Christmas Trade

Christmas

And so it's winter. We had some token snow three weeks ago but only an inch at most overnight and it disappeared promptly the following morning. It has been visible on the top of Mont Ventoux for over a month now and on the slopes of the surrounding hills down to about 1000ft.

I find it surprising how easily what has already become routine at this time of the year clicks in. The Christmas carols that a crowd of us have sung for the last two years have been decided for this year and rehearsals are under way. As an attempt to expand the numbers involved one way or another, I made contact with the school and some of the children may participate; for the moment we have to wait and see, participation being entirely voluntary, as it should be.

Arrangements are being made for Christmas day itself. I shall go to friends Steve and Jo, along with Liz, Neville, Jill, Robin and two Australian friends of Steve and Jo who have turned up in this hemisphere unexpectedly. We may be joined by my son, Carl. The whole assembly will come to me on Boxing day, so we'll have two days of no doubt over-eating, over-drinking and chat. I'm sure it will be a very pleasant way to pass the holiday.

The winter lights are up in the village, all blue and white to make a Chelsea supporter feel at home, and there is tinsel on the door of the Bar du Pont. The weather for the past 10 days has been sunny, and warm, during the day but very cold at night. All as usual, all as it should be.

Protectionism In France

I've commented before that the Common Market is just a pipe dream. What now occurs to me is that protectionism may be rife in the internal French economy as well as evident in its international stance, and may indeed be a factor that is seriously slowing any French economic recovery. The only outlet for newspapers in the village, the Bar du Pont, apparently has to use the distributor it does. That indicates a cartel, which would be illegal in England but apparently not in France. Moreover, the distributor not the retail outlet decides how many copies of newspapers are supplied. This minimises wastage but also militates against expansion. Speculative extra copies are not on the agenda.

I'm now wondering if some similar mechanism applies more generally. I've noticed that chain shops, when they gave some popular item that sells out quickly, never know if or when they will get resupplied. Thus near-certain sales are curtailed. I have put this down to the generally dozy approach to marketing in this part of Provence but it may be something else. The other day I went to the local nursery to get some more blue pansies for the pots in front of my house. The owner didn't have any but said he was expecting a delivery at the end of the week. Of blue pansies, or any pansies? He didn't know. In fact he didn't know at all what would be delivered. But he had a secured sale if he got some blue pansies so why not order some from elsewhere? It seems he couldn't, and this was not a chain outlet but a family business so no higher up was telling him what he could do. If what I suspect is true, then the French economy is in even more trouble than I thought.

The UK Civil Service

Friend Steve read an article stating that there was growing suspicion that numerous ex-pats were claiming pensions and other benefits for UK nationals who had died abroad. Apparently, UK and French authorities do not communicate on births and deaths. A proposal is to write to ex-pats asking them to declare if they are still alive. Now, granted this is certainly more intelligent than writing to ask them if they are dead (which I actually don't believe is beyond our Civil Service) but not much more. If any ex-pat is committing fraud by receiving money for someone who has died, they will presumably cheerfully confirm that that person is still alive.

I don't know whether it was part of this same scenario but my heating allowance this year was cut by half because, the Pensions' Team assured me, they had evidence that another claimant was living in my house last September. My house is not that large and I generally know who is living in it so I wrote back to say that they had been misinformed. If another claimant was claiming to have been living in my house at that time, then the Pensions' Team had an attempted fraud on their hands and they should investigate it. I did add that a much more likely explanation was a simple cock-up by someone in their team. I await their reply.

Food And Boules

French And English Food

Friends Steve and Jo have just arrived back from a 3-week trip to England. They brought back a consignment of food for me.

One of the pleasures of being here in France is the good food, particularly the fruit where I am. However, there are still some English foods that reign supreme on my palate; the same goes for friend Steve, who got his fill of bitter and fish and chips while in England.

The problem with English foods here is not generally that they are unobtainable but that they are exorbitantly expensive. The only food I asked Steve and Jo to bring back that I have seen nowhere here is vegetable suet, which I use to make dumplings for a stew. The other food stuffs were much as might be expected: Marmite, kippers, baked beans, brown sauce, cans of bitter, bacon, sausages, pork pies and a gammon. Most of these are obtainable here but at 2-3 times the UK price. I think they are artificially priced up by supermarkets because the supermarkets know that British residents can often be persuaded to pay a premium for them.

