I am writing this as lunchtime looms in a typical bar in a typical Breton market town at the end of the week before Christmas. A lot of people would think it not a bad place and time to be in my shoes and seat. Especially with lunchtime as well as Christmas looming.
If I seem to have overused the word ‘typical’ it is because I can think of no better word to say what I mean and feel in this instance. I do not like it when people try to impose their stereotypes or prejudices or misconceptions on to others (and particularly me), but some things are so, well, typical that the use of the adjective is truly justified. My thesaurus offers plenty of alternative synonyms for the word, but I think ‘ordinary’, ‘unexceptional’ or ‘common’ would be an insult to the typical rural French institutions I am attempting to describe.
There must be tens of thousands of market towns in France, and all will be the same but different. The population will be numbered in a handful of hundreds to the early thousands, and the town will truly come to life on market day. People who could get the same goods at half the price from their local supermarket will descend on the market square to ingest the atmosphere, and to recall times long forgotten and never actually experienced by the modern French country dweller. Times have also changed in the nature of goods on sale, and nowadays you are much more likely to come away from a market with a set of hand carved African drums than a live sheep. But at some special markets, local farmers do still meet long before the stalls are built. There they will do their business and then retire to the nearest bar to pretend to be unhappy about the deals they have struck with farming friends and foes.
The bar in which I sit is not only the nearest bar to the action on market day; it is also a classic of its genre. The décor appears to have been modelled on or left untouched since the early 70s. This means that rather than an attempt at recreating ye olde country pub which never was or a garish imitation of what the owners think a trendy Paris bar would or should look like, the age of the tables and chairs and fixtures and fittings is about the same as the clothes of the oldest regular customers. Adverts will be of the same vintage, and feature drinks that are no longer available and cigarettes that may now not be smoked on the premises. To handle and make a modest profit from such a bar takes a firm hand, and I can see that this one is in the most firmest and capable of hands. They are as usual female. Madame is, like the advertising, of a past if indeterminate age, and it is possible she has looked and dressed as she does now for several decades. She floats effortlessly around the bar topping up glasses and taking orders and (especially) giving them to her husband, who is very much and very properly the support act. Madame is clearly in charge, but in no more a way than the wives of the exclusively male clientelle would be in charge at their homes.
At the moment, Madame’s attention is devoted to a large table surrounded by farmers who are obviously gathered for the après haggle session, and who represent a complete gamut of age and size variations. There are eight members of the clique in total, and they range from a downy-cheeked young man to a withered and frail oldster who must have spent at least eighty winters and summers working on the land with his now skeletal and shaking hands. All the men wear the all-season Breton farming uniform of peaked cap and bib and brace overalls under well-worn jackets, and you feel they would be unfamiliar if not unrecognizable to their closest friends if they wore civilian clothing. One of the men is the biggest Breton I have ever seen, and must weigh in at not much less than a slaughter-ready boar. Like so many hugely fat men, he is very precise and delicate in his movements, and lifts his thimble-sized glass to his lips with just two sausage-sized fingers. Madame is now circling the table, topping up glasses from the half-dozen bottles she effortlessly totes. As she reaches the end of the round, one of the farmers reaches for a small purse, unzips it, counts out some change and looks at the coins as if parting from a lover before handing them over. Her customers toast each other and the day, and it is good to see how the youngest man helps the veteran get to grips with his glass and makes a comforting remark when a dribble is spilled. It must be reassuring to know that in the still for him unimaginably distant future he too will be well looked after by the new members of this band of brothers.
Nodding to the group and acknowledging the incurious and not unfriendly looks, I seek out the toilet and find it to be as comfortingly dated as the rest of the premises. On return, I look through the plastic stripped curtain between passageway and kitchen, and see that the table is set for lunch. There are two plates skirted by knives and forks, a basket of bread and a bottle already opened and breathing in the delicious aroma of what is in the oven. Everything is so rigidly and somehow ceremonially in place and ready for the inviolable sacrament of lunch that is like looking at an altar piece set up for communion.
Back in the bar, the tables and chairs are emptying as customers take themselves off for their lunch at home. In Britain there would have been a call for last orders or a meaningful shuffling of chairs and clearing of tables, but here there has not been a word spoken. Everyone knows that Madame and her husband will be eating at precisely noon, and that they should be too.
