Down at the dump

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Looking at the school kids piling wheelie bins against the doors of their schools - don't French schools ever have back doors? - and in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, I thought to myself that they were lucky that they were doing this in the towns.
Out here, in the wilds, they would find that their blockade material would have disappeared overnight to provide rat-free feed bins for the chickens, who are feeling left out because the rabbits copped all the yellow recycling baskets.
We see things differently in the countryside.

The dustmen are most obliging....they will take just about anything, all hurled into the back of the van with a fine disregard for recycling...which saves too many visits to the dechetterie - the local dump.
Not that you're supposed to call it a dump.....it is a recycling centre.

Well. it is, I suppose....
It's where the gyppos from the illegal gyppo camp recycle scrap metal into cash, totally unobstructed by the miserable jobsworth who works there who spends his time instead terrifying old age pensioners into dismantling the sofa they have brought in into its component materials for putting into the correct skips.

As you might imagine, we have had words.
He thought I should disassemble an ancient folding chair into fabric, plastic and metal components.
I disagreed.
He insisted.
I demurred.
The noise level rose to that of a local council meeting discussing sewage disposal.
He started flailing his arms about like Jacques Chirac's well known helicopter imitation.
I offered one finger upraised in return.
The gyppos stopped recycling and took on the role of mediation.

They would dismantle the chair.

All parties satisfied by this compromise, they dismantled accordingly, he went off to sulk in his hut and I threw my empty oil containers into the 'tout venant' skip in gross violation of Monsieur Jobsworth's policies.
He wants them stacked in a sort of bouncy castle next to his hut which is too high for me to reach, even by standing on the unsteady pile of concrete building blocks he has installed for the shortarses among us.
I am not a keen recycler at the best of times and I do not intend to meet my Maker with a broken neck and covered in sump oil just to make Monsieur Jobsworth happy.

Instead of the annual leaflet pointing out the error of our ways in not washing out our milk boxes and putting them on Tuesdays into box A while on Thursdays flattening sardine tins for box B - which may be appropriate for the big town whence these leaflets come but not for us where the dustmen come once a week only - I feel that more effort should be made to persuade French householders that their grass clippings would be put to better use in making their own compost heaps in their own gardens rather than using petrol to bring them to a tip whence more fuel will be used by the lorry that comes to remove the skip full of grass clippings to....well, there the trail goes cold.
Goodness only knows where it goes.
Probably on top of the Tuesday milk boxes and the Thursday sardine tins, knowing this area.

There's no pleasure in rubbish disposal these days....

The dumps used to be real dumps, surrounded by wire netting with holes in case the mairie was shut when you needed the key, and you could rake around at leisure.....like a Leclerc with no checkouts.
I used to keep an eye on the local cemeteries after the Toussaint, when families come to put pots of chrysanthemums on the graves of their relatives.
After a while, the council man of all work would come along and pick up all the faded and dying specimens and drop everything at the dump, so once I saw that the cemetery was back to its usual shade of grey I would be off with the trailer ready for the haul of flower pots...which were at that time nearly unobtainable in France without a plant in them already.

Other stuff could be found too, furniture, old tools, bits of bicycle, even a tombstone on one occasion....but never bottles. Bottles were never discarded. They were required for the bottling of wine bought in bulk from the vigneron and every house had its stack.

And you met people....the French and the British have different tastes when it comes to tip crawling, so there was none of the jumble sale aggressive spirit and many invitations to come back for a drink.

There was also a lot of asbestos roof sheeting there...dumped when renovating....which seemed to trouble nobody. Rural France was constructed with asbestos sheeting as anyone renovating in France can confirm.

Then recycling came in.

Councils decided to go for this in a big way.
They shut off their local dumps and opened recycling centres.
Fine if you lived near, a real pain if you did not.
Travelling miles with an unwieldy bed settee threatening to fall out of the trailer at any moment is not zen.

Then they decided that the new dumps could not take asbestos....and you had to have a specialised firm to take it down and take it away.
I never saw any of these firms at work, though I imagined chaps in NASA spacesuits moonwalking a la Michael Jackson, because of the astronomical prices they were charging to take away the roof of your chicken shed, so the first consequence of the recycling bug was that fly tipping rose to mammoth proportions and nearly every dirt track accessible by vehicle was lined with broken asbestos sheeting.

Not that local councils were unaware of the problems this caused.
I had bought a large building lavishly roofed in asbestos which was generally accepted as the winner in the 'eyesore of the commune' competition. Farms excluded, of course.
I wished to convert it into something more desirable, and the maire was all for it, not least because he lived alongside.
But the quote for removing the asbestos was  terrifying.
Clearly the firm concerned had not just bought NASA spacesuits but also the rocket to go with them and was keen to recuperate its costs.
As all the books about France tell you, when in doubt, consult the maire. So I consulted the maire.
He was an old boy wise in the ways of getting round inconvenient legislation and came up with the solution.

I'll get the gyppos to come and take it away. I reckon five hundred euros should sort it.

This being a tiny fraction of the estimate that had driven me to the armchair gasping for brandy, I thought it a good deal and authorised him to proceed.
In due course, the gyppo chieftain came to see me, agreed that five hundred euros should do it and offered me a price for some of the machinery in the outhouses.
The deal was done. I was happy, the maire was happy and I imagine that the gyppos were happy.

What, I asked the maire later, will they do with the asbestos?

Oh, they're 'sub contracting' on an estate some Belgian has bought, so it'll all go down as hardcore for the roads.

So that was all right then.

Recycling centres as such did not, at first, reduce the social element to dumping your rubbish.
The first employee was a cheery young man who unloaded cars and trailers for the elderly, sorted out plants from the green skip to redistribute to local gardeners...thus my iris alley...and practised his English on the British contingent.
Eventually he acquired a girlfirend from the south of France where he is now running her parents' restaurant.
We, in return, got Mr. Jobsworth.
But that was later.

At some point you would meet everyone at the recycling centre, from Annette busy smashing a vase before putting it in the skip so that no one else could use the monstrosity to Hubert pulling out the pieces to glue it together as it had once belonged to his aunt.
I was once there when there seemed to be an unattended bicycle propped up against one of the skips, but as I opened my car door, the son of the gyppo chieftain emerged from a skip and pulled his bicycle inside with him, to prevent it from being stolen. I rather liked that.
It was an alternative to the bar for doing business too....the cheery young man did not listen in as did the bar owner and you didn't have to buy a lousy Robusta coffee either.

It was there that Hubert met Mr. Poubelle.
Mr...not Monsieur...Poubelle - Mr.Dustbin - was English.
He had had a holiday house in the commune for years before retiring permanently to France, and his method of communication was to add 'o' or 'a' or 'e' to English words, interspersed with the odd 'oh la la!', and for some obscure reason 'quel con!'....all accompanied by gestures.
It says a great deal for the average person's good nature and adaptability that he seemed to manage pretty well, too.

