End of summer

Mes amis

The summer of 2009 was the best we have had of the five we have spent at La Lande. It was the “barbecue summer” that the UK was promised, but didn’t get. Temperatures were regularly above 30°C during the afternoon and the fan worked overtime in our bedroom to enable us to sleep at night. Every Wednesday there is a (Stableford) golf competition at Longeveau, spread over two sessions – morning and afternoon. We normally play in the afternoon, but this year places to play in the morning were at a premium to avoid the afternoon heat. We were grateful to friends and neighbours for allowing us use of their pools – our little “dunking” pool (i.e. children’s paddling pool) had sprung a leak and we were in need of a cooling off. My best memory is of one Wednesday in August when we got very hot playing golf in the morning then took our neighbours to a concert in the evening in a very hot barn and finished up at midnight in their pool eating ice cream and drinking chilled rosé wine. Sadly, the few days of cloud and rain we saw coincided with visits from family and friends from the UK!

This year was also a bumper year for fruit in the garden. In 2008 our total harvest from two cherry trees, two plum trees and three damson trees was 8 oz of damsons (figs did well later in the year). 2009 saw branches breaking off the plum trees under the weight of the fruit and damson branches similarly reaching down to the ground. Earlier in the summer the cherries had looked very promising, but some late rain meant that half of them went mouldy. The other half were attacked by birds before they had a chance to ripen; so our crop was a much-reduced yield of orangey-red, bird-pecked, but nonetheless tasty, juicy cherries.

Our harvesting of the plums and damsons was not well timed either. We watched the fruits swell; we cut off and tidied up the broken branches and just as the fruit ripened we went off for a couple of weeks to the UK (pre-planned). “Help yourselves while we’re away,” were our parting words to neighbours. I’m pleased to say they did, but it still meant that, on our return, half the crop lay rotting on the ground. We set about making damson jam and chutney and eating as many plums as our digestive systems could cope with. We gave more away to friends and took boxes full to Longeveau with the sign “help yourself”, but we still ended up “plum tuckered”. Of course everyone else was experiencing a bumper crop too, so even giving the stuff away was difficult.

I have written before about the cost of running a business in France – notably the costs of employing people and the crippling social charges involved. Many small businesses therefore are family-run with, probably, some family members working for low or no wages. Nowhere is this more common than in the bar/restaurant business. Lots of people still eat a daily lunch in a small restaurant (gainfully filling their 2-hour lunch break and maintaining an ancient tradition). This means that there are many places where you can eat nutritiously and cheaply at lunchtime, but to maintain a competitive edge on price overheads have to be minimised. Eating out in the evening is more expensive (but still cheap compared to the UK) and in the current economic situation fewer people can afford to do so. Enter the French government with a rescue package – a reduction in VAT. The standard rate of VAT (or TVA as it is known here) is 19.5% but the government has lowered this in restaurants to 5%. How much of this will be passed on to customers remains to be seen. Sadly this initiative came too late for our nearest bar/restaurant in our neighbouring village of Palluaud, which closed in July; and we’d only recently discovered how good it was. We must ensure that we support our other favourites to prevent them going the same way.

This will be my last epistle from La Lande. Perhaps we bought this house with undue haste. We had been looking for several months and seen over 30 properties. With our 6-month trial period coming to an end in the spring of 2005, we may have been a bit desperate. Although the house ticked all the boxes, living in it proved a slightly disappointing experience. It’s a wonderful house in the summer, but the winter is more of a challenge. Being a converted barn the main room is double height and very imposing, but it takes a lot of heating. The walls are thin and not soundproofed. When you live with a man who generates more than his fair share of noise, there’s nowhere to hide and find your own peace.

The garden of the house commands wonderful views and is large enough to feel spacious but, just about, manageable (five eighths of an acre). The hamlet it sits is strange (we didn’t research it enough). Of the 16 houses, just four are occupied all year round. The rest are holiday homes, mainly British, some of which have been owned by the same people for many years. We haven’t made friends with the French people (mainly because they are unfriendly) and the other owners come and go and tend to mix amongst themselves. This isn’t a problem for us as we have our own group of friends we socialise with 12 months a year, but it’s a bit unfortunate. Having said that, we do leave behind some dear (English) neighbours who have had a house here for over 30 years and two other couples (one English, one Dutch) who are newcomers, like us.

The current Mrs Barry hasn't really liked the house for some time and so we put it on the market a couple of years ago with the view of buying something else in the immediate area. It's taken all that time to sell it and in that time a lot has happened!

My illness spooked us both and Chris couldn't imagine being left here in France on her own. In addition, we now have a beautiful, growing granddaughter and another grandchild on the way (Laura is due to produce on New Year’s Eve).

We still enjoy living here, but our longer-term plans have changed. We have decided to stay on here, at least for a couple of years, but to rent rather than buy. Total costs of buying another house, including estate agents, solicitors and taxes would be in excess of 15,000€ - we can rent here for 2 or 3 years for that sort of money, so that's what we intend to do. We are buying a property back in Witney. It will be a "holiday home" for us initially and enable us to come over ad hoc and stay as long as we like. Eventually we will move back full-time and take extended holidays here in the houses of friends - we've had lots of offers.

