From La Lande

The Last One

2010-10-20T03:51:00.000-07:00

Mes amis

In the summer there was an exhibition in Ribérac by an English photographer, Rip Hopkins. He has published a book of photographs showing the British living in France (http://www.riphopkins.com/books/36-0). The book has a foreword by another Englishman who has an estate agency in Ribérac. Most of his research was done in the Dordogne and many of his ideas are thought provoking. It certainly made me think about our reasons for moving to France and our reasons for returning to the UK.

Throughout history, he argues, people have moved for financial reasons or been displaced by war or famine. Often they flock to the cities to make money. But in the Dordogne, you meet people who have moved to the middle of nowhere to places where they have no links. Bergerac airport acts as an umbilical cord to Britain. It’s courageous and unprecedented.

People’s reasons for moving here are interesting too: the climate, the geography, a good life. People rarely say they made the move because they like the French culture; it is more that they feel Britain isn’t what they feel it ought to be or how they thought it once was.

I’m not sure we were as deep thinking as that. We had both just retired and felt we wanted to do something different with the rest of our lives. We had enjoyed several holidays in France, some of which had been in the southern Charente or Dordogne area and as we had old university friends already living there it seemed the ideal choice for a “new life”. I don’t think we ever thought of it as “living the dream”, although we had chatted about the possibility in a cosy, post-holiday ambience.

We wanted to do it properly, rather than just playing at it, so, after an exploratory period, we sold up and moved lock, stock and barrel. Do we regret it? Not for a moment. Would we have done it differently? Isn’t life always easier with the benefit of hindsight? So why are we returning?

Since we have lived in France both of our children have got married, set up home and had a child. The family we now have is very different to the one we left behind in October 2004 and we want to play a bigger part in the life of that family. Jessica, the elder of the two grandchildren, has reminded us how quickly infants grow up and how much of this it is easy to miss.

In addition, we are now both pensioners and I have recently been reminded of my own mortality. Great as the health service in France is, it is much more comfortable to be ill in your own language.

Although we have both made great strides in our mastery of the French language, it still presents something of a barrier. The closest I got to breaking this down was with the band, La Société Musicale de Ribérac (http://www.riberac.fr/index.html?musique2.html). At one stage there were 3 other Brits alongside me, but one by one they dropped out or moved on until I was left tout seul. Perhaps as some sort of reward I was given my own solo. It was a great thrill to stand in front of a 40-strong band playing a piece called Gin Fizz Club by André Lutereau. I was sad to leave them and took my final bow with a concert on 13th July (when I played my solo for the third time and was then kissed by our conductor) and the annual Bastille Day ceremony the following day. We finished up playing a suitably stirring number in the mairie and the society president said some kind words and presented me with a parting gift and, of course, he kissed me! I couldn’t turn down the opportunity of a microphone in the mairie, so I made a short farewell speech (just as well I’d prepared something!).

This has been a great adventure, as we hoped it would be. We have never lived or worked abroad before, unlike so many of the ex-pats we have met here. Many of them are on second (or subsequent) marriages too. Does that tell us anything about their motives for living in the Dordogne?

A few final words about the culinary delights of this area we have enjoyed:
· Melons – Charentaise melons are grown locally and are delicious. Eat slices with dried ham as an entrée or cut equatorially, scoop out the seeds and fill the void with Pineau des Charentes.
· Strawberries are grown in the Dordogne and are the most flavoursome I have had the joy to eat.
· Artichokes are a local crop too – buy them on the market or in the supermarket for a fraction of the UK price.
· Périgourdine salad is my favourite summer dish – a small plate as an entrée or a large plate for a main course. Lettuce and tomato enhanced with thin slices of smoked duck breast, gesiers (duck gizzards), foie gras, walnuts, lardons, croutons and pine nuts with a vinaigrette dressing.
· Oysters are plentiful and cheap from market stalls (depending on size, 4 or 5€ a dozen) the Atlantic coast being just 90 minutes away.
· Biscottes have won a place in my heart. You might term them French Toasts. I was served them for breakfast in hospital where they were some of the more palatable offerings. I now eat them with cheese. We buy an economy pack of 100 for just over 1€.
· Talking of cheese we love Echourgnac – made locally by monks it is semi-hard with a tasty, brown, walnut-flavoured rind. It’s expensive, but a real treat.
· Wine and spirits – where do you start? I haven’t developed an educated wine palate (I couldn’t afford it), but have enjoyed many local wines (Bergerac, vin de pays Charentaise) and Provençal rosé. I also discovered white rum from the French overseas département of Martinique. I’ve never been a great lover of Coca-Cola, but now I buy a lot to mix with the rhum. Finally, Cognac Schweppes – that’s cognac and tonic – a popular aperitif; all I would say is don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!

One of our last events here was a university reunion. You may remember that 5 of us who met as freshers at Loughborough in 1963 now live here, or have a property here, within a 10km radius. We have all come of pensionable age over the last year, so decided it was time for catching up with some of the others who were residents of Rutherford Hall block 5 some 47 years ago. We managed to assemble 14 of us, from UK, France, Switzerland and Canada, at the Manoir de Longeveau for a memorable weekend.

