The English language is constantly changing, but not necessarily improving. In theory every new word or usage enriches the language in some way. How could we communicate today without verbs like “to Google” or “to outsource,” or adjectives like “supersize”? But, all too often, new terms simply push out the old without raising the quality of our English at all.

The fad for political correctness in the late twentieth century turned a lot of our language into mush. Old people vanished and reappeared as “senior citizens,” stupid kids metamorphosed into the “educationally challenged,” drug addicts mysteriously turned into “substance abusers,” and so on. You’ve heard this all before, but it really matters because language matters. If we talk like phonies we will inevitably begin to think like phonies. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, nailing the problem with his usual precision. Euphemistic, misleading, evasive, and just plain silly language now comes at us from every part of the political spectrum, and from business too. When we had to buy some curtains for our house I was amazed to discover that simple curtains were no longer available. We had to purchase “window treatments,” although they looked exactly like curtains to me.

The weasel word that’s aggravating me at the moment is “issues.” Whenever somebody is being difficult, or unreliable, or neurotic, their behavior is excused with the phrase: “Oh, he (or she) has a lot of issues.” This slippery term can also be used self-referentially, as in: “I have issues with that,” or even diagnostically, as in: “He can’t move ahead until he deals with his issues.”

Now “issue” in old English meant a number of things: the act of coming out, or an exit, or the label for a child in relation to its parents, or the act of publishing or distributing something, or a position taken in a legal case or a political dispute. I imagine that it is this last meaning that has been seized upon and made into nonsense by people who talk about “having issues.”

Issues are big problems or conflicts. Israel and Palestine have issues, President Bush and Senator Kerry have issues, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the rebel leader Guy Phillipe have issues. Most of us don’t have issues worthy of the name; we have complaints. I have numerous complaints, as listeners to this commentary know all too well: about computers, international politics, plastic bags, household chores, and squirrels on my bird feeders, amongst many other things. But none of them qualifies as an “issue.”

Nobody likes to admit: “I’m a miserable, negative sort of person who is never satisfied.” But it sounds rather grand to say: “I have issues.” When I floated this topic in conversation I was earnestly told that “issues” are much more significant than mere complaints. “Issues” are the psychic scars left by a lifetime of pain and struggle – divorce, illness, death, failure and all the predictable traumas of modern life. Some people seem to nurture and treasure their unhappy experiences forever. Like the old Bourbon kings of France, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. So, they have issues.

In the course of writing this I inevitably examined my own character. I have been accused of having curmudgeonly tendencies, so perhaps I too have unresolved issues in my life. This would be rather fun, because I could join in the whining chorus about “issues” and feel that I am, once again, on the cutting edge of the English language.

I don’t buy it. Let’s call things by their proper names. We all have complaints, pet peeves, discontents, irritations, disappointments, resentments, bad memories, gripes, grievances, grouches, grudges, and grumbles. We all enjoy being petulant, peevish, whining curmudgeonly, and querulous from time to time. The English language is rich enough to express every good or bad thing that ever happened to anybody. We don’t need “issues.”

Copyright: David Bouchier

The sight of the first bride in springtime always gives me a lump in my throat, and brings tears to my eyes. It must be some kind of allergy. She was climbing into a block-long white limousine outside a big church in Charleston and, because this was in the south, and in a very expensive area, the bride and the guests were all beautifully dressed. The bridegroom paid no attention to his new bride, as she struggled to get her billowing white gown into the limo. He was engrossed in the fancy video camera being used by the professional photographer to record the moment for posterity.

It must be quite a moment. I’ve never been a bride, but it must be as good as a starring role on Broadway, with the added advantage that she doesn’t have to repeat the performance every evening, plus matinées.

Big weddings, like exotic vacations, exist primarily to be photographed. They also provide an opportunity for the two families to get together and take the measure of each others’ weaknesses. Divorced parents can square off for another round, and the members of different religions can confirm all their favorite prejudices. Wedding receptions end with fights surprisingly so often that some wedding planners hire security guards. It’s a high-risk event for all concerned. But nobody seems deterred by that, or by the divorce rate, or by popular television programs like “Desperate Housewives.” Nor do the brides seem worried by the fact that everyone says that the wedding will be the high point of their lives. Who wants to hit the high point so soon? I’m still looking forward to mine. Sometimes brides do realize this and run away, like the woman who hit the headlines when she vanished just before her wedding in Duluth. But I suppose a lot of people run away from Duluth, with or without the threat of a wedding.

