Hedging Your Bets

Who’d have thought that there is a fashion for hedges? Not the impeccably manicured privet type, nor the laurel that ran amok at our old house, but the hedges that line the fields and roads.

Our outer boundaries were wild country hedges, with hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble, hazel – all the things you needed to keep your stock in and your vegetables safe. By and large the sheep stayed on their side and we stayed on ours.

A sheep with its mind not set on anything will spend twelve hours with its head stuck in a wide metal link fence, until you get so fed up of the plaintive bleating that the farmer is ignoring, that you march out to save its worthless life, and it takes one look at you and unhooks its ears with no difficulty at all and bolts for home. A sheep with its mind set on a lunch of your finest Brussels sprouts, however, is not going to be deterred by a bit of overgrown hawthorn. 

I once spent a warm afternoon patrolling the veggie patch, fending off a mother and her three lambs, until the farmer could be brought to remove them. His daughter tried - she led them away by rattling stones in a bucket; but when the promised treat didn’t appear, they opted for the sprouts again, and no amount of bucket-waving would shift them.

Cattle, however, are different. For these, the farmer stretches a thin electrified wire across his sparse, treeless boundaries, and they stay safely inside, munching happily. So convinced are they of the dangers of the wire that it can sometimes be seen replaced with a piece of string.

I’m not sure about cattle. I once had a bad experience involving a herd of cows, a narrow path along a river, and some farmers who didn’t think to tell anyone just where they were intending to drive their large, blundering, panicking beasts. Had there been an Olympic medal for running in wellies, I’d have been up there on the podium.

It doesn’t help that, whilst taking a stroll along the lanes here in cattle country, a herd of bullocks assume that I am their farmer, the bringer of good things (they don’t know about the Really Bad Thing), and inevitably come belting towards that flimsy bit of wire that is the only defence I’ve got. I don’t like it.

So the current initiative to put back hedgerows is a very welcome thing. After years of determined clearance, we now have an active plan to restore the verges of road and field, divide up the parcels of farmland, and slow down water run-off and soil erosion.

The cost is divided between the EU, water management companies, local regions, and the commune. It’s important that the farmers get on board with this; they are going to have to wait a good twenty years for the trees they plant to grow to adulthood - trees which are natural to the area, and which ten years ago they were cutting up for firewood.

And no doubt, at some time in the future, the circle will turn again, and the cattle will all have to re-learn the knowledge of their forefathers with regard to the dangers inherent in touching a flimsy piece of wire (or string). 

The Olympics committee should consider adding wellie-running to their programme, because when that happens it’s going to need to be revived, and I’m going to be too old to teach it. In the meantime, the spring is here, the cattle are back in the fields, and the walking season is upon us. I’m off to practise my hurdling.

©lms 2012

A Light in the Darkness

There are no rural bus services here. Once you pass beyond a certain perimeter of a town, that’s it – you’re on your own.

In the past, that didn’t matter: people worked where they lived, or lived where they worked. There were people who never travelled more than 20kms in any direction in their entire lives. Markets came to them, and the travelling grocer, butcher and baker still make the rounds of the villages.

But with mechanisation in farming, and with the loss of the traditional country industries, if the young, in particular, want to find work, they have to go to town, or to the meat processing plants. 

So at 6.30 this morning the fractious hornet buzz of a scooter broke the silence, transporting someone from their warm home through the dark, cold lanes to their place of employment. It’s the only transport available. There is no money for a car, and driving lessons, and insurance: even the sans-permis vehicle, which only requires a chat with the salesman by way of instruction, is way out of their price range. Inch for inch, those things are expensive. 

There are no lights on the roads at that time of day. In our village they go off at 10pm, and come back on again at 7.30am. In between the countryside is dark. Really dark. If you live in a town, you don’t know what darkness is. Some of our visitors have found that they are actually frightened by the intense reality of it, and have to leave a light on somewhere in the house overnight.

There are more stars here than you will ever see in the land of streetlights: the Campaign for Dark Skies does have a point. And I wonder whether, if we saw only the real black sky each night, we would feel so powerful as we think we are. Fear of night is very atavistic, and very humbling.

