I won't eat a startling number of things...

There are times when my pickiness with regard what I will and won’t eat leads to discomfort or even outright awkwardness. This tends to lead to progressively more awkward situations when I find myself in circumstances where the opportunity doesn’t present itself for me to simply ferret out some sweet food to stave off hunger until I can feed on something bland enough that it doesn’t offend my admittedly childish palette.

There was a time, shortly before the visit to the old folk’s home I described some weeks ago, when I was placed practically in my girlfriend’s care. During a trip to France (a country in which, it turns out, I am particularly poorly equipped for survival) she was forced to effectively make sure I had enough food that I wouldn’t, for one reason or another, die. Scurvy was an unnervingly real threat.

As it turns out, I lack the aptitude in foreign languages to do very much more than to understand the kinds of conversations that young children might carry with confidence. Worse still, this means that I spend an uncomfortable majority of my time frustrated and, embarrassingly, jealous that they can understand their elders, who tend to speak with their words rammed together, intimately intertwined as are the carriages of a train crash.

I find the most difficult aspect of learning any foreign language to overcome is the doubt evoked whenever someone raises a subject that seems in any way unusual or misunderstandable.

When confronted with the possibility of spending the guts of a month in France, I had meticulously prepared a survival kit. It was constructed in the same manner as I imagine the SAS might construct a survival kit – light on clothes, heavy on familiar food and drink. It was this preparation that prompted me to bring more tea than could be reasonably consumed by two men in a month, against the chance that I might simply sit in and read for the duration of our stay – a process which seems to involve the consumption of a copious amounts of tea.

On arrival at Gaelle’s cousin’s apartment, in which we would spend the vast majority of our stay, I sprang for the kitchen and (much like a guided missile finds a target from low orbit) secured the necessary accoutrements for the construction of a cup of tea. The first hurdle was the want of a teaspoon, which proved somewhat difficult to satisfy...

I leaned from the kitchen and called Gaelle’s cousin, “Ou est le... spoon,” For reasons of dexterity, I won’t be on any French bomb squads in the near future, but I can mime “spoon” passably. Julien returned a barrage of French, impossibly fast, hammering words into one another with a kind-hearted warmth that suggested:

A) that he knew exactly what I was talking about
B) that I am a simpleton for not understanding what is clearly a very simple exposition of the philosophy underlying his lack of spoons
C) that I need to consult Gaelle before asking simple questions

As it turned out, Julien’s philosophy with regard the spoon dilemma is relatively simple, and what follows is a rough description:

If you own multiple spoons, you are wasting time. Surely the day is far better spent using spoons as needed, and then simply throwing them away when they’ve been sullied by whatever corrupted filth you’ve decided to eat or drink. The point is that once you’ve committed to actually washing spoons, you might as well just own one spoon, and wash that as many times as you need. If you think about it, you’ll end up washing multiple spoons anyway. In a sense, it’s simple, beautiful even.

You can’t imagine the effect this has on a person with a staple diet principally composed of tea. I don’t wash spoons; I use the same one over and over and throw it in the sink at the end of the day. This seemed to be a concept with which Julien had never been faced before- but he being a man of action, was able to secure (by means I can only imagine involving theft) from the café above which we lived a small crate of spoons.

When a man’s first interaction with you in his home country culminates in the mass theft of cutlery, it’s hard not to view them as fantastically sanguine (in the sense of “hopelessly optimistic” not “bloody”). On this foundation we built a passably bilingual routine; we would play chess most mornings, and his English would gradually improve as my French far less gradually deteriorated. Having taught someone to speak to you on your terms, it becomes very difficult to revert to a position where the primary method of communication is charades...

I would later learn through my distinctly one sided French, thanks to what can only be described as an acute academic disinterest, he is considered to be a little less than the sharpest knife the drawer. This is a distressing thought to introduce to someone incapable of reply, particularly coupled with the idea that, despite the appearance that I had been teaching the man to play chess, he had begun to beat me under conditions that were increasingly less favourable.

Initially he would lose while I was reading a comic or watching a film, playing offhand. Later we would play over breakfast, and if I were sufficiently tired, he would gain an advantage. Within two weeks though, we would play early in the morning, with him having slept for less than four hours (often not at all), still drunk from the night before, in the clothes he wore the previous day, reeking of smoke and wine and somehow seeing through every effort I might muster, however carefully guarded. At the same time he learned to speak English passably, with little or no prior education, to an extent that laughed in the face of my six years of French.

In many ways he reminds me of Ross. I’m not sure why, though I suspect a large part of it is his startling aptitude with Cubase, the program from which the name CLED Error was unexpectedly supplied. Within an evening he learned to use a copy of Cubase entirely in English to an extent I have yet to see anyone else manage. There’s something distinctly depressing about that.

Marc "Hopelessly Outclassed" Mac


It's only worse because every time we played chess he'd use tricks I'd used on him in the previous game... it's depressing to see how poorly I play against someone who can use my own duplicity against me.