End of the world...it's Joanna Southcott's box all over again....



I returned home before the date announced by a plethora of charlatans as being that of the end of the world according to the Maya - a bloodthirsty bunch much admired by the 'peace and love and only five hundred dollars a head for a conference on Sirius' brigade.

I had seen the preparations to prevent the devoted and the demented from clambering about Mount Bugarach in south west France....provided not only by the local gendarmerie but even by the Garde Republicaine complete with horses, making a change from their usual country break guarding the vines of the Champagne region from theft by persons or other vignerons unknown.....the whole urged on by the director of the bit of the surveillance services that survey sects.

As until fairly recently the Anglican Church in France was suspected of being a sect - weird rituals with tea cups after the service and the sale and exchange of books in a foreign language providing grounds for suspicion - the news that someone had left the village in order to buy clean underpants before Der Tag was clearly enough to set the surveillance wheels in motion.

All in vain. The portals to another dimension did not open up, no more than the usual number of UFOs were sighted and Plod's overtime was cancelled.

A non event.  

But it was the means of reminding me of something I enjoyed and continue to enjoy about rural France.......its sheer, unadulterated parochialism.
The delight in small happenings, from the shock horror of fourteen people being fined for speeding through Ste. Conasse in the course of one afternoon - about half the population of the commune - to the delight at the reopening of the village hairdresser in Ste. Barbe, everything local is worth attention.

So it was with much pleasure that I clicked on the post from the super blog Le Cafe de la Ville, to find that the blogger's own town had not been left out of the End of the World scenario.....

The area around the station, undisturbed by much activity since the passing of the steam locomotiv, had been reported as experiencing strange noises......

All good fun, even if  retribution is to be expected from the owners of the minibus, the gentlemen of the football club........and how pleasant it is to think that someone can take the time and effort to celebrate  their  own home patch.

I'm on mine, I hope that you are on yours and I wish you a merry Christmas, wherever you are.



A Road in France

My lawyer in Costa Rica is to take a holiday in France with her cousin.
Guidebooks have taken over from legal texts in her office and perusal makes it clear that they are visiting Paris and Provence. Nothing but Eiffel Towers and lavender to be seen.

They are travelling between the two by TGV, their hotels are booked and my lawyer is very excited.
She always loved the idea of France as a girl, but her school did not have enough pupils who wanted to learn French to allow her to learn the language, once spent a fortnight in Normandy as a young woman (it rained) and cannot wait to get on the 'plane.

At home after our meeting, I looked at the travel sections of the online newspapers...and there it was...Paris and Provence, Provence and Paris.... with just a nod to the Languedoc and to Burgundy.

Where's the rest of France?
The bits with Eiffel bridges and clocks and church towers that no one cares about...
The bits with fields of angelica or saffron instead of lavender

The bits that don't pull the crowds...

I used, when at a previous house, to take one road quite often....going to major town for the Saturday market, or to the hospital. There was another road...across country....but it took too long for someone trying to get a parking spot near the market before the crowds arrived, so it was the main road that I used.

A road through a France entirely foreign to those who commission travel pieces.

I would arrive at the main road from the side road through the woods where I would look for mushrooms every autumn, the junction marked by a granite celtic cross.

Unique in the area in its style, it and other crosses in the region were supposed to mark pre Christian assembly points and I was heartbroken when a lorry careened into it...the pieces were there, it could have been repaired....but it was replaced by a miserable, lumpish concrete cross painted dull yellow...the 'ton pierre' so beloved of the 'heritage' professionals of the department.

On to the main road.....and on the left the sinister spikes of what was known locally as Chateau Congelateur - Freezer Towers - could be seen rising over the tiled roofs of what had once been its home farm.
A fifteenth century building, over restored in the full Gothic style in the late nineteenth century, it was a fitting home for a doctor who believed in cryogenics.
He had retired there from Paris and was held to be a good doctor when acting as locum for his  local colleagues, once the patient could get over the fact that he never cut his hair and appeared to have a mandarin attitude to his nails.
He had installed a freezer in one of the outhouses which was, in due course, occupied by his wife, local speculation being rife as to whether she was dead when she went in.
There was a mighty ruction with Electricite de France when a power cut threatened to defrost her....EDF sought an order that he should have his wife buried, but contacts in Paris soon hit that idea on the head and the Prefect contented himself with telling him to buy a generator.
In his turn, he went in the freezer, the process supervised by his son - another doctor - but eventually the pressure of opinion was such that the son was forced to move his parents, freezer and all, to a location in Paris.
Chateau Congelateur was up for sale....but remained unsold years later when I was leaving not only the area but France itself.

The village behind had no less than seven chateaux of all ages and styles and had one of the rare monuments in the area to the Republicans of the era of the Vendee Wars.....the Royalist troops advancing, the maire and eleven others climbed up into the steeple to fire on them and, despite the Royalists firing the church under them, their musketry was enough to see off the danger.

In the twentieth century it was the home of a post impressionist Irish artist....

And I used to wonder if this work of his was from his garden there.

Further on the road, emerging from more woodland, the land began to rise, and the vineyards took over.
In the pre war period there was a tramway here, hauling wine from the hinterland to the big merchants on the Loire...the only trace left being the boxy French railway architecture of the little stations and crossing houses alongside the road.

Over the crest and into the outskirts of the town....by the time I left well supplied with supermarkets, DIY emporia and major outlet stores for clothes...very different from the days when tractors were parked outside the one supermarket as the old boys in wellies went in search of their wives' shopping.
But in the approaches to the mega sprawl stood an old building.

Known as the Carolingian palace, where Louis the Pious learned of the death of his father Charlemagne, it was nothing of the sort....the palace had been sacked in the Viking raids and the remnants of the materials had been used ro build a defensive tower much later.....but the mere belief demonstrated that this had once been an important town on the network of the old Roman roads.

Out of town...and on an improved route.
On the right, a turning for a village of troglodyte dwellings....not cliff dwellings as along the banks of the Loire, but dwellings hollowed out of the surrounds of a quarry, open to the sky, not like the miles of  tunnels now used by vignerons to mature their wine.  Not really a refuge either...but I suspect something to do with escaping taxes.

Flat land now, sloping gently away to the Loire.....but we're only half way and already we could have pulled off the road to explore the quarries, the gardens and the architecture....so time to take a break.

No wonder the editors don't commission stuff like this...it would take a book, not a third of a column....and they believe our attention span is the same as their own...negligable.

When did you last burn Joan of Arc

                    Image via Wikipedia

While living in France, I wasn't one to take Sunday drives...the price of diesel for one thing and disinclination to move from the garden for another.