English sausages are not obtainable and there really is no French equivalent. French sausages can be very good but not the same. Bacon is a similar case; some winter mornings only a bacon sandwich fits the bill for breakfast. The French “poitrine fume”, similar to smoked streaky bacon, comes close, just not close enough; and there is no equivalent to back bacon. The same goes for pork pies. The gammon is to make a ham for Christmas and I haven't found that here; the French “jambon cru” is cured to be eaten as is rather than cooked. Tea bags, even English breakfast, which should be strong, how I like it, is easily obtainable at reasonable prices but the pieces of tea leaf in the bags would seem to have been counted out individually, so around three bags at a time are needed to make a decent cuppa. The other items are all obtainable but, for instance, a very small jar of Marmite will cost the same as a very large jar in the UK.

Anyway, I am now well stocked for winter

A Boules Problem

Many fewer people play boules in winter than in summer, as might be expected, but even those hardy few have been diminished this winter. The problem is a particular player. At her worst, which is not infrequent, she apparently feels the need always to win and also to tell other players how they should play. The result is, when teams are being drawn up from the players present, she tries blatantly to create teams that are clearly unbalanced in her favour, when everybody else is trying to create balanced sides. She (a pointer) also tries to tell the shooter when to shoot. If others don't do as she says (dictates) she is immediately in a bad temper and often simply throws her boules anywhere. Several of the regular players have said that they come for a good time and don't enjoy playing if she is, so they do not come any more.

That's the problem in a nutshell. I think the answer is to refuse to accept her behaviour, to refuse the team line-ups she proposes and ignore her when she tries to dictate how one plays. That is what I do, in the expectation that she will change her behaviour if she sees it has no effect. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who does that, which makes the dispute one between her and me and I don't want that. The other players grumble but say nothing to her and to me say that it is pointless because she will never change.

So they stay away and are proposing an email list, from which she is excluded, so that teams can be pre-arranged before going to play. This strikes me as difficult, cumbersome and unnecessary but I shall probably go along with it if that is what happens.

What strikes me most is the disruption and unhappiness that can be caused if a single individual who is effectively a bully is not stood up to by the “silent majority”. That is the way dictators come to power; and I suppose that over-statement illustrates how such a minor matter can get blown out of all proportion, as seems to be happening.

The Book

As the winter weather has been creeping in I decided to get down to writing a chapter of my proposed book (see previous postings). It's fine and makes a decent-sized chapter but I've realised that I've used about a quarter of the material I had outlined for the book. In short, I can't now see enough material to make even a modest-sized book. So......it's back to the drawing board or a search for another project for the winter.

Chestnust And Tarts

Old Chestnuts

My last posting provoked an interesting email from my cousin Sarah who lives in the foot of Italy. She pointed out that there is a chestnut festival each year in a village near where she lives (Matera) in which the locals make bread and cakes from chestnut flour and have a general knees-up to go with them, including dancing to bagpipes. She also included an explanation of the difference between “chataigne” and “marron” from her French son-in-law, which was that one denotes two nuts in the casing and one denotes one nut.

There are a couple of points there that I want to comment on but first I want to return to my original point: “chataignes”versus “marrons”. We have two different varieties of tree with two different varieties of fruit so clearly need words to distinguish between them. The only words are “chataigne” and “marron” so these must be the words; what I really wanted to know was which was which but I couldn't, until that pizza evening, get a believable answer. I, too, had been given the one nut versus two story but it doesn't stand up. Firstly, I see no particular reason to distinguish between one nut and two in a casing (other than saying simply one nut or two) and if there were a compelling reason then there should be a word for three nuts, which there isn't. Anyway, my Quillet-Flammarion dictionary confirmed the distinction I had been given: “chataignes” are sweet chestnuts and “marrons” are horse chestnuts. It seems obvious to me that most French people use the words almost interchangeably and either don't know or want to make the distinction.

My cousin's point about her local village festival missed my point partly. My point about the Ardeche was not that they traditionally make cakes and bread from chestnut flour but that chestnuts more than a century ago were an important part of their staple diet throughout the year; the Ardechois used it as their staple filler, rather than wheat, rice, potatoes or whatever.. On reflection, my assertion of the Ardeche's uniqueness in this respect (even if just to my knowledge) was definitely rash. There are quite probably other enclaves in the world which, before transport changed the situation, had chestnuts as the staple filler in their diet.

In the area where I live, a particular variety of wheat called “epautre” was generally used to make bread until improved transport brought flour which made much better bread and so supplanted “epautre”. “Epautre” is now grown only as a health food speciality, of uncertain superior properties except that it is glutin-free, but it sells at far superior prices to the usual wheats for bread.. That's life.

