Since moving to France, almost 28 years ago now, we've taken a perverse pleasure in collecting Anglocisms, if that's what you call them, that have crept – or rather leapt – into the French language despite the efforts of a Salon dedicated to keeping it pure. Les baskets, for example, are a form of footwear – which doesn't mean, alas, that people here wear great cumbersome basket-shoes on their feet, woven out of straw or raffia or whatever they're made from these days. No, the word means 'trainers' and presumably derives from basketball shoes.
Another early one that we have taken in our stride is un jean. Normally it takes about three French words to approximate one English word – and hence, I suppose, all these Anglocisms – but in this case it's the other way round. Un jean equals 'a pair of jeans' – again alas, because I like to imagine a whole nation of one legged-people wearing a single denim trouser-leg (and wearing a woven basket on the foot at the end of that leg). Sadly, not the case.
Le jogging was another early favourite – it's old hat now – as in 'Est-ce que vous faites le jogging chaque matin?' To which my stock answer would be, 'No I prefer riding my bicycle each morning with my faithful dog at my side, because jogging probably wrecks your knees over time.' A properly equipped French jogger does le jogging in un jogging (no 's', no need for 'pants'). From le jogging it's a comparatively logical bound to le re-looking. You can go to a hairdresser or a stylist for a re-looking, or you can even give furniture a bit of a re-looking, perhaps with a bit of sandpaper and a tin of varnish.
The other morning I received a gleeful text from the Good Wife, who'd tuned into a radio station on her way to work in Brive and heard about une stand-upeuse. All day long, I imagined it had something to do with women who made a habit of not keeping their dates – as in 'Oh, that one. She's a notorious stand-upeuse. Good luck if you think she'll turn up for the film.' But no, I was quite wrong. When the worker returned, she revealed that it means 'stand-up comedienne'. Sorry, I shouldn't say that any more, should I? 'Stand-up comedian.' So the male of the species would be un stand-upeur. 'What do you want to be when you grow up, Jean-Luc?' 'Je veux être un stand-upeur.'
There are many more that tickle us consistently. I won't even start on 'Cuir Homme', the leather shop for men. Fortunately, they don't take up any physical space, unlike my compulsive need to collect tangible objects. The ageing process slows most things down, but my obsession with cultural artefacts is growing apace. The older I get, the more it seems I want to look at things, touch them, listen to them while I'm still here to enjoy them. You can't take them with you.
It started early in my life, with Corgi toys and Britains Limited cowboys and Indians and... zoo animals. Then it was records. Then it was books. Then it was more records, and cassette tapes, and video tapes. Then it was CDs and DVDs. Now it's more records and more CDs. My wife's maxim is that for every new item that comes into the house, an old item should leave it. I've managed to get around it by being literal. I don't buy new items (well, not generally), I buy things second-hand.
The passion for books gradually abated after my student years. Books do furnish a room, as Anthony Powel entitled one of his novels, but the trouble is they have furnished most of this house. The shelves are full, there's room for no more. Besides, books take so frigging long to read and we're both, rapidly, running out of time. The same with DVDs. There's no more room and anyway there's not the pressing need now, given Film Four, Talking Pictures and so on.
People think I'm mad keeping my cassettes; you can never find the one you're looking for, anyway. But they represent a considerable chunk of my misspent life, they still sound pretty damn good and pre-recorded cassettes (for some peculiar reason) are becoming sought after. Records and compact discs, though, remain another matter. The official shelves are sagging at the seams, but you can slot records into canny spaces if necessary and you can build little hillocks of piled CDs. One of my few regrets is that I wasn't more avid in my collecting when vinyl was as unloved as CDs appear to be nowadays. But there are still bargains to be had, which makes the thrill of the chase perhaps that much more thrilling.
My oldest friend and lifelong male soul-mate spends much of his spare time trawling for records in the thrift shops of Manhattan. He has a small and just affordable basement apartment replete with tower-blocks of piled books and cupboards full of records. Apart from both being the eldest of four, we're shaped by quite different family influences, yet we're two peas in a pod. My hunting grounds are the charity shops of Romsey, when I'm back in the U of K, and – now that Philippe has closed his record shop in Brive to take his retirement – Emmaüs, La Ressourcerie and the Secours Populaire here in France. Charitable thrift shops, I suppose.
Much of the time, I come away empty-handed, but just recently I've had a bit of a shark's feeding frenzy. The other day, I came away with what could have once been someone's entire jazz collection on CD: 30 of them and a triple Django Reinhardt LP set, for 11 euros. I probably didn't need any of them, but they filled a few holes in my collection, which is already big enough to keep me going till the bitter end and into the after-life. My brother quizzes me with quasi-mathematical problems like, 'If you did nothing else, how much time would you need to spend to listen to everything you've got?' But that's missing the point. It's just so nice and reassuring to have them. I'm an inveterate browser, and it allows me to browse to my heart's content.
If this sounds like I'm a sad bastard, I'm happy/sad, as Tim Buckley might have had it. I was very happy the other day, when I stumbled upon several boxes of records in a depot, probably part of a house clearance, priced at three for two euros. The name on a couple suggested a fellow Brit and, judging by the records' vintage, perhaps a similar human vintage. Perhaps he died and his collection was dumped by long-suffering loved-ones. Perhaps he sold up and moved back home and decided that he couldn't take them with him. I don't know. In any case, he left behind Pink Floyd's first two albums. I'm not even a particular fan of Pink Floyd, but the adrenalin rush nearly knocked me off my feet. I could sell them for a considerable profit, but I'll probably hang onto them even though some of the music makes me cringe. It's simply to have them there, so I can pull them out of the rack and look at them from time to time and maybe glow in the pleasure of showing them to someone and hearing them gasp. Unfortunately we have few visitors these days, and even fewer who are remotely interested in perusing records. I shall have to wait for my Man in Manhattan's next visit.
Just lately I have also started collecting ticks: those fiendish parasites that jump onto your skin or clothing when you brush past their natural habitat. It's a hazard of living in the French countryside, but this year they have reached epidemic proportions. On Sunday morning, for example, we took Daphne on a long walk through the woods. I wore shorts because it was hot. When I got back, I removed seven microscopic swine scuttling over my legs. If you don't get them straight away, they burrow into your flesh to suck your blood. The tiny ones are the most difficult to remove with the green plastic hook device.
We removed at least seven from Daphne, too. Her coat is so thick that they're hard to find, and you generally only discover them after they've gorged themselves on her blood. Sometimes, if you miss them, they get so big and bloated that they fall off onto the floor. The other day I trod on one in bare feet. It was not a nice experience. The blood in the bulbous sac was a deep, virulent red and very difficult to wipe off foot and floor.
Just one of the many hazards of being a collector. But if I were young and wanted to follow a career as a stand-upeur, it'd provide plenty of material. I could call myself Kid Kollektor or something edgy. The other day, right...?