A Bit of a Boar

Driving through the countryside the other day – well, we can’t actually go anywhere without driving through the countryside – I spotted a man on the edge of a wood carrying a bow and arrow. The bow was big, modern, and professional-looking, and it reminded me that la chasse is almost upon us.

 

This is the season when signs appear along roadsides warning you that packs of dogs may erupt at any time from the undergrowth in pursuit of real, or imaginary, prey. There will be men in bright red hats lurking at field entries with large guns in hand, and whole fleets of white vans pulled up at the roadside in the middle of nowhere.

 

These men will, after the first foray, have gone back to base for a hunt breakfast. This will have involved huge amounts of food and some alcohol, to ward off the cold, and to bolster the spirits of those who will spend the entire time standing around waiting for something to happen.

 

La chasse is a very well organised event. In order to be allowed out with your gun and your fellow man, you will have a license, and to get that, you will have to pass an exam. This deals with the kind of game you are allowed to hunt, and what it looks like in all its stages of growth. You will be able to identify the right age of your prey, so that you don’t kill off next year’s animals. You will know which bird is edible, and what sex the boar is that is heading towards you bent on head-butting you to death.

 

All over the country there will be solitary men with guns broken over their arms, strolling through bare autumnal fields with their Breton spaniels racing around and ahead, eager to help bring home the spoils. And every Sunday morning at around 8am, there will be the pop-pop of sportsmen trying to shoot something startled out of its weekend torpor.

 

There will be stories in the papers about the ones that got away, and the ones that didn’t. One year, the police were called to a road accident involving a boar and a car. When they arrived, there was only a boar-shaped stain on the ground, and no sign of either. I suppose one man on his own couldn’t shift the boar – which is a big, big animal – and so called the authorities. But several men, in passing vehicles, say, who saw his dilemma, could manhandle the beast into a handily open back door, and take it away for later consumption. Boar is very good to eat.

 

Here in Brittany, it is possible to go hunting with a bow and arrow. It’s how it used to be done, after all; and if a boar stands on your inadvertently abandoned bow, it is not going to be able to shoot you in the leg whilst you hide up a tree (much the best idea).  Furthermore, you are less likely to accidentally shoot your colleagues, which happens a little too frequently for comfort.

 

The thing is that hunting here is about food. Unless it is causing havoc, if you can’t eat it, why go to the lengths of trekking across fields in the cold, consuming a huge breakfast, and standing around for hours trying to kill it? And if there is a problem – as when hares were found to be suffering from a form of leukaemia – the hunt bans the killing of the animals to give them chance to recover. It’s organised; it involves all levels of society; and it means that many households own large guns which are, by and large, responsibly used.

 

So, if your farmer neighbour invites you to partake of a dinner of civet of wild boar, remember to check his van for big dents as you go in. If there aren’t any, be very polite about the cooking.

©lms 2011

History in the Making

It may have escaped your notice, but this year Normandy is celebrating its 1100^th anniversary. In the year 911, the king of the Franks decided he had had enough of trying to fend off the attacks from the Vikings, and said, “Look, lads, why don’t you just take this bit of the country for your own, to look after?” Rather, you might say, in the manner of a parent with children squabbling over a toy – give them one each and tell them to play nicely.

 

The name of this king was Charles the Simple, which is rather unkind: unless it meant, “what a brilliantly simple idea that was about the Vikings”. (There was also a king with “the Bald” after his name, which wouldn’t be acceptable today, but Charles the Follicly Challenged doesn’t really work, however true). 

 

So in 911, Rollo, the leader of the Vikings, became the first head of what was to become known as Normandy – the land of the North men. I once had a long conversation in a doctor’s waiting room  with a Frenchman who, when I mentioned that, as the English had been ruled by William the Conqueror and his descendants for many years, that made us partly French, said very dismissively that William was a Viking so he didn’t count.

 

Now, you may think that 1100 years is a goodly slice of history to be celebrating: but that’s young, compared with some anniversaries remembered here in France. Down south, for instance is the little town of Vouillé La Bataille, in the Vienne (not the one in the Deux Sèvres, which is an impostor). The water tower, or château d’eau, without which no French town or village is complete, is decorated with the image of a warrior, and the date 507.

