A French Hedgehog is a Fearsome Sight For a Snail!
Just as surprising for a woodcutter, as well..
The difference between a French hedgehog eating a snail and a French person eating a snail is simply the garlic butter.
Although, back in the days when we had a holiday home in La Dordogne, one of our neighbours spoke with relish of simply plucking a garden snail from its shell and throwing it onto a red hot griddle, no preparation or tasty dressing. Sorry if you’re eating right now but yes, it is entirely true.
Bernard, if you’re reading this, I hold you up as a great example of the French countryman who sees a baby rabbit as simply a preparation for a dinner yet to come! As he said to me, if you can hold it in one hand, it’s a pet, but once you need both hands, it’s dinner!
And he always carried his pocket knife with him..
Here’s this week’s offering. The latest and newest is the last one, as usual.
(I know there’s a problem reading the first two of these. It won’t happen again, I promise!)
The Fundamentals of French Medicine in the Past
I have to confess that, when we first came to France for good, as it were, I was just a little concerned about what might happen if I got sick.
My late mother, ever a lover of a colourful anecdote, had told me many years ago that “the French” - she was prone to indulging in cultural stereotypes - were particularly horrified at swallowing pills and capsules, as they all thought that this would certainly be disastrous for the liver. Consuming medication by the oral route would undoubtedly provoke a ‘crise du foie’, which means ‘a crisis of the liver’. And “the French” know a thing about livers. Especially how to make a liver expand to several times it natural size, let me tell you, but that’s not the point of this piece.
As a result of such fears, my mother continued gleefully, “the French” prefer to put their medication up their rectums.
Well, you can imagine the effect that this piece of intelligence had on a young boy, almost all of whom are scatalogically minded at the best of times! I was flabberghasted and disgusted, of course, but then burst into paroxisms of laughter. I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to do such things for themselves, (oh, I know now that people can and do..) which inevitably meant that people had to perform this intimate service for each other.
I howled at the thought of some whiskery old woman, balancing her weight on a crook-handled walking stick, her drawers around her ankles, bending double so that her husband, his eyesight not quite what it had once been, so holding a candle aloft for greater clarity, can probe for the right spot at which to apply pressure on the capsule. Such scenes passed before my mind’s eye in hideous detail and to tell the truth, they still do!
All of which brings us back to my concerns upon finding myself living here in France and considering what to do if illness should befall me. I was jolly sure that I wasn’t having anything shoved into that which should properly be thought of as an exit, but what if that was all there was? My mind’s eye, doing its usual out-of-body overview, saw me desperately trying to apply the suppository on my own, sweating and contorted like a naked, demonic wrestler, in some obscene struggle against my own sobbing self-esteem.
Nothing would have induced me to let another perform the task. My buttoned-up and conservative English upbringing would never allow such an invasion of my person. I’m not at all sure that I wouldn’t have simply succumbed to whatever painful demise awaited me rather than allowing another to shove pills or capsules into my nether region.
Arriving here in France, blithe of spirit and carefree of concern, I had forgotten that in our own medical cabinet there lay my own medication brought from England. Nothing too serious; just some nasal spray against polyps and some pills for blood pressure.
Pills?
Suddenly, I was alarmed. A day would certainly come when they would need to be replenished. How did “the French” deal with blood pressure issues? A bead of sweat appeared on my brow as I shook the small jar and realised that a day of reckoning was almost at hand.
Other circumstances had already allowed me to sign up with a local poultice-walloper, so I made an appointment for the day before my medication ran out. The days leading up to this were not easy.
The evil hour arrived and I was welcomed by a diminutive and energetic fellow in a white doctor’s tunic and a mask. These were the days of the pandemic and so masks were obligatory in every medical establishment, principally to protect those who were aleady at risk due to other illnesses.
We went through all the normal procedures. He stood me on the scales and had the decency not to shout insults; he took my blood pressure, which was, as always when at the doctor’s, monstrously elevated and then he listened to my breathing and heartbeat. We had a brief chat about the blood pressure, during which I told him what my readings were when at home, free from the threat of some terrifying announcement about my health.
He wrote me a prescription, took payment for the visit (yes, we pay to see the doctor here, even though we get almost all the money back within a couple of days), and sent me on my way. He had said nothing about how I was to take the stuff, and that bothered me. Now, another fearful though assailed me as I approached the pharmacy to have the prescription filled. Would it be the pharmacist who would tell me that I must sit on the damned pills and try to suck them in? And would that pharmacist be a young slip of a girl trumpeting the instructions for all the other shoppers to hear? Oh, the hideous shame of it all!
It has been said, by somebody far wiser than I, that the coward dies a thousand deaths but the brave man, only one. I think I had got to about nine hundred and ninety dreadful deaths before my eyes rested on the cardboard box containing the pills and I saw, with indescribable relief, the words ‘voie orale’ printed thereon. The instruction to take the medicine by mouth.
“The French” had obviously moved on in their practices.
Thanks, Mum, for all your help..
Cartoonist For Hire
I can draw for you. It turns out that most people can’t do this but as you already know, I can.
Almost every presentation can be improved with an illustration and many could really benefit from something light and amusing. Or pithy and striking.
You may have used those online greetings card services which allow you to upload your own images to be printed on cards for birthdays, anniversaries, congratulations and plenty of other occasions, so if you have anything like that coming up, or a presentation event, give a thought to having a professional cartoon to improve the whole affair.
You might want a gag of some sort, a strip cartoon or just something whimsical; only you will know what you want.
So, for your next special moment, impress the living daylights out of the object of your appreciation by having something professionally drawn.
Simply reply to this email to let me know what you’re thinking and I’ll come up with a couple of ideas and an estimate of the price.
See you again soon!