The house we are renting is just 2 km by road from Longeveau (less if you cut across the fields). You can see the roof of the house from the 9th tee (and, perhaps, the 9th tee from the roof of the house). Future epistles will be from La Ferrière.

So life goes on much as before, but we now have an exit strategy. The new plan should enable us to see more of our friends when we come over – perhaps current readers included!

À bientôt
du Barry

Holiday

Mes amis

As I have mentioned before, the current Mrs Barry and I celebrated our ruby wedding anniversary in April. We had considered a big holiday in the antipodes, but recent events meant that we couldn’t get down under until the end of their summer. It would have cost a lot of money too, so we decided to use that money to change the (family) car; the Picasso was beginning to play up a bit. Instead we took a short holiday to the south of France.

Towards the end of the summer term of my first year at Loughborough, we were sitting around, probably having taken a small libation, discussing what to do with the long summer vacation ahead. Someone had the idea of working abroad, perhaps in a bar or restaurant – somewhere warm. Bill had been the previous year to a campsite in Le Lavandou on the Côte d’Azur and that seemed to fit the bill (no pun intended). So it was that in July 1964 me, Rick, Leo (real name Lionel) and Dave set off in Leo’s 803cc, side-valve, split-screen Morris Minor with my family frame tent on the roof for the south of France. No motorways in those days so it was three days later that we arrived. It soon became clear that bars and restaurants had taken on summer staff back in May. So there we were with no money and no prospects!

The lady who ran the campsite took pity on us and directed us to her brother’s garage in the town, “He can always do with some help,” she said. True to her word, he offered two of us work (mending punctures, washing cars and generally helping out and clearing up). The best thing was, he didn’t mind which two turned up each day. So we had one day on the beach and one day at work, weekends together then change partners for the next week; and so it continued until early September. We just about earned enough to keep body and soul together, but had a wonderful time.

So, I think, began my love affair with France, or, should I say, our love affairs with France. Rick and Leo went on to buy the remnants of an old Cognac estate in 1991 and develop it into a holiday centre, with three floodlit tennis courts (Rick’s game) and a 9-hole golf course (Leo’s game). That’s where you’ll find us now, two or three times a week. (See http://www.longeveau.com/.) Bill moved out here a couple of years before us, so we all live within a 10km radius (and Stephen, who had the room next to me and below Rick, has a house in St Severin, within that radius – we’re still trying to persuade him to give up work and move here permanently). The only one missing is Dave – we must work on him too!

So (back to our holiday) I thought an ideal destination for us would be Le Lavandou – I fancied driving the MX-5 along the front, top down and Chris has heard so much about the place over the years that she deserved to see it. It’s an eight and a half hour drive from here (France is such a big country!) so we planned some stops en route.

The first of these was Agde and Cap d’Agde at the mouth of the river Hérault and its junction with the Canal du Midi. The proprietor of the hotel said it wasn’t far between the two, but perhaps he didn’t realise we were walking. The return trip was about 12km, but we were refreshed with a drink or two at the large marina at the cape, which is famed for its nudist colony.

Our main reason for taking this route was to see the exciting coast road that runs through Sète, La Grande Motte and Aigues Mortes to the Camargue. The road to Sète sits out in the Mediterranean and is lined with motor homes. We found the town itself full of traffic and decided not to stop. Instead we pushed on to La Grande Motte, a resort purpose-built in the 60s to plug the tourist drain southwards into Spain. The architecture, revolutionary in its time, now looks like a slice of history. I thought it was great fun! Aigues Mortes, by contrast, is a small walled town and you have to park outside its charming, narrow streets.

From there it was on to Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, the main resort of the Camargue, France’s wild west, roamed by black bulls and white horses, a wetland wilderness. The 780-sq-km delta of the river Rhône is home to pale-pink flamingos, cranes, ibis and a host of other water birds; including migratory visitors from north and south; species total around 500. I’m not a real twitcher, but I know enough to realise that not all small brown birds are sparrows and if you see a group of crows they’re probably rooks, etc. I wanted to see this unique ecosystem for myself and probably the easiest way was to visit the ornithological park. Our hotel was out of town and a good kilometre down a dirt track, well into the wetlands. The most evident winged creatures around were mosquitoes, which, as we emerged from the hotel pool after a refreshing dip, decided it was “grub up” and we were dinner! It was a similar story next morning as we walked around the bird park, but we were prepared with repellent.

The ornithological park is well worth a visit. I had said that if I didn’t see a flamingo I’d ask for my money back. There are two circular walks: the first, shorter one is heavily populated with a wide range of birds (including a large flock of flamingos) mainly because they feed them, but they remain in the wild. The other walk is around a much more natural environment, still plenty of wildlife but needs more spotting; and fewer humans too.

Our next stop was the town of Arles, famous for its Roman remains and its association with Vincent Van Gogh. The Roman amphitheatre is stunning. It has a fascinating history over the last nearly 2,000 years. In the 15th century it was cleared out and houses, a small town, built inside the outer wall, which acted as a fortress. The seating has now been restored (it originally seated 20,000 for chariot races and gladiatorial displays) and restoration of the outer walls is nearly complete. They stage occasional bullfights there now (bloodless). Nearby is the well-restored Roman theatre (1st century BC), which seated 10,000, and there are baths too. Arles must have been a good place to be stationed for your average centurion in the first century or two.