Friends visiting, however, called for efforts to be made and we used to roam the small roads, with a vague aim in mind for somewhere to picnic....as by the time you'd shifted them out of bed, stuffed them with croissants and herded them out to the cars it was a sure fire bet that no restaurant would be open by the time we reached any selected destination.

Most friends had made many annual visits to us and 'done' the tourist sites, so were looking for the 'real' France...whatever they thought that might be.

Country drives were the answer.
Not so much in the immediate surroundings where most villages would have been in fierce competition for the 'most banal in France' category, but a little further off...in limestone country, where the houses gleamed white and cream in the afternoon sun.
Picture book France.

With a few favourite brocantes and antiquaires....junk in all its forms and prices.....along the way.

On one journey to a much favoured  junk shop we would descend from the heights...cross a bridge over the Dive...and drive through a village with the remains of a medieval fortress on the hill up from the bridge....Curcay sur Dive.

We crossed without incident...but had we come this way in the Hundred Years War, this would have been a frontier between England and France, or, more accurately, English and French territory and we would have risked considerably more than a gendarme jumping out with a breathalyser.

The tranquil Dive was at that time  not the tamed, canalised stream that we knew, but a series of watercourses running through marshes between the heights on either side...a real obstacle.

The only crossing was the old double arched bridge in the photograph above, said to date from the time of St. Louis  and named for his mother, Queen Blanche of Castille.

There are a whole range of fortresses guarding Loudon (French held territory) from incursions by the English installed to the south and west.....

Curcay sur Dive itself

Ranton

Ternay....the old fortress destroyed and replaced by the modern chateau which is today a hotel...

While my favourite...Berrie... to the north was held by English adherents, the Tremouille family.

This disputed ground had long been inhabited...surviving dolmens bear witness above ground....while archaeologists find remains of gallo roman and merovingian settlements below....only the experience of war led people to take shelter in the caves in the limestone which exist under all of these fortresses.

Du Guesclin reduced the English strongholds one by one and relative peace returned to the area...apart from the raiding bands of paid off mercenaries.

When hostilities started up again some forty years later the action was mostly up to the north and east, as Joan of Arc galvanised the Dauphin into action to reclaim the kingdom signed away by his father.

As I say, we had no difficulty crossing into 'French' territory physically...but do we find difficulty into crossing into French territory mentally, or culturally?

On holiday, there is not generally the opportunity. Too little time, too many places to see, or just the wish to collapse into a lounger and forget the world of work.

With a holiday home there is some involvement...paying your taxes, having your chimney swept, meeting the same people in the local superette....but I have come to think that it is not until you live full time in France that you get to grips with how it all works, how people think,....and your own reaction to it all.

I'd moved for financial motives.....but thought that, having travelled widely in France, learned the language and studied the history I would acclimatise fairly easily, and in one way I did.

The area in which I began my life in France was not rich, it did not attract important people for the holidays, there were no big houses except the dilapidated chateau up the road which was being turned into a privately run children's home.

Most of my neighbours were elderly, all were friendly, and the maire and her staff were extremely helpful, in the sense that I left them alone and they left me alone.

I made friends...I went everywhere I was invited and used my ears and eyes.

It became apparent that the words over the door of the mairie - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - were a parody of the reality. 

Coming from a culture where central government was viewed with a high degree of scepticism, where newspapers (pre-Murdoch) investigated and criticised and where (pre-Blair) one was not afraid of the police I found I was living in a society where you could not tell an officious gendarme where to get off (outrage), where the press 'confused' a respect for the private life of people in the public eye with a cover up of corruption and traffic of influence and where government had the last word.

People knew their place.

The phrase I heard over and over again was

'Nous sommes pour rien'...We don't count...

There was a lack of confidence in oneself...nurtured, in my view, not only by the hierarchical nature of society but by an education system in which was there was not only just one correct answer...but also just one correct question; where mistakes were treated with scorn rather than used as opportunities for explanation.

Thus people who had learned English at school hesitated to use it for fear of making a mistake...while I burbled on regardless.

A good French friend, principal of a maternelle, used to joke that I was a woman with no past and no future, such was my lack of acquaintance with either tense when speaking French in the early days...I recognised the tenses when I read them, but for speaking it was the present every time...and I'm going through the same stage with Spanish now.

Friends who talked about politics and explained political structures to me were convinced that the Mitterand reforms, decentralising government, were a force for the bad because they brought about the rise of local political barons, whose snouts were ever seeking new troughs and, over the years since, I am convinced that my friends were right. 

In practice these string pullers are the medieval baron restored to life....they exercise middle and low justice through the local courts; they have a privileged financial position as the local tax offices look the other way and they almost inevitably live in chateaux.

Then there was the chauvinism....not met so much among my elderly neighbours, but prevalent among those who felt themselves to be of a more exalted order...accountants, architects and suchlike, whose answer to queries was simple and universal.

'This is France!'

French practice was best...unquestionably...in everything.

I beg leave to differ. 

A country which produces the andouillette has a lot of explaining to do.

As does a country which uses coefficients to complicate what should be simple.

The reaction of these people to dissent was speedy and unpleasant.

What would a foreigner know about anything?

Especially one from a country that does not respect reason.

A country that is duplicitous.

And...wait for it...

A country that burned Joan of Arc!

I could not believe this the first time I heard it...but I was to hear it many times over the years.

It always amazed me that the very people who were proclaiming the superiority of France as based on the use of reason could come up with this particular gem.

My reply used to be

Yes, we burned her...but you sold her.'

Which went down like the offer of steak tartare at a coven of vegans.

The Front National (right wing) think a great deal of Joan of Arc....the woman who kicked out the foreigners.

I used to know a number of FN supporters and used to joke with them about how long would I have to pack my suitcases when they came to power.

The answer was always the same....

Oh, not you and people like you......it's the foreigners living on benefits....who won't speak French...who live in ghettos.

So should Marine Le Pen do the unthinkable and win the Presidential election that's most of the British expats on the ferry for home, then...

I

The dentists waiting room.

Image via Wikipedia

The door to the waiting room opens and the occupants look up as the newcomer salutes them.

'Bonjour, Messieurs..Dames'

'Bonjour, Monsieur' comes the subdued reply from a chorus of swollen jaws.

'Ah, Roger! I'll take the corner seat near you. How are things?'

'Oh, not so bad Jean Marie, not so bad...I've got this filling that that butcher over at Partouze le Bains was supposed to have done and it's come out. Giving me gip.'

'You're lucky that Mme. Forage could see you...her list is full to overflowing.'

'Well, I'm on the list, it's just that she was on holiday when I had the toothache....'

'So what happens now she's retiring this year? There's no one else nearer than that butcher and it's no better if you try to find a dentist in Chiottes la Gare or Benitierville...same story, all their lists are full.'

