Paris

So what would attract you to live here, said monsieur to the sunburned Brit

I see the weather has taken its toll, but dinner seemed rather a hit

The manual workers on two hour breaks, sipping wine as they talk about Proust

The manicured lanes, the yards of vine, the coq francais ruling the roost

26 April 2024, Friday

As I transit through Paris, having munched the only “pain au chocolat” I’ve ever disliked (thank you, American hotels), I’ve been reflecting on France.

I have lived for eighteen months in France and travelled the country widely. I’ve owned two properties here. I speak French. I have a French wife and in-laws. I love France.

And yet it has never been where I wanted to make my life. I dislike the French business environment. While in England you can establish a company for a tenner and start trading, in France it is thousands of euros and hundreds of regulatory pitfalls. In England it pains me that, for high-paid individuals, every pound they get in their pocket is matched by another going to the state for God knows what wastage; in France it is two to the government. And while the rest of the world gradually wakes up to the economic implications of the “problem” of longevity, in France they fight with bloody fingernails against raising the state pension age from 62 to 64 (in the UK it’s 68 already). This enterprise-stifling, statist philosophy has never been mine.

But I suppose we must recognise that the French government does provide world-class services, which undoubtedly His Majesty’s Government doesn’t. In a couple of hours I am jumping on the TGV (train de grande vitesse: a train that can go twice as fast as the British Intercity trains) to St Etienne where I have a 9 minute change to a local train. Nine minutes after a 3 hour, 500km journey! In Britain this would be an absolute joke. I take enough trains to know that just one in five runs on time (1 in five is cancelled, 1 in five is at least half an hour late, and the remaining two we just expect to dribble home 15 minutes late). The motorways here are sparkling clean, free of potholes, and uncongested. Little villages have well-tended greens and trees, local mayors with local accountability, and presumably useful activities in their little village halls and well educated pupils in their little village schools.

And don’t get me started on the food again. Let alone the wine. And the gorgeous countryside and marvellous weather (at least in the south).

On balance, France is a country to visit, retire to, or run a remote business from. In every way except being in the eye of the regulators and taxmen, France beats Britain hands down.

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