Detour de France by Michael Simkins

Author:Michael Simkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Hide and Chic

ONE OF THE most dismaying things about being both English and male is suffering continual derogatory comparisons with our Gallic cousins. The average Englishman has a genetic reputation for both sporting and sexual incompetence leavened by stoicism, necessarily in that order. The French, by contrast, do not.

When we triumph on the field it’s usually a result of grinding out a narrow win against the run of play. ‘It wasn’t pretty but I gave it my all. I was here to smother their natural game and come away with a point.’ And our sporting metaphors equally apply in the bedroom.

The principal components of French sporting manhood are flair, élan and amour propre. Englishmen always somehow manage to look like a conference of middle-management quantity surveyors on a team-building exercise. Could anything be more explicit than Tim Henman’s fist clench after each successful point over many weary years of Wimbledon failure? Heartfelt and meaningful in its own way, but inevitably more in keeping with a sixth-former completing a particularly difficult jigsaw than a testosterone-fuelled international sporting superstar.

Even our names seemed to be parodies of the sort of characters in a Carry On film: Crouch, Grewcock, Sidebottom. Names redolent of balding men with overfull bedpans shuffling up and down hospital corridors in flannel pyjamas.

But the French? Hearing John Inverdale reading out the names of the French Rugby Union team before a recent international was in itself enough to provoke the nearest thing to arousal I’d known for some time: Dusautoir, Bonnaire, Harinordoquy… images of chiselled poets with five o’clock shadows smoking Gitanes while they waited for their lovers to arrive with a bottle of absinthe and an unsheathed stiletto.

The Roman city of Arles in the Camargue is famous for being where Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear and the birthplace of the Gipsy Kings, but I was going there to sample the most daring manifestation of French manliness: the Course Camarguaise, or bull racing. The sport is a first cousin of the more famous Spanish version, but whereas in Spain the protagonists are preening dandies who demonstrate their virility by plunging vicious swords into hapless beasts already weakened beforehand, the bull-racing raseteurs of the Camargue compete on equal terms.

Dressed only in T-shirts and jeans, their aim is simply to get close enough to the charging beast to pluck the small woollen tassels attached to its horns without getting half a metre of compressed hair driven through their upper bowel. At one time all sorts of items used to be suspended from the creatures, including, at one point in the development of the sport, strings of sausages.

The only weapon these daring young hommes have at their disposal, apart from their agility and speed, is a small hooked metal crochet, resembling a knuckleduster, with which they cut the ribbons holding the tassels.

Arles can claim to be the true home of the sport. It began as a simple farm game when workers and staff enjoyed teasing and fighting with the bulls, although the

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