A confident outlook

Emissions recently returned from a jaunt en famille, in the South of France. Lovely place it was too. Reinforced my opinion of the French as among the finest people on Earth.

That said, I had my reservations. Never having graced the French Riviera with my presence before, I assumed it was all Eurotrash bimbos driving convertible pink Ferraris up and down orchid-fringed boulevards wearing nothing but thongs. I imagined the women were even worse.

The first thing I saw on arrival at Nice airport didn't do much to dispel this notion. A Porsche Cayenne was blocking a row of 30 taxis as a leather-faced perma-tanned old trout in head-to-toe Chanel disembarked, mauve-dyed poodle in her arms. Mouton habillé comme agneau, as they say in Toulouse. Airport security had to step in to stop the taxi drivers from skinning the pair of them.

I almost got back on the plane. Pater Emissions calmed me down. "They're not all like that, honest," he assured me.

He was right. Unlike we Irish, the French are confident enough not to need a massive SUV to reassure themselves that they are somebody. A single Frenchman in a battered decade-old Renault exudes 20 times more self-belief than a whole fleet of Irish nouveau- and wannabe-riche cretins in SUVs.

The vast majority of people in Nice drive nippy little hatchbacks. It makes sense. Parking spaces in the city are as rare as Playboy bunnies in Iranian military parades.

Until I witnessed them in action in Nice, I never saw the point of Smart cars. Tiny, toy-like and underpowered, they are to real driving what water pistols are to intercontinental missile warfare. But Nice's clogged streets are full of them. Why? Because they are so compact they could park in the crack of dawn.

The legendary French arrogance extends to their driving. Consideration for others is regarded as a sign of weakness, one that will invariably lead to a torrent of horn-beeping and abuse from other road users, including those you cede to. I let someone out of a junction and he stared at me like I'd just been let out of an asylum.

Indicators are similarly seen as capitulation of sorts, as if using them is akin to asking for permission. And asking permission is something the French motorist doesn't do.

Nor is patience a virtue one associates with the French, and French drivers in particular. Take the example of that nutter last month who lost the plot completely and drove into a crowd of student protesters who had the temerity to delay him by staging a lie-down protest on a Paris street. He flattened at least a dozen of them before his car was stopped and flipped on its roof by an angry mob who proceeded to try and drag him out. He would have been turned into Pâte de Campagne had les flics not intervened to cart him off to the safety of a prison cell.

One thing the French do, however, is stop dead, every time, at orange traffic lights. In Ireland, these are a signal to put the foot down. Maybe stopping for an orange symbol of authority is seen as some kind of hat-doffing throwback to our colonised past. Who knows? All this notwithstanding, Clan Emissions and our borrowed Peugeot emerged unscathed from our week of tootling happily through the refreshingly low-rise French traffic. Once you learn not to expect, or give, any quarter, you'll fit in swimmingly. Back at the airport, there were the SUVs blocking the rank again. There's always a few moral midgets trying to spoil it for everyone.

Ah well. Won't tar all our Gallic cousins with the same brush. Any nation that can give the world the Citroën DS, Catherine Deneuve and foie gras has got to have a rightful claim to a place right by the pool, I reckon.