The final point was the bagpipes in southern Italy. I have always associated bagpipes with the Celtic culture and was not aware of any great Celtic influence in the foot of Italy. Coincidentally, I was idly watching a TV programme that had a feature on bagpipes. It turns out that the Celtic connection is a popular misconception. Bagpipes are thought to have originated a couple of millennia ago, somewhere in the Middle East. The Scots, for instance, didn't get them until around the 13^th century. Bagpipes seem to have spread through numerous cultures and are now pretty well endemic throughout the world. For my part, the world is welcome to them.

Tarts

Friends Daniel, his son Kevyn and Marie came to lunch today and, for dessert, I served an apple pie I had made. I called it a “tarte aux pommes” as I had come to believe that the French for a sweet tart was a “tarte” and the word for a savoury tart, or pie, was “tourte”. Marie corrected me. The distinction is not between sweet and savoury but the position of the pastry. A “tarte” has pastry underneath and a “tourte” pastry on top. So, another distinction clarified.

Footnote

I've left the accents off French words in this posting. I put them on on in the last and they caused the point-size of the text to break up, as has happened before. \i've no idea why this happens and can't be bothered to try to find out and correct it. The easy way is to exclude accents.

Boules, Chestnuts And Rain

Ramatuelle

It's a month now since I was in Ramatuelle, at the French national boules championships for rural wrinklies. As two years previously, I had a very enjoyable time: good weather, good company and good food, if not so good boules. We played reasonably well but were inconsistent and finished nowhere. The very hot weather was welcome and once again I was surprised by the big difference in vegetation between Ramatuelle and here. The absence of frost so close to the Mediterranean means that a much larger number of plants thrive and bloom there at this time of the year.

I had decided to don my very English outfit for the tournament, bowler hat and Union Jack T-shirt, and my garb was received very much in the spirit that I intended. It was a source of jokes, anecdotes and other pleasantries and the bowler hat drew particular approval. If we go next year I shall wear it again.

On our day off, as we weren't in the finals, we visited St Tropez and wandered round the old port which, as usual, was full of impressive yachts. This time though there were a number of racing yachts. I hadn't realised how long, sleek and tall they are; it looked as though they couldn't possibly stay upright in full sail but they obviously do.

Chestnuts

Last evening at the pizza get-together Anne-Marie and Patrick brought along some chestnuts that they had collected in a visit to the Auvergne. Roberto duly roasted them in his pizza oven and they were passed around to all and sundry. It made me try again to get some clarification of the French use of both “marrons” and “chataignes” to denote chestnuts. I was sure that one must apply to sweet chestnuts and the other to horse chestnuts but the two words seemed to be used interchangeably.

I still couldn't get any firm clarification until I asked Patrick. He said that if you ate them they were “chataignes”; “marrons” were inedible. That, at least was clear. But what about the “marrons glacés” (crystallised chestnuts) that were in all the shops at Christmas? That, said Patrick, was a misuse of the word “marrons”. When I put this to the other French people present they all agreed. So that's another puzzle solved.

Incidentally, the renowned region for chestnuts is the Ardèche, the area immediately across the Rhône from us. It is unique to my knowledge in being the only place where the main “filler” in food was, in the 19^th century and before, chestnuts. Even bread and cakes were made from chestnut flour. I know that other regions of the world have, variously, potatoes, rice, pasta, tapioca, noodles and types of bread as fillers but I know of no other region that had chestnuts for this purpose.

Rain

It rained on Saturday, and how.......Friend Steve likes to point out that our area has a very similar amount of rain per year as southern England. Here, though, it comes occasionally and generally in large quantities at a time. The Ouvèze became a torrent, ripping up trees from the banks and river bed and carrying them downstream. This is what happened in 1992 but to a much greater extent. Then the river blocked the Roman bridge in Vaison with trees, cars and caravans it had gathered in its flow so that the water had to flow over the bridge at a height of over 30ft. When the “dam” unblocked, the subsequent flood killed nearly a hundred people.

It was of course a very rare event but it makes me wonder why more attention is not paid to keeping the river bed clear of trees and bushes. The bed is very wide in many places so that the river flows in shallow channels and scrub grows up in the drier places. If the same intense rainfall as happened in 1992 happened again there seems every prospect that a similar disaster would again occur.

The kind of rainfall that we had on Saturday always makes me want to go and look at the river bed under the village bridge. Heavy rainfall invariably changes the contours of the stones that cover the bed and thus also the channels along which the river flows. Sometimes it spreads out the stones evenly, giving a shallow flow across the whole bed and sometimes it piles the stones up in hillocks that force a faster, deeper flow between the banks of stones. This time it seems to have formed a hillock in the middle of the bed, forcing the river to flow either side.

