2007 - a Good Vintage in Spite of the Weather

One of the reasons I started this blog was to save a few trees and use it at Christmas to keep friends and family up to date with our news. My motives weren’t completely altruistic, though, and were partly prompted by the slog of printing out 60-odd double-sided copies on our ink-jet printer, then folding them and stuffing them in the envelopes. So, if you got one last year, I hope you appreciate that it was a real labour of love!

However, the problem with avoiding the donkey work is that I’ve had more time to write this piece, so I apologise for it being so long. There’s no prize for getting to the end, and I won’t be offended if you give up half-way through!

It’s hard to believe we’re into our second year of our new life in France. We feel very well established in the village, with Sarah doing a spot of English tuition for friends’ children, and occasional sessions at the local primary school. Jonathan has also been helping village friends with the odd computer problem, and regularly plays tennis locally.

Through local contacts, Sarah has also started helping a lawyer in the nearby town to improve his English and is really enjoying it. We’ve also been far more involved in community activities than we were ever able to do in Godalming. Jonathan won third prize in the bowling at the village celebrations for the national day on 14^th July and as a result was pictured in the local paper. We’ve also both enjoyed being invited to classical piano concerts and French song evenings.

Probably our most important news this year is that we’re the proud (or should I say besotted?) owners of a girl golden Labrador puppy called Circé (pronounced ‘Seer-say’). We’ve both always been fond of dogs but it’s only been feasible to have one since we left the rat race; neither of us felt it was fair to have a dog while we were both working. Our feeling that it would be best to wait until after the building work was put to one side after we adopted a lost Labrador for a weekend last year. Although his owner retrieved him (sorry for the pun) after a couple of days, he left a big gap when he went and we decided we couldn’t wait; probably a good job as we’ve not progressed as much as we’d hoped with our building plans this year, but more of that later.

We were both very keen to find a reputable breeder and through the website of the French equivalent of the Kennel Club we tracked down a really nice Labrador breeder about an hour’s drive from home. We first met Circé when she was three weeks old and she came home at the beginning of October when she was almost three months. Since then, as you can imagine, our lives have not been entirely our own and we’re enjoying every minute of it. She’s settled down really well, is as bright as a button and has quite a penchant for brushes, as you can see from the picture!

The other thing that’s taken up much of Sarah’s time since the Spring is the vegetable patch she’s renting from friends. It’s about ten minutes’ walk away from the house in a lovely spot by a stream with beautiful views across fields to the village. From what people have told us this part of Cirfontaines could have been the vegetable farm for the monastery down the road at Clairvaux. It’s quite a thought that people may have been growing vegetables on Sarah’s patch since the 13^th century! It’s quite a big plot – 27 metres by 9 – and although Jonathan has helped in the evenings and at weekends, Sarah has done most of the graft. She’s found it’s been a great way to meet people, as her fellow plot-owners have given her lots of advice, much appreciated as the growing season here is completely different to what she was used to in Surrey. Her ‘brouette anglaise’ (a folding wheelbarrow she bought at a Hampton Court flower show several years ago) and the English tools she uses have been quite a talking point.

Weather-wise 2007 wasn’t a good year to be a vegetable-growing debutante but we’ve been in good company as even the older people in the village thought this was the worst and wettest summer they could remember and, following a very mild winter, this made for a plague of enormous slugs. The worst thing was losing the whole tomato crop (more than 70 plants!) to mildew, but the consolation was that so did most other people, even those who had less compunction about using all sorts of chemicals.

However, the courgettes went mad in all the rain (even the slugs couldn’t keep up with them) and Sarah’s very proud to have grown such a wide range of vegetables on the plot, including fennel, peppers, chillies, sweetcorn, broccoli, carrots, celeriac, cucumbers, parsnips, French beans and squash. The spinach is still going strong and we only picked the last of the lettuces a few days ago. So who knows what’s possible if we have a good summer!

Circé enjoys going to the vegetable patch and has been a great help with the harvest, as you can see!

Jonathan’s also done his fair share of gardening, and has enjoyed it even more since he bought himself a tractor-mower and trailer at the end of the summer. Although Sarah wasn’t convinced at first that he needed one, she was won over after Jonathan nobbled one of her friends to tell her how much he needed one! He was right as it’s reduced by half the time it takes him to cut the grass.