I always feel sorry for the bridegrooms. They are symbolically necessary but functionally useless. The bridegroom is an extra, in the Hollywood sense, and I think a lot of them feel this rather painfully. Their job is to dress right for once, say their lines properly, and not get too drunk. Men shouldn’t be required to go to their own weddings. They’d be happy just to get a note in the mail after the event.

A wedding is an important ritual, of course, but rituals easily degenerate into mere performances. In a big wedding production, something profoundly personal becomes showily public, and even theatrical. The main performers are helpless in the grip of the wedding machine, so carried along by the script and the staging that they can scarcely resist.

I can’t produce any statistics to prove it, but I suspect that small, intimate weddings, where the bride and groom invite only those people they really want to see (which may be nobody) give couples a better start than those big staged events that cost on average twenty thousand dollars, and set up impossible expectations. The most spectacular example was the multi-million dollar nuptial extravaganza of Charles and Diana in 1981, which led to nothing but misery.

The small wedding fits with the nature of modern marriage, which is more personal and less social than it used to be – and shorter. You don’t have witnesses and a great big party when you sign a car lease contract, even though a standard car lease runs longer than many marriages.

Men, with their less developed social brains, can understand and participate in a small wedding in ordinary clothes. A modest wedding, religious or non-religious, takes the pressure off both parties, and allows them to think about each other. Also, if they do divorce soon after, it’s much less embarrassing. Our wedding was very small, and I couldn’t be happier with the resulting marriage, now heading for its quarter century. If anyone had proposed a white limousine, a tuxedo, and a catering hall, I’d still be a bachelor.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The desire to make things clean and tidy in the springtime seems to be an almost biological urge. Like most biological urges, it should be resisted. Spring may be the season of renewal and new beginnings, but there’s no point in going mad about it. The energy and optimism we feel at this time of year shouldn’t be wasted on cleaning.

Only a few hundred years ago spring was a season of joy and happiness, music and dancing, not domestic labor. The Romans had a great festival in honor of Flora the goddess of springtime and low-cholesterol and, in primitive countries like England, the annual spring ritual would be the Maypole Dance, in which young virgins, youths and maidens, would dance around on the village green, holding long ribbons attached to the top of a pole. As they circled the ribbons would wind around and get shorter and shorter until the dancers were all very close together. Obviously, this sort of thing couldn’t be allowed in these puritanical days, even if we could find young persons qualified to take part.

Naturally there were accidents during the celebrations – drunken falls, heart attacks, and inappropriate liaisons. Nobody cared much about that. But now we have legal liability, and political correctness, and the health police. A bit of wild partying can easily land you in court. The maypole dance might get you sued for discrimination against the disabled, or the merely dizzy. Excessive drinking will lead to huge medical bills. It’s safer to stay home and tidy the closets.

Another dismal modern phenomenon is what we might call springtime double jeopardy. Not only are we expected to clean, we are also expected to diet. In fact the quest for domestic order is very like dieting. It’s easy to achieve some short-term success, but almost impossible to maintain it. We are seduced by the many forms of disorder, just as we are seduced by the infinite varieties of food. The habits of a lifetime are just that – the habits of a lifetime.

I feel the tug of the spring-cleaning disease myself, but only very faintly like the gravitational pull of a distant star. I never have any trouble ignoring the symptoms. In fact I can allow my mind roam over the many possibilities that present themselves to my imagination as the weather improves. There’s outside painting, of course, and some power washing would be a good idea. The bird feeders need cleaning, the garage is a mess, my car is a disgrace, and there must be a hundred small odd jobs waiting for me to attack them with a hammer, or a chainsaw or a screwdriver, or a power drill. I have a lot of tools in the garage, because I like tools. But I don’t like using them, in case they wear out.

The good news is that there are more and more specialized services out there to take over these tasks and allow us to enjoy our lives. Domestic cleaning is a whole industry, and even the traditional handyman is back in the form of a franchise operation. Thousands of “professional personal organizers” are poised to sort out our messy paperwork for about $200 an hour. It’s only a matter of time before we can look forward to dieting services – offering a range of large people who will lose weight on our behalf.

