44:47] - [Speaker 1]
She found this really difficult.

[00:44:49] - [Speaker 0]
So it would be...

[00:44:50] - [Speaker 1]
We're in the old system.

[00:44:52] - [Speaker 0]
We're in the old system. The first of...

[00:44:57] - [Speaker 1]
You know it now

[00:44:57] - [Speaker 0]
because... I can't remember, it's like you with the metric system.

[00:45:02] - [Speaker 1]
Obvious that after the 12/31/2025 comes the 01/01/2025.

[00:45:10] - [Speaker 0]
Then... It does, it was like that, you're right.

[00:45:12] - [Speaker 1]
After the March 24, or 03/25/2025, comes the 03/26/2026, because that's

[00:45:22] - [Speaker 0]
That's when the

[00:45:23] - [Speaker 1]
year changes. And again, that happened until 1752 in England, and And that's then all they did was move our New Year's Day from the March 25 to the April 6, when we adopted the Gregorian calendar and lost those eleven days. So...

[00:45:44] - [Speaker 0]
So, you know, you discover these really really mad things. It's it's fascinating. Anyway, anyway, enough enough of, you know, these things that we enjoy talking about. Let's open this to the floor.

[00:45:58] - [Speaker 2]
Muriel, I wanted to ask a question. Everywhere in the world when you go to dine anywhere, the first thing the waiter says to you, are there any allergies? How do you go with the children eating everything? I mean, we've got lactose intolerance, and I don't...

[00:46:20] - [Speaker 0]
No, this is a very good When I grew up,

[00:46:23] - [Speaker 2]
we didn't have this stuff.

[00:46:24] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. I know. So there are two... Yes.

[00:46:26] - [Speaker 2]
Gluten free and all yeah. So how do you manage that?

[00:46:32] - [Speaker 0]
So there are two aspects to your question really. One, I'm with you, there appears to have been an enormous growth of these issues. Why that is, I mean, are many schools of thought, you know, more additives in food, I don't know what it is. But certainly children now have a lot more food allergies than say when I was growing up. I should say that the French system is rigid up to a point, for example you can't bring a packed lunch into school unless you have an allergy.

[00:47:01] - [Speaker 0]
So for children who have not an aversion, so not a child who doesn't like vegetables, for example, but a child who genuinely has a lactose allergy or peanut or something, then they can bring a packed lunch in. It's a comparatively recent introduction, but it's, you know, we've caught up with the times there, so we're not trying to kill children. We're trying to keep everyone alive. There are accommodations, yeah, thank thank goodness.

[00:47:30] - [Speaker 2]
Thank you.

[00:47:32] - [Speaker 1]
Does anybody want to ask a question?

[00:47:34] - [Speaker 2]
We had the metric system and why do we have inches? In yards and...

[00:47:42] - [Speaker 0]
Where are you from? May I ask?

[00:47:45] - [Speaker 2]
Well, I live here, But I'm a Texan. Right. Yeah. So...

[00:47:51] - [Speaker 0]
Do you measure in inches? Inches. In the area? Yes.

[00:47:55] - [Speaker 2]
Well, all of The United States does.

[00:47:57] - [Speaker 1]
And miles. In miles. Miles. We have miles. Yes.

[00:48:00] - [Speaker 1]
Very pleasing. Yes. So so how

[00:48:03] - [Speaker 2]
did all that come about?

[00:48:05] - [Speaker 1]
Well that's because that's that's that's the old British system that would have gone over to America at that time. And of course, so we... The the reason it's complicated now in The UK is because we partially adopted the metric system and decimalisation in the nineteen seventies. But we did it, you know, with enthusiasm, I mean the coins, because before decimalisation, our coinage system was completely different. Sort of Ellis and Wonderland.

[00:48:40] - [Speaker 1]
And I think we can all agree that it is easier when things have to divide by 10, I get that. But we didn't really do it all the way through with weights and measures. So if you buy milk, it'll still say on it 1.3 something litres because that is... So this is my Achilles heel. So is that two pints?

