French cuddle crisis

Daniel Johnson, the very amicable marketing chap at Siblu , whom I know from knocking about at various industry do's, just pointed me to this bizarre survey on the GMTW website. It's the kind of thing that editors get sent all the time by PRs scrambling for attention – and, of course, the financial crisis is the current angle for all stories, no matter how tenuous the link.

Apparently the French aren't as handy as us saucy Brits at cuddling up in bed on a cold winter's night in their efforts to stave off ever-growing heating bills.

And they, the French, would do well, say the sponsors of the survey, to put aside ten minutes each week to do something 'green'. Fair enough, we all can do our bit and I'm as partial to credit crunch cuddle as anybody. But read further down, to the second bullet-pointed section "And in Europe", and among a list of things that some people are wasting ten precious minutes on each week, you find this:

"Twenty-one per cent of Frenchmen and women spend more than 10 minutes a week waiting for their food to arrive in a restaurant."

Quelle surprise! I would suggest that any restaurant where you don't have to wait ten minutes for your food to arrive is called Burger King. And how, one wonders, is something that takes longer than ten minutes to cook from scratch, supposed to be cooked in less than ten minutes?

In future I will order salade niçoise every time I eat out, thereby giving me ten more minutes to put my recycling out. If only steak tartare had been on the menu at Kyoto Agreement meetings...