The folly of crash diets

Apologies to all my eager readers who have been eagerly lapping up everything I have written about how to be an impossibly perfect Frenchwoman: - I am aware that I have not written a post for a long time.  As was said in my previous post, Bilal and I are now engaged.  I have been a woman in high demand for a long time, but so far, only Bilal has been able to win my father's approval to court me.  He is a very handsome Touareg man with an extremely muscular physique and lovely curly hair: - the muscular physique is a consequence both of his tough desert upbringing and his desire to continue to work out when his family moved to Marseille.  He speaks hip-hop French, but hey, as was said at the end of "Some like it hot", "Well, nobody's perfect".

I am hoping to work on Bilal's French.  Although it is his native language alongside his local Touareg language, his accent is a mix of Mali and La Savine, with his vocabulary being hip-hop, e.g. saying "tu voit ce que je veux dire?" at the end of sentences, inverting words (verlan) etc.  Although I am somewhat bemused by his use of French, I would much rather have a big, muscular and tough man from the ghetto toughened by living through years and years of gang warfare with real muscles than an upper middle-class man who has lived a cushy lifestyle, doesn't like the great outdoors and whose only way of looking nice is to stay under a gym sunbed and occasionally work out on sweaty gym apparatus (not to a Frenchwoman's liking, as Mireille Guiliano explains).  If one wants to see some of Bilal's acquaintances without actually visiting La Savine, many of them can be seen in 1.D.3's video Marseille Paname: -

Even though Bilal has grown up surrounded by such people, he is actually a very gentle character who has always resisted the pressure to get involved in a life of crime and who has presented an extremely convincing testimony of his new birth in accordance with what the Bible describes as the signs thereof, even if he is not so good at resisting the creeping influence of the language.  Anyway, I digress.  Bilal and I are in the midst of wedding plans.  We are spending ages obsessing about what we will have for each meal.  A croquembouche will unfortunately be out the question unless we can find a gluten-free version.

Bilal would probably just have jollof rice, taguella, goat's meat and Eghajira if I left the whole thing up to him, but since most of those present will be of European origin, we want something much more sophisticated.  With the exception of Bilal, we are planning to serve some extremely dainty portions, so as to show how sophisticated we are: - they will be so dainty that even the daintiest Frenchwoman will feel no need to say, "La moitié, s'il vous plaît".  Some people will be shocked (e.g. my English relatives on my mother's side), but I will respond that they are entirely normal portions for me.

Already, some people are asking me if I am worried about how I will fit into my dress.  I respond by telling them about how I already have an absolutely perfect figure.  I am aware of an unpleasant story about a crash diet called the LighterLife diet: - a British woman followed this diet on account of a desire to look good on her wedding day and died.  I am not inclined to make extremely inappropriate, insensitive and tasteless jokes about the deceased woman, but the article I have linked to really does indicate how French women really do know best when it comes to diets (or the lack thereof).  As Mireille Guiliano explained, French women never diet: - they simply make permanent changes to their lifestyle to shed the weight, whether this means walking further each day, buying a flat further from the ground floor, cutting out sweet foods, saying "la moitié, s'il vous plaît" more often etc.  Granted, Mireille Guiliano does not have any children as far as I know, but Bilal and I want a large family and I hope in creating our large family, I will demonstrate to the world how a Frenchwoman maintains her dainty figure even during and after pregnancy.

Samantha Clowe, the lady who unfortunately lost her life to a crash diet, did not understand the rule of the harvest.  The rule of the harvest says that if you wait till two weeks before the harvest to plant your seeds, spray them with hydroponic solution, cover them with bright lamps etc, you will not reap a harvest.  There are too many people who simply do not understand the value of setting good habits early on so that they can be kept with little effort.  Non-French women think they can buy the skimpiest bridal dress and then do a crash diet to fit inside it.  If such women had read the words of Proverbs 24:27 ("Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field; and afterwards build thine house"), they would realise that their order of working was wrong.  Occasionally, some Anglo-Saxon women manage to fit into skimpy wedding dresses (the photo below is of Patricia Nixon-Cox), but this is the exception rather than the norm.

I have no doubt that I will look absolutely divine (in the non-religious sense of the word) in my wedding dress.  Bilal is not exactly a perfect gentleman, as he uses the term "bien faite" to refer to my physical appearance, but I know he means well.  He has done very well to restrain his desires for me all this time.  I have no doubt that he will look similarly ravishing in a morning suit.  He refuses to wear suits at work and insists upon wearing a tagelmust and his colleagues have gotten used to this.  Don't get me wrong, he looks gorgeous in that, even though one cannot see much of his face, but I am hopeful that our wedding will persuade him to wear a suit.  Anyway, back to the subject of the baffling situation of Anglo-Saxon women eating like there is no tomorrow, somehow or other finding a husband-to-be (it's beyond me how) and then crash dieting to fit into their wedding dress.  Why won't they just adopt the la-moitié-s'il-vous-plaît diet that Frnech women use?

As a believing woman, I think unnecessarily long engagements are not a good idea on account of the temptation during the engagement, but maybe some Anglo-Saxon women would do well to spend a few months getting their eating habits sorted out before they try sorting out their wedding dresses.

