Toussaint

It’s that time of year again: the weekly publicité tells us that every supermarket and garden centre everywhere is stocked to the roof with chrysanthemums. Empty shops will open just to sell them by the pot. Markets will have stalls dedicated to them. It’s nearly All Saints, and on that day, November 1^st – a national holiday – people everywhere will be placing these flowers on the graves of their lost ones.

  

Hallowe’en has become a new and not totally trusted event: it’s for the young. It's lost its original significance. All Saints is for the older generations. It used to be celebrated in England, in a sombre fashion, as an exclusively religious day. Here in France it belongs to everyone who has someone to remember; and failing that, it's a day off work.

One of the many things that perplexed us since coming to France is the lack of old graves, and indeed graveyards. Where are they all? In England, burials traditionally took place within the churchyard; historically, disposing of the bodies and souls of the dearly departed was the purlieu of the Church. You can walk amongst these tombs, in various stages of upkeep, in just about any village and town.
 

In the Poitou, this is rare. The cemeteries are detached, often on the edge of the village, with no religions building in sight, and on inspection, you will find nobody commemorated from before the late 1800s. 

South of Poitiers there is a Protestant burial ground in a forest, dating from the 17^th century. It had to be hidden away because the believers couldn’t, wouldn’t, be buried according to Catholic rites. They were outcasts in life and death by virtue of their religion. But that is one of the oldest sites of common people’s graves still in existence. There will always be the grand tombs in Cathedrals and city churches, but where were the ordinary people laid to rest? Where is the old hallowed ground? 

What’s missing is the sense of time, of continuation. Earlier generations couldn’t afford engraved stones to mark their passage through history, as was the case in England too; but there aren’t any monuments to local lordlings or constables, either.

In Brittany there are churches with attached burial grounds, still in use. One of these, at a tiny village near here, has an ossuary. This is a small stone building with open sides, like a miniature market hall; and inside are jumbles of old bones. 

The graves are occupied as long as there are people to pay for their upkeep. Once this lapses, a notice will be attached to the headstone, warning that if there is no contact from the relatives of the deceased within a certain time, the plot will be cleared and made available to someone else. It’s a pragmatic approach.   

With the publicité for shellfish, and wine events, and chrysanthemums, that comes to the mailbox every week courtesy of La Poste, there will often be a leaflet advertising funerary monuments. Look at our range of stone! Look at our carving! Want your loved one’s name in Gothic script, picked out in gold? Easy terms available! 

You can have your place in history for as long as there’s someone to remember and to care: which, when you think about it, is the simple truth. 

Perhaps fame should be measured in chrysanthemums. 

©lms 2012

If Music Be the Food of Love

What did history sound like? 

I can hear something working on a farm somewhere; I can hear a motorbike, the occasional jet, passing tractors and grain lorries. It’s tempting to think that history was quiet in comparison.

It wasn’t.  

Every year in Quintin there is a celebration of the linen industry that made this part of Brittany important. During the fête, it’s possible to wander lanes that are usually hidden behind closed doors. These were the poor, dark houses where women twisted the threads into a yarn on a hand-held spindle. They would sit outside as often as possible, in heat and cold, just for the light. There would have been several women, with their children around them, chatting, singing, working their fingers for hour upon hour.

We went for a walk (and lunch, naturally) yesterday at Ile Grande, on the Côte de Granit Rose. It’s a peaceful place. The tide was out, the seabirds wheeled, and the masts of beached boats chinked in the easterly breeze. It’s so easy to think that it was always like this, but it wasn’t. This little island was riddled with stone quarries. In the 14^th century, stone from here built Tréguier Cathedral. Right up until the 19^th century stone was taken out on barges, loaded at low tide and floated out when it was deep enough to do so. Men worked with hammers and chisels at the rock in all weathers, and the island would have resounded with their rhythmic tapping.

Animals lived close to the farms – inside the longhouses, in the winter months. There would have been axes chopping trees and wood, the slow turning of soil. This would have been no silent countryside, but a place of agricultural industry day in, day out. 

Times may have changed, but the past can be heard, all over Brittany – in the music. 

Breton music echoes the rhythms of the workers who sang the simple songs as they spun their thread, or as they sat at the end of the day with the endless tapping of metal on stone still inside their heads. It’s often a sort of question and answer form – a theme played on one instrument, repeated on another. In the same way, a woman might sing a few lines, and her neighbour copy her, along the hidden lanes and back again. 

There are bagpipes here, but they are nothing like the Scottish ones: even though they were really only introduced in the early 19^th century, they have come to sound like Brittany, and at any fête you can almost guarantee a bagadou – a band of pipers and drummers walking through the streets. The cornemuse as depicted in medieval church grotesque sculpture is an early form, and far closer in sound to the Breton version than to Scottish pipes. 

