lundi 29 mars 2010

Village Life

Erratic Jobbing
The boules ground is still not in a playable state although little other than the spreading of some gravel, already on site, needs to be done. The laying of drains under the ground there has been something of a saga, work having been started as early as last October. So it's taken six months (and counting) to lay fewer than 100 metres of drains. Nobody seems surprised, which makes me wonder why.

Extended durations for any kind of building work are very much the norm here and I now understand the reason. My admittedly limited experience of building work in the UK is that a workforce is allotted to the job and basically works at it until the job is finished. Here, a workforce seems always to be allocated multiple jobs at a time and works on one or another for indeterminate periods according to circumstances and convenience. It results in delays often commented on by would-be Peter Mayles writing about their experiences in house renovation in France.

The incredible (to me) time taken to lay the drains under the boules ground has been at least partly explained to me by neighbour Jean-Pierre. What apparently happens is that the builders complete a chunk of the work and then go to the Mairie to ask for payment for the work completed. Getting the payment can take weeks and, while waiting, the workforce moves on to another job. Even if payment is forthcoming within days, they are then engaged elsewhere and stay there until some similar break-off point. Then, if payment has been made, they return to complete another chunk of work. And so on. The typical traditionally British attitude is to assume that the workforce is simply slacking and needs a kick up the jacksie but that, from my observations, is untrue. The workers seem to be hard at it when they are there. The execution time for a job is probably no different from that in the UK, may even be shorter; it is the elapsed time that is far longer.

Boules and Flowers
The recent good weather (typical UK April weather atcually, sunshine and showers) and rise in temperature finally tested the patience of the boules crowd too much and we played for the first time since Christmas, albeit on the “grande terre” next to the Cafe des Sports rather than the usual pitch. I managed to play reasonably well, given that it was my first time out in months. When the new gravel surface is eventually laid on the usual pitch it will be like learning a new ball game, literally. All the slopes, stony areas and “placid” runs we used to know will have changed. Should be fun getting to grips with it.

The good weather has also finally brought into bloom all the bulbs I have in front of the house that have had buds ready to burst for the last two weeks. The terrace is looking good with anemone blanda and scilla siberica showing well in crevices in the terrace wall. I bought a false jasmine to replace the true one that didn't survive the winter so that should be climbing and blooming before long. Like many plants here, I've noticed, it seems to have two flowering periods per year, one in spring/early summer and one in the autumn. The back garden itself is more or less done, apart from a little weeding and the installation of a water feature. Ever since I visited the Alhambra as a student at Madrid University in 1962 I have understood the appeal of running water in a hot environment. Just the sound of running water seems refreshing. The Moors, of course, found that out long before I did.

Anyway, the water feature I brought back with me from the UK after Christmas came without any wall support attachments, despite the wall-mounted illustration in the catalogue that persuaded me to buy it. It sits perfectly adequately on the ground and looks OK there but I really wanted it on the wall; and the prospect of trying to drill holes into the rock terrace walls and the feature itself wasn't inviting. So I asked friends Steve and Jo to come round and give an opinion and they duly did so this evening. As so often seems to happen, extra minds produced a potential solution: a plinth. Why didn't I think of that? I don't know; in retrospect it's a fairly obvious thought but one that my tunneled vision of the moment wouldn't allow. So, in the next few days, it's off to find/build a plinth.

Change In The Village
The Bar du Pont has been changing ownership over the past week and has been closed for stock-taking and renovations, so the normal pizza evening routine was interrupted. Since we couldn't use the Bar, neighbours Jean-Pierre and Monique invited all the usual crowd to get their pizza and come to eat it at their house. Which we duly did. At the Bar, Jacques and Monique (famous for her sense of humour?) are giving way to people I have yet to get to know but who are apparently cousins of Martine Moreau, a neighbour of Steve and Jo. It seems that about a quarter of the population of Mollans have some such slightly indirect relationship to Mme Moreau so that much wasn't surprising and it keeps ownership of the Bar within the village. Incidentally, Martine was bereaved of her husband a few years ago and, as she recounts, got a visit from a local widower the day after her husband's death telling her she needed a man, i.e. him. The former may or may not have been true but the latter wasn't, at least in Martine's opinion. Apparently all available women in the locality get a similar visit but the visitor hasn't had any luck so far so there must be something wrong in his logic. The episode does illustrate though how the French don't muck about in coming to the point in such matters.

During the evening I learned from Anne-Marie that one of the two bakers in town has also changed hands. In this case the new owners are from Merindol, which is at least 10 km from Mollans and therefore foreign territory. Will the foreigners be accepted? Time and the quality of their bread will tell. As Anne-Marie said to me: “Everything is changing in the village”. Well, the new library is opening at the weekend also and the hairdresser is apparently passing over the business to one of her assistants but...............................Maybe only so much change at a time can be properly assimilated in a village such as ours.

mardi 16 mars 2010

Spring Etc

Spring At Lasr?
After a number of false dawns, perhaps spring is at last arriving. Last weekend was reasonable, Monday too, but with a cold wind to accompany the sunshine; the Mistral, as usual. Today, no mistral, sunshine, a temperature in the sun of around 20 degrees and a deep Wedgwood blue sky to die for. I spent the day clearing the winter debris from the back garden and spreading smelly stuff, which will hopefully result in plenty of much sweeter smells later on. The really good news is that this weather is forecast to last for at least another two days so maybe spring is breaking through.

