DIARY EXTRACT
(Edited for the purpose of this post, and to decode my messy handwriting)
Monday, December 28th
9:30pm, Somewhere in the West of Ireland, 2015
Dear Reader,
‘Les Misérables’ is
just starting now on the Christmas side of television, so as you can guess, I’m
at home in Ireland.
I was out with two of
my besties - Méadhbh and Rob the other
night; St. Stephen’s Night it was. It’s one of those big nights of the year in
Ireland, you know, December 26th. It’s the day after Christmas, so
everyone has played their fair share of games of Scrabble with their Aunts and Uncles, and now that means it’s time
to have left over turkey for dinner and indulge in the box of Roses or Heroes your Uncle John brought when he came to visit; Cursing and
blinding at your sister for putting the wrappers back in the box when you’re there tossing the chocolate treats like
a salad in an effort to find all of the good ones.
When the evening hits,
it’s time to head into town; Donning whatever tacky Christmas jumper or sparkly
top you might have; Grabbing that bottle of Merlot from the wine cabinet on
your way out, you know, the present Auntie Mary brought when she came to visit.
I wasn’t supposed to
go out. Naturally, I was supposed to be writing, but there was too much
Christmas television on as a distraction and I thought: If I’m watching Home Alone for the tenth time, then I might as well be
out, and not writing.
Wow, I’m
such a good writer.
Star Trek was on the Christmas side of television when I got to
Rob’s house for pre-drinks, and he nearly cursed my name when I asked him if it
was Star Wars (sorry) and he thanked
the stars that Éamonn (another one of our besties) wasn’t there to hear me say
that because he might have cried. There could have been tears.
But there were no tears. I gave the bottle of Merlot to Rob’s
parents, and before long we were on our way.
In an Irish Pub with
Méadhbh, we spotted an Aiden Gillen look-a-like (Little Finger from Game of
Thrones) and freaked out with excitement.
The poor man didn’t know what was going on.
Then we went on to our
favourite hipster bar with actual student
prices. The music was great, but my memories are hazy now; Arctic Monkeys and
classic 80’s tunes I think it was. It’s a funny thing that; Remembering that
the music was great, but not really remembering the music itself.
And of all the people in the
crowded pub that night, of course I ended up chatting to the only French people
there. My fondness for France must have radiated through my snowman hoodie, or
maybe I just smell them out, like those service dogs you see at airports.
I was on my own briefly in the
smoking area when I got separated from the others, but I turned around suddenly
when I heard French mumblings, and the tipsy Mairéad inside of me amplified X10,
saying Yes, I am so going to talk to
these French people, and it’s going to be fine, and I won’t make any grammar
mistakes.
I don’t remember it quite as clearly
as the ice palace in Frozen, but I
know those guys must’ve been really nice to put up with me insisting on
speaking broken French the whole night, even though they had perfect English. I
assured them that they had phenomenal English, and I just really needed to
practise my French before I returned to Paris (clearly). I was excited to learn that one of them was from
Toulouse, because I had been planning on visiting a friend in Toulouse, so I
plagued him with questions on what I should do there, and what I should see.
Still, he answered them politely. All was going well as I chatted with him and
his friends, but alas,
I was about to make a grave grammar mistake.
(C’est pas grave)
I noticed that the Toulousain was
wearing a really heavy winter coat, despite the fact that we had moved away
from the smoking area and were all dancing around in a crowded bar with no
air-con. Now I’m not trying to be all stereotypical but I’ve noticed a lot of
people wearing heavy winter coats in France even when the sun is out; (Flash
forward to March 2016 when I was lounging with my ice-cream in the Luxembourg
Gardens having just gotten off work early, and everyone around me was sunbathing in
their winter coats…?) That’s fine if you want to do that. I’m all for
alternative styles and I’m not here to judge, but it just confused me and I
wanted to know the reason behind it.
Maybe I’m the one with the unusual habit
of wearing a not-so-winter jacket à Paris, ‘cause France is a sauna compared to
cold Ireland, especially when you live in the windy west of the Emerald Isle.
Maybe the French aren’t as used to the cold as I am, so that’s why they rely so
much on their winter coats, even when Paris is just a tiny bit cold, according
to me.
