Shat on from a great height

Image by fredpanassac via Flickr

Not far away from where I first lived is a little town that I scarcely visit these days. It is run down, has social problems and is on the way out, yet it should be one of jewels of tourist France and a cultural hub for its area.

Imagine if you were planning to visit France and someone proposed a town with part of its medieval walls and massive gatehouses intact....a wonderful church with a magisterial carved frontage....a medieval town centre with timber framed houses and little winding alleyways leading down to the river below, the whole thing dominated by a chateau perched on its rocky base. You would probably jump at the chance to visit it.

Well, when you did, you would be deeply disappointed. Yes, the town has all these attractions, but does nothing with them.......in fact, it seems perversely to want to negate their impact.

You arrive, and seek the tourist office. Twenty years ago, it was run by volunteers, in the centre of the old town and you would walk down the shopping area to get to it from the main car park on the old market place. You were already in the heart of things.

Then it was moved to the market place 'to be more accessible'. It was accessible where it was, in a half timbered building at an angle to the old church, so what was meant was 'accessible from the parking area'. Then council money came in and they got rid of the volunteers. Nice young things from goodness knows where took over the counters in the summer months, doing their 'stage' - training - no doubt for some diploma in tourism, and events started to be held. Night markets...story tellers and conjurers accompanying walks round the town. A fortune was spent on chateau images in metal implanted on the pavements.

What you could no longer do was consult leaflets either about the town and its attractions or about what was happening or available in the general area. To 'avoid waste', these were all kept in drawers of the filing cabinet to be produced if asked for...which begs the question

'How do you know to ask about something if you don't know it exists?'

Recently in an epic power struggle between factions of local government, the tourist office is to be moved to the outskirts of the town, where local government conveniently has spare office space due to the failure of yet another of its wild schemes. How the tourist is to find it is a puzzle. Where the tourist is to park having found it is yet another...there is only on-street parking, all taken up already by local government workers.

The main market used to spread from the market place, with the nineteenth century market building, down the main shopping street to the clothes market near the old tourist office, so, at least once a week, people would be drawn past the shops in that street and business was flourishing. Then, there was concern on the part of the council about the circulation of traffic. The market area was drawn back to the main marketplace, and commerce lower down in the town atrophied. Already, the town faced competition from two supermarkets installed in communes on its outskirts, so you would think, if only out of a sense of responsibility to its ratepayers, it would do something to keep commerce going in the centre.

Not at all. The town had set up two industrial estates, and its tax income from the enterprises installed there let it ignore the dying heart of the town. As commerce died out, rates went up. The only first class restaurant closed its doors. That was fifteen years ago and the hulk of the building is still there, its roof green with algae and the windows falling apart, the wreck of a sixteenth century wonder. No one will take it on. The shopping street became a desert of empty plate glass windows. A tattooist installed himself.....the only active commerce for some hundred metres and indicator of another phenomenon. The population change.

The centre used to house families, but mostly in rented property. The 'big' families of the town, heirs of notaires for the most part, owned the houses and saw that it was much more profitable to turn these properties into studio flats, as there were council grants for the conversion. The council led the way, turning a magnificent medieval hostelry into poky flats, ruining the interior and where the council led, others were quick to follow. The old centre became a ghost town of the unemployed and single, empty of commerces because they did their shopping at the supermarkets on the edge of town and decidedly unpleasant to frequent at night as the population changed yet again - younger people from the Paris area, bringing their habits of all sorts with them. Trash built up, dog turds littered the streets, and the council was unconcerned despite the calls of the original inhabitants of the area to have something done. The rates went up again.


A notaire - from the North of France - decided that the old centre could be turned round if a few people started to renovate the old buildings that were available for sale, and formed a group of like minded people with a bit of money to try to start on the area around the church. They faced nothing but obstacles as, not only was there the normal planning permission to be obtained for change to exteriors but because the area was one close to historical monuments, further permissions had to be obtained from the departmental architect of 'Batiments de France' - something like English Heritage.



These gentlemen, once appointed, are difficult to shift and run their departmental policies as they please. The one in place at the time of the notaire's initiative had an obsession with covering all walls in 'crepi' - rendering - in a colour described as 'ton pierre' - stone colour- but which would be more accurately be described as shit yellow. Now, this town was noted for not only its half timbered dwellings, but also for the buildings in local stone, built like the town walls, more than a metre thick, and it was this feature that the architect wanted to cover in - shit.
He had managed to have this done this to the medieval ramparts of a town down the road, with the result that the bastion overlooking the river now looks as though a giant had had an bowel movement while touring the area....and this is the sort of person entrusted with France's architectural heritage.

The notaire persisted and has a wonderful house, but most of his friends gave up, defeated by the beaurocracy and sheer resistance that they encountered. The town council sat on its' hands. It had the revenues from the industrial estate, after all. The town centre continued its' decline.

Two years ago, there was a suspicious death in one of these studio apartments and finally the police intervened in what had become an area of drug trading and sleaze. The council was forced to take action and sent in a councillor to hear complaints. He was blown backwards bow legged by the volume of said and the council set up an action group meant to improve conditions.

What has it produced? A plan to ban parking in the little square by the church. More litter bins...which have had to be protected by knee high concrete surrounds to prevent larrikins overturning them. As one long term resident was reported as saying

'If I'd put up a thing like that, I'd have been fined and made to take it down.'