The main instrument, though, is the bombarde – the thing that looks like a clarinet, and sounds medieval. When you hear Breton music played by a small band of men and women, with a drum, a violin, and a bombarde, you hear it in your feet. You want to dance. You know the tune after a couple of verses, and you hum along. 

There are so many fêtes in Brittany, all through the year, all with their own history to honour – linen weavers, onion growers, horse traders, fishermen. At every one of them, you will have the old music and the dancing of people in costume; black based, heavily embroidered jackets (and it was often the men who did the embroidery), lace head-dresses. There are clubs where you can learn the steps, in many towns and villages. 

I don’t know what it is: the Celt ancestry? The working day, the need to get through by any means possible, whilst counting the hours in verses? The hills, where you can’t see the next clustered farm, and each one was a little hamlet all to itself? 

Whatever it is, it’s still there, and it still calls. 

History sounds like toes tapping, hands clapping, and a bombarde, piercing, slightly raucous, and heart-stirring, as a band passes through a stone-built street. It’s the sound of the people who worked with their hands and their backs, and who still had a need and the time for music. 

It’s a question and an answer in the same song: yesterday and today. It’s Brittany.

©lms 2012

 

La Rentrée

It’s September 1^st, and someone has turned the sun off. 

The schools go back on Tuesday; the shops are full of mothers trying to decide which really is the best calculator, and not the one Child wants because Best Friend has the same model. The mannequins in the clothes stores are wearing wool and raincoats and boots. The colours have turned dark. 

July was wet and ruined the tourist trade’s balance sheets. Now, you have to wonder at people not coming to Brittany because it was raining. If you are going to choose the far north-west of France, the bit that sticks out into the Atlantic, for your main holiday of the year, you know to bring your umbrella. Apparently the financial squeeze made people demand more for their money: sunshine, or the deal’s off. It rained; they stayed at home and sulked. 

I never really got the French grandes vacances until this year. Down south, where half the time we huddled behind closed shutters, fanning ourselves and mopping our brows with wet flannels, we didn’t really see any tourists. They were either at the beach, near La Rochelle, or in private villas with pools. The roads remained quiet. 

Here there are beaches a-plenty, and events organised for every day of the week. There are music festivals – Les Grandes Charrues, which draws people like Bob Dylan, and 180,000 spectators, and Le Petit Village, a couple of kilometres from here, where they have all manner of French artists. 8000 people turned up, and we never heard a thing. Sea-shanty festivals at the coast, rock, pop, punk, folk, jazz , classical – it’s all here. 

There are the son et lumières at ruined abbeys like Bon Repos, and night-time hikes. There’s walking chest-high through the water across the Bay of St Brieuc. There are cycle races, and old car races. Our next village had a speed trial and hill climb round the fields of maize and up the roads and through the farms. (We didn’t hear that either.)This weekend there is a vintage car race round St Brieuc itself – Model T Fords and Porsches and anything in between. 

It’s been an amazing summer. It’s been so hot that I couldn’t sit up here under the roof to work.  We’ve lived in shorts and tee shirts, which we never did down south, where covering up was the name of the game. I even dug out my swimsuit. (Rather like having a wasp in the room, I like to know where it is. I may not do anything about it, but I feel one should keep one’s enemy in the sights.) 

Today, I am back in cardigan, long trousers, and a scarf to keep my neck warm. It’s as though the weather’s giving a nudge to the rentrée, a little kindness to say that it’s time to stop playing now, and get back to work and school. Our Parisian neighbours had a wonderful month, with lots of visitors staying, getting fit and tanned and happy. They went back last weekend, in the rain. 

So now Brittany is ours again. There are still foreign cars around – English, German, Belgian, and some from other départements, but in the next few weeks, they will wander off home, too. The beaches will be empty though the sea will be warm; no-one will be there to see me in my swimsuit, should I be so brave as to put it on. 

There will still be music: this is Brittany , and music is what we do. There will be more festivals all through the year, whatever the weather, because there always have been. 

It feels like the end of something. It feels like the start of Autumn. Now it’s time for the ones who are left behind, when the tourists fade away, to make the most of what we’ve got, just for ourselves.

The bright, noisy, excited visitors have left us, and we will sit back and enjoy the quiet once more.

Maybe I’ll just tuck the swimsuit back into its drawer. It wouldn’t be fair to disturb the peace. 

And I wouldn’t want to make it rain.

©lms 2012

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Brasserie

Here in the land of milk and honey (well, cider and crêpes), it’s amazing how many pizza restaurants there are. They’re obsessed with pizza here.  Maybe it’s a sort of cousin of the crêpe – fast food of a floury sort with a filling of your choice. 