There was much reminiscing, with the aid of some old, black-and-white photographs, and catching up on the intervening years – careers and families. Email addresses and telephone numbers were exchanged and everyone agreed to repeat the experience in 12 months time with, hopefully, some of those “absent friends” then in attendance.

The only shadow over the weekend was poor Scottie, who, having travelled all the way from New Brunswick, Canada, arrived suffering a slight heart attack. He spent a week in hospital before recovering in our company for a further week. His son travelled over to take his now well dad safely back over the Atlantic. See you next year!

So I conclude these epistles. Thank you for reading them and for the kind comments some of you have made. They have been a good reflective tool for me. I can’t see the ramblings of a pensioner living on a housing estate in West Oxfordshire having quite the same appeal; but you never know!

Merry Christmas to all my readers and perhaps I will see more of you after we relocate to UK at the beginning of December.

À bientôt
du Barry

From La Ferrière

2009-12-03T02:24:00.000-08:00

Mes amis

‘Tis done! We have sold La Grange, sent the money back to UK, bought a “holiday home” there and are now living in rented accommodation in the commune of Nabinaud in the département of the Charente. For those of you who have been onboard since the beginning, we’re back in the Charente, because that’s where we started this adventure in October 2004 at Chez Charrier. Some of the local information that follows has been copied from my early epistles.

We’ve only moved 9 kilometres, but have crossed the departmental border. In so doing we have also moved into another region – from Aquitane into Poitou-Charentes, a collection of four départements which sit north of the Gironde estuary.

Our nearest town is St Séverin, 3km away, a small town of about 750 inhabitants with all the usual shops – butcher, baker, groceries, hairdressers, tobacconist/newsagent, pharmacy, a bar, a tea room (these last two both run by ex-pats) and a small Spar supermarket. St Séverin once specialised in the production of paper, producing the first greaseproof paper in France in 1876. In the 17th century there were as many as 5 mills, the oldest dating from 1482, now I think there’s just the one (reminiscent of Witney’s now absent blanket industry).

Compared to the Dordogne, there’s not a lot wine made in this immediate area and Vin de Pays Charentaise does not have AOC status, but at £1.25 it’s pretty good value for money.

The most famous product of the Charente is cognac. The town of Cognac is about an hour away and well worth a visit. The town has a definite aroma as the brandy matures in thousands of oak casks and a certain amount is lost to the atmosphere – what the locals refer to as “the angels’ share”. All the well-known cognac houses are there (except Courvoiser, which is in nearby Jarnac).

A less well-known local product is Pineau des Charentes – a happy and, I’m told, serendipitous marriage of eau de vie (the clear distilled liquor that undergoes a metamorphosis into cognac after years in oak barrels) and partially fermented grape juice. It is a delicious aperitif and goes particularly well with foie gras. You can buy both in Waitrose! There are a number of small producers locally who have the necessary distillation licence, and many more who do not! When you are offered Pineau from a plastic, ex-water bottle, be prepared for something different!!

Our house is only a couple of years old and we remember it being built. We sit on a small hill that affords us 360˚ views. A few hundred yards to the southwest is the estate of Touvent, the former home of the maternal grandmother of François Mitterand, who was born in the Charente in the town of Jarnac. Young François spent many a summer holiday here with granny. You, and up to 18 friends, can now holiday in the 8 bedroom manor house with its own pool set in 6 acres of grounds (see restezenfrance.com #444). The bad news is that in high season it’s £3,250 a week and you’ll have us for neighbours.

Our house is a pavillion, i.e. a bungalow, with three bedrooms, two of which open onto the south-facing patio and pool (just a small one). The only disappointing thing about the house is the kitchen – it’s typically French, by which I mean sparse. From what we’ve seen, the French don’t go in for fitted kitchens. We think of France as the home of haut cuisine, but I’ve concluded that most French people eat quite simply at home and enjoy quality cooking when they dine out. When I think of the blood, sweat and tears that I put into the kitchen I fitted at La Grange I feel a bit let down. On the other hand, we now have double-glazed windows and doors; normal height rooms and can look forward to a warm and cosy winter.

The trip to Ribérac is about the same distance, but it’s more convenient for the Manoir de Longeveau/Golf d’Aubeterre – just two minutes away.

One of the consequences of moving from one département to another is that centres of administration change. We are pretty much equidistant from the two departmental capitals – Périgueux (Dordogne) to the south and Angoulême (Charente) to the north – where these centres are situated. You may remember that when accessing the health system you have to pay, then be reimbursed by the state (who, for us, are then reimbursed by the NHS); “it all makes work for the working man to do”. Now that reimbursement has to go via the office in Angoulême. At the time of writing we are waiting for the paperwork to be completed then we shall be able to visit our local pharmacy, put our Carte Vitales (little cards with a chip and magnetic strip which the health providers, except our GP, use to access your account) into their machine and update them (mis à jour).