'I hear some councillor had the bright idea of having vets fill in for the shortage of doctors in rural areas....they could fill in for dentists as well while they're at it! They might even do house calls! And come out at night rather than tell you to ring the emergency services!'

'It would never work...the local doctors and dentists would never stand for it....the vets might do a better job...after all, their patients bite if they're not happy.'

No...something helpful, they'll squash that before it starts.'

'Mme. Forage is running a bit late, isn't she? Not like her.'

'No...she's got an emergency. Albert from the superette. He's had a bit of an accident.'

'Not that old Solex of his....I've been telling him for ages he'll have an accident cornering the Place de l'Eglise like that over those cobbles they put down.'

No, nothing like that...it happened in the tax office at Chiottes la Gare.'

'What was he doing there? The nearest he goes to them is posting his tax returns through their letterbox after dark on the last day for returning the forms.'

'It's about the new VAT rules. He got himself into a bit of a paddy about it all and went to see them.'

'Well, how does it affect him?'

'Because they've put VAT up on some of the stuff he sells in his superette and the whole thing's a minefield.
As far as I can understand it, they want to discourage people from eating fast food...so up goes the VAT.'

'What, pizzas and things?'

'Yes...unless they're frozen. And soft drinks and suchlike. According to Albert, if you sell a fruit drink in one of those plastic cups with a lid...it's 7 %. If you sell the same thing in a box...it's 5.5%.'

'Mad...totally mad.'

'That's what Albert says. He's having to alter his till to cope with it. They don't think these things through, either. Albert says that if he sells one of those snack lunch packs...you know, the sandwich with a serviette and plastic kinife...then it's fast food and it's 7 %. If he sells it on its own...then it's 5.5%.
Now my son in law works for old Duvenin...they've got big contracts for plastic packaging and I bet they do those lunch packs....so that'll be another contract down the tubes.'

'So he went in to kick up, then?'

'No, he went in to demonstrate that there was no real difference. That it was absurd. And to kick up.
He took one of his frozen pizzas -5.5% - and one of the chilled ones - 7%, then one of those soft drinks in a cup - 7% - and another in a box - 5.5%.
By the time he got there the frozen pizza was starting to defrost a bit and by the time he got in the office it was well on the way. Just the way it would be if you bought them in his superette and took them home.'

'Not if you had an igloo bag...'

'Albert doesn't sell igloo bags.
Anyway, he pulled all this out of his shopping bag and started to demonstrate that there was no difference.
He opened the plastic cup with his fingers and tore the box open with his teeth. Same amount of time.
'Where's the difference?' he asked.
It was when he got to the pizzas that he had the problems.
He tore a piece off the chilled one and then a piece off the defrosted one. Same amount of time.'

'So where was the problem?'

'That blasted new man. He said he wasn't convinced that the frozen pizza was in the same state as the chilled one and that if Albert expected him to write a report then Albert would have to show him that one was as ready to eat as the other.  By eating them.
Albert said he could try them himself if he liked but he said he had every confidence in Albert's veracity.

Albert managed the bit of frozen pizza, no problem at all...it was when he started on the chilled one that his tooth broke off in the dough...'

'Probably weakened opening the box....'

And meanwhile, as Merkozy fiddles....

                     Image via Wikipedia

The gendarmerie van pulls up in the farmyard. Its sole occupant gets out and heads for the barn.

Hoy! Victor! You there?

In here....in the tractor shed...I'm overhauling the muckspreader. Well, you're a stranger these days....what fine breeze blows you in my direction? Here....let's drink to it.

Well, I'm on duty..

So who's going to breathalyse you?

Yes...well, go on then. What've you got there...is that Albert's?

Yes, a good drop, make the most of it, he's got esca in the vines and he'll be pulling a lot out this winter...
Anyway, what's it all about? I see you're on your own...

Yes, I wanted a quiet word...

If it's about young Laurent's speeding ticket then all I can say is that one of those Parisians with holiday homes round here must have copied his numberplate...
How the hell could my muckspreader be doing 170 kilometres on the periphique at three in the morning!

No, no...that'll get sorted out. But the muckspreader is involved, in a way...there've been complaints.

Complaints? What about? If that's those English again complaining about me not ploughing in Bernard's duck manure for him for over a week ...when we had that hot spell a way back...they can just forget it. They're living in the country, not the middle of London.

No...but you know you're supposed...

I know what I'm supposed to do, but I was organising the Algerian veterans do what with Jean-Antoine being ill...and anyway, it's Bernard's responsibility to get it ploughed in in twenty four hours, not mine...I was just giving him a hand.
So what's it about if it's not the manure?

Well, it is the manure....you seem to be collecting a lot of it.

And if I am? Not illegal, is it? I'm a farmer. Farmers always have manure.

Yes, of course.....but there have been complaints that you're not keeping it in an approved manner...you don't have it drained and whatnot in accordance with EU regulations.... it's all in your barns.....piles of it.

You'd think people would have something better to do...what business is it of theirs?

I don't suppose anyone would have been interested but after young Laurent drove the muckspreader through Ste. Conasse last week with the spreader attachment still going, it caused a bit of ill feeling...

With all this rubbish going on about the euro you'd think they had other things to worry about!
I'm sorry if Mme. d'Enculade got her car covered in it, but that's life in the country!

From what I hear it was lucky the cold snap had started...if people had had their windows open you'd have had a delegation round your ears in a flash and a fair few claims for compensation.
Still, let's stick to the point.
Do you or do you not have a slurry facility in line with EU  regulations?

Yes, you know I have...your son's girlfriend works for old Machin who installed it.

So why is all that muck stored in your barns?
I hope you've not been buying it....no one round here has a permit to sell manure..

No, people without 'a slurry facility in line with EU regulations' have been giving it me......for my project.

And what might that be?

Well, with all this crisis and whatnot, we're supposed only to buy things made in France...but there isn't much made here anymore so that's a bit difficult...look at my muckspreader...made in Italy!

I don't know who you think would be buying manure in those quantities Victor...but you'll still need a permit to sell it...even if you stick a tricolour on it.

I tell you, I'm not buying or selling manure!
I was wondering what to do to make a few bob extra....on the small scale, you understand...and then it came to me!
People are getting paid God knows what to make those windmill things...which is why the electricity bills will be going up again...so what about something much more efficient....
Biogas! Made in France!

From the manure?

Yes, to start with...but you can use anything organic. Next year, the supermarkets are going to have to recycle all the stuff they chuck out in their bins and my idea is to get this up and running and go for a contract with The Mutant over in Les Deux Biscouilles.....
They pay me to take it away and I make the gas and sell it!
Win win!