We met a lady in our last village who was a retired teacher. She had done her training in the late 40s, and seeing that there used to be a station in the village, we assumed that she had taken the train to Poitiers every day to study. However, apart from the fact that she couldn’t have afforded it, there were no passenger trains running after the war. She had gone to college by bicycle.

The distance from the village to Poitiers is 25kms. It takes 30 minutes in a car. The road passes through open countryside and forest, and two or three small villages. She told us she used to set off before 6am to get there for lectures, whatever the weather, whatever the season. She would spend a whole day there, then get back on her bike and cycle home.

Some evenings there were parties, and she wasn’t going to be left out, so on the odd occasion, she would travel cross-country in the small hours of the morning, get home for 3 or 4am, get changed, have something to eat, and cycle back again. 

She told us that she never questioned it. If she was to be a teacher, she had to study; and if she had to study, she had to go to Poitiers by whatever means was available. 

That bike, and her unflinching determination, got her to where she wanted to be, in more ways than one.

Hearing that scooter in the still-dark hours, it was easy to turn over and pull the duvet closer, and listen to the ticking of the central heating. Maybe I should have been out there cheering them on instead. They may be motorised now, but the old spirit is still there: if you want something, you have to find a way to help yourself towards it.

One tiny headlight doesn’t make the vast darkness any less complete, at 6.30 on a rainy winter’s morning; but it does open up the immediate road ahead.

©lms 2012

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

Before the days of the washing machine, women used to take their laundry to the lavoir. There they would scrub and soap and rinse and gossip, to their heart’s content. Over the soiled linens, the conversation would be rude and robust and frequently ribald; so it was unfortunate that all too often these lavoirs were situated near churches. 

In our last village the lavoir, a large one, with a good solid roof, was built right between the church and the presbytery, and neither had a good or lasting effect upon the ladies of the scrubbing brush club.

Before there were proper lavoirs, washing was done in the stream. There it would be dunked and then beaten with paddles. Forcing the grey (and anything else) out, and forcing the – well, the beige, in was a matter of a strong right arm, and the chance to whack the daylights out of something other than your husband.

Go back a bit in time, and the paddles were just branches of hedgerow plants, but the method was the same.

Now, in those days there were a lot of people wandering around who were destined, in one way or another, to become saints. The process seems to have been much simpler than it is now: a chap performed a miracle, and there he was, with a chapel named after him.   

It has to be said that some of these proto-saints were not necessarily realists.  

Take, for example, St Quay, who at the time was presumably just known as Quay. This was a man from Ireland (an awful lot of Breton saints came from there: take Ivy, founder of Pontivy, who possibly felt all the indignity of the boy name Sue and so left home) who sailed, for want of a better word, all the way round the coast of Wales and Cornwall, turned sharp left up the Channel, and then hung a right to come in to land in a boat made entirely of stone. No oars, no sails. He was probably thinking that Someone Up There was on his side to have made landfall at all, rather than sinking in his ill-chosen vessel within seconds of setting out.  

He came to land on wash-day, and suddenly wasn't so sure.

The washerwomen were at the spring, beating their laundry with broom sticks. Sticks, that is, of broom: the plant, genet, which, by the by, gave the Plantagenets their name, after the habit of Richard I who liked wearing a sprig of it in his hat, to give him a jaunty air and so fool people into thinking he wasn’t after the throne at all, but was in fact far more interested in horticulture.

Quay staggered ashore looking, no doubt, rather grubby and the worse for wear. What were the washerwomen to do? True to their calling, they pushed him into the spring and began to beat the stains out of him. The legend says they tried to kill him, but I am standing up in their defence: they just wanted him to have a bath and a nice clean set of clothes, and if he didn’t have a spare suit with him, they might as well kill two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately they nearly did just that, and left him for dead face down in the spring. But Quay was a proto-saint, and the waters had mysterious healing properties; and instead of drowning, he was revived.

One: he couldn’t have proved his saintliness if it weren’t for the washerwomen. Two: he couldn’t have proved the healing quality of the waters if he hadn’t had a lie-down in them. So it was a little mean-spirited of him to banish all broom from growing in the surrounding heathland, where it continues not to grow to this day. 

