Po faced in Poitou and Tits up in Touraine

Image via Wikipedia

The books about expat life in France, left me by my summer visitors, have been found a new home with a friend as there are none which I will want to read again. I was never even a fan of Peter Mayle, so I suppose the only one which I ever really enjoyed was the period piece by Lady Fortescue, 'Perfume from Provence'. Nothing in the last batch matches up to it. If you really want a book to tell you what life in France is like, then you need to read 'Clochemerle'. Nothing has changed, but then, that was written by an insider...a Frenchman.Friend is having a super time finding out, like me, that she lives in a different country from the one being described but, being generally a more sociable soul, she is able to relate the books and their message to the expat community in her area...she goes to meetings, walks, book clubs, lunches, BBQs and quiz nights catered by the fish and chip van, although she does admit that doing so is good PR for her business, otherwise she might not be so tempted - except by the fish and chip van.

Apparently, there really are people who religiously go down to the bakery to buy croissants for breakfast every day,visit cafes when they do not even have visitors to drag them there and go to the local market. There are even people who go out to restaurants in the evenings...even when it's just the two of them.....travelling miles to do so. One of the biggest howls from the expats tightening their belts in the wake of the drop in the value of the pound against the euro was that it would not be possible to eat out so often....not a high priority for survival in my book. It is one of the reasons that I don't take too seriously the tales of penniless British expats heading for the Chunnel for the safety of England, home and beauty, eager to unload their property at bargain prices at the sight of folding money. Yet another estate agents' tale to make a commission, any commission, at any price, by pushing down prices with scare stories. There are always people who move to France, find it is not to their liking and move back or on...and I wonder if, rather than regarding them as the 'failures', as seems to be the case on the gin and tonic circuit, they might not be better regarded as the 'realists'.

When something isn't working, in business, politics or life in general, it's best to cut your losses and get out of it, but that generally isn't what happens. Egos are involved...loss of face.....so worthless projects run on into the sand, swallowing money and enthusiasm as they go. It's true for government....look at all the 'czars' and 'initiatives' which end up not, as they deserve, being terminated but carrying on in truncated form to no good end. Business is no better, shareholder control being but an unsavoury joke, since the major shareholders are other institutions with a similar mindset to that of the board of the directors. Why people spent decades worrying about workers' wage demands I do not know...what we have today is employees awarding themselves pay rates and bonuses out of all proportion to the value of their work to the company, but it seems to be all right if these employees are called chief executives, chief finance officers and all the rest of the bloodsucking gallimaufry. It took hordes of trade unionists to bring companies to their knees...now it only takes a corrrupt and greedy duo or trio at the top to achieve the same end.
If a move to France works for you, that is great, but if it doesn't, for whatever reason, then why stick with it? There's no shame in having been wrong and a lot to respect about people who accept that an idea was a mistake and get on with the rest of their lives, so why is the gin and tonic circuit so scathing? I think it says more about the G and Ts than about the realists.

The worst day's work I ever did in France, far outweighing upsetting a local politician, was to be involved on the fringes of the G and Ts. It was for a short period and long in the past, but the unpleasantness of it lingers still.
French friends sold their house to an English couple and gave them my name for someone to turn to if they needed help. They were and are a nice pair and we met up from time to time when they were in France on holiday. Then things became complicated. The G and Ts in their area made themselves known and before they knew it they were in on the socialising scene...the British invasion of rural France being then in full swing, although at that time it was mostly people buying holiday houses, not people moving permanently. By accepting the couple's invitations, I began to meet this new crowd, among whom were some very pleasant people, though others, permanent residents, made me distinctly wary. Most were involved with local estate agents and were providing services to the holiday home owners....but the relation was not one of employer and worker, it was quite the reverse. When we studied classical Rome, we learned of the practice of clientism...the influential man, the patron, with his followers, the clients, rather like the workings of the Mafia - you have a problem, the big man sorts it out, you owe the big man - and what was going on resembled this to me.
In reality, the holiday home owners were keeping the service providers afloat, but in practice, the service providers ran the show and offending them put you out in the cold. You will need no telling who it was who managed to offend them. The whole thing runs on a recognition of the pecking order and a unified vision of what the group is about and the dissident is not wanted on voyage. Not having quite the power of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus, however, the vision canot be reinforced by sending in the tanks, so the patrons have to resort to other means to discredit the dissident...gossip and lies. The exclusion has two functions - there is no threat to the unifying vision from within and the group members will distrust anything the dissident says from without, so the show can continue undisturbed. I got it in spades!
This, I think, is why the G and T circuit mocks and disparages those who leave France....their action threatens the group vision which supports the 'patrons' and their source of income.

This may be also why so many of the British expats are so po faced about fitting in in France - it is an article of faith that one has done the right thing in moving, so everything about the move must be right too. Suggest that a law or a policy is unfair, and the bricks start to fly...
'Moving to France means you respect the way the French do things...'
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Start asking which French are doing things and you end up with the same divide between ruling and subject castes that you find in any society. I can't see why a system should not be subject to criticism and analysis, either. French friends criticise endlessly and as I pay taxes, I think I have the same right to kick up about what is done with my money.
It's not even safe in some circles to say that you like baked beans from the U.K., while admitting to importing Marmite calls for the restoration of the guillotine! When these people start pontificating about French food, I feel like offering them my books of traditional recipes - scalding live lampreys, a thousand things to do with pigs' blood, duck gizzards and other tasty morsels - except that, not bothering to learn French, they could not appreciate the wonder of it all.
However, the expats are now facing a dilemma...or they would be if they could read the newspapers. President Chirac was given a dog, a bichon, by his grandson, while he was still at the Elysee Palace. Since leaving office, he has moved to a duplex in a good area of Paris where he lives rent free thanks to the generosity of foreign friends...but there is no garden! The bichon has allegedly become aggressive, and after a couple of incidents, managed to leap at Chirac and bite him in the stomach, drawing blood. The dog is being sent away.
Do the expats think that this is all right, that it is the French way to do things, or do they think the British way and think that someone should have a word with the Chiracs? How will the group vision react? One also wonders whatever is going on in the Chirac household, but that is by the by.

The summer books have had one positive effect. They have started friends on the search for suitable titles for future expat sagas....two of which lead this post. All that remains is to call for volunteers to write them.