Fluid consumption habits

One thing I hear repeatedly when I go to the Anglo-Saxon world is criticism of people who drink bottled water.  Stupid people like to comment on how in drinking bottled water, we are consuming at great expense something we could get for free from the tap.  To me, this shows a tremendous amount of ignorance.

I could never drink tap water.  Ever.  For the simple reason that it is not pure enough.  I hope I would never find myself in that situation, but if I were in a desert dying of thirst, I would be highly tempted to decline tap water, even if it meant death, but then who knows?  Even salt water can taste delicious in a desert.  For this reason, when I travel to hot countries, I carry with me some means of filtering the water so that the disgusting nature of tap water is mitigated.  To me, tap water is only for washing and not for drinking.

When it comes to what I will condescend to drink, at the very least, I will not settle for anything less than the quality of the French brand Volvic.  Volvic is by no means a top brand, given its ubiquity, even in the UK, where bourgeois bohemians often drink it, mistakenly thinking it is a top brand.  Ha!  What ignorance!

Ignorant people say that the only real difference between water types around the world is the isotopes, which indicate where people were from to archaeologists many years later.  Well, I've got news for such people: - a French woman's palate is so sophisticated that it can tell the difference between isotopes.  How do we do that?  Hard to say.  I guess it is part of how we are so effortlessly perfect.

Another brand of water I love to drink, even though it isn't French, is Fiji Water.  I feel privileged to be sophisticated enough to be able to drink all these different types of water and know where they are all from.

Another brand of water I love to drink is San Pellegrino.  Though it is not French either, it is a sophisticated Italian brand that comes from San Pellegrino Terme, near Bergamo in Italy.  It was briefly mentioned by the Aga Saga Woman in The Catherine Tate Show, a British comedy show (one of the few things British people do better than us French).  The Aga Saga Woman is portrayed as a snobbish woman, but as far as I'm concerned, her tastes are actually very lower class compared to those of sophisticated French women.

Now, when choosing mineral waters, one must be careful, as not all bottled water is drinkable.  There was one occasion when I was in the UK on business and my incompetent bank activated the policy I have for automatically cancelling all my cards when one's wallet gets stolen.  What happened was that a woman with a similar name called to have her cards cancelled, meaning that none of my cards worked.  The most horrific thing was that I had to live on the £200 cash I had before going back to France the following day, where I was able to get the matter sorted out with my bank.  As a result, I condescended to go into a branch of Tesco when I became thirsty.  YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was one of the most horrific experiences of my life and it left me deeply traumatised for months afterwards.  Anyway, one of the things that mitigated the experience was finding bottles of Volvic and San Pellegrino available.  However, there were bottles of low-quality water, in particular things like Buxton Water and own-brand stuff from Scotland.  Yuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Look at the photo above with the overweight women collecting water from some sort of spring water fountain in Buxton, Derbyshire.  If they drank proper water like us French women, they would not get like this.  The only brand of mineral water bottled in Britain I would ever consider condescending to drink in Britain.  The reason is that Glastonbury is somewhere near Bath, which is the site of Britain's only thermal spa.  The photo below shows the reservoir from which Glastonbury Spring Water is collected.  As far as I am aware from the company's website, the water is only sold on a trade basis, but maybe that is a mark of its exclusivity?  If I were to start a British version of my magazine and I didn't want to create controversy by importing foreign water loaded with air miles (some people are ignorant, but alas, in the world of business, you sometimes have to do things to generate public goodwill), I would probably choose them as the supplier of bottled water for my office.

However, those wanting to be like us sophisticated French women, all I can say is beware!  Not all bottled water on sale is high quality and anyone who thinks so needs to do further work to refine their palate.

Café culture

Another way in which we French are far more stylish than our Anglo-Saxon cousins is the way we gingerly sip drinks in cafés.  Visiting cafés is something only yuppies tend to do in the USA, but the fact that café culture has been so ingrained in French life for such a long time now is a sign of how we are genuinely sophisticated and not just a bunch of upstarts.  See this picture below of a café scene in Maubourguet near the Pyrenees.