But the best and cheapest solution to springtime madness is just to wait it out. Once the weather gets really warm all these labors will become humid and unpleasant, the great outdoors will pull us away from domestic concerns, and weight loss will come as nature intended: through exercise, heat exhaustion, and plenty of sweat.

Copyright: David Bouchier

President’s Day gives us a three-day weekend, which pleases everybody. But there’s so much to plan and to remember – the sales, the bank closings, the hotel bookings, the discount ski-tickets, and so on – that the Presidents themselves are usually forgotten. They were rather special Presidents. We don’t have a national holiday for Chester Alan Arthur, or Grover Cleveland. But the banks close and the sales open for Washington and Lincoln.

George Washington was commander in chief of the Continental army during the revolutionary war, a leader of the insurgency in modern terms, and the first president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President, who really made the mythical journey from log cabin to White House, and was elected President at just about the worst moment in the history of the United States. He preserved the Union and ended slavery, although not everybody was happy about those achievements at the time.

Everyone agrees that these were two men of heroic stature. The word “hero” has a strange, archaic ring, but we know what it means. “A brave, illustrious or much admired figure,” says the dictionary. We have a tendency to create instant heroes these days, but in the past heroes had to wait until some time after they were dead before getting their accolade. The same applied to “great statesmen” or “immortal composers.” These were essentially postmortem honors, because living people could never live up to them, and in any case they would be embarrassing.

True heroes exist only in history. The strange alchemy that turns mortal men into immortal heroes is a process of forgetting. Neither Washington nor Lincoln would have any chance of being elected to the Presidency today, or even to the local school board. Washington, with his grim unsmiling face and his austere character would be an image-maker’s nightmare. Lincoln, with his complexity, his ambiguity, and his alarming habit of speaking unwelcome truths in complete sentences, would never make it past the first primary.

Washington, in his own time, was a highly controversial figure. He was the richest man in America, and was widely mistrusted by farmers and ordinary working people. He was accused of running a “Republican Royal Court” in his first Presidential term, and his foreign policy was so unpopular that it caused riots in the streets.
Lincoln, of course, was feared and despised by half the population at the time of the Civil war. Nobody was more vilified or caricatured. Much of the press was hostile to him, and he was accused of tyranny, arrogance, and fraud. Both great men were intimately involved with what was politely called “The Indian Removal.”

But that was all in the distant past, and time has done its soothing work. Nothing is more reassuring than the past. It comes to us already edited, like a movie. We know the plot and we can rerun it again and again. George Washington will always win the battle of Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln will always save the Union in the last reel. It’s not like the morning TV news, when anything can happen and heroes are created and destroyed between commercial breaks.

We owe it to future generations to provide them with real heroes on the historic scale – men and women who were truly brave, illustrious, and admired. Our great-great grandchildren in the twenty-second century will look back to our times for such larger-than-life characters, and such satisfying stories of the triumph of good over evil. They may not be obvious to us today, but we don’t have to worry about that. History will reveal them. That’s what history is for.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Darwin Day tends to get lost in Valentine hysteria. Darwin was born on February 12th in 1809. In some ways it’s a happy accident that Darwin’s Day comes just before Valentine’s Day, when birds and young people are traditionally supposed to select their mates. If anyone was paying attention we might be able to use Darwin Day as an opportunity to teach about natural selection, and perhaps to get evolution moving again in the right direction. We seem to have stalled out, and even to be slipping backwards.

The social prophets of the past, like H.G.Wells and Edward Bellamy, never imagined in their wildest fantasies that, in the twenty first century, we would still be embroiled in the tired issue of metaphysics versus science. Europeans are both amused and dismayed that we are still arguing about the teaching of evolution in American schools, arguments that hark back to the 1920s and that were considered pretty silly even then.

This is not to say that the theory of evolution is self-evidently correct. In fact it is one of the most fantastically improbable theories that anyone could imagine. If you study an ordinary garden bird, a Nuthatch for example, it stuns the imagination to accept that such a beautiful and complex creature could be created by a series of small adaptations, even over millions of years. There is evidence in the fossil record, and more from modern research. The theory of evolution could well be true, but it’s not always easy to believe it.

What sows another seed of doubt is the human condition. Millennia of evolution should surely have produced a better result. If Darwin was right we should expect, as the most highly evolved creatures, to be living in a peaceful society governed by people with superior intellectual and moral qualities and based on the principles of science and rationalism. Maybe we need a few million more years to get that far.

