France versus Albion is always good sport. The latest instalment of the rivalry was settled conclusively with PSG’s recent victory over Arsenal. As for the wider comparisons, strewn with titanic clashes – the Hundred Years’ War, the Battle of Trafalgar, Liquorice Allsorts versus Carambar – I’m no expert but I did live in Paris for a couple of years and was intoxicated by it from the very first evening there, a January Saturday in foul weather with the normally placid Seine a broiling mess. But after moving back home I hadn’t returned until this year. Inevitably, the first thing you do upon rolling off the Dover to Calais ferry is start declaiming how much better the French do things than us. This, then, is a criminally unscientific list of the good points and bad points gleaned after seeing a beloved old friend again.
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Let’s kick off with roads. Theirs are a complete delight: not a pothole in sight. Not to mention the huge service stations replete with stellar facilities that are light years ahead of our shanty town dumps that cling to the side of our motorways like barnacles on a rusting trawler. If anyone wants to understand why our record with capital projects is so awful, a quick trip to the Bridgwater services on the M5 suffices; if we can’t handle modernising that, then what chance HS2, the Heathrow third runway or Hammersmith Bridge? The pay as you go tolls the French pay for motorway use is the fairest form of taxation: you can’t begrudge it in the slightest and boy, does it deliver.
