And Out Went the Light...

Fresh from having his seventy five per cent tax on incomes over one million euros thrown out by the (Sarkozy appointed) Constitutional Council, President Hollande has come up with another cracker....

Puting out the lights in Paris at one o' clock in the morning in order, as his environment minister says, to give an example.
An example of what, exactly?

An example of how to keep the Green ministers in the government and the Green party voting with the Socialists in the National Assembly while hoping no one will notice the rape of the land in the interests of private enterprise in the affair of the proposed airport at Notre Dame des Landes ....duplicating the far from overcrowded international airport at Nantes, just up the road....

An example of hoping that bullshit will baffle brains......

An example of how to annoy the Maire of Paris.....

An example of how to allow lowlife as free a rein in the centre of Paris as in the ghettos of the suburbs in the interests of equality...

Goodness only knows.

President Hollande exhausted his intellectual resources in becoming elected.....now, in power, he is waiting for the economic cycle to turn up, like Fortune on her wheel, to see him re elected in 2017.

Only someone trained....not educated...at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration could have such faith in the powers of the classical Roman goddess to scatter good fortune as she rolls through the darkened streets of Paris.

Experience would indicate that she will either be mugged or that no one will notice her passage.

However, there is always a positive side to things. Depardieu has departed for Belgium, so the hostesses of Air France can put aside their bleach and mops.


Still, the lights are going out here too. but not in sympathy with Monsieur Hollande.

I had hoped that the stalking problems were over.....but find that they are not.

Already, I had been thinking twice about what I wrote about, but when, while staying with my mother, some limb of Satan saw fit to call her to ask if I were actually in  Europe or just laying false trails on the blog it was clear that the pleasure in blogging here was no adequate justification for having a woman in her nineties disturbed and upset by an obsessive.

I have enjoyed all the comments made, the friendships found, the opening of horizons offered by blogging......and would like to thank you for all the pleasure you have given since I started to blog.

I will continue elsewhere...away from prying eyes.... and would be very happy to meet you again there. Send me an e mail, should you have the inclination, and I'll send you the new address.

Happy New Year to you all.

No Chateaux... no Culture...no Croissants - My France

Alone in the house, I had been able to rise early (midnight) to listen to the Test Match Special team commentate on the first day of the Test match against Pakistan in Dubai.
The dogs went out dutifully then returned to their beds, flicking the odd glance at me, huddled up in my old djellabah with a cup of tea and plate of Marmite toast alongside the computer.
Bliss.

And then England collapsed....wicket after wicket.....exciting stuff, but not the performance expected of the team rated first in Test cricket.

The light came up, and I went out onto the balcony for the part of the morning I like the best...when the sun rises over the mountain behind the house and hits Grifo Alto across the valley, making that great bluff a soft golden ball emerging from the shadowy woods below.

The solitude ended quickly. I had hardly done the watering and fed the chicks before the Man from ICE was at the door.
ICE - the electricity board - wanted to  reroute its lines along the road rather than crossing private property....fine with me....but needed my permission to cut back two branches of the huge higueron tree which stands guard over the water tank on my land.
Fine.
There was a consent form to sign, so he came in to the house and accepted a cool drink while we undertook the formalities....and I had to dig out my passport as I had forgotten my passport number.

English! He exclaimed.

I have learned by now not to complicate things by mentioning Scotland on first acquaintance so I agreed.

Big Ben! Houses of Parliament! Westminster Abbey! Trafalgar Square! Nelson!

The Man from ICE was a fan of London...big time. He wanted to go there, but...the money...

He departed and I decided to set up the lap top which I had bought in London.
I looked at it...it looked at me...and I decided to do something else.

The weeding was interrupted by American friends bringing their visitors over for a coffee....
The conversation came round to 'and how did you come to Costa Rica?' as it always does, but on hearing that I had previously lived in France, the jaws dropped, the eyes widened and out it all came!

Paris! The fashions! The croissants! Pavement cafes! Boules! Provence! The food! The wine! The culture!

Slapping down the temptation to say

All good reasons for leaving

Which would have been neither polite nor totally accurate I let them bubble on...but when the house was quiet again I started thinking about my own images of France.....if asked, what would mine be?

The true treasure was the time spent with friends...but that's universal. The sure knowledge that you'll be greeted with a smile is one of the best feelings in the world.

But as for France itself....

Driving back from the hospital in the late afternoons over the plains around Poitiers two sights would always lift me....

The first, lying back from the road, the tiny church of St.Martin at Noize, a place of worship long before St. Hilaire brought his brand of Christianity to the pagans of the area.

Closed for years because of its poor state of repair, locals got together to put it into some sort of order and it is now, once again, a place of worship.
It is a simple building dating back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, but has an atmosphere of stillness and peace sometimes lacking in more elaborate surroundings.

Then, soon after, the necropolis of Taize, the dolmens rising from the surrounding farmland....man has been here a long time which could be a comforting thought after hospital visiting.

And when feeling in the mood for a good time...nothing better than Le Trianon at Saumur...

with Monsieur Jacques in fine form...

and the fellow customers giving the only example I came across in France of the craic. Good times!

And the end of holiday river festival...le Rendez-vous de l'Erdre....the river running into the Loire at Nantes, lined with the mansions of of the merchants who had made their pile from the trade in tobacco and brandy.
This always gave a great day out....boats of all sizes and shapes, from rowing boats to a steam tug via gondolas and traditional working boats....jazz bands on the river and in every nook and cranny ashore...the muscadet flowing like the river and teenagers sniggering about 'voile et vapeur'.

