France an embarrassment?

General Discussion
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Yes John, that’s the whole point. The overspending in France has been investing in the future. Unfortunately Sarko reversed that trend when services started to be cut, like Thatcher. The results have been longer waiting lists in the public domaine ie hospitals, govt offices etc etc.

The Bayrou plan, which failed was to cut even more services to better balance the books. Cutting out two bank holidays maybe would have been more acceptable or, even better cutting out one Bank Holiday now and another later to get it through parliament. He tried (imo), to be too drastic too quickly just as Macron did when he first came to power.

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Here is a very well written article from The Irish Times. I admire Ireland in their embrace of the EU and the seriousness with which they view it. Clearly they are embarrassed by it all.

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I’m not convinced that “austerity” actually helps the national debt. The first lesson is that national economies do not follow the rules which apply to households (whatever Thatcher would have had us think) - France is more constrained by the Euro but it can still pull financial strings households can’t.

Robert’s example is cute and it does demonstrate that there can be large amounts of “debt” which amount to nothing because it is owed by a number of people to each other in a closed system - in the same way a lot of “national debt” is owed by the country to itself.

However national economies are not totally closed (household economies are not closed at all) and one difference between UK national debt and French debt is that only 30% of UK debt is owed outside of the UK economy, the comparable figure in France is 50%.

Also the French debt is a good bit higher in terms of GDP at 114% compared with the UK at only just over 100%.

France is now the third most indebted country in the EU (behind Greece and Italy).

I don’t know the answer to this problem, it is possibly bigger than France and needs proper management from the EU - which is always problematic.

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64

Thank you.

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“POOR FRENCH” you say? methinks he doth protest too much… In any case, I hope you won’t feel imposed on by this suggestion (the reviews give a bit of a flavour). It’s for anglophones especially. Amazon.co.uk

Another way to improve your French!
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Freudian slip? :wink:

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Downhill is all I can envisage. Certainly hard times for sometime. Been in France for a 24 years. Property was cheap as chips in rural areas. Still is. It’s easier now than ever to be off grid. As long as you are connected digitally. No smart phone you are screwed. I am old now and unable to continue my autonomous life. I would recommend to anyone capable,to buy a rural property with land.

There is divinity and deep satisfaction to be found.

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Or Americophones perhaps? Are you American @NigelMiddlemiss :thinking: :smiley:

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Dear David,

Thank you for your (good) question. I’m British, in fact, and so ‘Memorize French!’ has a British English slant, in the phonetic transcription for example. However, in the not very many cases where I’ve noted American English usage deviating very much from British English, I have tried to mark it e.g. the word chips.
Are you American or English, David?
I guessed from the tonality of your comment that you might be British: many of the anglophone expats are, I believe.
Very best wishes, and happy reading or learning if you do decide to get the book.

Nigel Middlemiss
M.A.Oxon.

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“All generalizations are false, including this one”.

This is not the case where Ilive, the museums, château, and industrial heritage sites are full of families of all ages.

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Just a friendly dig at your spelling, @NigelMiddlemiss , this from Oxford, your alma mater:

Memorize and memorise are both English terms. Memorize is predominantly used in :united_states: American (US) English ( en-US ) while memorise is predominantly used in :united_kingdom: British English (used in UK/AU/NZ) ( en-GB ). In the United States, there is a preference for “memorize” over “memorise” (98 to 2).

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Dear David,

Thank you - I certainly take the dig as friendly! What it doesn’t take into account, however, is that although I’m indeed an alumnus of the University, I was also an in-house author for a long while at OUP (Oxford University Press), who explicitly have a different standard on this compared with the University, as the University’s own style guide makes clear: “[Oxford University advises that you] use suffix -ise/-yse/-isation not -ize/-yze/-ization. Note that this is different from OUP’s choice, because OUP prefers to reflect the Greek roots of some such words”. So I was very pleased to adopt for my book a title which respected both OUP’s standard as well as the American one, particularly as the US / Canadian market has eager French students who I hope will buy the book :smiley:.

