An exciting week: our B&B website has finally gone live, we’ve been Christmas shopping, and I’ve added yet more documentation to my burgeoning carte grise dossier.
Having received encouragement from our IT consultant up in Normandy, we decided to unleash www.lepicvert.com onto an unsuspecting global village, such that we are now inviting anyone with a computer to come and stay with us in a house we’re not yet living in (obviously they don’t have to bring a computer, I suppose I mean anyone with Internet access). However, we have kind of made it clear on the site that we’ll only be taking bookings once we’ve moved in, spruced the place up a bit, and registered with all the appropriate official bodies, so it’s not too dodgy, and anyway if we get arrested I’ll sing like a canary and bring the devil-may-care IT consultant down with me.
The last few days have seen some lovely clear weather here on the Vendée/Deux Sevres border, with the loveliness tempered somewhat, well completely, by a wind bitter enough to rip the hairs off your chest. It seems to be coming from a northerly direction, and I seem to remember that that usually means trouble. The plummeting temperatures have severely tested the new electronic notice board recently erected in our ‘downtown’ area, as the Americans would have it (ie in our case the bit next to the church). Vegas-style proclamations welcoming people to the village, and scrolling messages rather redundantly explaining that the reader is looking at the village’s new notice board, are underlined by the stark announcement that the temperature is a somewhat un-Nevadan -2; and that’s without that windchill factor thing that the weathermen always darkly refer to. With no sign of wind-abatement in the offing, I’ll now monitor it to see how low it’s programmed to go.
However, despite the weather, I donned my balaclava helmet and went for a walk the other day and saw, dead in a verge, what I’ve subsequently been told was a coypu. At the time, I felt quite sad that this unusual-looking creature had apparently met such a violent death on the road to L’Absie, but then I read that since they were somewhat short-sightedly introduced to Europe in the middle of the last century, they’ve made life hellish for many of our good, honest Euro-mammals by ruining habitats and, erm, some other naturalistically complex concepts like that. On reflection, I also thought that he must have been pretty dozy to get himself run over on the L’Absie road, whose volume of traffic isn’t exactly at M25 levels, and all feelings of sadness evaporated, to be replaced by feelings of hypothermia. Half-frozen, I returned chez nous for claret and sympathy.
Yesterday, we went Christmas shopping in the megametrolopolopolis that is Fonteney le Comte. I was anticipating the Dante’s Inferno scenario one tends to get in every English town centre/out of town centre/rural shopping hellhole the wrong side of November, but the gigantic Hyper U seemed to house just one Vendéen shopper to every hectare of its apparently excessive floorspace.
Glorifying in this capaciousness, I pushed my chariot up and down the aisles with gay abandon, throwing vaguely appropriate gifts in as and when (only joking, My Family), and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, we were through the checkout and I didn’t feel like killing anyone. Result.
As mentioned, the carte grise dossier grows apace, the latest addition being the quittus fiscale. A few days prior to the Christmas shopping expedition, we battled through the fog sitting obstinately over the Vendée river on our way to Fontenay. The Office du Tourisme (Syndicat d’Initiative in old money) gave us directions to the Hotel des Impots, and off we went to speak proper French.
After a little trepidation and consequent trembling hands (fortunately I was able to pass that off as weather-induced), I passed the fonctionnaire our various official papers, and after a delightful conversation about engine sizes, we were sent packing with a nice new certificate and, wonder of wonders, a complimentary word on our linguistic skills! All we need now is our controle technique thing, and we’ll have a dossier fit for a carte grise.
January 4th is the fateful day for the controle technique - I’m fully expecting the Land Rover to ruin my life yet again, but he has been going pretty well of late, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of his electrical innards are currently hanging out as part of some multiple-fixing project of Squidge’s. I was halfway to the supermarket today when I looked in the rearview mirror to see the naked bulb of the central rear brake light mechanism dangling against the rear window, with its casing, screws and washers dribbling around in the boot below. Luckily, the gendarmes were all too busy checking up on fraudulent B&B businesses at the time, leaving me free to dangle.
That’s about it for now. I’d just like to wish all my blog readers (and I’m assured by James Admin that there are more than none) a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and a lovely 2007.
Oh, I should just say to all you France-based folk that I’ve got one or two ‘Mark’s Blog 2007’ calendars of scandalously poor quality for sale. Obviously, I can’t come door to door with them, so perhaps if you just send your cheques to Living France, payable to me, we can post them out to you (just leave the amount space blank).
A bientot…
Big storm last night, couldn’t sleep, got me thinking about a chat I had yesterday with a real live Frenchman.
