Is It Any Wonder...

Quebec and the ROC are always at odds?

This is so true.

"...like 'lads looking for a brawl outside a pub on a Friday night'"

[---]

"...when Franco-British relations sank to an all-time low over Paris's fierce but ultimately futile opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Blair termed Chirac's stance "foolish" and "irresponsible", Chirac asked Blair how he would answer when Leo asked what he had done in the war, his foreign minister Jack Straw recalled "Napoleon – and remember who won", and even Straw's urbane French counterpart Dominique de Villepin complained of "comments unworthy of a friend and a European partner"."

[---]

"...in the period from 1066 to 1815, when the two countries fought each other in, among others, the Norman invasion, the wars of Henry II, the hundred years war, the Italian wars, the wars of the Spanish and Austrian succession, the seven years war, the American revolutionary war, the French revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic wars. Eight-hundred-odd years of near-continual armed conflict do tend to colour a relationship.

Today's Anglo-French rivalries, though, are born not of military ambition but long-established and strongly-held differences of view: social, cultural, political, commercial, on the economy, Europe, America, and free-market liberalism versus the "social model". Each remains the other's favourite mirror, in which to hold itself up and say: 'Well, at least we're not like them.'"

"For as Chirac once put it, "You can't trust people who cook as badly as that." Or as Noel Coward preferred: "There's always something fishy about the French."

There's something about this ancient row, which actually does date back to the early Middle Ages, that feels rather comfortable. LOL!! The world has always been thus.  There were connections dating to Offa, King of Merica and Charlemagne, Richard the Lion Heart and Eleanor of Aquitaine, remember Charles de Gaulle and his "Vive Quebec Libre".  Anyone who thinks we can easily rid ourselves of this yoke should think again. In days gone by, both our friends and our enemies were those people who lived next door, simply because we knew them best...and they were next door.