Despite, or because of, this entertaining verbal wrangling between us, I hope you’ll consider getting a copy of “Memorize French!”, though I suspect your own French vocab is probably quite advanced. (You still might find the mnemonics entertaining).

All good wishes

Nigel

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So you are on here to promote your book, as it appeared in your first posting ?

(Sorry but I’m having two whole bad days, yesterday and today, dealing with lying useless crap-system-backed French customer service. So I’m grouchy and as the English would say, I’m ‘not taking prisoners’ today ) :slight_smile:

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Which particular crap French customer service, Karen? There are so many.

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Speaking personally, I might find the book useful. I struggle with the names of various preserved ham products - spiced or not - indeed, I embarrassed myself a couple of days ago by asking whether what we were eating was rosace (I don’t even think that’s a word).

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Oh it is, but not for pork products!

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It certainly is, those round ornate windows you’ll find in churches and round plaster work above ceiling lights

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is this deja vu..?

:sleepy_face: :rofl:

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Yesterday GLS who delivered late, without following procefure, without signature as required by their own rules - and dumped my large expensive parcel on the drive while it was raining and continuef to rsin where I returned to find it shortly before midnight.

GLS did the same with a much smalker parcel 2 months ago - with the added refinement that they actually threw it over the fence where it hit the satellite dish and bounced to the ground into a hidden place. Not that amyone looked for it till 2 days later on the Monday - as GLS does not do or accept to do deliveries here to a particulier on a Sarurday - when it was due Monday. Miraculously the Monday GLS driver was able to point out the soaking wet package’s location when I asked where was the second package also due that day.

On that occasion I kept the items that had sold out - to my regret as 3 days in the rain had indeed lessened their quality as it has turned out.

This time I’ve sent photos to Lidl, made a video anf told them it will not be opened as the package has been danaged by 3 violations of GLS which have made the contents unacceptable and it will be returned. Asked them to replace it at no price increase (though I still lose cashback of 23;euros).

La Poste forced a delivery failure on Tuesday because they proposed that as a late delivery date I’m not there on, Their system invited to modify date and allowed Wednesday to be enteres but refused to ssve it. Even their custy service couldn’r fix it when I called on Monday to head off a forced delivery failure on the Tuesday.

Result : preprogrammed delivery fsilure that took me hours struggking with their systems and calling their ba$tard defended-like-a-fortress-by-robots call centre. Miraculously thoigh the system wasn’t blocking the othrr choice on the same page, to do La Poste’s work for them by choosing to collect your own oarcel at a dépôt. Just refused to save the modification of date it offered to same address. Funny, that.

Only 1 more delivery attempt allowed and that was Wednesday. I’d been standing by the gate since 9am waiting for both GLS and La Poste but simply could not wait any longer and had to hit the loo inside for 4 min .. Sod’s law that’s when La Poste pitched up with my parcels.

So yeah unfortunate on the only true delivery attempt on Wednesfay but due to the forced failure by their $hitty want-to-avoid-work systems blocking the right to tell them you’re absent and not to try to deliver when they’re late on a later date thst doesn’t eork, My 3 large parcels are now at the Post Office as they forced a delivery failure on Tuesday despite all my efforts to use their invitation to chsnge the date and must be collected.

I am rural and don’t have transport so this is a catastrophe for me as I can’t collect. Parcels will not be collectef so will go back to sender.with me having wasted 2 days battling to get through robot to their customer service and being hung up on twice because ‘too hsrd” for robot human F agents - who if they carry on like this wikl definitely deserve to be replaced by robots - as not in their script.

And today Credit Agricole is denying they were instructed (twice) to do something which they forgot to do and now has consequences. Fortunately I have proof

Well…. you asked. Sorry for download.

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80

Sorry to hear all that! I hope it helped to get it out of your system.

One day, I may tell the story of the IKEA Delivery That Wasn’t, and how Jonathan Creek nearly solved the mystery by having a lightbulb moment.

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