The not so Belle side of France

Hello friends and enemies. I'm back from a brief sojourn in Paris which led to a regrettable lack of posting action. Good times were had as I experienced the over-priced, obstinately rude, yet wonderfully art and monument laden hospitality of the French nation. However, the thing that has played on my mind most consistently throughout and after my trip has been a simple question: How have our Gallic friends managed to create some of the most amazing art and historical monuments known to man; produced a selection of the world's finest food and wine (notwithstanding the chips I was served in Montmartre which seemed to have been cooked, then plunged in a bucket of water before serving); and yet collectively failed to educate themselves in the not particularly challenging art of using a toilet correctly?

Somewhere in the cultural development of the French nation this particular skill seems to have been omitted. To the extent where they seemingly have no idea quite how a public toilet should be used or kept. It doesn't seem to matter how many free public toilets there are nearby, upon exiting any metro station in Paris you are forced to traverse a force field comprised solely of the pungent smell of human urine. The Frenchman (or woman), always eager to break convention, likes nothing more than to exercise his or her liberty to piss wherever the hell they want. Especially if the area is an absolutely necessary and unavoidable daily thoroughfare for thousands of people. Vive la revolution.

The famous liberté, egalité, fraternité motto may well have been coined to express the inalienable right of everyone French to relieve themselves anywhere in a brotherly manner. And how fitting then that they should exercise this right to the nth degree in the most opulent symbol of the ancien regime: Versailles. The men's toilets in Versailles were literally flooded with liquid expressions of French freedom, to the point where a Spanish lady emerged from the women's, almost in tears due to the unfortunate meeting of flip-flops and baggy trousers with the unstoppable invading force of the neighbouring men's overflowing urinals. Only in France could you be standing in a beautiful, listed, historic building, being told not to use the flash on your camera, while inch deep in piss.

None of this compared to the experience in Gallery Laffayette however. Having sauntered through one of the most upmarket shopping malls in Paris I thought myself assured of a reasonable toilet experience. How wrong could I have been. As I turned a corner, having just wandered past a series of €7,000 Versace dresses, I was hit by a wall of stench so powerful that I can only describe it as like having been directly hit by a salvo of explosive diarrhea straight from the arse of a particularly Camembert fond Gaul. Merde. Immediately my eyes began to water as my nasal hairs spontaneously combusted. This was awful. With no urinals I waited an age for a cubicle and finally got in one as it was vacated by a very smug looking old man. By the look of the floor, it seemed that he had used the toilet for the sole purpose of pissing himself with a modicum of privacy. As the heavy, sweet stench that only old man piss can produce entered my recently depilated nostrils I realised that his smugness had probably been due to the warm trickle of urine comfortingly making its way down into his shoes and the knowledge that he was about to olfactorily stick it to an Anglais. Touché.

Some attempt has to be made to clean all of this mess up and with a depressingly unflinching continuity this always seems to be the unfortunate job of a poor black woman. They look at you with the dead eyes of a person whose job it is to make some frankly token attempts to clean these cess pits, trapped by a system of institutional racism. Next time you witness the indomitable cheeriness of the (similarly racially profiled) toilet attendants found in English clubs, know that they are happily singing the 'freshen-up song' due to an uncontrollable joy gained from not being in France. Most often these poor ladies simply chuck buckets of soapy water at the floor while numerous Frenchmen continue to nonchalantly piss up the walls and shit in the sinks with a laissez faire attitude that only they know how to pull off. How hard is it to actually shit in the bowl, one wonders. The French so loathe to look like they are trying hard at anything that I imagine they simply drop their drawers, and with a Gallic shrug and an audible "Bah" simply hope that whatever their body produces does not go on their clothes. Quite how they arrived at this way of doing things, I'm not sure anybody knows; perhaps they were too busy cooking or painting or going on strike. However this came to be, there's a lot to be said for the good old British way of actually depositing bodily excretions in a porcelain bowl and doing this thing called flushing. Apart from that Paris was pretty cool. FC