When I need affirmation about how stylish I am as a French woman, I tend to go into a café, buy the drink with the most unpronounceable name on the menu, sit watching the world go by and think about how vulgar and unstylish Anglo-Saxon people are.  I (sometimes reluctantly, as this disgusts me) picture this image of some overweight American swigging from a 3 litre bottle of Diet Coke, thinking that the fact that it is the "diet" variety will cause him or her to lose weight.

Why is it that women in other nations are so ignorant of how effortlessly perfect we French women are and why can't they slavishly replicate our example of stylishness, weighing almost nothing and generally being perfect?

Avoidance of supermarkets

Another way in which we French women are without equal: - we do shopping better than anyone else.
Firstly, we don't do the Anglo-Saxon thing of buying food in bulk.  Large size is a very vulgar
Anglo-Saxon thing that has absolutely no place in a French home (unless it is the floor size of
one's residence). 

One thing that makes us better than our Anglo-Saxon counterparts is that we only buy food on a
daily basis. 

When I see a suave French man wearing a polo neck jumper and square glasses walking along the
street with chin-length hair carefully gelled to flow backwards holding a paper bag of shopping
containing the day's food, with some herbs contained within the bag still in their plant pot
protruding above the top of the bag, I think to myself about how we French ooze sophistication.

When I go to the USA, I tend to see fatty women (who wobble around from side-to-side because they
are so fat) driving MPVs, mid-size cars (by American standards, anyway), SUVs, pick-up trucks etc
emerging from the "maaaall" with gigantic trolleys loaded to the brim with gigantic quantities of
food, loading them into the car.  When I see this typical sight, I think to myself how vulgar and lacking in sophistication Americans look in comparison to us French.

I must comment that I only see this sight from a distance, as I feel "shaaaapping maaaalls" are unbefitting of a sophisticated French woman such as myself.  The closest thing I am willing to do when it comes to going to the "maaaall" is visit Le Bon Marché in Paris.

Everyone (in France, that is) knows that the proper way to go shopping is to spend several hours (if necessary, though if you are sophisticated like me, you will know all the local specialist high-quality shops) hunting for ingredients in high-quality specialist shops.  I have such a refined palate that I can tell the difference between such food and food that has come from a "shaaaaping maaaall".  When the latter enters my mouth, I spit it out in disgust.

My tea party sentiments

I own enormous penthouses in Paris and Marseille, but I have the conspicuous feeling that there must be more to life than this.  There must be more available to me out there.

There is indeed.  Given François Hollande's desire to bleed successful people such as myself out of every cent we have, I find that I have to make do with two penthouses, both of which overlook the water (the Seine in the case of Paris and the Vieux Port in the case of Marseille).  I am outraged by this!  I have done some calculations and I have found that if the government adopted tax rates more to the liking of successful people such as myself, I would be able to afford to buy a château.

This makes me mad and arouses my tea party sentiments.  I think that people who are not successful should be left to starve, but with one proviso: - that the government adopt a taxation and spending strategy that encourages people to buy magazines!  Obviously, as I'd have to find another income if people couldn't afford to buy them.

Some people would accuse me of being hypocritical at this point and point out that I travel via gold-plated infrastructure (the TGV).  I would counter by saying that the TGV recoups 100% of its service costs and 70% of the infrastructure costs by fares alone: - any true tea partyist would travel by train.  Also, RFF (Réseau Ferré de France, the railway infrastructure manager) is forbidden from making unprofitable investments.  But anyway, I digress.

I don't normally like things in the Anglo-Saxon world, but there is one lady I really admire in the Anglo-Saxon world.  She is the Australian mining tycoon named Gina Rinehart (no photo of her on Wikimedia Commons, unfortunately).  She is famous for her conspicuous consumption, greed and various other things: - much to my delight.  She was at one point rated the richest woman in the world and I believe she still holds the Australian record.  One of the things she famously did was calling upon Australians to take a wage cut, given the large number of Africans willing to work for $2 per day.  Some people would say, "Now, hang on a minute, you call for us to take wage cuts when you are living a life of affluence".  I would say, "You go girl!"

