We are fresh back from our own Tour de France. Or rather, a good bit of that country. We cheated a bit by using the car and not our LeClerc special bumper bargain Road Eater pushbikes, but I reckon a tad over 3000 kilometres in just five days was not bad going. In spite of stopping at a lot of cracking chambres d’hotes, relais restaurants and even a Buffalo Grill ( much under-rated eateries as I recently discovered), we still managed to get through a goodly part of south and south-eastern France. Alphabetically speaking, just some of the towns we stayed at or whizzed by included Arles, Avignon, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Bourges, Grenoble, Lyon, Saumur, Toulon and Tours. Not the ideal way to properly visit any country or part of it of course, but the idea behind the trip was to take snapshot views of as many potential southern regions and departments as possible for the next book in my French Impressions series. Next month we will do the same sort of thing in the south-west, if my stamina and our bank manager permit.
Apart from being a total if expensive delight, the trip reminded me of two inarguable facts:
- France is a huge and hugely diverse country.
- French drivers are truly, truly crap.
With regard to (1), the thing most Brits get wrong when trying to demonstrate the comparative sizes of the two countries is by pointing out that France is a couple of times bigger than Great Britain and with only the same population. Quite true, but I reckon a better way of looking at it is to factor in the equation that eighty five percent of all the people in GB live in England, and France is actually seven times the size of the purely English bit of Blighty.
No wonder Brits find the roads so relatively empty and the streets so relatively quiet across the Channel.
Also, although we have our Lake District and Pennine Way, the truly awesome thing I find when travelling long distances in the southerly areas of France is how dramatic and changeful the French landscape can be, and how you can travel from vast plains to proper mountains in a day...or even less. And with each region’s distinct cuisine, customs and sometimes version of their common language, you might as well be travelling to and through different countries.
One morning last week we started the day in the Carmargue, with white horses and stunning flights of roseate flamingos as breakfast companions, spent the afternoon with knuckles white and eyes often shut (and that included me as the driver) navigating the winding and very narrow pass through France’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon ( the Gorges of Verdon)..and had dinner in a ski resort in the Alps. Now that is what I call variety. Having said all that, it was nice to chug back across the border into Brittany after our tour. It was market day in the small town of Jantze,and sitting round a table in the bar on the square were eight sturdy farmers of various ages and sizes, but all wearing the identical uniform of bib and brace overalls and flat cap. They were celebrating a good day at market or drowning their sorrows after what they claimed as a bad one, and a suitably motherly Madame was effortlessly whizzing around the table dispensing admiration or sympathy as she ensured their glasses were kept filled to the brim. The lovely thing about this little epiphany on our return was that I knew that scene would be being repeated all over rural France. A reassuring constancy in a very varied, and, for me, hypnotically appealing country.
Now on to point (2), and you have to realise that, when it comes to driving in France, I know my onions. I also know about driving in all parts of the UK, though am limited as to experience in other countries in or outside the EU. Over the best part of a half century as the wheel (Blimey, surely it cannot be that long?) I have clocked up the best part of a million miles behind the wheel of cars, brewers drays, monster lorries and even tanks, and a quarter of that distance has been on the roads of France. My French driving experience does not include tanks, though at times I reckon that would have been the safest and most apt vehicle in which to be.
I hate stereotypes, and especially the sort of dumb no-brained lack of thinking that glibly accepts and labels people and their countries. In my book, to say that everything in or about France is better than everything in or about Britain is as mindless and even fascist as claiming the opposite. I know some really rubbish French cooks, and lots of Brits who can’t make a decent cup of tea.
But, and it is a huge one, my simple and single view of the general standard of driving by the French is that they are totally and utterly hopeless and clueless. And before you jump to any conclusions about my age and likely pace of proceeding on the highway, you only have to look at my collection of speeding tickets to realise I am not yet one of the driving gloves and car coat brigade. My point is that the French are not fast and furious in a skilled way, or have a different style of driving than is found in the UK. They are just absolutely hopeless in all aspects of sensible and safe road usage.
If there were time and space I could give you hundreds of examples to prove my point. Anyone who has been tailgated by a French driver who is waiting for the next blind bend or hump-back bridge before overtaking will know where I am coming from. Suffice it to say that our recent tour of the south reinforced my opinions, and demonstrated that it is just not in Brittany where drivers are mad, bad and very dangerous. Finally, in a country which as mentioned is seven times the size of England and about the same number of drivers on all those empty roads, the French still manage to kill twice as many drivers as we Brits at home.
I rest my case...