But manure's not the same thing as supermarket waste.....oh no! Don't tell me that's you!

What's me?

The dustmen are complaining that someone took all their food waste bins from here, St. Ragondin and Ste. Conasse this week.....

Well, yes...I wanted to see how it would work so I got young Laurent to nip round the night before the collection and pick them all up...a sort of dry run for The Mutant contract.
Don't worry, I've got all the bins hosed out and he'll take them back as soon as he gets back from the dump...

Where, I suppose, he is dumping all the containers and wrappers....

What do you think we are! We're not fly tipping. This is professional.

And I suppose he'spaying the professional rate at the dump?

No, or course not...we're farmers.....

Isn't it a bit messy, this food recycling?

I should say so...Laurent had to take a shower and put his clothes in the wash by the time he'd finished...but it won't be so bad with the supermarket packs, they won't have been opened and squashed up with other stuff.
I was thinking that I could hire a couple of English pensioners to do the dirty work....they're all on their uppers with the pound the way it is...

Was,Victor, was. The way the euro is going the English will be the only ones with any money round here...apart from the politicians, that is.

Well, all the more reason to diversify...the biogas. It's a way of showing your patriotism...not just national but local....environmentally friendly...
It's win win!

So where are you making this stuff? The food waste gas, I mean?

I've fixed up the old root clamp...few valves and whatnot...it'll be a few days before it gets started properly, but I've already got the manure started...in the slurry facility in line with EU regulations. That's going well. I'll soon be able to sell it off.

But how are you going to sell it? You can't lay pipelines all over the commune?

No, I'd thought of using that old pump  I used to use for the tractors......people can bring their cubis and fill them up at the pump....just like getting your wine in bulk...

Victor, you can't just start up like this. Where are your permits? Have you contacted the Fire Brigade for an inspection? Gas is dangerous stuff!

Typical! No wonder France is in a mess!
You get an idea to make a few bob and help the environment - just like these firms flogging windmills - and the next thing you know it's permits and inspections and all to be paid before before you see a penny...and when you do make a penny you've got the taxman hanging on one of your balls and the social security on the other...all useless mouths!

And don't go on to me about safety...I've worked it all out and there's nothing to worry about.

If the worst came to the worst and the tank explodes my bungalow is behind the cattle sheds so I'll be sheltered from the blast....I can claim the sheds and the animals and whatnot on the insurance and the only house in the path of the blast is owned by English.

And anyway, there won't be an accident. Young Laurent has made this sign to hang on the pump.
What do you think? You can't miss it! And it's in two languages!

Defense de fumer
Now smoking.

The Poisoner's Wife and the Sands of Time

Image via Wikipedia

It was in April of this year that I heard of the death of The Poisoner.

His house had been destroyed by fire in the previous summer, and he, at 91, could not survive outside his own environment.
The little bungalow in the retirement colony in the village centre, surrounded by other people, with no garden except a strip under his windows...to him it resembled a circle of the Inferno.
He, to whom control was everything, was no longer in control of his life.
He gave up.


His widow is still living there, in one of those bungalows.
Six months after his death and more than twelve after the fire.
She wants to return home.
She goes up every day to tend the garden, but she has nowhere to bottle her fruit, nowhere to store her potatoes......Alain and his wife next door do their best to help, but she is fighting a losing battle to get back to her old life, her old routines, the things she knows and which give her value in her own eyes.

Why is she still in her bungalow?

Well, as you might guess, the insurance claim took a long time to settle, despite the clear reports of the fire brigade and gendarmerie.
The cause of the fire was undisputed....she had left the gas on in the back kitchen when summoned by her husband to carry out some task or other...there had been an explosion, and the fire had taken hold.
The amount the insurance company would pay out was, on the other hand, greatly in dispute.

Until the insurance claim was settled, nothing could be done.
The tarpaulins covering the roof flapped dismally all through the winter and were still flapping when The Poisoner died.

The insurance finally settled, her son called on local builders for estimates.
They were all up to their ears in work despite the economic downturn....a phenomenon which I observed over the years of my residence in France.
When times were good, they were twiddling their thumbs looking for clients....once things turned down, they were worked off their feet.
I could only think that the French consumer of building projects has the same reaction time as the French motorist whom you see in the distance as you are driving on the main road, hovering at the exit of a country lane.
He has seen you coming....he has plenty of time to pull out......but by the time his reactions permit him to act  you are upon him in a conflagration of brake pads.

So when times are good, the French client thinks about his project....and eventually engages his builder, who thus starts work when the downturn begins, and as always, takes on far more work than he can perform, given the exigences of French employment and social security provisions.

But in this case another complication has arisen.....the chosen builder's faithful foreman has retired....and he can't find a replacement.
This has dragged out the process yet further and with no solution in sight the Poisoner's widow looks like spending another winter in her 'temporary' accommodation.

Get another builder?

No chance, they are all up to their eyes in wood and plaster, and, moreover.....

When she agreed the estimate there was no provision for timescale in the contract.

She's stuck.

A few wrinkles from the cosmetics counter....

Image by jmcknight via Flickr

A little contretemps has occurred in the quiet world of Chiottes la Gare....like a puppy crapping in a discreet corner and about as welcome when discovered.

In the well regulated Hexagon that is France, certain things are sacred...monopolies, for example.

You can't qualify as a notaire and set up where you like. This would give rise to the risk of competition to other established notaires.

I really can't see where the worry would be from the clients' viewpoint....the course of studies followed by notaires seems to include - apart from the vital art of turning pages on a document for the client to initial - an element best described as professional procrastination.
Professional as in being paid to procrastinate.

Clearly, established notaires might well object to another professional procrastinator turning up in the area...there's a risk to the annual purchase of the new car, after all....and, as in the Hexagon it is the view of the monopoly holders which counts - with only one exception - the client is thus deprived of choice.

Same thing with taxi and ambulance firms. Taxis Merdiques have got their area sewn up and will brook no competition.

But at Chiottes la Gare it is chemists' shops.

Chemists too have monopolies.
You go to the doctor for your corns, emerge with a prescription for enough stuff to start up a health service in a third world country and set off to the chemist to have it packed into the lorry you will need to carry it away.

'The' chemist...not 'a' chemist. The one with the monopoly for the area.

But this guaranteed custom was never enough for the chemist to lead la dolce vita.....there had to be lines of business other than prescription pills and potions to finance the winter ski break and the summer month in Reunion.

Waiting in line....as Madame Goupil described the nature of the symptoms that had led her to consult the doctor, with sympathetic interjections by the chemist, his assistant and the other clients ...you had the opportunity to appreciate the range of goods on offer....the 'parapharmacy' lines.