Earlier in the year...and earlier in my years..I used to be invited to sail in what was then le Raid du Golfe...now much more elaborate and called  la Semaine du Golfe, up in the Morbihan....a video clip will give you a taste...

Although as far as boats are concerned, the thrill of my life was to be invited aboard a garbare at Nantes

although not La Montjeannaise shown above, and to sail down the estuary on a cold spring day which promised rain and squalls.....a promise duly fulfilled.
Hair plastered to my face, my jeans running dye over my shoes I was absolutely exhilarated as the squall filled that vast sail and a ton of wooden boat lifted her nose and planed!

Back on dry land I have good memories of the troglodyte village at Tourtenay....not least because when taking my mother on a tour of the landing sites where a Lysander would drop off and pick up British agents during the Occupation we heard an elderly man in the group comment to his mate
'She doesn't have bad legs for her age!'...

The current village stands on a limestone bluff which, since the third century has been used as a place of refuge. Part of it has been sold off as a 'police' training area, but in the part still accessible is a wonderful underground pigonnier...

I love the revolving ladder for checking the nests...and I miss the grandad in the cardigan who owned the vines on the land above.

But my most abiding memory is one which I have no photograph to illustrate....and it comes back to friendship.

Sitting under the cherry tree in Madeleine's garden with the others she'd invited to lunch, the tranny playing in the branches to deter the birds and a glass of Suze with ice cubes in hand - all talking politics!

Country goes to Town

Image by Julie70 via Flickr

There are times when I feel like Heinrich Schliemann, excavating Troy and finding to his growing dismay that there seemed to be an awful lot more of it than he had bargained for.

It is entirely my own fault, too, just as it was his.
No one forced us to start.

When sorting out books and revues, I have a tendency to light on something I haven't seen for some time and take it off to read...leaving the box or shelf whence it was removed in the same disorganised state that it was in when I started. 

Which was why I started.

Finally returning to the task - as my father used to remark, like a dog to its' vomit - I then find something else to pick up and take away, so the process of sorting things out advances at a pace which would shame any self respecting sloth.

However, like Schliemann, I do make discoveries.

Thus, tucked into an acte de vente for a house sold in 2006, the coach trip company's brochure for 2005, offering everything from a bateau mouche on the river Erdre at Nantes  to a tour of Andalucia with the reassuring mention that a French speaking guide will accompany the tour from the moment it crosses the Spanish border until the moment it returns to the sacred soil of France. So that's all right then.....no chance of some dubious foreigner leading the tour astray with the offer of fabada and morcilla.

When I was of primary school age, my mother and her sisters would occasionally break the demented tedium of the school holidays by taking their collective brood for a day trip in the cream and chocolate coaches of Surrey Motors.

The sisters favoured Stately Homes, so we children saw acres of gloomy looking aristocrats peering down from walls, probably thinking that if they hadn't blown their riches on fast girls and slow horses their descendants wouldn't have had to let the descendants of the servants hall loose in the family side of the house.

There were lighter moments.....
I still treasure the image of the small boy balancing on a cliff in the Cheddar Gorge shouting 'Look Mum! No hands!' while his parent was hitching up her frock in an attempt to scale the rocks to get at him.
Not to get to him. To get at him.

In those unenlightened days I think it highly unlikely that he would have been congratulated on his derring do and invited to make a drawing of it for the pinboard in the kitchen....a swift clump seemed a more likely possibility to judge from his mother's expression.
And if she'd laddered her stockings I wouldn't have given much for his chances of sitting down for a while, either.

Not until moving to France did I come across coach trips again, and then only because I had been trapped by the dashing local dentist into taking part in amateur dramatics...here....and those proceeds of ticket sales that had not been spent on providing galvanised buckets of mulled wine while 'on tour' in the neighbouring villages were dedicated to taking the participants, friends and families to see a play in Paris...by coach.

I was taken under the wing of Alfred and his wife Renee. He, limping from some unspecified illness in his youth, always played the manservant roles in the farces which were the staple offering, year in, year out, and his leer was famed over five communes. Not just on the stage, either.
He and his wife ran a B and B.....in the days before every B and B in France was run by a smiling Brit...and Renee ran a tight ship.
Alfred was kept busy in the garden supplying fruit and veg for her table and store cupboard and had to watch his Ps and Qs,  reserving his leer for the potting shed.
However, when Renee was called away to her ever-ailing mother, Alfred was in sole charge.

I had sent a friend there when he turned up unexpectedly at the house only to find every bed and sofa full.
He appeared, as arranged, at about ten at night, having had dinner with the rest of us and Alfred showed him to his room, which involved climbing a stone staircase up the outside of the house without benefit of light or handrail.
Relieved at making it in one piece, he was unpacking his toothbrush when there came a knock on the door, which opened to reveal Alfred with a bottle and two glasses.
Alfred descended and ascended twice more before they decided that they had made enough of a night of it and the friend retired to sleep the sleep of the just.
In the morning he descended the deathtrap....as he said, the nearest he had ever been to self defenestration...to find Alfred showing him to the breakfast table.
Everything was laid up correctly....croissants and flute of bread fresh from Moniques' van....home made jam....coffee - and a large china hen.
Alfred removed its' lid with ceremony to reveal eight boiled eggs.
'Renee says I have to do boiled eggs for foreigners' breakfasts...but I don't know how you like yours...so I've done a variety...everything from three minutes to six and a half.'
'But which is which?'
'I don't know. You'll just have to try them all.'

