Mauvais goût

It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a water glass of triangular section and silly cutlery that would bring even Philippe Starck’s most empurpled morphological fantasies into the arena of commonsense. I thought wistfully about the simple charm of the old Duralex glass. The timelessly perfect round-shouldered Burgundy bottle’s unaffected handsomeness only served to make its table-top companions look all the more ridiculous.

Modern France is in a terrible state as far as design is concerned. Renault’s peerless record of ingenuity is gone: it has not produced a worthwhile innovation for nearly 20 years. Anyway, who sold us the idea of French superiority in taste in the first place? Why do we continue to beat ourselves up about a presumed inferiority in matters of style and design? Has anyone stopping for a brackish coffee on the A26 autoroute been able to maintain any delusion of French grandeur?

Grandeur aside, many of our words calibrating the leagues of snobbery are French in origin: hauteur, arriviste and parvenu, for example.