He was always out for a bargain and accessed some places into which you would hesitate to put your walking stick....like the old boy from whom he bought wine at three francs a litre.
I like a bargain, but nothing on earth would have induced me to buy wine there.
It was certainly atmospheric.

You gained access via a yard where pieces of obsolete machinery made it look as though a few Martians from the War of the Worlds had just lucked out.
Then you went into the shed, where bits of tools obsolete by the time of the French Revolution were hanging awaiting repair under a thick cover of dust and cobwebs.
Finally you reached the 'cave', where ancient barrels leered through the gloom of one dim electric bulb liberally covered in more dust.....and you would be offered a tasting glass.
One of the ones that had once held mustard and which looked as though all the mustard had not been cleaned out before the change of use was imposed upon the receptacle.
At least, one hoped that the high relief streaks were mustard.

The wine was undrinkable. To call it vinegar would have been a compliment.
But as it cost only three francs a litre, Mr. Poubelle was happy.
But I noticed that he only bought there once.
Even Mr. Poubelle had limits.

There are those who would disagree with this statement.
Like the couple who gave him his nickname.

They were Parisiens who had inherited a house up the road from Mr. Poubelle which they used for passing the summer.
Mr. Poubelle had made their acquaintance  and they became quite friendly...to the extent that they invited him to their daughter's wedding, which was to take place in the Auvergne.....but only after a high powered campaign mounted by Mr. Poubelle to the tune of he had never been to a French wedding before, etc....

Now, the French habit is to make hotel arrangements for guests, and, accordingly, the family had booked a small hotel near the village in which the marriage was to be celebrated.
The idea is that the guests pay their own hotel expenses while the family provide the vin d'honneur, the wedding breakfast and the dance with refreshments which inevitably accompany the ceremony.

Mr and Mrs. Poubelle duly arrived, enjoyed the civil and religious ceremonies,  and after the vin d'honneur settled into the wedding breakfast.....the first course of which proved to be prawns.
Not just prawns, but tiger prawns.
Mr. Poubelle set to with a will. He demolished his own. He stabbed more from the plates of his slower eating neighbours at table. He stood up and announced that if there was anyone who did not like prawns they could bring their plate to him.
The horrified mother of the bride had had enough.
She stood up and said

Yes, give them to Mr. Poubelle.

And to cap it all, he refused to pay his hotel bill, on the grounds that he was a guest!

The story went round the village and the nickname stuck.

On meeting Hubert, Mr. Poubelle discovered that Hubert had a surplus of wine.
It was only 'vin courant' for everyday drinking and Hubert had to shift a lot of it as it had had been badly made and was starting to fizz a bit.

How much?

Seven francs the litre. But mind...you're not to bottle it. It won't keep.

How much have you got?

Seventy litres.

I'll take it.

But it won't keep, I tell you.

Then I'll take fifty.

Seeing an answer to the bulk of his problem, Hubert accepted and Mr. Poubelle took delivery.

He bottled it and stored it in the newly redecorated (by Mrs. Poubelle, a dab hand with paintbrush screwdriver and hammer) kitchen.
Warm places, kitchens.
Bottle after bottle blew its stack until visitors reckoned it was like living on a firing range and Mrs. Poubelle announced that if she had wanted her kitchen painted red she would have done so originally.

Down at the dump, Mr. Poubelle encountered Hubert again.

That was some duff stuff you sold me.....I've lost about twenty litres of it.

Hubert knew when he was beaten...he gave the rest of his wine to Mr. Poubelle.

Who duly bottled it up but this time put it and the remains of the first load into the dining room, which bore a strong resemblance to an ancient crypt, being dark and dank.
The explosions were less frequent and it was too dark to see the stains.

Mr. Poubelle's cousin came over for a holiday in the August of that year...in his caravan, which he parked in the garden.....and helped Mrs. Poubelle with a lot of the DIY in return for being fed and watered liberally...both the Poubelles were superb cooks.

He was a beer drinker normally, but readily took to wine and one day just before his departure Mr. Poubelle carefully uncorked one of his bottles from Hubert.
It came out of the bottle like Vesuvius unchained and the cousin was most impressed.

I've got a fair few bottles of this stuff, red champagne.....you'll never see it in England...it's hard enough to get it here. You've been such a help, I'll make you a special price if you want some to take back. It'll be great for weddings and Christmas.

How much?

Well, it would normally be about twenty francs a bottle, but as it's you, it'll be  ten...as a sort of thank you.

The cousin agreed and on the night before his departure Mr. Poubelle loaded the bottles into the caravan, refusing all offers of help in order, as he said to the cousin, to avoid accidents.
Wine was volatile stuff and needed experienced handling.

The cousin set off in the cool of the early hours, to get well on the road before the sun got up.
Warm places, caravans, when the August sun gets on them as they jolt their way over the roads of rural France, but the cousin drove happily on, deaf to the explosions behind him as he listened to his radio.....

For some reason, he never returned to Chez Poubelle for another holiday....but, as I say, he was really a beer drinker.

What to do when France is on strike...

Image by Nocturnales via Flickr

First......secure your transport.

There is one sure rule to follow when buying a car in France.
Always buy one with a diesel engine.
That way, when farmers or lorry drivers or Uncle Tom Cobley and all block the refineries and the petrol pumps run dry at the supermarkets, you can always fill up from your central heating tank.

Illegal?

I wouldn't worry too much.
The customs are too busy hanging about on the roads into France from Italy and Andorra in the hope of confiscating the knock off  Gucci handbag you bought on your holidays to be on the lookout for red diesel in your tank...and anyway, it's not worth their while to run checks as they would probably find most of those concerned to be farmers who cannot be touched under any circumstances, so, in my book, it's a gamble well worth taking.

Just remember to fill your central heating tank at the first signs of public unrest.

This will not help you, unfortunately, if you wish to leave the country from Charles de Gaulle airport which has currently managed to run its supplies down to almost zero....I can't see your pilot being very appreciative if you drive your car 'airside' and offer him a syphon and tube with the injunction to get sucking.

Try to avoid big towns.
Union leaders know they exist, and will doubtless soon have endless convoys of lorries circling their ring roads until they run out of the fuel they have been blockading in the refineries and just happen to break down on every major intersection.
By keeping clear of the cities not only will you avoid the lorry drivers, you will also avoid those streams of self righteous teenagers bunking off school for the day who have a tendency to get annoyed when you won't put some money in their collecting tins to pay for the post demo booze up.

Stock up at your local supermarket...at all your local supermarkets...for when their supplies of food run out.
The French have never managed to master 'just in time' stocking at the best of times and a strike of transport workers is no time for you to be testing their capacities in an emergency situation by looking for an aubergine for your imam bayeldi recipe.
History will tell you that the French do not excel in emergencies.
There is no handbook to follow.