They collected me by car,  together with another couple of waifs and strays and headed to the mairie where the cars would be laagered up for the day.
The coach was waiting and the dentist was counting heads, most of which were well covered in headscarves or caps, it being a nippy April morning.
The count finally coinciding with his list, and Monsieur Machin's daughter having run down the road with his pills for the day, we were off.
We stopped for lunch at a motorway service station which offered the usual fare of stuff that had been cooked at nine in the morning and had sat in trays ever since and hit Paris in the early afternoon, in time for a tour of the sights before being let out at the theatre.
We were counted again and led to our seats by a female usher who, it appeared, had to be paid for not letting us find our own way in our own time and settled down to enjoy the play.

Now, the dentist always produced Feydeau farces, all swinging doors and split second timing, and the play we had come to see was itself a farce by Feydeau...wonderfully acted, but it was clear that this one would never feature in our repertoire.
The major part of the action consisted in the leading lady continually swinging her leg over a chair back, thus inducing the other female characters to assume this to be the latest fashion and copy her.
Passing in review the leading ladies available to our dentist, I came to the conclusion that without even counting the bad backs, lacking some sort of assistance from a fork lift, not one of the elastic support stockinged legs would make it over a footstool, never mind a chair back.
Not to speak of the effect on the audience if they did.
The local hospital would be on red alert for cardiac arrest.

After the play, we were bussed to the Pigalle district, home of the Moulin Rouge, where some of the gentlemen whiled away the hour until our reservation at the restaurant in fixing their noses to the advertising photographs of semi naked women in feathers....Monsieur Machin popping a pill the while...while others saw fit to show their wives the old garrison buildings where they had done their national service - and the really unwary showed their wives where the girls they visited at that time used to hang out.
The expressions of the wives so informed resembled that of the mother about to claw her child down from the cliffs of the Cheddar Gorge.
Fortunately Alfred had done his national service elsewhere....and knew when to keep his mouth shut.

The restaurant had corralled us into a function room on the first floor, the aperitifs were generous and the food was good.
No Michelin stuff, which would not have been appreciated anyway, but basic classics and plenty of it.
The main course served, the waiting staff departed for the restaurant downstairs, leaving ample supplies of wine on the table.
Well, I thought it was ample, but others thought differently.
'Think we're a school outing, or what?'
'What's this, alcoholics anonymous?....la croix d'or?'
'I'll have a look round.'

No sooner said than done. A posse of gentlemen started opening cupboard doors revealing stocks of linen and other necessities of restaurant life until they found the door to the wine stock for the function room.
Bottles were passed out, opened and enjoyed and the waiting staff returned to take the orders for cheese and dessert to find tables boasting more bottles than they had left when they departed.
I was waiting for the explosion....but nothing....the meal continued through coffee and digestives and we left without the slightest sign of protest on the part of the management.

Back on the coach, I was given the seat next to the dentist, who was the nearest thing to a seductive man that I have ever met in France and I could quite understand why the wife of the chateau owner in the next commune was happy to avail herself of his asiduous attention to her cavities.
But the business with the wine was still puzzling me, so I asked him what on earth was going on.
Why weren't the restaurant staff furious?
Why.....

He stopped me.
I had to understand something.
This restaurant catered for parties up from the country on a visit to Paris.
They knew their customers.
They quoted for a very generous allocation of wine, but, if it was all produced at once then it would all have been consumed long before the cheese arrived and people would have to order more individually which was a nuisance for the staff....and might be a bit embarassing for some of the customers, since not everyone was well heeled.
Thus the supply in the cupboards...initially to be set out by the staff after the main course.
However, groups like his had been going to that restaurant for years, knew that extra wine was to be supplied and where it was kept, so just helped themselves.
Suited everyone.

'Mark you, though, they won't accept bookings from the old age pensioners any more.'

'Why on earth not?'

'They loot.'

They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere

Image by Deerbourne via Flickr

Or, the case of the missing tourist.

No, not the one who disregarded the warning on the door of the wine cellar which read
'Descend qui veut
Remonte qui peut..'

Which translates roughly as
'Come down if you like
Get out if you can...'

I've been down there and survived to tell the tale, but to be fair, I wasn't there on the occasion when the postman turned up half way through the session and it all had to begin again....

Nor is it the case of the man with a GPS system trying to reach us in France's Bermuda Triangle...

No, regretfully, it is the general case of the missing tourist.
France has sunk to third in the world rankings, but the worrying feature for tourism professionals is that an increasing number of these tourists are just one night stands, roosting in France on their way to spend their money somewhere else.

I cannot say I am surprised.

The French national tourist effort seems to be aimed solely at drawing visitors to Paris, and Paris for the casual visitor can be a right royal rip off, complete with bad manners.
One encounter with the average Paris waiter in a tourist area is enough to change any open minded person from Francophile to Francophobe in seconds....the refusal to understand the tourist's attempts at French, the insistence on using non existent English, and the contempt with which an order is received, make me feel like taking sandwiches and a flask.
Tthe mostly non French people fronting up in cafes and hotels off the tourist beats are nice, kind and helpful (here), but the tourist isn't very likely to meet them.

