November 2008 - Posts
Surveys repeatedly confirm that the main reason Britons like the idea of living in France is the quality and pace of life.
But here’s the curious thing: The French take more anti-depressant pills than the inhabitants of any other European country. To be fair, it may of course be that the natives are depressed by the statistics regarding the ever-growing number of Britons who live in their country… and the even more mind-boggling number who say they would love to adopt la vie francaise.
However, I have always believed that most stereotypes must have something going for them to have become stereotypes, and over the years it has seemed to me that the French do their best to live up to their reputation as a nation of hypochondriacs. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that they enjoy all things connected with ill-health and its treatment more than most races.
Any nation whose people regularly visit their local pharmacy like the British go to their favourite pub must appear to have a healthy interest in ill-health. I have French friends who go to their nearest chemist almost on a daily basis, even where there is nothing wrong with them.
To understand this apparent idiosyncratic behaviour, you have to appreciate the differences between a British chemist shop and a French homeopathic pharmacy. In a typical chemist’s shop, you scurry in and out to have your prescription made up or buy some headache pills, and the surroundings and décor ( and usually the manner of the staff) are not intended to encourage you to linger.
In a typical small-town high street pharmacie, there will be soft lights and sometimes even soothing music, with television sets a to allow visitors to see the latest fashionable ailments and their cures. Some of these extended and very unsubtle adverts take the form of ongoing mini-dramas which are followed as keenly as TV soaps. In the average French pharmacy there will also be all sorts of interesting medical appliances and contraptions to tinker with, and easy chairs so those with the time to spare can relax and take in the action. So far I have not seen any enterprising managers selling popcorn or ice cream, but that is probably only because the French do not, as a rule, snack.
At the business end of the shop, there are usually privacy lines some distance from the counter, but they are usually ignored; if not, the patient and pharmacist will often raise their voices sufficiently for the case notes, symptoms and solutions to be heard at all points. Experienced observers will nod or frown at each suggestion of treatment, and there may even be a round of applause when the pharmacist has come up with a particularly inspired proposal.
But what really marks the difference is how many customers go in for one item and go out with much more. I can understand that in a supermarket or clothes shop, but in a pharmacy? The customer may have gone in for a corn plaster, but will often go out with a trolley load of impulse buys of anything from a kilo of throat pastilles to a prosthetic limb.
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I suppose another reason that the pharmacie is such a popular venue may be that a visit to the doctor can be so time-consuming, costly and confusing. I have spent many years observing this area of Gallic womb-to-grave community care, and concluded long ago that the French do not understand how their own health service works. And that includes medical practitioners and administrators, and especially those initially responsible for constructing an edifice which makes the Tower of Babel look minimalistic. In brief and very general, French citizens pay for their health care through a system of levies based on their age, situation, income and health. This will establish them on a sort of health care star rating level, which seems to govern how fast the ambulance will arrive when you have an accident. But, with (of course) a number of exceptions, they will still have to pay to see their doctor, then claim anything from seventy to a hundred percent of this cost back. This system also applied to foreign residents with all the right pieces of paper, but the system and process is naturally much more complicated.
So far I have generally avoided becoming embedded –or rather enmeshed-in the French health care system for resident aliens, but having infected a finger while cutting down a tree this summer, I called in to make my first appointment at the surgery in a nearby town.
To my surprise (makethat shock), the receptionist said the doctor could see me at noon. Assuming that he or she was either on a fasting regime or not French, I turned up at the stroke of lunchtime and found four other patients sitting glumly in the waiting room. After a while, a man with a nasty-looking boil on his nose enquired of an elderly lady when she was seeing the doctor, then asked the rest of us for our appointment times. In each case the answer was the same. We all had a date with Doctor Felix for noon, a time which was by now a mere memory.
An hour or so later, and it was my turn to be shown in to the good doctor’s examination room. The finger was looked at, anti-biotics prescribed, and a consulting fee of 22 euros politely required. When queried, the good doctor gave a small cough, then said cash would be most convenient. Peeling off the readies, I decided to get my money’s worth and told him I had put on at least ten kilos since stopping smoking earlier in the year. When I asked if I should try and lose some weight, he said it would be better if I did. But, as he continued with a fatalistic shrug, most sensible people would agree it was better to risk one’s health and life by putting too much good food in one’s mouth rather than too many cigarettes.
Looking at his watch, he said that he did not wish to be rude, but he had a table reserved at a rather good restaurant in town, and it was close to last orders. As it was obviously far too late for us to find a similarly obliging establishment, perhaps we would like to join him for a late luncheon?
We would and did, and thus established and ticked off reason 987 for living in rural France…
One of the biggest and truest differences betwixt us and our Gallic neighbours is our attitude to food, cooking and eating.
I realise that that statement may appear to be a bulletin from the Department of the Absolutely and Completely Bleedin’ Obvious, but I chose it carefully (for me).