When we have been out spending huge amounts of cash on kitchen fitments, or plaster board, or any of that DIY essential collection with which the working man likes to surround himself, we occasionally find ourselves away from home at lunchtime. In the shopping complex which houses the biggest bricolage store, there is also a pizzeria, where we sometimes drop in for lunch. Imagine our disappointment when the last time we went, it was closed for refurbishment – it’s being renamed and turned into another pizzeria. 

So we climbed into the car (He Who Does Everything Around Here having the taste of pepperoni so close and yet so far) and headed for the next one along the road, only to find it was full. Everyone else, driven by deprivation, had headed in the same direction. 

We ended up in a bar-brasserie attached to a supermarket, where all the workers go to eat. This is a guarantee of good food, by the way – so if in doubt, eat like the French White Van Man. (That ought to translate as Homme de Van Blanc, but we’ll gloss over that.) 

In the frantic atmosphere of shouted orders and whizzing waitresses, while we awaited our lunch (not pizza), we looked around. There were the working men with their plates piled high and their carafes of rosé wine (it’s summer: real men do drink pink) enjoying a good hour’s conviviality with their colleagues. A second carafe replaced the first, and they ate and chatted and eventually went out into the rain for a smoke. 

This happens a lot: diners leave the table en masse, and then come back for a dessert and a coffee. They are trusted not to do a runner without paying the bill. 

The thing is that as of July 1^st, every car has to be equipped with 2 self-test breathalyser kits. Really you need one, but if you use one, then you have none, so you have to have two to make sure you have one. (Do keep up.) 

The idea is that, if you have partaken of a few bevvies with your lunch or dinner, you can test your suitability to get behind the wheel of your chosen vehicle, and can stop yourself, and say, No, I have had too much to drink. I will spend some of my hard-earned cash on a taxi, leave my car in this rather dodgy car park, and come back for it when I am sober. 

However, thinking of the chaps who lunched, and have lunched that way every day of their working lives, I wonder: at what point are they going to think, when they have never thought before, that they may have had more than is wise? 

If you attend any country market, you’ll find the local bar busy, well before lunchtime, and frequently before breakfast time, with men (and it is mostly men) knocking back a glass of marc, or a beer. There is a story that in some regions market stall holders will have a bowl of French onion soup on a winter’s morning, and will wash the bowl out with a glass of red wine in which they will dip their bread. 

Will they reach for the self-test kit? 

And if they do, have they got one (or two)? The shops had sold out long before the date when the law applied. The police can stop you and fine you 30 euros on the spot if they find you less than fully equipped. If you are a foreign person on holiday here, you have until November to comply, except that the police in general do not know this, and will fine you anyway. 

I wonder if the kits have a use-by date; and being of a frugal race, will a French driver get within two days of this, and think, I’d better use it before it goes off, and find that all his life he has been drink-driving? He’s more likely to think the kit has failed. 

In much the same way as you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink, you can take a Frenchman to a bar-brasserie for lunch but you cannot make him test his alcoholic intake.  Lunch and a glass of wine – it’s written into the Constitution, surely?

 

©lms 2012

Swallows and Albatrosses

It’s been a good spring for birds. I’m not very knowledgeable about wildlife, but it seems that the interrupted, not to say downright contrary, weather patterns this year have mean a lot of birds have nested and produced at the same time. 

A month or so ago our Parisian neighbour, down for the week, knocked on our door and invited us to see ‘the spectacle of the village’. We put on our wellies and waterproofs, expecting a stroll down the garden, but we didn’t need them. The spectacle was in the house. 

Because this is a holiday home, the owners cover over the fireplace when they are away to stop birds coming down the chimney. Nobody told the Mother Owl, who, for reasons unknown but apparently not rare, flew down and laid her five eggs in the cold, soft ashes of the old fire.Our neighbour and his wife were woken up by so much noise, they thought an angry cat had fallen down the chimney: but on investigation, it was the mother coming to feed her chicks. 

Another neighbour has been keeping a close eye and a record of their progress, and what we first saw as five fluffy, sharp-beaked yellowy bundles, graded by size from tiny to almost adult, have fledged and flown. We had no idea how they would learn to fly upwards in so confined a space, but they apparently made their way up in stages, from ledge to ledge, and departed according to their size. 

In the meantime, we have had hirondelles - swallows -  nesting in the Little House – the ruined one, which we hoped to re-roof this summer. That is now on hold: these amazing little birds, which fly up from Africa without stopping, sleeping on the wing, and only make landfall to lay eggs and bring up their family, deserve the chance to do that in their chosen place. There were three of them involved in the nest building, zooming in and out of the open doorway. 

Then one sunny day, as we were sitting in the garden, we saw a similar bird fly up to the wall of our house under the eaves, cling to the render there, and call. Another joined it, and they had a chuckling sort of chat, and flew away again – but not before a tiny speck of mud had been deposited on the wall.That speck is rapidly growing into a nest. 