Any amount of help was available for that most French of ailments  'heavy legs' ....quite apart from shampoo, stuff for dandruff contracted by using same, herbal supplements, soap, and anti  ageing formulas whose price was guaranteed to put years on you just by looking at it.
The range could be vast.....and you had plenty of time to be tempted to buy as by now Madame Goupil would be into the genetic origins of her problems...vocally supported by those old enough to remember the indifferent health of her Aunt Leonie.

Chiottes la Gare has two supermarkets on the periphery...one over the border in the next commune as the Chiottes council of the time didn't want it setting up in town as providing competition to established businesses.
Once they had discovered that even in the next commune it was quite capable of knocking out any and every business, they decided that they had better have one on their own territory to be able to cop it for local taxes.
Thus two supermarkets, one closer than the other to the town centre.

Chiottes la Gare has more than two chemists....as, given the size of the place more have been authorised by the appropriate authorities.
It should have had one less, but the gentleman in question is the son of the man who at the time was maire of the town and senator for the department, so the protests by the existing monopoly holders went by the board.
This is the exception referred to above. String pulling by those who know where the bodies are buried.

One of the Chiottes chemists decided to close up the shop situated in the old town, stating 'economic reasons'.
These may be understood to be the enormous taxes imposed by the Chiottes council on businesses in the area over the years  together with the reluctance of even established customers to enter an area where scum from Paris snort coke and patrol the streets with their pitbulls when emerging in the late afternoon from the 'social housing' which is what the wonderful historic buildings of the centre have become.

Why not buy your corn plasters in the morning?
You might slip up on the dog turds.

So, the said chemist thought it a good idea to install the business alongside the nearer supermarket, which was  about to expand. Clients could do their shopping and pick up the pills at the same time.

But the said chemist did not think fit to discuss the idea with the supermarket franchisee...who had ideas of his own.

So the shop was built alongside the supermarket.....but could not be accessed from the supermarket car park....the franchisee alleging that this would involve danger to his customers as they would have to cross the road used by delivery lorries.
Let no one even think for one moment that he changed the proposed layout...

Parapharmacy lines were always a very profitable affair and now that minor cuts have been made to the list of snake oil cure alls previously available on the public health service, those profits are even more valuable than before, so you can imagine the reaction of the chemist to the news that part of the supermarket's expansion involved setting up a vast parapharmacy section.....
A bit more than 'Zut, alors!' I reckon...

The egg basket would have been looking a bit fragile....

The chemist defiantly states that only chemists can run parapharmacy goods....nothing to do with their monopoly, but down to the trust people have in their advice.
The chemist recalled that the other supermarket tried a parapharmacy section years ago and it only lasted a short while....so this new one is also doomed.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Times have changed from the days when people really believed that they had better service and quality from individual shopkeepers - though ironically that may now be the situation - and like doing all their shopping in one place.
Given the current belt tightening all round, cheaper prices are appreciated as well.
I suspect that the supermarket parapharmacy section will do well.

I don't think the chemist has too much to worry about either.

The chemist for whom an exception was made has applied to set up a satellite business....alongside the same supermarket.
Having, one supposes, kept the franchisee in the picture.
Clearly he imagines that the extra trade from the supermarket clients will outweigh the effects of their parapharmacy.

However, times have changed.

His father has now retired from politics and is occupied in manoeuvres to avoid regurgitating some of his ill gotten gains......
Son and chemist, although on the Chiottes council, is in opposition and even if his party win next time round a career politician is slated to be maire....

Thus no one in the appropriate authority can see any reason for making another exception and have told him that such a subsidiary would be too far from his current shop to qualify as a satellite.

The chemists can get on with it....I gave up on them long ago....
Ever since they stopped selling Baume de Peru and the Elixir de l'Abbe Perdrigeon....

L'intimidation

Image by Miss Blackflag via Flickr

L'Intimidation.....bullying.

A part of the French experience that doesn't surface in the books and articles about France, but I think it underlies what we, foreigners, might class as discrimination, as we see it only from what happens to ourselves, without a wider picture.

I have been brought to thinking about this by reading a discussion about discrimination on the Survive France network, then an item  on Marilyn Z Tomlins' blog about the assault on an autistic child by his classmates and...at a side angle... by a post from A Year Down the Line about something which may or may not turn out to be a problem.

A participant in the Survive France discussion, Sarah Hague, who has a super blog at St. Bloggie de Riviere, made the point that you are all right in France until the moment you stick your neck out at which point the knives come out too and I think she is right, but I also think it reaches across the whole of French society, not just, as was the focus of the Survive France discussion, in relation to the French reaction to foreigners.

Before I start, do just bear in mind that my experience of France has been garnered from living out in the sticks and what I say will necessarily reflect that experience, though from the little I've seen of the urban beaufs and bobonnes they seemed pretty similar to their rural counterparts.
Neither am I in any way a social scientist, so what follows is purely anecdotal.

Talking to French friends' children, especially those working in the private sector, the amount of harassment and bullying in the workplace related by them would not be tolerated in the U.K.....yes, just as in the U.K. there is legal resource to combat this, but there is a culture of resignation.
That's how things are.
If you're lucky enough to have a job, then you just shut up or get out....
The pressures can be appalling and the results tragic, as in the case of the multiple suicides at France Telecom, but that is the workplace culture.
Bullying.

The union structure in France does nothing to protect the average worker...outside the previously state run sectors unions hardly exist, after all. The unions exist to look after themselves and any attack on their position is met with crippling strikes.....the dockers want to be included in the 'exceptions' to the raising of the retirement age, so they strike, bringing France's maritime commerce to a halt.
Dialogue?
Forget it.....just bully.

It happens in other spheres too.
I blog frequently about the scandal of the septic tank inspections...the hidden quotas, the inequality of treatment...(here)..... where the response of the water boards to the legitimate complaints of  those concerned is to put up two fingers...or rather, this being France, just one finger... and threaten to send in the bailiffs.
Bullying.

A crooked politician wants to underpin the garden wall of his town house.
Does he pay for this himself?
No.
He causes damage to the wall on his side and calls on the neighbour on the other side to assume both the fault and the cost.
The neighbour is undergoing treatment for cancer.
The politician harasses him and his wife, night and day, with threatening telephone calls.
Bullied, they give in.

You do not, in your right mind, speak truth to power in France.

Didier has a phrase which sums it all up...
'Nous sommes pour rien...'
We count for nothing.