Van Gogh arrived in Arles in 1888 transferring to an asylum in nearby St Rémy de Provence in May 1889. Both towns vie for which had the greater influence on his work – he painted starry nights in both locations – but it is the Provençal countryside, light and colours that must have been his greatest inspiration. He only sold one painting in his short, troubled life and of the hundreds he painted there none remain in Provence, neither in Arles nor St Rémy. The best we found was a gallery displaying life-sized photographs of some of his works.

We then made our way down to Le Lavandou. It was very exciting for me to be back after so long, but in reality there was very little I could remember. There can be few places in the world that haven’t changed out of recognition over the last 45 years, many buildings were clearly younger than that. I did find the garage we worked at and the beach was as wonderful, golden and sun-kissed as before. The small fishing port is now a 1,100-boat marina, but I felt that the resort had maintained a friendly feel and it doesn’t have the expensive, over-inflated ego of St Tropez, 20 minutes to the east.

We were in Le Lavandou for National Music Day (21st June) and the whole place was buzzing: a disco all day on the beach; a performance stage on the boule park; the Town Band outside the Mairie; and singers, duos and groups wandering from restaurants to cafes. It was the first year I hadn’t been playing myself.

After another relaxing day on the beach we started our journey home. We broke this in Albi on the river Tarn. The massive, fortress-like Gothic cathedral dwarfs the rest of the town. The largest brick-built cathedral in the world was built to impress and subdue; to remind the world of the Christian might that crushed the Cathars in the bloody crusade of the 13th century. The cathedral is dedicated to St Cécile, the patron saint of music and musicians (a nice link for us to National Music Day). The inside could not be in greater contrast to its stark exterior. No surface has been left untouched by 16th century Italian artists. Intricate limestone carvings are everywhere and behind the main altar is a particularly vivid Doomsday horror-show – The Last Judgement (1490) – with the damned being boiled in oil, beheaded or tortured by demons and monsters. Those who couldn’t read The Good Book were left in no doubt about the consequences of sinning.

Albi is also the birthplace of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In contrast to the dearth of Van Gogh’s work in Provence, the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, housed in the Bishops’ Palace alongside the cathedral, is full of Henri’s paintings, lithographs and posters.

Then it was home. Other than for security when parked, the hood was down the whole holiday and we enjoyed sunny weather throughout. We also experienced something that I recalled from O level Geography, the Mistral, and quite awesome it was too. I shall remember driving topless (the car, that is) down roads lined with plane trees as the Mistral whistled overhead.

The region we spent most of the holiday in is rather clumsily called Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, or Paca for short, and its residents Pacaiens. The current regional president describes the name as “a profound handicap” and has invited suggestions for a new name. The Côte d’Azur bit seems to be the major stumbling block, with people referring to Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Côte d’Agneau (lamb chop); but I say, what’s in a name … ?

À bientôt
du Barry

Summer 2009

Mes amis

May is a good month for bank holidays. In UK you have two; here we have three or more: 1st – Fête de travail; 8th – Victoire 1945, Ascension Day, this year the 21st and, usually, the Monday of Pentecost, although this year that was 1st June. It amuses me that the 5th Republic declares France to be a secular country, but observes Christian festivals if they generate a holiday! I was, as usual, on parade with the Ribérac band for VE Day and on May Day we were invited by friends to join in the celebrations in a small village near Chalais (in the Charente) called Rioux-Martin. Here they celebrate the new season of spring garlic with a walk and lunch.
Around 130 people undertook the walk, which turned out to be 13 km, although it seemed longer! Some of the ground underfoot was a bit wet and slippery and this did detract from some of the fine views the route afforded and slowed us down a bit. Although I didn’t see any wild garlic, there was a grand array of spring flowers en route, including wild strawberries. The whole event was nicely timed to get us back to the village by 12:30 for aperitifs – Cognac/Schweppes (i.e. brandy and tonic – don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!). We ate outside, under cover.

The spring garlic was waiting for us on the table. It looks a bit like big spring onions (we once bought it in the supermarket, mistaking it for the same) but tastes very different. It went down well with pâté for the entrée. The main course was omelette. There were four people breaking and whisking the eggs (55 dozen were lined up) and another four cooking the omelettes to which they added sorrel and, of course, chopped spring garlic. The ubiquitous cheese course preceded local strawberries. They grow a lot in this area and the season starts in early May. They are the tastiest I have had the pleasure to eat. The whole lot was washed down with lashings of red wine. A great way to celebrate May Day, although it took me several days to recover (from the walk!).

We have recently changed our car. This coincided with a new system of vehicle registration being introduced in France, ending a system based on departmental identification; so it’s goodbye to 9374VR24. Since Adam bought his first car the last two numbers of the plate have indicated the département in which the vehicle was registered (24 being the number of the Dordogne). If you’ve travelled with children in France a good game to keep them occupied was to collect the department numbers from registration plates. In future, a vehicle will have a registration for life, replacing the previous system under which each time a vehicle was sold to anyone living outside of the department of the current owner it was necessary to change the licence plate.