Those who have lived here many years are saying that this year has been the hardest winter they have known. That statement needs to be put in some perspective vis-a-vis my English experience. Since my return after Christmas, the weather has certainly been colder than I have known and with four separate snowfalls. That is what the locals notice; you normally get a day of snow here or maybe two, but that is all. But.......you start counting winter here from December. Until after the first week in December, the weather here was very pleasant. So, with my English background, a long hard winter that lasts only three months (if that is what happens) is something I can put up with.

That said, I am amazed that there is still snow hanging around in odd places in the village. We are talking not micro-climates but mini-mini micro-climates. The remaining snow is in odd ditches and corners that aren't getting the sun. It's a question of where the sun gets too (how high it is) and the effect of the shadow thrown by surrounding hills. This maybe explains why I am so puzzled by plants that are perennial here that aren't in the milder climes of the UK. Oleanders generally won't survive a UK winter without protection but happily do here. The same goes even for marigolds and, quite often, Californian poppies, verbena and diascias.

Whatever, I am now going to work on the assumption that spring is on the way and start planting seeds. I've already taken ~20 cuttings of my blue pentstemons, which should give me a dozen plants. My true jasmine, which struggled through the last two winters hasn't survived this time so I'll replace it with a false one (trachelospermum jasmoinides) and the same may be true of my plumbago, but I'll give that another couple of weeks to show signs of growth. Seems like it's gardening time again.

Anglo-French (Food) Relations
I invited Daniel to eat tonight to save him having to open his usual tin before going off to England. He hasn't been to England since his student days but a neighbour, Christine, who is married to an Englishman and spends most of her time in Worthing, invited him across and he decided to go. The cross-channel links are further supplemented by friend Michèle, who turns out to have a cousin married to an Englishman and is living in Richmond and Mana, who taught English. Michèle, like Daniel, hadn't been back to England since student days but was recently persuaded to do so by her cousin. Mana has never been back since her schooldays, although she spent a couple of subsequent years in America.

What they all have in common is a terror of English food. Given that their last experience of this was in the 1950s, their terror is understandable. However, their assumption that nothing has changed in the intervening half-century is less so, especially as all have eaten both at my house and Steve and Jo's and declared the meals to be good. Daniel's attitude, given that he doesn't cook for himself but simply opens tins, is even more perplexing. I think that their continued perception of English cooking has more to do with perpetuation of a myth than anything else. Having undergone a ghastly experience in the past, they are reluctant to give up on it.

Translating Shakespeare
It wouldn't be a new entry in this blog without some comments on translation, so here they are. Daniel is a Shakespeare devotee and, in the course of some discussion, he said that his favourite play was Hamlet and I said mine was MacBeth. I love the poetry in MacBeth and started to quote MacBeth saying “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.........”. I know the full speech by heart and, halfway into it, realised that Daniel was lost. So I started to translate. Leave aside the poetry and connotations of the words, what is “creeps” in French? I was stuck, so was Daniel despite my attempts to describe the action. “ A tâtons” only gets part of it. A dictionary finally produced “ramper”. But it's not really the same. “Ramper” is what kids do before they learn to walk. Crawling has some of the connotations of creeping but it's not the same. Anyway, continuing with the attempted translation I decided that the task was impossible (at least for me). Which led me to ask Daniel if he had a French translation of Shakespeare. He has, somewhere, but can't find it for the moment. I think I want to see one and see what the translator has done. God help him/her.

Following on from that, at the last pizza evening Jo asked René if there were any words in French that changed meaning according to their pronunciation, even though the spelling was the same. In English, “close” meaning “shut” and “close” meaning “ near” are spelled the same but mean different things according to how they are pronounced; the same is true of “refuse” meaning “deny/say no to” and “refuse” meaning “rubbish”. None of the assembled French could think of any such equivalent in French. As if English pronunciation wasn't difficult enough in the first place, we have to lumber foreigners with this extra difficulty!

I've always maintained that an English person, with even just a basic grasp of French pronunciation (and the same goes for Spanish and Italian), has a much better chance of getting an explanation of some unknown word than his foreign counterpart trying to get an English word explained. As long as you can say “Que veut dire XXXX?” you have a good chance of pronouncing XXXX sufficiently correctly to get a useful response. Contrast this with, for instance, a foreigner wanting to know what a chough is, confronted by the pronunciation possibilities offered by though, cough, bough, bought, etc, and you can see that the English have a definite advantage.

As a corollary to all this, conversation at the pizza evening turned to English politically correct language. It seems the French don't really have that either (good for them!) apart from words with obviously insulting connotations. Trying to explain why the word handicapped wasn't acceptable (and I don't understand either) proved impossible. As far as they were concerned, if you were “handicappé” you were “handicappé”; there were no sinister implications, it was simply a fact.