Many people reject evolution because they think it is the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. These skeptics look around at the winners and leaders of the world and very reasonably conclude that the survival of the fittest is bunk. But that’s not what Darwin proposed. “The Survival of the Fittest” was a phrase coined by Darwin’s contemporary, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, to describe the evolution of cultures, not individuals. This theory is very appealing to cultural conservatives, but it puts them in a strange dilemma if they are also Biblical fundamentalists.

Darwin never suggested that evolution works through the survival of the fittest. Obviously the world would be a different and better place if that were true. What Darwin proposed was the theory of Natural Selection, that the best-adapted individuals survive. The key to survival is not superior intellect, or even a being superior physical specimen: it’s knowing which way the wind blows, and adapting to it no matter what. You can scarcely argue with that, especially if you work in a bureaucracy.

As a theory, evolution has the advantage of being fundamentally un-provable, so the various sides can defend to their positions (and make a good living out of it) until doomsday. Those who feel left out can always go for the third option, the so-called “Intelligent Design” theory. But it’s hard to hold on to this belief if you read the newspaper every morning, especially if your newspaper happens to be a tabloid.

Physicists have been busy throwing wrenches into the works of all these theories. That’s good, that’s what science is for. String Theory, for example, although I don’t claim to understand it, suggests that there may be an unlimited number of universes. If there are infinite worlds, we don’t need and can’t have a theory to explain our particular world. It simply must exist the way it is, as one of a zillion possibilities, just as there must be a universe in which the American Revolution failed, and North America consists of three nations ruled by the Mexicans, the French and the British, and there must be another universe in which cats are loving, useful domestic animals that help blind people and never sit on your favorite armchair.

The new physics suggests that Darwinian evolution may be just part of a much more complicated answer, which we are a million universes away from understanding. Perhaps all our theories about the nature of the universe, religious, philosophical, or scientific, are not much more than uneasy dreams in the dark depths of Plato’s Cave. We have no idea what is going on, although of course we would love to know.

The great evolutionary scientist J.B.S.Haldane summed up our dilemma like this:

“The world is not only stranger than we suppose; it is stranger than we can suppose.”

Copyright: David Bouchier

New Year: it’s a strange liminal date at the best of times, full of anxiety and hope and empty resolutions. The artificial changing of the calendar makes us feel that something momentous should happen, but it never does. This annual New Year Anxiety Syndrome reached its height in the Millennium hysteria. A lot of people must have felt very silly on the morning of January 1st, 2000, when they woke up and found themselves and the world unchanged, apart from the usual damages of time, as they and it will be again next January 1st, and the one after that.

We like to think that we are living in a time of history-making events, but we may be living in a footnote to a book already written. The ancient Greeks believed that history was cyclical: the same events repeated over and over, like the programming on some public television stations. This is a comforting philosophy. Nothing entirely unexpected can happen, because it has all happened before in the great turning wheel of time. From this perspective, we might expect that the twenty-first century will be essentially a rerun of the eleventh century. In that century the world was divided into an infinity of warring tribes, fighting over religion, wealth, and territory, and the Christianity versus Islam Crusades were just getting started. Cynics may say that this is just another example of the irony of history. But history is not so much ironic as simply repetitive, which is why each New Year surprises us by being very much like the one before.

There are reasons to be anxious about the future, but change is not one of them, and nor is danger. There’s nothing new about danger. Even in the so-boring 1950s we had the looming threat of the bomb, and the even more imminent horrors of Rock and Roll to worry about. You just never know.

It’s not surprising that we prefer to turn our backs on the enigmatic past and the opaque future, and focus on ourselves. That’s where New Year’s Resolutions come in. We may not be able to control the great forces of politics and economics, but we imagine we can at least take charge of our own personal lives.

This is a notion that can apparently survive any amount of disproof. We all know people, some of them very close to home, who have been making the same resolutions about diet and exercise and smoking and drinking for decades. The resolutions are always consigned to oblivion by Easter, and often as early as Valentine’s Day.

This is because we make the wrong resolutions. They tend to be punitive and puritanical, rather than prescriptions for pleasure. Diet and health resolutions are doomed before they start, and indeed they may soon be unnecessary. Just last week I read two news items that promise salvation to couch potatoes and hearty eaters everywhere. From the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio comes the news that volunteers who were asked to “visualize and imagine” themselves taking a training session, actually gained muscle strength without doing any real exercise whatsoever. From Israel we read of a new technique that melts fat away without the need for diet or surgery. When we learn about discoveries like this our motivation to discipline and punish our own bodies is undermined still further. Why bother with New Year’s resolutions that will only cause misery now and embarrassment later when, just around the corner, is a technological fix that will solve all our problems and cancel out all our weaknesses?