Secondly, our cars were registered at our old address in the Dordogne, so we had a trip to Angoulême to re-register them. A couple of letters ago I was disappointed that our new car had an old style number plate. Well, I now have my wish – both cars have new style plates. Previously, car plates showed the departmental number as part of the registration, e.g. 3405VV24 from the Dordogne (24). As part of President Sarkozy’s drive to decrease the power of the départements, or, more generously, remove a layer of bureaucracy, car registrations are now centralised and the number stays with the car for life, rather than changing each time the vehicle moved to another département. As a sop to protesting MPs the regional badge and departmental number are added, but more as decorations because they do not form part of the registration number. In fact, you can choose whichever department you wish – where you were born or where you may aspire to live. As we have lived in two departments I have one car showing 16 and the other 24.

It’s now early December: Christmas is coming and so is our second grandchild. We have booked our journey back to our holiday home in the UK for Christmas, the New Year and Laura’s confinement (not necessarily in that order). We send you season’s greetings and wish you good health and happiness in 2010. Wow! 2010!! It only seems a couple of years ago we were letting off rockets in Ian and Aly’s garden to welcome in 2000. Tempus fugit!

À bientôt
du Barry

End of summer

2009-09-12T03:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-08T04:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-25T05:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-12-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

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

2008-09-03T05:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-05T03:09:00.000-07:00

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

Spring 2008

2008-03-06T02:21:00.000-08:00

Mes amis

The top bit of news for this quarter has to be “We are a grandfather”. Mark and Rachel had a daughter, Jessica Rose, in the early hours of Sunday 3rd February (well done, Rachel). She may look a bit small in this photo, but that’s more to do with the size of Uncle Andy’s hand! I won’t wax lyrical about the joys of grandparenthood, as I know some of you have been there before me. Suffice it to say, she’s a little sweetie and we treasure the time we spend with her. We look forward to introducing her to the joys of la vie française in due course. I won’t bore you here, but if you’d like to see more go to http://picasaweb.google.com/barry.derek

I’ve arrived, and to prove it, I’m here. Something Jessica might have said, but older readers may remember this catch phrase – from Educating Archie. Well, I’ve arrived – and to prove it I am a statistic with Insee (l’institute national de la statistique et des études économiques). We were counted! Unlike the UK where the whole population is counted every 10 years, France has a rolling census on a 5-year cycle. Bouteilles-Saint-Sébastien was one of the 20% of communes to participate this year. Other than asking who I was and where I was from, the census was mainly concerned with level of education, employment and transport. It was certainly much smaller than what I completed in England in 2001. Perhaps they will concentrate on other aspects in 5 years time.

Regular readers will recall that we support our local rugby club during the winter. The rugby section of Club Athletique Ribéracois (CAR XV) has been punching above its weight for some time. Ribérac is our nearest large town with 3 supermarkets and the largest open-air weekly market in the northern Dordogne; but the population is only around 5,000. Last season we won our pool of Fedérale Division 2 and were duly promoted to Fedérale Division 1 for 2007/8. There had to be some big changes for this upgrade. The team that turned out for the first match of the season bore little resemblance to that which secured the promotion. The club had to upgrade its ground with a new perimeter fence and hard standing (no more muddy shoes). Division 1 is again contested in regional pools (France is a big country) and we came fourth in our pool, which qualified us for the play-offs for promotion to Pro-2 (thereafter it’s Pro-1 then the big time) – not bad for the first season at this level! It’s all very exciting, but promotion is not really a viable option. Most of the visiting teams in the play-offs come from towns very much larger than ours and are used to playing in stadiums rather than a municipal park. The other week we lost (by a penalty in the last minute) to a team that has 20 professional players and a budget of 1.5 million euros. Ribérac, by contrast, has 4 pros and a 250,000€ budget, but it’s nice to dream and the standard of rugby has been much better this year.

I don’t watch much French television. The main reason for this is because my main TV can’t pick it up. I have a TV that I brought out from the UK and French TV is a different system, which is a pity as I have a French aerial. I could buy a new set, but why would I want to dispose of a wide-screen, surround-sound model, still in working order? (That comment may be tempting fate!) When it does finally give up the ghost I will probably want a 100 cm HD digital set that hangs on a nail on the wall.
So I’m restricted to UK stations via a satellite dish, which is OK except it’s all an hour late. (I didn’t realise it took that long for the signal to travel up to the satellite and back again!) I keep the video clock set to UK time to minimise confusion there. In the fear that I was missing something (mainly the development of my French language skills), I did buy a second-hand portable, but this seems to be used mainly to watch Leicester Tigers playing in France or French rugby teams playing in the UK (i.e. Heinekein Cup matches). I did use it to watch some coverage of the presidential election last year and supplemented this with France 24 (an English language, French-based, 24-hour news station – Sky 517).
So it was with disappointment that I read that France 24 is to close down. It will be amalgamated with TV5 (which I used to watch on satellite in the UK, but is not available on my current package – Sky 799) and Radio France Internationale to create an all-news channel called France Monde to be broadcast internationally, but only in French. Mr Sarkozy is quoted as saying, “I’m not prepared to use taxpayers’ money to broadcast a channel that’s not in French.” I could point out to him that several thousand of those taxpayers are Anglophones.
In one of the English language newspapers published monthly here a correspondent estimated that the 300,000 British residents in France have introduced in excess of 20 billion euros capital plus another 2 or 3 billion annually in living expenses. With EU citizens moving home around the continent it’s not an argument I would want to pursue; perhaps I should be championing better integration.

