L'entente cordiale

It is international rugby time again, as it was when this was written 30 years ago.

On our first visit to Paris, we sat in the Parc des Princes stadium amid thousands of Frenchmen whose patriotic fervour at such times must be a determination  to obliterate memories of Agincourt and Waterloo.
The French tricolour, together with large banners on which their emblem, a cockerel, can be seen stamping the British Lion to pulp are in profusion.

Many of their supporters carry live cockerels painted red, white and blue, which invariably escape the strings to which they are attached and invade the pitch with red-faced Frenchmen in pursuit.
Between drinking red wine by the litre, they shout “Allez France” in chorus, to the accompaniment of exploding fireworks that cast great palls of coloured smoke over the ground. Regional bands play mutilated military type music as only the French know how.

We had no banners, but one of our number who wore ‘union jack’ socks was obliged to take them off and wave in retaliation. They were immediately snatched by a Frenchman, who was persuaded to return them on the promise he could have them back if the French won - which they did. After the match, the ‘snatcher’ and his three friends invited us to go to a bar for a drink. Max, the ‘snatcher’, was a Frenchman of Polish origins. We drank and laughed and exchanged cards, which was never easy in a bar packed shoulder to shoulder with celebrating Frenchmen. It was the beginning of a relationship which has lasted over 25 years.
A year later, when the memory of that day in Paris had been put aside in the mind, there came a telephone call from an official of a French bank in Paris. It was news of their impending visit to England for ‘the match’.

Each year since, in alternate years, we go to Paris and they come to England.
We have broken plates in a Greek restaurant; sung “Under The Bridges Of Paris With You” to the unbelieving clientele of a French restaurant in Montmartre; enraged the piano-playing star of a French night club by insisting on being entertained by his more musical understudy; thrown glasses over our shoulders and tried to remove the tablecloths from tables containing empty wine bottles without, initially, breaking the bottles, while a patient waiter with an eye to the main chance, with napkin over his arm, swept up the debris as he served.

We dragged off the snow-covered roof of a five storey hotel in Paris, one of a party of three from the adjoining room, two of whom had gone out leaving their companion ‘locked’ in the room because of his inebriated state. He had taken the only exit available to an escape minded Briton, namely through the window, along the roof to the window of our room on which he knocked and asked quite politely: “could I come in please?”

We have searched Paris in the early hours of the morning for one of our number who had stepped out for a breath of fresh air, only to find when he turned round that ‘the restaurant had disappeared’.
We watched, through a crack in the floorboards, another French waiter in a somewhat lesser restaurant refilling wine bottles with ‘more rouge’.
In the Mimiche restaurant in Montmartre, at four o'clock in the afternoon, in response to our inquiry as to when the place closed, the head waiter explained:“Monsieur, we are already closed!”
The French are businessmen first and all else afterwards. The doors may be closed, but the customer can stay for ever as long as he is still spending.

In their turn, our ‘amis du rugby’ have played darts against village teams in English pubs and played the perfect example of the French screen lover to Chrissie, the one-time perfect example of the English barmaid in the Row Barge at Wallingford.
There, publican Horatio Septimus Hoddinott, seventh son of a seventh son, filled the pub with music. He was once runner-up in the ‘British Pub Pianist Of The Year’ competition. He would have won, but was disqualified when he exceeded his time limit of five minutes because the audience wouldn’t let him stop.

In return for gastronomy and wine of the highest standard in restaurants like the very, very expensive Jules Verne restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower, our French friends have eaten steak and kidney pudding with pints of bitter at a pub, played the local team at skittles, and still believe they had the best of the bargain!

Now you may understand why it takes almost three days to watch a rugby match for 80 minutes!