About this blog...

Foreword

Bonjour from Paris and welcome to the Champs-Elysees blog. Let me introduce myself. My name is Hugh Schofield, and I am the notes editor for the Champs-Elysees language courses. I am also a journalist for various print and broadcast news media, and above all a longtime exile in France. How I ended up here is a longish story. Like many people from the British Isles, I was awakened to a love of France by a brilliant language teacher (Louis de Gardelle, nickname Mush, who taught at Brook House school in Monkstown, County Dublin in the 60s and 70s, long since dead alas). Later it was family camping holidays that nurtured my romantic infatuation with the country.

France seemed to me then impossibly rich and impossibly beautiful, and the fact that I knew next to nothing about it only increased its appeal. After taking a degree in Arabic and Turkish at Oxford, I embarked on a career at the BBC -- working as a correspondent in Jerusalem and Madrid and later as a roving foreign affairs reporter. And then in 1996 a post became vacant in Paris. I leapt at it. Four years later the assignment was over but rather than leave France I quit the BBC instead, and Paris is now my permanent home.

I met my (English -- well, Cornish) wife Rebecca here in 1991, and we have three children: Louis, born in 1993, Ruby in 1995, and Milo in 1998. They are having an interesting upbringing, I hope. The home environment is thoroughly Anglo, but at school they are French. They will probably end up totally confused about their identity -- which is interesting, because I am too and it may well be that I am merely inflicting on them some version of my own experience. I am of southern Irish Protestant background. Brought up in Dublin but sent away to school in England from the age of 13, I have never been entirely sure in which country I belong. Living in France means I can avoid making a choice. Anyway, that is some of the background. I think I have an unusual situation, which allows for perhaps more than the regular expat view of the country. I am not here for a three-year stint, living in an expenses-paid apartment in the 16th arrondissement and with my children at the international lycee. I am right in the system -- and see its advantages and frustrations from close-up.

What I hope to do in this blog is pass on observations as they occur to me about France. Some of it will be political, some cultural -- but most I imagine will be just about day-to-day living in France. France is a country about which people tend to have strong opinions. This is particularly true today, as it seems to champion a distinctive view of the world that can clash with the US-led zeitgeist. I have my own often critical perspective on the country, which I shall not shrink from expressing if occasion demands. But deep down my romantic infatuation remains as stong as ever. As for my ignorance, I hope it is -- gradually -- being dispelled.