The French have a lot of culture. Their food from Provence to Brittany is heavenly, the wine is fit for Bacchus and the countryside invites picnics at every turn.What some Frenchmen do lack though is the ability to allow a person to have a free-ride, or if someone is enjoying a situation above their station - then they will try to jeopardize that situation.
There should be a word for this phenomenon. It could well be the venomous opposite of serendipity (stumbling upon something wonderful by accident) – let me call it venomdipity.
Take the movie “Jean de Florette”. The gist of the movie is Gérard Depardieu inherits a rocky farm that apparently has no nearby spring – or water. He toils and struggles, until he almost dies from fatigue as he carries water from over a faraway mountain by the bucketful.
Short of death, and a beaten man, he discovers that the local villagers have always known that there is a spring a hundred yard from his crops. The bastards didn’t tell him. Venomdipity is what it is!
Imagine sleeping in the camper van after a hard drive over the Col du Galibier to the next mountain stage – a bottle of grungy Cahors red emptied, looking forward to the next Contador attack the following day – when at 12:45 am a car starts honking from a long way off and then hoots right outside our camper door.
This carries on intermittently as locals drive passed the camper vans and tents. Then the early morning locals – maybe they work at la boulangerie in the village – why else would the idiots be driving at 3:30 am and hooting all the way down the mountainside. This is venomdipity at its worst.
I can only think that they despise us as gypsy-like tourists.
So be warned – pack ear plugs.
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