I just sincerely hope that the tourist does not meet with the employee of SNCF - the national railway company - who was quite content to see me stranded overnight in the capital without money or transport rather than sort out a problem with SNCF's own system.
I still wonder what would have happened if I hadn't had enough French - and volume - to insist on calling for his supervisor. From experience, a night on Montparnasse station is not to be recommended.

What astounds me, though, is however the one night stand tourist manages to escape from Paris in order to get to wherever it is he is going.
If the Paris metro or the buses aren't on strike, then it's SNCF...and if by chance all these are back at work, then the air traffic controllers decide that they need to be at home to look after their kids because it is the school holiday period.
Considering that on average an air traffic controller only works for 96 days a years - speaking from memory - you might think they could manage to crawl into the tower for peak travel periods, but, if so, then you'd think wrong.
Strong on family values, air traffic controllers.

I am sure that if the national tourist bodies shifted the emphasis to the pleasures of the provinces, the number of tourists staying longer would increase.
Everyone knows about the Eiffel Tower, Versailles and Monet's garden....what about the Rhone Valley, what about Bordeaux, what about Alsace?

If sitting on cafe terraces watching the world go by is an important part of a visit to France, it can be done anywhere in the country and, from what I recall, it was a lot more interesting in Aix-en-Provence than in Paris.

Regional and local tourist boards could do with raising their game, as well.

A little less attention to the importance of the tourist board director's wife's company getting the contract for printing the brochures and a little more to advertising attractions which don't necessarily have the means to pay for publicity in the said brochures would work wonders for attracting tourists who would then automatically fulfill the mission of tourist boards, which is to fill hotels, guest houses and restaurants.

Every year, in the local brochure, the same vigneron is presented. By coincidence, he is the son of the woman who runs the local tourist office. Given that there are over fifty other vignerons in the near vicinity, that wine must be pretty good!

The riding stables run by the wife of a local politician feature largely, despite the existence of at least two others.

A wonderfully restored chateau offering B and B gets hardly a mention, while the place run by a British woman said to be 'close to' the regional tourist board boss has full frontal coverage. Year after year.

I did toy with the idea of putting up a website with the real attractions of the area, but given my general IT incompetence and having no idea whatsoever how, having put something together, one gets people to know that it exists, the toy went back to the toybox.

When we were running holiday cottages I liked to hear what people had found to do in the intervals between eating croissants for breakfast and downing wine in the evening and for people with kids the overwhelming attraction of the area was the local theme park....not Futuroscope, nor even the Puy du Fou, but the local Parc.....d'Attractions.

It opened officially at Easter and lurched on into the autumn, the notion being that if there were more than two people at the gate, it would be opened.

You could bring your own food and drink, though if desperate Madame could make you a sandwich and find you a can from her fridge, so it was economical.

There was a swimming pool, but nowhere to change except round the back of the house by the outside loo which doubled as the toilet block so there would occasionally be startled cries from those unwary enough not to post a lookout man, at which point Madame would appear flapping her apron as if shooing off ducks.

There were, I think, three 'attractions', one of which was a caterpillar ride and the other two varied depending on what had been cobbled together during the close season.
The caterpillar ride was very popular with teenagers, though how they thought they would be unobserved given the holes in the carapace is beyond me..but then, those are the years of the triumph of optimism over reality. If you don't have it then, you're never going to acquire it later unless you take up politics and investing in Ponzi schemes as a career choice.

As Madame's son ran the rides and as Madame only had one son , only one 'attraction' could be operated at a time, so the whole clientele would follow him like the chldren of Hamelin. His word was final when it came to which attraction to run and preference on the caterpillar was given to those who had taken the other rides, so let no one say that he was backward in marketing skills.

Every year there was an event on Sundays. At 5.00 p.m. sharp...ish.
This varied every year, depending on who could be rounded up to provide it and what material was available, so one year it would be the Foreign Legion beating up Arabs - and I still wonder where all those Gendarmerie kepis came from - another year when the local motorbike club was going strong  it was Hell's Angels terrorising people and being driven off by the gallant Gendarmerie...the kepis again..

One year, Madame having realised that foreign tourists were leavening the lump of the faithful local attendees, she decided on Joan of Arc defeating the English, as there were a number of horses available.
Which is to say that the pony rides - run by Madame's daughter - stopped while the animals were prepared for their star roles.
It says a great deal for the total insensitivity of the French that she could think this was appropriate, and a great deal for the inhibitions inculcated by British culture that no one suggested lighting a bonfire.

The most popular was the cowboy and indian event, which appeared every three years or so - as there were a number of horses available - with chaps in feathered headresses galloping among the attendees trying to drag off attractive young ladies until other chaps in hats appeared firing into the air to drive them off and rescue the said attractive young ladies.
Health and safety would have had a fit, especially as one year it was discovered that some idiot had been using live ammunition. That time the kepis were for real...gendarmes swarming all over the place..... until it was discovered that the idiot had gone to the wrong drawer in the back shed.
The incident passed off peacefully. Madame's son agreed to keep his live ammo in the house in future and the gendarmes had a ride on the caterpillar. I've seen the photograph, and it is surreal...

The guests' kids were uniformly enthusiastic....
'It's so tacky it's out of this world...' about summed up the majority view and I am sure that some of our repeat bookings were due to the Parc d'Attractions.
Others were down to the massive spider which inhabited one of the bedrooms, but that's a different story.

