World Cup euphoria, Brexit Blues, Patriotism and..... Melania Trump!

To what extent are we willing to turn our backs on real-life issues to
better join in a nationwide communion, our attention riveted on a team
of eleven athletic young men kicking a ball around a playing-field,
with millions of people staring at their every movement and for ninety
minutes or more, holding their breaths, overwhelmed in utter bliss in
the belief they are sharing a unique experience of comradeship?
I am a neophyte. I never believed I would ever watch a football match
to the end and had always despised the naïve masses. In a word, I was
proud of not being led like sheep, which was how I saw the crowds of
mostly men huddled in cafés during the period of the World Cup. Yet,
last week, a sprained ankle forced me to stay still for two whole days
and I thought to myself what a golden opportunity this is to appraise
the phenomenon. I started with the match between France and Uruguay.
It didn't take me long to figure out the rules of the game and
distinguish the main players but I didn't expect to feel so elated
when France scored a goal for the first time. Later on, when it
happened a second time, I was almost shouting and clapping my hands,
alone on my couch. When the match ended two-nil in favour of France, I
could see on my screen the delirious faces of French people and the
dismal look on the faces of Uruguyan supporters. The French were
brandishing flags, their cheeks painted blue, white and red, sometimes
even wearing wigs or clothes the colours of our flag. Such a
demonstration of sheer love for our country is anathema in France, and
is sometimes associated with the ugly and definitely uncool "Front
National", Marine Le Pen's party, a party most people would never
admit to supporting (even when they secretly do).
And yet, not only is it acceptable to be an arch nationalist during
the World Cup, but to be seen as favouring another team than one's
country's would be dubbed as treason, no less. It doesn't fail to
remind us of what happens in a situation of real war. And undoubtedly,
in the documentaries on the liberation of Paris in 1944 and 1945, the
faces of people in the overcrowded streets, wanting to celebrate their
release from fear and deprivation, didn't show more exultation than
those of the supporters of the winning teams. Thus, it does appear as
if the Word Cup acted as an outlet for our need to rise above
unsavoury and intricate real-life issues in order to connect with an
imaginary collective entity we call our nation.
This was plainly what the throngs of deliriously overexcited
working-class young men (and a few women) were expressing when
interviewed by Skynews after England had won the match over Sweden
last Saturday. They could at last forget all about the mess Britain
finds itself in as a result of trying to come up with an acceptable
Brexit deal, which is in itself an impossible task, given that, during
the campaign, pro-brexit arguments had had less to do with hard facts
than with this undefinable notion of nationalism, the same one that
makes the crowds inebriated with bliss each time their country scores
a goal.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, the USA, having been eliminated at an
early stage, cannot rely on this subterfuge, although it would have
been handy to distract Americans' attention from the awkward (but so
refreshing) picture of Melania Trump turning her back to the whole
world with the words "I really don't care, do u?" scribbled on her
coat in big white letters while she visited a shelter for children
separated from their immigrant parents. Who is being the better
patriot?

What will 2018 bring? Another dark hour?

And so this is a brand-new year! Time to hope for being better and for a better year all round. While the clock was relentlessly ticking away, in the last hours of 2017, each of us tried to take stock. We hope we have achieved as much as we could, in the circumstances we happen to be. Our small or big achievements, although they matter enormously to us individually, have no significance in the greater scheme of things. Except for those who are in a position of power, with the ubiquitous camera lenses focused on them, watching their next move.

All last year, the world has been holding its breath, while Donald Trump skipped from blunder to blunder. Provoking the North Korean dictator, recklessly announcing the acknowledgement of Jerusalem as capital city of Israel..... and that's only to mention foreign policy decisions. Is it better or worse than George W. Bush starting a war against Iraq under false pretences? There seemed to be more predictability in the latter. I asked my students whether they were scared by what might happen next and, on the whole, they were less scared than a year ago as they were reassured by the fact that Congress has seemed to oppose D. Trump's every move and also by the attitude of other world leaders who won't bow to him.