He knows.
An electricity line ran across the field behind his house to service an outlying house in the hamlet.
Then EDF decided that they wanted to re route the line via the roads for ease of access and proposed to run it round past Didier's house and garden. This would involve felling his plum trees, which were on the boundary.
The plum trees which supplied the raw materials for his eau de vie.
The owners of the house on the corner of the road, next door to Didier, protested.
If EDF put up new poles, they would block the drain that ran round their house and their walls would become damp.
The EDF subcontractors agreed to put the line underground to meet their objections...after all, the long term aim was to put all lines underground.
Didier asked them if they could not just extend the underground line past his property, another fifty metres...if the lines had to go underground anyway at some point.
No.
Why not?
Because they weren't obliged to do so. And who was he anyhow?
Trivial?
Not to Didier.
And the whole thing was an eyesore in a pretty hamlet.

Conformity is dinned into the French from their schooldays....individuality is not appreciated.
Not only is there only one answer...there is only one question, and woe betide you if you run over the lines of the box provided for ticking.
I don't and didn't have children going through the system but I noted with French friends' grandchildren that it suited the plodders and tended to bore the pants off the imaginative.
No wonder it produces a culture of box ticking and inflexibility.

So, kept in their place and that place well defined, is it any wonder that the French need an outlet for their frustrations?

A friend told me that in Iran the only place people feel that they control any part of their lives is when they are at the wheel...and that the driving is wild!
Well, let's look at French driving habits.
Tailgating....infuriated hooting when the lights change and the first car hasn't gone off at Mach 1...overtaking on the inside lane...overtaking on the brow of a hill...and revving their engines at full blast to do so....the coup de poisson....speeding......and as for filtering one and one at a lane closure...doesn't sound unlike the friend's description of Iranian drivers.

The behaviour I came across most often took place on a hump backed medieval bridge on the back road to town.
There was a right of way system, but just how many times, coming from the disfavoured end with nothing on the bridge, my little A3 would get half way only to find a white van, which had been invisible when I started to cross, just advancing and blocking the way.
Common sense would tell you that if you arrived at the favoured end when something was already on the bridge you would wait for it to clear, but common sense had nothing to do with it.
The white van was bigger and demanded right of way.
I have had threats of violence from the drivers of the white vans when I did not immediately reverse and this is nothing to do with discrimination...the car had local plates so until I replied they had no way of knowing that I was foreign.
It was the wish to dominate.
The wish to bully.

In relation to the threats of violence I cannot say that my replies, when being told to get off the bridge, were such as to turn away anger....more like grievous words to stir it up....but I don't like being bullied and I won't stand for it.

It strikes me that if, in France, you are not born into a family who can make your way for you in society, you are frustrated at every turn...and, if you are not of a naturally peaceful temperament, you take it out on those further down the pecking order.
Thus a frail elderly man, like my husband, was natural prey (here) for a bunch of louts encountered at a vide grenier.
If you have any sort of power, you use it, you demonstrate it, in order to maintain your status.

Now, turning to the sense of discrimination felt by immigrants, add to the mixture of ticked boxes and the pecking order the intense chauvinism of France..the land where the French believe that the best of everything is to be found...and you find a very volatile situation.

The foreigner, just by not being French, is inferior, as is his or her culture.
His or her knowledge and experience counts for nothing as not being French.
Thus, in whatever situation, the French view should prevail.
Even if the French view as presented is totally illegal in the French system and would be laughed to scorn by any other French person...particularly a Parisian. (here)

There is an underlying feeling that a person who does not speak the same language is stupid...and is thus a mark, to be taken advantage of.....and how annoyed are the partisans of this view when the 'mark' refuses to have advantage taken.
How, I might wonder in passing, is one to speak the same language when it is a patois unintelligible to people living only a hundred kilometres away, but this is a problem which does not trouble for one moment the speaker of patois concerned.

I had a problem of this sort years ago with the contractor who was installing a septic tank at a house I was renovating. He was weeks behind schedule and the only way to get him on the job was to track him down every week and nag him.
He didn't like it and neither did I.
Just before Christmas, job still not finished, he turned up at my house demanding payment.
I told him he would be paid when he finished the job.
He looked round at my house and its setting and said

'I see where your money goes, keeping up this place...no wonder you can't pay poor men's bills...'

It was like having a conversation on railway tracks diverging at the points.
He genuinely thought that he could shame me into paying him for something he had not done.
I had money, he wanted it...despite not having finished the job.
It was like dealing with a very primitive organism.
But at least the hostilities remained at the verbal level; he did not try violence, which is what happened to a friend (here) in similar circumstances.

The other side of this coin is the refusal to understand anything you, the immigrant, might say.

One part of this is that common phenomenon....
'This is a foreigner, he or she doesn't speak French - even when you are addressing them in that language - so I can't understand.'
A sort of panic.

The other part is a refusal to believe that anything the immigrant might say could have any value.

I had asked for a speed limit sign on the stretch of road by my house, where the local hillbillies used to come screaming off a bend into a short straight just before running into the ditch on the next bend at the limit of my property.
Formalities and begging letter to the President of the Conseil General completed, a road engineer turned up and so, by sheer coincidence, did the Maire.

Me to road engineer

'You can see the problem...they pick up speed coming out of that bend and lose control on the next one.

Maire to road engineer

'There's no need for this at all, the road is perfectly straight between here and St. Ragondin.'

Me to Maire, pointing with both arms to the bends at either end of the straight

'What are those then? Scotch mist?'

Maire to road engineer

'The road is perfectly straight.'

The matter was resolved by producing the letter from the President of the Conseil General authorising the work..a copy of which had been sent to the Maire in any case, but it was an interesting experience.

There is also the commonly held view that economic life is a pie diagram...and the more fingers in the pie (immigrants) the less plums there are for the French.

Following on from the chauvinism, where everything French is best, it is clear that immigrants only come to France to take advantage of what it provides, thus taking what rightfully should be available only to the French themselves.

Chance would be a fine thing!

The hoops you have to jump through to get anywhere with what is laughingly called a system in France would baffle all but the most hardened benefit cheat....there are times when it baffles even the French!

Like a lot of things, you have to be able to understand French and how France works - not in order to avoid discrimination, but to understand how and why it operates.

It is not universal, luckily, but it does exist and it seems to me that some of the people who claim never to have been discriminated against are those who could be said to have integrated well......

In that they are as supine and unquestioning as the majority of those of their host nation.

Snowy scenes

Having just acquired an external hard drive I have been busy loading photographs onto it from the computer...I have lost the contents of too many computers in the past to risk it again and am inordinately pleased with myself for getting the thing to work.

Again, as with anything computer related which works, I am always grateful to Ayak, thanks to whose encouragement -  and instructions written so as to be understood rather than to totally mystify - I have now left behind the days of boiling my head and throwing heavy objects when faced with anything more complex than the capitals key.