Great Expectations

The Generation Gap

A good friend of mine, Barry Knight, once said to me that we were the golden generation, in England at least. We hadn't had to fight a war, jobs were plentiful and the vast majority of us had a standard of living that was relatively comfortable and secure, if very modest. All of that was certainly untrue of the generation that had lived their youth in the 1920s and 1930s rather than the 1950s and 1960s.

It hardly needs saying that things are very different for the youth of today. In fact, almost the reverse is true. But I think there is another important difference which I realised only when it was pointed out to me by friend Rineke at the pizza evening this week. I also think that, in a slightly perverse way, this was another advantage for my generation.

When we started out on life, most of us had little or nothing. Only under 4% of us had a university education. Some had a few O or A level passes to their credit and some had apprenticeships or a secretarial qualification but the vast majority were essentially unqualified. However, most largish organisations had induction and training schemes (because they needed them) and casual work was plentiful. I personally had a miserable university grant (but a grant nonetheless) which I could easily supplement with casual work in the summer and winter holidays. It was “grunt” work, as the Americans call it (you give it only to grunts) and very poorly paid but it was a bonus to my circumstances.

As regards standard of life, few of us went hungry but televisions, even telephones, washing machines, tumble-driers, cars and central heating were something of a rarity. I well remember the temperature differences in even modest-sized rooms, trying to get into a position in front of a fire between burning shins and a freezing bum.

What Rineke pointed out to me is that it is not just the work situation that has changed dramatically but also the personal expectations and many aspects of the standard of life. We started with nothing but the current generation mostly start with quite a lot, including lots of (fairly meaningless) qualifications. All of the appliances mentioned above, cars and central heating are now the norm rather than the exception, plus of course PCs, mobile phones and broadband connections. These now tend to be expectations rather than luxuries to be earned. Compared to our young lives, theirs are often quite comfortable. But what they do not have is a zero starting point and the fear of unemployment and insecurity that the experience of our parents passed on to us. The current generation has a higher starting point and higher expectations to go along with their much more plentiful qualifications. So it is not only facing much harsher times but is also in many ways much less well equipped to deal with them.

Self-confidence

Rineke and I also got to discussing self-confidence and the times when we had had it or lacked it. It reminded me of an experience when I was teaching at Summerhill school.

I was teaching a lad of ten some elementary maths. Having explained the sums, I took him through several examples saying just “how do you start” and “what do you do next” and so on. With just that prompting he was perfectly able to do them. When I left him to do more of the same on his own, however, he could do nothing. I'm not sure how the thought came to me but I thought it must be a question of self- confidence. The lad was quite athletic and, as I played football with the kids, I encouraged him at football. As he grew more confident at football so he did at maths. A few years later, when I returned to the school for a get-together, he came leaping out, jumped on me to give me a hug and said: “You'll never guess what; I just passed O level maths”. That didn't make him a great mathematician but it did do great things for his self-confidence and gave him a platform to build on.

Ever since I have thought it should be a criminal offence to attempt to undermine anyone's self-confidence.

Autumn

Autumn is definitely here now. Leaves aren't turning yet but there is a definite nip in the air in the mornings. After I get up I usually make coffee and take a cup up to my front room, open the door onto the balcony and look at the news on my PC. Now I'm finding I close the door again before long. Last Monday it was still quite comfortable to sit outside for the pizzas until quite late but I suspect that that may be one of the last pizza evenings outside this year. And the grapes I'm trying to sun-dry on my balcony are taking a long time to dry into raisons. I've just bought what will probably be the last two melons of this year but, in compensation, figs are around in the markets and shops; neighbour Liz kindly brought me a bag full.

More Words

More Words

American friends Hallie and Mary arrived back in Mollans recently and came round for aperitifs the other evening. I was commenting on the lime trees in front of my house and Mary interjected that her dictionary gave the “tilleuls” as linden trees, not lime trees. Had I been getting it wrong all this time? So.........I duly searched on the Internet. What I found was that linden and lime are apparently interchangeable names for the same genus of trees, known botanically as “tilia” (from which the French “tilleuls” can easily be derived).. So maybe it was a question of species. I searched that and found that the number of species is indeterminate, lime/linden trees apparently being pretty promiscuous and creating new species at the drop of a hat (or speck of pollen). I left my search there. I have no great desire to know whether the species in front of my house, by comparison of leaves, bark, flowers or fruit, are of a known species or of an as yet unclassified one. I'll continue to call them lime trees but am now better informed on the subject, should.anyone ask.