The wet summer means we haven’t enjoyed the pool this year as much as we did last year, although when Jonathan’s nephew, William, and his friend Coryan visited in September they were determined to swim every day! We were very hopeful when we had the pool opened up for the season at the end of April, as we’d been enjoying what turned out to be some of the best weather of the year in the early Spring. We were foiled, though, when the pool maintenance men (or piscinistes) spotted that the plastic liner had cracked and would need replacing. Without boring you with the technical detail this meant draining the pool of all 100,000 litres of water, removing the old liner and its felt ‘underlay’ then getting a new one fitted before re-filling the pool. Mind you, when we bought the house the former owner told us that it had already outlived its 10-year life expectancy so the last two years have been a bonus.

After all the sun we’d had in the spring, this was very disappointing, but a couple of days after this news the weather broke and it rained for pretty much all of May and early June. While this compensated for our disappointment, it also delayed the fitting of the replacement liner which can only be done in completely dry weather. Normally the removal of the old liner and the fitting of the new one would take two days, but after having one fitting appointment rained off, we decided to remove the old liner ourselves, meaning the specialists only needed one dry day.

Taking the liner our was the easy part but stripping off the underfelt from the concrete pool walls was a devil of a job, made more unsavoury by the swamp of green slimy rainwater which had collected in the deepest part of the pool. We only achieved this with a lot of help from our old friends Lis and Will and their two girls, Josie and Pippa, who came over from Switzerland for a working weekend in May.

Picture: Josie, William and Jonathan scraping the felt by the swamp at the bottom of the empty pool.

Eventually we had a few days respite from the rain in the middle of June and the piscinistes fitted the new liner in blazing sunshine. Of course a week later, by the time we’d re-filled the pool with another 100,000 litres of water (and yes, we’re metred!) the rainy weather had set in again.

The frustrating thing is that we had a really good Autumn and if the pool had been heated we’d probably have been able to swim until mid-October. Unfortunately the water never had the chance to get properly warm during the summer so while the air temperature was warm later in the year, the water was far too cold for any but the hardiest swimmer. In fact we do have the means to heat it using the central heating boiler but as this is powered by propane and you could probably see the dial on the tank moving steadily down as the temperature of those 100,000 litres inched up (or should I say centimetred up?) we’ve never attempted it. This has spurred Jonathan to research other means of heating the pool and, given we’ve got a huge almost south-facing roof at the back of the house, we’re planning to have solar heating installed.

This is only one of Jonathan’s plans to save the world. Since a friend bought him George Monbiot’s book ‘Heat’ for his birthday in January (at my suggestion, I have to admit), Jonathan’s been a man with a mission. He’s replaced all our light bulbs and is in the middle of his insulation programme before the winter sets in. He’s becoming an authority on alternative energy and I expect by this time next year we’ll have a log-fuelled central heating boiler and will be selling electricity to EDF! I jest not.

This brings us, finally, to news of our building work. We engaged an architect to draw up plans for the house and both outbuildings in September 2006. By March we’d got plans for the house but not for the two barns which we also want to renovate. Worse, the proposed costs were around three times the budget we’d set. While we’re canny enough to know that projects like ours typically go over budget and we had allowed a bit of a ‘cushion’, we were disappointed that all this had taken so long. The cardinal sin from our point of view was the fact that this news was communicated in a letter rather than in person! Sacking him, in French, was one of the hardest things Sarah has done, especially as he and his team were so nice. So we found ourselves back to square one in the Spring with no plans and no architect. Once again we turned to the internet, found the website of the French professional association of architects and got on the phone. After organising on-site meetings with three local architects, we’ve found one who’s easy to communicate with, understands what we want and is very enthusiastic about the project. So as we come to the end of the year we have plans for all three buildings including creating a two-bedroomed holiday cottage from one of the barns as well as adding a bedroom, more bathrooms and an office for Jonathan to our house. The outline figures look much better, too, so we’re hoping we can get going with the planning approval and tendering for builders in the new year.