[00:49:01] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. That's two pints. And if you read British cookery books, they'll give both all the time because we're all sort of constantly trying to move between them. The reason I happen to like inches and yards and things is because they come from the olden days where you... I say olden days, that's terrible.

[00:49:22] - [Speaker 1]
They come from the time where actually people needed to have an easy way of measuring and they're they're quite organic, they're they're, you know, so this is an inch and this is a

[00:49:30] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah.

[00:49:30] - [Speaker 1]
Yard or whatever it is. There's there's a there's a real kind of organic story behind it. And the same with with the weights obviously and the distances.

[00:49:41] - [Speaker 0]
And of course, we used to have these old measurements in France before as well. And in fact, lots of different regional versions. So nothing was quite the same size depending on whether you were in a small village in Brittany or in Provence they would have their own units...

[00:49:59] - [Speaker 1]
Say does it matter? Well, yes because again

[00:50:03] - [Speaker 0]
you're trading and you're selling grain or whatever it might be you want to make sure that you're buying the amount that you think you're buying. And that I think explains France being so much bigger and having all these little fiefdoms and and it took a long time to make France the way it is now, you know. Britain was unified a lot earlier than we were.

[00:50:23] - [Speaker 1]
But certainly England and Scotland became portion...

[00:50:27] - [Speaker 0]
This union. Whereas France remained a sort of a mosaic of little places with their own ways and their own dialects. And that I think explains possibly the obsession, the post revolution obsession with the French language being codified, everybody learning the same thing and measuring in the same way and the meter. Because we had, well, we felt we had to bring everyone in. And you may say it was tyrannical.

[00:50:52] - [Speaker 0]
I don't know, was it?

[00:50:55] - [Speaker 3]
Hi, thank you very much, it was really really interesting. So I was in Paris a couple of weekends ago and went to visit Napoleon's tomb Oh. And it's an incredible sort of baroque structure, very grand, very imposing. And I was wondering what the sort of French attitude toward Napoleon was. Is he sort of the...

[00:51:11] - [Speaker 3]
Like the French Churchill? Because I imagine he's at at one time a very impressive sort of military political leader, but also very controversial.

[00:51:18] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. No. Very controversial. I was reading Balzac the other day, as one does, and a novel called I'm not quite sure how that's translated into English, but you know, shady story or something like that, which is about a plot against the emperor. And Balzac is very good and I think still valid in that he is basically a traditionalist who likes the monarchy and is horrified at the revolution and Bonaparte and at the same time can't help admiring this great man.

[00:51:53] - [Speaker 0]
And I think that's probably where we still are, that we are aware of all the terrible things that Napoleon did, I'm not going to deny them, but this extraordinary man who, this kind of willpower on legs that was Napoleon, essentially makes us all feel quite optimistic about being French, and he did create a lot of French institutions. In terms of nation building, his legacy is terrific. And I would also say that we are at a... In a period of time where the French are loving themselves more. I'm talking about those new films about De Gaulle.

[00:52:29] - [Speaker 0]
I don't know if anyone's seen these... The the second one, the second part is coming out at the end of this month, but the first one is out. Yeah. And they have been terrifically successful in France. So there's been none of the kind of...

[00:52:42] - [Speaker 0]
Since you mentioned Churchill, none of the... Oh, well, Churchill was an awful man and he was, you know, and let's be down on ourselves. It's more, De Gaulle was marvellous. People are weeping in the cinemas and they're weeping with national pride. And it's it's a moment of coming together and coming together and and coming to terms with our great men and hugging them to ourselves.

[00:53:05] - [Speaker 1]
Mhmm.

[00:53:05] - [Speaker 0]
So possibly beware because the French are the French are assembling and becoming more confident. And if that's a little bit of a threat and just as your friend, I'm saying Wow. Perhaps you should be watching the

[00:53:19] - [Speaker 1]
But we are always watching.

