I have recently undertaken a comprehensive review of what my readership like and don't like about this blog. For larger media operations it would be a complicated and expensive process. For a boutique concern such as this one, the research involved seeing the majority of my audience in the pub and him telling me what he thinks. The conclusion was that you the audience want more words and fewer silly videos and pictures. I'm afraid I will never lose my love of silly pictures, but I am nothing if not pliable. So this one goes out to a man sitting in his office in the Square Mile, reading this while absent-mindedly signing bits of papers covered in very large numbers and made-up words.
Because apropos of nothing much, I was thinking recently of a disastrous French exchange that I undertook when I was 12. I didn't want to do it at all and was horrified when I realised that my parents weren't joking. Despite the best efforts of the famille Latour in the Tricolore text books, I was (and remain) terrible at all languages and the folks must have thought that total immersion would stun my second-rate brain into firing up a few new synapses.
So I was signed up and allocated Nicolas from Grenoble as my exchange partner. We exchanged meticulously composed letters filling each other in on the age of our siblings and pets and the hobbies we (or at least I) pretended to have. J'aime collectionner des timbres! Things were going well so far. Then I pitched up at a snowy mountainside farm house and actually met him.
It's not often that you meet an alpha 12 year old. Nicolas was about twice my height, blond and ruddy cheeked, and played and excelled at every sport he could get his broad muscular hands on. The first day was a scarcely credible montage of humiliation as he found me to be an inadequate opponent at football, tennis, table tennis and, finally, checkers. "Theenk, Garet', theenk!" he scolded as he captured all my discs or whatever you do within seconds for the third or fourth time.
His disappointment with me intensified when, after some fairly awkward work with a map, we established that my home town of Nottingham was in fact quite a long way from Manchester and he would not be seeing his footballing idol Eric Cantona in the flesh on the return leg of the exchange. We both went to bed quite clear that this wasn't a lifelong friendship in the making.
His family were perfectly nice and accommodating of the monosyllabic cuckoo in their nest. They gave me tasty French food and tried early on to force me to speak French, although after one too many cheek-burningly awful exchanges we all tacitly decided that I was a hopeless case. I had my first and only experience of skiing that week, which ended with me picking my way down a black run sideways, gibbering with terror all the way, after a directional mix-up when ascending the mountain. I told Nicolas about it and his ruddy jock face expressed bafflement at the idea that going down a really scary mountain would be anything other than totally brilliant.
The other people from my school that I saw that week were the exchange partners of Nicolas' friends, most of whom I had no relationship with at all in everyday Nottingham life. However, they were largely having as miserable a time as I was, which meant we were all desperately happy to see each other and ditch the Frenchies on trips to Grenoble.
On one of these trips I made momentous decision. My music taste (largely Bon Jovi's Crossroads compilation on a loop) was palpably behind the times and needed freshening up. One of my new enforced English buddies offered to guide me into fashionability and, as a first step, prescribed Nevermind by Nirvana. This was scary stuff. The coolest boys in my school - the ones with the longest, greasiest curtains - all wore the Nirvana t-shirt that said "flower sniffin kittty pettin baby kissin corporate rock whores" on the back. If I was going to get into them I'd have to hide any such clothing from my Mum, which raised the question of how it would ever get washed. Don't worry, said my new friend - just start with the music and worry about the rest later. So I bought the album, heart thumping at the prospect of being ID'd because one of the song titles was Territorial Pissings, and stashed it proudly in my suitcase. The minute I got home, I'd get into that and start to be very hip indeed.
The rest of the trip passed in a fug of moody silences between me and Nicolas and a very weary goodbye, both of us dreading his trip to England in a few weeks (of which I have very little memory, probably because I completely ignored him). The atmosphere on the coach to the airport was jubilant. I was about to give Crossroads another whirl when there was a commotion from the back row. I turned around to see a two day old copy of the Daily Mail that had been left under one of the seats being passed around with great solemnity. The headline read "American singer found dead". "Does that mean there'll be no more Nirvana?" asked one of the cool kids plaintively as his friends chewed their fringes with angst.
I was absolutely livid. I'd not even listened to the sodding album yet and it was already retro. I knew enough about music to know that I'd now always be a nouveau Nirvana fan and nothing more. When I got home I gave it a few half-hearted spins but it just wasn't going to work. I resolved to stick with Crossroads until someone would get around to inventing Britpop.
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