We’ve had a lot of pleasure from the visits of friends and family this year; Sarah’s dad has enjoyed several visits and helped her paint the front gates in March. Although he’s not been in the best of health recently, he’s looking forward to spending Christmas and new year with us. Jonathan’s parents have had the best of the weather, coming in both April and then September – probably the best two months as far as sunshine was concerned. We love welcoming friends and family to our home and exploring with them this lovely and unspoilt corner of France.

Lots of interesting things happened in 2007 which never made it onto these (electronic) pages so one of my resolutions for 2008 will be to update this blog more often. If you’d like to get more of our news by email, use the ‘Subscribe’ option on the right hand side of the screen near the beginning of this newsletter (underneath the photo of me!).

We hope 2007 was a good year for you, too and that 2008 is at least as good for you and everyone close to you.

Lunch by the pool and seven jars of mincemeat

Yesterday was rather a special day. After a week or so of heavy grey skies and rain, during which we felt as if we were spending most of our time wiping Circé’s feet or washing her undercarriage, the sun shone, we opened the shutters and Jonathan cut the hedge in his t-shirt (look, no fleece!).

Although there was a bit of a breeze we had to have lunch outside, so we briefly got back into our summer routine of loading up a couple of trays with bread, cheese, and salad, put on our sunglasses and headed for the pool terrace. Even though the pool was closed a couple of months ago it really did feel like summer. Actually it was even better than most days last summer. As I munched on home-grown salad, still growing strong in the veg patch, I was thinking how awful it would be if we were only on holiday and would have to pack up and go back ‘home’ tomorrow. Jonathan broke the silence; “I’m really glad we moved here. Aren’t you?” Great minds think alike.

Meanwhile, Circé was enjoying her usual pastime of getting into trouble. In spite of our emphatic shouts of “no” and “come”, she was having great fun walking on the pool’s winter cover. The best thing is that it’s made of a very fine mesh which means that as she walks over it, the pool water wells up pleasingly between her paws. I can understand why she likes it so much because it takes me back to childhood memories of watching the sand wash between my feet as the sea came in and out at Waxham beach. While the cover holds her weight at the moment as a huge dog who’s temporarily a reasonable size, things won’t be the same when she’s a big girl, so this palaver had to stop.

Actions speak louder than words, all those puppy training manuals would have us believe, so after a couple of episodes of pool-cover paddling and shouting “no”, we banished her from the terrace, very pleased with our decision to go for a fence rather than a pool alarm when the legislation came in. We half expected (and feared) that she’d spend the rest of our lunchtime either whining or peering in accusingly with her pink nose stuck between the bars of the fence. The so-called punishment was obviously not effective, though, because she simply wandered off to amuse herself with the watering can.

It’s no surprise we’re having mixed success with her training because she’s far too clever for us. She sits nicely before we present her with her food and she understands ‘stay’ when we put her in the back of the car and pull down the hatchback. She’s also got the hang of toilet training, and has worked out how to outwit the stupid humans by pretending to wee or poo so she can get extra treats. The worst, though, is that when she’s doing something interesting she wilfully ignores everything we say. What chance a miracle next week when we’re off for her first proper training session?

And what about the mincemeat?

What really made this an exceptional day was that this surprising treat of a lunch outside wasn’t in April or October but today, Tuesday 5^th DECEMBER. The day I also made seven jars of mincemeat (far later than if I had been an organised cook with no Labrador puppy, I know) AND we had our first two Christmas cards in the post.

Of course today, it’s raining again.

Circé est arrivée!

She’s certainly made her mark on our lives since she arrived almost two weeks ago. Our golden Labrador puppy was eleven weeks old last Monday and she celebrated with her favourite activities – helping with the housework (she especially loves sweeping the kitchen floor, loading the dishwasher and re-arranging the slippers) and the gardening - mostly picking flowers!

Circé is the name she was given by her breeder, Evelyne Bourgoin. As her mother is Athena, her sister and brothers are also named after gods and goddesses, all beginning with ‘c’, as that’s evidently the letter for dog names this year. In spite of the goddess Circé sounding like a rather tricky character we decided that it’s a pretty name which suits her well. Besides that, it’s much better than any of the names we could come up with – she just doesn’t look like a Clarrie or a Carmela!