So, having secured your supplies and locked the cap of your central heating tank against those who walk by night with tubes and jerrycans you can sit back and watch it all on the television like the majority of the French because, despite all the placards and shouting, physical involvement in protest is decidedly limited.

Why aren't they all out with their billhooks and pikes?
Because billhooks and pikes are no longer used by union members...and it is the unions who organise protests as part of the unholy tripartite process of negotiation with the bosses and the government which has bedevilled France since the last war.
The unions who represent a tiny proportion of French workers.

Think about it....why don't the unions send their lorries to blockade the employers' organisation HQ?
Or government offices?

Because they're all in this negotiation together, that's why and poodle does not eat poodle.

The schoolkids do not understand this...they think it's all about fairness, or jobs, or abstract things...so they annoy the unions mightily by trotting off to stand outside MEDEF...the bosses' HQ, not understanding that they are thus introducing a snake into the jolly game of ladders that the grown ups understand.
If you have a twisted sense of humour, take a look at the facial contortions of a union leader congratulating the youth of France for their involvement while all the time wishing them at the devil, because their lack of understanding of the realities gives government a chance to change the pattern of the ritual negotiating dance.

If, however, you find that counting demonstrators on the television does not induce a well earned siesta...what else is there to do to forget that the country is at a standstill?

You can trust the British to some up with a solution.

A friend has telephoned me with the news that, over in Ste. Mere Maquerelle, Mrs X - translator truly extraordinaire - is starting a 'salon'.

Salon du the, salon de beaute, salon de toilettage...?
No a salon.
A proper salon.
A regular gathering where social, literary and artistic affairs are discussed....usually presided over by women.

It is a French invention, dating from about the seventeenth century and coinciding with the dominance of the royal court over the nobility....bringing them from their independence in their own chateaux to dancing attendance on the monarch at vast expense.
Having assembled these people, something had to be done to amuse them, so, apart from endlessly rehearsing ballets and suchlike, people would gather in the houses of ladies with literary pretensions to pass an evening exchanging allusions.....the salon is credited with civilising the French nobility, teaching them to spit out witticisms rather than phlegm and keeping them off the streets.

Now, I note that my friend saw fit to telephone me with this news rather than send an e mail.
E mails are fine, but no 'smiley face' can substitute for the whistle of incredulity or the sharp intake of breath that really juicy news deserves...let alone the evil cackle.

So why does Mrs. X's venture deserve a telephone call?

Well, she is after my time....I moved from St. Supplice before she moved into Ste. Mere Maquerelle....but I know the company she keeps, and still hear the local gossip via the friend who 'phoned me.
Mrs. X is one of the local 'helping hands'...that is to say hands which help themselves to the money of those they assist in the British immigrant community by looking after holiday homes, gardening, translating, etc..(.here.)
Unlike some areas, where there seem to be battles for dominance, the Ste. Mere crowd seem to have got their act together and sorted out a pecking order so that everyone gets some chance to have a go at the later arrivals, (here), so this 'salon' must have majority backing.

So what's she planning?

Well, said my friend, I've got the flyer here.
It says she wants to recreate a French cultural institution to help expats assimilate better to French culture even though they don't have good French. It's to explain cultural references to them in a light hearted social atmosphere to help them to integrate better.

So there'll be French people there?

Oh no! She thinks that might discourage people from coming if they had to speak French.

That's never on the flyer.

Yes it is....it will be an all expat affair, to encourage participation!

So who's going to be helping people to understand French culture, then?

She is...with, according to the flyer, other 'local community leaders' like Y........no smiley face could substitute for the wild outburst of mirth at this point.....Paul the Perv......cries of 'No!'.....and The Performing Elephant.

Shrieks! Howls! Groans! How can laughter hurt so much!

I decline to further identify Y, Paul the Perv and the Performing Elephant...they are well enough known in their vicinity....but suffice it to say that their  joint and several knowledge of the French language and culture would not inspire confidence.
Not that they need the confidence of others...they supply their own in abundance.

But there can't be many new arrivals these days?

Oh, there's not been much of an exodus here, you know, and there are quite a few holiday home people coming over for good now they've sold up in the U.K.....so she'll have quite a bit of prey.

Are you going?

Well, I have to show my face...you know how it is.

Why didn't she ask you to help out? Your French is much better...no, no, of course, I'm getting slow in my old age, that's just why she didn't ask you!
Anyway, you can have some fun.

Not what I call fun.

Yes, just think...you can ask her what things mean...tell her you've heard this phrase or whatever and ask what it means.

No, she'll twig I'm pulling her leg and you know how vicious she is.
But I could take Arthur. He doesn't care what he says to anyone.

Good idea. And she'll take anything from Arthur because he wears tweeds, carries a walking stick and has a big house.
Let's make a list.

Right.....Limoge (sent to Limoges).

And......mettre en placard....(put in a cupboard).

And what about beaufs, bobonnes and la bouffe?......(French archetypes and their food).

What about Groland?
Well, that will do to start with....get Arthur on the job.
Oh, but what I don't understand is, what's in it for her?

Well, that's on the flyer too. There is going to be wine and nibbles...done by Sophie...and there'll be a 'participation' of twenty euros.

Oh.
In that case get Arthur to ask her what 'niq ta mere' means too.

He nothing common did, or mean...

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A great man died this week. Not well known outside his own area, but a man of his place and a man of his time.

Known to the children and young people of the schools he visited as 'the grandad in the cardigan' he was a quiet man with a story to tell who put to shame the professional 'storytellers' who infest the public sector of education and the arts......the exploitative children of the middle class who suck in the milk of public subsidy supplied by the people they insult with their puerilities.

He was a young man, helping his father with their own farm and the business they had lately undertaken, when the French government surrendered to the Germans in 1940.
While the government and 'le tout Paris' fled to the south to escape the fate of those they left behind, with little thanks and no recompense for the troops who died to secure their safe retreat, he was working in his father's vines.

The Germans arrived, their vehicles circulating as they wished on the roads under the high hill upon which he worked.
An intrusion he could not accept, despite all the appeals of Marshal Petain...the man who played on his reputation for killing less men than other French  generals in the First World war to bring France to its' knees in the face of the German Blitzkrieg which ran over the French defences like a knife through butter.

Marshal Petain, allied with the Catholic bourgeoisie who thought that the soul of France had been massacred when workers achieved not only the right to holidays, but holidays with  pay!

Our great man could not accept that 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' had been replaced by 'Family, Work, Fatherland', the slogan of the Petain regime.
He had grown up in a household which held firmly to Republican values...no Church schools, no interference by the Church in State affairs..no class subjection.
He and his family were easy meat for those who envied them their improved position in society and the rise to power of the Petainists, the collaborators, gave the opportunity.

