Normal service will be resumed....

Image by Wisconsin Historical Images via Flickr

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.

Gemme of all joy, jasper of jocunditie

The chateau of Saumur from the 'Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, showing the vendange

Lately, a chance reading brought me back to my first encounter with the Loire Valley at Blois,. which has always been my favourite town in France.

This week, while looking for something else entirely, I rediscovered the poems of William Dunbar, one of whch...his celebration of medieval London (1)...had made me think of Saumur as soon as I saw the place for the first time more than forty years' ago. 

Well, medieval Saumur was never London, but the images conjured up by Dunbar, a rich medieval city set above a fast flowing river, are the written equivalent of those white castles and green fields of a medieval book of hours, and the town still retains something of that distant past.

Saumur came to have a particular significance for me...when returning to my first house in France from  visits to the family in Brussels, driving through the night to avoid the lorries on the main roads, the sight of the floodlit chateau of Saumur, hovering high above the river, was the signal that I would be home in half an hour, leaving behind the slate roofs of the north for the roman tiles of the south.

Saumur is no longer on my way home, but it is a wonderful place to take visitors...plenty to see, but not just a tourist trap...as part of a trip along the Loire.

It has been a garrison town since the nineteenth century, first cavalry and then tanks, and there are visible reminders of both.

The tank museum is just outside the town, and is a perfect place to park the men...but I liked it when it was in the centre of the town and the exhibits used to rumble out into the arena for the annual military Carrousel - the tracks ripping up the asphalt surface of the roads, the exhaust fumes heavy in the still summer air.
Watching them crawl forward made me realise why my father said only an idiot would be a tankie...just fancy shutting yourself up in a metal box big enough to be a target!

Only one thing worse....trying to attack it!
My mother, in the Army in the second World War, was taught to ambush tanks. The idea was to put up roadblocks, then once the tank stopped, you were supposed to creep up on it and shove a molotov cocktail up its' exhaust.
This seemed to assume that the German Panzers had a truly British sense of obedience to road signs and would wait accordingly to discover that they didn't...in the immortal words of Corporal Jones...like it up them rather than just driving round the obstacle while machine gunning all those in attendance.


The horse still has a strong presence in Saumur, despite being overtaken by technology. There are regular dressage and three day event competitions, carriage driving trials too, but the star turn is the existence of the Cadre Noir, France's equivalent of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. To see these wonderful horses performing their dressage routines whether ridden, or controlled by their rider from the ground, is a tremendous spectacle.

You can pay a packet and go to one of their Gala evenings, or you can see them for a lot less at the Carrousel, which these days has morphed into a civic fete rather than a military tattoo and occupies the whole town centre for days in July.

I think I preferred it when it was an all army affair....the band in their perch in the stands smoking while waiting to perform....the troops in the arena smoking while waiting to be inspected, then snapping to attention as the commanding general and his guests emerged, rosy, beaming and none too steady on their pins, from their lunch in the garrison...the horse versus motorbike event over the obstacles in the arena...the military ride...and all the corny clowning inseparable from any military entertainment. Not forgetting the tanks.
A period piece, and no longer considered appropriate in this era of political correctness.

I just wonder if it is politically correct to remember those cadets of the garrison who were charged with preventing the German army from crossing the Loire in 1940, some of whom are remembered in the quiet churchyard at Gennes, just downstream from Saumur.


Not content with tanks and horses as means of locomotion, you can even take a trip on the Loire, in the gabare which is moored in front of the stone lace of the Hotel de Ville.

These traditional boats had almost died out until some twenty years' ago when a few enthusiasts started to try to reconstruct them from old photographs and written records, and their enthusiasm has been rewarded. Today there are many gabares and their little sisters, the toues, navigating the Loire...built by individuals and riverside communes and celebrating their existence in 'meets' and festivals all summer long.

These square sailed boats with a rudder like a Chinese junk brought all sorts of products downstream all the way to Nantes...but depended on the west wind, the 'vent de galerne', to get back upstream against the current. So difficult was this that the practice arose of building them in green wood and, once at the destination, they would be dismantled and the wood used in house building.
Just one reason for their failure to survive.

Conditions are generally calm at Saumur, but if you ever have the chance to sail a gabare in the estuary, you may have the unforgettable experience of a few tons of wood planing, the nose up out of the water, if a heavy squall sets in.