In fact, polls show that fewer and fewer people are making New Year’s resolutions these days. It may be that, after long experience, we have lost faith in our power to change or that, quite sensibly, we are less inclined to inflict pain on ourselves. To that extent, we’ve become more realistic (or cynical if you prefer). But it seems a shame to launch into the New Year without at least a token resolution, so how about trying something that gives pleasure instead of pain?

A resolution doesn’t have to be a discipline or a strait jacket. In fact, it shouldn’t be. The etymology of the word “resolution” stems from the Latin verb “solvere,” meaning to loosen or reveal, or set free.

So my resolution is to set myself free from negative resolutions, and give myself the gift of a positive one. I want to take more pleasure in small things, to become more naïve, to regress. The older we get, the more we tend to take everything for granted and find the whole world tedious and predictable. I would prefer to move in the opposite direction, so that I find everything interesting, new, worth doing, and fun.

A few years ago I was at a conference in Iowa, and attended a reception organized for us by a group of senior citizens. I fell into conversation with a lively octogenarian, a tiny sprite of a man with a long white Santa Claus beard. He wore a T-shirt with the inscription: I AM SIX, and he was a delightful companion, full of enthusiasm for everything.

That’s my resolution for all the future New Years I am lucky enough to see. It’s not going to be easy, especially if all my friends really do get fit, give up drinking and finish their eternal novels. I may have to climb back on the puritanical bandwagon. Meanwhile, I’m not giving up anything. I am six.

Copyright: David Bouchier

It’s the greatest luxury to spend Christmas in a hotel. It seems lazy and extravagant, and it is. But my mother gives us the excuse. She wants a change from her genteel English retirement, home, but she’s too frail to travel all the way to America. So a nice, old-fashioned hotel by the sea is the ideal compromise.

These big Victorian hotels pull out all the stops at Christmas. You get the impression that the managers have spent the previous six months reading Charles Dickens, and making notes. The hotel we are staying in, which overlooks the sea and a distant view of France, is decorated up to and beyond the maximum, with spectacular trees, candles, and festive paraphernalia of all kinds.

The restaurant staff delivers sustenance from morning till night, including afternoon teas, champagne receptions, and special children’s teas in the Mad Hatter’s Restaurant. In case boredom set in the hotel has organized carol singing, carpet bowls, dancing, gambling, a strolling magician, dancing, two different fancy dress balls, a golf tournament, and an event called the Hythe Imperial Egg Drop (don’t ask). Father Christmas came by to visit, on his way to a more demanding assignment in America. On December 26, what the British call Boxing Day, we head out into the country for a traditional clay pigeon shoot. I forgot to get my eyes tested this year, so the clay pigeons are safe from me.

My mother loves all this traditional stuff, although sometimes she talks wistfully about how we used to make our own entertainments at Christmas. It’s true, we did, but I have to remind her how bad those entertainments were. It would take six months of preparation to put on a Christmas like this for ourselves, and it’s deeply relaxing to let other people, far more experienced and professional, do the whole thing. This is supposed to be a moment of stillness in the turning year. Here, in the embrace of the hotel, we can relax for a moment.

This is where guilt sets in. We can relax only because the hotel staff is working twenty hours a day. Many of them are young people who come over from France to learn the business, and are enthusiastically exploited. Others are immigrants from everywhere, starting again at the bottom. For a few days we live like nineteenth century aristocrats, with our every need attended to by servants.

We could and perhaps should feel worse about this. But perhaps not, because we work like servants ourselves the rest of the year. In Charles Dickens’s time even a reasonably affluent family would have a maid, a gardener, a cook, and a nanny for the children. Dickens certainly did, after he became successful. More modest middle class families might have no more than a single servant, but they would certainly have at least one, to do the cooking and the dirty work.