The French postal system seems to work well. All things being equal we can usually get a letter to or from the UK in 2 days. But if it’s something important it’s advisable to use registered mail (recommandé) and if it’s anything of a legal nature it’s obligatory. In short, if someone is likely to say, “Letter? What letter? I haven’t received a letter.” then send it recommandé. For a small extra fee La Poste will inform you when it has been delivered and give you a copy of the signature.
I recently received a letter en recommandé from Mazda France (avid readers will recall that I am the affectionate owner of a LHD MX-5). I was slightly bemused to find it contained an erratum list of prices for accessories and support items. I then recalled a small catalogue I had received a week or so earlier and on recovering it from the recycling bin was able to match the two together. It was then that I realised that I had missed several real bargains arising out of some misprints, e.g. a smart jacket with Mazda logo for 20€ when the price should have been 120€. Mazda France probably had to send out thousands of registered letters to cover themselves legally from being obliged to sell items at the originally offered prices. If everyone was as observant as I had been they could have saved themselves the expense. I wasn’t sure that I would see the same reaction in the UK?

À bientôt
du Barry

Winter 2007

2007-12-06T02:38:00.000-08:00

Mes amis

Holiday – day of festivity or recreation, when no work is done; period of this, vacation (OED). As there is no qualification as to whether this work is regular or remunerated, I think this definition still allows me to take a holiday. In fact, most of my life appears to be a holiday! Is mowing the grass, painting the windows etc. work or recreation? Perhaps ‘holiday’ should now be reserved for trips away from home: we visit family and friends in the UK and we’re ‘on holiday’.
I always thought that England should have more bank holidays. An additional one I always favoured was Trafalgar Day, as this could coincide with autumn half term. Now I reside in France perhaps this is not such an appropriate choice. Which reminds me: I’m so glad they have moved the Eurostar terminus to St Pancras. Did no one ever see the irony of arriving at Waterloo? The last train left at 1812h; wouldn’t 1815 been more apt? Here we have 11 public holidays each year (although if they fall at the weekend no day is given in lieu), two of which are in November, a month of remembrance. Thankfully French children don’t get involved in any Halloween ‘trick or treat’ nonsense, not here in the country anyway. The following day is Toussainte (All Saints Day), a holiday when people take flowers to their family graves. During October florists, garden centres and supermarkets stock up with huge pots of chrysanthemums and on 1st November these are all transferred to local cemeteries. They look magnificent, but I’m not sure how much the residents enjoy them.
The second November holiday is the 11th, Armistice Day. The French also celebrate the end of the second world war on 8th May (one of four holidays in that month) and yours truly is on parade with the band on both of these occasions playing a suitable selection of nationalistic songs and, of course, the Marseillaise. I have yet to learn the words to this, although as I’m usually blowing, I can’t sing at the same time.

A popular pastime in these parts is Lotto – you may know it better as bingo. Local towns often have a ‘Super Lotto’ to pass a winter’s evening with prizes – sometimes cash, but more usually hams or half a pig. The poster here for the Christmas Lotto at nearby Palluaud shows a week for four at the Pyrenees ski resort of Gavarnie as the top prize. Clubs and villages will use such events as fundraisers. Ex-pats who have been say it’s very good for your numbers. If you’ve studied a bit of French you’ll know that numbers are a bit bizarre. It’s generally OK up to 69 but instead of what you might expect for seventy, it translates as sixty-ten. Eighty is four-twenty and ninety is four-twenty-ten. If the doctor asks you to say 99 you have to reply quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (four-twenty-ten-nine). I get a lot of practice here coping with bar numbers at rehearsals, but the real tester is telephone numbers. The French quote telephone numbers in groups of two as numbers between zero-zero and ninety-nine. For example, 05 53 91 54 28, spoken as zero five, fifty three, ninety one, fifty four, twenty eight. This is OK until you are taking one down over the phone at ‘fluent’ i.e. breakneck speed. When I hear soixante I automatically start writing a 6. That’s fine if the next word is, for example, trois (=63), but if it’s trieze that makes it 73 and I have to cross out the six and … they’re already on to the next number. When taking numbers off the answer phone it usually takes me two or three runs.
Like their postcodes, telephone numbers are logical. Paris numbers start 01, the northwest 02, northeast 03, southeast 04, here in the southwest 05 and mobiles 06. The next pair relates to the département, the next pair narrows it down to your canton (collection of communes) and the final two pairs are unique to you. The cost of calls, like the UK, depends on whether it is a local, national or international call. Being France, ‘local’ means within your department. Now, we live in the northwest corner of the Dordogne; hence I can call someone over 2 hours away in the southeast corner at a local rate, but if I call Rick 10 minutes away in the Charente it’s national rate.