However, if I found a Wikimedia Commons photo of her, I would illustrate how immensely fat she is.  She famously said that if people wanted to have more money they should “stop whingeing” and “Do something to make more money yourself - spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working”.  Yes, some people should smoke less and drink less.  I would conversely say to Ms. Rinehart that some people should eat less!  Honestly, if you see a picture of her, you will see how she desperately needs to replicate the French lifestyle when it comes to portion sizes.  I think it is a shame that somebody as successful as her has no class and looks like a big, fat, ugly pig.  If only she could complement her wealth by being classy, daintily thin and stylish!

The lavender of Provence

When I was in the UK, I frequently found myself having to cover my nose when my refined olfactory glands detected the whiff of artificial air fresheners.  In France, we are disgusted by the idea of anything artificial and we hold to the view that unnatural air fresheners are poisonous and only a small step up from nerve gas.

Here in France, we only do the real thing.  Us French women love nothing better to go to the market and buy some French lavender from Provence.  The fact that we do this is a mark of how cultured we are.

With summer upon us, you can bet I will be spending lots of time in the lavender fields of Provence.  Paris is wonderful with its sophistication not found anywhere else in the world (save for perhaps Marseille!), but sometimes the rat race becomes too much and I find I need to steel my wall by going to the lavender fields.

A bit about myself

I have just come across a most terrible example of covetousness by Zoë Williams of the British newspaper The Guardian here.

I am absolutely outraged that anybody dares to question the idea that we French women are anything less than perfect and that foreign women should have any pastimes besides aspiring to be like impossibly perfect and dainty French women such as myself.

I thought I would take this opportunity to tell my readers a bit more about myself.

I may appear to be a pure-bred French woman, but this is not the whole story.  Some of you may have been reading this blog and wondering if it was actually written by a native speaker of English.  Well, you were right.  I was born to a mother from London.  My mother made sure to teach me to speak English with me from the beginning and made sure I read lots of English material, even though it pales in comparison to the sophisticated French philosophers.  However, the pain of reading such unsophisticated material was mitigated by reading English translations of great works of French literature, such as Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, though the beauty of the original novels was never fully captured in the English translations.

Still, even though I had to endure such a horrific lack of sophistication in my reading material, I am glad my mother made sure she imparted her command of the English language, as it proved very useful in my career.  One of the few things I am willing to slag off France about is the stale labour market.  In France, the government is mostly concerned with protecting jobs for useless older workers and it is very difficult for a young ambitious professional such as myself to get a foothold in the labour market.  I moved to London to work in the fashion industry and build up my expertise.  I worked for various fashion magazines, honing my writing and journalism skills, climbing the career ladder as quickly as I could.

I am grateful to the UK for giving me the chance to build up my career, but even so, I still feel obligated to comment on the fact that it is an unsophisticated wasteland.  Luckily, the extension of the UK's HS1 (the high-speed railway line between London and the Channel Tunnel) to St. Pancras opened in November 2007, shortly before I took up my employment in London, meaning that I could get back to Paris in two hours and fifteen minutes.  Every weekend, I would travel back to Paris on the Eurostar to give myself some respite from the UK's severe lack of sophistication.  On anything longer than a standard weekend (e.g. holidays, weekends followed by a Monday public holiday etc), I would take the Eurostar to Paris, stay the night in Paris and hop on a TGV to Marseille the following morning.  Since the extension of the LGV Méditeranée opened in 2000, it has been possible to go between Paris Gare de Lyon and Marseille St. Charles stations in just three hours and five minutes.  Absolute bliss!

In case you are wondering how I know all this despite viewing it as severely unladylike to be a gricer, my father has worked as a rolling stock engineer for SNCF for many years and he regularly talked about railway-related matters at home, much to the chagrin of some family members, but nevertheless, I have a latent knowledge about railway-related matters as a result.

Eventually, I had the expertise that enabled me to seek my dream job in France's fashion industry and I got out of the UK as quickly as I possibly could.  A short while later, the magazine I worked for went under, not through any fault of my own, I might add: - over time, the magazine made some very poor recruitment decisions, employing some people who didn't know their left hands from their right when it came to fashion.  After this, I set up my own magazine using the contacts I had acquired.  The magazine's main office is in Marseille, as this is home to me, but all the glamorous fashion shows happen in Paris and pretty much all the glamorous people without which my business wouldn't be possible are based in Paris, so the magazine's secondary office is in Paris and I spend most of my time in Paris and Marseille, using the TGV, given that I selected offices near to the stations named Paris Gare de Lyon and Marseille St. Charles.

In terms of how my mother came to move to France, in short, attitudes such as those shown in Zoë Williams' article drove her to move.  Following family holidays to France, hearing about French culture in the media etc, she started to find herself more interested in French culture and disapproving of the lack of sophistication of English culture.  People started accusing her of being "up herself" and "pretentious", until eventually, she felt she could no longer put up with such backwardness and decided to move to France.  She took a trip to Marseille, met my locally-born father whilst sipping pastis on the Vieux Port, who soon wooed her with his sophisticated charms (a world away from the bumpkins my mother had encountered among the British male populace) and, as they say, the rest is history.  My mother gave up her English nationality and received French citizenship as soon as she was able: - she was glad to kiss goodbye to the lack of sophistication in the UK.  I regret the fact that I had to go to the UK to build my career, but I hope that in future, my beloved homeland will offer trendy upwardly-mobile young somethings such as myself the chance to build a career at home, rather than having to make a decision between not fulfilling one's dreams or being surrounded by unsophisticated British bumpkins.

I personally have no time for François Hollande, the man who has been doing his best to get in the way of me and my dreams, given his taxation plan.  I much preferred the bling-bling playboy Nicolas Sarkozy.  I admire Nicolas Sarkozy, given that he is a man not afraid of conspicuous consumption and rubbing other people's lack of success in their noses.

I'm reluctant to say anything positive about the UK, but I hope France will one day adopt the UK's lack of willingness to stand in between me and my dreams.

Experience French Toastmasters

I have recently become aware of an organisation called Toastmasters International, founded in the USA by Ralph Smedley for the purpose of improving people's public speaking and leadership skills.

It has come to my attention that there is a francophone Toastmasters club in London called Experience French.  I have been reliably informed that the club regularly serves French cheeses during the break between the two halves of the meeting.  I'm so thankful that there are some people in the UK who aren't daft enough to think Cheddar is the height of sophistication and know about things like Camembert.

You can be sure I will go there next time there is a meeting and I happen to be in London, I will be going along, as it sounds like an oasis of sophistication in the unsophisticated wasteland that is the UK.

For the Frenchies around, the club meets in City Temple Conference Centre (EC1A 2DE), which is a short distance from Chancery Lane and City Thameslink stations.  City Thameslink is particularly convenient, because if one is parched and dying of thirst for sophistication and cannot wait to get back to France, the station is two stops away from St. Pancras International, the main departure station for Eurostar trains going to France.  However, the unfortunate thing is that at present, the latest train to Paris on Mondays leaves at 20.01, long before Experience French's meeting finish.  Maybe Eurostar will put on later services in time.

Dark Chocolate

This is another area in which I have noticed extreme ignorance when I go outside of France.  In the UK and USA, the silly bumpkins there think real chocolate is milk chocolate.  A few years ago, the EU was trying to put its foot down with the UK in order to stop them misrepresenting their wares by referring to milk chocolate nonsense as chocolate.  Disgusting stuff!

Every French woman knows that the only way to do chocolate is for it to be luxurious dark chocolate with that dark chocolatey aroma and slightly bitter taste.  If you are so unsophisticated that you don't like the slightly bitter taste, it can be counterbalanced easily by things like mint flavouring, dried raspberries, lemon or anything else with a powerful flavour (though sophisticated French women prefer subtle flavours).  Personally, if chocolate entered my mouth and it were anything less than 60% cocoa, I would spit it out.

If you care about your body in any way and you want to avoid being an unsophisticated bumpkin, make sure the chocolate is nothing less than 60% cocoa.

I also disagree with the Anglo-Saxon way of buying huge quantities of mediocre chocolate in the supermarket.  A real French woman never does this and will only ever buy small quantities of top-quality top-price chocolate from the best chocolatier in town.  The daintier the quantities and the higher the prices, the cleverer the purchaser is.

Also, on the subject of avoiding ridiculous Anglo-Saxon habits, when eating chocolate, do not stuff it into your mouth and gulp it down.  Close your eyes and take in the aroma, getting a sensation of pure pleasure in the process.  After you have done this, break off the daintiest piece (no bigger than an orange pip), put it on your tongue, close your eyes again and let it dissolve, gaining another sensation of pure pleasure in the process.