Brexit is another worry. Theresa May is really in a quandery. Nobody had told British citizens that leaving the EU would be a messy, costly, almost impossible thing to achieve. Ukip and Boris Johnson had not thought anything through when they harangued the crowds with their popularity-seeking arguments against the EU. A year and a half have gone by since the referendum and negotiations haven't really progressed. It looks like the UK still wants its cake and eat it. As was the case before the referendum. To be out of the EU, but in when it suits. Meanwhile this embarrassing deadlock is weakening both the UK and the EU. So much uncertainty is not good for anyone as the world is much in need of a strong Europe.

Last but not least, Catalonia voted two weeks ago and what the results confirmed was its profound division into two groups roughly equal in numbers: those in favour of independence and those wanting to remain Spanish. Catalonia will suffer socially and economically if those two groups can't find a common ground and they do not seem to be about to.

All in all, 2017 has been a painful illustration of the severe limitations of politics; no politician ever delivers the goods he or she promised. Although, perhaps, once upon a time, one did. 2018 is beginning with the new movie about Winston Churchill: Darkest hour. Churchill's pledge to the British people at the start of the war was not a lie: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat". Churchill was fully aware of the gravity and solemnity of the moment and he dared talk plainly and honestly. What an inspiration for 2018!

Garanti sans virus. www.avg.com

London Snapshots: from silencing the clock to hearing the click...

On August 21, we heard Big Ben chime for the last time. It is due for some revamping work and won't be heard again for four years. My 13-year-old daughter was my excuse for taking a stroll round the main historical landmarks. Trafalgar Square with Nelson still perched on his column. Will she remember that he was the one who defeated Napoleon at the battle of Trafalgar? I doubt it. She paid more attention to the buskers and other street artists who try to attract an audience. Piccadilly Circus where she took pictures of the Eros statue; the changing of the guard in front of Buckingham Palace; unassuming Downing street the significance of which she failed to gather and, last but not least, afternoon tea at Fortnum and Mason, a very English tradition although it didn't seem to me that there were many English people about in the quaint and luxurious establishment. I refused to be defeated by the recent terrorist attacks there, so we took a walk across Tower Bridge. The views from the glass-floored footbridge high above the Thames are spectacular. To walk on the glass floor while watching the water and the cars hundreds of meters below without feeling dizzy was enough of a challenge for me when I realized that if I lifted my head I could see myself and what was a hundred of meters below me. One can't fail to see from there the dense entanglement of glass buildings of all shapes and heights, from the Shard to the Gherkin, tightly packed and overpowering the Tower of London.

Luckily, not even market-liberal, pro-brexit Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, dared to sell a single acre of the many parks and woodlands dotting London. I had many an invigorating early-morning walks in some of them, especially Hampstead Heath, my favorite, and a less well-known one, Edgewarebury Park, where I stopped walking occasionally to gorge myself with plump ripe blackberries jutting from the undergrowth. It still amazes me how England still feels like a garden in many parts, even in overcrowded London. And this, despite some very unwelcome changes in other areas.

One of my English friends' elder son, 19, has dropped out of his first year at university after only six months. He had already accumulated a £15,000 debt and couldn't stand the pressure of the debt piling up while not being absolutely sure of his job prospects as an architect, especially now that the Tory government has changed the system. Student loans are no longer run by the state but by banks and they are no longer interest-free. I knew this would happen. I said it repeatedly to my French students. England's higher education is for sale! To the highest bidder. Universities are more interested in attracting rich foreigners than in investing in the youth of the country. The aim is short term and consists in making as much money as possible despite the media doing their best to write stories about deserving sons and daughters of immigrants who have managed to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge. My friend's younger son, 16, was waiting for his GCSEs results but he has already decided he would not go to university. Difficult to imagine that only 13 years ago, higher education in England was more or less free. All my English friends took advantage of four years of carefree higher education. This is what post-thatcher governments have achieved (Margaret Thatcher herself, as far as I know, had never suggested privatizing higher education; she who, as a grocer's daughter, had benefited from free first-class higher education at Oxford university); both Tony Blair and David Cameron will be the names attached to making higher education an impossible goal to reach for many working class and lower middle-class kids. And it will change the face of English society for the worse, no doubt about it.