The system led to an enormous growth in the number of registration numbers. Whilst there are around 40 million cars on the roads in France, there are 150 million registration numbers in existence! As there is no car tax in France there is no annual registration of vehicles. Car owners who disposed of their vehicle to the tip simply did not notify the préfecture that the car had been destroyed and, as a consequence, it continued to be registered with the authorities. Not only did this lead to the system becoming saturated, it was also contributing to trafficking of registration numbers.

The new plates will comprise seven characters, formed of two letters, three numbers and two letters. The new plates will all be uniformly black lettering on a white background. The first registration plate out of the system, AA-001-AA, has gone to a vehicle museum on the French colony of Reunion.

There has been strong local political and parliamentary resistance to the introduction of the new system, with many politicians reluctant to abandon the territorial basis of registration. They even formed a pressure group within the French Parliament, called ‘jamais dans mon département’. In the end, they managed to persuade the government that a departmental number should remain on the car plates, together with a regional logo, but separate from the main number. However, as the vehicle owner can have the departmental number of their choice, the number that appears on the new plates will offer no guarantee of the place of residence of the owner! In the event of sale, the new owner is entitled to change the regional and departmental identification.

[When I wrote the section above we were waiting for the prefecture to re-register our car. We were disappointed that an old-style number came through (4990WN24); the Dordogne didn’t introduce new plates on second hand cars until 15th June. The lady at the garage said, “You’re lucky – you were able to keep the 24.”]

It has been concert season here – Ribérac held its music festival at the end of May. The Société Musicale de Ribérac gave a concert of music from the cinema together with a local choir. There were 40 musicians and 60 singers performing a number of well-known pieces, most of which were from English/US films. The next day we (SMR) joined with our sister band, Vents de l’Ouest from Razac-sur-l’Isle, to become the Orchestre des Deux Vallées and were one of three bands to perform in the closing concert. We opened the afternoon and were followed by OAP – not what you might think, but the Orchestre d’Accordéons de Paris: imagine a band of 16 accordionists and 2 percussionists!

Finally on stage were the Orchestre d’Harmonie de l’Union des Sociétés Musicales de Dordogne (USMD rolls off the tongue a little easier). This is a band made up of musicians from various town bands across the département. I played with them a couple of years ago (check your archived epistles). It was quite a commitment: 4 weekend workshops over the winter held at various venues, some quite distant, and I was the only Englishman.

The French don’t seem to have an expression for “too much of a good thing”. Each band played too many pieces and the concert lasted 4 hours – a bit of a marathon for the current Mrs Barry and other members of my fan club, sitting on hard chairs.

The following weekend we were part of the Thiviers music festival celebrating 40 years of their band, Les Joyeux Thibériens (lovely name!). We cut our programme down from 12 pieces to 8, so I was home in time for dinner (Thiviers being 65 km away).

The next weekend we played at the Chancelade Jazz Festival (a lot of our repertoire is jazz/swing, e.g. Basie, Ellington, Jobim). I arrived in time for the pre-performance snack (wine and a sandwich) at 7pm, but didn’t stay for the meal, which was to be served at 11pm as it’s a 35 km drive home and I need my beauty sleep. Thankfully we decided not to take part in France’s national music day this year (I was on holiday anyway – more about that soon).

Finally, a big thank you to those readers who have sent me messages of support and encouragement, they are much appreciated. The good news is that I have finished the treatment and the consultant doesn’t want to see me for another 6 months. So I feel I can start to uncross a few things and adopt an air of cautious optimism.

À bientôt
du Barry

Spring 2009

Mes amis

So spring arrives at La Lande. We had an excellent March and spent several afternoons sitting in the sun. It means that we have endured another Dordogne winter. Endured may be too harsh a term, but, as I may have mentioned before, the winters here are harder than we had anticipated – plenty of frost and a good fall of snow this year too. We decided this year to keep warm by burning more wood and less oil. It worked well and probably saved us some money too.

The current Mrs Barry is not a great fan of the dark evenings and, being in the country, winter seems to be more evident than perhaps it was in the UK. When I last wrote I told you about my hospitalisation and promised to spare you the details. However, the ramifications of this have taken up much of my winter and to relate this I have to give some background. If you are of a sensitive nature and don’t enjoy Casualty etc. you may want to skip a paragraph or two.

I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last July. At the time the urologist thought that the tumour was totally enclosed within the capsule of the gland and that removal of the prostate would take the problem away with it. So at the beginning of October I had a radical prostatectomy (by keyhole surgery). Subsequent examination of what they removed suggested that there was a small chance that the cancer had spread to immediately surrounding areas so further treatment was recommended, including 33 sessions of radiotherapy – that’s daily sessions, weekends off. This started on New Year’s Eve. The hospital is an hour away and the treatment amounted to four 10-second bursts of radiation. With preparation, lining me up on the table in the correct position and getting dressed again I was usually at the radiotherapy unit for 10 – 15 minutes, then an hour home again.

