Thursday 22rd October:
A thick coating of ice on the windscreen of Reggie the Renault this morning ( I know, I know, but my wife insists on naming all our cars. I too give them names, but only when they will not start on a frosty morning), so a wake-up call to action. I need to spend more time in the woods with my chain saw and chopper, and we need to find a wood- burning stove pretty pronto.
One of the most significant changes to come over most Brits when they move to or buy an old property in rural France is how obsessive they can become about heating -and firewood. Where to get it, how much to pay for it... and how to burn it to best effect. When we first came to live in France, I wondered at the sheer size of all our neighbours’ ostentatiously displayed log piles, and why they spent the best part of the long summer days growing and tending them like British gardeners fussing over their entries into the giant vegetable competition at the village fete. When we had our first winter in a stone walled and floored farmhouse with no insulation or double-glazed windows, we realised why good quality firewood can have a price above rubies in the mind of the rural homesteader.
In the UK, most people simply turn up the heating thermostat when winter approaches. In rural France, any form of central heating can be as rare as a French vegan/ animal rights protestor. Paradoxically, using wood as a main or supplementary form of heating is usually both a delight and a drawback for the average Brit. There is all the romance of being ensconced in front of a blazing fire as the rain lashes down outside. The exquisitely fragrant smoke curling above the rooftop as one trudges back to home and hearth still makes my heart sing, but there is always a price to pay for living the good life. For a start, you have to clear up and lay your fire or wood burning stove every morning, and you obviously have to keep it supplied with fuel. And we are not talking here about a purely cosmetic and very twee fireplace or stove that Brit townies often like to have on show in their otherwise completely heated and insulated home.
Without getting technical, when it is the main or only form of heating, a single stove or fire can consume several cords of wood through a long and hard winter, and we have very hard and long winters up here in the Monts d’Aree area of Finistere. In Little Paradise, with its hundred square metre lofty sitting room, our single open fire can get through three cords of split logs over the seven months winter hangs around in this neck of the woods. And that is after rationing the fire to evenings only.
As to how much wood that is, it is a bit of a ball of string situation. A cord can contain any number of logs, as it is a measurement rather than a quota. Suffice it to say that a cord is the amount of logs/faggots which would fit into an invisible box eight feet long by four feet high and four feet wide. That is if you have an honest wood seller, of course. As with most things in life, you pay for what you get, and it is a general rule that the harder the wood the better and sweeter it will burn..and the more it will cost. There is a delightful and very accurate poem which describes the virtues and drawbacks of wood for burning, and I particular love the line which claims that elm wood burns like churchyard mould, and even the very flames are cold. A bit imaginative perhaps, but it does have resonance. For those of you interested, I will reproduce the poem below.
In the meantime, we are off to find a cheap, second-hand wood-burning stove. As I write those words, I realise they are self-contradictory. ‘Cheap’ and ‘wood-burning stove’ is a classic oxymoron. At this time of year, any second-hand stoves on sale will be even rarer than that rural French vegan animal rights activist. In fact, ‘cheap’ and ‘second-hand’ are words that do not naturally go together here, but more of that later. The reason for our reluctant decision to invest in a wood-burning stove is primarily that we rent and not own here, and also that we are admitting defeat by buying one.
The arguments as to the vying attractions of an open fire and a stove are several, but basically it comes down for us to an open fire looking much more attractive but sending most of the heat straight up our cavernous chimney, while a capacious stove will blast the heat directly into the room and save on wood consumed, but cost several hundred Euro to buy, let alone fit with al the pipes and metal sheeting required for the chimney. That is why we are off to scour the local depot ventes, though as the winter winds come scurrying across the mountains, the cost factor is becoming less and less a factor...
Friday 24thOctober:
As usual when visiting a depot-vente, we went shopping for one very specific item and came back with something completely different.
The thing one needs to understand is how uniquely the French approach disposing of their unwanted or out-of-date goods. Unlike in Britain, second-hand shops in provincial and (especially) rural France are abut as rare as the aforementioned vegan activist. I don’t know why this is, but it is. You do see the odd bric-a-brac or quasi-antique furniture shop, but they are generally run by Brits (the clue is always in the clever or punny title). In the main, the French dispose of their goods at a braderie, marche au puce, brocante or vide grenier event, or for larger items at a depot-vent or troc establishment.
