There have been many articles in the UK press recently extolling the virtues of the French life style,  and presenting the usual statistics about how the French work less hours, but do more work, sleep more, have more fun (there may be a correlation there), eat unhealthy food but don't get fat, and so on.  I suppose from the perspective of Gordon Brown's bankrupt (in many senses of the word) Britain, just about anywhere seems better these days, but is the French lifestyle really so wonderful?

This article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5280355/The-French-are-wide-awake-to-the-joys-of-life.html contains numerous of these cliched generalisations about the French. It's well worth reading.

Without wishing to sound too 'anti-French',  which I will undoubtedly be accused of for considering the nation less than perfect,   I reckon this lady was wearing 'lunettes teintes de couleur rose', if such an expression exists in French. I am therefore inviting some opinions on this matter.

I do of course know some utterly charming, friendly, generous, and trustworthy French people,  a lot in fact, and if I make the effort to meet more I know I'll find them.  I have almost always found that public officials, approached the right way, will be helpful rather obstructive, and that the French have a wonderfully pragmatic approach to problem solving, something which those who have constant brushes with bureaucracy find hard to believe.

Apparently the French achieve more work in shorter hours than many other nations.  I suppose this is about lies, damned lies, and statistics, but where I used to work, the French came in, spent the first half hour walking around shaking hands or snogging each other, another half an hour at the coffee machine or outside littering the ground with cigarette ends, and then once at work, endless hours waffling and pontificating, using 300 words where 30 might have done the job more effectively. They did of course invent the hot air balloon in 1783 and seem to live up to the reputation very well.

Then there's the myth of the beautful slim French women.  They certainly exist, and in greater numbers than in, for example, the UK where lumpen, tattooed, metal pierced, shaven-headed lumps of lard roam the streets. They do seem to find it awfully hard to smile though, or maybe it's hard to see the smiles through the clouds of cigarette fumes that seem to halo their heads.  Many of them are slim, so slim that they look ill, and they seem to have the pinched personalities to go with the pinched look that they acquire as they age.

Apparently the French have less stress and a very low suicide rate, although road traffic statistics probably need to be considered in the context of the latter.  I can understand why the Scandies commit suicide so often, what with 25 hours a day of darkness for most of the 11 month winter, and only 5 minutes of darkness in the short summers. The Danes seem to be the exception, they're a happy lot, but maybe being a bit further south without actually being German is the reason for that.

I'm just curious to know what others think.