The washerwomen had to find something else to beat their linens with, and turned to their dearest ones and said, “Look, Husband: that nit Quay has lost us our broom sticks, so can you make us some paddles to beat our washing (and any passing would-be saints) with?” 

And so progress took its course, and the paddle was invented; and the women continued to gather and to bemoan their lot at the hands of saintly men, right up until the day when someone said, “Can nobody rid us of this turbulent priest-baiting lot?” and the washing machine was invented.

I can’t help thinking that something has gone out of our lives as a result. All that healthy exercise, for a start: and how is the next man, sailing in on a stone boat, going to win his saint-hood? 

Maybe the answer lies in the pile of ironing. It’s got to be good for something.

©lms 2011

The Song of the Chainsaw

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that un homme in possession of a wood-burning stove must be in want of a chainsaw.

The delivery of a load of wood is a wonderful, atavistic thing. It speaks of hot fires and warm feet, and it will go on burning even in a power cut. Bring on winter, we’ve got wood – though what we need are logs, so there will be some tailoring of a robust nature required to get the fire going.

I saw an advertisement in an English magazine recently for a dinky little log store with a felted roof, just right, it said, for storing your winter wood out of the weather. It made me laugh; this was a mere toy. What good is that going to be when your wood comes on a tractor in metre lengths? Or you buy fagots from the woodyard, which come as long as the trees they once were? The little fancy store is for hobby-burners, people who get their wood ready-sized, no chainsaw required. Where’s the fun in that?

It’s a little like buying all your fresh meat on little polystyrene trays under gas-filled plastic: it cuts you off from the reality of the source.

For instance, it had never occurred to me that a tree is very heavy. Then one day He Who Does Everything Around Here needed help in topping an oak tree that was hanging over our pond. He climbed the tree, chainsaw in hand, tied a rope around the offending branch, and prepared to cut. I was on the other end of the rope, planning to run in the opposite direction as soon as the branch parted company from the tree.

Run was over-optimistic. I hauled for all I was worth – and I did stop the branch from falling into the water. I just wasn’t expecting it to weigh so much. There is, it seems, a big difference between freshly cut wet wood and a nice dry log ready for burning.

With a little bit of research I could probably find out the ratio of water to wood in such an equation, because there are books out there that will tell you. There are books on how to stack your logs in the optimum shape for drying; what sort of wood to burn; how to stop your chimney from getting too sooty, and what to do if you have been burning wood that is a little too damp, and you get a soot-fall. They will also tell you what to do with your ash.

There is, it turns out, a whole wealth of literature devoted to your cosy fireside. 

A Frenchman, however, has all this information written into his DNA. All over France you will find huge orderly stacks of logs, cut one year for use two years hence. They form barriers along the sides of fields; they are placed between two trees like giant bookends, so they can’t slide away. They are outside houses old and new, in barns, by front doors – everywhere you look. In France, all new-builds are supposed to have the ability to burn wood – forward thinking, if you like. And all this wood needs to be cut to size.

A chainsaw is a dangerous thing. I am told (from a safe distance) that when it starts it can rear up and give you a deep and permanent frown. You are advised in England to wear a special helmet and visor and ear defenders, and bright orange Kevlar trousers. This is so that you can tell which is the tree and which is your leg, and so when to stop. I have never seen a Frenchman using any of these things. In the right hands – experienced hands – it is, after all, just a tool for a specific job.

There is something fascinating about the felling of a tree – something devastating, and permanent, and impossible to put right again. Man has done it for millennia, to provide heat and for the ability to have his steak anything less than blue. It’s part of the folk-memory, stronger in some than in others. So when, as has been the case here recently, the chainsaw is not working properly, it’s not just a broken tool – it’s a man’s right hand, the link between tree and fireplace that’s missing. 

If this is strong in you, but you don’t have a wood store or the capacity to have a real fire in your house, and therefore no excuse at all for lurking in the DIY store next to the really big boy’s toys, don’t despair: you can always download the ring-tone.