Very broadly, the first four are either open-air boot sales without the cars or boots, or indoor events at the local hall. A brocanterie may also be a junk or bric-a-brac shop posing as a fine antiques outlet. At a typical braderie, an area of the town will be taken over by those with a piece of old furniture,broken seed drill, wooden leg or WWII German trooper’s helmet ( if not his hand grenade) to sell. As well as a treasure trove of household and agricultural artefacts across several centuries, there will be professional traders playing their wares, the ubiquitous frite vans, and even entertainment acts like a group of locals dressed up as South American pan pipe players, miming to a suitable track from Music of the Mountains part IV (and I kid you not about that). When the French go in search of a bargain or to dispose of the late Uncle Eugene’s dentures, they like to party down as well.
For more serious and specific shoppers, the depot- vente or troc is the place to go. And for all Brit home owners in search of furniture and furnishings.
Depot Vente speaks for itself as to function, while troc is a noun for swap or barter. In both cases, the system is that people bring their unwanted household and garden goods to a warehouse and demand what they see as a suitable price for them. The manager of the depot will then slap on a commission and display the item in a suitable section. There, it will either sell quickly or hang about until the owner sees sense and adjusts the price. What is so fascinating about a visit to one of these depots is not only the range and condition of items on sale, but the insight it gives the foreign visitor as to Gallic ideas of taste, style and sense of value.
I could and often do spend hours wandering and wondering around the average depot –vente, and when you are after something as rare as a wood-burning stove at the onset of winter, you have a perfect excuse for haunting all the local outlets.
We have two prime examples in our area. One is quite posh, while the other is a real people’s palace of bygone treasures and once-loved goods, where you can see anything from an almost complete crica 1980s bathroom suite in avocado to a magnificent 19th century buffet or wardrobe. In general, the bathroom suite will be gloriously overpriced, and the hand-carved solid oaken furniture will be a quarter the price you would be asked to pay in a trendy antique shop in Britain.
This morning, we scoured both premises, fell over at the 500 Euro price tag on a battered old wood-burner without even a flue pipe, and stood spellbound before a bedroom suite made entirely of silver painted bamboo, complete with drapes around the bed depicting scenes from Jungle Book. Wow.
We also literally stumbled across and could not resist a period double-handed tree saw. It is nearly six foot long and must be at least fifty years old, and is one of those impressive rural tools you see being hefted by heavily moustachioed workers in early black and white photographs. The handles are shiny with age and riddled with worm, but can easily be replaced( my wife is a dab hand at whittling), and the savage teeth looked as good as the day they were forged, given a bit of attention with a file and some oil.
Best of all, the asking price was just fifteen Euros. I could see by the look on the face of the man in the cash box that he thought us another pair of Brits who for some strange reason would be painting the blade of the piece of junk black, then displaying it artfully on the whitewashed wall of the former byre we had doubtless paid a king’s ransom to make habitable for humans instead of cows.
Little did he know that the magnificent old saw was for using, not looking at. It will enable my wife and I to keep warm in several ways. The first will be in the cutting down of a goodly few dead pine trees in our landlady’s grounds. We have permission, and though pine burns too furiously and spits like an enraged cat, its big attraction is that it comes free.
The other ways we shall keep warm will be wheeling barrow loads of the hard-won fuel up the slope and to our open fire. A wood- burning stove would be much more efficient and labour saving, but it would cost a great deal more than fifteen Euros...
Beechwood fires burn bright and clear,
if the logs are kept a year.
Store your beech for Xmastide,
With new cut holly laid beside.
Chestnut’s only good they say,
If for years it’s stored away.
Birch and firwood burn too fast,
Blaze too bright and do not last.
Flames from larch will shoot up high,
Dangerously the sparks will fly.
But ashwood green and ashwood brown,
Are fit for a queen with golden crown.
Oaken logs if dry and old
Keep away the winter’s cold.
Poplar gives a bitter smoke,
Fills your eyes and makes you choke.
Elmwood burns like churchyard mould
E’en the very flames are cold.
Applewood will scent the room,
Pearwood smells like flowers in bloom.
But ashwood wet and ashwood dry,
A king may warm his slippers by.
(anon)
Sunday 12th October:
Summer arrived in Finistere this morning. In a very French way, it was rather more than politely late, but so much more the welcome. Autumn will doubtless return tomorrow, so it was important to make the most of it and yomp the next stretch of the Nantes to Brest canal. It is our ambition to walk the whole length, but as with a superb meal or the last glass of a particularly fine glass of wine we are making it last and savouring every moment. In truth, the savouring bit is also a good excuse to keep the daily mileage down to a manageable level.