I was out taking my daily constitutional, and he emerged from a waterlogged field, wearing regulation bleus de travail and wellies, said something unintelligibly guttural to me and we shook hands. He was clearly a perceptive fellow as I was something like two seconds into my introductory sentence when he realised I was English.
Now I’m enjoying the steep linguistic learning curve I’m on at the moment, and I really like trying out my French on French people, but bizarre as it sounds, we haven’t had much chance to do so recently because the weather’s been too rough to venture out, so we end up speaking nonsensical English to each other, and I find myself typing ‘All work and no play, makes Mark a dull boy’ over and over again, and then pursuing Squidge through the house with an axe. However, I digress…
The language thing. I’ve existed in a comfort zone of holiday French for a long time now, confident in my ability to ask for beer, wine, food and accommodation, and then to thank people for providing me with beer, wine, food and accommodation. It got to the stage where I was affording myself the luxury of experimenting with a broad Inspector Clusoe accent for that authentic flavour, an accent I was complimented on by a waiter in Carnac once, incidentally.
But now that we’ve decided to live in France, rather than just take holidays here, everything’s changed and the comfort zone has disappeared. The words for beer, wine, food and accommodation have necessarily been replaced by those for wheel wrench, rawl plug, planning permission and edible dormouse (glis glis). The accent experimentation has gone as I concentrate solely on blurting out all the new vocabulary and verbs, and attempting correct structures. Where previously I only needed to tense everything presently, I now have to talk about things that have happened, and things that are going to happen, if I’m to sound vaguely intelligible.
So anyway, this conversation…
We shook hands and started chatting in the lane. The lanes round my way are used almost exclusively by mangey dogs and aggressive geese, so as long as we each kept a wary eye out for the odd goose, we were in no danger, certainly not from motor cars. It was clear that the Frenchman was in no hurry to go anywhere, having either become bored with checking waterlogged fields, or having checked his last field of the day, and my time isn’t exactly at a premium at the moment, so we lingered….
My new friend, let’s call him Jean-Francois, asked where I was from in England, whether I liked France etc. I told him that we had just bought a house in the Ariege, and would be moving there in a few weeks time, and that part of our employment plan was to run a chambres d’hotes business. JF considered this foolish, bordering on contemptible, but conceded that perhaps with the additional winter season in the mountains it could be just about feasible.
He then asked whether I would apply for French citizenship in order to involve myself fully in the democratic process. I said probably not, hadn’t really thought about it, didn’t know whether Segolene Royale was ‘a good thing’, or whether Sarky would be ‘a bad thing’, but he didn’t hear me mention Sarky. The very mention of Royale sent him recoiling across the lane grimacing. ‘An actress’, ‘bad for ecology’ he asserted. This reference to ecology wasn’t as bafflingly random as it might appear. He’d asked me earlier what I did as a job in England, and I said ‘ecologique’, which is what, a few weeks ago, the YTS boy at Credit Agricole told me I had done as a job in England, once he’d recovered from the shock of the realisation that I was taking approximately a 100% pay cut to come and live and work in his country. I noticed JF’s interest perk up considerably when I added that I had been involved in giving grants to farmers….!
There was then a mildly awkward little lull, and a bit of foot shuffling, so given that we were discussing politicians I blurted out that I considered that Margaret Thatcher had been bad for people who worked in the power stations. I hadn’t meant people who work in power stations, I had probably meant miners though I can’t be sure, but the sentence appeared perfectly formed in my mind before I opened my mouth - an opportunity too good to waste. This seems to be where I’m at on the learning curve. If something comes to me, and my brain reckons it might be grammatically acceptable, I say it, regardless of context or relevance.
So we’d covered politics, accurately and comprehensively, and at this point I announced to him, I know not why and apropos of nothing, that I like buzzards. Again, it just drifted into my head so I said it. He understandably wondered if I’d used the correct word, and if I really meant buzzards, but after a bit of a mime from me (miming the movement of a buzzard in the middle of the countryside wasn’t something I’d ever done in England), he realised I meant what I’d said.
Astutely sensing that the English way of conversing was to lurch uncertainly from one unrelated topic to another, he then asked me if I’d ever been to Puy de Fou. I said no, he told me it was formidable, and we finally stuttered to a halt, shook hands and parted.
A thoroughly enjoyable quarter of an hour. As I walked home, a buzzard flew overhead, eee’ing to its mate perching in a tree in the next field, presumably asking if it had ever been to Puy de Fou. And then the rain returned….
A bientot