Seven weeks of daily trips sounds daunting, but enter the French health system. My GP wrote me a prescription for transport. So each day at 1 pm a car arrived at the house and took me to the hospital, waited for my treatment and drove me back again. I had a number of drivers, but Sébastien, Evelyn or Cristel undertook most of the journeys, and I built up a good rapport with each of them. So, in addition to daily radiotherapy, I was treated to a 2-hour French conversation session. I think this has been the most effective contribution to my language development. It certainly helped to enjoyably pass an otherwise tedious and stressful period.

I did take one day off (in addition to New Year’s Day) when I planned to fly back to UK on 28th January to attend my nephew’s wedding the next day and my granddaughter’s first birthday party the following day. Sadly, the French Trade Unions had other ideas and chose the 28th January to stage the first of their days of protest against their government’s handling of the current global financial crisis. My flight was cancelled and the weekend of family celebrations had to go ahead in my absence. Merde!

Sébastien is a charming young man who lives with his wife and two small children in nearby Verteillac. He loves speed (we were sometimes back home within 2 hours) and has had some brushes with the gendarmerie as a result. Here in France you don’t get points on your driving licence, you get them taken off an initial 12. In fact that has recently changed. On passing your driving test you are now given six points, the other six are added after six months of trouble free driving. Sébastien is currently down to one point, not a good position for a professional driver, but some offences are due to expire and he will be re-credited. He liked to talk about cars, driving in the UK and motor racing, so you will know that we got on well. Other topics of conversation with the drivers included the royal family, particularly the constitutional role of Her Majesty and the lives of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, English cuisine and Christmas.

Sébastien turned out to be the grandson of Mme Fauré who used to own most of our village. Many of the houses in La Lande are converted farm buildings and the Faurés owned the farm that must have been at the centre of the life of the village 50 or 100 years ago. As the English (Dutch and others) discovered the Dordogne and started to buy holiday homes here, Mme Fauré was happy to sell them barns, pig stys and other outbuildings for redevelopment. Our house is called La Grange (The Barn) and there is also a Petite Grange. When Sébastien first picked me up he proceeded to make a tour of the village (sounds grand but I mean a 200 yard detour). “Not this way.” I advised. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I know La Lande” and explained his background. He also owns a plot of land up the road from us and “one day will build my house there”.

When the leaves fell last autumn a large structure was revealed high in a tree at the bottom of the garden: a round, slightly conical construction about a metre high and half as wide. This was identified to us as a nid des frelons, a hornets’ nest. This is the Asiatic hornet, which is proving to be a bit of a nuisance in the area as they attack the local bees, so we were advised to report it to our local Mairie. This we did, but there was never any follow up. The frost got at the nest and so did the local birds and it started to disintegrate. A large portion remains and I shall be keeping an eye on it as summer approaches. I wasn’t aware of a significant hornet population nearby last year, but forewarned is forearmed.

The arrival of spring at La Lande brings with it two things – botanical rebirth and holidaymakers. The grass seems to have got off to a vigorous early start and initial mowings have been more difficult than usual. I make it worse for myself by avoiding spring flowers. When we arrived I planted a few clumps of daffodils, which haven’t proved Wordsworthian, more impressive are the wild cowslips, violets and odd orchid. For the first few cuts I’m carefully avoiding these. The blossom this year (cherry, plum and damson) was spectacular. We didn’t have the late frosts of last year and the bees have been busy so we have fingers crossed for a good crop of fruit later in the year.

Spring, Easter especially, brings back the second-home owners. I may have mentioned before that of the 20 houses in the village only 4 are occupied all through the year (us and three French households). The rest are second/holiday homes many of which have been owned for many years by the same people – mainly English and some Dutch. Winter is very quiet and can give a feeling of remoteness and isolation. At the time of writing several houses are opened up and the sound of children and other voices mix with the familiar birdsong and occasional frog. We, having lived here just four years, may seem like newcomers to them, but counting weeks we’ve probably spent more total time here than most of them have. I’m not sure whether we live in their holiday village or they holiday in our village – most of them don’t mix much with us locals. Perhaps I’m just becoming a grumpy old man.

Sunday 5th April saw the celebration of our ruby wedding anniversary. The current Mrs Barry and I treated ourselves to a no-expense-spared lunch (I had foie gras, salmon, beef en croute and chocolate fondant pudding) on the day and the following Tuesday (dubbed Ruby Tuesday) we had a couple of dozen friends round for a grande soirée. A good time was had by all (witness the 12 litres of empties I disposed of next day) and Bill, who was one of our ushers, proposed the toast, recalling the evening Chris and I met (he and Rick were there too) in Leicester in 1964. (For those of you who aren’t keeping up: Bill, Rick, Leo and I were at Loughborough University together and now all live here within a 10 km radius.) We’ve been together now for 40 years and it don’t seem a day too much …

