Gardez la toilette!

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KoRail KTX highspeed train

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uploaded by Jaako

We Brits are rightly suspicious of toutes les choses francais. I was brought up to know that everything francais was suspect.

"Don't drink the water".

"Of course, the French don't wash themselves: they just add more perfume!"

"They may think they know how to cook, mais non, they merely add garlic to everything".

"You cannot trust them".

Quite rightly so, if today's story of French chaos on a train le plus-grande-rapide-de-la-vitesse is to be believed.

It concerns a toilet bowl.

And a Frenchman - the French are so..stupide.

The man in question became trapped while he tried to fish his mobile phone out of the toilet on a high-speed train. These high-speed trains are well known to affect every task tres tres malheurerse that gets negotiated pendant le journey at such high speeds. [The British High Speed trains are of course somewhat more 'sedate'.)  If the man in question, a twentysix year old as he is alleged to have told the [french] reporter during the incident; if he had been a Brit, he would have known to gardez la toilette. Quite why or how the mobile phone had fallen down the toilet, the A[francais]P report does not explain.

Was he on the phone while attending to his toilet needs? Perhaps he was standing in such a peculiar position that his phone slipped out of his breast pocket. Did he manage to 'adjust his dress' [using only one hand] before he raised the alarm?

We will never know. Fortunately, a certain Monsieur Bennoit Gigou (the French use such strange names) was nearby to witness what occurred on the seven: twentythree train La Rochelle to Bordeaux, and was happy to be quoted about the calamitous event: "He came out on a stretcher, with his hand still jammed in the toilet bowl, which they had to saw clean off".

Unfortunately, we do not know where exactly Mr Gigou put the comma when he spoke these words. So it is not at all clear whether the "which they had to saw clean off" refers to the toilet bowl or Mr Gigou's hand.

We can only hope it was the former.

Post script: I apologise to Johnny Summerton and any other Brits still alive in France for any French spelling/gender mistakes I have made. The French language is really quite impossible.