Is anyone else here from England?

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I'm from London but now live in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.
Debra

nearish to scarborough, famous for its teenage pregnancy count!! !

That's reasonably close to where I am.

Im from nottingham in the uk

Essex

Oh cool, my grandparents are in Essex.

Those of you who are English but now live in France, how do you find it?

I am originally from France, but now live in England (Fareham in Hampshire, to be more precise). I couldn't handle life in France, because the expectation to conform was sooooo high! I find that, in England, I can be eccentric and get on with life easier.

What are your experiences?

Cool

I used to think that; now i wonder whether it isn't just a result of being an outsider in a country that feel "freer".
Having said that I would never have deliberately chosen to live in France precisely because i did have that impression!!

It just happened cos was the warmest sunniest country whose language i spoke, and where i had previously been able to survive for 5 weeks without a penny, begging in bakeries and looking through bins and sleeping rough, so that when was equally homeless and also jobless, and decided to go in search of the sun i ended up here, ( 9 and a half years ago).

France has lots of wonderful untamed wild "bits", not necessarily huge natural areas but the little corners around towns etc which in UK seem to have been all tidied up. It seems less like a playmobil set than the UK does so often nowadays, when it isn't totally depressing. Though i still love lots of UK landscape i am amazed when visit and see how tidy and neat so much of it is!

Have lived like virtual hermit for most of last 6 years or so. Been astonished by level of conformity in most people i meet. But then i didn't hang out with these kinds of people in England. The father of my son, who i met when hitchhiking, was the first person with a job they actually liked that i had met in years ( possibly 10). With an air-conditioned car, with a suit and tie!!

I just live like hermit most of time. I don't speak french well enough to enjoy the kind of conversation with like minds that i did in UK, and i suspect that those with whom i might hit it off are put off by my "flat"/fluent but limited/unsophisticated french as i was by people with accent and not good at english when i lived in UK. This lack of close intense complex conversation felt increasingly like a problem until 2 years ago when realised that it's possible that i actually prefer this.

I think the worst/most oppressively conformist/provincial places in France might be medium sized towns. Nimes ( where we lived for 6 years) was very "provincial". Marseille not at all. Here ( little village in foothills of alps in Drome Provencale) is odd because has a tradition of rebellion/resistance; educational and political in the first half of last century, and religious over the last few hundred years. Also with an artistic/musical/cultural reputation which has , in the past anyway, attracted many "free thinkers".

I would be interested to hear what you think is main difference in this respect between the french and english.

I think it's possible that as a highly sensitive introvert i actually quite like the state of exile. It protects me !

Last edited by ouinon on 25 Dec 2007, 12:32 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I live in London, England; it's wonderful but I'm sick to death of it.

I'm wondering whether the difference is this: in France, if you are going to live an eccentric lifestyle you have to do it fully (e.g. by going into academia, the arts, or being a hermit), whereas in England you can be eccentric and lead what appears to be, on the surface, a conventional lifestyle.

For instance, when I was looking for jobs in France, I was told that I couldn't apply for such or such a job because it was for women; I was harassed for cycling to work, and never actually meant anyone else who cycled to work - in England there are plenty of us; I was harassed for being in a job that didn't match my qualifications - here in England it's not a big problem.

Like you, I think that being an outsider in the country you live in makes you feel freer. That is probably because people expect you to be different, and because they don't mind explaining basic social expectations to you that they wouldn't want to explain to one of their own.
However, I still think, as well, that England is more tolerant of eccentricity and diversity.

I thought we were blunter than that. Is it wonderful, or are you sick to death of it? That sounds like NT double-talk!

What of the overseas departments...? They're in France and it's warmer than the mainland (but expensive I gather). If I could speak French I'd probably be off to Martinique...

No, not double-talk. I literally love and loathe the place.

That needs explaining. I don't understand that.

BTW I used to live in London, Highbury to be more precise. This was the first place I lived in when I moved to England. I stayed for two years.

I'm in sunny Wolverhampton which has a claim to fame as having England's first ever automated traffic lights (which i've seen, and even touched!!), and er...... we had the famous but ever so slightly controversial MP Enoch Powell who gave the infamous Rivers of Blood speech a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.