Jean-Pierre our loyal retainer is talking about lagging the water pipes that we’ve had installed in the greenhouses for watering the cuttings and seedlings, he seems to think we’ll have a cold one this winter, he’s usually right about these things.
The mention of frozen pipes takes me back to our first year here at the chateau when our French wasn’t very good at all, we used to get into all sorts of situations with the language.
If we didn’t know the correct word to use we would use the English word for it but say it with a French accent, sometimes this worked other times it just led to further confusion.
It was winter and the whole region had a very cold period where temperatures got down to around minus 15 during the night, we had some frozen pipes which stayed frozen for two days so we ended up with no water supply to one end of the chateau, luckily we were closed and everything was ok for when we opened. Anyway on with the story,
We were chatting with a young French couple over dinner about how cold it had been before Christmas and it was mentioned that it was the coldest spell in over twenty years, it was quite late in the evening and I was quite tired, (its difficult to speak a foreign language when you’re tired ) anyway I mentioned about the temperature here and said “toutes nos pipes ont été gelées” (all our pipes were frozen)
I couldn’t instantly recall the French word for water piping so I used the English word pipes but pronounced it with a French accent (peeps).
We received a strange look and a slight smile from the young French couple and thought maybe they hadn’t quite understood our accent which was quite often the
case.
Thought no more about it, until a few weeks later we were watching a film with French subtitles on the tv (can’t remember the title) and at some point in the film the word “blowjob” was mentioned, in the subtitles the slang word for blowjob is, yes, …. “pipe”
I can imagine at future dinner parties the French couple telling their friends of that time when they’d stayed at that chateau with the strange English couple where it was so cold in winter that all their blowjobs were frozen.