Badger, Badger Badgers, Badgers, Badger

Boris Johnson visited our town today.  It was a vanity trip.  You couldn't find a place that is more overwhelmingly Leave. The MP is, the posters in windows suggest that the majority of the population are and so he wasn't in danger of converting anyone.  It was just a breakfast trip to stand in a picturesque place and have a pint of beer for breakfast surrounded by people who think he's wonderful. You can't deny that he's working hard at being liked; he was in Yorkshire for a lunchtime pint but part of his popularity is that he's a very strange man.

I can't look at him without thinking of badgers.  I'm not sure why.  It might be to do with the cartoon Bodger and Badger.  Was Badger called Boris Badger? No? Oh well, I seem to have made that up. Maybe it's because in the yawning photos of Mr Johnson he looks a bit like a badger, or because he answered, "Badger, badger, badgers, badgers, badger," on Have I Got News for You.

The school I work in has animal names for the classes and I was sitting with the French teacher in the staffroom, while she was making labels for the class doors in French.  Our French teacher is French but she has been here long enough to have lost some of her vocabulary but not her accent. She struggled a little with Octopus, wondering if she was just calling them calamari but she couldn't remember the word for badger.  She googled it, blushed, giggled and said, "Oh no.  It can't be."
"Is it a swear word?" I asked, sensing her mood (I'm clever like that)
"Well, yes, sort of. It's not polite.  We would say that about someone who isn't very ..." she tapped her temple, "you know."

So you might say, 'Boris Johnson c'est un blairau'?
Maybe I'm a natural french speaker and that's where my association comes from.