The French health system is excellent: waiting lists are almost non-existent and the level of care is top rate. But all this comes at a price and, frankly, France can barely afford it. So President Sarkozy decided that Britons and other EU nationals officially resident in France for less than 5 years who are not working (and hence not contributing to the social charges) or who have not reached retirement age would have their entitlement to French state health cover removed, with effect from March 2008. This was a rather worrying, retrospective decision that would affect many people. It was headline news in the English language media here and a hot topic of conversation amongst ex-pats. There were stories of patients undergoing a course of treatment who had been told they would not be able to complete it. To be resident in France you would either have to be in the system or have private health cover. No insurance company would cover those with a pre-existing condition.
The crazy thing is that under the E121 form, which the current Mrs Barry and I use to access the health system here, the British government reimburses the French for what they spend on us!
I sprung into action and wrote to David Cameron (I could still vote in the Witney constituency), the Health Minister and MEPs in the southeast. The most helpful was Caroline Lucas (Green MEP) who had written to the EU Commission. She pointed out that many EU citizens would, in effect, be stateless with respect to their healthcare. Who would issue me with a European Health Insurance Card when I visited UK (where I am no longer in the system)? The British government had washed their hands of us, saying that it was a matter for the French and MEPs were wading through the processes of the EU, the wheels of which turn mighty slow.
Thankfully, and, we are told, largely due to the intervention of the British ambassador in Paris, the French government removed the retrospective aspect of the legislation so that those who were in the healthcare system in September would retain their right to cover. However, it will certainly make early retirees think twice about settling here now.

A propos of this and also the new St Pancras mentioned above, the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 travelled to France on the first Eurostar train out of the new terminus and presented the show from here featuring the recent industrial unrest and interviewing several UK ex-pats about their lives in France. A friend’s wife, who has lived in the Charente for 15 years, received an unsolicited telephone call from a researcher on the show to ask if she would be willing to be interviewed. She declined and asked how she had been chosen to be invited. She was told that they had traced her through the Internet as she regularly listens to BBC Radio on-line. Now, if this is true, it is a little spooky and very worrying. Already, if you carry a mobile phone, you can be tracked across the face of the planet; and I read recently that there is one close-circuit television camera for every 14 people in the UK. 1984 may be a bit late coming but BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!

“What do you miss?” is a question I’m sometimes asked. An easier question might be “What don’t you miss?” Top of the list there would be traffic. When we drive out of the ferry terminal onto the M275 at Portsmouth at 8 am we see more cars in the first 20 minutes then we see here in a normal month. Chris doesn’t miss dark afternoons. We think she suffers from seasonal affective disorder (SAD), so she enjoys the extra hour of daylight we get in the afternoon with the western European time zone.
Of course, we miss the children; especially as their lives develop in our absence: Mark is to become a father in February and Laura a bride in September. It’s the price we pay for enjoying la belle vie here. We look forward to sharing as much of the joy of those events with them as we can. I miss Saturday’s Guardian – it used to keep me informed, amused and occupied all weekend. But I think what I miss most is the post dropping through the letterbox. Our letterbox sits out at the roadside and, unless I happen to be looking out of the window, I don’t know if the post lady has even stopped at our house. So at some time after I think she may have called I take the key out and may have to suffer the disappointment of finding the box empty. I guess e-mail doesn’t help the cause either! Every Wednesday we get a wadge of publicity from local supermarkets and shops – often worth a scan. If I were greener I could put a “No Pub” sticker on the box (and miss the offers on wine etc!). Many thanks to those readers who have cheered me recently by sending a Christmas card to our post box.

Merry Christmas to all our readers!

À bientôt
du Barry

Autumn 2007

2007-09-11T01:55:00.000-07:00

Mes amis

So that was summer? For readers who don’t live in Europe, this summer has been a strange and cruel one. Southern parts have been baked and northern parts soaked. Our hearts go out to all friends in Witney who suffered with the floods in July. Here in southwest France it’s been more like a poor English summer – cool, plenty of cloud and rain and just the occasional day when you wanted to strip off and dive in the pool. This isn’t what I signed up for! Just as well we have a fortnight in Cyprus to look forward to at the end of the month – a real family holiday with both of the children and their partners.
One result of the wet weather was a bumper fruit harvest. However, cherries started going mouldy on the trees with the damp, so we had to harvest quickly. The plum trees had branches collapsing under the weight of the fruit. We probably ate or preserved about a quarter of it, gave another quarter away and the rest rotted on the compost heap or on the ground – I couldn’t keep up with collecting the windfalls. All the leaves started falling early, in August. What is going on?