During the last century the servants slowly vanished into better-paid and more attractive work. Now only the very rich can afford them. That leaves us trying to live the lives of people with servants, but without servants. We all do the dirty work. It may be democratic, but it’s no fun.
So we could claim that this seasonal indulgence is our gift to ourselves, in exchange for all the domestic labor we do the rest of the year. But no matter how I try I can’t completely justify it. Christmas in a hotel is decadent, lazy, extravagant, and probably exploitative into the bargain. It’s perfect. Sometimes, even at Christmas, we have to fact facts.

Copyright: David Bouchier

These are the sociable months. In November and December we will eat out much more, be invited to far more dinner parties, and even give a few of our own.

This raises many prickly questions of food etiquette and table manners. Although there are numerous books on the subject, and we can even hire a personal trainer to correct our unsophisticated habits, table manners are increasingly conspicuous by their absence. One reason for this is that a lot of people don’t have dining tables. They eat on the couch in front of the TV. The big difference is that a table almost forces sociability, because we sit face to face with no other entertainment than each other. On the couch all the formal rituals of the table are abandoned. Knives and forks and even plates vanish. It’s all too easy to slip back into the pre-civilized habit of simply grabbing food with our hands.

In a restaurant it’s easy to tell which families habitually eat at a table. The children know how to sit up, and how to use their utensils. They talk to each other. Couch families are equally conspicuous. The children run around the restaurant screaming and carrying lumps of food, while their parents stare vacantly around looking for a TV screen.

This is just one consequence of living in the Home of the Free. People can choose exactly how to eat, and they do. In a democratic republic there are no artificial, aristocratic standards to dissuade people from eating with their hands, or on the street, or in cars, or on the couch, or on the floor with the dog. What are table manners anyway, if not a form of social control?

That’s exactly what they are, and why they may be very important. Anthropologists argue about this, but one school of thought says that primitive civilization began with collective eating, and that modern civilization began with the introduction of table manners. When people ate together, they would talk. They also needed some rules. When food was scarce and every diner had a sharp knife in his hand, lunch could turn very nasty indeed.

So, with food as with love, certain formalities were introduced. Modern western table manners began in the middle ages, and have been elaborated over the centuries until we have rules about everything – order of seating, what a formal place setting should look like and how to use all the utensils, plates and glasses, what to do with your napkin, and even the correct posture for eating and the correct way to pass the wine or the salt.

Of course the rules are arbitrary and ridiculous. It’s different in Japan, different in Outer Mongolia. The point is that table manners, like any other social rules, make order out of what can easily become chaos. They save embarrassment, because everyone knows how to behave. They also save the carpet, and the couch.

We don’t just eat food differently from our ancestors, we prepare it differently. If civilization began around the cooking fire it continued in the kitchen, where cooking was an excuse for more conversation and sociability. Everyone loves a kitchen. You know how hard it is to get people out of it when you have a party. But now, too often, it’s just sixty seconds in the microwave and straight to the couch. Not much chance of sociability there.
The last people to eat while lounging on couches were the ancient Romans, at the height of their imperial glory – and look what happened to them.

Copyright: David Bouchier

We have plenty to be thankful for, more than our ancestors ever did. We should be thankful for our incredibly safe and cushy lives compared to ninety per cent of the other people on the planet – thankful we’re not in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or just about anywhere really. We don’t know who exactly to thank for all this good luck. So, at Thanksgiving, we express our appreciation in a general way, rather like sending out Spam on the Internet, in the hope that some of it reaches the right destination.

It’s a pity that Thanksgiving is such hard work. First there’s the nightmare of travel – at least thirty million Americans will be on the highways this week, and about five million will pack into the airports to fly towards their families.

Then there’s the anxiety of getting together with remote and complicated families, who may be almost like strangers. It’s no longer a simple case of “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House we Go.” The fashion for multiple marriages often means that we have a large choice of grandmothers and mothers to visit at this time of year. Sometimes there’s even a choice of fathers, assuming they left a forwarding address. It’s not Norman Rockwell’s picture any more.

But the really challenging thing about Thanksgiving is the food. Not only does the traditional menu contradict every known principle of diet and health, but also there is the inescapable fact that somebody has to cook it, and almost nobody remembers how to cook any more.