He and his father had sought contact with the local, vestigial, Resistance, and were given the responsibility of running the drops made by a Lysander aircraft from England...delivering radios and arms to help the local groups.
They and a few friends organised well, lighting the landing field they had chosen at the last minute, always conscious that the Germans manning the posts on the hills around could descend on the landing ground in less than twenty minutes...by which time the gallant pilot had taken off again, leaving our great man and his friends to dispose of the bounty....often bicycles were their only means, riding through the dark lanes with radios strapped to their carriers.

But, of course, the they were betrayed.
Denounced.
By neighbours jealous of their farm and their business.
By neighbours who could justify what they had done because the people they denounced were people they had been taught to think of as contemptible, beyond the pale of the Church and not acceptable in respectable circles.
And those who had taught them this were now the people in power.

His father was taken.
He was taken three days later.
He was taken from a wife he had married only three months before by French policemen, and dumped in a French prison.

Thence he was sent to Buchenwald and, eventually to DORA the site where the V2s...the precursors of the moonrockets... were fabricated.

Theses V2s were aimed at Great Britain..and when they struck, the devastation was terrible.

The men forced to work on these monsters knew their devastative power and attempted to sabotage them....so, one morning coming to work, our great man saw seven men hanging from a gantry, slowly strangled to death.
It is not only story of the officer's revolt against Hitler that needs to be told...but also the revolt by the hopeless, those slaves who had only once choice...slow death by overwork, or the bright spark of revolt..with the inevitable bitter ending.

He was lucky. He survived. He came home.

Home, where his wife had struggled against all the odds to keep their vignoble working.
Where he had to live alongside the people who had denounced him.
Where he could have pointed the finger.

He did nothing of the sort.
Knowing who he was, and where he had been  he did not approve of the backlash of the liberation, the settling of scores, the shaving the heads of those girls who had had German boyfriends...
He knew the loneliness  of being away from home, family and friends...
He knew the drear misery of life for girls in rural France..those without a penny of money to spend on themselves.
He did not condemn those girls.

What he did condemn was the fate of the children born of their relationships...plonked into orphanages by family pressure and brought up as third class persons.

What he did condemn  were the people who had collaborated actively and, at the last minute, had turned their coats to maintain their power.....and he condemned the political impulsion which supported these people.

Once home again, his  sole idea was to make his vines productive again.
But the locals had other ideas.
They wanted him to become maire of the commune.

There were a lot of communes where a new maire took over after the war, part of the effort to sweep under the carpet the Occupation years, and his commune was one of them.
A new council, too, to make a clean sweep.

As maire, he was returned time after time, but, as the years wore on, the old families who used to control the commune started to be elected as councillors again....but any dubious proposals would be crushed as he raised his head and stared steadily at the man concerned. There was a lot of history in that stare.

He was not a vengeful man, but he wanted to make sure that what had happened to him, and to France, should not happen again.

In a period when France was inventing the legend of 'every Frenchman was in the Resistance' he started visiting schools and talking to the children, from primary age up to the lycee pupils.

He warned of what happens when a nation becomes divided into interest groups who place their own welfare before that of the country as a whole.

He warned of the brutality that people permit themselves once they can stop regarding people as people. When they can replace the idea of  'a human being like myself' with a label.....'Jew', 'Gypsy', 'Handicapped', 'Agitator', which entitles them to treat those so labelled as they please.

Aware of the ease with which France pushes aside unpalatable facts, he started to collect the reminiscences of all those genuinely engaged in resistance, and with the help of others like himself, started a small museum which showed what had happened in the area from the German invasion in 1940 to their retreat in 1944.
Consultation of the archives was open to everyone...and most revealing.

For over sixty years he bore witness to what happens when a society forgets its' values.....and generations of children in his area have been able to ask direct questions of a man who had suffered the worst that life can offer and be helped to understand that ignoring something does not make it any less real while doing nothing allows evil to triumph.

'The grandad in the cardigan' has gone and with him the soul and conscience of the area.

Special Delivery

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I saw a report which made me laugh...then sigh.

A stonemason in the Rhone Valley took out professional insurance to cover his fledgling business, which cost him an arm and a leg.
He then discovered that other companies charged about half what he was paying and asked his insurers for a reduction.
You can imagine the upshot of that little initiative.
They had his money and they were sticking to it.
In fact, they sent him a bill, just to rub his nose in it.

Somewhat indignant, he bethought himself of what to do about it and inspiration struck.
Taking a large block of stone and the tools of his trade he wrote...or chiselled...a cheque in stone.
Everything legally required was there...names, amounts, order to pay...and he even took a bailiff with him to witness that payment had duly been made.

It can't be often that a bailiff has been asked to accompany a massive block of stone in an ancient van on a journey through the Rhone Valley, but I suppose it made a change from banging on doors demanding to seize the television.

The stonemason, the stone and the bailiff duly arrived....only to find that the insurance company's office had closed one hour earlier than usual.
This being France, clearly someone had denounced him!
Probably the journalist from the local paper whom he had summoned to photograph his arrival.

Disappointed, he asked the bailiff to witness that he had done everything in his power to deliver the cheque...well, short of flinging it through the window which would have resulted in the unwelcome attentions of the police, taking his statement from his hospital bed while he recovered from the hernia operation....and returned home, announcing that if the insurance company wanted their cheque they could come and get it.

Why do I suspect the journalist of being less than sympathetic?
Because he ended his report with the lugubrious statement that the stonemason would probably find that his bank would close down his account...for chiselling their name on the stone without their permission.
I expect he was on the bank doorstep first thing the next morning with a photograph as evidence.

The stonemason appeared to be quite a young chap, or I would have suspected that he had been inspired by A.P. Herbert's tale of the negotiable cow, published in the 1930s....the reported attempt of one Albert Haddock to pay what he regarded as an unjustifiable tax demand by writing a cheque on the backside of a cow of malevolent aspect...not forgetting the then obligatory fiscal stamp attached to one of its' horns.....and delivering the animal to the offices of the Inland Revenue...or the Inland Revenge as a disgruntled friend used to call it.

It is rare for an individual to express indignation in France...they go in for collective action - the solidarity bit - to make it more difficult for the police to pick them off and their employers to discriminate against them, though this relative safety cannot be relied on by bands of youths from the urban high rise estates when the police manage to outnumber them.

Gypsies, 'gens de voyage', 'manouches', call them what you will, are good at collective action, thus proving that they are, as they proudly claim, French and not foreigners.
In the recent events at St. Aignan following the shooting of a manouche by the gendarmerie, a crowd wearing balaclavas managed to take over the town centre, cutting down trees with chainsaws which, as one of them claimed, were lying unattended on the ground and breaking into and robbing the baker's shop!
What happened?
Well, about three of them were taken to court and had their hands slapped. Thus the value of collective action.

