Dear English Friends… You might be slightly surprised, but the word that goes around in many expat homes in London is that, despite being often very friendly, it can prove difficult to really become close friends with you. I personally disagree, but try to understand here where this rather widely spread reputation might come from.
When I settled in London in 1999, I got a briefing from a French school friend who had been living here for a while. After offering essential survival tips (how to deal with Victorian plumbing and where to find good bread), she shared one particular social observation: “The English are very friendly, but it is almost impossible to become friends with them”. I was quite surprised, especially since she worked for a British firm, and is lovely, smart and generally sociable. But in her three years in London, she had managed to make dozens of international friends, except born and bred Brits. That could have been an isolated case, but the fact is that I have heard this remark many times since, not only from French people but also from American, Italian, Australian or German Londoners, which seems to confirm that this experience is not confined to my compatriots, but widely spread amongst expats.
My own experience, however, has been different as I find that the English make for great friends, easygoing and loyal, and after eleven years spent in London, I probably have more English friends than French ones. Of course, I am no exception, and many of my French friends have settled equally well, quite a few having pushed the Entente Cordiale not only to friendship but also to marriage. But how can perceptions vary so hugely? One explanation might lie in the fact that -as with most large communities- many of the 350,000 French living in London simply choose to stay amongst their own. Why indeed socialise outside one’s circle when there are so many compatriots with whom to share not only the same language, but also common cultural references and similar experiences- not to mention so many existing friends from school or university to bump into, especially when you come from Paris, where a majority of French expats lived before settling here? This is particularly true around South Kensington -otherwise known as “Frog Valley” and “the XXIst district of Paris”- where it is not uncommon to go to big parties where there are not only just French guests, but also -speaking of personal experience- where you can find some people that you knew when you were still wearing braces and spending all your Wednesdays afternoon in detention. Ironically, this insular propension to import the Parisian lifestyle to London also rightly prompts some Brits to express their own “it is difficult to really get close to them” complaint when they talk about the French…
Another recrimination I have heard from French friends is that “English people don’t invite expats in their homes”, unless the said expats are particularly lucky or well connected. One English friend once offered her own explanation: that she found it intimidating to invite French people, because she felt under culinary pressure of gastronomic heights and thought her own cooking couldn’t compare- so at the end she just couldn’t bother. That might indeed be an explanation, at least for her, but given the Brits obsession for home cooking -thanks to Jamie, Nigella, Gordon, etc.- I don’t think that it applies to a majority, as I am usually quite impressed by my English friends’ cooking abilities. In my (purely empirical and totally unscientific) opinion, the true interpretation rather lies in the social process of inviting itself -who, how and when- which varies between cultures: when French people meet someone they like, their first reflex, in true Latin spirit, is to invite the person at their house for supper, even if they barely know them. On the other hand, “an Englishman’s home is his castle”: a more private place where they will happily invite you (and it has to be said, often in a much more informal way than the French), but only once they have got to know you a little bit first- because as with friendship, an invitation is something that happens over time, with no shortcut. Not as spontaneous as with the French but not without sense either…
A shorter version of this article was first published in my “Expat” column for Metropolitan, the Eurostar magazine.