There are lots and lots of misconceptions, prejudices and old chestnuts favoured by residents on both sides of the Channel. In general and despite what some Brits believe, French people do wash regularly (and even use deodorant), and rarely in my experience mistreat or eat horses and dogs. Conversely to what some French people think, Britons do not generally mistreat or eat children.
But there are some long-held credos ( like all French adults being genetically incapable of driving safely) which do stand up to the closest scrutiny. The one about male French lovers being so good at it is obvious rubbish, but all the stuff about the French attitude to food is absolutely true. Whether it is nature or nurture is not the point. Without argument it exists. By this I do not mean how rabidly our self-hating middle classes buy into the fallacy that everything cooked and put on a plate by a French chef must be better than any Brit cook could manage. What I am talking about is the basic French relationship with food, and how it reaches into their very souls and is much part of their lives as the air they breathe. The old axiom about an Englishman eating to live and a Frenchman living to eat is no longer as accurate as it was, but there is still a huge, huge gulf between us as to what we put in our mouths and why…and how much we are willing to pay for it.
I set to thinking about this when talking to a French friend yesterday and she casually mentioned she had just bought a nice roasting joint for eighty euros . Yes, that’s right, this ordinary working-class mum had laid out more than £60 at today’s prices for a piece of meat… to go in the oven.
When I came to, I learned that there would be six people at dinner, and it was a piece of beef from a renowned Aquitaine beef farm near her home. The real point is that she was not showing off in the way that a British man or woman would drop the price of their car or underwear into the conversation. She was merely mentioning the price and provenance en passant as evidence that it would be a corking bit of meat. Mind you she was also seeking my approval of this evidence of her passion for buying the very best for the table, but more of that later. Speaking as a man who would not dream of spending eighty euros on a whole meal for six at the snottiest restaurant in Brittany, I was –even after all these years - still shocked. But I was not actually that surprised.
The other day I was shopping in our local branch of Super U and saw they were doing a special offer on saucisson sec. This, as you will know , is a spicy dried sausage along the lines of a midget Italian salami, and can be a bit of an acquired taste for a lot of Brits. I like it very much, but not at the usual price.
When I saw that the offre special was a staggering one euro a piece, I grabbed a big handful. ( It keeps, of course, as that is what it was made to do). As I was about to chuck the delicious sticks in the basket, I saw that they were not all the same. Two of the sausages were wrapped in very classy wrappers and had the over-the-top names signaling that the product is going to be expensive. Looking at the shelf, I saw that the own-brand sausages were indeed a euro a piece, while the la-di-da ones next door were, wait for it, a snip at 23 euros. Each, that is.
That there could be such a range in price for the same products of the same size and containing the same materials is very French. It is also very French that the posh sausages and its poor relations were displayed alongside each other. Most of the older women in our area obviously come from a country peasant background, and are very prudent with their spending. Except when it comes to fine food.
Like a typical Brit let loose in a duty-free wine and beer store, I had grabbed a handful of the cheapo-cheapo special offer dried bangers because I like the taste and it was a very, very special offer. But most French women- and men- I know genuinely believe that the more an item of food costs, the better it will be. In some case, of course, they are right. But my bank manager actually makes a once-yearly 900 kilometer trip to and from Rochefort to pick up his shipping order of cheese of that name, for God’s sake. He pays through the nose in the town where it is made because he truly believes it tastes better than the same, much cheaper stuff in the supermarket. And of course, he will lose no status points when friends and customers find out about his devotion to buying the best.
Again like a typical Brit boasting about how little he had paid for his bottle of mediocre Cotes du Rhone in the duty-free, I did not care what the other shoppers at the checkout would think about me stocking up on the special offer saucisson But the ladies behind me with their chariots full of posh nosh would definitely not wished to be associated with cheap grub.
That is why so many French people are more than happy to visit cheap relais routiers –style restaurants at lunchtime, but opt for fifty-quid-a-head joints when eating out in the evening. It is also why my wife and I, being of Scottish and Welsh descent, would never ever darken the doorway of any restaurant with a pretentious name, damask tablecloths.. .and napkins pretending to be swans or scallop shells.
November 11th:
Reason 986 for living in rural France (Reason 985 was not being in the UK for Guy Fawkes night-and the month either side of that yearly orgy of sending money literally up in smoke).
Late Sunday morning, and we were returning from the now-traditional weekly morning French/Breton/English conversational classes at our local (all very informal and a good excuse to knock back a few glasses of everyday red wine, or as our Breton professor would say, gwyn roux).
Passing a field above our hamlet, we saw the diminutive form of a friend washing the very large and impressive bottom of a bull called Lulu. This sort of cross-gendering name is unusual even in rural Britanny, and perhaps explains why the great beast looks so maliciously at us each time we pass. Actually, as our friend the full-time stonemason and part-time farmer Little Georges said, his plaisanterie may have spurred Lulu on to greater sexual endeavours to prove his maleness, and the love machine has now impregnated half the cows in our area.