I did see one incident of individual action when I had not long moved to France.

It was in the days when banks would have outposts in the villages....usually just a room...which would be open on one or two afternoons a week, as a service to local customers.
Given some of the customers I saw going in there I used to suspect that the banks had these little branches to prevent some of their less salubrious customers from lowering the tone of the branch in town, nattily attired as they tended to be in sagging trousers, vests bearing the signs of their last three meals and torn tartan caps.

Passing the village branch one afternoon on my way to see a friend I was astounded to see that a huge pile of manure had been deposited in the doorway....and that the bank clerk was waving frantically from behind the window.
Now, in a village where the eyes behind the shutters missed nothing, from the priest falling out of his car having drink taken to the unexpected sighting of Madame Machin wearing her Sunday best during the week, the arrival of such an unusual deposit could not have gone unnoticed....but nothing was stirring in the heat of the afternoon except the flies busy working the heap.

I now know that I should have ducked out of sight and continued to my friend's house by the back alley behind the church, but I was relatively new to France and did not know the form.
I approached the window.

'Can you 'phone the town branch for me?'
'Don't you have a 'phone in there?'
'No....the bank don't want the expense.'
'What shall I say?'..........Thinking that if I were the person at the other end of the line when some foreigner called to say that one of their clerks was imprisoned behind a pile of manure I would not tend to take it seriously, putting the whole thing down to a lack of familiarity with the language and an over familiarity with the bottle.
''Tell them Camille says to send Jean-Aymon and his tractor and trailer down here right away.'
'What about the gendarmerie?'
'They don't have a tractor and trailer.'

He gave me the number and I went to the call box by the mairie...shuttered and silent...to call his bank.
I told them what he had told me to tell them and there was a sharp intake of breath at the other end and then a pause while someone higher in grade was informed.
A man then came on the line, identified only as Claude, who instructed me to return to Camille with the news that Jean-Aymon had been contacted and would be on his way.

I returned to the window and gave the clerk the news.
Was there anything else I could do?
No, but I would be very welcome to open an account with his bank once he got the door open.

Awarding him full marks for a sang-froid almost British in its' nature, I went on my way to my friend, accompanied by a few hopeful flies keen for a change of diet.

She...and the gaggle drinking coffee and cognac in her kitchen...knew all about it, of course.
Apparently, there had been a falling out between the bank and Monsieur Lacroix, farmer and vigneron.
Unable to come to an agreement, Monsieur Lacroix had closed his bank account and then sent down his workman with a load of manure to close the bank door.
There was general agreement that this was not fair on Camille, who was not responsible for the actions of his superiors and who did not have access to a lavatory and that Monsieur Lacroix should have taken his manure to the town branch, except, of course, that even the local town police could not overlook a steaming heap of the best dumped in the main square,and there would have been unpleasantness.

There may be unpleasantness ahead for the stonemason, however.

Once you have signed a contract with a French insurance company, that contract is automatically renewed unless you cancel it...usually some three months before its' expiry date and by registered letter.
Not that they take much notice.
Eight years after cancelling with one company, their computer still churns out demands for payments and threats of bailiffs every year...that's how I can tell it's October.

I suspect the stonemason will find that he will be renewing the acquaintance of his companion, the bailiff.....when he arrives to bang on the door and seize the television for non-payment of his insurance policy.

Normal service will be resumed....

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Summer is over, and life returns to normal.

Families are storming the aisles of the supermarkets in search of school notebooks with pages divided into little squares...which I feel somehow accounts for the way the French think...firmly within the box with the lid nailed down.

Having returned from their holidays, the railway workers are going on strike shortly, but this might be preferable to what happened recently while they were still at work when some bright spark managed to mix up the front and the back of the train at Lyon station so that those going to Milan ended up in Zurich and those going to Zurich ended up in Milan.
Fans of Fawlty Towers will not be surprised to hear that the train came from Barcelona and that the driver knows nothing.

A person somewhat detached from reality drove into the courtyard of the President's residence, the Elysee Palace, at four in the morning...only it wasn't the usual person somewhat detached from reality who is still on holiday in the south of France taking a break from presidential duties.
Let no one blame the gendarme responsible....considering what he must see passing him on a daily basis - ministers, politicians, foreign dignitaries - a car with a flashing light must have appeared quite innocuous.
Even at four in the morning.

Gypsies of Roumanian origin are being returned to Roumania, whence they will return to France in due course, thanks to the open borders of the European Union and the services of Eurolines.

Gypsies not of Roumanian origin are being moved from noticeable encampments to less noticeable encampments  so that they 'cannot be found' by tax inspectors reluctant to enter into dialogue with the owners of top of the range cars, caravans and chainsaws.
This must be part of the campaign to reduce government spending as I calculate that for every tax inspector entering a 'travelling people's' encampment - here - you would need to add the services of a platoon of riot police; the tear gas and rubber bullets associated with same; the services of ambulance, fire brigade and hospital personnel, the cost to the social security system of the resulting time off work of all those enumerated above and, last of all, the big expense - the fees of the spin doctors who will present the fiasco as a success for the law and order campaign.

Austerity is the watchword..not that any politician dares use it...but, as usual, it is more do as I say rather than do as I do.
Having announced big cuts in ministerial budgets and arranging to sell off quantities of government property to pre-selected bodies, the President still sees fit to maintain his official residence off the coast of the south of France even though he actually spends his summer hols with the in-laws at Cap Negre nearby.
However, he did use the fort to have a meeting with his Prime Minister and two other colleagues recently....either to justify hanging on to the place or because he was ashamed to have people visit a house with sewage disposal problems.

Out in the sticks, though, local government has been listening.
The big end of summer event locally is a fete with demonstrations of old farming machinery..... real 'Walter-Gabriel-falls-in-the-threshing-machine' stuff....and tractor agility competitions.
It attracts a lot of farmers, and anything that attracts a lot of farmers attracts a lot of local politicians, anxious to court their votes.

Wherever you have politicians you have speeches and this fete is no exception.
First up is the deputy....the member of parliament.
He belongs to the opposition so has no access to the gravy train. Thus his speech is full of promises about what he would do if he could.
Next up is the local member of the Conseil General...the county councillor.
He belongs to the majority political party, but the opposition controls the county council and the regional council, so his access to the gravy train is extremely limited too and his speech is thus a mirror image of that of the deputy.....just reverse everything.
Then we have the leader of the Pays.......a body which claims to represent the local communes. He wants to know what the first two speakers are going to do about all the things that they have carefully not mentioned in their speeches.
Finally we have the maire of the commune which houses the fete and we turn at last to serious matters.

'Who is going to pay for the vin d'honneur?'

Now, in rural France, people are willing to put up with the endless speeches. They are the tax you pay for access to the table full of glasses and the racks of bottles and casks behind......the vin d'honneur.