On a lighter note, I had been looking forward to attending a performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Apollo Theatre. Like many people of my generation, I still remember the unforgettable acting of Elizabeth Taylor and of Paul Newman, as Maggie and Brick, in the movie of the play. How to parallel this level of acting? This must be the impossible challenge that any director of the play is bound to be confronted with. Perhaps, as the untamed passion of both Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman could not possibly be matched, the director chose to show the heat of the emotions expressed through props such as, for example, a shower running over the flimsy white clothes of Brick (played by Jack O'Connell), revealing his perfect naked body underneath the clinging shirt and pants. And in the last scene, I was more than a little surprised to see the two main characters appear, out of the dark stage, stark naked. If this was meant to raise the temperature and exacerbate raw emotions, I felt the end result was rather the opposite. Still, the great lines of the play remain and the spirit of Tennessee Williams prevailed.

Garanti sans virus. www.avg.com

Macron Trump May, A New World Order?

About eight months have elapsed since the last article I posted here. Like a lot of people, I have been burying my head in the sand, trying to forget that the worst had already happened. For a long time, I avoided switching American TV channels on. Yet I continued to hear. Sometimes I shuddered, as when there seemed to be an escalation of threats and tension between Kim Jong Un, the scary North Korean dictator, and Donald Trump. We would not sleep a wink if we didn't do our best to forget that even a country like North Korea with such an unstable leader has enough nuclear weapons to blow up our small planet!
 Still a little over three years to go, holding one's breath.

The few American citizens I have had the opportunity to talk to, in the past months, seemed largely embarrassed by their choice of president, especially those who claim to be republicans, probably because they know they are partly responsible for bringing him in office. And yet, I found it almost touching to observe D. Trump, on his best behaviour (maybe, as he does not speak French, he had to keep his mouth shut, except when addressed in English), sitting primly on the right of Emmanuel Macron who was presiding over the ceremonies of Bastille Day, last July 14th in Paris. Despite being 30 years younger, the French president definitely appeared as the one who had the calibre of a head of state. In yesterday's NYT, I read that D. Trump attended the events in Paris last week, partly because E. Macron had told him: "They love you in France"! If Donald Trump believed that blatant piece of flattery, it implies, but that's not a surprise, that he seriously lacks in historical knowledge and that there is nobody by his side to fill in the gaps in his education. He definitely could do with a well-appointed think tank next to him.

As for us, the French, we are still in the blessed stage of congratulating ourselves for our good sense in the choice of our brand-new president. Among the dozen or so of candidates for the presidency, Emmanuel Macron stood out as the brightest, most articulate, most able to comprehend the complexity of our global world, and, last but not least, the most truthful and trustworthy of the lot. In a word, the most capable of manoeuvering the destiny of France, as one of the two main countries at the helm of the European Union, a very shaky union indeed, now that the UK has made its very unfortunate and ill-advised decision to leave the European boat, to sail, alone again, on choppy seas. The French, once more, have managed to avoid falling into the populist mirage. Let's hope this commonsense endures.

To be allowed to choose and decide is the prerogative of citizens of democracies, who are now equipped with multiple means of information, from social networks to the traditional press without forgetting innumerable TV and radio channels. And yet, more than ever, making an informed decision requires a critical mind and the ability as well as the time to ponder over several sources of information. Why did poor male white Americans vote in favour of someone who claimed he wanted to take away what a more equality-minded president had fought tooth and nail to provide for them? Why did poverty-stricken Welsh people cast their votes in favour of Brexit when a lot of their job opportunities come from the European Union? This morning I came across the front page of the latest issue of The Economist at my newsagent's. The headline read: "Britain is facing up to Brexit" and the picture underneath showed a lot of people on a beach, adult men and women, all kneeling with their heads buried deep in the sand, while, in the foreground, a little boy, bucket and spade in hand, was the only one to stand up and look, anxiously, to the future. There's no denying that, right now, UK kids are justified to doubt the commonsense of their elders.

Garanti sans virus. www.avg.com

A time of reckoning, Hillary had said!

