The kings of no sense thinking - it's written in the constitution.

I work with French people every day and I try to be diplomatic, but often the French do your job for you and today a French man declared to me, “We are the kings of no sense thinking!” And so they are. The traffic lights for pedestrians turn green to red and back again and the lights which control road traffic work in the same way, timed so that red lights for traffic coincide with green lights for pedestrians and vice versa. This we all know, but the French apply their own bent logic, so that pedestrians and cars both cross on red as often as they do on green. Somehow the wrongness of one counterbalances the wrong of the other. Of course, sooner or later someone gets bounced off their feet by a bike, a motor cycle or a car, but as another Frenchman told me “We know we are breaking the rules, so it is ok for us when we get caught.” A French friend told me a story about how, when he was in Switzerland, he started to cross the road against the red light, but a Swiss woman caught his sleeve and sharply berated him for his irresponsibility, in demonstrating such a bad example to her child. “I’m sorry," he retorted "but I am French.” There is certainly a French idea that the liberté of their constitution can be called upon to justify jay walking, cycling without helmets, smoking in enclosed areas of bars and so on. If you drive a car, you know there will be pedestrians crossing at all times, so you keep an extra eye open. If you are a pedestrian, you don’t trust the green light to be safe, so always look to your left as you cross. Somehow in this fraternité of shared no sense thinking the égalité finds its own balance. Voila! Long live the king!

How to drink cheap wine and speak bad French.

I am not a wine snob. I simply can’t afford to be. In the UK my average wine purchase was no more than £3.49 for weekday bottles, rising to £4.99 at weekends and occasionally to £5.99 for a bottle for friends. I am aware of what a philistine this makes me, choosing wine by its price bracket, but twenty years ago I travelled through France for a few months and tasted some of the most exciting wine of my life. Bought from co-operative wine makers in small villages, I recall the vin de pays which rolled itself into a velvet wave on my tongue or frolicked like a muddy puppy in my throat. This was straightforward wine, drunk in the region of its birth from grape growers producing wine which can make a warrior of a timid man.

Imagine me here in a Paris supermarket, scanning the shelves for cheap wine, dreading the pinched noses and turned down mouths of my French friends, who disparage my taste in wine, as much as they disdain my attempts to speak their noble language. Ask a group of French people a point about grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation, and there will be huge disagreement between them: so it is with their opinions of wine. The first dispute stems from the way that they are reared and educated to revere the perfect stasis of their own language, but because there are so many rules, they simply can’t retain it all. The second dispute comes from their equally strong conviction that they know all there is to know about viniculture and palate. No two people in the whole of France actually taste wine in the same way. I do know however, that when I found a lovely wine for just over 3 euros ( a Côtes-de-Duras 2008 from Château les Roques, a 14% wine which was 60% Merlot and 40% Cabernet Sauvignon produced from 12 hectares sitting on a small plateau) all the bottles had disappeared by the time I went back two days later.

By choosing wines from the bottom (cheapest) shelf, but keeping to those from small producers, I have found some cheerful companions and haven’t had a wine headache since I came to Paris.

I drink my favourite wine first. ‘Keeping best to last’ just doesn’t bear up after the first few glasses and once ‘les amies’ have got onto their third bottle, they stop caring about my grammar and miraculously I speak much improved French.

Nature morte - still life and the love of a sticky toffee pudding.

A few weeks ago I visited La Bibliothèque Nationale to see an exhibition of early photography. Here’s a tip: you’re not allowed into the impossibly inspiring domed reading room without a reader’s ticket, but you can peek through the windows and if, as a voyeur like me, you get a thrill from sneaking unseen glances at people deep in thought through small high windows, architecture aside, you’ll find it worth the detour.

The labels next to the exhibits brought my attention to a French term which gives an insight into the French psyche. The photographs of fruit, grouped wine bottles, dead pike and such on a table, were all referred to as ‘nature morte’. These details of daily life (cut flowers, a cup just abandoned by the absentee user) are conceived as dead nature in French; the moment recorded is gone and withered, a romantic reminder that we are all heading in that same direction, whereas, ‘still life’ in English suggests a shared pause, a bridge between one moment in another time when the scene was recorded by the artist, and a moment taken now by the viewer to enter into the picture. For me this clear difference in the choice of description, is an indicator of the comparative pessimism and optimism of the French and English.

During my first year here in Paris I have witnessed displays of public crying no fewer than 10 times: Woken by a woman’s wailing in the street in the early hours: 3. Silent weeping on the metro: 2. Sniffy weeping on the metro: 1. Walking along crying openly in distress: 3. Standing by the tabac having a lovers' break up on a mobile phone, pleading with him not to leave, all red ringed eyes and uncontrollable snot: 1. As Lucy Wadham says in her book ‘The Secret Life of France’ the French want life to be constantly beautiful, therefore they cannot help but be disappointed. I, in my Anglo- Saxon way know that life is pretty ugly most of the time, so I am occasionally pleasantly surprised.

Because we English expect life to be miserable, we don’t have the taste for the ‘visual perfection’ kind of desserts that the French pâtissiers display like crafted jewels. We’re not interested in revering a damanding gâteau, some of which can cost a working man’s days wage, or a coquettish and high maintenance mille-feuille, which is lean and spiteful when you get under it’s corset! No, instead we go for the big, busty comforters, the girls we know and love, like a puffed up bread and butter pudding or a damson cobbler. These are puddings that hug you to them like a generous mother and indulge you in their comfortable familiarity, so that you leave them feeling well loved and happy, not toyed with, teased and spent.

Don’t get me wrong, I can wolf down six macaroons with a glass of Champagne in the afternoon as well as anyone, but however you flirt with it, a macaroon knows in its own bones that it ain’t no pudding. Watch them trying too hard, posing in their latest mode. Gold plated, or designer colour coordinated, a macaroon is still flighty, promising much but crumbling in the box or soggy by dawn.

If you want to cheer a French person up there is only one way to do it in my book. The wholesome, tooth licking love of a proper English pudding is hard to resist. Let them have a glass of Champagne, allow them to cry like rain on a dark day, then dab their eyes and sit them down to a bowl of warm Sticky Toffee Pudding with real Channel Island cream and watch their faces light up in the realisation that what you’ve been telling them all this time is true: Life really isn’t so bad after all.