 

In that year, Clovis, king of the Franks, decided to take on the Visigoths, under Alaric II. There were also Ostrogoths, but they were busy elsewhere having a bit of a punch-up with the Byzantines, so couldn’t come to play, though they were invited.

 

The two armies met near Vouillé at dawn. The Visigoths used cavalry; they were very good at this, and hoped to carry the day, but things degenerated into a general bout of fisticuffs.  And in the middle of this, having their own set-to, were Alaric and Clovis. In those days, leaders led.

 

Clovis won by killing Alaric, at which point everyone downed tools and said, Fair enough, guv'nor, and went home. Well, actually, they took it as a sign from God, but the result was the same. The next year Clovis decided Paris was a good place to have a capital; so he could be seen as the founding father upon whom one could, in a vindictive moment, blame the creation of the Paris ring road.  Can’t have a Paris ring road without Paris, and there would be no capital city there without Clovis. I rest my case.

 

Whenever we went to the market – a very good one, on a Saturday morning – or to the supermarket at Vouillé, we drove through The Valley of the Dead – La Vallée aux Morts – which was a little off-putting, and caused us to regard the offal section with a rather jaundiced eye.

 

But without the fracas at Vouillé, Charles the Simple couldn’t have given Rollo the run of Normandy, as there wouldn’t have been a Frankish king at all. And then Rollo’s descendant William couldn’t have come to England, and Harold wouldn’t have got the arrow in his eye (unless he liked playing dangerous sports and didn’t listen to his mother).

 

So there you have it – one lucky punch, one handy stab, and the whole of English history was changed. Celebrate, by all means, the anniversary of Normandy: but don’t forget Clovis. It’s all his fault.

©lms2011

Blowing Hot and Cold

Most mornings when we open the curtains, there is mist lying between us and the hills. There is always a question mark hanging over the day – what will the weather do today?

 

Down in the Vienne, there was no mist.  At 7am, we would open the shutters, and there would be the sun, brilliantly clear, already heating the clay tiles and bleaching the grass. Summer was relentlessly certain and endlessly there.

 

That was part of the problem. It was just too hot. When we moved into the house, in early June, the grass was white and brittle. We were grateful for the shade of acacias which roared from dawn till dusk with exhausting bees, and for the march of apple and peach trees whose blossom enchanted and whose too-abundant fruit drew wasps and hornets to feast on the fallen.

 

That first year we planted out peppers, aubergines, tomatoes, courgettes, chillies, butternut squash and melons: they all thrived and produced excellent crops. I bottled ratatouille, and froze pints of soup which would be wonderful in the chill of autumn and the depths of winter. 

 

The following year was a cool summer, and wet. We learned that the plums came every alternate year; probably the trees were exhausted and had to recover. But the year after that we were back in the heat again. The soil baked so hard that it was impossible to weed, even by hand with a trowel. The only way to work at all was for one of us to go in with a fork, to break the surface, and the other to go on hands and knees and force the roots out. 

 

Watering was to be done by 10am or after 7pm, and hose pipes were banned. The authorities checked: they went out looking for suspiciously green patches from the air. A dear friend who was working in her garden (slightly green in places) was astonished to see a helicopter coming straight up her drive towards her. No more gardening in a bikini for her that year.

 

We lived in the half light, with shutters pulled to against the sun which rotted the upholstery of anything left near the windows.  We went barefoot on hot tiles inside the house, but daren’t go outside without shoes for fear of burnt soles.  We had a small plunge pool, and that first summer we used it quite frequently, late in the day, when the sun had gone behind the high hedges. We would sink nervelessly into the tepid water and just wallow, too wrung out to try to swim.

 

Even the weather reports in the paper couldn’t think of new ways to say, it will be sunny.
 

We went out one day in the air conditioned car, to buy an ice cream maker. It was 40C, and when we got back to the car, it wouldn’t start: the garagiste said the engine didn’t like that sort of temperature, and the only thing to do was to throw a bottle of water over it to cool it down.
 

Sleep was frequently impossible, with all windows open, fly screens in place, and a ceiling fan whirring. It was interminable.

 

So each morning, when we draw the curtains, and look at the mist, we relax, just a little. It’s summer, but it’s gentle.  We’ve done our time in the sun.

©lms 2011

The Next Big Thing

Apparently one third of all French people are overweight.

 

I read that in the newspaper recently, and my immediate reaction was to ask where all these people are when I am standing at the checkout in a clothes shop trying to look slim. 

 

A book  came out recently which reckoned to tell us all how to be as thin as a Frenchwoman. Well, there you are – I am as thin as a Frenchwoman already. So are you. She may not be the one you are looking at in the street, the one who, when she turns side on, vanishes; but she is the one you have a reasonable chance of resembling. 

 

The only way to be as thin as a thin Frenchwoman is to have her genetic make-up.  You may as well want to be as short as her, too – because French people in general are not as tall as the average English person; and nobody is as tall as the Dutch. Do the Dutch also want to be as thin as a Mademoiselle? 

 

Apart from the fact that being hooked on trying to be thin is pointless for most of us – look to your parents, and think about it – why should we want to look like someone who in all respects looks nothing like us? 

 

When we first came on holiday to France, playing tourist, we were amazed when, on entering some attraction like an Abbey or a museum, the hostess behind the till would, without us speaking a single syllable, promptly hand us the English guidebook.  We had not been in the habit of thinking of ourselves as typically anything, really.

 

So we asked the owner of our gîte what it was that made us so obviously English. The answer was simple: “You are tall, you have red hair, and you come from a country where the sun doesn’t shine.”

 

Red, in this context, means fair; and furthermore, she said, “You have freckles.” Well, there it was: the unavoidable Englishness of it all. The blue eyes are another giveaway.

 

Since those early days, my hair has given in to its platinum tendencies. Oh alright, I have gone silver, and I don’t use hair colour. The French find it fascinating. I turn heads in the street. Women of a certain age, all sporting this year’s mahogany, will actually stare at me. They think I am being either very bold, or stupid, but whatever the reason, they find a perfectly ordinary head of perfectly ordinary hair to be a thing of wonder and puzzlement.

 

So maybe the next book to come out, in French, will be “How to look like a Middle Aged English Woman – the Essential Guide.” Because, as much as we want to look like them, maybe they would like to look like us? They are already hooked on Marks and Sparks, and the modern version of Carnaby Street décor, complete with Union Jacks on their cushions and red phone boxes on the wallpaper. Why not long for silver hair and blue eyes whilst they are at it?

 

We are never satisfied, you see. We all want to look different, whilst being terrified of not looking the same as the next person. We just don’t want to look like us.

 

Well, I for one am going to stand tall (though not as tall as a Dutch woman) and hold my silver head up, and set a challenge: I am the Next Big Thing.

 

I wonder if I will catch on?

©lms2011

In a Roundabout Way

July 14^th is a national holiday commemorating the storming of the Bastille on that date in 1789. It was a political prison, and its fall marked the beginning of the French Revolution.

 

Last time we were in Paris, we went to find it. There is bound to be a monument, or a ruin, or something to mark its importance, we thought. 

 

Wrong. It’s a roundabout. And every minute of every day, Parisians storm it again, in their Renaults and Citroens. The idea seems to be that, if they throw themselves at it fast enough, centrifugal force will shoot them off down the right side street. If it seems like a good idea to go and stand in the middle of it, take my word for it – it isn’t. You won’t survive the attempt.

 

The roundabout is a fairly new concept over here. Whereas the British have had them for donkey’s years, and the Highway Code will tell you exactly how to approach one, and how to choose a lane, and when to signal, the French seem to have no idea how to handle them. 

 

Until recently, it was the rule that anyone joining any road from the right got right of way. So if you were on a major road and someone approached from a farm track, that rule applied, and you would screech to a halt, and do the gentlemanly thing. In fact there are villages in Brittany where the rule has not been changed, and there will be a notice to tell you of this as you enter. If you don’t see it, you may well wonder at the hostile reception, not to mention the death wish of local drivers leaping out in front of you.

 

Motorists over a certain age can cause no end of interesting moments as they pull across your front wing, with a determined set of the jaw, and a gesture implying that you are completely and unjustifiably in the wrong. When such a person approaches a roundabout, your immediate instinct is to floor it and get out of the way. The behaviour of the other drivers suddenly seems understandable: it’s simple self-preservation.

 

There is a big roundabout here which we have learned to avoid at busy times. This means taking a wide detour, but in the long run, it is the wiser course. Nobody has any lane control. They will either drive all the way round on the outside, or they will be on the inside and suddenly leap across in front of the outside laners to take the desired, but apparently totally unexpected, turn-off.

 

If you try to do things properly, you not only confuse the locals, who then drive in the middle of the two lanes in case you should be trying to overtake them, or you are too scared to ease out for your turning because there just isn’t room, and no-one will give way. You could be there for hours.

 

No wonder the Paris ring-road is notorious. It’s just a giant roundabout. And on that particular roulette table, all bets are off.

©lms2011

The great and the good

In our village, there is a church with an unusually pale spire.  It is a pretty stone building, hung with flowers, but otherwise fairly plain. Inside, however, there is a surprise.

 

The barrel vaulted ceiling was painted, in the 17th century, as sky with saints sitting all around. They would have been very familiar, as the artist took local people for his models.  The artwork is naïve in places, but it suits the country church and the people who frequented it. The child who found the sermon boring could have looked up to the sky to see his neighbour looking beatifically down at him. Whether or not his neighbour was of a saintly nature in life, the effect would have been comforting. Here, it would have said, you are among friends and equals.

 

In the Middle Ages, however, churches were built to impress. When anyone – rich or poor, educated or not – approached such a building, they were to be astonished by the grandeur, the architectural brilliance, and the colour of the edifice. Time has muted the effect: statues defaced, colours all but gone. Only the stone-workers’ genius still remains. 

 

In the past, those with the power and the money chose their own way of achieving immortality, and those with the hammers and chisels made their response inside, where grinning faces and depictions of lewd acts were often added to the tops of columns or to the choir stalls. A monk singing plainsong could well be propped up on something rather more profane.

 

At different times of year, the front of the church of Notre Dame in Poitiers is restored to its original colours by means of a projection. All the statues on the brilliantly white façade are picked out, as they were intended, in red, blue and gold. The whole thing is a picture book, where biblical scenes take place in recognisably local settings. 

 

We went there one Christmas. As the show began, a hush fell on the people gathering in the plaza. Lights slowly washed down, giving texture to the pineapple roofs, and picking out the mountings of the great doors. Stony faces took on colour under hair made young again; and as we watched, it began to snow, big lazy flakes drifting over the whole scene. It was completely magical, and it was not hard to imagine being a peasant newly come to town, encountering the wonder of the place. After a lifetime of country clay and red tiles, the sight must have been almost otherworldly. 

 

But it would have said, ‘Look at us – we have assured our place in heaven, and it’s not for the likes of you.’ In a time when colourful clothes belonged only to the elite, the whole thing would have shrieked exclusion. The drab and dirty pilgrim would have shuffled, head bowed, under the beady gazes of his betters; those rude and knowing carvings inside would at least have spoken of being on the same side.

 

So next time you wander inside, have a look round. The powerful dead shout their presence: but the ordinary people may still be there, too, smiling from the sky, or whispering and sniggering from the sidelines. It’s a comfortingly human thought.

©lms2011

A Little Local Difficulty

Here are a few figures.

England has an area of approximately 130350 km2.

The UK has an area of approximately 244,750 km2.

France has an area of approximately 551,000 km2.

France is therefore 2.25 times bigger than the UK, and 4.25 times bigger than England.

England has a population of approximately 49 million, the UK 60 million, and France 59.5 million. 

The reason I give these figures is because I was watching one of those “Run away from the hurly burly of the cities and find your country idyll far from all the noise of the 21^st century” programmes which we English like to watch – and to believe. So many of them feature people complaining, “Yes, it’s very pretty, but I can hear a road,” and that’s the deal-breaker.Well, that’s what happens when you have a lot of people all trying to buy property in the same small space: if someone else is there, you are going to have to learn to share.

 

In France, there is space. Unlike in the UK, however, rural property is still far cheaper than in the cities, because nobody wants to live out there. There’s no work, few facilities, and nothing to do. The reason why there are so many houses for sale in the country is that inheritance laws say that property must be passed on to the children of the family. But whereas Mum and Dad may have made a good enough (for them) living making cheese, or keeping sheep, or farming, their children want proper jobs with prospects and with less hard physical graft. So either they abandon the houses, or they sell them off. Frequently they are unmodernised, unsanitary, or just too isolated to be attractive. 

Sometimes they are used as holiday homes for les grandes vacances, and people will come down and camp for a month just to get away from their daily lives. In these circumstances, the shabby interior, the lack of plumbing, or the minimalist kitchen, is part of the adventure – up until the time when the children start to complain that actually it is cruel and unusual punishment, and they want to go and see – well, anything except Granny’s House yet again.
 

Sometimes, though, it really is a homecoming for the parents. Our neighbours, for instance, live and work in Paris. They were born in our village, and own a pair of cottages here. They come down every Easter and for a month in the summer, and they bring their younger children, who have over the years made friends nearby. There is family scattered about, too. 

The parents are Breton in their hearts and minds. They were born here, they belong here. The children, when asked if they think of themselves as French or Breton, immediately say, French.

One of the older children, in his mid-20s, couldn’t repeat the name of a pub in the nearby town, as it was “how they speak down here”. 
 

Brittany has a proud – and very separate – history. It had more dukes per acre than the whole of England could manage at its busiest. It is littered with castles, and manors, and fortified farms. It was a different country, in all but name, for centuries, with its own languages, Gallic and Breton. Road signs give place names in French and Breton. There is even a man who translates Chinese literature into Breton. 

There is music, dance, folklore: there are more saints here than there are in Cornwall, and that is good going. There is wonderful coast, and a hugely varied landscape as you travel from west to east. But there is no work. If it isn’t farming related, or food production, there is really not much on offer. Cornwall has pretty much the same geology as Brittany – granite and slate. But there are no tin mines dotted over the land here, no stark abandoned chimneys left against the sky. 

There was linen and hemp production in the region, and the Nantes-Brest canal to ship all manner of things inland to avoid the predations of the British. Like the wool in the UK, though, it is a thing for museums and historical reconstructions.
 

A Breton is a Breton through and through until the day he dies: but his children have looked over the fence, and seen something bigger, something less particular. The world of over there seems so much more exciting than the little land of slate and stone, of dead dukes and forgotten valleys.  I wonder, though. Like Any High Street in the UK, is it better to be anonymous and like everything else, or to be different, and boldly so – to know where you stand in defence of what is yours, against the blurry sameness of what is theirs?
 

I know a man who was born in a mining town in Western Australia, which existed as long as the mine lasted, and was then dismantled and removed. The area has once again been totally subsumed by the desert. He can’t go home. It isn’t there. He has no roots, no family home to visit, no place in the country to go to for the holidays. It’s like climbing a ladder, and looking down to find that someone has taken all the lower rungs away. 

Will our neighbour’s children ever wish they hadn’t climbed so high, or are they made bold because they know where they don’t want to be? They still have the choice, to belong or not. My friend in Australia hasn’t. 
 

So whilst in England people long to escape from the cities into the green and pleasant land they believe is still there, the French are still heading in the opposite direction. It’s not a question of the grass being greener; more, “Who wants grass?” 

To which the answer may be, you will, when there isn’t enough left to go round. When it is impossible to go back, perhaps you try harder to look over your shoulder to see what was there. 
 

Until then, well - we’ll always have Paris.

© lms2011