It looks like Wednesday November 9^th was another 9/11 for many Americans who woke up or fell asleep in the early hours with the terrible realization that the unthinkable had indeed happened. As on June 24^th, the day after the referendum on Brexit, but even more so since the remotest country feels in some ways concerned by who the president of the United States is, people all over the world felt bewildered and flabbergasted. I went to work and my students, who are not American but French, were not smiling as they usually do. They were gloomy. Some said they were shocked, others sad, others angry. Donald Trump's rhetoric had been so simplistic with words and phrases that many of us thought no one with a modicum of common sense could fall for. He said he would make America great again. But that is just what Barack Obama has done in his two terms of office. Barack Obama gave back dignity to the function of president of the United States, the dignity that Georges W. Bush had tarnished with his ethnocentric understanding of the world which had led to very unwise foreign policy decisions. Donald Trump's victory appears to the world as being the victory of ignorance and narrow-mindedness over knowledge and open-mindedness. It obviously says something significant about America and the dereliction of its education system. Are all Americans really taught in the main subjects at a sufficient level? Have they really been made to reflect and to develop logic? Those election results seem to highlight a wide gap between the showcase of the Ivy League universities, of Silicon Valley and the Deep America, the midwest, the America of the Ku Klux Klan with its pathetic rednecks selling pamphlets on the superiority of the white race, dating back to Nazi Germany. Such level of illeteracy does not fit with the image of a highly sophisticated country. It sounds like some parts of America have not evolved much since the period of the conquest of the West. One can thus understand that the unsophisticated appearance and discourse of an uneducated man such as Donald Trump would appeal to those Americans who consider themselves forgotten by the intellectual elite, the elite of those who succeeded and reached government offices thanks to their studies in the best universities. It is just that the rest of the world did not expect those Americans, those who see themselves as left behind, to be so numerous.

But let's go back to America's new president, the one whose face the world will have, willy-nilly, to get used to seeing everyday on the news. All through the election campaign his political platform was almost void. On American TV channels, I heard several times such words pronounced as unpredictable, unchartered waters. Indeed, no one knows what to expect and the worst is that he probably does not know himself that he does not know. America, what have thou done?

Hillary vs Donald

Enough wallowing in the past, I woke up this morning with an urge to fast forward and react to today's reality which is assailing me left and right. My current circumstances, workwise, are that of a college lecturer, teaching English translation and Anglo-saxon civilization to French students. These days, when I switch on an English or American TV channel, I often find myself watching either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or the two together on the same TV panel tearing at each other. In the past week, the election campaign has taken a nasty turn; criticisms are getting personal. There is nothing typically American in this resorting to dirty tricks and digging in the opponent's past; unfortunately, it has become a standard feature of most election campaigns in democracies – I guess it implies freedom of speech – ever since, under the growing influence of the internet and the gutter press, privacy ceased to exist.

However, as a French citizen, living in a centralized country where, not so long ago, one could tell what every school kid of the same age-group was learning at a given time of the day, what stikes me most when I hear replublicans argue, is their absolute fear of the State. The federal state is seen by possibly a majority of Americans as a monster – it reminds me of the bank portrayed as an inhuman monster in John Steinbeck's masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath – a monster which is out to get them and deprive them of their sacrosanct freedom. As if a state run by an elected government was not yet considered by Americans as a more evolved political framework than the mere juxtaposition of self-governing groups of people.

A few days ago, on CNN, I chanced upon a TV show where Paul Ryan was answering questions from American citizens to encourage them to vote for republicans. Paul Ryan who seems to be a civil and balanced individual -I can't help wondering why he, rather than Donald Trump, is not the republican candidate to run for president- was doing his best to convince a citizen that all that mattered now was to stop those dangerous democrats to regain a majority of seats in the Senate. To prove his point, he did not have any theoretical arguments but he gave the example of a smallish American town in his constituency through which twelve gangs used to spread terror. Apparently, a handful of citizens worked out some sort of scheme by which redeemed gang members acted as mentors for active thugs and, as a result, local violence had much abated. He concluded with those words: "They did it by themselves, they did not need the state to tell them what to do." And here I thought that it was a strange way of reasoning. First of all, why did that town have twelve gangs raging in it in the first place? Then, why do Americans have this strange notion that doing it all by oneself is better than a government making decisions for everybody?