As we pay our bill, I point out to my wife how the giant farmer is gently escorting the old man from the premises. I wonder if the big man is taking the little old man for lunch; my wife watches as the man mountain deposits the frail figure into the passenger seat of the battered van, then observes it might just be that the small man is the huge man’s lunch…
Two of our hens have gone off lay, and the response from Breton friends and neighbours has been predictably true-to-type.
When he arrived on his daily visit to check out what townie/Brit madness we have been up to, old Alain said this was a signal that it was time to start eating our chickens rather than just their eggs. If we were too busy (which was code for ‘If you are too squeamish’) It would take no more than a minute for him to stretch the selected necks. If we were unfamiliar with the simple but delicious classic country dish poule au pot (code for ‘As you are British and thus not able to boil and egg properly’), he would be only too pleased to do the cooking and invite us over for dinner.
When my wife huffily explained that she had no wish to have her beloved Blanche foully murdered, let alone attend a dinner at which she was on the menu, our neighbor went into overdrive with his pantomime puffing-out-of-cheeks-rolling-of-eyes- removal –of-cap-and-scratching-of-head-before-a-final-exasperated-sigh routine. He then favoured us with his standard parting expression of pity mixed with incredulity, and stomped off to tell Jean-Yves about our latest demonstration of Martian-like behavior.
His departure was followed by the arrival of our friend Little Georges, who owns an entire hamlet on the other side of the mountain which his wife keeps fully inhabited with more varieties and numbers of animals than trooped up the gangplank of Noah’s Ark. They are also the only couple we know to own a bull called Lulu.
Though not much taller than our largest hen, Georges is another stereotype and comes straight from Central Casting as the alpha male French countryman who lives in an uncomplicated world where the male is the dominant species and any problems with the female of any species can be solved by a good rogering.
Thus it came as no surprise to learn that Georges’ solution was not to kill and eat our hens, but to get a rooster in. Having a hen house with no male chicken to keep the inmates in order was asking for trouble, he said, and became so excited at the prospect of a sorting out our temporary problem that I thought he was going to offer to do the job on Blanche and Whitney personally.
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Jean Yves was not wearing his hearing aids when we met in the lane after lunch, so our conversation was limited to a mixture of me yelling in bad French, worse Breton and mediocre English, and both of us using universal sign language. When we had exchanged greetings, Jean said he had heard about our egg laying problems but did not think we should put a rooster in with the hens. When I asked why, he said that the crowing of a cockerel was the surest sign to Mr Renard that chickens were in the area. He knew about my arrangement with the fox family in the forest that I would feed them and they would not feed off our hens, but he feared any advertising by a cockerel might cause them to break our one-sided contract.
As we talked, Jean-Yves saw me watching Milly crouching on the verge, and asked why I always paid such keen attention to our dog having a bowel motion. I explained that, when Donella was not walking with us, she liked a full report on the texture, colour, consistency and overall appearance of Milly’s stools. As he leaned forward and cupped his hand around his ear as if fearing he had misheard and misunderstood me, I said that Milly cannot tell us how she is feeling, and studying her poo was a good way to check she was in good health. I realised that it might seem a little over-obsessive, but we were not as bad as a British couple in the next village. Because the wife suffers with her legs and is unable to walk the dog, her husband not only reports on the condition of their eight dogs’ poo, but takes advantage of the latest digital technology by filming it. When he returns, it is a simple matte to plug the camera into their wide-screen television so they can study the evidence together over breakfast. Another advantage of transferring the film to the big screen is that they can show the footage to other dog-loving visitors.
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Underlining our ambivalent attitudes towards the animals we keep or eat, I got a panicky e-mail this morning from a friend who lives in Normandy and says she is in a sticky and potentially very bloody situation. She and her husband decided recently to share the cost of a whole pig with another pair of expats. It works out far cheaper by buying gros, as the French would say, and the meat will be really fresh as the animal will be slaughtered to order.
But there is a problem. Tradition in her corner of France demands that one member of the buying syndicate has to attend the ritual stunning, hanging, killing, bleeding, disembowelling and dismemberment of the pig. As the husbands have done the unmanly thing and refused to volunteer, the two couples have agreed to draw straws to select the execution witness. Although my correspondent says she is a committed carnivore and hopefully not a hypocrite, she cannot stand the thought of watching the animal’s death throes. It is strange how so many enthusiastic meat eaters (including me) do not want to be reminded of where the piece of meat on our plate began its journey. I will write back and suggest that the lady either pulls out of the deal, bullies her husband into volunteering, or quite simply cheats by ensuring that she is in charge of the draw - and therefore who will end up with the short straw.