Unleash your inner Gaul!

That's the rather clever tag-line for Pardon My French by CharlesTomoney. I am told by a dear friend who lives in France that it hilarious. But ordering a single title from Amazon UK means that the shipping charges to the Sandlands are higher than the cost of the book itself. So it will have to wait. But other Francophiles might want to know that the book...

...takes you through various words you need to survive, shows how and why they work, and steers you past various pitfalls and potential embarrassments of speaking French in France. This title covers various areas of everyday life from eating and drinking to travel, work and, crucially, and, swearing and sounding like a teenager. When Charles Timoney and his French wife were both made redundant in the same week they decided to try living in France for a year or so. But it wasn't easy: Charles' French O level was little help when everyone around him consistently used a wide variety of impenetrable slang and persisted in talking about things he had never heard of. Two decades and two thoroughly French children later, he decided to write the guide to French that would have saved him so many blunders and misunderstandings along the way. This is it.

Just one snarky comment directed at the publishers and their Art Departments. I posted last Wednesday about the itle which I hope will next year shoot up the best-seller lists, Petite Anglaise, which I fully expect to be as good as Kate Muir's Left Bank.

Now, guys, what's the excuse for this amazing copy-cat timidity, this trifecta of twee, this numbing naff?

Is this the only conceivable genre of visual vernacular which sells books about France? Surely not!