À bientôt
du Barry

Winter 2008

Mes amis

We had a great summer. The weather wasn’t all it should have been, but it was better than the UK had to suffer.
One thing we miss in rural France is live theatre. It’s quite a trek to Bordeaux, our nearest cultural centre, and would need an overnight stop. So when some friends, who have a holiday home near us and otherwise live in North Berwick, invited us to stay with them for a couple of weeks in August it gave us the chance to take in some of the Edinburgh Festival.
If you like live entertainment, the Festival Fringe has it all: theatre, dance, music, comedy and there’s so much going on each day. We pre-booked a number of shows, but, if I go again, would only book those I really couldn’t miss, then buy the Scotsman each day, read their reviews and pick up some “hot shows”. We saw about 12 shows in all and there was only one lemon amongst them. Prices vary a lot (from West End prices to free), but we felt we had good value for money. Give it a try! We also took the opportunity to cross the Firth of Forth and explore the Kingdom of Fife. We were in Scotland for 14 days and it rained on 13 of them. This did curtail much of the street theatre that goes on. It would have been so much better to have held the festival in the summer – whenever that is!

Event of the year was the marriage of our lovely daughter, Laura, to Andy in September. We were blessed with a fine day and the bride and her father walked along the promenade at Brighton to the ceremony in bright sunshine. The wedding party later decamped to the beach to demolish a few cases of methode champagnoise before the reception. There are a few more pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/barry.derek.

I am now in a position to reveal more about France’s health system, having recently been hospitalised for surgery. (I’ll spare you the details.)
It’s generally accepted that health care in France is excellent. The odd thing is that, unlike most other things, it was never nationalised and remains, in effect, a private system that the state buys into; hence those payments, reimbursements and pieces of paper flying around the country, of which I’ve written before.
There was a scare last year amongst younger ex-pats that they may not be able to stay in the system, but this was resolved. That group would have included me as I am below pensionable age and not paying into the Sécurité Sociale. Luckily, I am married to a pensioner and I can access the system as her dependent!
The state reimburses 70 – 100% of medical costs. If you stay fairly healthy you can probably cope with the remainder, but who knows what’s round the corner? So most people pay for private insurance (mutuelle) to cover, at varying levels, other costs. For my hospitalisation the state picked up the medical bill (which they will reclaim from the NHS) and my mutuelle paid for my board and lodging in the hospital. I just had to pay the extras, like any hotel bill, TV and telephone calls.
The administration of all these charges, payments and reimbursements has been made easier by us being issued with a little credit card sized Carte Vitale with a chip on the front and a magnetic strip on the back. This is placed in a card reader and the need for forms in the post is alleviated. Sadly my GP has not yet been dragged into the 21st century, so visits to her remain paper-based.
My only disappointment was the hospital food. I had hoped for reasonable French cuisine. I had not expected the sommelier to come to my bedside to discuss choice of wine, but the food wasn’t even up to local bar/restaurant standards. In brief, the medical care was world class; the administration was French and the hospital food was hospital food.

Most towns and villages in France have their own annual Fête day, usually in the summer, the scale of which often bears little relationship to the size of the population. One such local village that punches well above its weight in the fête stakes is Gurat. For various reasons we have not been able to attend over the last 3 years, but in 2008 we got lucky. The main event is, of course, lunch: served to a couple of hundred people (far more than the village population) in a marquee.

Melon is a simple starter, but here it is given a local slant. Charentaise melons are a local product. Cut them in half equatorially, scoop out the seeds and fill the void with white Pineau des Charentes (a local aperitif made from grape juice and eau de vie) – delicious! Having devoured the sweet flesh, the waitresses were happy to refill the even greater void with more Pineau!
This was followed by charcuterie – pork-based cold meats. Strangely, charcuterie is one of the few things with which butter is served with the accompanying bread – never discovered why. The main course was spit-roasted lamb, nicely rare, and lots of it. The ubiquitous cheese course preceeded sweet, as always. Sweets at such events are often a cop-out in the form of an ice cream. These come in little plastic sundae dishes. The main after lunch event, no doubt fuelled by the copious helpings of red wine during the meal, was to see who could assemble the highest tower from the empty plastic dishes.

As some of you will know, I love gadgets, boys toys, call them what you will – I’m a great knob twiddler. So I recently treated myself to a GPS/Sat Nav. It does, of course, have full European maps in addition to UK. I loved using it in the UK and it gave the current Mrs Barry someone else to argue with. The strange thing about it was that I had no idea where I was because I had totally surrendered myself to the voice (we’ve called her Jacqueline, a French name, but switched to the English language) and had stopped looking at roadside direction signs. I’m less sure about its use in rural France.
It’s great for long journeys and can be very helpful negotiating your way round cities like Rouen en route to the channel ports. For driving on the back roads it can be quite challenging. It seems to take a straight line between start and destination then finds roads that are the closest fit. Here in the country some of these have grass growing down the middle. It also suffers with junctions and seems unaware of ‘priority to the right’. I must have a play with it and see if it will prioritise major roads, if it can tell which these are.

France, of course, has not been immune to the credit crunch and we, together with other ex-pats living on UK-based pensions, have suffered from the poor performance of the pound in addition to rising prices in shops. There have been some suggestions that the UK should join the euro zone. Yes, say I, but please, not at the moment; let’s get back to a better exchange rate first.
There doesn’t seem to be the same level of living on credit here. Lots of people use bank cards, but these are usually debit rather than credit cards and a large number of people still pay by cheque in shops. It is a criminal offence to write a cheque if you don’t have the funds in the bank to support it.
Obviously, I write from the experience of living in rural France. If I were experiencing life in Paris or another large city it may be a different story.