A trip to London with Bilal

Recently, I needed to travel to London on business and I hadn't seen so much of Bilal on account of various other things that needed to be done (in spite of my Frenchwoman efficiency) and so I asked him to travel with me to London.  Given his relative lack of travelling experience, I wanted to show him why there is such a need for my magazine to be promoted and be part of the fight against lack of sophistication.  As always, he was reluctant, on account of his predisposition to homesickness.  We took a TGV to Paris and a Eurostar to London on the Friday afternoon: - I have made this journey numerous times, though Bilal hasn't done the Paris-London leg before.  I am eagerly anticipating the introduction of Eurostar's direct London-Marseille services.Following a bit of research, I found out about a part of London that I thought Bilal would be inclined to visit.  I found out that the Borough of Southwark contains the Aylesbury estate: - one of the roughest areas in the whole of the United Kingdom, home of the rapper Patrick Chukwuemeka Okogwu, better known by his stage name Tinie Tempah, for the first twelve years of his life.  This was so that Bilal could be with the "homies", lol.  I also found out that the Borough of Southwark contains the church where Charles Spurgeon preached.

Earlier in the visit, we visited some marginally more sophisticated places.  In a previous post, I talked about Mariage Frères, the French brand of tea that knows how to do tea properly, unlike stupid English people, who tend to drink the disgusting "English Breakfast" variants with milk.  Yuck!  They have a counter in a British store named Selfridges on Oxford Street.  I was booked into a hotel that had the disgusting English stuff and I had forgotten to pack some Mariage Frères tea, so I was pleased to discover this.  While in Selfridges, I also discovered that Selfridges has a mini gluten free section in the food hall.  Bilal bought a few gluten free cakes: - as I mentioned, he is an extremely ravenous man on account of being tall, muscular and having coeliac disease!  The complete antithesis of me as the Impossibly Dainty French Woman!  I explained to Bilal that he should make sure to avoid developing a taste for sweet foods such as creamy cakes, given that they are characteristic of unsophisticated people.  Unfortunately, the taste was already there, as people in Mali are used to drinking extremely sweet tea!  Still, he is thankfully unlikely to consume such things regularly, given that coeliac-friendly bakeries are not exactly ubiquitous in Marseille!

I bought some Mariage Frères tea from Selfridges in the evening.  Given the late hour of our arrival, there weren't many options available for sophisticated French stuff in London (our decision to visit London was last-minute).  I found some French restaurants in London, though they were a pale imitation of the real thing.  Bilal and I ate in various French restaurants on the Friday evening and on the Saturday.  On account of our unwillingness to do anything that would generate employment on the Lord's Day (Sunday, remember the 4th commandment), we had no intention of visiting restaurants, meaning we therefore desired a packed lunch.  Good quality food stores are hard to come buy in the UK, so we decided to go to a bog-standard place in the Knightsbridge area known as Harrods.  The food wasn't particularly good quality, but it was the bare minimum that I was willing to condescend to, MDR.

I conducted my business meetings late on the Friday and during the Saturday: - a Frenchwoman is careful about work-life balance and does not avoidably work on a Sunday, much less a Bible-believing Frenchwoman!  The people involved in the business discussions wanted to resume discussions on a Sunday and I completely refused, saying that I would sooner refuse their business than work on a Sunday: - luckily, they agreed to have some late-night business discussions instead.  The discussions finished just early enough for me to catch up with Bilal that evening, who was at the Aylesbury Estate when I called him.  The estate is currently in the process of being demolished, though not all of the residents have left yet.  Bilal doesn't speak English and so had been struggling to communicate with the locals, though some of them were French speakers.  When I arrived, I agred to help him out by interpreting for him.  My interpretation capabilities were pushed to the max, as Bilal was talking in French hip-hop slang and the people in the Aylesbury estate also spoke hip-hop slang!  I probably looked rather ridiculous like Cléo Le Tan, a middle-class "bien élevée" ("well-brought-up") woman using hip-hop slang!

Bilal was asked by some hip-hop people if he would sing them a song.  They probably thought he would sing something silly, such as "Jungle is massiv", but instead, Bilal gave the most beautiful performance of "Je suis Tien, Seigneur" ("I am Thine, O Lord", by Frances Crosby): - http://www.mcreveil.org/Recueil/cantiques/lyrics/jsts278.htm .  One of the others present was from Congo and was therefore able to tell his friends what the lyrics meant.  Rather than an encore, he opted to sing "Croire, obéir" ("Trust and obey", by John Sammis): - http://www.mcreveil.org/Recueil/cantiques/lyrics/co396.htm.  Prior to his performance, the people present were boisterous, yet almost as soon as Bilal started to sing the first hymn, the silence was deafening.  Again, I know Bilal has made some friends for life and again, they parted with a fist bump!

The following day, we visited Charles Spurgeon's church.  In my church, we are very familiar with the work of Charles Spurgeon.  As with Bilal, The Assistant Pastor comes from Mali, yet he speaks a very educated form of French, rather than Bilal's hip-hop slang: - a fact I can hopefully use to persuade Bilal to learn to speak properly! I don't believe I would find a better boyfriend anywhere else and I adore Bilal in spite of this idiosynracy, but this is nevertheless something I want to work on.

We took the very earliest Eurostar service to Paris (05.40-09.26), as I was eager to be surrounded by sophistication again, with the Marseille train following shortly afterwards (I'm posting this via mobile broadband).  During the journey, Bilal told me that he is beginning to loosen up when it comes to travelling to unfamiliar destination, given that "homies" don't only exist in La Savine!  MDR!  Bilal has always been awkwardly shy, but I seem to be having some success in getting him to come out of his shell.  I am enjoying having a new travelling companion who I absolutely adore.  I hope our relationship progresses quickly.  Bilal refuses all physical contact with me (quite rightly, given that we are unmarried) and I have very rarely seen him without some sort of head covering (given that he is a tuareg): - he wore a hooded sweatsuit during the trip to London.  I can't bear to be apart from him for long and I can very easily see myself being his wife one day.