Encouraged by my success with the photographs from the computer, I started to look through the boxes and envelopes of 'proper' photographs with a view to putting these too on the computer and then off to the hard drive, in case the tropical humidity gets to them one day and they turn into a mass of mouldy cardboard.

What a difference progress has made from the days of the Brownie and the snaps of people who seem to be either headless or legless....the costs of developing films of stuff out of focus...the light at the wrong angle...
Now I can see what I want to keep or discard on the digital camera and make a second choice when it gets to the computer and while I drooled at the possibilities opened up by the camera of one of our Belgian visitors, Anne-Mie - a Nikon D5000 which could zoom in and out and perform more tricks than a circus dog I think I'll stick to my little Canon.....it's about at my level of sophistication.
Press button ...take picture.  I can manage that.

Among the photographs were a few of my very first house in France.....some taken in summer with the swathe of  Monsieur Untel's larkspur running from the gates to the house and a couple taken in the winter against a looming sky...with snow on the ground.

Now, before moving to France I had never visited it in the dead of winter. Belgium, yes, in Ghent, freezing my feet to the ground while eating  frites with mayonnaise from a stand from which the ice had not melted despite the heat from the fryers, but not France.

As my first autumn ended, I was quite pleased with myself.
The house was reasonably draught-free, I had a woodburning stove and an open fireplace both with working chimneys and Jules had put me in the way of a trailer load of old barrel staves as well as the load of wood Monsieur Untel had negociated for me, so I was set.

I asked Papy about the winter.

Oh, nothing for you to worry about...you're from England.

Wondering about the inchoate mass of supposition underlying that remark, but lacking the conversational capacity in Papy's patois to enquire further I carried on sawing up the barrel staves and putting off lighting the fire.

The autumn was golden and mild, ideal for beating the wilderness behind the house into a vegetable garden and it was not until just before Christmas that the evenings were chilly enough to make it desirable to have lit the stove in the afternoon for overall warmth with a burst in the open fire in the evening to make things cosy.
I found the remaining draughts, shut up the back door for the winter and stuffed fire retardant fibre round the edges of the register plates.
Things were going well.

Papy stopped on the crossroads and I remarked on the mildness of the climate for the time of year.

Oh, yes, always like that...haven't had snow for over ten years now...and then it was only for a day...

I remember thinking that all the stuff I had read about the mild climate of the Loire Valley - Atlantic weather pouring into it along the river to preserve it from the dreaded Continental climate - must have been true....which was about when, in early January, I woke in the dark hours of the early morning feeling like a leftover frite on the frozen cobbles of Ghent.

Never in all my puff had I been so cold.

It lasted for days...days when I realised that putting off insulating the roof until spring had been an error close to that of Hitler in not providing winter clothing for his troops invading Russia.

I moved my bed downstairs and blocked off the staircase.

I put pillows and duvets against the shuttered windows and boarded them in with packing cases.

I hung blankets against the doors.

I put more packing cases over the floors, where the chill was striking up through the tommettes.

I stuffed yet more cardboard round the water meter outside.

I moved a week's supply of wood inside to keep it warm and dry.

It felt like living in a dugout in Flanders...but without the whizzbangs.

Nothing moved outside...no post van, not even a tractor. Rural France had battened down the hatches.

I had started to worry about the wood supplies when one morning it felt milder and pulling back the blankets from the front door I stepped outside into a white world.
Snow had fallen, a heavy fall and I shot back inside for the camera.

It was while I was taking shots of the house that Papy passed again on the crossroads, his ancient Ami towing his granddaughter behind on skis which she was trying to keep inside one of his tyre tracks to maintain movement.

It was while trying to turn in time to take a photograph of such a sight that I tripped on the edge of the stone covering the water meter and measured my length in the snow, so that I have only memory to depend upon for the moment when winter sports came to St. Supplice.

Some days later, when the snow had melted, I met Papy again on the crossroads.

I thought you said it was always mild here.....!

Oh yes, it is...you just get a cold snap now and again. Good for the crops...kills of all sorts of bugs and such.

Where did you get those skis from?

Up in the chateau, before he...with jerk of chin towards the chateau...took over. The six fesses used to go to the Alps every winter when they were young...I remember them driving to the station with the skis tied alongside the car.

You don't mean to say the six fesses (renowned for being as tight as a duck's arse) actually gave you them?

Well, no, of course not...but I knew they'd have no use for them...they were too poor to go to the Alps anymore..and it only snows here every ten years or so.

Let's get back to the sheep....

Image via Wikipedia

It is evening on our little farm in Costa Rica.
The heavy scent from the papaya flowers pervades the house.
We planted these trees from seeds from a super tasting fruit eighteen months ago and now we have four trees which are higher than the roof, laden with green fruit which will ripen in our absence.

We have eaten mango from our own trees for breakfast, together with coffee from our own bushes.
We have had elevenses of coconut milk from the green coconuts on the palms behind the house.

The orchids which fell from the trees in the last storm are starting to flower on our balcony.
The vanilla vine is starting its' climb up the support provided for it and we hope for the first pods next year.

We have plantains to cook, guinea to cook or to eat and bananas by the hand.
I would love to be able to bring two or three hands of our bananas to Europe for friends...never being a banana lover I have been converted by eating them fresh from the stem and I would love to share the experience.

Friends will just have to come to see us.

Well, after the Lord Mayor's Procession of our trip into Nicaragua and Honduras, comes the dustcart...I am about to set out for deepest France again and I am not particularly looking forward to the trip.

I also wonder whether I shall be happy to be back. Distance lends perspective and although Costa Rica is by no means a paradise,  time away from France has been time for reflection.

I have finally managed to sell the last remaining small house and the whole process has been a nightmare from start to what I sincerely hope will be a finish on Friday - though I suspect it will be fifteen rounds with the notaire on Capital Gains Tax and a sharp tussle to get my hands on the cheque on the day of the sale.
All hassle I could live without.
When I bought the farm in Costa Rica, I checked the Land Registry for title in the morning and by afternoon the purchase was completed.
The contrast is startling.

We know that we have to downsize - the effects of winter on the garden being the final blow - so I have to start the dispiriting round of agents again for the sale of the big place.

I have already decided that the first one to start sucking teeth will be out of the door on the end of my foot and that any local one who tells me that he knows what I paid for the place will swiftly follow.
What is it about the French that they think that what you paid for a mouldering wreck has any relation to the fine upstanding house you are about to sell many years down the line?
Inevitably I will get one who will gloat about the British leaving France because they have run out of money - indicating that he thinks I am in the same position - so the foot will be employed again before he can offer his insulting estimate.

It occurs to me that I'd best buy a stout pair of boots before starting to contact agents or I'll soon have sore toes.