Shaking hands (after he had politely washed his in the water trough), we invited our chum back to Little Paradise for a chat and a pre-prandial beer. Coming in to the kitchen, he noticed my latest chainsaw in bits on the table. When I explained the machine was not working and I feared it was dead, he set about re-assembling it with the speed and confidence of a 12-year-old Rubik’s Cube grandmaster. Yanking the cord and finding it still unresponsive, he disassembled the machine in a trice and spent the next hour tinkering with its innards. After five beers (I find most Breton countrymen work best at a rate of three bottle of beer an hour. Any less and they get dehydrated and fretful, and any more and they can become torpid or a danger to themselves as well as the job in hand) he strolled out into the yard and set the machine running with a single, casual hip-high heave. Knowing our way around country mores and social niceties, my wife spent the next ten minutes telling Little Georges how wonderful and manly and strong and clever he was, and that was all he wanted for saving us hundreds of pounds. But he did suggest a trip with a bottle of gywn roux and the chain saw across the lane so that he could demonstrate his achievements to our neighbour Alain.
Of course, we realise not everyone might think that sitting in a French countryman’s kitchen with a glass of wine, plate of pot au feu and a chainsaw running at full belt as a perfect way to spend a Sunday lunchtime, but as my dear old dad used to say, it’s a good job we aren’t all the same…
November 9th:
It is a truth universally acknowledged by all owners of log - burning stoves that there is no such thing as free wood.
Like lunches and love affairs, there is almost always a hidden cost to pay.
In theory, all our winter firewood comes gratis, as we are lucky enough to have our lovely landlady’s permission to cull the dead pine trees in the three acres of woodland surrounding Little Paradise.
Finistere has pine trees like other counties have grass, and the foresting of every available hectare in the department coincided not unsurprisingly with the arrival of a EU tree- planting subsidy. Farmers and land owners competed to squeeze the most pines on to any otherwise useless bit of land, then generally left them to rot. The sort of pine trees most common here grow very tall very quickly, then die from the ground up. In our patch of woodland there are many dozens of pines reaching up to fifty feet, and a good percentage of them are technically dead. A strong wind could cause them to topple, which is why the owner is happy for us to cut them down and chop them up.
So far so good, then. We clear the dead wood, and our reward is free heat.
It takes around 7,000 split logs to see us through a long winter here in the Brittany mountains. That would cost us around five hundred quid’s worth of euros, and the thought of saving that sort of cash for the outlay of a few gallons of sweat and perhaps the odd lost finger was most attractive. Until we started counting the true cost of all that free wood.
Our first chain saw imploded after a month. The English expat dealer who sold it to me said it was because I was using it incorrectly, but I think it was just not man enough for the job. In truth I think it was a hedge trimmer in disguise rather than a full-on ferocious tree destroyer. So we took a deep breath and bought a proper job in the shape of a second-hand but top-of-the range model, as seen in those TV documentaries about butch blokes clearing whole forests in Montanna in the space of a single afternoon.
But with the fearsome tool came other expenses for which I had not allowed. The machine gets through more petrol than the average 4/4 gas-guzzler, and needs constant attention in the shape of regular and expert repair and maintenance, such as chain sharpening, declogging and the replacement of broken bits. During the summer and autumn I sometimes saw more of the owner of our local chain sawery shop than my wife, and Patrick and I have become close friends.
But, at a rough tally, the cost of our friendship and his goods and services, the write-off of the old machine and the purchase of the new one comes out at about twice what I could have bought the same amount of wood for, and without getting out of my armchair.
But then as my wife says, a year’s subscription to a gym would have cost at least that sort of money - if there were a gym in this neck of the woods. And how many couples can say they have brought down and sliced up the corpse of a fifty foot fir tree while a lot of people their age would be pleased with managing to cut the grass at regular intervals?
29th October:
A very, erm, French day.
Our elderly Renault’s windscreen wipers refused to budge yesterday just as the heavens opened. We were far from home, and in what could be fairly called the middle of the middle of nowhere.
After initially honeyed words leading to threats of extreme corporal punishment and even torture had failed to move either our RenauIt or his blades, I said to my wife how annoying it was that windscreen wipers always break down when it is raining.
With a deep sigh, she explained as if to a child that, in the same way as misdialled telephone numbers appear never to be engaged, normal motorists usually only try to use their wipers when it is raining, which is why it is then they discover a problem.
I do not know if you have ever tried to drive in heavy rain without windscreen wipers, but in case not, here are a couple of important tips, the first and last being the most important:
- Don’t do it.
- If you must, drive very, very slowly.