I wish all my readers a very happy Christmas and, dare I say, a prosperous New Year. Let’s hope that 2009 brings some sort of return to normality in world finances.

À bientôt
du Barry

Where I Live

Mes amis

I’ve been asked to tell you something about the geography and history of this area of France, where we have made our home. We live in the northwest corner of the département of the Dordogne (which the French call the Périgord and the Sunday Times has called Dordogneshire). Départements are administrative areas, which can be compared to counties in the UK. We are just two kilometres from the border of one neighbouring département, the Charente. The Dordogne is one of 5 départements that make up the region called Aquitaine, which sits at the bottom left-hand corner of France stretching from the Gironde estuary at Bordeaux down to where the Pyrenees meet the Atlantic ocean and across to the Limousin. The Charente is part of the region of Poitou-Charentes, so we’re near the border of these regions too.

The Romans arrived here about the same time as Julius Caesar got to Britain and they made Bordeaux the capital of their administrative area called Aquitania. They can also take the credit for the introduction of wine making to the area. In 1152 the beautiful, intelligent and astute Eleanor of Aquitaine married Count Henry of Anjou uniting Aquitaine with large areas of northwest France. Two years later her husband was crowned King Henry II and so began three centuries of English rule.

The local lords, an unruly lot, settled down a bit when they found themselves at the heart of a very profitable business exporting wine to England. But the border between French and English rule was always disputed and led to the building of many fortified Bastide towns, most of which exist today. The majority of these lie between the rivers Dordogne and Lot and are all built to the same pattern: square or rectangular towns with streets at right-angles around a focal point, the market square, which is often covered.

The Dordogne/Périgord is divided into four areas. We live in the Périgord Vert (green) in the north; green because of its woods and streams. There are more châteaux in the Dordogne than the Loire valley and many of them are in this part. Below us is the Périgord Blanc (white), with limestone plateaux, valleys, forests and lakes. Here you will find the capital city, Périgueux, and the Venice of the Périgord, Brantôme. If you’ve been kind enough to pay us a visit we will surely have taken you for a walk around this town, which sits largely on an island in the middle of the river Dronne, and lunch by the river. The Périgord Pourpre (purple) is centred on the wine region of Bergerac in the southwest and there are many bastides there. The Périgord Noir (black) in the southeast is the most popular part of the Dordogne with tourists and English residents. It’s called black because of the dark, dense foliage of holm-oak trees that dominate the landscape. Here you find medieval castles, stunning river scenery and prehistoric caves, the most famous of which are at Lascaux.

Magnificent, prehistoric cave paintings were found at Lascaux in 1940 and opened to the public in 1948, but they closed in 1963 when it became obvious that the CO2 breathed out by more than a million visitors was damaging the paintings. Ten years later they had the bright idea of creating an exact replica of the caves and Lascaux II was opened to the public in 1983. I was really knocked out by a visit there.

This part of France was at the border of German occupation and free Vichy France in the Second World War. As you drive through the Double Forest it’s easy to imagine groups of resistance fighters hiding and ambushing passing Huns. There are many local horror stories about the viciousness of the occupation and some family feuds, emanating from perceived collaboration, persist today.

So that’s where we live. We’re in the heart of the wine industry with Bordeaux and Bergerac wines our local brews. The former, which includes Medoc, St Emilion, Sauternes and Pomerol, can cost anything from a couple of euros a bottle to several hundred. Other wines from Burgundy, the Loire and the south are all readily available in supermarkets; not so wines from other parts of the world! Why is the Dordogne so popular with the English? I think it’s because the rolling scenery, the agricultural industry, the pace of life, lack of traffic and warm summers make it very reminiscent of an idyllic English countryside of 50 years ago.

You won’t find La Lande on the map, unless it’s a very large scale one, but it’s about halfway along a straight line drawn between Angoulême (capital of the Charente) and Périgueux. No doubt readers skilled in Google Earth or with a European GPS could track us down (N 45deg 20’ 41” E 0deg 16’ 50”).

À bientôt

du Barry

Summer 2008

Mes amis

This is a little late in production and, to those readers who have been eagerly awaiting its arrival, I apologise. I have been waiting for my mood to improve before putting metaphorical pen to paper. At last, summer has arrived – the sun is out, the pool is up and my spirits have been lifted.

It was a very long and, if I may term it so, a very English start to the year. Although we didn’t have any snow this year, winter was cold and wet. We had some nice days in February and thought spring had come early, only to have our hopes dashed as the rain and cold returned; and it has been June before things have looked up. One of the factors that persuaded the current Mrs Barry to leave Old Blighty and the bosom of her family was the promise of shorter, brighter winters – a promise that the Dordogne and I have not fulfilled.

