The answer my friend...

Can I have a Rosetta stone to take away, please?

I still feel I need a sort of the Rosetta stone to interact in a fluidier fashion with my British cousins. After almost two years spent on the wet compost of la perfide Albion, there is something I am still not able to handle.  Let me explain.

When I bump into someone, more precisely an English person, whom I don't know very well but enough to stop for 5 seconds and politely say "hi, how are you?", I am often left bewildered and irritated.

Why? Because I simply say "hi, how are you?" and the person answers "Hi, you alright there" and as I say "yes and you?", this person says "I am fine thank you" and starts to ask me "what are you up to these days?" or "how was your weekend?" and I start to answer because I don't want to appear rude but, guess what, that person is already gone. Gone. Gone!

Why bother to wait for the answer to a question you asked after all? And here I am, promising myself this will never happen again but guess what? It's like a pavlovian reflex, there is nothing I can do about it. Something I say triggers the question that shall never be answered. What is it?

Usually, when I stop to say "hi, how are you?", I literally only say those words because that is all you can say in 5 seconds. In these kind of polite exchanges, both people go back to their normal life in a matter of seconds with the satisfaction to have said "hello" to someone you hardly know.

Sometimes I even reply "I am fine and you?" before the question and that's fine. It makes things shorter, it's quite handy when you are in a hurry but don't want to compromise with the etiquette.

Think in terms of 'frenchpeopleness' here, for us being polite is a lifelong inner fight with our deeply encrusted rude wildboar-eater-barbarians' instincts. In short, this is a great achievement.

Since I reached the other side of the Channel, these 5 seconds of satisfaction turned into 40 seconds of frustration. Alas, the answer is not to be found in an another Rosetta stone but forever blowing in the wind.