It might earn you a look of respect in the supermarket check-out queue. People might think you are a real he-man type, orange trousers hidden beneath your Italian suit.

At the very least it might make them think you are some weirdo in love with your chainsaw.

Now, is that a bad thing?

©lms 2011

Food and other Heritage

Recently, UNESCO added French gastronomy to its list of the world’s intangible heritage that must be safeguarded. By this they mean the long, not to say interminable, meal which arrives in multiple courses, lasts five hours, and leaves you vowing never, ever to eat again.

I once ate a similar thing in a French gastronomic restaurant in England, and spent the entire night lying like a beached whale unable to turn over for fear of causing a seismic shift. If you are ever going to try this sort of feast, do it at midday – then go for a long walk. It won’t be easy; your legs will complain about the extra weight. But it will be necessary for life as you know it to continue afterwards.

Food, obviously, is important to a French person – so much so, that when the current economic crisis arrived on their doorstep knocking to be let in, the first thing that the government came up with as a means of making money was to increase the TVA ( VAT) on restaurant food and drink from 5.5% to 7%. This, it is implied, will rake in the euros and pay off a fair amount of debt. After all, you’ve got to eat.

That apart, I got to wondering what else was on the list. The Mediterranean diet is there, because it is healthy and kind to your arteries, which it has to be said the grand dinner en fête is not.

There is a Brazilian ritual for the maintenance of social and cosmic order. Well, a French meal probably equates to that: without food, what have you got?

There is the watertight bulkhead technology of Chinese junks, which, after eating a meal of the larger variety, though by no means junk food, washed down as it is with copious and varied types of wine, would come in handy.

Mongolia is represented for, amongst many other things, circular breathing in the Limbe folk long song performances – and trust me, after the gastronomic blow out, circular breathing is about all you can manage. Anything deeper is impossible.

Mexico’s Day of the Dead Festival rates an inclusion, but one hopes it won’t come to that; just keep the antacids handy.

The UK, however, is conspicuous in its absence. Now, I think this is unfair, and would like to redress the balance a little. I have one particular ingredient in mind that really ought to be included, and which you will not find in French gastronomy – or any other level of cookery: and that is suet.

You don’t get suet on sale in the supermarket here. You won’t see it displayed in a butcher’s shop. A lady I know asked for some, and was handed the whole portion of animal fat, as cut from the carcase. It ended up in her garden for birds to peck at, but they were French birds and declined on the grounds of deep suspicion.

Where is the French dumpling? The steamed pudding? Mincemeat, in which suet is the only remnant of its historical past as a savoury mixture? They don’t exist. Suet, you see, is a regional delicacy, and that region is the UK. So, on the grounds that the intangible heritage list is for things that should be safeguarded, and as suet is under threat from the cholesterol war, I think it deserves a place.

In the 16^th Century, a French diplomat said that to visit England in the pudding season was to come at the best of seasons. So, in these difficult times, perhaps we should cancel the gastronomy and eat suet. You’d be just as full, at a fraction of the cost, and you can clog up your arteries without having to sit at the table for hours on end. What more can you ask?

If only Marie Antoinette had said, “Let them eat suet” – who knows where history would have led?

©lms 2011

After You.   No, After You.

Now, I want you to pay attention, class, because this is going to be complicated. We are going to discuss the knotty question of la priorité à droite.

The idea is that, at any junction, any vehicle (and that includes the two wheeled, leg-powered variety) approaching from the right has priority, except when it doesn’t.

It doesn’t, when it has a sign telling it that it doesn’t. I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. 

Now, supposing you are proceeding along at, say, 90 kph, on your largish sort of road, and there is another joining from the right. It’s not big, not small, but a useful sort of road to the people who live up that way. They use it regularly. In fact, there is a car approaching along it now. You would assume, you daredevil, you, that you have right of way because yours is the Big Road. But do you? Can you see the sign on the other road that says so? No, because there are trees or a hedge in the way. In fact, there are many such junctions, and you can’t actually see much of any of them, just at the critical point.