Anyway, at the time I
still wanted to know why the Toulousain was wearing his winter coat while
dancing, and that’s when the pas grave grammar mistake occurred. In French, and
on the crowded dancefloor, I asked the Toulousain:
‘Are you not too warm
in that coat?’
That sounds fine, doesn’t it? There
doesn’t seem to be anything at all wrong with that question. Well, I’ll
explain. There’s this one great thing (of many) about French that makes
speaking it a lot easier for a non-native speaker like myself. Should you raise
your voice at the end of a sentence when speaking French, it automatically
turns your sentence into a question, so you don’t even have to worry about that
whole grammatical way of forming questions (Est-ce-que
etc.) That stuff is only for the written
form of questions. We do the same thing in English, but technically it’s not
correct to do so in English, and we only do it when we’re being sarcastic or if
we’re a movie’s antagonist like a bond villain, for example. You wouldn’t get
any marks for it in an oral exam, but in a French oral exam, you would. Well
isn’t that great!? Yes, but, the music and chattering on the dancefloor was so
loud that night that the Toulousain didn’t hear my voice raising at the end of
my question, so to him, it was a statement. At this point I was thinking, well
this isn’t a huge grammatical mistake of mine, because obviously he’ll realise
that I meant for it to be a question. (C’est
pas grave)
It’s
cool. It’s fine, I thought. The Toulousain is going to answer my
question now, and I’ll finally know why I keep seeing winter coats in France.
But you already know, that’s not how it’s going to go. The Toulousain said to
me in English:
‘You’re really pretty! Would you
like a drink?’
I was taken aback to say the least, because his outburst came
out of nowhere, and he just ignored
my question and I still really really wanted
to know what was up with the winter coat. Still, I was paying rent in Paris and only working 12 hours a week. I wasn’t
going to turn down a free drink.
‘What’s there to lose?’ I said to the Toulousain, and followed him to the bar.
(Hey, I never said I was good at jokes, but I am ‘good’ at puns)
Two minutes into my
vodka coke, I realised what I’d done. (C’est pas grave)
My Secondary School
French teacher’s voice swam around in my mind saying;
‘J’ai finit means I am finished, but Je suis finit means I am dead!’ and the whole class laughed, saying
who would ever confuse those phrases with
each other? Then the teacher said:
‘J’ai chaud means I am
warm, or I have a temperature, but je suis chaud means-
Oh!
Oh.
I nearly choked on my vodka coke.
So,
Instead of being nerdy like I thought I was being and asking the
Toulousain why he was wearing a winter coat and why there are so many coats on
people in France, and woww the
weather is so much colder in Ireland than it is in France.
Well, what I actually said was:
‘You are so attractive in that coat’
-
to put it mildly.
(C’est pas grave)
And so at the bar,
when this realisation hit me, I flinched like a gazelle in the wild when they
hear a noise and think it’s a hyena, but cool
as I am, I just pretended it was because I really loved the song that the DJ
had just put on, and it was a nice surprise. Yep, I played along and got away
with it. Hey, at least my brain
waited to make this grammatical error for the cute guy at the bar, rather than
a random teacher at my work place, or I don’t know, maybe one of the random
infinite strangers I see on a regular basis walking around Paris with heavy
winter coats. Meanwhile, in the same weather, the sun could easily burn me. (Hey, don’t judge, I have Irish skin!)
Fast forward to the following
morning –
I wake up in the guest bedroom at Rob’s house, dehydrated, regretting
spending God knows how much money on chips, and reaching for my phone to delete
my 5am Facebook friend request sent to the Toulousain. Yep, because misusing
grammar embarrasses me that much, but
certainly not enough to make me stay at home, skip St. Stephen’s Night in the
first place, and write that chapter I was supposed to write for that book I
should be writing right now.
That said, I had a fantastic
night!
I can’t wait to do it all over again next Christmas when my
grammar skills have improved, and this time I’ll remember to order many pints
of water from the bar.
Moral of the story:
If you’re drinking vodka cokes, drink plenty of water too, because the
dehydrated sand storm scene from ‘The
Mummy’ is not a good look.
Also, grammar, much like punctuation, is very important. Don’t
disregard it!
(… And I still don’t know what the deal is with those winter
coats.)
C’est pas grave.
Ciao,
Madame Mayreed.
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