The excess rain here has presented problems for the region’s agricultural industry. Many local farmers were not able to sow maize and sunflowers. This is bad news because the European Commission stipulates that it must be done before 31 May! Even those who did manage to sow their crops then suffered damage when seeds were washed away by excessive rainfall. Many had chosen to cash in on the country’s bio-fuel needs by growing rape – there were numerous large, yellow expanses on the landscape in April – others seem to have ignored the 31 May deadline and the familiar maize and sunflowers are making a late appearance around us here. The only up side to the rain is that the countryside is very lush and verdant.

The inclement weather has also had a bad effect on our own fruit crop – in brief, there isn’t one. Cherry trees, which last year bore a bumper crop, and plum and damson trees, branches breaking under the weight of fruit in 2007, are bare. Some say it was late frosts that killed off the blossom, but I remember the mother and father of a hailstorm in late March that brought a lot of blossom down. Whatever, the results are catastrophic. However, the figs are now setting well, the vine has plenty of its insignificant flowers and the pomegranate tree is covered in showy red blooms. Pomegranates are supposed to be the new panacea but sadly ours are so bitter that the amount of sugar you would have to add would surely outweigh any benefits.

On top of all this, France is not immune to the effects of the financial crisis gripping the western world. Diesel fuel, which last year was 99 cents a litre, now costs 1.50€ and rising. The French government promised to keep the cost of diesel below that of petrol, but the difference is now only a couple of cents (or centimes, as the French continue to call them). Food prices and transport costs have also raised the weekly bill at the supermarket.

Our local town Ribérac supports three supermarkets: Intermarché, which is the other side of town and rarely gets our custom; Lidl, the German chain which is a good source of bargains and, from time to time, New World wines and Leclerc, our preferred choice. That’s E. Leclerc, as in J. Sainsbury, or Chez Eddie as it is affectionately known.

Over the winter our local Leclerc underwent an expansion. It pretty well doubled the floor area and car park and added a separate book store and electrical outlet plus a number of independent shops and a bistro in an inside arcade. My favourite revision is the extended wine section – a huge range, beautifully presented and slightly detached from the plonk. The picture shows the champagne section - that's real champagne, lots of other sparklings wines are also available!

The store has also been refitted with new tills, the receipts from which are organised by section – fruit and veg., bakery, butchery, dairy, etc. – rather than just the order items went down the conveyer belt. But, most interestingly, the receipts now show prices exclusively in euros. Since the switch of currency, in January 2001, all goods in the supermarket have been dual-priced in francs and euros and the conversion rate stated. Finally, the French have accepted the change is permanent; and why not when the euro goes from strength to strength against the pound.

Our income is exclusively from UK-based pensions so when you add a 12% decrease in the exchange rate to all the price rises mentioned above you may see why my mood has needed some uplift.

Much of this has come from the joy of our growing granddaughter, now 5 months old, and the excitement of the impending nuptials of our daughter, Laura. Mark and Rachel seem to have taken to parenthood like ducks to water and Jessica is thriving as a result. Chris is looking forward to visiting the sales in Bordeaux (and Angoulême and Périgueux) this month to find the perfect outfit for the bride’s mother. Meanwhile I’m making do with a new shirt and tie, courtesy of M&S.

Regular readers will recall that my life en France centres around keeping an old converted barn and its large garden ship-shape, playing golf, studying French cuisine and the local wine industry (eating and drinking), socialising (mainly with ex-pats) and playing my saxophone with the Société Musicale de Ribérac (my main source of French conversation). In addition, I am a member of a group called Variations (that’s Variations in French). This group grew out of the local Anglican Church choir and, over the last 3 years, we have put on Music Hall and other revue type shows. The choral section (plus other recruits) is doing a performance of Verdi’s Gloria with a touring English orchestra at the end of August. Meanwhile we are rehearsing a show for our “home town’s” Fête day on the 13th July. Let me explain “home town”.

Every club or association in France has to be properly constituted (bureaucracy rules, OK) which includes being affiliated to a mairie (town hall). We did our first show in the salle des fêtes (village hall) at Villetoureix (a village just outside Ribérac) and the mayor so enjoyed it he offered his mairie as our base. As well as playing in the accompanying combo (piano, sax and bass), I have been persuaded to reprise my performance of Crêpe Suzette. This is a Kenneth Williams piece, which is a skit on the French words we use in English. (The first verse is: Honi soit qui mal y pense. Fait vos jeux, reconnaissance. Hammersmith Palais de Danse. Badinage, Ma Crepe Suzette. Sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.) Williams introduced it in a thick French accent, as did I last time. (“Ees a song of lurve, about a man and a woman. Ee lurve er; she lurve im” etc.) Now I’m performing for a French audience I’m going to introduce it in French (probably with a thick English accent!). I’m not convinced how well the humour is going to translate. Watch this space!

The following day is Bastille Day; France’s National Holiday, so I shall be on parade with the band in Ribérac playing suitably nationalistic songs while the mayor lays a wreath at the statue of Marianne (France’s equivalent to John Bull or Uncle Sam). Then in the evening we have a table for 24 booked in the square outside the Hotel de France in Aubeterre sur Dronne – organised by French friend Gerald (if you can put French and organised in the same sentence).

À bientôt
du Barry