George East's Blog

Friends and Neighbours

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…