What the English do better than the French, and what the French do better than the English

“Le crunch,” they call it. An eminent French radio journalist suggested on Friday morning that it was nothing less than the continuation of the Hundred Years War by other (not too dissimilar) means. A meme circulating on social media has a cockerel standing triumphantly on an oven-ready joint of beef.

The French, in short, take Saturday’s England-France match at Twickenham very seriously indeed. They want to beat us much more than they want to beat anyone else. Our mutual history rather requires it. And it looks likely that they will. France may not have much of a government right now, but their rugby union team knocks seven bells out of all-comers.

Of course, as we invented almost every sport of any interest – football, golf, tennis, horse racing, badminton, cricket – so, in the 1870s, we gave rugby to the French. I think we’d now rather like it back. For the moment, at least, this appears improbable.

The pupils have surpassed the masters. That said, cross-Channel superiority is not all one way. The French may presently be better than us at rugby, skiing, maybe football and a few other things. But we take the trophy in at least as many departments. I know this to be the case, for I have a foot in both camps. To ease the tension emanating from Twickers, here’s a comparison of some of the fields in which either nation takes the lead. You might like to add your own thoughts…

What the French do better than the English

Living life full-frontal

Not in a lubricious sense – though, certainly, French people are less surprised by sex than the English, perhaps because they lack a tabloid press to raise the alarm. I’m referring to French life being less sheltered. Vertiginous mountain roads often fail to qualify for barriers. Live and angry bulls storm through village festivals, as they don’t through English parish fêtes.

Farmers still kill the family pig in their farmyards in autumn. In restaurants you might, if not wary, be served andouillette – strips of pig intestine rolled-up and wrapped in the pig’s colon; manouls – a gloopy dish of sheep intestines or, as one appalled English lady said to me, “fish with their little faces still on”.

Formality

In France, there’s “tu” and “vous” and “bonjour messieurs-dames”. In England, it’s a ubiquitous “hello, mate” or “goodbye, love” even when he or she is very much neither one nor the other.

Confidence

We master understatement and diffidence. We apologise when someone else bumps us off the pavement. I’ve seen an English lady apologise to a lamp post she crashed into. The French don’t do this. In a restaurant, you can spot the difference easily: the English study the menu, unsure whether we’re allowed to enjoy ourselves. The French enter the place and pick up the menu as if about to subject the staff to an examination.

Fair play

The French don’t grasp this, and probably should. There’s no way of even translating the concept, thus they talk of “le fair play”, but as a foreign abstraction. No way of saying, either, “it’s not cricket”. Frankly, “c’est pas pétanque” doesn’t get there.

Consumption of food and drink

Let’s leave aside the question of whether French food in general is better. (It is, but I’ll not say so for fear of, once again, disturbing the peace.) What I will say is that the French snack less. You don’t board a train from, say, Paris and find the carriage strewn with empty cans, packets and stray chocolate biscuits by 9.30am.

The lady beside you will wait until midday – maybe half past – to open her sandwiches, eat her apple and then put all the detritus neatly in the onboard bin. Nor do the French excel at binge-drinking – the sort of sessions which so enrich English city centres come 11pm. Thus they don’t get quite as fat as we do. They do get fat – on a bus recently, I sat both next to and behind an overflowing young fellow – but it’s not as common in Rennes as in Reading.

Patriotism

The vast majority of French people consider it normal to be proud of France, including of its past. Nor do they consider it a fascist aberration to fly the tricolour flag. And they aren’t, either, visibly embarrassed by a national anthem urging them to water their fields with “the blood impure” of their enemies.

Seafood

We English are good at fish fingers, not bad at filet-o-fish, and brilliant at fish and chips (though I’m less sure about the mushy peas). For an island race, though, and certain outposts aside, we don’t seem to get the most from the world of fish. Consider the ubiquity in France of mussels and oysters.

Or the iced seafood platters with oysters, whelks, scallops, scampi perhaps, sea urchins, clams and mussels. Maybe spider crabs, too. A bottle of Picpoul de Pinet, and your afternoon just got booked solid. Consider, too, bouillabaisse fish stew, ttoro fish soup, tielle octopus pie, or cod brandade from Nîmes – and that’s before we tackle several dozen different ways with bass, sea bream, John Dory, swordfish and the rest. I think the French could lead us to better times, fish-wise.