One example of what I mean is the issue of childcare. In a recent article published in the New York Times -Oct. 14, 2016- Pamela Druckerman claims that she might have thought America's parenting misery was inevitable if she hadn't moved from the USA to France (one of the rare countries apparently where parents are slightly happier than non-parents)! I'd rather quote her given that she is American and thus cannot be accused of boasting: in France, she writes, "The government offers high-quality day care, billed on a sliding scale, and free preschool for children 3 and up. Older kids have subsidized after-school activities and summer camps. On average, college costs less than $ 500 a year." She adds that Americans seem not to realize how terribly they are being treated. And you might think that income taxes must be over the top but this is not so, only slightly higher than in the USA. And to those who would immediately retort that at that price, you can't provide top quality education, I'll answer that France has had its fair share of Nobel prizes over the years, especially in economics, mathematics and literature. So, it can't be all that bad!

Perhaps it is high time Americans left behind a way of thinking inherited from the Pilgrims and the first settlers, a time when communities had to do it all by themselves, and it's high time they started trusting in the institutions underpinning the country. It might be a step forward to stop perceiving the federal state as the Arch-enemy, a substitute for the English monarch of yore.

7 - Volunteering

But you must not think that this sad episode with the landlord was representative of my interactions with the Asian community in Bradford. Far from it. If anything, the landlord's attitude was a reminder of what it had been like everywhere for most women, up to a few decades back. I could even remember how my own parents had first reacted when they learnt of my first boyfriend. It was not such a long time ago when western women were expected not to leave the family home until they married. But to go back to my connections with Asians in Bradford, I had actually started to get quite involved, a few months earlier, in doing some voluntary work within Bradford's Asian community. A few of my English friends, including Tony, were also involved in teaching English to Asian immigrants. Devoting some of their time to do something worthwhile was common among English young people. I had immediately liked this generosity and wanted to do my bit. Looking back, what strikes me is that, despite our utter poverty -we managed to eat properly but we didn't have enough money for new clothes; luckily there were quite a few second-hand shops in Bradford where one could buy a jumper for 50 pence, I remember wearing one of those, a purple one, for months, if not years- we felt privileged enough to want to help those in need. And, there is no doubt that we were privileged. Think of it: we had access to higher education for free! What an amazing privilege compared to what is happening in today's Britain.

The Home Office had set up a nationwide programme of teaching English to immigrant adults who did not master the language. Women were a special target because because it was a known fact that a lot of them were homebound while their children went to school, which put them at risk of being quickly disconnected both from the new society in which they had settled, but also from their own children. I was quite impressed at the time by the efforts made by the British government to ease the Asian immigrants into British society; I had not witnessed anything of that scale in France. In Britain, for a few decades, they recruited teachers who made a career out of teaching English as a second language, rather than as a foreign language. Methods were developed, linguists wrote books about it and it provided jobs to many people who liked the idea of teaching well-behaved and subdued adults in small groups rather than classrooms full of unruly teenagers who could send one on the edge of a nervous breakdown in not time. Obviously, the methods had to be very different from those applying to the teaching of a foreign language to kids who spoke the same language as their teacher. In a word, a whole set of devices and procedures had to be developed in order to meet the needs of non-English speakers now residents in the UK. Those needs were huge and one way to achieve more was to resort to volunteer workers, especially from the student population, which was, generally speaking, in those days, at least so far as I could tell, a generous lot, aware that the state was being generous with them. This volunteering was organized by qualified teachers who provided a training to volunteers and guided them. At first, I imagined my application would be turned down given that my own English was far from perfect and that I used to speak with a heavy French accent. But when I expressed my anxieties to Pam, my trainer, she only burst out laughing and exclaimed: "Don't worry, you'll teach them to speak English with a respectable accent!" Of course that comment was not to be taken at face value. I had already understood that Pam, like most other teachers who had chosen that field of work, could not have been more politically correct than she already was. But her comment reflected the mainstream opinion in the British population towards accents. The crux of the matter however was that the issue of accents was the least of their problems given that, most of the women stuck at home, some of whom under strict orders from their husbands not to leave the house, did not speak a word of English. Indeed, learning some basic Urdu was necessary for qualified teachers and volunteers alike in order to manage to get some explanations across to the potential students.