This most unusual collection of waterways takes more than 360 kilometres to get from the old capital of Brittany at the bottom right of the region to the north-western seaport of Brest, though the distance must be less than half that if it were to follow the straight line canals usually adopt.
Work on joining these two important towns started at the beginning of the 19th century after, again in a very French way, the authorities had been talking about it for around four hundred years. Problems with bad or non-existent roads and latterly the British raids on Breton ports were spurs to come up with a way of moving goods more efficiently and safely across the region. What makes this canal so unusual and attractive- if you are in no particular hurry- is that only around a fifth of the distance is made up of man-made cuts; the rest of the journey meanders alongside eight rivers on their eccentric way from the Edre at Nantes to the Aulne estuary at Brest. Because of the undulating countryside, it took more than 200 locks to even-out the watery highway, and what would be a formidable engineering task in any era was forty years in the making.
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Dusk falls slowly over the glittering course of the canal as we break open another bottle of modest red. More savouring of the moment needs to be done, and there is still a smidgeon of saucisson to be paid due attention to. Interestingly, this almost addictive chopped meat dry sausage gets it name from a primitive explosive fuse of the same shape which was used to set off small bombs like the petards employed to blow up castle gates during a siege. Sometimes when too much wine had been taken by the bombardier, he would set the fuse wrongly and be blown up together with the fortifications under attack. Thus, he had been hoist by his own petard. I bet you always wondered where that expression came from, and so did I.
Today we have covered the best part of ten miles and met some interesting fellow travellers, as well as some bracing encounters with cyclists and a whole pony club. The fishermen we meet always smile and say hello and are pleased to have a chat about what they are not going to catch that day; many of the cyclists and horse riders look down their noses at pedestrians as if we were some inferior species. In my experience, there is nobody more courteous, considerate and friendly than a polite French man or woman, and nobody more pig ignorant that a rude one.
There was also the chance to stop for a drink and chat in our native language, as nearly all the former lock-keepers’ cottages along this stretch of the canal seem owned by Brits. Small, almost painfully quaint and even twee and in a perfect location for lovers of nature and tranquility, they make perfect second homes. I think the preponderence of Brit ownership also signifies something about our two races. As the relative price of river, lake, canal and coastal properties in Britain shows, we all love to live near water. Although it is a huge generality, Bretons seem to be broadly divided into two types in this regard. There are those on the coast of the Armor ( 'Land of the Sea') who work on the sea or love to live by it and will pay fortunes in property prices to do so. Then there are the inland Bretons of the Argoat ( Land of the Trees). They have the good earth in their genes as well as often under their fingernails, and are not fussed about living near any sort of expanse or course of water. In extreme cases, they dislike or even fear it.
Of course, more cynical observers might say that it is only Britons who would pay such outrageous asking prices to own a tiny, damp and liable-to-flooding cottage just because it is in such a twee location. The other factor is that all properties along the canal come under the control of SMATAH, the official body charged with looking after the canal and preserving its image. Given the standard level of French bureaucracy and regulations heaped upon houses in ordinary locations, one can see the problems of living in what amounts to a listed building in France. SMATAH makes the Heritage Trust look almost indulgent. The garden area around the cottages are designated as having the same cultural and historical importance as the environs of a church, which technically means you cannot even cut the grass without written permission. We looked at a stunningly attractive ecluse cottage at a reasonable price last week, but there was a major drawback. The unusually honest agent showed me a letter from SMATAH to the notaire handling the sale, which pointed out that any new owner was specifically forbidden to use a car or any sort of motor vehicle on the towpath to get to and from the nearest access point. Given that the nearest access point was almost a mile away, that would seem to be a bit of a problem. Especially when you consider that the local fishermen had awarded themselves special dispensation, and would regularly whizz by the home you would have to walk or cycle to.
For us, it is the end to a perfect day. Mind you, there are plenty of those to be had here in rural Brittany. Or for that matter so many other bits of our adopted country. It is a significant fact that seven times as many Britons visit France on holiday as the other way around. When you know what is on offer here, perhaps that is not such a surprising statistic...
Saturday 4 th October:
A long, long, long lunch yesterday, and with it came further evidence of at least one truism I have proved conclusively as a result of messing around in France for more than twenty years: A foreign language is not absorbed by some sort of process of osmosis just by living in that country.