How true that is. His story is echoed all round the old centre. People who want to make it come to life again, who want to restore it, who want to make it an area where tourists would like to come and spend their money are being prevented by a lack of initiative at all levels. Worse, obstructionism.

Why might that be? Go to the notaire, now retired and having to put security devices on the doors and windows of his lovely house.

'Simple. The big families still profit from these studio rentals. They don't want anything to change and they still control the place, whichever party they say they're from. The other thing they don't want is outsiders making a penny from anything in the town. The town is for them and their kind. It's not for us.'

So, take heart, immigrants to France. It is not only that France is for the French, and not for us, but that each town is for its 'owners', and not even for other French.

Window shopping

Image via Wikipedia

We had to paint the window frames and shutters this year. We should have done it last year, but having done it the year before, we thought we were due a holiday. Fools. French paint is the definition of built in obsolescence.
It is not my idea of bliss to stand on a very high ladder, grabbing the curtain rail hoping it was the competent workman who attached that one and swinging half one's not inconsiderable bulk out into the void several floors up to reach the bit that the unutterable fool in the garden has just pointed out as the bit you missed that morning when you started the hellish process. You suspected that you had missed it as it was the bit you could not see. You just hoped no one would notice. I should learn to hide the field glasses.
Don't mention scaffolding.
Painting the blessed things is bad enough, but fitting them in the first place was another nightmare...bring back the window tax and brick them all up.

When buying the house, it became evident that the windows on one side of the house would need to be replaced, so I asked for quotes. Blown backwards bow legged by the results of that bright idea, it was decided to buy and fit them ourselves and we made the tour of the builders' merchants. It soon became evident that this idea was not going to run either....the house was not in the norms...it had windows of a different size to those currently in vogue. It was not possible to be flexible, either and change the size of the windows because of
a) planning permission
and, more importantly
b) the window surrounds were very solid granite.
The windows would have to be made to order and, surprise, surprise, that would cost even more than having them fitted by a professional firm. This is France.

As the winter wind whistled through the perished frames, the man in my life decided on one last throw of the dice. We would try the DIY stores which were then a new phenomenon on the French scene.

We duly visited our local outlet - all of an hour's drive away - and found nothing in our size in the racks of ready made windows, but then M. Supplice, who had begun to recognise us from our earlier visits, pointed us to an area in the back. The misshapes.
He explained all. At that time, the DIY store would make windows to measure, at prices well under those quoted by the regular builders' merchants. The client would measure and the DIY store would make. Unfortunately, there was a problem. For reasons best known to the French mind, if you have a hole 100 cms wide and high, you will order a window to fit this and get a window which measures 105 cms high and wide. The client, not being an artisan francais window measurer, did not know this, which accounted for the number of misshapes on offer. Our luck even improved on that. Because only windows which were within the modern norms were stocked by builders' merchants, people were ordering odd shapes made to measure. And were mismeasuring, thanks to the professional secret of the 5 cms, so we actually found windows which would fit most of our gaps. M. Supplice, wary from his experience with the misshapes, made us draw and label our gaps before he would sell us anything.
'I'm not having this lot coming back.'

Scaffolding was already in place to deal with the render on the walls, which was cracked and letting water by, so fitting the windows was not too much of a problem as long as no once started to quote Gerard Hoffnung's address to the Oxford Union once the pulleys were set up. Weight I can cope with, but not when in hysterics. One sepulchral voice intoning
'And then I met the barrel coming up...' was enough to finish me off.
It was all looking good, but we were two windows short of our full complement and, at some point, the scaffolding would have to come down to attack the rendering on the other walls. The quotes from the builders' merchants had gone up, as we only now needed two. M. Supplice had no more windows, but he did have a suggestion.
There was a chain of discount stockists who held all sorts of end of line stuff like paint, fittings, sanitary ware, barbed wire - but also, windows and doors. They got theirs from the builders' merchants when the experts mismeasured the hole for the window and were said to be reasonable. They only opened at the weekends, thus anticipating Sarkozy's measures to free up French trade by some fifteen years. The force of the wind decided us that there was no alternative, so we hitched on the trailer the next Sunday and wended our way through the bleak winter countryside to the nearest outlet, some two hours' drive from us.
We arrived at opening time - ten o'clock - which gave us only two hours until it closed at noon, so it was a relief to find that the window and door section seemed to be well organised, with everything in size marked racks. Inspection and a tape measure quickly showed that these markings bore no correspondence to the contents, so we had to resort to hauling out and measuring anything that looked likely - not forgetting the 5 cm. It was going to be a long job and I began to think that we would never be able to find what we wanted before closing time unless we could have some help.
The lady on the till apologised that she could not leave her post, but indicated the boss who was in the materials yard and suggested I ask him. I found him, well wrapped up in fur lined jacket and leather gloves, sporting dark glasses in the winter gloom, and asked if he could help.
'The workman does all that sort of thing.'
'Where is the workman?'
'He doesn't work on Sundays.'
'Can you help me, then?'
'No, I'm the boss.'
Well, there may have been windows in the size we wanted, but there was no way we could find them before we were thrown out on the dot of noon. The boss was still standing in the yard as his cashier closed the heavy gates behind us.

We eventually found the windows at another branch of the chain where the staff were helpful and managed to beat the deadline for moving the scaffolding, but it was a salutary introduction to French commercial practice and an interesting introduction to the the French mode of measurement.