To this day, some twenty-five years later, I still remember a few set phrases in Urdu and I occasionally show off whenever I go to a Pakistani or Indian restaurant. I still remember the 'student' I had been allotted. On our first meeting, I felt as shy as she seemed to be, an intruder in her home. She smiled a lot and offered me Indian tea and biscuits. What struck me was how unsuited for the bitter cold of the north of England her flimsy sari seemed to be. The bright colours, yellow, red, orange or blue, of Asian women's striking saris dotting the dark-grey cityscape were in themselves emblematic of a clash of cultures.

I will never know how much English I managed to teach that lady through my twice-weekly visits, although I do remember that she ended up understanding a post-office form and the value of the coins in her purse. Once, while we were looking at a pound-note, I remember being struck when I realized that the portrait of the Queen did not mean anything to her. Meanwhile, her children attended schools in Bradford and were learning fast to speak English with a yorkshire accent. The gap between her and them would not cease widening. I couldn't help thinking that there lied the root of much turmoil to come. What I remember clearly is my unease and my feeling somewhat daunted by the sheer scale of the task: I was never going to teach her more than a few fragments of English. The irony of the situation was that we were both, her and me, on the same boat so to speak, at least linguistically speaking: on a quest to grasp the subtleties of Shakespeare's language, only I was a few steps ahead of her...

6 - From political correctness to cowardice

I was fuming. 'How dare he?' I kept repeating to myself. 'Wait till Tony comes back and he'll go and give him a good talking-to'. There I was, thinking of his housebound wife dutifully looking after him, unaware of the whereabouts of her husband while he was out of the house, unaware that he was gallivanting about, paying unbidden visits to young female tenants when he knew they happened to be alone.

At last, Tony came back. Hardly had he taken off his jacket that I had started telling him the whole episode in details, my voice still shaking, such was my shock and lack of understanding of what had happened. I talked and talked and, gradually, I was becoming aware of a conspicuous lack of reaction from Tony. He was listening but never looked at me in the eyes until I exclaimed: 'Well, why aren't you saying anything?' 'What do you want me to say? he replied, you mustn't forget that for a muslim man brought up in Pakistan, our household must look odd'.

'What are you saying?' I whispered in utter disbelief. 'You may have misunderstood his intentions; after all he didn't actually do anything, did he?' Tony added.

'What do you mean he didn't do anything? His intentions were clear enough. Don't you believe me?'

'Yes, I do, but we mustn't forget that they have a different culture, different values; we would be racists if we thought otherwise...'

'So, are you saying that not to be accused of racism, I ought to comply with his notion of me -and, thus, of any white western educated young woman- as an easy woman, well let's say it, as a slut really?' I was beginning to raise my voice in anger.

'Come on, Louise, you're exaggerating, I'm sure he didn't mean any harm. I really think you're making too much of this. We'll see if it happens again....'

I couldn't believe what I was hearing; Tony, the man I was still looking up to in starry-eyed wonder, chose to doubt my words so as (I could already sense this) not to have to take steps to redress a wrong. The implications of what was happening were so serious and it would have hurt so much to admit to myself the cowardice of his response, that I, too, in my own way, resorted to burying my head in the sand and I did not press him into doing anything which he was not willing to do anyway. However, it turned out to be one of my first major disappointments in Tony.

Shrugging the whole episode off, Tony headed towards the kitchen: 'I'll put the kettle on and we'll have a nice brew!' he said cheerfully as if we had been discussing the weather. 'Putting the kettle on', I came to realize, was a most emblematic phrase in Britain, perhaps as significant as, for instance, the Queen, to ensure the preservation of law and order. So many British people spent so much time waiting for the kettle to boil and then nursing the obligatory 'cuppa' that, in the meantime, it allowed a government to vote an unpopular and unjust law like, say, the turning of universities from free state establishments into highly expensive profit-seeking ones, without provoking much reaction, and no public outcry to speak of.

You may wonder whether this was the last of the landlord pestering me. In the few months that we had left in that house, he never came round again. But a few weeks after the incident, one day I was walking in a deserted street in broad day light, when I saw him walking towards me in the opposite direction, on the pavement across the road. I was going to pretend not to see him when I heard him whistle at me in a low tone. Now that I was in the open air, my immediate reaction was to look at him straight in the eyes and shout at the top of my lungs: 'F... off!' It felt liberating. However, I never mentioned this incident to Tony or to my English friends in case they branded me a racist!