Even the most assiduous buffing up on the essentials of bringing up a happy, well-balanced dog isn’t preparation enough for the life-changing experience of getting your first puppy. We bought every dog manual we could find in the Oxfam book shop in Farnham, and a few others, but none of them told us how scary it is to think that her life and well-being are entirely in our hands. If we don’t get the toilet-training right she might grow up to be a delinquent and judging by the size of her paws if she is going to be a delinquent then she’ll be a big one!

But even in the few days we’ve had her she’s gained in confidence and has already learnt to ‘sit’ before her meals and to come when she’s called – in two languages. We’re trying to teach her to be bilingual so she understands our French friends as well as us. Mme Bourgoin told us that she has come across other Labradors who understand both English and French, and that the Labrador is one of the few breeds intelligent enough to cope with this. Maybe Circé has a head start, though, as her father is English.

Regardless of the language, there’s still a way to go as far as her training is concerned. Her toilet habits are a bit erratic, but that’s probably more about us not reading the signs properly. Why is it she can spend an hour chasing about with us outside and then five minutes later do a wee on the doormat? The good news is that she can be completely clean during the night -provided the day starts at 5:30.

But in spite of all of this, there are many unexpected pleasures in being a puppy-owner; the sweet doggy smell made fragrant with lavender when she’s been sauntering around the bushes in the garden; her joy every morning when she realises we didn’t really abandon her overnight and the delight on her face as she bounds towards us when we call her, ears flapping – who says dogs can’t smile?

Take a look at our Flickr pictures of Circé and her family.

Labradors de la Tour Farmina

What the Wikipedia says about the goddess Circe

Heralds of love – or death – or Autumn ?

Our friend and neighbour Claire came round recently with a basket of wild mushrooms which she and her brother had collected from the forest above the village. They were slaty-grey tubes, almost black, and mixed with bits of leaf, bark and vibrant green moss.

“They’re ‘Trompettes de la mort’”, announced Claire, but just in case we were worried about such an alarming name she assured us that she and her brother, an expert in identifying wild mushrooms, had eaten some the day before. She was living proof that they were the real McCoy. To the untrained English ear the rather sinister name could be mistaken for ‘Trompettes de l’amour’ and maybe this is a more appropriate name for such a precious gift. I was very touched not only that she should be so generous in sharing them with us but also that she’d tried them first before giving some to us!

The next day I sorted out some of the trompettes from the moss, bark and leaves and gave them a quick wash and dry in the salad spinner. Purists would probably be horrified by this but they needed a light wash to get rid of the smaller bits of the forest floor and I couldn’t think of a better way of drying them. Once I’d done that I sautéed a couple of shallots in some butter and added the mushrooms, but as I was lightly turning them in the butter over a low heat I spotted an ominous small grey blob and had to remove the whole lot from the pan very quickly.

Ten minutes later, I’d inspected each trumpet and cooking continued. The moral of the story so far is that the fine tubes of the trumpets make great hiding places for little slugs so if you don’t want to make your guests really think you’re trying to poison them, slit each one open and inspect very carefully.

I kept all this hidden from Jonathan – quite an achievement given that while all this was going on he was with me in the kitchen making his speciality omelettes to go with the mushrooms.

I was very surprised that he’d been so enthusiastic when Claire came bearing her gift as up to now he’d been adamant that any fungus which didn’t come from a supermarket was by definition a toadstool. So I knew any additional protein in his lunch would cause a wobble which might wipe any wild food off the menu for ever.

Once this little hurdle had been overcome I stirred the now-certified-vegetarian trumpets lightly in the butter for a few minutes before adding chopped parsley.

After our lunch, I thought about what to do with the rest of the lovely trompettes. Googling ‘preserving wild mushrooms’ gave me a few options and I decided that of these, open-freezing (sans limaces) gave me the most flexibility for their future use (and also gave me the chance to try out the nifty little tray which came with our new fridge-freezer).

This googling revealed some other useful information about trompettes de la mort. According to l’internaute.com they should start appearing in October and are at their best in November and December. So in this year of decidedly weird weather maybe they’re really trumpeting that Autumn is here.

Jonathan’s a champion….. and Sarah reaches the play-offs

After weeks of rain, the sun finally came out so everyone was in a party mood for the village’s 14^th July celebrations.