Miraculous

I commented in my last posting about the problem with “un bébé miraculeux”, duly changed to “un bébé inespéré”. I recounted this to some French friends while playing boules and they said an alternative would have been “un bébé miraculé”. Both “miraculeux” and “miraculé” translate as miraculous, so what's in the difference? It appears that “miraculeux” has to apply to an event, whilst “miraculé” applies to a person. I'm sure there are instances of the same kind of distinction in English but have struggled to think of any. All I could think of was tall rather than high applying to a person but there must be better examples.

Incidentally, in the same last posting I mentioned the mental struggle to come up with fire-proof. My son emailed me to suggest incombustible. Now why couldn't I think of that?

A book?

I'm contemplating writing a book. Why? Believe it or not, it's not so much ego as thinking what to do over the coming winter, to keep me off the streets, hitting old ladies over the head, smashing shop windows, etc. It occurred to me that, having written this blog for 3-4 years, I probably had a third or maybe a half of the material needed for a book of 50-60,000 word-space, adequate if not generous. It could be titled A House In Provence or A House In The Baronnies or some such. For previous books I have written the publishers came to me with proposals, which made it easy; this time I was going to have to find a potential publisher.

If I'm going to take this further than an idle thought, I am resigned to having to write a synopsis, chapter breakdown, target reader spec, brief bio and maybe three sample chapters. No way will I write a whole book on the off chance of finding a publisher. Anyway, I searched on publishers and submissions. My results so far have been disappointing, with failed links and opacity predominant. New submissions are clearly, and understandably, one of publishers' minor concerns. What caught my attention dramatically, though, was the number of publishers that require hard copy (with return postage prepaid). This last I can understand as I know publishers to be very cost-conscious. But hard copy? I mean HARD copy, on paper that is. Haven't the advent of ebooks and Kindle really sunk in or is this just a way to make submissions more difficult? You can bet that final copy will be required in electronic form.

I knew from a period of my career when I was busy creating new magazines, taking chunks out of the big publishers' markets and selling it back to them at a profit, that the big publishers were generally dozy, complacent and marketing neanderthals. Nonetheless the hard copy requirement took me by surprise. Caxton lives on, probably even longer than he thought he would. Ah well, if any publisher reads this it's probably the end of my book project.

Words, Words, Words

Searching For Words

One of the English who have second houses here, Tony, said that his daughter was getting married next week to a Frenchman, in France, and so he had to give a wedding speech in French. Would I go over it for him? Of course I agreed and duly went through it, picking up the odd grammatical error, which probably wouldn't have noticed anyway when spoken, and the occasional translation error. In fact, I found only two and even one of those I wasn't sure of. The obvious one was latest being translated as “le plus tard”, which it could have been but in this case what Tony meant was “plus récent”, exactly the opposite. So much for word for word translation; it's the semantics that count.

The other mistranslation was “annonce” for the speech he had to make. I was sure it should be “discours” but got a sudden doubt; weddings are special occasions and special occasions often have special vocabularies. For instance, the meal after a wedding in England is called a wedding breakfast when it's clearly never a breakfast, unless the couple get married at dawn. “Une annonce” is an announcement, which could be appropriate for an engagement but the couple would be married by the time Tony gave his speech. Anyway, at the last mussels and chips evening at the Bar du Pont I was sitting next to friend Dominique's sister and asked her to go through the speech with me. She cleared up the doubts and improved the phrasing.

I also wanted to pass the speech, with my corrections, through someone French anyway because I am aware that it is only too easy to create a French sentence that is perfectly grammatical but just isn't what the French would say. Dominique's sister pointed out a perfect example of that. Tony had mentioned “un bébé miraculeux”, referring to a grandchild whose mother had previously undergone radiation therapy. That made perfect sense to me but it seems you can't have a miraculous baby in French, at least not without a virgin birth beforehand. The required word in French is “inespéré”, meaning not unhoped for but which you didn't dare hope for.

The chase for words didn't end there. At the pizza evening this week I was chatting with Jacques and Claudine when we somehow got onto the question of fire. The French have the word “ininflammable” and I don't think the word uninflammable exists in English; if it does, it shouldn't because it's too ugly. So what is the word in English? I asked Alex and Pauline, the only other English people there, and they couldn't think of a word. In the end it was Jacques who came up with answer; he remembered seeing “fire-proof” on some packaging.

Gardens

Jacques, Claudine and I got around to chatting about gardens and Claudine, as ever, was very complimentary about mine and said she didn't like the French way or gardening, only the English way. I've remarked before that I don't think the style of gardening in large French châteaus works in small spaces but think it does for the châteaus. It then occurred to me that we don't usually have the French château style in large English country houses. We tend to break up the large landscapes into smaller areas for the gardens and create different types of small gardens, often walled. So we really are a nation of small gardeners.