June 21st was national music day in France (Fête de la Musique). It’s a great idea: one day when the whole country celebrates music. The event was started in France in 1982 and there are now 100 countries around the world that have adopted the idea. Every town has something going on. Organisers estimated that there were about 18,000 free concerts on offer, and this doesn’t include musicians in the streets or in bars and cafés.
The Société Musicale de Ribérac has usually been involved locally in the town, but this year we performed (together with our sister band from Razac, as the Orchestra of the Two Valleys) in Périgueux (the capital of the Dordogne). Outside the theatre there is a large open esplanade; a stage was erected there and people stood or sat at café tables listening to a wide variety of groups. We were positioned outside the entrance to the theatre and had a bit of an early spot at 8.00pm. Most people were still eating dinner then and the place wasn’t really buzzing until about 10.00pm. Nonetheless, it was good to be part of a larger event and be able to dip into some of the other things going on in the town. When is the UK going to join in?
This is what the Dordogne Libre newspaper had to say about us:

This summer we were invited to two French weddings. Weddings here are distinctly different compared to the UK. Firstly, France is a secular country (witness the furore when Muslims were forbidden to wear religious dress to school; a ruling that did, of course, also ban crucifixes and other religious symbols) so churches have no powers to conduct weddings. Everyone has to be married in a civil ceremony at their local mairie. I don’t find these particularly romantic affairs. The mayor reads the couple the relevant clauses from the French constitution, governing marriage and the raising of children, then they agree to a contract under those articles. The mayor may lighten the occasion by saying something about the bride and groom, but this depends on how well he knows them and how good a raconteur he is. If the couple so wish they then go on to the church (usually very close to the mairie) and get married all over again.
In the UK the usual arrangement is to invite close family and friends to the marriage ceremony and reception, then have a wider group to an evening party. Here everyone is invited to the mairie, and on both days we spilled out into the surrounding streets. Then we all went on to the vin d’honneur, where drinks and nibbles are served. After a couple of hours of this (a sort of extended aperitif) the peripheral guests go home and the inner circle sits down to a large meal (what we would call the wedding breakfast).

I have never been a great fan of cycling, seeing it only as a cheap means of travelling short distances between A and B in fine weather. Even as a fit youth I didn’t have a “racing” bike, but relied on what W H Smith gave me to deliver papers – a large, heavy, red step-through with panniers. I did, however, bring my bike (5-speed tourer) to France. It’s taken me a couple of years to finally fix the puncture it had (I finished up buying a new inner tube and tyre) only to find out that I live on the top of a hill, so wherever I go, it’s always hard work coming home. The idyllic notion of popping down to the boulangerie in the morning for croissants and a loaf has not materialised.
So it may come as a surprise to you, dear reader, that in August I went to see the Tour de France. There was a stage towards the end of the event from Cahors to Angoulême that travelled southeast to northwest across the Dordogne, passing within 20 km of us. So we positioned ourselves beside the main Périgueux-Angoulême road on our folding chairs one sunny afternoon and awaited the spectacle. You will know that this year’s tour was blighted by drug taking and disqualifications, but this didn’t affect the carnival for us.
The riders were due to pass us around 4.30 pm and we were in place by 2.00. This was not in order to beat the crowds and get a good spot at the front, although there must have been a couple of hundred of us stood roadside through the village of Vieux Mareuil. We had to be there early to see “the caravan”. This is like a carnival parade of cars and decorated floats from all the sponsors of the Tour. It must have taken over half an hour for them to pass through, and a very entertaining half an hour it was. Various goodies are thrown from the vehicles into the crowds. The sponsors weren’t too generous to the scattered multitude of Vieux Marueil and I was standing by two Dutch teenagers who pounced on anything falling within grabbing distance. I thought it unseemly for a 60-odd-year-old man to been seen fighting for freebies with a couple of children. However, I did bag a key ring, some post-it notes a shoulder bag, a sachet of coffee, reflective armbands and a spectacles cleaning cloth; but not the nice yellow baseball cap Mrs Barry coveted.
Then there was 90 minutes of calm, with just the occasional car, motorcycle or gendarme coming by. The organisation of this event is awesome. This main road, from the capital of the Dordogne to the capital of the Charente, was shut from midday until gone 5 pm. It is such a national event that this inconvenience is taken in one’s stride, although it does put a lot of traffic on the narrow side-roads. Finally, the cyclists came.
Four competitors were well ahead of the rest and they were cheered by. One of these was bearing battle scars where he had earlier collided with a dog, which had walked out of the crowd and onto the road. The guy had to quickly pick himself up, change bikes and get going again. The other leaders slowed down a little so that he could catch them up again. There’s sportsmanship for you. He went on to win the stage! This group was followed by a small flotilla of support cars, photographers on motorbikes and gendarmes.
It was 17 minutes later that the main pack (or peloton, as we aficionados call it) came by. Around 170 cyclists in a group 4 or 5 wide travelling at a lively pace is a breath-taking sight, but many of them looked as if they were just out for an afternoon’s ride, chatting to each other and not breaking a sweat. They couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two to pass by, and then there was a mighty horde of support cars, motorcycles, medical vehicles etc. which took another 10 minutes; then tranquillity. The young gendarme, who had been looking after the road junction and the Vieux Mareuil populace, started to remove the barriers and we wandered back to our cars.