Being a small village of around 200 people, the day’s events are far from elaborate and hardly vary from year to year, but this simplicity, and the opportunity the activities present for meeting old and new friends makes them very enjoyable.

Everything starts at 11.00 with a brief ceremony at the war memorial, this year in the presence of some of the local pompiers in their ceremonial uniforms complete with silver helmets as well as the marching band from the next village. This was followed by kir and brioche in the village hall after which all the sensible French people retire for a leisurely family lunch. We, on the other hand, went for a bike ride.

The main activities start in the late afternoon – fishing games and a merry-go-round for the children, a mobile rifle range and, of course a bar, for the adults. Most attention, though, focuses on the two skittles alleys, one run by members of the town council and the other by the sports and leisure committee. The former is free and everyone can have one attempt to win a prize. Mind you, there’s no ‘run’ as such on this one – it’s set up on the road so the rough surface and patches of gravel add an element of surprise to the trajectory of the rough wooden balls. The committee’s alley is more sophisticated – it has a reasonably smooth wooden run and a rickety metal chute down which the balls are returned for the next player’s turn. There’s a charge for playing skittles on this one with the euros not used for the attractive prizes going into the sports and leisure funds.

Jonathan spent quite a long time studying tactics before attempting either of the runs himself. ‘Make your balls go diagonally’ he told me after watching one villager powering his shots arrow-straight along the wooden run and right between the skittles, ‘that way you’re more likely to knock down several with one ball’. As anyone who’s ever seen me play skittles at the Elephant and Castle will know, this sounds remarkably hopeful, so I was very surprised when towards the end of the afternoon one of the village councillors asked me to have another go at the ‘free’ alley. It turns out I was in the ladies’ third place playoffs! I got through the first round but inevitably got beaten by Mme Hargé who has much more experience!

Jonathan was more successful – he won the men’s third place play-offs at the more sophisticated alley and he’s now the proud owner of an electric circular saw. He’s very happy he came third because he wanted the saw far more than an electric coolbox or a coffee machine which were the first and second prizes. He even got into the local paper with his fellow-winners, Francois (whose wife knocked me out) and Michel.

After all this excitement there was still the lantern procession to the fireworks to look forward to but there was enough time before it got dark for something to eat from the barbeque accompanied by champagne served in what looked like overgrown shot glasses at 2 Euros a go.

It was a balmy evening so it was inevitable that we returned to the outdoor bar after the fireworks. As we sipped more of that rather good Champagne we ruminated with Monique and Bernard; the English have their fireworks in November when they celebrate a revolution thwarted and a monarch safe and sound and the French celebrate the reverse at a much better time of the year. What does that say about our two great nations? And isn’t it a shame that there’s no longer a bar in the village!

Up to our necks in courgettes

May and June whizzed by and the poor blog has been neglected. It’s not that there isn’t lots to write about – rather that there aren’t enough hours in the day. Yet when our friends from England ask me what I do with my time, I struggle to come up with a credible answer. Whatever I am doing, it’s certainly not sitting on the terrace with a good book; I have less time for reading now than I did when I was a commuter!

The reality is that I’ve spent most of my time over the last month or so, whenever it’s not been raining and even sometimes when it has, either in the garden or at my vegetable plot. Whatever the venue, the agenda has been the same – waging war on the slugs and weeds which have been doing so well in the warm damp weather or planting the backlog of seedlings which have been growing faster than I’ve been able to keep up with them.

I’ve just about caught up now and we’re starting to see some results, mostly in the form of monster courgettes (in the picture that’s a dinner plate, not a saucer!). With all this rain it feels like a game of vegetable grandmother’s footsteps – no sooner do I turn my back than they grow another 5cm.

Given Jonathan declared early on in our relationship that he didn’t like courgettes, this has been a bit of a challenge! I daren’t tell him that there’s a very fine line between a large courgette and a small marrow, because while he will eat courgettes as long as they’re well disguised, he won’t allow even a molecule of marrow to pass his lips.

A couple of weeks ago I was able to give the odd monster or two away, but now everyone’s in the same boat (and if you don’t believe me, google ‘courgette glut’ for enlightenment); my neighbour declined my offer of some more courgettes at the bread van last Friday.