The baby boom moms are doing Thanksgiving these days. One thing we know about the baby boomers is that their lives are too busy for cooking. They never got into the habit eating of home-cooked family meals around the table. The fast food industry was created by them and for them. The papers fill up with neat recipes for delightful little Thanksgiving extras like roasted cauliflower, raisins, and anchovy vinaigrette or spiced sweet potato pudding. The New York Times offered a food preparation timetable that ran for five full days. Who has time for this? The harassed modern mom can only spare an hour or two away from her corporate desk to buy a packet or vitamin-enriched turkey-flavored artificial food product and zap it in the microwave, while talking to the Tokyo office on her cellular phone. The prospect of cooking a multi-course meal with six vegetables and dessert for a whole house full of people is her worst nightmare. It’s like trying to pilot a Boeing 777 when your only flying training has been with a kite.

Millions of single people head for Miami or Marrakech to avoid the danger of food poisoning, and the family slide show. More families each year spend the holiday in hotels, or have Thanksgiving catered. Our local deli will deliver the whole gastronomic tsunami to your home for a very modest price. Health insurance is not included.

It’s probably best this way. The old kitchen skills have faded, but also the old kitchen slavery. I remember my mother in law working incredibly hard to cook a huge dinner for fifteen at Thanksgiving, which may be easy for a trained restaurant chef in a professional kitchen, but not for an average domestic cook in a kitchen the size of a closet. Progress and the catering industry have liberated us from all that. We can enjoy the sociable part of the holiday, and not worry about the food. That’s yet another thing to be thankful for.

Copyright: David Bouchier

When we first came to live in France ten years ago I could stumble along in a simple French conversation. I assumed that it would be only a matter of weeks before I was speaking the language, if not with Gallic fluency then at least with some degree of competence. I expected to learn effortlessly by osmosis and total immersion.

This miracle failed to happen. Simple negotiations in the post office or the grocery store regularly turned into hilarious comedies of misunderstanding. I was entertaining more people in Aniane than I ever did in my short career as a humorist. Shopkeepers smiled when they saw me coming, anticipating a few minutes of harmless hilarity at the Englishman’s expense. I was quickly becoming a local “character.”
So I decided to take a class.

I’ve never been good at languages because languages are mostly about arbitrary rules, and I hate arbitrary rules. French has more arbitrary and more bizarre rules than any other language. There is a whole national institution, the French Academy, dedicated to inventing and defending these rules, so that no foreigner ever has a chance to get them right. Gender, for example: you probably remember from school that every French noun is either masculine or feminine, except for a few that swing both ways. Since the language has thousands of nouns, this means a lot of guesswork, and it is very, very hard to make a good guess. For example France, the country, is feminine (la France), while French, the language, is masculine (le français). How is anybody supposed to guess that? The answer, of course, is that you are not supposed to guess it. You are supposed to get it wrong and reveal yourself as an utterly ignorant and stupid foreigner. David Sedaris, in one of his entertaining dispatches from Paris on National Public Radio, confessed that he bought two of everything so as to use the plural form and avoid the trap of guessing the right gender. I often used this trick myself. It works fine, as long as the object of your desire isn’t obstinately singular, like a haircut or heart transplant (both, by the way, feminine). The limitations of my French trapped me in a formless, genderless, present tense. I wanted to change this.

Language incompetence has a bad effect on one’s self-image. A person who can’t talk properly is immediately reduced to childishness. Even my elegant French teacher was a study in perplexity when she tried and failed to speak English. And while French accented English may sound sexy, English accented French most definitely does not! That’s why kids brought up in the American style hate languages. Learning a language is one long exercise in humiliation.

I enrolled in a language class in the heart of the handsome city of Montpellier. There were many schools to choose from and, lacking any other criterion, I chose the one on Rue August Comte. Comte was the inventor of sociology and the father of positivism. He was quite mad, but I’ve always admired him. He was born in Montpellier almost exactly two centuries ago, and his name on the street seemed like a good omen.

I took a placement test. I came fully prepared with all the usual test phrases: “Can I look it up in the dictionary?” “My pencil is broken.” “I have to go to the bathroom.” None of this did any good. The teacher snatched the test paper away before I was finished, and struck out most of my answers muttering “incroyable,” and “extraordinaire.” We tried some conversation.

“You’re very clever at making up sentences without genders or verbs,” she said (actually I think “cunning” was the term she used).

“How long have you been learning French?” she demanded.

“About fifty years,” I replied truthfully,

Fifty years was obviously not enough. My linguistic self-esteem, never very robust, was completely shattered. I expected to be assigned to the lowest class of débutants, or absolute beginners. But I must have caught Madame Patricia on a particularly good day. Or perhaps she was looking for a challenge. She wrote on my folder “Intermediate Class.”

