A friend of mine, fond of fashioning his own brand of aphorism, announced one day, after what he claimed had been a long period of research, ‘butchers are much given to bullshit.’
It was actually said with some affection and, unlike most of his other putatively pungent reflections on the cosmos, this one struck me as having some truth.
Butchers tend to be rather jolly blokes (they are almost invariably blokes) with a ready line of patter, chitchat, jokes, small talk, wisdom, footy gossip and observations.
This is because, unlike their retail brethren, butchers need to fill silences which might otherwise be punctuated by the slash of the cleaver, the crunch of bone, the whine of saw, the splat of soft tissue and pulpy organs, the secretive but noticeable oozing of blood. Butchers’ endless verbalising—their ‘bullshit’—distracts us from all this and turns what might have been a gory, vegetarian-inducing experience into a kind of theatre.
This is why, when I first entered the village’s sole boucherie, I did so with certain anticipation. What would be the Gallic butcher’s manifestation of his trade’s verbal embroidery?
At first, I was disappointed. My opening gambit—an enquiry about chicken filets—elicited an unequivocal Non and silence. Taken aback, and being taken aback often happens in a foreign language, I asked for some pâte de campagne and left it at that. But my second visit was much more successful.
Monsieur Leclos, the butcher, is a big man, perhaps in his mid thirties. His white apron covers a vast area of chest and stomach. His face is large, its features pronounced and definite. Heavy black eyebrows make him look as if he’s ill-tempered and scowling, but bronze tips through his thick mop of black hair suggest a more playful nature. Still, it’s heavy going again until he refers to me as Anglais and I correct him: Je suis Australien, I say.
Had I seen La Coupe du Monde de Rugby? Absolument, I lie. (Well, I saw the semis and the final on telly.) He has a heavy local accent: he corrects my pronunciation of Australien to Australienne which makes me female; he calls les Francais, his team, les Franci; when we get round to talking about wine, as we inevitably do, vin becomes ving. But it is le Roogby that is his great interest and passion. With blade poised above the three large chicken legs that he is to cut each in half for