There’s nothing for it but to seek out every palatable courgette recipe I can find and then freeze the surplus!

If you’re in the same predicament, my list of courgette recipes from the past week or so (plus a few I’m planning) might give you some inspiration:

• Courgette and Brie soup (made with our local cheese, Langres, rather than Brie) from The new Covent Garden soup company’s (first) book of soups

• Antonio Carluccio’s Sedani (a type of pasta) with courgettes and walnuts from BBC.co.uk’s recipe section. This is a dream ticket recipe as it sorts out more than one glut – we’re still eating last year’s walnuts and this year’s are already swelling on the tree!

• Petites (that’s a joke) courgettes farcis from Joanne Harris and Fran Ward’s ‘The French Market’

• Courgette and cheese gratin from Marks and Spencer’s ‘France – the food and the lifestyle’

• Pretty much everything from the courgette section of Sarah Raven’s recent ‘Garden Cookbook’ (published just when I was in the direst need and my current favourite). We particularly like the courgette risotto, courgette and dill farfalle and the courgette and lemon salad.

• I never go for more than a few days without cooking something from Nigel Slater’s ‘The Kitchen Diaries’ and his zucchini cakes with dill and feta are especially good (though I sometimes use French ewe’s cheese rather than feta). I have no doubts about this being my desert island book!

• I’ve also designs on the courgette and tomato pie and the broad bean and courgette pasta sauce recipes from Anna Ross’ ‘Green Cuisine’. The latter of these is another dream ticket recipe as the broad bean pods are also looking rather threatening!

So bring on those broad beans!

Présidential 2007

I wrote this piece earlier today, before the result was known, but I decided to publish anyway.

Since school I’ve always had a strong interest in politics so I’ve followed the 2007 Presidential elections as closely as my still-limited French will allow. Through the local paper and talking to friends, I think I have a reasonably good grip of how the process works, but I have had to rely on the UK media to understand the nuance of the political debate. My French just isn’t good enough (yet) and people here are much more discreet about their political opinions – no ‘Sarko’ or ‘Ségo’ posters stuck like ‘for sale’ signs in people’s gardens here.

In the run-up to the first round, the Journal of the Haute-Marne ran a feature on an Observer Journalist, Jason Burke, who wanted to understand the views of the citizens of a typical medium-sized French provincial town. To the delight of our local paper, he chose Chaumont and his piece in today’s edition gives the Préfecture (the capital town of Haute-Marne) a rare mention in the UK national media.

To the uninitiated Anglo-Saxon, the two-stage process may seem a Gallic mystery. In the first round, people voted for one of 12 candidates representing a wide range of interests and positions - from the Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition party to the Workers’ Struggle party and everything else in between. The Wikipedia’s entry on French political parties highlights how fragmented the landscape is; it lists 18 nationwide parties and many more minor ones, including five supporting the royalist cause (and I don’t mean those supporting Mme Royal). Only the parties who can gain the support of 500 ‘sponsors’ from elected officials in at least 30 different departments make the long ‘shortlist’ candidates for the first round.

The process is very open; the local paper publishes the results in detail for each commune and these are also posted on the noticeboard at the Mairie. This is how I know that at least a couple of our fellow inhabitants have Trotskyist sympathies and more than a dozen voted for the Front National (something I’ll worry about for the next five years, no doubt). It feels, too, as if voting is accepted as everyone’s social responsibility – 85% of the national electorate voted in the first round last month.

But elections are not about processes – it’s the result that’s important. From what I’ve read and heard both here and from the English media, both candidates believe that France needs reform and the fundamental debate is about how. Should she become more closely modelled on the liberal economies of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries or not?

As I see it, France has always been proud of its distinctly individual values - a sophisticated nation with, historically, a strong sense of social responsibility. Playing in the same playground as other western countries doesn’t have to mean playing by exactly the same rules. I fear France may become yet another place where what’s seen as ‘consumer choice’ and ‘economic freedom’ will lead to the sharp divides between the haves and the have-nots which we see elsewhere; she will become just another country where people use the comfort-blanket of shopping to pass the time when they’re not working.