Being sophisticated with fats

One thing I think contributes to making us French women effortlessly sophisticated is the fact that we do spreads properly.  When I first went to the USA and I tried a piece of toast with Crisco on, I was so disgusted by the taste that I had to spit it out and spend half an hour washing out the disgusting taste from my mouth.  Ooh la la!

However, here in France, we do things properly.  We only eat real butter, no margarine or anything like that, even though the inventor of the disgusting stuff (Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès) was French.

Here in France, we have an impossibly thin slither of butter on our toast in the mornings: - this gives us an unrivalled and extremely pure sensation of pleasure.  I pity those poor people in the Anglo-Saxon world who don't know the different between poisonous margarine and real butter.

Comté

Cheese is a food with a notable saturated fat content, yet we French women eat it without any feelings of guilt whatsoever, given that we eat such dainty portions.  Actually, we don't eat it, we cut off dainty shavings and allow them to dissolve on our discerning tongues.

In my last post, I talked about France's LGV network.  The most recently opened LGV in France is the LGV Rhine-Rhône, which covers most of the route between Dijon and Mulhouse.  Close to the eastern end of the line is a station called Belfort-Montbéliard.

Belfort-Montbéliard is situated at the heart of the region that produces one of France's best known cheeses called Comté.  The LGV Rhine-Rhône allows me to easily travel to this area (4h18m is the quickest direct journey, though this will come down in time as and when new sections of LGV come into service) and remind myself of how sophisticated I am.  I buy Comté and shave off dainty slithers of the stuff, before allowing it to dissolve on my tongue.  It is fun to do this in front of Anglo-Saxon fatties and tell them I am full after just a few tiny slithers!  Vive la France!

The TGV

Being a gricer is most unladylike in my view.  However, I thought I would talk about the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse), given that this is something that shows how France excels in several areas.  I know that it is very unladylike to boast about speed, but the gricers reading this will know that France achieved the record for the highest speed of a train on conventional rails ever.  The record was set by the V150: - 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph) on 3 April 2007 on the not-yet-opened LGV Est.

I mentioned that I come from Marseille and that my life is split between Paris and Marseille.  Such a lifestyle would be less easy to maintain without the high-speed rail system that exists in France.  There is a pretty much continuous stretch of high-speed track between Paris and Marseille, save for the local tracks at each end of the route.  Shown below is a TGV Duplex in Paris Gare de Lyon station.

The fastest journeys available between Paris and Marseille by train are three hours and five minutes in length.  This means that I can easily find the time to go between the two cities (in between my strenuous 35-hour working week), without having to resort to Anglo-Saxon methods of transportation, such as car and plane.  Sophisticated French women walk pretty much everywhere, though for some distances, it is not always practical: - the distance by train between Paris and Marseille is approximately 750km.  Even sophisticated French women don't tend to do that distance on foot on a daily basis!  For the distances too impractical to do on foot, we have the TGV!  Vive la France!

The LGV (Lignes à Grande Vitesse) network covers several French towns and cities I just adore, particularly in my part of France.  Aix-en-Provence and Avignon both have their own TGV stations.  Also, I can get to Lyon in a little over an hour from Marseille and sample the gastronomic delights thereof.  Bordeaux, with its fine wines, will be connected to the LGV network in 2017 or so when the line from Tours is put into service.

Even today, we are showing how sophisticated we French people are in the field of rolling stock design.  Recently, the Italians put into service a train made by Alstom (a French company, no less) called the AGV (Automotrice à Grande Vitesse).

Further proof that we French are unrivalled in our sophistication.

Unsophisticated Excess of Sweetness

One of the reasons we French women find it so easy to maintain our dainty figures is the fact that we dislike excessive sweetness in food.  We enjoy our desserts without guilt, as they are made with the bare minimum of sweetness.  I can't stand the way yuppies in foreign nations think cupcakes are sophisticated.

Yuck!  Too unsophisticated for a French woman like me!  Oh, if only the rest of the world were as sophisticated as us, but then I suppose we are an impossible act to follow.  We French women, who know how to do desserts properly, much prefer for our desserts to be slightly tart, rather than nauseatingly sweet.  Tarte au citron is an example of one such tart dessert.

