The reason Parisians do not like tourists is not because they speak French badly, but because they dress badly. Dressing badly makes their city look less amazing, and is offensive and annoying to the beautiful French people. It is not acceptable to nip down to the patisserie for a pain au chocolat in your tracky bottoms. I can understand this, and I know this because of a book I read about an Australian who lived in Paris.
It is not the same in Durban. In Durban people wear flip-flops, if they even bother to put shoes on, and I have seen people walk into the Bakery with wet pants on and sand in their hair. They think they can look hot by putting a surfboard under their arm. Mostly they kind of can. It is lucky that I currently live here, because about fifteen-sixteenths of the time I am too lazy to decorate cities.
But I am one-sixteenth French, and at least one-sixteenth of the time I decide to exercise and promote my minimal, but over-stated Frenchness by wearing infinity dresses to neighbours’ braais and chastise everyone else for being so sloppy and disrespectful to the hosts.
In Durban, unlike in Paris, foreign visitors and residents actually raise the sartorial standards. Among many other standards.
The first time I met Al, who is English, and therefore a little bit foreign, he was wearing a bright beaded necklace – and other clothes and accessories of course – and he helped me save a stranger’s rabbit on Shirley road. We chased it from opposite directions into the rabbit owner’s garage and then we went away.
I found him again about a year later at the Bakery eating a pain au raisin (although I am not sure what percentage French he is) and we became friends. And I became friends with his wife, Georgie. He was still wearing his necklace. He told me his son made the necklace for him at preschool and he hasn’t taken it off for years. This is great. Its like when my daughter made Joe a shell necklace for his birthday and he wore it for months until the bits of shell were breaking off while he slept and poking him too much and he had to take it off. Him wearing it made my daughter very happy, but it probably isn’t really very French.
Last year my now friends had a party to celebrate their wedding anniversary. It was a xenophile party. We all dressed up and were keen and relieved to celebrate foreigness after the recent xenophobic attacks. Last Saturday we went out again, for Al’s birthday. We all dressed up. Above this text is a picture of the inside of Al's jacket.
We had our normal conversations about how to make money out of the 6000 grams of excess chicken fat one small Woolworths food shop produces every day; about our children and the difficult questions they ask us: “If lightning and cement were to have a fight who would win?” and “does it take longer to make a cup of tea or bake a cake, not in real life, but in a movie?”
We discussed whether it would be better to have no elbow joints or no knee joints and whether we thought one of our friends who has a French girlfriend is punching above his weight. We didn’t in the end think so. We discussed whether if a person is part Israeli, part German, part English, part African and grows up in Sweden is he then just naturally Swiss?
I was very happy on this night. These conversations seemed extra-specially sparkly. We were in Durban, with Al and other friends who are from all sorts of strange places, eating delicious food, being hosted by a Zulu Japanese chef. We looked pretty good, more like eight-sixteenths French English African. From where we sat, in our good clothes, half way up the Elangeni, the city looked very good too.