In fact, I do not think it would be going too far to say that there is often a law of inverse ratio at play when Brits go to live abroad anywhere that English is not the lingua franca. In short, I know of people who have lived in France for forty years and yet speak less French than when they arrived.
My personal theory is that it is not about the problem of teaching old dogs new tricks or some people being unable to grasp the basic tenets of speaking another language. Rather, I think it is all down to how much you want to learn a foreign tongue. The long-term expats who cant or refuse to learn French are prime examples. I think that their failure to pick up at least a passing knowledge of the language their neighbours speak is more to do with a mental block rather than an inability to get to grips with French. It is as if speaking only English is part of their Britishness and even their individual identities, and it would damage that shell of individuality somehow to realize what the lady at the checkout in their local supermarket is saying about the weather when they do their weekly shop safely within their force field bubble of ununderstanding.
But I am hardly one to talk, given that my command and control of the French language after two decades of using it regularly is put firmly in place and perspective by an English friend’s son, who is nine and been attending the local school for less than a year. Already, he can rattle away like a native, and -most importantly- his accent is so good that French people he meets think he is one of their own.
That’s my point really, and what nearly spoiled my otherwise wonderful relais lunch yesterday. Don’t laugh, but the restaurant is within the grounds of a now ( thankfully) redundant nuclear power station. Although the site is virtually deserted, at least a hundred office, building trade and farm workers descend on the place every day on the stroke of noon. It is that good, almost exclusively used by French people and certainly lived up to the recommendation we were given. But what upset me was how, when the waitress arrived and I said no more than two words – or you could say even no more than one( ‘Bon jour’), she responded in flawless English.
When we first went to live in Normandy in 1990, nobody in our nearest town- up to and including the bank manager- spoke a word of English. Or at least they pretended not to, and that also includes, wait for it, the bar owner who also taught English at the local primary school. We never knew whether this lack of usage of the Queen’s English by the good people of Bricquebec was all about a point of principal, or embarrassment at how they might sound when using our tongue. Nowadays, the reverse is true, or at least it is in every part of Brittany we visit. No sooner have you opened your mouth than the person you are addressing is responding in English. I suppose this should please us to see so many Bretons practicing their command of our language or being polite by speaking in our tongue, but, however perversely, I find it extremely irritating. Because, of course, it means that I, who have been cultivating a decent French accent for more than twenty years, betray my nationality so easily when I speak. A typical example is when dropping in to an unfamiliar bar for a coffee break. I will slouch up to the bar trying to look very Breton, and ask or rather grunt for two coffees. Without exception, the man or woman behind the bar will ask, in English of a varying degree of fluidity, if we want big or small ones. Often, they will go on to explain the difference. This is particularly galling, because, as you may know, real French people only ever ask for coffee when they want a small, black expresso. That is the norm, and they will specify if they want a milky or weak one or otherwise. So even though I am using local code, all my responders have indicated that they not only know that I am not Breton or French, but also that I am British. Or as they would have it, English.
This lead me to the inevitable conclusion that not only do I merely have to open my mouth to reveal my origins, but that, to all French people I must sound the equivalent of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, asking to see the minkey’s leesunce.. or the French-mangling British spy pretending to be a local policeman in ‘Allo Allo who would always enter with that immortal line: ‘I was just pissing by…’.
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An interesting encounter in the car park at Super U this morning. About the only time when we are sure to be thought of as French is when we are in or around our car, which is a locally registered (29) Renault runaround of the sort much favoured by retired farmers or other older and staider Bretons. Curiously, when we swapped our British-registered Volvo for a French make of car that would indicate we are locals we thought we would receive better treatment from Breton road users. In fact, the reverse proved true, but that is another story.
This morning a British-reg car pulled up alongside us, and we were treated to that wonderfully singular and ingratiating smile which all decent francophile Britons in France reserve for the natives, and which roughly translates as: ‘Thank you so much for letting us be in your wonderful country and we promise to be no bother while we are here or try and change your culture or increase the price of property for young people too much.’
When I explained that we were British and living here more or less permanently, the smile disappeared and the couple gloomily explained they had a holiday home nearby, and were stocking up on goodies before the much resented trip back to Middlesborough and work. They could not wait, they said, to be our age and be able to retire to Brittany and live here all the time. I was about to point out that it was not all fun reaching retirement age, what with all the extra aches and pains and non-functioning bits, when I realized that they were, actually quite right. We at least have found that all the drawbacks of ageing are more than compensated for by being able to spend the autumn- and hopefully the winter- of our lives right here in the adopted country of our hearts…