5 - The landlord

That house in Grantham Road was a former worker's back-to-back in a row of houses once occupied by mill workers or miners.Very few alterations had been made since it had been built back in the XIXth century when the industrial revolution was at full throttle. Still, we did have hot water and a shower so we could not complain. But there was no central heating, just fireplaces in which gas heaters had been fitted. Those contraptions had a meter system and only worked when fed 10p coins which they swallowed rather greedily; that meant we always had to think of keeping a supply of them. Indeed, I remember often being cold, especially, in all the places which the heating did not reach: the stairs, the passage going to the bedrooms, the bathroom and also the tiny kitchen, equipped with very basic appliances. The street was cobbled and one could still easily imagine the dry noise of hooves hitting the polished stones of the street, as cars were rarely seen in that part of the city, populated mainly by poverty-stricken Asian families or students like ourselves. Now, however, most of the houses in the street belonged to Pakistani landlords who had bought them when they were still in employment but who now could no longer afford to make any repairs or improvements unless they did not really care. Many of the women who lived in those houses never came out or, if they did, very rarely, they were veiled from head to foot. Some of those houses were let to students and landlords expected to be paid in cash at the end of each week.

Our landlord sometimes came round to visit us. In those days, I had not yet reflected on the issue of culture clashes. I was myself a foreigner but I was not aware that this presented me with any special difficulties. The reality was perhaps that I was young and absolutely willing to adapt to the mores of the people I was now sharing my life with. I was all in favour of tolerance, of course, like any young person educated in the seventies in a French state school where the watchwords of liberté, égalité, fraternité were drummed into us. However, I had not come to realize that racism or intolerance were to be found everywhere, in all groups and ethnicities. For example, it had not occurred to me to think about what a Muslim man born in Pakistan might think of a young western woman living in a house with two young men. Well, I was going to find out!

One day, Tony had just left the house and Steve was away for the day; I had only been on my own for ten minutes or so when I heard a knock on the door. I had been looking forward to having the place to myself for once with no hung-over would-be musicians left over from the previous night, monopolizing the settee and my attention, while nursing a lukewarm upteenth cup of tea. So it was with a none-too-pleased expression on my face that I opened the door to find Mr. Hussein, our landlord, standing there, a sugary smile on his lips. I thought I was going to be able to send him back easily, given that in the past he had only paid attention to the men of the house and I was not sure he had even noticed my presence. But to my surprise, when I told him that I was on my own, instead of turning back, he pushed past me through the open door. I repeated that neither my boyfriend nor our housemate were present, thinking that possibly the combination of his heavy Pakistani accent and of my marked French one had led to misunderstanding. But I soon realized that this was not the case. Mr. Hussein had come with an intention. "Cup of tea, dear!" I heard him say, not knowing whether this was an order or whether his poor command of the English language didn't allow him a more polite form of address.
I busied myself in the kitchen while, from the corner of my eye, I could see him sitting down at the dining-room table. A few minutes later, I was bringing the tea pot, a cup and saucer and sugar. While I was pouring the tea into his cup, he patted the chair near him and uttered "Come and sit!"
Not knowing what was expected of me and still thinking that he wanted to discuss the rent, I obediently sat down on the chair close to him, a little worried now. "Come closer!" he added, the sugary smile was beginning to make me feel ill-at-ease. I shuffled my chair, and only brought it one inch closer. "Look, if this is about the rent...." I started, but I suddenly felt his clammy chubby hand over mine and as he was looking into my eyes, I heard him say "You, very sweet lady!". My blood curled. I withdrew my hand as fast as I could and said raising my voice: "Is there a problem with the rent?" "No, not a problem with the rent. Do you like it here with the men?" I remained speechless. "I'd like you to come and see me sometimes, soon, you'd like it". I couldn't believe what I had just heard. I stood up abruptly and said gasping: "I'll send my boyfriend round to your place", emphasizing the word 'boyfriend' hoping that I was clear enough about my unavailibility. But Mr. Hussein didn't seem to see it that way. The sickly sweet smile never left his face. So I rushed to the front door, opened it wide and waited for him to figure out that he was not welcome any longer. "I see you soon I hope" were his parting words, as I nearly had to push him out. "You certainly won't", came my reply as I slammed the door shut. I was fuming. "How dare he?" I kept repeating to myself. I couldn't wait for Tony's return, to tell him all and for him to express his shock and his desire to avenge me. Little did I know!