Jason Burke sums it up far more eloquently than me in today’s ‘Observer’; the people of France are either voting to ‘Work longer to earn more’ or for ‘Human values not financial values’.

Jonathan is more optimistic – as his French teacher says prospective Presidents always say they’re going to change the things they so obviously can’t because these things are wired into the French nation’s psyche. There’s still hope for a nation for whom ‘soldiarité’ and ‘cohésion’ are part of the everyday vocabulary, and there’s so much more meaning attached to these simple words in French than can be conveyed in any translation into English.

Links

Jason Burke's article in today's 'Observer'

The Wikipedia on French political parties

The Wikipedia on the 2007 presidential elections

Life is tough

We saw the year’s first lone swallow last Saturday, and while one swallow doesn’t make a summer, things are harder for Jonathan when the sun shines. He has to stay at his desk staring at what I call the ‘ones and noughts’ on his computer screen while I play outside (his name for my ongoing efforts to tame the garden).

It all got too much earlier this week after the fourth or fifth day of continuous sunshine and so he tried to move the office outside. All very well, but even with the parasol the light was too strong and he couldn’t see the computer screen. The experiment failed and he and all his technical accoutrements had to go back inside.

In spite of these difficulties he’s enjoying a couple of weeks of respite – as the days get warmer we don’t need fires, except perhaps to relieve the evening chill, so he’s off wood chopping duty. However, next week the piscinistes come to open the pool for the summer and the daily maintenance routine will start. But don’t have too much sympathy – unlike the wood chopping (my shoulders are too puny) he could delegate the pool stuff to me. But the bottom line is that he enjoys fishing out the leaves, testing the pH and all that schoolboy chemistry. And a very good job of it he does too.

By the way, the lone swallow has been joined by two friends, so maybe we are heading for summer. I saw the three of them this morning in an aerobatic fly-past, chatting merrily together as swallows do. No sooner than the pool opens, they and no doubt more of their friends, will be swooping down to skim a drink of water in full flight – the best pool-side entertainment there is, although it is a bit off-putting if you’re in the water at the time. My challenge now I’ve got this blog going will be to get a picture for you.

Simple pleasures

Finding fragments of egg shell delicately arranged on the leaves on one of the cowslips which are growing in the shady, grassy area on my route to the washing line was a lovely reminder for me that Spring is well on its way.

In my previous, rushed existence I would never have spotted these first egg shells, even if there were cowslips in my Surrey lawn. For one reason, there were swathes of sunny Spring days when I never went into the garden – my leave-at-seven-a.m. and get-back-after-seven p.m. routine meant I missed much of what went on in the garden. The other reason is that I never put washing out to dry until I came here. OK, I helped my Mum hang things out when I was a child in Norfolk, although I was afraid of the jackdaw who used to run along the line trying to pull out the pegs after her. But in all the years since I left home and had to look after my own domestic jobs, it’s something I’d just never done – either for want of a garden or, more to the point latterly, for want of time.

As I pegged up duvet covers and towels in the sunshine, listening to the faintly jangling bells round the necks of M et Mme Petit’s sheep on the hillside and the happy clucks of our neighbours’ hens just over the fence, interjected with a strident cock-a-doodle every now and then, I reflected on what I’d been missing over the last twenty-plus years.

I’m very lucky that I have had the chance to change the pace of my life and get such delight from simple and apparently insignificant things. And I’ve still got the ironing to look forward to when the rain comes later this week – there’s nothing like steaming out those creases while listening to a good drama on radio 7. Once again, praise be for broadband!

On trains

As someone who commuted into London from Surrey before escaping to France, I was intrigued when Jonathan came back from his weekly trip to the office in Paris yesterday with a sorry story about dreadful delays on his way there. His tale of being stuck behind a broken down train and then being shunted backwards and forwards down suburban sidelines before arriving an hour and three quarters late would strike a chord with anyone who commuted on South West trains in the late 1990’s. Giving credit where credit is due, though, things had improved by the time I abandoned the commuting life.

But it wasn’t the similarity with horror stories from England which struck me, but rather the difference in the way customers were treated afterwards. Jonathan was completely gobsmacked when he and his fellow passengers were greeted on the concourse at Gare de l’Est by an army of SNCF staff handing out forms to enable the weary passengers to claim compensation for the delay.