Regular readers may recall that last year I was involved in a Music Hall staged by a group of mainly ex-pats, known as Variations. This June we put on a show called “Summertime”. As well as playing in the accompanying band, I was dragged onto stage to do a performance of Jake the Peg, last seen at the Mayor’s Ball in 1983. In case you’re wondering how that fits into Summertime, it was a section which was a sort of end-of-the-pier show. The band was an interesting mix – piano, double bass and two saxes. The other saxophonist (Eric) was a semi-pro and friend of the bassist who came over from the UK especially for the show. The band did three jazz/swing numbers in the second act, which went down well. So much so that Eric came back later in the summer and we put together a repertoire of 15 or so numbers and did a couple of gigs at local restaurants.
Eric has his own jazz quintet in England, so was very clearly the one with the jazz talent. George on the piano is a retired agricultural journalist and plays piano and organ with the local Anglican Church choir. He also plays flute with the Société Musicale de Ribérac and is currently learning the cello. He recruited his neighbour, a French guy called Patrick with an English wife, to play drums. Polly, our bassist, used to play with various orchestras in the UK before coming to France. We found a jazz singer: Dotty, a well-know local personality who used to own an art gallery and, unknown to anyone, when a younger lady, was an actress and singer. Something of a motley crew, but we had fun and the audiences were most complimentary.

The current Mrs Barry has now got to know the best shops in our nearest cities, Angoulême, Périgueux and Bordeaux, so on June 27th we were off to the summer sales. The dates of sales in shops in France are state-regulated. (Why are we not surprised about this and how would dfs ever cope?) The prefecture of each departement fixes the exact date after consultation with shop-owners and consumers in their area. Sales may last for no more than 6 weeks, so they had to end by August 7th.
The one thing you can’t do is get up, have a leisurely breakfast and then wander off to the shops. Firstly, shops are at least a half-hour drive away. Secondly they are all closed for lunch: 12 – 2, or longer. Markets are all over by midday too. So shopping means an early start and, if you’re a serious shopper, stop for a good lunch and then carry on. Not really my idea of fun!

À bientôt
du Barry

Summer 2007

2007-06-12T02:34:00.000-07:00

Mes amis

After an early spring here, summer has been reluctant to establish itself with a strange variety of weather. One day scorched on the golf course in 35˚C, another freezing in 15˚C, a third washed off in a torrential storm. My only consolation is that it appears to have been much the same in the UK.

An interesting piece of French social history, but first a little French revision. If you have studied the language you will recall that there are different pronouns for the second person singular and plural. Where we use ‘you’ for both, the French use tu or vous; but it’s not quite as simple as plurality. I learnt that tu is reserved for children, pets, family and close friends; everyone else is addressed as vous. The general rule is: use vous until someone uses tu to you (known as tutoyer). My own experience is that it remains confusing. Some members of the band and people I play golf with address me as tu, others vous. Old people tend to use vous in all but the most informal situations and young people use tu in all but the most formal situations. In between you make up your own mind, carefully, to avoid offence.

Anyway, I was watching the film The Queen at a local cinema in English with French sub-titles. As a keen student of French I was following the sub-titles and noticed that when the Blair family spoke to each other you was translated as tu, but when the royal family addressed each other it was vous. On enquiring I was told that the French aristocracy, out of respect for each other’s position, would always use vous. So they were members of the aristocracy first and family members second. No wonder the peasants stormed the Bastille!

I may have mentioned before that the French language is a bit short of words and hence one word can have several meanings. At the same time there are many words we use in English that are of French origin, but are not used in the same way here. For example the French don’t say: en suite (bathroom), cul-de-sac, risqué, a faux pas, double entendre or an encore (at the end of a concert). You would think that our chef (de musique) would conduct with a baton (or bâton), but no, he uses a baguette – not a French stick, but the usual white one.

The other month Bill lost the plastic trim off the door of his car (either knocked off in a car park or stolen). So he sought a replacement. What is that strip of plastic called? A baguette!

La Lande
Bouteilles St Sébastien

May 2007

Always wanted roses round the door!

On two consecutive Saturdays last month we were invited to (English) friends’ houses for dinner. On both occasions the other two guests were French. Out of respect for them and in the interest of our own language development, we spoke French during the evening. It’s very good for us, even if it is hard work! The second couple was a local notaire (solicitor) and his wife. There was more English spoken on that evening because Marie-Hélène teaches English, so she was a great help when vocabulary dried up. She also expanded hers, for example, when she heard me say, “Bung a load of stuff in”.

François comes from the Loire valley and Marie-Hélène from Burgundy; so, inevitably, the conversation turned to wine. In English supermarkets one finds a whole range of wines from all over the world. Here in France supermarkets have 2 or 3 times as much wine on the shelves with around 98% of it French. In larger stores a tiny section may be devoted to vins étrangers (foreign wines): Spanish, Italian and, if you’re lucky, something from the New World (e.g. Australia, Chile or California). I asked why there weren’t more foreign wines for sale in France. I was told that with the range and variety of French wines available, it didn’t seem necessary. François has a cellar of around 1,000 bottles and thought that 2 of them were foreign: he’d been given them as presents. He claimed to drink “just one type of wine” at home. I didn’t reveal that the current Mrs Barry and I have recently been drinking a lot of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon and Australian Chardonnay Colombard sold at Lidl in screw top bottles for £1.40. Smashing! Pity it takes a German supermarket to give us access to “foreign” wines.