The cuckoo is very late this year, but maybe that’s a good thing – if all the other birds have had their first clutches of eggs and seen their families safely into flight, maybe the bully birds won’t push so many vital little chicks out of their rightful nests. 

This morning, there was a sparrow on the ground with four young, all demanding food. Imagine having four children round the breakfast table, and having to hand-feed each one, with them all jostling for position and yelling, “Me! Me!” Birds have more patience than we do. 

On the way to the supermarket yesterday we passed a house with a cage in the garden; the last time we passed, there was a magpie in the cage. Now there are two. Whether the owner of the house is protecting other nests, I don’t know, but it seemed wrong to see such big, bright birds so contained. Maybe he will release them again when the other baby birds have flown: better than killing them, anyway. 

But there is one bird that is not welcome in my garden – not that it ever lands here. It just passes over. Frequently. On those rare days when I get to hang my washing out – the big washing, like sheets and duvet covers, that look so lovely and fresh billowing in the breeze – a bird the size of an albatross spots it from on high, and decides to use it for target practise. I have never seen the bird itself, but the results can be spectacular. I hate to think what it is eating, but I think it could do with a few more vegetables in its diet. 

So all in all it has been a hopeful spring, no matter what the weather has done to delay it. And apart from those odd days of hot, welcome sunshine, when we humans all dash outside and turn out faces up to the warmth, if it’s too wet to hang out my washing, at least it can’t be bombed by the albatross.

Medically Speaking

There is a problem amongst the medical fraternity in France: no-one wants to be a country GP (médecin généraliste)any more.  Live in the country far, far from all amenities (aka, outside the Paris ring road, but we’ve been there in another post) where the nights are dark (been there too) and culture is lacking? Non, merci. The older GPs are retiring, or dying out, and it is increasingly difficult to convince any young up and comer that he or she could continue to come up whilst dwelling outside a major conurbation. 

It’s not as though there are many major conurbations to start with – there are only about five real cities in France – so it would actually be harder, statistically speaking, to work within a conurbation than outside of one, without being stacked one on top of the other. The idea of being the Big Fish in the small pond just doesn’t seem to translate. That, or the French think small ponds are over-rated. 

We used to have a small pond, and it was full of interesting life forms. 

In our old village, the GP was also the Maire. He was, and apparently still is, a chronic late-arriver. Appointments were blithely made by his secretariat for 9 am in the certain knowledge that he wouldn’t turn up before ten, when the waiting room would be packed and every single patient there would present with high blood pressure. It was possible to arrive to find the door locked, and we would all be sitting in our cars when he got there looking quite unabashed. I made the mistake of walking there once, and spent a good hour wandering up and down a plain and not very interesting housing estate road in the cold until he arrived. He never once apologised. 

The upside was that once you got in to see him, he would give you all the time you wanted – up to 45 minutes on occasion. The downside to that was that having waited to get into the building, you then also had to wait whilst everyone in the queue ahead of you grabbed their chance to discuss everything in minute detail for as long as they could. Your revenge was that the GP would be late for his lunch. His was that he would be even later for afternoon surgery. You couldn’t win. 

The previous owner of our last house used to be the district nurse. They still have them here, doing the rounds of country homes to take blood, or change dressings or visit new mothers, and they do an important job. They aren’t attached to the doctor’s surgery, but have their own offices and are self-employed.  One year when she was away, our friend employed as a locum a young lady from Paris. She looked like a city person. She dressed like a city person. She didn’t know what a farmyard was. She didn’t own a pair of wellingtons. 

One day she went to see an elderly gent who offered her coffee, and being polite, she accepted. So on went the pan of stiff coffee that had been lurking on the side, and he looked around for something in which to serve it. To her horror and consternation, he picked up a glass, took the false teeth out of it and popped them in his mouth, rinsed it under the tap, and poured the coffee into it and handed it to her. 

She was forever unavailable after that. 

Perhaps it is fear of that sort of experience that puts the newly qualified GPs off the idea of moving outside the city walls. If they can be so upset by the threat of a dirty farmyard, or an unsavoury glass of coffee, do you really want to be treated by such a person? Worse, would you want a home visit? However ill you were, you would spend the hour before the appointment cleaning and tidying both house and self. He’s a Parisian, you’d say, sneeringly – and you wouldn’t want him to be able to look down his patrician (and very clean) nose at you. 

What’s needed is a dose of reality. All medical students should have to do at least a year in a country practise before being allowed back into the city.I’ve never met a medical student yet whose digs weren’t a total tip. So maybe that’s the answer: just tell them it’ll be like going back to their university days. By the time they find out you lied, it will be too late. 

All they need to know is to bring their wellies and avoid the coffee. How hard can it be?

©lms 2012