Lack of sweetness is another area in which French desserts are more sophisticated than elsewhere.  Even within the same dish there are variations.  Consider the Kouglof (Gugelhupf in its less sophisticated form).

It is made in a very sweet form in the German-speaking world.  This appears to be quite popular in the USA, given sales of Bundt cooking tins.  Yuck!  However, as only we French know how to do desserts properly, I should mention that there is a version originally from Alsatia (for those not au fait when it comes to France, Strasbourg is the largest city in this area).  This version is barely sweet at all and is more like a brioche.

I only wish the rest of the world weren't so ignorant when it comes to desserts.

Pastis

Being from Marseille, I just adore pastis.

Pastis is the epitome of sophisticated French culture.  For those who are not au fait with sophisticated French culture and prefer the unsophisticated nonsense of Anglo-Saxon culture in its various forms across the world, Pastis is an aniseed liqueur very similar to Pernod.  I have no less of a taste for Pernod, though I am saddened by how the TV show Little Britain has tried to cheapen it by showing that the character Vicky Pollard is fond of the drink.  Unsophisticated Anglo-Saxon bumpkins don't know the first thing about how to do aniseed liqueur properly.  We sophisticated French women like to sip it on the shores of Mediterranean cities and towns in hot weather.

Unsophisticated bumpkins in Anglo-Saxon nations tend to dislike its bitter flavours, but that is characteristic of how unsophisticated they are.  Real epicures like bitter flavours in their food and don't like the overly sweet lack of sophistication that characterises the Anglo-Saxon world.

Slimming Clubs

Being a sophisticated French woman, I have absolutely no need to go to slimming clubs like Weight Watchers, Fat Fighters etc for control of my own weight.  However, when I am in Paris, I sometimes like to take the Eurostar to London.  When I am in London, I often like to visit slimming clubs to show people how effortlessly perfect we French women are.

I can scarcely bring myself to look at the horrible picture above, but I suppose some measure of contrast is necessary to show a comparison to how sophisticated and impossibly dainty us French women are.

When I go along to these slimming clubs, I love to join people for dinner, eat a nouvelle cuisine dish, daintily nibbling away at the virtually non-existent contents of the plate and then loudly proclaim to those around me that I feel completely stuffed.  People form dislikes of me for rubbing it in, but hey, we can't all be effortlessly perfect like French women, I suppose.

Impossibly Dainty Portions

Dainty eating
I'm so grateful for how us French women are so effortlessly perfect.  One of the reasons us French women are so difficult to replicate in our perfection is our figures.  How do we achieve this effortless perfection in our figures?  Simple: - we have impossibly dainty appetites.  We never eat: - we take impossibly dainty nibbles out of food that is before us.  Look at the supposèd nouvelle cuisine dish below: -

In the eyes of a sophisticated Frenchwoman, this is the size of dish a self-indulgent overweight woman from an Anglo-Saxon nation who eats like a construction worker would consume.  Us French women are so effortlessly perfect that we would be feeling full after eating just a tenth of this.

However, at least it is nouvelle cuisine in that there has been some apparent focus on presentation.  One trick we sophisticated French women have is to gain pleasure from looking at something, causing us to feel at least partially full by this alone.  As far as I'm concerned, if food doesn't look perfect, it will poison me and so it will not pass my lips.

The great gala opening

Hello, name is Marianne Gaboriault and welcome to the great gala opening of this blog page intended to tell the world about how sophisticated French women are in comparison to their overweight and unfashionable counterparts in the Anglo-Saxon world.  Let the world know how effortlessly perfect we French women are.  My mission is to create as much envy as possible among the world's non-French women and to brag as much as possible about how effortlessly perfect France and French women are.

I'm from Marseille, meaning that I grew up with all of the treats of Provence, such as lavender, olive oil, Savon de Marseille, the smell of pine in hot weather, pastis sipped in cafés on the edge of the Vieux Port etc.

These days, I live a two-city life so I can enjoy the best of both worlds: - Marseille for the aforementioned things and Paris primarily for everything that is available there to do with fashion, designers etc.

Vive la France!