Markets

England has some good markets, notably in London. Elsewhere, though, too many appear to be weary affairs at the very fag end of retail. By contrast, almost every town and village in France has a market assembling the abundance from the surrounds and beyond, as it has for generations. Assembling, also, local social life. I encounter more people I know around the fruit and veg stall than at any other given point anywhere.

Town centres

French town centres are having a tough time – but they’re still holding out against the pandemic of dereliction, charity shops, estate agents, pop-up greetings card outlets, “all-the-crap-you-can-carry-for-a-quid” outlets and national sausage roll chains.

There’s real life coursing through most of them, proper shops and markets people actually need, family restaurants and bars, and all sorts of people – lawyers, barbers, bakers, engineers, binmen – still living bang central. Thus, come evening-tide, they aren’t abandoned to drink-fuelled bedlam.

Festivals

England has its festival moments – Aldeburgh, Glastonbury, Reading, Lytham (there’s a surprise: Kings of Leon, Alanis Morissette, Simple Minds and others on the Fylde coast in early July this year: lythamfestival.com) – but, up and down the scale, France has a lot more.

The big ones – drama in Avignon, music in Carcassonne, opera in Aix, rock’n’roll at the Vieilles Charrues in Brittany, French pop at Bourges, jazz at Marciac, Nice and Juan-les-Pins, dance in Montpellier and very many others – are balanced by more local affairs enlivening summer with live music, theatre, bull running, water jousting, dancing and dodgems. The tendency is for normal rules to lie fallow a few nights, notably around the starlit bar.

Rugby Union

Well, let’s check the Six Nations table in a couple of weeks.

Languages

The English person who has mastered “bonjour” and “au revoir”, “très bon” and “une beer, seal vue play” reckons he’s effectively bilingual. By contrast, I’ve rarely been to the Tourist Office in the remotest nook of France and found no one who spoke English. English may indeed be the world language. But English people may be the world’s laziest linguists.

Villages

Bit of an obsession of mine, this one – but it is the case that French villages remain vibrant and complete unto themselves as many English rural settlements no longer do. All 35,000 communes run much of their own business via a mayor and his council. They’re not beholden to a distant district council which you can never get through to on the phone. You have a problem, you want to see the mayor – it’s a couple of hundred yards to his office in the mairie.

Nearby, there will be a grocer’s, a butcher’s, a baker’s, a primary school, a bar-tabac, a boules pitch, a tennis club, weekly market and annual skiing trip for the village kids. Sunday mornings, you’ll stroll to the boulangerie for bread and – it’s Sunday – cakes. Life, not usually very fast, has slowed to an amble. People stream out of Mass, the older faithful surprised to realise, as every Sunday, that there’s time for a sharpener before lunch. You join them in the village café, buy the local Sunday paper and wend home to light the barbecue. Lord, this is terrific.

Service

France has career waiters – serious people in serious aprons who can correctly deliver 12 different drinks to one table, even when they were ordered in English. England has youngsters filling in time between social media, Fortnite Battle Royale and TV reality shows, and who can’t spell “cappuccino”.

Intellect

The English and French are as clever as one another. No doubt about that. The difference is that the French aren’t embarrassed about it. They’d be embarrassed, rather, not to know who Louis XI was or what he did. Or what the “madeleine de Proust” might be. Or how photosynthesis works. They have, for heaven’s sake, philosophers on primetime TV – and no way of saying “too clever by half”.

What the English do better than the French

Head of state

We’re way ahead. On our side of the Channel we have a more-than-a-thousand-year-old monarchy, admired by most, revered by some, staffed – at the top end, anyway – by exemplary people assuring continuity, and international standing. The soft power is ringing bells. On the other side, well. Nicolas Sarkozy? François Hollande? Gifted fellows, both, but you’re not going to turn to them to embody restraint and millennial stability, or queue to watch them ride past on a horse.

The French clearly need a royal family to give public life a bit of status. Also ceremonial, constancy and colour. They had one once but shortened it disastrously. Restoration is required. The problem, for an institution destined to be above squabbling, will be the squabbling. There appear to be three pretenders to the French throne from the Legitimist, Bonapartist and Orléanist camps.