(Signage in France is a whole other problem: quite often you will miss your turning because the sign is there for people coming the other way. They don’t expect you to want to go to A from B, only from C, so they aren’t going to tell you B’ers when to turn. And as for deviations – take a map and a packet of sandwiches, because you are going to be abandoned halfway along the route.  But that is for another discussion).

You have to assume, in that case, that you don’t have priority, because if they do, they are entitled to take it, and saunter out in front of you at a critical moment. They, you see, have been told that they should not use excessive speed when entering onto another road. 

You will be delighted to know that really small country lanes do not have this right, so you will only have to be alert to every other sort of side turning.

Streets, cul-de-sacs, however small, can have the right of way over anything they join (unless they don’t). Your way may lead you across a dual carriageway, in which case one would devoutly hope that the sign makers had been diligent, and the road painters lavish with their white lines; but in case they haven’t, and you do therefore have right of way across the two lanes nearest you, you must stop in the middle, and think twice, and make sure that the other road users have spotted you.

If, however, you lose your nerve, and actually stop, even though there is nothing to tell you to do so, you must then behave as though there is: you must give way. It’s your own fault.

Roundabouts in general have the appropriate signs and rules: vehicles approaching from the left – that is, those already stuck on the roundabout and so in a panic about how to get off the darn thing – have priority, and you would need to be – well, a Frenchman, to ignore this.  We were crossing a small roundabout near a major retail outlet the other day: we clearly had the right to proceed, and the road on the right was definitely signposted with a triangular STOP sign. The driver we encountered, too closely for comfort, not only ignored the imperative but stared right at us as he did so. I was forced to make a gesture, which did not mean  “live long and prosper”. I was in the passenger seat, so he won’t have seen it, but I hope he felt the vibe.

Happy motoring!

©lms 2011

Making Haste Slowly

I’ve been in England a bit recently, which inevitably means I’ve been stuck in traffic. A lot.

I’ve been up and down the middle of the country on motorways, I’ve been in cities and towns and on country lanes, and it is no pleasure at all.

But whilst I’ve chugged along behind all the other cars trying to get from A to B in one piece, I’ve have time to think. 

For instance: why do lorries overtake each other? It takes on average three minutes for a reasonable-sized lorry to pull out, creep up on the one in front, overhaul it, and pull back in – so close, mind you, that the overtakee flashes the overtaker as soon as he has passed the front wing by a hair’s breadth to say that he has achieved his goal. That’s to say, he has gained about thirty feet of road, and a change of view. He has also annoyed a lot of car drivers, but that’s just a bonus.

And why do people in big towns buy fast cars? What is the point? They sit in the traffic, commuting to and from their executive homes on the periphery – and it’s only a matter of time before their edge of town houses become not quite edge of town any more houses – in their BMWs and Audis, which were built for the autobahn, not the Manchester Ring Road. They can’t do more than 30mph at the fastest moments, which are few and far between. 

Maybe the point is that, on the odd occasion when there is a gap in the traffic, they need all the torque they can get just to make a break from one lane to the next, because they are only going to get a tiny chance to do so.

Given the state of the roads, what you really need is a Land Rover – and not the fancy town version, either. Why risk your super-expensive suspension on the pothole-fest that is the British road system? In fact, get a 2CV – they were designed to be able to drive across a ploughed field, so that’s about right for the circumstances.

Whilst we were there, a lady was caught causing havoc by driving at 10mph on a major road, in the rush hour. Several drivers called the police, who came out in force. They tried to attract her attention in the usual way, but she ignored them, until she came to a roundabout. When they attempted to block her, she just kept going round in circles until a policeman got out of his car, ran alongside and tapped on the window.

Well, she said, she never goes 40mph – it’s too dangerous and you can’t stop.

It’s also practically impossible on most roads at that time of day. 

The only plausible reason to own a flash car in urban Britain is so that the man in the next car can look at you in envy, and think, Gosh, you look good in that, or, That’s a handsome hunk of metal you’ve got there – you must earn a lot.

Or maybe it’s to pretend that, if you ever got the chance to go over 40mph, you wouldn’t be afraid to try. Otherwise known as, you’re bluffing. How can you possibly know?

©lms 2011