A Year in the Merde - Stephen Clarke

"My good friend Chris told me not to come to France. Great lifestyle, he said, great food, and totally unpolitically correct women with great underwear.
But, he warned me, the French are hell to live with. He worked in the London office of a French bank for three years.
" - They made all us Brits redundant the day after the French football team got knocked out of the World Cup. No way was that a coincidence," he told me.
His theory was that the French are like the woman scorned. Back in 1940 they tried accents and their big-nosed Général de Gaulle, and ever since we've done nothing but poison them with our disgusting food and try to wipe the French language off the face of the Earth. That's why they built refugee camps yards from the Eurotunnel entrance and refuse to eat our beef years after it was declared safe. It's permanent payback time, he said. Don't go there.
Sorry, I told him, I've got to go and check out that underwear."