- Do not ask the person sitting next to you to help navigate, or ructions, violence or divorce is likely to follow.
- Don’t allow your wipers to cease to function in France.
One of the 873 (and counting) most annoying things about French drivers for me is their contradictory attitudes to driving in wet weather. If there is so much as a cloud passing across the sun, all French drivers will switch their lights on. At the first drop of rain, they will turn their headlights to full beam, and switch on all fog lamps and spotlights and searchlights which may be mounted on their vehicles for the purpose of looking butch and blinding oncoming drivers.
Now here’s the really amazing and infuriating bit:
Having totally overreacted to the conditions, they will proceed to drive even more insanely than before.
Indeed, the lunacy of their actions will relate directly to how bad those conditions are. The wetter the road becomes, the closer the average French driver will come to your back bumper, as if seeking comfort and company in the inclement conditions. Also, the faster he or she will take corners and bends awash with more surface water than you will find gushing down the biggest, baddest flume at AltonTowers. But from their perspective, their lights are on and blazing, so all is well and they are secure in the knowledge that they are acting like responsible road users.
Given that prior knowledge, I suppose it was extremely irresponsible of me to try to drive home without windscreen wipers. Especially on an expressway. It was not until we entered the N147 that I realised that the faster one drives without the wipers on, the more blurred the screen becomes. I also forgot the way the French motorist’s mind works, and the first giant euro-lorry loomed in my rear mirror within minutes of our speed dropping under 90kph.
I still do not know how we saw the escape route reserved for lorry drivers whose brakes fail, but we did and I took it. A bonnet full of sand was better than a juggernaught in the boot.
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Next day, we arranged for the car and us to be taken to the garage where we bought it. The manager was most sympathetic, and invited us to take a complimentary coffee while his top windscreen wiper man investigated. Within an hour, the manager returned to say that the wiper motor was kaput, but it would not take long to fit a new one as we had been put into the priority lane.
The American writer and philanthropist Gertrude Stein spent much of her life in Paris and counted Matisse and Picasso as chums. In one of her pithy critiques, she acknowledged that France had scientific methods, machines and electricity aplenty, but claimed most French people did not really believe in these things. For them, the real business of living was about tradition and human nature. In that and even after all the intervening years and technological advances in France, Ms Stein and I are as one.
It was another two hours before our windscreen ace arrived to say there was (surprise, surprise) a small problem. He had not thought to ask earlier, but it now transpired that the store was bereft of windscreen wiper blades. As he spoke, I noticed he was pulling on his coat, and that what seems the entire staff of the garage and showrooms were flooding from the building. At first I thought from their concerned expressions that there was a bomb scare, then looked at my wrist and saw it was a minute to noon. The concerned expressions were because they might be late for lunch.
As we sat like the band on the Titanic, the manager was the last to abandon ship, shouting over his shoulder that the car would be ready by Monday, but there was no problem for us, as Martine would organise us a hire car for the weekend. When I asked where Martine could be found, he looked at me as if I was mad, pointed at his watch and said she would be back from her lunch at 2.30pm. Precisely. Obviously, we would have made arrangements for our lunch.
With that he was gone, leaving us in charge of around ten million euros- worth of new and used cars, the keys for which were conveniently dangling from a giant board near the (open) automatic doors to the workshop.
A despairing call to a French friend’s mobile revealed that he had been on his way to lunch, but would come and pick us up. Nobody should suffer the cruel and unnatural punishment of going without their lunch, no matter how responsible they were for a lack of foresight and planning.
An hour later and we were racing down a highway, desperately seeking sustenance before the witching hour of 2pm. Our chauffeur was not familiar with that part of town, and things were looking grim. Then, just as I was about to suggest a singalong to keep our spirits up or picking straws to see who amongst us would make the ultimate sacrifice and become lunch, my wife spotted the magic sign of the crossed knife and fork. Within minutes we were parked, in through the door and seated with another hundred diners, all well into their meals.
In the way that these things happen to us in France, serendipity had come into full play. Not only had we chanced upon a much-respected ouvrier (cheap lunch) restaurant, but it was owned and run by someone we knew. We regularly take our dog for walks around a lake near our mountain home, and in summertime our host runs a busy creperie on the shore. As he explained, he had one business for the good weather, and one for the bad. As Donella pointed out while we attacked the first of four courses for less than a tenner a head, it also appeared that the boss had a new wife. The lady who had served us and been given an affectionate squeeze in passing was not, she said, the same woman whose waist the owner had regularly encircled at the creperie during the summer.
When my wife asked our French friend’s opinion. he looked surprised that she was surprised, and neglected his fillet of coley fish in cream and white wine sauce long enough to give a puzzled Gallic shrug. It was, he opined, obvious. The owner had the more svelte lady of the lake for summertime, and the larger lady of the town for when the winter winds blew.
What could be a more sensible working and living arrangement than that...?