Normally, for this fete, the Conseil General provide the wherewithal, but, as the maire points out to the audience who are by now in a state between open revolt and cardiac arrest, this year, it has decided it cannot afford to do so.

After a great deal of extempore oratory from the floor the maire calls for order and announces that, exceptionally, the commune will pay.
Clearly he has prepared his coup well in advance as minions promptly appear with tables, paper covers and boxes of glasses while others push in trolleys with the casks and bottles and the usual rush of the gadarene swine begins, to the hum of approval for the maire's respect for rural tradition.

For once, the politicians do not circulate, but make a discreet departure, shaking hands with the beaming maire.

I am not so sure that the inhabitants of his commune will be so happy when they get their local tax demands next year, though.

The funding of local authorities has changed under the Sarkozy regime and the Taxe Professionelle - the tax on businesses - has been abolished. Unfortunately, this was one of the main resources of income for local government, so while business rejoices home owners tremble.
After all, when in search of revenue, the easiest thing is to go for assets which cannot be hidden....like property.....and it has been estimated that the average homeowner will be paying about 200 euros extra on their property tax bill next year to compensate for the loss of the Taxe Professionelle.

Not content with that, the local land registries have been geed up to make a re-evaluation of property values with a view to raising the tax base and, accordingly, I have received a form H1 with an annexe to form H1 which requires me to enumerate the number of shower trays and washbasins I possess and to venture out with a tape measure to confirm the extent of my outbuildings.
Among other things.

I have a source at the local Land Registry.
Deep Thirst.

Deep Thirst tells me that the panic is on. Apparently, there hasn't been a re-evaluation for years with the result that old houses which had been given a minimum of wash basins and shower trays in the 1970s are taxed at a higher rate than houses which acquired their washbasins and shower trays later.
I know this to be true.

Despite reporting that I had converted a two bedroom house to a four bedroom house in the 1990s, I was still paying less property tax than did my neighbour with a two bedroom house which had been assessed in the 1970s. No one in that period was interested in the property tax...they had the Taxe Professionelle.

However, this being rural France, while the panic might be on, the panic is selective.

Deep Thirst informs me that while I have received an H1 and its' annexe, as have the Americans who bought the place at the other end of the commune, the notaire who managed to sell the Americans the house together with two fields which did not, as it happened, belong to it, and who is busy converting the stables and outbuildings of the chateau in the next commune, has not and will not be the happy recipient of an HI and annexe.
Neither will farmers.

Taking advice....

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I decided to try to organise some of the stuff on this blog into book form, urged on by the kind comments and advice on recent posts.

Thus has the night air been rendered hideous by a return to the old days of the projection of heavy objects and boiling of heads as I attempted to get a split screen on the computer.....finally did it but then couldn't remember how....then wondering how many goats I would have to sacrifice to get the brute to copy and paste when I wanted and not only when it wanted to do so....and hours trying to find double spacing on Open Office...and more hours wondering how to get rid of bullet points, as I think they are called....then trying voice recognition, only to find that I speak some variant of English not known to the machine, which must have been trained on Winston Churchill after three cigars and far too much brandy. I don't mind the brandy, but I draw the line at having to smoke cigars to please a computer.

It has all been very trying.

However, word having spread among friends and family, I have been the recipient of much sapient advice on the content of the book.....so much sapient advice that I think it best to record it all while it is still fresh in the memory for the benefit of anyone else thinking of writing any book about anything. Except childrens' literature.


Firstly, it appears that there has to be sex. Preferably with a hint of perversion....or more than a hint.

I foresee difficulties here....I never actually interviewed the three generations of prostitute who used to be the attraction of the main bar of St. Supplice on the details of their calling but doubt very much that elastic stockings figure in anyone's erotic repertoire.

As far as other sources go, the local ducks are not forthcoming.

I do know a great deal about the efforts at integration undertaken by some British immigrants...from having an affair with the local tourist boss to setting up an all-British partouze....not to speak of the nude calendar project with the local photographer.....but accounts of unorthodox but effective ways to get a three star rating from Gites de France might not be regarded as being of general utility while as for the intimate detail of the partouze I rely heavily on the account of the woman who was ejected from the group for promiscuity so there might be some slight lack of objectivity.


Secondly, there has to be something about high life to engage the other fantasies of the potential reader...frocks, champagne and luxurious living, with names like Moet et Chandon and Dior thrown casually into the text.

Frocks...forget it. Rural France is the land of polyester, acrylic and salmon pink corsets with steel reinforcements. Thinking about it, the corsets might qualify under the perversion requirement, but only for those keen on the Rubenesque.
I cannot imagine how I could casually slip mention of these garments into any text bearing on the high life unless some modern couturier has taken them for his latest inspiration....which is not, I suppose, impossible.
It has long puzzled me why women allow themselves to be made ridiculous at the behest of a gaggle of homosexual dress designers......but the women of rural France are immune to the infection.
They stick to Barbe Bleu and Defi Mode, and I Defi any Paris couturier to take any inspiration from their offerings.

There are the Parisian second homes...where I suppose you might find mention of Moet and Chandon.... but there is only one such in this area and the owner is a somewhat taciturn judge where you're lucky if you get a tisane and the sniff of a biscuit, so it seems we will have to forget high life.



Thirdly, food and wine must figure largely.

This seems all right until further enquiry reveals that this element has to feature 'little' restaurants where the owner takes a personal interest in you, his client.....back to the first requirement here, if we're not careful......and where the whole meal that you have ordered has to be discussed in detail between you, the owner and the reader.

I am not convinced that anyone wants to hear my reaction to piercing the carapace of an andouillette, nor my reaction to finding a living organism in a shell peering out at me from the plateau de fruits de mer.
Given the risk of food poisoning I do not often go to restaurants, nor, these days, to cafes, since they are dying out under the twin bans on smoking while eating and boozing before driving.
Sitting on the terrace watching the world go by is not what local cafes are for...they are for escaping from the wife and doing deals and smoking and boozing are essential elements in these activities.

I can do wine...but not all the swirling sniffing and spitting....Try that in this area and you'll get a reputation as a wimp.


Fourthly, there has to be mention of either sunflowers or lavender, depending on the area of France under discussion. No one will know the book is set in France without mention of one or other of these staples.
Too far north for lavender, I can certainly do sunflowers....the iniquity of growing them in an area where they need irrigation, while we get bans on watering the garden....but it seems people want to hear about the beauty of fields of the darned things instead.


Finally, I must deal with the French reputation for style and glamour.
Nix. Niet. No way.
All the men round here look like Depardieu after a hard night and are usually tastefully attired in vests and torn caps, while as for the women, suffice it to say that if Paris had come looking for Helen in rural France there would have been no Trojan War.


