What A Lot Of Gaul

When I was in my first year of university, my classmate (the one who is now my partner) and I devised a mischievous plan as part of our ongoing battle against our jobsworth, oh-so-patriotic French tutor. For our oral exam, we would debate the motion 'The French believe that the world revolves around France'. We would do it completely over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, and annoy her so much that she would give us 2.1s instead of Firsts, but hey, it's first year and the grades don't count, so it would be worth it for the sheer entertainment value. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons (of which cowardice was not one) the plan never transpired. Now, two years later, I'm discovering that our proposition was not quite as ludicrous as we'd once believed.

When it comes to taking undeserved credit for things, the French beat Gordon Brown hands down. It is absolutely incredibly just how many things - small, insignificant and thus all the more frustrating things - that they will claim as French without a hint of irony. It struck me how much this was the case when my housemate happened to play 'A Whole New World' from Aladdin one day. It was in French and I didn't know the words so, as I was baking in the kitchen, I began to sing along with the English lyrics. She looked at me, open-mouthed: "C'est quoi, ça?"

I smiled. "Well, it's the original lyrics. You know, from the original film."

She snorted with laughter. "What are you talking about? The original film is French!"

"You can't possibly be serious. Walt Disney was American! All Disney films are American."

"Quoi? Disney is French. He built Disneyland in Paris, didn't he?"

In the end, it took twenty minutes on Wikipedia and a number of YouTube clips of the same song in German, Hungarian, Chinese, Arabic and so on to convince her.

Something like that is so ridiculous that I can laugh it off. I can even cope when, after promising my housemates an authentic English dessert, I made them an apple crumble, only to be told, "Ah, but apple crumble is French!"

What I cannot allow to slide is the heinous violation of my heritage that comes from a Frenchman claiming that they invented the sandwich. I am not proud of what I did, but there are some things an English girl has to do to protect the honour of her country. I'll be packing my suitcases, but when the Rennes police find the dead body of a Frenchman with a picture of the Earl of Sandwich shoved up his left nostril and, "Show me another French word with a w in it!" scrawled on his corpse with a board marker, they won't need too many clues to find the perpetrator.