This time of the year I wish I was French. You get to ride bicycles in vintage skirts and fantastically expensive sandals and, even though it’s like the Venusian Plateau right now in CharmingVille, you still look like you’re on the way to une lavender fair at le old stone mill.
You and your Olivier Martinez looky-likey always seem effortlessly put together and barely moist despite your harebrained plan to take the kiddies for a midday nature walk in Hun Sen Park. Given what’s on the menu round yours, I don’t understand how. I shop-stalk you at Thai Huot in the hope I can learn what you guys make with those tins of chestnut cream. I notice you buy a lot of rusks.
So how do you stay so unshabbily chic? The French people at my gym don’t humiliate themselves wheezing through dozens of knee-cracking bunny hops while balancing a massive blue plastic ball above their heads at 8 in the morning. Or afterwards, weeping through 150 huffy puffy star jumps. Non. They ride their searingly elegant Lapierres to the tennis courts for a proficient doubles match with Jacques and Marie-Claire. How they laugh and laugh! Meanwhile little Serge and sister Frou Frou plash and peal in the sunkissed shallows poolside, each modelling a tasteful neoprene Confidence Jacket, watched by their francophone Khmer nanny. She’s wearing a spring-fresh cotton shift and a straw hat the size of a Provençale cartwheel. Just before 12 they all head home for paté on toast and chilled sauternes.
If this sounds like sour grapes from a blousy antipodean with a green streak, it’s not entirely true. I’ve been to Paris in the springtime. It’s glorious. And I like many French things. Monoprix has great homewares at reasonable prices. You can walk down the street eating cheap cooked langoustines right out of the bag. Policemen wear rollerblades. Old fellows have actually got berets. Many cups are big with handles on both sides. And then there’s the art.
Sometimes I even practice French stuff. Like while I’m choking down a Pastis and some artisanal duck-fat thing at one of CharmingVille’s gallic eateries, I pass the time with those online quizzes in the hope that somewhere deep in my DNA I’ve got a little bit of style-redeeming je ne sais quois to help me through the next four sweltering months. Like, Which Capital City Are You? (Capetown Shmapetown) Or Who Should You Really Be Married To? (Homer Simpson. Merde!) I had a few goes on the first one, trying to get Paris. Or Nice. Even Marseilles would have worked for me, but cheating and ticking all the French-sounding things I still got Dallas, Port Moresby and Islamabad. I’m sure each has its plus points, but îIe de la Cité they ain’t. On the second one I hoped for Nicolas Cazalé or a 30-something Alain Delon. Clearly I ticked the wrong ‘choose your favourite wolf’ box.
Though most French ladies I see here look like Tatou, I resemble Depardieu in leggings and a sports bra. While I stagger, beetroot faced and heaving from weightroom to lap-pool in my orthopaedic thongs, I mentally step into my club-mates’ Coq Sportifs. We’d start the day with a breezy half hour of family Parkour around Olympic Stadium, followed by a carefree lope home down Sihanouk to our renovated colonial pile on Street 19. The kids go to fencing lessons so it’s a simple repast of figs, sharp cheese and a smart little Chablis with previously mentioned Olivier, with whom I’ll then do some French kissing, naturally. We’ll make stormy continental love just as a hot season downpour breaks overhead. He might read a bit of poetry. Later we’ll share a tarte tatin.
As my idyll melts under the relentless Bodes sun, the post-workout Red Bull and boiled egg in my gym bag have lost their appeal. The ear-withering screams of multicultural tots gouging each other with plastic dinosaurs ring across the twinkly pool. No matter. I plug in my headphones and order an icy cold beer. Here in the Paris of the East, you don’t have to be completely French to enjoy la vie en rose.