How different from my Dad’s experience when he came over to visit us from England for the New Year. We made the mistake of booking his travel for 27^th Dec, after a Christmas engineering-fest on the line into Waterloo. His journey, which usually takes an hour, took about three so he was too late to have any chance of catching his connecting train to us from Lille, as there’s only one TGV per day serving that route. Unsurprisingly there were no South West trains staff ready and waiting with claim forms when his train did eventually arrive! When I later checked whether there was anything we could claim I drew a blank; as far as South West Trains were concerned they did all they needed to do by getting him to Waterloo, and how long it took to do this and any resulting problems were not considered.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that everything’s rosy with the trains over here. The Eurostar staff at Waterloo were incredibly helpful when my Dad had these problems in December, and I’ve always found the English Eurostar people incredible helpful whenever I’ve rung them (which is quite often, given we often help friends and family change their arrangements for coming to see us). I wish I could say the same about the Eurostar people at Gare du Nord this week.

My Dad comes to see us every couple of months and I’m really proud that he’s undaunted by doing the journey on his own, even though he’s well over 60 (he probably wouldn’t thank me for revealing his age on the world wide web but he was born in 1920). He had a great couple of weeks here with us and I accompanied him back to Paris on the first leg of his return trip last Thursday.

There was a bit of a spanner in the works when we discovered he’d lost his return Eurostar ticket. The really helpful chap on the Eurostar helpline told me that the ticket office in Paris could produce a duplicate ticket for a small charge. But it would have been even more helpful if he’d also told us to avoid lunchtime on Thursday 22^nd March because that’s when his Paris colleagues would be entering the French customer non-service awards.

If you know the Eurostar ticket office at Gare du Nord, you’ll know that there are two doors into the same ticket hall, one for business class passengers and one for the rest of us, with service desks designated for each passenger group. Even without that insider knowledge you can probably picture the scene – practically no-one in the business class queue and about twenty squeezed into the two metres between the head of the pleb queue and the door. As each transaction was taking about ten minutes and it was less than an hour before the next departure, everyone was getting pretty antsy. Now, I’m a great fan of the French commitment to proper lunch breaks and think much of the UK’s work-related stress would be resolved it we did the same but when first one and then another of the clerks went off for lunch and their replacements took some time to appear it did increase stress levels in our queue!

We were pretty relieved when we got to the head of the queue after about 20 minutes but these people were pretty serious about those customer non-service awards so our ordeal was by no means over. After explaining that the ticket was lost and that the Eurostar customer service centre had told us that we could get a replacement from the Paris ticket desk, the service agent went off to the back office, presumably to check with a manager. She was back after about 5 minutes, to confirm what we’d already told her. Then her colleague at the next desk arrived back from her break and so they had a bit of a chat. They perfectly judged how long to carry on with this because she started stamping papers in the way that only French people can do at just the point when my fairly high tolerance level was breached and I’d formulated in my head what I was going to say to get her back to the job in hand. After a few more clicks of the mouse she handed over the new ticket, a handwritten form detailing that the original ticket had been lost and a third, rather strange document which pretended to be a ticket to Calais but was, she assured us, really the receipt for the 23 euros we’d just paid for this experience. All in all about 15 minutes to do something which sounded so simple when I spoke to Eurostar on the phone!

After all that I’ll be disappointed if the Gare du Nord Eurostar ticket office don’t win one of those awards after the grief we went through to help them.

A kind of beginning

It's a bit hard to begin at the beginning, given it's already six months since we moved to France, but yesterday our project manager sent us the first draft of the plans for the changes we want to make to our house and that feels like some kind of beginning.

'We' is said with more than a hint of royalty (although that has a whole new meaning here in election year) as 'we' aren't going to do all the work. My partner works full-time (from home, praise be to whoever pressed the button to bring broadband to our small dot on the map of France) and although I'm a dab hand with a paintbrush I don't think I've enough weight to pull when it comes to making holes in our 50cm-thick walls, however big the hammer.

I hope this doesn't become yet another blog about brits in france having disasters with their renovations......given there are already far too many books on that subject, I don't intend to fill the Google-ether with even more. I want to write about everyday life here, rain or shine. On verra, as they say......