OK, so we need to amend these rules slightly. You must be foreign, but NOT French. French dude moved in at the beginning of October and proceeded to annoy the hell out of me almost immediately. He has just returned from three blessed weeks in his home country and clearly spent his holidays at a training camp, learning How to be French and Annoying Overseas. Have racked my brains to discover precisely what it is about the guy that irritates me so much, without success. He articulates every sentence with lots of 'er', has one eye that tends to do its own thing, deliberately fails to understand the meaning of English phrases (eg 'chilling out'), thinks that French wine is the best, and does advanced research into Earth. None of these things on their own - or even all combined together - is warrant for intense annoyance in a lady of such broad and various experience as myself.
Discussing this matter with friends, one or two were quick to point out that an inclusive foreign policy should naturally exclude the French. What was I thinking of? The trouble with this diagnosis, accurate as it may be, is that it leaves me with two problems. Firstly, I still have the man in my house, with no good reason to send him packing apart from 'sorry, you must leave because you are a bastard frog'. He obeys all the rules, never leaves any crap around, makes hardly any noise and is out all day and often evenings too. There must be millions of much worse, non-French lodgers out there, just waiting for a nice rooms to become vacant due to the uncontrollable xenophobia of landladies. And secondly, the pure hatred that this gentleman causes to grow daily inside me is not doing my self-image any good at all. There I am, lecturing prospective occupants on the necessity for openmindedness one minute, and nurturing rampant hatred of foreigners the next. Surely this is where genocide begins?
