Stupid Foreigners

All I did was buy a simple coffee then this happens.

I’m trying to drink my coffee and read The Times in relative peace but he has to announce his arrival by smashing a chair to pieces right next to me. Well sounded like it, anyway. My body reflex was to drop the newspaper and peer at him, something I quickly regretted. My coffee spilled. I felt exposed. Well, might now have to engage with the man or something. I averted my eyes as if I’d just seen something fascinating down the narrow, cobbled street, shadowed by three-storey buildings on either side. They had to have been there when Christ walked the earth, if he ever came to France, their dusty red-brick a bland backdrop for the scattered white patches of washing hanging over balconies like an old panel-beaten car.

“Excusez-moi, je m’appelle Francois,” he said, extending his long, limpid fingers towards me. Of course, they’re all called Francois here, aren’t they!

“Pardon?” I asked, reluctantly turning to look at him. So tempting to raise the newspaper again, more for escape than for information. Such ignorant aggression, these foreigners. They don’t let up, do they?

“Je suis desole,” he said. Of course he’s sorry but he’ll do it again and again, clumsy blighter. I just know. God, I wish they’d speak English like all intelligent people. “ze noise, I am very sorry, sir,” he said in English, peppered with a garlic accent, his spindly fingers still aimed at me.

“Oh, that’s alright, old chap,” I said, faking nonchalance with a shrug, as they do, to have him gone. His prying fingers didn’t move so I extended my hand and was crushed in a shark-jaw grip. Gads, such enthusiasm, such blundering into your face, these Frenchies. All garrulous smiles and shouting bonhomie. Where was subtlety and discretion, nowadays? Gone with the death of Queen Victoria, I presume.

He eventually released my hand, the blood flowed again and I saw he’d just tipped one of the garishly painted chairs over. Nothing more. My shattered nerves did tend to exaggerate things these days. After that incident … well, those incidents, really. I’d escaped my London flat in the dead of night, avoided the rabid press and snuck away to this dramatically Gallic little town on the Bordeaux coast. It looked peaceful but the people spoke a thousand decibels higher than they needed to. There’s no peace anywhere, it seems.

You become an MP, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, try to bring your country back from bankruptcy and they’re always at you, wanting this, that and the next thing. No gratitude. I mean, a chap needs his time out, release the pressure, couple of call girls, a few splifs, nice hotel. God, I’m saving the country and they complain about a few pounds from the public purse … well, a million or so if I recollect. The girls squall and I’m served up on prime TV and need to get out before all is lost.

So, peace is what I need and this French oaf barges into my first morning, his thick black hair awry, his multitudinous teeth gleaming and he wants to strike up a wretched conversation merely because he stumbled on a chair … a chair that he’s now pulling over to me. Might as bloody well sit on my lap.

“You want other coffee?” he asks, scratching his stained white t-shirt and flipping hair out of his eyes with the other hand. Blasted hands everywhere. “I sorry for dis crash bang. I get you other coffee, oui?” His hands keep flaying about – this time, in the air and a waitress miraculously appears from the café’s gloom, at our pavement table. Her black skirt and white apron are a smart uniform and I wonder if she’d like a roll in the hay and then realise I’m being asked a question.

“Pardon?” I ask, nearly lapsing into a French accent.

“Un café, Monsieur?” she asks, her breasts quite determined to leap out at any moment. I blush and berate myself.

“Aah, yes, I suppose so,” I stammer, my English more limited than theirs for a moment. “Yes, if you insist.”

“Aah, I insist!” he bellows in a rich baritone as if I’m an audience of thousands. She totters off, her bottom jiggling nicely and I force myself to look away. “You are here for holiday, oui?” he asks and I realise I must engage, if only to shut him up.

“Yes, yes, a wee holiday,” I say. “Time out and all that.”

“Oui, business is stressful, yes?” he says, smacking his forehead as if it just behaved badly. “Time out for … how you say … rest and recreation?”

“Yes, R and R, we say,” I inform him, hoping to improve his English.

“And what do you do for zis R and R?”

“Oh, very little, actually. Sitting about and staring at your blue sky …”

“And you like humpy pumpy?”

“Pardon?” I ask, shocked.

“Aah, jigga jigga,” he says, his fist pumping like a piston. Quite unmistakable meaning.

“Ooh … aah … that,” I stammer, blushing again. “Yes, that’s nice to … aah …”

“Jeanette here, she sit on your leg,” he says, nodding towards the approaching waitress. “You take her for little jigga jigga. She like that.” I stare at him. What blatant effrontery. So ignorant of the fineries of life. No subtlety.

She is standing there, looking down at me and I’m tempted to slam the newspaper over my crotch to hide the rising tide, so to speak.

“I sit on your knee?” she asks as she bends to place the coffee down, her breasts both menacing and inviting. How could I say no so I nod and smile awkwardly.

She pops onto my lap and accidentally presses on my rising groin. Or was it an accident?

Then there’s a click and I look up to see his camera and, below it, his huge smile. She puts her arms around my neck in a vice grip and kisses me on the lips as the camera chatters like a machine gun before I have time to recover my senses. Then she leaps up and disappears into the bowels of the café.

“So, this coffee maybe, say, five thousand euros, oui,” he suggests, waving his camera in my face, menacingly. “Then we not say where you do R and R and we not show pictures to anyone.”

Maybe these foreigners aren’t so stupid after all!