Hell is an expat dinner party

I just don’t understand it. Emigrating from Britain to France is a big step. Shifting from one culture to another takes courage and enterprise. Especially if you are of maturer years. But let’s assume it’s now or never and you follow through with it. You look for a house in France, buy one, go through all the bureaucracy, the rigmarole. You put all your worldly goods into a high-top van and get someone to drive it down. You move in. You go through the further circle of French bureaucratic hell and get your family saloon reregistered.

At first you don’t know your way around. When you are driving, young and old French people tailgate you, hooting and giving you the finger. On foot, you can’t understand a word anyone is saying. You become discouraged. But you persevere: you’ve burnt your bridges and must like it or lump it. You sign up to a French mobile-phone company — robbing buggers — and for an internet account and an electricity account and you pay the taxe d’habitation. Now you are all legal.

Your new life comes slowly into focus. You get used to the eccentric opening hours. You know where in the Spar to find the Heinz baked beans and the Worcester sauce and the Rich Tea biscuits and you’ve gravitated to a congenial little inexpensive local restaurant and got to know the waiter and the menu. (Out of curiosity you once tried the tête de veau and know never to order it ever again.) Old M. Suzanne, the local indie garage mechanic, might be a paid-up fascist but he’s cheap and, moreover, honest. He doesn’t, for example, automatically double the bill because you are English or a woman.