4 - The groupie of the guitarist

I soon realized the extent to which England was a land of musicians and I came to understand that such brilliant bands as the Beatles had grown on fertile ground. Indeed, I found myself surrounded by young people most of whom had some musical skills. This had been very unusual among the French crowd I had left behind in Toulouse. Not surprising when you think that there was practically no music initiation taught in French schools; artistic skills being considered an extra, a cerise sur le gâteau that the French State did not feel bound to provide its children with. My boyfriend, Tony, was a good example of this plethora of talent. He was a guitar player who had taught himself to play and who seemed to have become something of a budding rock star. At least he and his friends firmly believed so. He could play and sing all the classics as well as, with his band, compose songs. They had jamming sessions until late at night and were even booked for some local events. Once they were invited to a music radio programme on a local radio station. My own knowledge of Anglo-saxon music, pop and rock, expounded no bounds. Rather like "La groupie du pianiste" in the famous song by Michel Berger, I turned into the groupie of the guitarist and just as the protagonist of that song, there really was nothing else that seemed worth doing in comparison. I did not see what else I could do to fill my life but eagerly attend all the musical activity and patiently wait for the end of the concerts to, at last, have the artist all to myself in the early hours of the morning.
On the one hand, it was exciting, especially since I was desperately in love with someone I considered a semi star but it was also depressing to feel I had no active part in the creative activity which was taking place around me. I soon realized that my relationship was not going to be with one man only but with an extended family of musicians. And I would never be one of them.

Caught as I was in the web of my new love life, I made the decision to postpone going back to France for a year, which at that age seemed like forever. At some point the decision was made that we, that is Tony and I, were going to share a house with other students. Not that I was very keen on the idea but I soon realized that I could not escape it. In Britain, already at that time, and contrary to the situation in France, where it was an unknown phenonomenon, house-sharing or flat-sharing was a popular way of getting cheap accommodation among students. As an excessively private young woman, I have to confess that I found the prospect daunting. To live with my lover was already a big step but to live with him and with others to boot was something I was anticipating with a degree of anxiety and even dread. And yet, I understood that there was no way I could avoid it; since I lived there, I had to adapt to their ways; when in Rome....and all that! And it did make sense financially speaking. We were students with no income other than scanty grants, small savings or the money earned doing odd jobs, thus it was a good idea to share resources. However, it was mainly a question of expectations; English students had been growing up looking forward to the day when they would at last leave home, become independent and have a whale of a time sharing a house with like-minded friends. This notion was totally connected to the whole university experience and seemed to me to be as important for them, if not more, than the studies themselves. It was expected to be a lot of fun. As for me, I didn't have those expectations. They are only beginning to appear in France now but were unheard of, then. Sharing a house with people who were not related to one in any way was still considered by most French young people as unpleasant if not altogether weird. There is no doubt that I would have much prefered it to be just the two of us. I had envisioned spending all our free time looking into each other's eyes adoringly but it was not to be. My boyfriend had other plans.

Therefore, as it was becoming obvious that I could not escape the house-sharing experience, I did my best to steer the decision of "who we were to share with" towards a manageable compromise. I wanted to prevent at all costs the presence of another woman in our house. The trust I had in my man was not so absolute that I wanted to test his resolve by jumping into a situation in which every morning or every night he would bump into another semi-naked female in our common bathroom. This was avoided in-extremis and we ended up sharing a two-bedroomed back-to-back house with Tony's best friend, guitar-playing Steve. I hasten to add that I had total confidence in my own ability to resist Steve's charms as I was not in the least attracted to him and could not figure out why so many people, including my own boyfriend Tony, were blabbing on about him being irresistible to the opposite sex.