Now, no tourist supremo would have put the Parc into his brochure....so I was surprised to see publicity for it when I went back to the area last year but my  friend told me that Madame had sold up and a new company is runnning the place.
Everything is smartened up, there are at least four rides, and they are spending a fortune on advertising.

I would love to have the kids' verdict on it these days...but I expect that now it has lost its' rustic charm, they would prefer Futuroscope.

The five horse accumulator over the obstacles

Image via Wikipedia

We have the chance to get away on holiday, so I have been at the computer checking dates, flights and prices, and I am in need of a wet towel round my head and the cup that not only cheers but also inebriates. I hope to goodness that I still have some of Didier's rocket fuel tucked away.
And to think travel is supposed to be pleasurable!

I have never been in the sector of society that could be described as the 'jet set', or 'alternative' so my experiences have been pretty run of the mill. I never went on the hippy trail in one of those VW campervans that used to be lined up for sale outside the Australian embassy in London....the female sex tours to the Gambia were not my cup of tea or rocket fuel at any age....business class travel was never an option...mine was 'the age of the train', in second class.

For my mother, it was not only the age of the train - excursion trains ran to all the major seaside towns to take the huddled masses for an awayday - but also the age of the motor coach, going to the sea, or touring beauty spots.
Even then, travel was not without its' hazards.
She remembers being taken to the sea in a Surrey Motors coach...custard and brown livery as she recalls... with the motor in a sort of outhouse at the front of the vehicle.
All was well until it made the obligatory loo stop at a pub which had acquired the passing trade of several coach companies, and thus had a huge car park, in which, as passengers disembarked, queued for the loo, took tea or beer and rejoined their coach, the vehicles would keep moving forward rather than parking in one spot.
It behoved the passenger to memorise the livery and the name of his coach company or he would share the fate of the bewildered woman who was wandering the carpark looking for her chariot of delight.
The Surrey Motors' driver tried to help.
'Which coach are you from, Dear?'
Mother still remembers the despairing wail with which the woman replied
'I know it's green but I don't know if it's a Venture, a Vulcan or a Vulture!'
The poor soul was eventually recaptured by her husband, all cap and beery breath, and hustled away, but it was a lesson to mother that she should keep a weather eye on the transport if she wanted to make a getaway.

As children, we had much more liberty to travel than the modern child seems to have.
From an early age, at the start of the school holidays I would be taken to Euston Station and put in charge of the guard on the Royal Scot - then a proper fire breathing steam engine - for the journey to Glasgow where an aunt would meet me for the next stage of the journey.
I would be placed in a compartment with other children under the guard's control and off we would go, perfectly safe, escorted to the dining car and back, but otherwise trusted to behave ourselves. And we did. The boy who tried to empty his orange squash bottle through the window while not understanding how air flow worked is the only malefactor that I can remember.
The aunts would be assembled at the gate of the platform at St. Enoch's...the guard would shepherd us up to them and there could be no problems of identity as aunts and children waved, smiled and hugged.

Later, there were Rover tickets on the Green Line buses, to explore the countryside for the day with a packet of sandwiches and a few coppers for a cup of tea. We were independent, without fear and without mobile 'phones. We made it home every evening.

So, as a student, travelling French railways for a week in the summer was a doddle. I could buy a Thomas Cook timetable - at that stage of my life I knew what two crossed hammers signified - and plan my trip in the most economical way, then it was off to Picadilly to the offices of French Railways - SNCF - to buy the ticket. It was my first unwitting step to succombing to the wiles of the great seductress.

Now, much later in life, I don't go to offices or travel agents to buy my tickets..I search and buy 'on line'. Out in the sticks, it is a tremendous boon not to have to shift from the house and trek to the town to wait in line at the station where one harassed man - currently in a portacabin while SNCF spend vast amounts on modernising the station - tries to deal with every query under the sun.
I reckon about one in three actually want to buy a ticket...the rest are doing the French equivalent of a five horse accumulator, working out whether a ticket for large families, employees of the railway, with two grannies and travelling mid week beats the price for the current offer of discounts if making your reservation by mobile 'phone.

Why am I worrying about trains when I am going by 'plane?
Because I have to get from la France Profonde to an airport, that's why.
And before I start checking flights, I need to have a comprehensive overview of what trains say they will be available on the day.

Last minute cheap package holidays are no trouble at all...as long as they go from an airport to which a friend can drive you if and when the railways are on strike.
I learned this the hard way, leaving from Charles de Gaulle airport for a week in Turkey. I arrived at Montparnasse only to find that some parts of the Paris railway system were on strike, and ended up hauling suitcases all over the Metro to the Gare du Nord, and then trying to find a train out to the airport. The lifts were out - in sympathy? - so I had to haul the luggage up a steep and narrow stairway to get to the platform.
After that, I picked charter flights from Nantes. A long drive, but no nasty surprises.
However, this is long haul and regular flights. It will have to be Paris.

As I have said before - here - French railways are distinctly luggage unfriendly so it is as well to try to get a through train rather than having to change, with all the heaving and hauling that is involved, but here I have come across a problem.
I know that there used to be a train in the early hours of the morning that gets into Montparnasse at about 6.00 am, thus, in theory, making it possible to catch flights leaving Orly or Charles de Gaulle around 9.00 am.
It does not show up on the SNCF online booking service.