It's not all action. You can sit in the place St.Pierre and listen to the organ music issuing from the church doors, or walk through the quiet streets of the old town, wondering if you might be passing the house of Balzac's 'Eugenie Grandet'.
You can even go to the market on Saturday morning.  If you insist.

I don't share the obsession with French food and restaurants that figures so largely in magazines and on the web, but there is a place I like in Saumur...where I have never been disappointed.
It is the only place in which I have ever been offered a glass of wine on the house while waiting for a seat to become free.
It is also the only place in which I've ever been involved in a discussion on the virtues of Daf cars.

Passing the cinema, on the river bank, there is a shabby building lying back behind dingy green railings. In summer, severely dilapidated umbrellas shade battered metal tables in the little courtyard...in winter you stay indoors, in the unchanged atmosphere of a 1930s bar...huge mirror behind the bar, smoke stained lincrusta and bentwood chairs.

The customers are local workmen and a surprising number of working girls, but tourists are treated with the same courtesy as the regulars whether the waitress is the nice young thing in exiguous clothing or the lady of a certain age. The resident dog will settle under your table expectantly and your order will be taken by the owner-cum-chef, who has been over seventy for the last twenty years, the only signs of advancing age being the exchange of carpet slippers for shoes a couple of years ago and the adoption of a woolly hat in winter. Indoors.

The menu may claim to offer pork chops, but what you get will be steak and chips..

The chef will ask you how you want your steak, but you'll get it the way he cooks it...

and while this would ordinarily drive me mad, I've always had a super, if simple meal there with a good cheap house wine.

There is only one problem...and this too was addressed in Dunbar's poem 'A Lament for the Makars'....
'
Timor mortis conturbat me......the thought of death disturbs me.

Yes, it does. Not mine...his.

What if he's died since I was last at Saumur?

We'd better take sandwiches.




(1)
LONDON, thou art of townes A per se.
 Soveraign of cities, seemliest in sight, 
 Of high renoun, riches and royaltie; 
 Of lordis, barons, and many a goodly knyght; 
 Of most delectable lusty ladies bright; 
 Of famous prelatis, in habitis clericall;
 Of merchauntis full of substaunce and of myght: 
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all. 

 Gladdith anon, thou lusty Troynovaunt, 
 Citie that some tyme cleped was New Troy; 
 In all the erth, imperiall as thou stant, 
 Pryncesse of townes, of pleasure and of joy, 
 A richer restith under no Christen roy; 
 For manly power, with craftis naturall, 
 Fourmeth none fairer sith the flode of Noy:
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all. 

 Gemme of all joy, jasper of jocunditie, 
 Most myghty carbuncle of vertue and valour;
 Strong Troy in vigour and in strenuytie; 
 Of royall cities rose and geraflour;
 Empress of townes, exalt in honour;
 In beawtie beryng the crone imperiall;
 Swete paradise precelling in pleasure; 
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

 Above all ryvers thy Ryver hath renowne,
 Whose beryall stremys, pleasaunt and preclare,
 Under thy lusty wallys renneth down, 
 Where many a swan doth swymme with wyngis fair; 
 Where many a barge doth saile and row with are; 
 Where many a ship doth rest with top-royall. 
 O, towne of townes! patrone and not compare, 
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all. 

 Upon thy lusty Brigge of pylers white 
 Been merchauntis full royall to behold;
 Upon thy stretis goeth many a semely knyght 
 In velvet gownes and in cheynes of gold.
 By Julyus Cesar thy Tour founded of old 
 May be the hous of Mars victoryall, 
 Whose artillary with tonge may not be told:
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all. 

 Strong be thy wallis that about thee standis; 
 Wise be the people that within thee dwellis; 
 Fresh is thy ryver with his lusty strandis; 
 Blith be thy chirches, wele sownyng be thy bellis; 
 Rich be thy merchauntis in substaunce that excellis; 
 Fair be their wives, right lovesom, white and small; 
 Clere be thy virgyns, lusty under kellis: 
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all. 

 Thy famous Maire, by pryncely governaunce, 
 With sword of justice thee ruleth prudently. 
 No Lord of Parys, Venyce, or Floraunce 
 In dignitye or honour goeth to hym nigh. 
 He is exampler, loode-ster, and guye; 
 Principall patrone and rose orygynalle,
 Above all Maires as maister most worthy:
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all.