My Good Life in France by Janine Marsh

Author:Janine Marsh [Marsh, Janine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782437321
Publisher: Michael O' Mara Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Flop chef, not top chef

WE HAD HEARD a lot about how good the French health service is, but had been lucky enough not to have had cause to try it. This all changed when Mark was struck with a mysterious illness that made him very sick. Like many men, he is averse to going to the doctors but, after a week of him eating dry toast and moaning, I’d had enough.

Me: ‘Right, that’s it, I am going to make you an appointment with the English-speaking doctor in town.’

Mark: ‘I’ll be better by the time we get an appointment.’

We were both used to London waiting times where, as a general rule, you need to make an appointment days, if not weeks, in advance. I phoned anyway. It was 9 a.m.

‘Can you come in at 11.30 a.m.?’ asked the doctor, who answered his own phone.

My jaw hit the floor in shock.

The doctor’s office is a room in a converted old mansion house. It has seen better days, but who’s complaining when you only sit for five minutes in the waiting room and then go straight in?

‘I love English patients,’ said the doctor. ‘You don’t mind waiting a few hours for an appointment. My French patients start screaming if it’s longer than thirty minutes!’

That day he organized for Mark to have blood and various other tests, the results of which came back two days later. We phoned the doctor for an update and, although the cause wasn’t clear, it was nothing serious. Later we discovered Mark had developed an allergy to certain thickening products in processed food, which he had been eating a lot of when I was in London with Dad.

It was a wake-up call.

It is a well-known fact among my friends that I am useless in the kitchen. I have no interest in cooking. When I worked in London I lived on takeaways of all sorts, not just because it was usually too late to make anything except for toast but because I didn’t want to cook. Mark says that the issue is not that I can’t cook but that I’d rather be doing something else. It’s true. I start cooking, go and look at my Facebook page, or read emails and that is far more interesting so I sit a little longer and forget completely what I am supposed to be doing in the kitchen. Most people use a timer to alert them to when their dishes are ready to serve; for me it’s often the smell of burning.

Of course, we all know about French cooking and the national love of good food and wine that is not just a hobby, but practically mandatory. However, I was totally unprepared for the shock-horror reaction of my French friends when it came to the subject of gastronomy and me. In the same way that we Brits are obsessed with talking about the weather, the French are fanatical about food.

In my village, everyone, and I mean everyone, grows vegetables and fruit in their gardens; many of them additionally rent or borrow a bit of field and some of them are farmers.

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