I ring Ziya who has minitel. He says it exists on the timetable on minitel.
Further he rings the SNCF automated travel service. It says it exists as well.
I ring the man in the portacabin. He says it exists too, but if I want to book it I'll have to come to the portacabin....
Why isn't it on the computer booking service?
A deep sigh.
They want to make you pay for the TGV.
I have always said that living in France is good training for moving to a third world country.

Well, that's the trains. Now for the planes.
I am going to Central America and I want as hassle free a journey as possible.
This automatically cuts out any flight going through the U.S.A.
I have done this twice and refuse to do it again.
Not only do they want to know the ins and outs of a bull's arse three days before you travel, but, having acquired all this information, they still make you reclaim your luggage and go through immigration even though you are only in transit!
I have visions of mother faced with a demand for her fingerprints by some surly immigration official....veteran of the Second World War and not very impressed by the speed of American participation in said conflict, I can just see surly official blown backwards bow legged and mother off in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay.
Do I hear a siren voice breathing
Go on, book via the States....?

Mother is not coming, so I can resist the temptation.

That leaves flights via Mexico.
That simplifies matters.
Or it would, except that the online fare and flight comparison sites like to give you the flights from the airlines with which they are affiliated so a fair bit of time is wasted knocking out the U.S. element.
Further, some sites give prices with taxes, others without.
Depending on the site, the prices could be quoted in pounds sterling, euros or U.S. dollars. With or without taxes.
Up goes the currency calculator on the screen.
I know that I am supposed to be able to have split screen on this machine, but as computers don't come with handbooks, I don't know how, so I keep dodging between flight websites and the converter until I feel distinctly overwhelmed by it all.

I finally find a flight. It leaves Orly at 6.00 am, and makes a change in Madrid. A short wait in Mexico City, then on to the destination.
Only one problem. No train will get us to Paris that early. We shall have to take the latest train and sit in the airport overnight. Not a good option with a husband who is not well. We shall have to book a hotel.

That is fraught with problems as well. The last time I booked a hotel in Paris through the Paris Tourist Office I wanted to stay for two nights. Hotel number one could only do one, so I booked that, and the second night in a different hotel. All through the Paris Tourist Office site.
Checking my e mails before checking out of hotel one, I was just in time to catch a message from hotel number two cancelling my booking for that day as they were full!
Luckily, the delightful Algerian lady at the desk found me another room for the night in a hotel nearby, but so much for the Paris Tourist Office!

Our Turkish builder rings. Ziya told him we we're going to get an early morning flight so he thinks it best if he takes us.....he can load up on Turkish goodies in Paris at the same time. Typical of him to find an excuse for covering up his kind heart.

Only a few problems now remain.
I will book the flight with my bank card. It is not beyond the bounds of probability that my bank will refuse to honour it, as they did once before for an airfare.
I had made a booking and the day afterwards the agency told me that my bank wouldn't pay. I lost the flight.
I called the bank.
It was for my own security.
Why? Didn't they think I would be safe outside the boundaries of France?
No, it was an unusual amount.
I agree it is more than the usual fifty euros in Leclerc, but why didn't you call me to see if it was genuine?
We don't do that.
This is the bank who managed to let someone take over a thousand euros from my account - more than the airfare - without a quibble.

If the card works, then all I have to worry about is whether the baggage handlers or the air traffic controllers will be on strike. The holiday period, any holiday period,  is usually the cue to down tools, but I am booking for just before the great Easter exodus, so I might just make it.

I have been warned of the hazards awaiting me in Guatemala, the most emphasised of which has been armed men leaping out at my car on the road and demanding money at gunpoint.

I had had no idea that the gendarmerie would be on holiday in Guatemala at the same time.

Putain de merde! Back to the computer....

Paris and the provinces

Image by cbertel via Flickr

 I was reading a pleasant article...though I have now forgotten where...by a chap who had been visiting Paris and was surprised how friendly everyone was which was contary to its reputation and his expectations.
I don't often go to Paris....usually crossing it is enough for me, from one station to the other....but I have only twice met with rudeness there in over twenty years of intermittent visits. On both occasions it was from a person safely esconced behind a counter and a glass wall.

As a tourist, I used to go occasionally to Paris, staying in the cheap hotels round the Gare du Nord. Now, if I have to go for any reason, I stay in the slightly more upmarket hotels in the same area...the ones with bathrooms. Then as now, the hotel staff are Algerian. The local shops are Algerian. The little cafes where I look for lunch or supper do not have maitre d's..they have Italian waiters who are kindness itself.

There must be another Paris which I do not have enough money to frequent.

I have met only one other rude Parisian, and I met her in London. She was trying to find the School of African and Oriental Studies of London University and was clearly lost. From her question as to directions, it was clear that she was French, from Paris and that her English was not up to much, so I thought I would help by replying in French. She looked rather as if I had just slapped her between the eyes with a wet fish, then, eyeing me with a contempt that was palpable, she continued in her execrable English.
I am afraid I directed her to Kings Cross where I thought she would feel more at home.

Seeking approval, the British who buy a house in the French countryside are delighted to be told by  local people that they would prefer to have foreigners - well (unspoken) white non-muslim foreigners - than Parisians as neighbours.
I think this is a sort of back handed compliment, and long observation leads me to believe that this is because the Parisian is far more wary and on the lookout for rural craftiness than the starry eyed British immigrant looking for a dream.