[00:53:21] - [Speaker 0]
Always watching.

[00:53:22] - [Speaker 1]
But actually talking of always watching it, because the the sort of the older version of that question was about the Normans, and we looked a lot into the post Norman conquest, two hundred years that followed the Norman conquest. And at that time, of course, the Normans weren't the French. They were the people who lived in Normandy. And the poor king of France had this about this much territory,

[00:53:45] - [Speaker 0]
isn't He had a tiny mushroom shaped kingdom. Yeah. And then and then there were all these other dukedoms and you know, which were very magnificent and had a lot of power.

[00:53:55] - [Speaker 1]
And we ended up by the start of the thirteenth century with basically the Normans had become British rather than French because they they all owned lands on both sides of the channel. And so, you know, King Richard and King John were Norman kings who chose to style themselves primarily as King of England and then Duke of Normandy rather than the other way around. So that was really interesting, really understanding that absolute connectivity at that time. But what you said was interesting is that you never really got taught about the Normans in the same way.

[00:54:33] - [Speaker 0]
Not in the same way. So we're not really taught at school about that period of time where our two histories were so closely woven together. Recently, we've we've been talking about 1066 and and Hastings and Guillaume Le Conquerant, call him, or Guillaume Le Bettaire, because of course that's what he was. So William, William isn't to us a huge historical figure. We know that he's important to the history of Britain.

[00:54:59] - [Speaker 0]
Mhmm. But to us, he's a sort of regional lord.

[00:55:02] - [Speaker 1]
He's not really French captain.

[00:55:03] - [Speaker 0]
And he did quite well. He did a, you know, to get himself onto the throne of England. But we don't think of him as one of one of ours. It's interesting how the focus is really radically different. Napoleon, who came from Corsica, we own.

[00:55:19] - [Speaker 0]
He's one of ours, but not not Guillaume.

[00:55:21] - [Speaker 1]
No. Well, kind of left, didn't he?

[00:55:23] - [Speaker 0]
He did. Yeah.

[00:55:24] - [Speaker 1]
Fair enough.

[00:55:24] - [Speaker 0]
Anyone else?

[00:55:26] - [Speaker 1]
What do you think would happen if we dubbed you into French and broadcast you to Paris? What would your reception be? Do you think your humour is particularly British?

[00:55:37] - [Speaker 0]
What is your sense of that?

[00:55:39] - [Speaker 1]
People listen to your episodes because you're telling British people really interesting, informed stuff about France when we're all learning. And it's kind of... I I have the harder job in a way

[00:55:50] - [Speaker 0]
because

[00:55:51] - [Speaker 1]
I'm speaking in English to a British audience who knows it all already. So I have to find... The really quirky stuff. I have to find some quirky stuff that you know, because otherwise I'm just repeating something that everyone already knows. I wonder whether it would possibly work the other way or maybe they just, would they just think that...

[00:56:11] - [Speaker 0]
I think it might work the other way because, so we do have some listeners in France, we know this, What we don't know is whether they are French Francophone or whether they are in fact British expats who listen to us because it, you know, it takes them back. I think you're right. I think that there would be possibly a sort switching around. And I say this because we did a series of shorter episodes where we talked about the things we admire. The French admire about the British or the British admire about the French.

[00:56:40] - [Speaker 0]
And the French, would you believe, are really enthralled to British glamour, which is a very particular kind of glamour to do with the royal family. We are obsessed with the royal family. And there again, there's a sort of return of the repressed after the revolution that, you know, we we cut his head off and we got rid of poor Marie Antoinette. But actually, we dream about, there are magazines, French magazines that are devoted almost entirely to the royal family of Britain and elsewhere, but specifically Britain. So I think there would be the same sort of fascination on the French side, but probably not particularly about my own episodes, more about yours because they don't know about the British tax tax system and hedgerows and hassles.