Analysing the advice and my reaction to it, it is clear that this book, if ever it leaves the confines of the computer, will be a resounding failure.....


And if by some chance it isn't, I will be bankrupt in very short order as the writs for libel fall like confetti at a wedding.

Parking out of control

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The French run to excess. Either they're totally out of control or they're tiptoeing round like naughty children afraid of stepping on the cracks in the pavement.
I put it down to all the lessons on being a good citizen that they absorb when at primary school, where the state hopes to form obedient casters of votes for the future elites who will despoil them of their money in their own best interest.
Goodness only knows what would happen to society if ordinary people decided how to spend their money.

A couple of years ago, the local council decided to give us yellow plastic boxes into which we were to put - I think - milk cartons and the like...or tins...or something.
Like everyone else, I put it in the shed and used it for storage.
You see a lot of them used for transporting rabbits, too.

Now, when Good Queen Bess, or, more accurately, her Privy Council, wanted to get a message across, they 'tuned the pulpits'....reckoning to hit most of the populace in that era of next to compulsory church attendance.
In France, having separation of church and state, they 'tune' the blackboards, thus the message went out via the children that we were not being good citizens....a good citizen sorts its' rubbish, washes it and delivers it to a recycling centre to the great joy of the 'travelling people'  - who seem to run the place - who then don't have to dirty their hands while sorting out anything of value.
You still see a lot of yellow boxes used for transporting rabbits out here because it's hard to apply collective presssure to people leading fairly isolated lives in the country, but the campaign has had a lot more success in the villages where collective disapproval has force.

I think this 'good citizen' pressure has a great deal to do with the way in which the French drive.
It is as if, once safe from outside influences in their little tin box, they can throw off all inhibition.....can overtake going uphill on a blind corner, can rush up to a 'stop' sign and slam on the brakes at the last minute, can honk and hoot if kept waiting a second after the lights have turned green and can make one fingered gestures to all except the gendarmerie...who take exception.

However solipsist in their cars, they return to good citizen model once back among others, but parking seems to mark an intermediate zone between the two.

I've just come across  a website with tips on how to avoid a parking ticket in France, on which drivers exchange information on where and when to park without attracting the attention of the authorities.
I expect it will be closed down shortly as being unpatriotic by helping people to avoid fines in a period when everyone is supposed to be tightening their belts....except at the French defence ministry where they are congratulating themselves on saving money by not installing an Olympic size swimming pool, but one slightly smaller.
Let no one say that Paris does not share the pain.

Inevitably, the page where readers are invited to leave comments has one chap - a good citizen - grumbling that people should just obey the highway code and there wouldn't be any problems with which the website could be occupying itself....well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

Parking is impossible in the nearest town, except in supermarket car parks......town centre workers park all day in the legal spots so thank goodness there is a cheap and cheerful supermarket in the centre where you can park free for an hour, even though when grouping my visits to town to save petrol I usually have to go out and return at least once.
It is also free at the tax offices, probably on the reckoning that charging already aggrieved parties for parking there would invite gratuitous violence. It's a pity it's so far from the shops, or I'd go there.

Market day is sheer hell.
I forget occasionally and make an appointment when the market is on, only to curse myself as I have a devil of a job finding a place in the supermarket car park while the rest of the town centre is double parked, cars blocking garage entrances and every road blocked while some desperate driver tries to manoevre into a space that was always going to be too small.

Inevitably, this is the only day of the week where the town police are in evidence....on any other day they lurk in their offices, guarded by a well trained receptionist who refuses access to anyone ranking lower than the maire, but on market day they are out in force with their little tickets to stick under the wipers.
Not that they walk far, you understand...they come out in their cars and double park like everyone else....

Last year, one hero parked his van in front of the police garage which reduced them to buzzing ineffectively round that all morning instead of dishing out fines to the multitude, but this year they have a tow truck.

A friend of mine parks in the space reserved for the weekly bus - not that it runs on market day - picks up the inevitable parking ticket and takes it to the police offices where it is torn up...but then, she used to be the maire.
I asked her why the police bothered to give her a ticket in the first place as her car was well known to them and the ticket was always torn up and she explained that it would look bad if her car didn't get a ticket like anyone else. So that was all right then....
Yet another example of the classic French dichotomy about equality.....rules are to be obeyed, unless you are part of the caste that makes them.

It's not just round here....take a look at Delana's 'Du Jour' blog post for imaginative  - not to speak of desperate - parking!

It's not just in towns,either.
Because villages were built before cars, and gardens and productive land were on the outskirts, there was no thought of parking, even for the horse and cart, who lived in the barn on the productive land.
These days, with two car families living in village houses, it can be a struggle to get down the road for a car, let alone for the dairy tankers and feed tankers which pass regularly from farm to depot.
Not to speak of those who rely on GPS and get stuck in the turning by the mairie.
No maire is going to be bold enough to tell voters to park their cars off the road...there is no 'off road' to start with and the only place that I can see where you could park, apart from the little square by the cafe which is full to overflowing as it is at lunchtimes, is the football field at the other end of the village.

So it's no wonder to me that the solipsist doesn't become the good citizen until the moment that he has locked his car and walked away into conformity again.

Boules to all that

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I used to know when spring had arrived, as the faint click of boule on boule could be heard from Jules' yard as I passed while walking the dogs.
They were nothing lothe to renew acquaintance with his old Breton spaniel and I was nothing loathe to join Jules, his wife and a couple of neighbours in a few rounds of boules followed by a few rounds of drinks in his hospitable kitchen.
Playing and drinking were two separate activities, and probably as well while I was undergoing my apprenticeship in the fine art of boules on a dusty surface where you had to know where the dips were - only to find they had changed by the next time as the Breton spaniel had taken a dust bath on the piste.
It was not competitive, just a way to pass the early evening before locking up the barns for the night and settling down to supper and the television and that was the way I liked it.

As more British moved into the area, more learned the game and it seemed to take them two ways.
Some, like me, just liked the excuse for a natter with the neighbours while others became extremely competitive indeed and started running - British only and by invitation only - competitions...even building boules courts alongside their houses with much use of the spirit level to ensure British fair play.
They also called it petanque. Some of them even wore panama hats and white trousers on competition evenings. Some of them used to practice, too, which I thought completely non-British.
So there was a sort of divide between the casuals - boules - and the professionals - petanque.

Then a chap with a holiday home, who enjoyed playing boules with his neighbour, had an idea of furthering integration with a 'boules day'.
His idea was to invite his British friends while his neighbours invited their French friends, get scratch Anglo-French teams together on the day and have a jolly with a picnic.
All went swimmingly. Too swimmingly. The event began to outgrow his neighbour's yard, and by the week before the due date, his neighbour approached the maire about using the salle de fetes, which had a huge car park, the idea being to mark it out for boules.
The maire was delighted and signed himself and friends up for the event.
The organiser was getting short of British. The casuals were all about signed up, including one lady with a zimmer frame, but the professionals were holding back.....it was all a bit, well...casual....and it wasn't petanque.