There has long been an urban/rural split in France.
When I was househunting all those years ago, it was long before the days when every gite and bed and breakfast was being run by a beaming Brit, and I stayed mostly with urban French who had retired to the country.
To a man they were scathing about their rural neighbours.

'Watch out when they smile at you...it means they've got one over on you.'
'Off to church every Sunday...from what they get up to they should be on their knees in there all day every day.'
'Keep your hens locked up.'
'Count your fingers.'

This view is not new.
'Ignorant, full of prejudices, they have no scruples in craft or in deceit.' Thus an officer speaking of the country people around Le Mans in the 1860s.(1)

Country people were held - by the urbanites - to be uncouth savages, ignorant and cunning.

Well, from some of the stories I have been told about youth and growing up in the French countryside between the wars here, it was a damned hard life if you were on the bottom of the heap, so what it had been like in earlier centuries passes the powers of imagination. Lack of education, superstition, bigotry and poverty are not the best feeding grounds for ethics and morality.

However, the old habits linger.
The village feuds carry on down the years - luckily, as foreigners, we are excused boots in this regard.
The delight in getting one over on someone else...here we are the perfect targets as not being part of the fabric of the feuds so lessening the chances of retribution.
The avidity for land which leads to endless boundary disputes.
The jealousy. Monsieur X might have three centimes...he begrudges Monsieur Y one.

It is far from universal. There are many kind hearted and helpful people in the countryside, but they are not generally the ones wielding any power.

Book after book and blog after blog relate tales of crafty maires trying to put something over on a foreigner and it is all laughed off as being part of the rich experience and privilege of living in rural France.

It is nothing of the sort. The rose coloured spectacles should be lifted to admit that these guys are taking advantage of the lack of experience and lack of language of foreigners moving into their communes. People who pay taxes.
I have posted earlier here about public and private enterprise in the matter of land and boundaries. You can bet anyone's boots that these shenanigans would not have been tried on a Parisian.
There is a Paris based judge with a holiday home near St. Ragondin. He is deeply unpopular with his farming neighbours for refusing them permission to use a ditch which crosses his land for farm waste.
It wouldn't surprise me if the dafter type of Brit would be persuaded it was his civic duty and evidence of his willingness to integrate to accept.

So, if you're moving to the provinces, make friends with your Parisian neighbour. He has suspicion built into his genes and might well save you from a host of problems.














(1). I am indebted to Eugene Weber's 'Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernisation of Rural France 1870 - 1914' for the quote.

This is the age of the train.....

Image via Wikipedia

We are going to stay with friends and must gird our loins for the journey. I don't know why people are always going on about how wonderful public transport is in France...out here, out in the sticks, there isn't any. No street lights either, but I digress. We have had to reserve our ticket yonks in advance to get something we can afford. Not being an area frequented by holidaying politicians, etc, there are not many good offers either, and there is the small problem of booking online and having to retrieve the ticket at the station - always a dicey maneouvre when short of time, fifth in the queue and the woman at the head of it wants information on train times to Marseilles for a proposed holiday in three months' time. It might take us those three months to get to the head of the queue. To avoid having to leave the car in the station car park where it will be vandalised friends have to take us to catch the local train...a mere forty minutes' drive away....at the ungodly hour ordained by French railways, SNCF, if we are to make a reasonable connection to Paris, rather than making endless changes and waiting about on passenger unfriendly platforms. I don't know what they think a terrorist might do with a bench, but they must think they'd do something, so the old benches are disappearing and you end up having to sit on a plastic bucket type of thing in the waiting area.



The train, to be fair, will be a comfortable push me pull you, well, it is after you haul yourself and suitcase up the steps into the carriage from the platform. You can feel like the daring young man on the flying trapeze as you reach backwards for the suitcase to be handed to you...the alternative being to practise tossing the caber and launching the thing ahead of you up the steps, a good recipe for a hernia, in my book. Why do the French think we invented platforms, for goodness' sake? None of this problem on a British train.



The mainline train will be a TGV, so fast that the countryside is a blur beyond the window, except when the catenaries are down or someone has left a few tons of straw bales on the line, in which case you repair to the buffet car so that the interior of the train becomes a blur instead. It has the same problem with steps, and an infuriating luggage rack just inside the vestibule, so that you can't see your luggage and get a crick in the neck from turning round every time there is some movement in the carriage in case some enterprising fellow traveller is making off with your smalls. It is comfortable, your seat is reserved and if you have forgotten to punch your ticket before getting on you will be fined by the conductor. SNCF also have a delightful wheeze if you buy a last minute ticket....they will sell you one at full price without a seat number, despite their policy that all seats must be reserved to ensure that no one stands! I have travelled down from Paris hopping from unoccupied seat to unoccupied seat as people came and left at various stations, but, having varied viewpoints, did not on this occasion get a crick in the neck watching my luggage.





Then, the horror. We will have to cross Paris. Always supposing that the trains and the busses are not on strike, which some of them inevitably will be. We were trained on the London tube with its' wonderful map and its' sensibly named lines and what will now face us is a journey in which we shall walk for miles looking for place names that mean nothing to determine that we are travelling in the right direction, have to change three times at least, so more walking miles looking for place names and then will probably get stuck in those alarming doors that clang as you leave a station. Worse, there will inevitably be an Irish band playing in our carriage...and probably in all the carriages we use.