“The lowest level of the Intermediate Class.” she added, before I could get too pleased with myself.

Thus I entered the quaintly-named category of faux débutants, or beginners who pretend to know something.

The following week I began my daily commute of about forty minutes into Montpellier, over hills and through vineyards, to be in class at nine o’clock. Three intensive hours every morning was considered the minimum dose of French necessary to cure someone at my level. I was the oldest member of the class by about thirty-five years. At first I felt like a kind of grandfather figure, but then I realized that there were worse things than spending three hours every day in the company of a dozen (mostly) charming and (mostly) very pretty young women from all over the world. One of the few male students was an Arab from Oman, who was looking for a second wife. Nobody volunteered.

The group changed week by week. At various times it included English, Americans, Japanese and Germans, some Scandinavians, Africans, and Italians, an Egyptian model, a glamorous Polish singer, an agricultural engineer from the Sultanate of Oman, an Icelandic girl like a tiny blonde elf, a Spanish policeman, an albino doctor from Syria, a super-elegant Swiss lady who always looked above it all, and a Brazilian bombshell who made it very difficult for any of us males to concentrate on our verbs.

We had conversation periods every morning, on topics carefully chosen to avoid politics, religion, and anything else that might give offence to all the different sensibilities packed into that small room. This didn’t leave us much to talk about. But we talked nevertheless, and our conversations were like a surrealistic collaboration between Lewis Carroll, Samuel Becket and Marcel Marceau. The high point for me was when a Danish student called Ken and I presented the bewildered class with the whole of Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, in fractured French. (If you have no idea what this means in any language, don’t worry about it).

It was interesting to get a perspective on the young people from different countries. They lived up to their stereotypes: the Germans were serious and intent on learning ‘the rules’; the Italians and Spanish were relaxed and insouciant; the Scandinavians were cheerful and sensible; the Japanese were totally paranoid; the Americans were undisciplined and lazy; and the British were confused and apologetic.

After three months, I left my French class for the last time. I’d like to pretend that this departure marked my achievement of perfect comprehension and fluency. But the truth is that I had learned enough to understand how far I had to go.

I expected to finish the class with relief. For three months I’d commuted into Montpellier every day during the morning rush hour, and sat for a total of two hundred hours, in a state of complete confusion, in a cold room, on a very hard chair, with a bunch of people who could have been my grandchildren.
But it was a wrench to leave those people. We were a miniature United Nations – united by our tenuous grasp of the French language
Every day, one of us had to present a short speech to the whole class, in French. We played silly games with words, we laughed a lot. Above all we endured the hard slog of grammar. I cannot imagine why the French need fourteen tenses of verbs, when we get along fine in English with only seven. In addition to all this, we got homework every day – a short essay and a grammar exercise. It was virtually a full-time job.

I learned, among other things, that younger brains really do move faster. It’s chastening to discover that, when it comes to remembering grammar and vocabulary, age and experience count for less than nothing. It was pleasing to see how the whole class took on some of the nicest French habits, such as daily hugs and kisses all around. I’ve never seen this happen in a British or American college class. I missed seeing these charming, intelligent young people every day. They included me very cheerfully into their company, even though I must have seemed like a peculiarly inarticulate grandfather.

Above all, I missed my teacher. I’d forgotten what a pleasure it is to have a gifted teacher. Madame Patricia was stylish, charming, professional, endlessly patient, and strict. Her strictness was important. I was often tempted to stay in bed, especially when some particularly nasty grammar was on the program or it was my turn to give a talk to the class. Madame Patricia did not tolerate this kind of backsliding. Once she demoted me to the lower class for a week, because I had failed to come to grips with the subjunctive.

“It is necessary to come to class every day, David,” she would admonish me.

Nor did she tolerate my feeble attempts at humor in the French language.

“It is necessary sometimes to be serious, David.” she said, many times. I did my best.

Madame Patricia was a most interesting woman. She was born in Syria, and was quite beautiful. My wife seemed to think that I shouldn’t have lunch with her on my own, even though this would have been a good chance to improve my French at little extra cost. I’m sure that this restriction slowed my progress in irregular verbs.

If I know any French at all today it’s thanks to those two hundred hours of gentle torture in Madame Patricia’s class. On my last day I took a farewell picture of them all. That picture really is worth a thousand words.

Copyright: David Bouchier