There’s an impasse staring right at us. The solution is obvious. We share King Charles with them, allow them – of course – all the independence that self-governing dominion status entails (see Canada), finish the job started by the Hundred Years War – and everyone wins. I’m surprised no one thought of this before.

Rock’n’roll

On one side, the Stones, Queen, Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, David Bowie, the Beatles, Mott the Hoople, Fairport Convention, Yes, The Yardbirds, Florence and the Machine and Oasis. On the other? Sacha Distel and Johnny Hallyday.

Popular culture

France takes popular culture very seriously – witness the quasi state funeral for Johnny Hallyday (see above) – but isn’t always good at it. Most, but not all, programmes worth watching on French TV are inspired by, or dubbed from, the UK or US. The French can raise their game – witness Call My Agent, Lupin, HPI (the inspiration for Disney’s High Potential) – but don’t always choose to do so. The wit, invention and diversity of English TV would, if transferred to France, chase most domestic offerings off the small screen. To everyone’s benefit. Luckily, the French are infinitely better at films, which may explain why they haven’t enough energy to spare for TV.

Classical theatre

I may be wrong, but I suspect that the world would chuck Molière, Racine and Corneille off a raft to save Shakespeare. It is a bit late to try this. I mention it solely in the hope of persuading the French to pipe down a little about their three.

Newspapers

Notwithstanding the slings and arrows slung and arrowed at both the English tabloid press by people who, once famous, resent the media partly responsible for their fame, and at the serious press by tribunes of the intellect convinced that standards are going to hell in a handcart (“they pay you for this drivel?”), English papers (and magazines and news websites) would become like the French press only if they embraced desiccation, dropped human interest stories, chopped the photos, cut out the offbeat stuff, most interviews and Jeremy Clarkson, tackled the big issues determined to bore readers into submission, and ran endless opinion pieces à la “whither dialectical materialism in the dystopian future of a society bereft of reason?”

Pubs

The difference between pubs and French cafés? The pub is a refuge from the street, the café is an extension of it. In a pub, you hunker down away from the everyday – which, in a café, never ceases flowing visibly past the big windows and, as often as not, popping in to buy a lottery ticket or a coffee and then exiting again, pronto.

There’s no cosy sense of stability. Also no pork scratchings – which the world can manage without – or decent pork pies, which it can’t. That the French are, in fact, learning about the appeal of pubs is indicated by the epidemic of same, often admittedly in Irish pub kit form, spreading across towns and cities.

Breakfast

I’m talking about the proper English affair, not the sort of new wave breakfast (nuts, Greek yoghurt, chia seeds, avocados, half an apple, decaf tea) which sounds more like moral harassment than a meal. The real egg and bacon thing (hold the beans, extra black pudding, please) is so far ahead of croissants and brioche as to be an entirely different beast. One is breakfast, the other amounts to subsistence rations.

Other food

Though I cede to no one – well, apart from the French themselves – in my admiration for French cuisine, there are some things we do better and from which the French would benefit. Eccles cakes, for instance. Fish and chips which, though now common in France, haven’t yet been mastered in all their lightly battered glory.

Did I mention pork pies? Pies in general, in fact: I’d probably divorce my wife and marry any woman who brought over meat and potato pies to southern France.

Or even steak pies. Afternoon tea, of course, with scones, and cream on after jam. Proper chutney. Stilton – better than any blue cheese in France. Cumberland sausage. And, please, a late-night rogan josh in a proper, cheap curry house – as rife in 1980s Lancashire – would be a genuine step forward for French catering.

Stiff upper lip

Declining in England, of course, since the great days of Lord Uxbridge, hit by a cannonball at Waterloo (“By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” The nearby Duke of Wellington: “By God, sir, so you have!”) but some, at least, will still minimise a leg amputation. The French person probably won’t. He’ll be describing the agony of a broken toenail.

Humour

The French have a terrific, cutting sense of humour – as long as it’s made clear that the conversation, or the circumstances, have taken a light-hearted turn. They do not, unlike the English, laugh at pretty much anything at any time, however serious it may be. This is a direction in which we could usefully lead them.