When I was about fifteen, someone told me that I have a “very French facial features”. This came as quite a surprise to me, coming from an incredibly British family. I’m not even sure that we have any other nationality in our blood. Maybe a little bit of Icelandic on my mother’s side. But apparently the shape of my nose, the way the sides of my lips curl when I smile and something about my eyebrows makes people think I look French.
For a while, I thought nothing of it. I’m not one of the British people who still seem to harbour resentment to the French for I guess the war or something. It’s just my face. It might look French. It might look stupid. Ultimately it doesn’t matter because it looks like me.
But when I was eighteen, a girl came up to me in the pub and asked if I was French. I was just standing at the bar waiting to get served. I wasn’t doing anything even remotely French. The girl was very pretty and I got nervous and told her the truth in my charming West Country accent.
‘Err… No, I’m from Bath. It’s kind of near Bristol.”
The pretty girl was less than impressed. She made some small talk with me about Bristol being kind of gross and then walked back over to her friends without inviting me.
Similar situations like that occurred before I figured out what to do. It was starring me straight in the face. On a night out for a friend’s birthday, a pretty girl with glasses asked me if I was French. I smiled, making sure to curl the ends of my lips a lot more than usual and contorted my eyebrows. Forcing my voice to go quite a lot lower than normal, I whispered one word that I was sure to interest her with.
‘Mademoiselle.’
Or at least I tried to say that. It’s very hard to say French words when you’ve been raised in the South West. I ended up sounding less like a charming French man and more like a confused tourist. Needless to say, the pretty girl walked away almost immediately and I don’t blame her. I have since stopped smiling, started to get my eyebrows plucked on a monthly basis and I have an appointment for a nose job booked for early next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment