A Lightbulb Moment

One of the advantages of having a steeply sloping south-facing roof is that it is just the right place to install some sort of solar powered apparatus. In this house, we have solar-heated hot water, to replace an old, inefficient electric tank. 

We had great fun removing that, as over the years it had accumulated a lot of sediment, and weighed far more than anyone could possibly imagine. He who does everything around here (aka the man with the bad back) got the thing out of the door, but we then had to lift it into the trailer. We roped in a neighbour to help, while I sat on the other end of the trailer as a counterbalance. This was not a fair contest, and I was nearly catapulted across the courtyard. DIY is so exciting.

That was late last summer; now we have had the first non-estimated electricity bill, covering the winter, and we have had our monthly payments almost halved. 

The electricity bill in France will tell you where your power comes from, and in what percentage. In Brittany last year, 87% of the electricity produced came from renewable sources.  There are 95 wind farms already, and 30 new ones are planned. These will increase production from the current 665 megawatts to 950MW. 

Brittany only produces 10% of the energy it consumes. The hope is that this will rise to 35%. It’s a windy place – I’m sure it can meet the challenge. Of course there are days when the wind dies away, and nothing can be produced; but on all the other days, there are the giants turning on the hilltops, doing their thing. 

But times are tight, and electricity is expensive, so there are all sorts of ideas as to how to cut down its use. One national initiative is that from July, shops and offices have to turn off their signs and their interior lights, between 1am and 6am. This will save enough energy to power 260,000 households – just by turning off some lights. 

On a smaller scale, there is a place by the sea where, in the winter months when the Parisians are tucked up in their arondissements, and the streets and seafront are quiet, the locals have opted for a novel approach to lighting: they call up the lamps via their mobile phones as they go along. 

Many people have discovered that actually, without streetlights, there is plenty of visibility to be had from the moon and stars, and that their own outside house lights can guide their way to the roadside with their wheelie bins. 

I read a story in the local paper this week, about an initiative in Rwanda, which does not, in general, have what you might call a National Grid. In the depths of the country they rely on torches to go out at night, or petrol lights indoors; but batteries are expensive and take up half of any earnings they may make, and petrol lamps are dangerous and fumy. So some bright spark has come up with a pedal-driven generator to charge LED bulbs. A minute’s pedalling gets you 375 minutes of light. 

Here in the Breton countryside our village lights go off at 10pm, and reappear at some early hour of the morning when I don’t. There’s no-one about in between, so why waste the power? Well, there is the odd occasion when there has been a Do on at the Salle des Fêtes, and you have to walk home in the dark, but it’s rare. 

Green initiatives don’t have to be handed down to us from the Top. We can do our bit. A spot of daylight, and you have hot water. Natural light lasts a lot longer than we think. And a bit of cycling will get you some lamplight and keep you fit at the same time. 

It’s Earth Hour tonight at 8.30pm, when we are being encouraged to turn off our lights for one hour, for the sake of the planet. Start small: if everyone does it, it soon becomes something big. A lightbulb is nothing, until you have to pedal to charge it up. A million lightbulbs turned off, and you might just be able to hear the planet sigh its thanks.

© lms2012

The Top of the House

In the old fairy story, when Rapunzel let down her hair, her would-be lover didn’t say, hang on, love, I’ve just got to get this past Health and Safety. (There’s a reason why no-one writes Fairy Tales any more.) He was probably a French roofer in his day job.   
 
We have a little house in our garden, whose roof has failed under the weight of ivy and snow. It will need to be replaced completely, wood and all. Of all the jobs we have to do, that’s the romantic thing that we’d like to tackle first. Forget the septic tank; and who needs a kitchen? We’ve got a ruin, and it’s calling to us. 

Roofs. Most of your life, you don’t think about them. They are up there, doing their roofly thing, and you rarely raise your eyes above the parapet, as it were. 

When we were thinking of moving over here, we had to choose an area in which to look for a house. France is a huge country, so where do you start? It seemed worthwhile to come up with a limiting factor, so we decided to go for west and south enough for rounded red tiles to take over from black state. 

Never having lived with a clay roof before, we had things to learn. For instance, they aren’t attached to anything: they just curl onto each other. You have unders and overs, and they slot together in a sleepy fashion and lie there, being a roof. After a high wind (of which we had a lot) you might have to resettle a few. And bees can get in amongst them, and did – but that’s what happens when you have acacia trees right next to the house. 

Clay tile roofs are low, shallow of slope, and accessible. 

Slates are different; they are attached with nails, and lend themselves to a different sort of architecture. The fairy-tale Chateau of Josselin, for instance, has a tremendous slate roof. It has round turrets with conical pointed hats, a miracle of workmanship; but the point is that the castle is built on a rock overlooking a river, and the roof is a long way up, and the ground therefore a very long way down. 

I watched some men re-laying slates on a lesser building recently, but not for long – I had the sudden urge to sit down on terra firma and stay low. The roof was on a Medieval house, high and tall and very steep. The men were not attached in any way, but strolling about up there with trainers on their feet, tossing slates about, directly above the pavement just as it has always been done. 

When our neighbour needed a couple of tiles replacing after a storm the local man came to do the job. He’s over seventy, and has various metal plates inserted where, in the course of a long working life, he has fallen off and hurt himself. He parked his van, and got out the tools of his trade: two wooden ladders. He climbed up to the roof in a pair of old wellies, did the repair, climbed back down, and was off again. 

Where is the scaffolding tower, the English metal roofing ladder with the curved end to hook over the apex, and the full harness? Well, they built Josselin without them. There’s no apex on a conical roof to hang a ladder over. 

Our little house is nothing in comparison: a mere speed hump compared to a mountain. But it is a roof, and therefore up there. It will involve – well, anyone but me – climbing about with slates and nails and hammers a long way from the ground. 

So I was just thinking: isn’t it more romantic to have a ruin? 

There’s a lot to be said for a septic tank, after all; maybe we should do that first, and think about it. Sitting down.

© lms 2012

A La Recherche du Veg. Perdu

There is a tiny, quiet, stealthy revolution taking place in France’s markets. At first you wouldn’t really notice it – after all, there is nothing remarkable about the thing itself. You see it everywhere in England, you’re used to it being there in winter, it’s normal. 

But to the Frenchwoman, it’s bizarre, alien, even dangerous. It threatens kitchen life as she knows it. 

It is the appearance of that most subversive of vegetables, the parsnip. 

If you were to look turnip up in the Larousse Gastronomique, you will find several recipes. Let’s face it, there would have to be – the turnip, alone and undressed, tastes of stale water. 

Look up parsnip, and you will get a few paragraphs, and the conclusion that the English eat it roasted with their rosbif. End of story. 

When we first came over, it was impossible to get parsnips anywhere. I found out why when I bought a magazine devoted to Medieval life, and found it there under Foods of the Past. The parsnip was eaten in the Middle Ages when everything was boiled into submission and therefore safe to eat. It made a brief resurgence in the 19^th Century, but it didn’t catch on. 

The ex-pat English bemoan the loss of many things – bacon, Marmite, marmalade – but if you mention the golden-skinned, pointy vegetable, they will suddenly remember it, and miss it terribly. 

So little by little, supermarkets began to stock them – English grown, of course. No Frenchman worth his salt would give turnip land over to parsnip production. The word went round – ‘you can get them in Leclerc’, ‘SuperU have a few’ – and off we went to buy them whilst stocks lasted. 

But recently they have begun to appear on the market stalls: never in huge numbers, and frequently grown well past the point where you can actually cut through the things with anything less than a chainsaw. The market is quintessentially French – it’s where the housewife of note and standing goes to make her savvy purchases from her chosen stallholders. She will squeeze the radis noirs, glare at the endives, turn her nose up at the chicory; it’s her right to flex her marketing muscles to her own satisfaction. 

And there, amidst all the usual produce, is the parsnip. And next to the parsnip is an Englishwoman (or man), cooing and sighing and dreaming of soup, mash, puree with cream and a sprinkling of paprika, chunks in beefy stews. The Frenchwoman will sidle away, sensing madness. 

I was once asked by a French lady, in the middle of a hypermarket, what to do with a parsnip. Several others stopped to hover, whilst pretending not to listen. It’s food, therefore it’s of interest: but it’s foreign food, therefore it is viewed with suspicion. 

But it’s there, not just on the stalls of the organic growers, or the sustainable farming types, who could be excused on the grounds of incipient hippiedom; it’s crept onto the ordinary veggie stalls too. 

This is, of course, delightful for us. But there will be revenge to be extracted somehow, and I fear that you are going to suffer for our victory. English supermarket shelves will groan under the weight of radis noir, chicory, and endive: but far, far worse – there will be an attempted Turnip Takeover. 

Run for your gastronomic lives – run to France: we’ve got the parsnips!

© lms 2012

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