Could do butter!
Famed French chef Raymond Blanc told www.gransnet.com in February that British women are more prone to porkiness than French women because of our tendency to drink six glasses of wine rather than one, our love of fry-ups and our inability to cook with butter.
I was in Paris recently, and it’s true. Look around and there are very few muffin tops winking at you over the rubbed red waistlines of jeans that go wide at the belly and tight on the thighs. You rarely struggle to sit on a seat on the metro (like you do in London) because your fellow passenger is dominating the space with her bottom and an anorak that blocks out views from the window. But my, oh my, and I don’t like to generalise, the Parisians looked glum. Les Miserables. It was the 20th January. It was raining. Everybody is broke in every Christian country because of Christmas. But still.
British people, albeit in monk-like silence on the underground, look happier. We all drink here because we are no good at philosophy. In France, they have great philosophers that people know as household names – in the same way we know characters from EastEnders or the Chuckle brothers. So we don’t have philosophy as ‘normal’ in our culture. Instead we do our own reasoning, looking at the futility and mystery of existence and saying to ourselves “This is weird. I have no idea why I’m here, where anyone goes to when they die or why on earth the joke is that if you do something interesting and meaningful with your life you will be skint but if you do something utterly boring and corporate you will have loads of money but no time or energy to enjoy it.” So us Brits think ‘Blimey, I need another glass of Chardonnay, another cider and a fry up just to get to grips with this.’
Add on all the things that go on unsaid beneath our British reserve (think Saville) and you need a drink.
It probably does make us fat. It also gives us half an hour’s respite from worrying about where we come from, why it keeps on raining and why we will never be a smaller dress size – or if we are it’s only for a week.
Sorry Raymond, I’d rather have a fifth glass of wine than a face like a wet day in Paris.