We will eventually arrive at the Paris terminal for our friends' line, go through the ticket punching and caber tossing again, get a crick in the neck, and descend, exhausted, to be met by these kind people at the main line station. They are making the long drive to pick us up as their push me pull you won't be running by the time we arrive in their area, nor is it as good as our PMPY...it reminds me of the old British Rail poster at the station I used to use...'This is the age of the train'...under which someone had written 'Mine was one hundred and four.'


We are looking forward to seeing them..it has been a long time...but we reckon we'll need the holiday to recover from the journey as we will feel as old as the train.

Big bud authors

Image by wallyg via Flickr

I was looking for something else but with my usual keyboard incompetence arrived on the Saga site perusing an article downloaded from another website about how to behave if invited to a French house. I really don't know where these articles come from...there must a be a factory somewhere....but they all seem the same. First they tell you that you won't be invited to a French house anyway - so why, I ask, continue further? Undeterred, they then tell you what to do when you are.....don't take chrysanthemums or foreign hooch - causes offence....don't expect a tour of the house....and all you'll get is booze and biscuits, 'les aperos', which you will be expected to hang out for hours before you can make your escape.
Why do the media buy such derivative stuff? I call it big bud theory from the range of old gardening magazines describing the problem that assails blackcurrant bushes, all of which inevitably stated that the bud was as big as a sixpence, as indeed they would as their authors all diligently copied earlier authors and so the legend began. Have any of these big bud authors visited French houses, and if so, what sort? Which French invite you out to a restaurant in lieu of dinner at home and why?
We have been invited to a great many French houses in our time, but only three times for 'les aperos'. The first time it was my tax inspector who invited us, and we had a whale of a time, the second was an antique arms' collector whose wife sent the champagne round pretty briskly and we ended up taking a startled look at his private arsenal before being invited to try it out in the garden, the third one was the ex politician who wished to impress me with my own insignificence by offering as an aperitif the remains of the Bordeaux he had been drinking at lunchtime. We are in court with the ex politician shortly. This is probably because I turned up my nose at his leavings and joined his wife in a bottle of Pouilly fume. Don't know their place, these foreigners. All three of these encounters were the nearest I have come to the sort of inspection visit described in these articles, and only the third was actually that, so I must assume that the big bud authors are dealing with a stratum of society that does not come my way out here in the sticks.
I consulted Madeleine about the French who invite you to restaurants rather than to their homes and she immediately demanded to have the articles translated, then roared uninhibitedly. In her view, this was all about business in the good old days when anything could be charged to expenses, and if Monsieur invited you to meet him and his wife in a restaurant all it meant was that his wife didn't have to cook and they both ate on the firm, as it were, thus saving the household budget for more important things like buying Madame a nice little car. The mere idea that the French were ashamed of their homes and so avoided allowing outsiders to see them - as suggested in the articles - struck her as hilarious, and she had lived in Paris for years before coming down to retire to the country. They weren't ashamed of their homes at all, she explained, it was just that you weren't important enough for Madame to put herself out - especially as thanks to you she had a good night out as well. This explanation rather miffed Mr Fly who had constructed for himself an alternative theory which was that if, presumably, every businessman and politician in Paris was sexually rampant between the hours of five and seven in the evening - the 'cinq a sept' - then he had to be SR with a female equivalent,which meant that none of the ladies involved would have had time to cook. Thus dining out. After seven o'clock.
Big bud authors, feel free to take up and develop this idea.

Looking back after so many years it is difficult to remember how things started up. People would invite us in for a drink, we would do likewise, things would slide into a lunch, to be returned, you'd be invited to a Sunday lunch to meet the family - a bit like entering the village of Asterix given the size of some of those dining tables - you would invite the family, and buy another table or two for the occasion, and then it settled into a sort of routine as if you were an extension of the family. Cousins would invite you with the rest of the horde. You would invite cousins when the rest of the horde came to dine. I liked it very much. I still do.

No one brought flowers, plants or chocolates. They brought something to put on the table - usually their speciality, awaited by everyone - or something only available in their area. A mate of Didier since they did their national service together always brought his neighbour's brioche Vendeen...which meant that lunch had to be held up as the brioche wasn't baked before nine o'clock and then he had to drive hundreds of kilometres to get to Didier's place. I don't greatly like these sweet breads, but this was unforgettable. Feather light, delicately flavoured with rum and orange flower water it was simple but a masterpiece of the baker's art. Worth putting back lunch, especially given the range of Didier's aperitifs.

I suspect that the big bud authors are not thinking of country folk, but I can assure them that what might be called higher up the social scale it is not so very different. A lady whose acquaintance we made through a friend invited us - without the friend - as she wished to enlarge her circle. We arrived at a most imposing mansion to find that Madame was butler, wine waiter, cook and bottle washer and had not the least objection to handing over some part of her duties. We had an uproarious lunch, repeated several times before her untimely death, and she always insisted on a treacle tart being produced. While the men drooped over an aged eau de vie I would wash up with her the priceless china which she produced carelessly from a cupboard, luckily having just enough drink taken to be confident but not over confident handing these relics of the ancien regime.
She washed up at our place likewise....but our china was never of the same quality.
Those of you who live in France, or are expatriates elsewhere, you must be equally fed up with the big bud syndrome in people writing about your area. What about sharing your experiences so people can see what it is really like?