The tax forms will be arriving soon, the insurance company - from whom I parted company years ago - will be threatening me with bailiffs for not paying them to insure a house I sold seven years' ago , the water technician will be wanting to discuss demolishing one of my weirs - for which read 'we are going to do it anyway' - so that will involve yet more useless lawyers to challenge the decision, and I must remember not to try to change one hundred dollar bills as these have to be passed via the French Central Bank and will take five weeks to return to my bank account in euros.

Still, as Roz's photographs on Dirty feet and rubble in my hair remind me, there will be compensations.

The fruit trees should be flowering and there might even be some asparagus if it hasn't been nicked.
The spring bulbs should be performing which will give me heart as I check the poor tender plants to see if there is any sign of new life after the winter's killing spree.
I'll catch up with friends.

It might be all right after all.

All I now have to do is get up at 4.00 am, get the plane to Mexico City, wait seven hours for the connection to Madrid, then see if Iberia are actually laying on coaches for the Madrid to Paris leg as their website says they are, and if not, leg it over to Estacion Sur to try to book a seat on Eurolines the same day. If I cannot, then get a hotel until I can get a flight or a seat - and don't talk to me about catching a train as the alternatives are either taking local trains which take twenty two hours to reach the destination, or a con trip train which offers showers and inedible meals for a price to take my breath away.

So as the local sheep shagging fraternity say
'Revenons-en a nos moutons'.
Back to France it is.

Looking back, not forward

Image by your neighborhood librarian via Flickr

It has always seemed a sort of frowsting about month to me, January, with only the indoor plants to liven the scene.

Can't do much in the garden, too early to start off the half hardy annuals, and in these days of eBay there is no longer the anticipation of the box of seeds arriving in the post to cheer the winter day with thoughts of Nantaises Ameliorees or Bedfordshire Fillbasket. These days, little packets arrive all the year round, in response to impulse buying, rather than undergoing the annual ceremony of assembling all the seed catalogues and working through them for the definitive orders.

Arriving in autumn, the catalogues would have been hanging around for a couple of weeks, old favourites and a few newcomers, before a rainy dark afternoon would seem the ideal time to clear the table by the fire and lay them out for proper inspection. This, at least, was my way of doing things when in the U.K. but it survived only in truncated form when I moved to France.

M. Untel saw to that.

I have spoken of M.Untel before, defrocked gendarme, expert in all things bibulous and trafficker in untaxed wine,

http://http//real-france.blogspot.com/2009/04/were-out-of-wine.html

but it was in his role of seed rep that I first made his aquaintance.

I was poking about in the barn in the first autumn after my arrival when a car pulled up at the gate and sounded its' horn. Repeatedly. The first honk got no reaction, but by the fourth, I was on my way to the gate, loaded for bear.

A large man, face an unforgettable shade of brick red, like the facade of Hampton Court, emerged, holding up a hand as if stopping traffic.

'You the foreigner?'

'Yes'

'I see you've been making a garden out the back.'

By the amount of cars that had stopped for a good gawp while I had been turning over the sods of couch grass, it was a wonder it wasn't headline news on French television. Some had even got out for a closer gawp.

'Yes'

'Well, you'll have been spending too much on seeds. I'm part of a co op...small gardener's stuff, you know, and I can get you seeds a lot cheaper than going to the shops. Robbing bastards, they are.'

The man had unerring sales skills. First, I love choosing seeds and second, I love saving money on something.

I invited him in for further discussions and he promptly plunged back into the car...for his catalogues, as I supposed. He emerged with, yes, the catalogue and assorted papers but also with a six pack of wine....uncapsuled bottles in a sort of galvanised milkman's pannier.

We headed for the house and cleared a space at the table.

'Where do you keep the glasses?'

I brought out two and he neatly opened a bottle. It had a sort of hollow plastic cap and he used a rifled plastic plug to get at the contents. He saw me eyeing it.

'Now this is fine for wine you don't want to keep...and a lot easier than putting in corks. Look out for a pack of these when you go shopping...save you a fortune.'

Well, I wasn't at the wine bottling stage then, but I bore it in mind and later trial proved him right. I use them for my half bottles of epine...never last long enough to need a cork.

He got down to business. We discussed the nature of my soil. We discussed what I wanted to grow. He told me what I ought to be growing. He opened a second bottle.

He then showed me the catalogue. He made suggestions about varieties for this area. I made an order. He opened the third bottle.

He pointed out that I had not ordered any flower seed. I pointed out that I did not yet have a flower garden.

'You're a woman. You have to have flowers. Here, you get a free packet of flowers with your cardoons...take some larkspur and by keeping the seed you'll have enough to cover the whole place in a couple of years.'

He rose to go, placing the empty bottles back in the pannier.

'What about paying you?'

'When the seeds arrive. Never pay for anything in advance....that's something else you'll have to learn.'

He departed and I wondered if I had dreamt the interlude, before tottering out to sleep it off in the deckchair. I awoke some hours later, distinctly chilly, but not in the least hungover.

A few weeks later he returned, bearing seeds and the pannier. Luckily, this was a one bottle job, but I did say how surprised I had been not to have been hungover.

'Ah. That's because I'm careful who I buy from. Some of them lace the whole thing with so much sulphur you can even smell it. That's what does for you, additives! Buying supermarket wine as you do'....eye passed critically over my stock.....'you're just asking for trouble.'

Over the years, I began to look forward to his visits - official, about seeds and unofficial - he kept a close eye on my garden from his car and when he had a glut of whatever it was that I didn't have he would deliver a large carrier bag. And the pannier.

It was he who warned me not to go into town on a Friday in November and December, as the gendarmes were making up for lost time in handing out fines before the end of the year.

It was he who showed me how to change my land from being classed as agricultural to being classed as being for leisure purposes.

It was he who introduced me to vignerons, washing machine repairmen and wood suppliers. Thanks to him, I got local's prices, not rip offs.

He gave me the entree to local life. A great gift, and beyond price to a foreigner finding her feet in a wholely strange society.

My front garden was swiftly covered in larkspur and descendents of the first packet of seeds are still with me, many moves on.

I used to see him from time to time when visiting friends in my first village....older now, the high colour even more prominent against his greying hair, asking what I was growing, how was the soil, had I had rain......and always time for a drink.

Then, last time over there, my friends' neighbour dropped in for a chat and happened to mention that M. Untel was moving back up to the north of France, whence he had originated, years ago. His wife, that shadowy woman more rumoured than observed, had died, and he no longer wished to live where they had been happy together.

The neighbour was censorious.

'He must have led her a life, always drinking the way he did.'

I have no way of knowing. But to me he had always been a 'verray, parfit, gentil knyght' and I suspect he had been so to her also.

'