The maire, a very nice old boy who must have descended from a long line of corkscrews so Machiavellian was his conduct of the commune's affairs, had the answer.
As this was a sort of community event, a step towards integration, the commune would put on the wine for the picnic. Free. The press would be invited.
As he had divined, no professional ever spawned can refuse free drink and publicity.
The ranks of the British were reinforced overnight.

The maire had also offered the salle de fetes' trestle tables and benches for the picnic and had persuaded the farmer with the field behind the car park to move his cattle off in time for the cow pats to dry out before the day, so that the picnic could be al fresco, rather than in the stifling air of the salle, which bore no small resemblance to the Black Hole of Calcutta during wedding receptions in the summer.

The organiser, by now relegated to sub organiser behind the maire, bethought him of food.
Since the French - well, the maire - had been so generous with the wine, perhaps the British should make sure that the picnic buffet tables were well replenished in the food line.
He and his wife undertook basic salads and levied contribution on the British participants for the rest.

I'd volunteered to help his wife with the salads, and as we transported the mounds of lettuce, cucumber and tomato, not to speak of beetroot, spring onions and radish, to the buffet area, it was clear that the tournament was going great guns.
The French and the British were mingling and playing amicably, and, more surprisingly, so were the casuals and the professionals, but this could have been because the maire had decided that communication on a dry throat is never a good idea and had opened the casks early on in proceedings.

The British picnic contributions were arriving, and it was interesting to link contribution with contributor.
Some had been incredibly generous, plates of ham and charcuterie, cold roast chickens, huge bowls of mixed salads, cheeses...some had even sacrificed their emergency food parcels - pork pies and cooked, cold, British sausages! There were commercial and homemade chutneys and even bottles of salad cream with which to astonish the French.
Trifles, summer puddings, fruit salads, treacle tarts, chocolate mousses - we had to ask if we could use the fridge in the salle to keep them from spoiling.

Others would arrive with much aplomb, all straw hat and garden party dress, and deposit their offering of a small bowl of pasta salad - where the pasta element had beaten the other ingredients by a country mile - in pride of place in the centre of the buffet, smiling sweetly at those working behind the tables before turning sharply to the wine cask area and the serious business of the day, tracking down the press photographer.

The tournament had been a great success...I have no idea whch team won, if indeed any did...but now for the moment of truth as the crowd approached the buffet.
How would the French get on with the British idea of a picnic?
We had filled bottles from the casks and distributed them around the tables, but now it was every man for himself.
The maire plunged in and, reassured, his flock followed.....
The sausages and salad cream were the great successes....one lady had to go home to round up some more of the latter.
Chutneys intrigued, especially with pork pies, while the puddings roused the maire to send out for supplies of the local dessert wine straight from the cellars of one of the players.

Clearly, a success, and so it has proved down the years.
I moved away a long time ago, but friends in the area say it is still going strong although with more and more difficulty getting generous donations from the British element, it has for a few years' now been a mechoui - a spit roast lamb - affair with a professional caterer and a small admission fee.
Still, it was a super idea, founded on the amiable idea of having a few friends round for a quiet game and a few drinks.
And that, to me, was boules.

I was wrong. There was a lot more to it than that.

In August, Madeleine's cousin used to hold open house on sundays for those who had not gone off for the holidays.
The wine was cooling in a bucket in the well, we would all bring something to eat and the afternoon would pass with a game of boules, gossiping in the shade or a quiet nap, depending on circumstances.
However, occasionally the mood would take the cousin to be up and doing and he had the entree everywhere...nowhere was a closed door to him, or not for long...he knew who held the keys.

I had been playing boules with the guys when the cousin came up on us.
'Let's show her a real game!'
I thought he was going to take a part himself and up the standard, but it was nothing of the sort.
He disappeared into the house, then emerged, beaming,.
'Everyone in the cars!'

We headed for the silent, baking town, and into the alleys of the medieval quarter, where we drew up before an ancient building with an iron grill in the wooden door.
He shouted, the door was opened, and we found ourselves in a large, cool club room, where a number of elderly gentlemen were having a quiet drink.
There was a lot of joshing around, to the effect of what was he doing, bringing women in here....this was a men's club...was nothing sacred?....but we were supplied with cold, dry white wine all the same and the cousin explained.
He had brought his friends to show the foreigner - me - how a proper game of boules was played.

La boule de fort.

His friend the club president issued us with slippers and flung open double doors to reveal what looked like an enormous gutter running the length of a vast room, seven metres wide by twenty long.
He presented me with something heavy that resembled a squashed pear...not round, one side was less so than the other, which was weighted down by a lead plug on the bottom. A metal ring, adjustable, encircled the thing and it weighed a ton.
No mere boule this, but a boule de fort.

The idea of the game was similar to that of all games of boules....to get nearest the jack, but when some of the gentlemen demonstrated, it was apparent that this was a far more sophisticated game.
The slippers were to protect the gutter in which the game was played, and the teams had two sorts of players....the first would select their spot and gently roll the boule as near as they could to the jack.
The second were the artillery..they would roll the boules down at speed to clear opponents' boules from the track. The noise was unbelievable.
I could see that it would take a lot longer to learn this game than that as practised in Jules' yard on a spring evening.

Back in the club room, the president explained that these clubs were, like the old 'amicales', the refuge of men, and very precious too in the days when, unless you could afford to marry, you didn't, so respectable bachelors needed a place to foregather and talk dirty.
The vocabulary could be a bit 'special' - nothing these days when filth spews from every television set - but mostly double entendres and very daring in their day, of which the one which has lasted longest is the invitation to 'partager une fillette' - to share a young lady.

Before anyone gets all PC, it would be as well to know that a 'fillette' is a half bottle of wine, and I've shared a few fillettes in my time without any moral damage.
The most important duty of the president was to choose the wine to fill the fillettes.....and make sure he got a good price so that the members paid about half the price of the same stuff in a regular bar.

However, as always, the best was saved for last.
The president explained that after a game, a player who had made no score at all was obliged to pay a forfeit.
.
Yes, a round of drinks, the losing team would pay that, but for the man with no points to his name, a special forfeit was in store.
He had to  'embrasser Fanny' - to kiss Fanny.
What? I thought this was a men's club...for respectable bachelors! Where was this woman tucked away?

With a sly smile, the president moved to a cupboard on the wall, which opened out rather like a tryptich to reveal a painting of the luxuriant bare backside of a woman.

This was Fanny!

I wonder what the panama hat and petanque brigade would make of her.






If you would like to learn more about the boule de fort, there is a super website here which can tell you a lot more than I can.