[00:57:22] - [Speaker 1]
Can't imagine them really wanting to know about the British tax system, but maybe... And I did a...

[00:57:27] - [Speaker 0]
There would be a lot of interest.

[00:57:28] - [Speaker 1]
The A Roads episode as well. I don't know how well that... I think that... Yes. There might be a risk that I'm talking about something that is just so...

[00:57:35] - [Speaker 0]
With A Suzanne did a brilliant episode about A roads, British A roads, and when she told me she was doing it, said, okay, you know, I mean I always trust your decisions, but I couldn't quite see how it would make a story because we always try to tell a story that people will want to listen to till the end. You told the most tremendous story about A Rose and we got so much engagement with that particular episode.

[00:58:02] - [Speaker 1]
I said that, I know you proved me wrong, but I said that most British people, even if they don't admit it to themselves, do have a favorite a road. And I then on LinkedIn, I just got all these people writing to me saying, my favourite A Road is the A168.

[00:58:21] - [Speaker 0]
We got a lot of engagement on A Roads, on my side we got a lot of engagement with an episode we did about topless sunbathing, Being a French thing, because of course it's not just the French who have done it or do it, but it it was specifically a French practice, let's say during the seventies and maybe a little bit of the eighties, and now it's waning for all the usual reasons that, you know, it's waning elsewhere. I've had so many people contact us to say, mostly British people with mildly traumatic memories of family holidays where you're a British child and you find yourself on this beach in France with your family and a lot of women with no tops on and your parents are obviously saying, don't draw attention to it darling, it's just something that happens here. And it really opened the eyes of a lot of people who never quite got over it. I think we reopened something. It's interesting.

[00:59:23] - [Speaker 1]
It is interesting,

[00:59:23] - [Speaker 0]
Mostly isn't women who got in touch rather than men who kept their own...

[00:59:28] - [Speaker 1]
There's a whole thread of things where the really popular... I noticed and I sort of in a way are my own kind because the really popular ones that Muriel does are things like brothels or Brigitte Bardot or...

[00:59:45] - [Speaker 0]
The je ne sais un l'habe, you know the painting by Manet with the naked lady in the glade with the two men. Yeah. Nudity and sex appears to draw the crowds. Don't know

[00:59:59] - [Speaker 1]
why. Draws the crowds. It draws... I think that again, I think it highlights something quite interesting because it it draws British crowds in a different way to...

[01:00:10] - [Speaker 0]
Yes. The French probably wouldn't be that interesting.

[01:00:12] - [Speaker 1]
You ended up in the spectator with the one about brothels. Both.

[01:00:17] - [Speaker 0]
Yes. Because we did this episode about the golden age of French brothels at the Belle Epoque, you know, and then into the nineteen thirties, really up until the second world war. And it's very interesting, for reasons of architecture as well as, you know, ideas about sexuality and and the way prostitution was, you know, league attitudes to prostitution, which are very different in France and Britain, especially at that time. And then I wrote an article for the spectator on the back of it, and this article was picked up in Private Eye, where essentially there was a little paragraph in Private Eye that said, spectator is disgusting as sure. You know, look at this article by this woman who wrote about brothels and it was so funny to find myself.

[01:01:01] - [Speaker 0]
It was... I should say both the episode and the article are really historical. They're about they're about a particular period and what it tells us about the culture. They're not really supposed to be about promoting...

[01:01:14] - [Speaker 1]
Not advocating brothels.

[01:01:16] - [Speaker 0]
No. But there was a reaction, definitely.

[01:01:19] - [Speaker 1]
Which in itself...

[01:01:20] - [Speaker 0]
Trigger the British with brothels.

[01:01:22] - [Speaker 1]
It's really interesting the extent to which all you have to do is have a French woman talking about brothels in your own private eye.

[01:01:28] - [Speaker 0]
And on that note, we're going to stop because I think it's time for people to have some dinner. Thank you so much.