FRench At Last

 

French At Last

I have just been informed that my application for French nationality has been accepted. As long as I retain my Britsh nationality as well I am therefore officially half frog and half roast beef, a strange creature indeed but I rather like the idea. Also it means I can now throw brickbats at Macron as well as Johnson and whoever succeeds him. It’s taken five years and mountains of documentation and…...it seems the documentation is not over. With the official acceptance I also received a whole list of instructions to download various documents, fill in forms and…..Boy, do the French love documentation! Where do they keep it all?

I’ve sent the news to some friends and suggested that any of themwith an artistic bent should try to visualise a creature who is half frog and half roast beef and received one response; I am obviously a John Bullfrog. I think that is brilliantly inventive.

To mark the occasion, or not quite, the local tourist office has taken a photo of the front of my house and made a jigsaw out of it which it sells to tourists here. My mother would have been proud but it seems I cannot claim any royalties as the front of my house is not copyrightable. Damn! It seems that they should have sought my permission but I am not repared to quibble about that. Anyway I bought the jigsaw puzzle to give to my granddaughter.

The allotment continues to produce and I now have enough ratatouille as well as aubergines to feed an army in the freezer and jars of pickled cucumbers and courgettes despite having given a lot away. Some of the plants are giving early signs of giving up and I won’t mind now when they do. It’s been fun doing the allotment and I’ve met a new group of people. On Friday evenings, since not all of us are retired, we have a ritual aperitif together on the tables and benches by the allotments.

This winter, though, promises to be hard work to improve the soil. I’ll need a lot of anything that retains water and I can foresee a lot of digging. I’ve bought some cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage and kale seedlings, will get some radish and spinach beet seeds and will plant some garlic in November. . We don’t normally have a significant frost until December, but who knows this year? Anyway, I’ll take it from there.

Writing

 Writing

I have been writing all my life, four books and hundreds of articles published in magazines and newspapers. Since retiring, though, I have written only this blog; some pages for websites and a few translations. But I have a new projet: to write about my impressions of France and the French in the manner of Voltaire's Lettres Sur Les Anglais, akind of 21st century response to 18th century observations from the opposite point of view. A bit late, I know, but I do live in Provence. I am already well into the project and, the material is good for animated discussions with French friends. Topics range through government and administraton, business, love life and food and drink., They may be published elsewhere but, if not, I shall publish them here. Below is the Introduction.

Introduction To Letters About The French

The title “Letters About The French was suggested to me by Voltaire’s “Lettres ssur Les Anglais”, which he wrote while in England, and the objective is similar: to inform one nation of the idiosyncrasies of another., mostly gently, often humously but with some underlying insight; I avoided the title “French Letters” for reasons that will be obvious to any English person if not to every French person. My situation is like that of Babouc, one of Voltaire’s characters observing the way of life of others, though in my case not sent by an angel and I cannot claim to have a remit to report back to Heaven.

My circumstances, admittedly, ar are quite different to those of Voltaire; I did not come to France as Voltaire did to England for reasons of personal safety, to avoid getting beaten up for what he wrote. I came to France through a life-long feeling of kindred spirit with the country and its inhabitants and an appreciation of the beauty of many areas. Much as I will happily criticise the English establishment I am not of sufficient significance to warrant the former prime minister organising a beating-up for me, even if he was not beyond such measures. Our motivations in writing must be a bit different then. While mine are to entertain and inform they do not have the edge of revenge that Voltaire’s did. Although I am sad at the state of England I have no reason for resentment.

Major Thompson, the archetypal English character created by Daninos, should also probably be included in this general sweep of Anglo-French (mis) understanding. However, national service was abolished in England before I reached the age when I might have to endure it so I never became even a private, let alone a major. And my friends and others who know me, whatever they may call me from time to time, would never call me typically English. So my perceptions are unlikely to be anything like those of Major Thompson.

My experience of living in France over the past 15 years has been above all in the north of Provence so some observations may be truer of Provence than of France as a whole. The village in which I live, Mollans sur Ouvèze, was known in the 18^th century and before as the village of those with ňholes in the elbows of garments, caused by long spells spent leaning on the Bridge that dissects the village and gazing at the river Ouvèze below and thinking or dreaming of who knows what. I have not observed a prevalence of holes in the elbows of garments worn by the villagers but the attitude suggested by that is certainly evident. A local joke is that a Spaniard came to the village wanting to learn Provençal and asked what was the equivalent in that language of “manana” (I can’t get the “enye”) He was told that no equivalent of such great urgency existed in Provençal.

It may also be noted that , four centuries on, my world is vastly different to that of Voltaire. The technological advances are obvious but have not been matched by political maturity, although human nature probably remains much the same. Nowadays all is certainly not for the best in the best of all possible worlds so fewer misunderstandings can only help.

That is the background to these letters.