Most wine in the UK is labelled with the grape variety and if you know, for example, that you like merlot, you can try it from various sources. There is some of this labelling in France, sometimes on the back of the bottle, but usually at the lower end of the market. The French guard their wine appellations fiercely. You need to do a bit of homework to find out what the cépage (grape variety) is in red Bordeaux or white Burgundy etc. This is less important here than the terroir; which can be translated as region, but in wine-making it conjures up much more than the area of production: the soil, the aspect and the vintner’s art. The French people are proud of their wine heritage and the wine industry, for its part, knows its home market and serves it well, but needs to accept that there is a different approach to wine drinking in the rest of the world if they are to continue to prosper in the 21st century.

Both the French couples were keen supporters of M Sarkozy. It was quite exciting to follow the presidential election here. For the first round of voting there were 12 candidates and outside every mairie (town hall) a hording was erected with a large, numbered poster from each candidate. Most carried a large, flattering picture of the person with their snappy election slogan; one or two chose to use their poster to publish their manifesto. For the second round of voting a fortnight later just two posters remained. The fact that 85% of the electorate made their way to their mairie to cast their vote is a triumph for French democracy. After each poll the Sud Ouest (our regional daily newspaper) published the number of votes cast for each candidate in each commune, which made interesting reading: some intriguing pockets of support around.

Despite the fact that I am now a French taxpayer, I only get to vote in local elections – regional government downwards. It will be interesting to see what changes the new regime makes. President Sarkozy has said that he wants all immigrants to be able to speak French, so some local ex-pats will need to get their textbooks out! Incidentally, our new prime minister, M Fillon, has a British wife. Penelope (née Clarke) comes from Abergavenny and is described as “well-integrated” in the village where the couple live in their 12th century chateau, near Le Mans. No doubt elle parle très bien le français, regardez vous – she speaks French very well, look you!

À bientôt
du Barry

Spring 2007

2007-04-03T02:13:00.000-07:00

Mes amis

When you can put one foot on half a dozen daisies, you know that spring is here. By that definition spring arrived in the Dordogne in mid-January. But it wasn’t long before this optimism was replaced by two falls of snow on consecutive days, which stayed around for a week or more. All very pretty, but, in the absence of salt or grit on the roads, not great for getting around country lanes. Thankfully the promising warmth returned, albeit with some heavy falls of rain, much needed to replenish the low water tables. I’ve had difficulty getting to grips with what is “normal” weather here and what is part of the world’s current climate change.

I spent three weekends over the winter blowing my sax with others from bands in the Dorgogne (Thiviers, Mussidan, Razac and my own, Ribérac) as we came together as the USMD orchestra (Union des Sociétés Musicales de la Dordogne). The two days each time followed the same pattern, typically French.

We’d arrive 9 for 9.30, lots of kissing and shaking of hands, then take coffee and croissants, set up, tune up and start playing around 9.50; a break for more coffee and pastries/cake around 11.15 then stop for aperitifs at 12.15. These are pastis, Pineau des Charentes, Muscat or the French are very keen on whisky as an aperitif. Then we’d all (40 - 50) troop off to a local restaurant for lunch, never getting back before 2.30. Another break mid-afternoon – more coffee/soft drinks, cake – before calling it a day around 5.15. The music is more demanding than we normally play at Ribérac and the level of musicianship appropriately higher. I sit next to Thomas, aged 14, whose musical skill and dexterity on the tenor saxophone leaves me in awe. He takes an improvised solo in one number. The afternoons were especially challenging, blowing with a full belly. The lunches were the typical fare of which I have written previously and which could bear further description.

We always start with a tureen of soup: good and wholesome, usually based on vegetables and sometimes with bread floating in it, and once we had a layer of grated, stringy cheese on top. The locals have the habit of pouring a little wine into their bowl when they have finished, swirling it round, lifting it to their lips and drinking. It’s known as chabrol. Then the entrée – charcuterie (pork-based cold meats, pâté and sausage) is popular or cold vegetables, e.g. asparagus or tomatoes. Vegetables don’t feature highly in the main course. Lamb is relatively pricey here and pork cheap. Beef is always wonderfully rare (cooked, that is) and veal is popular. I understand the veal cattle are raised humanely and the meat is, consequently, darker. Green beans are a frequent accompaniment, but potatoes are a rare treat. Then the ubiquitous cheese board arrives, with somewhere between 3 and 8 to choose from (no crackers!). This may be preceded or accompanied by a large bowl of tossed green salad. Finally, the dessert – apple tart, ice cream, fruit compote, île flottante and crème caramel are popular – and coffee, small black.

There is always an economic use of crockery and cutlery. The entrée, main course and cheese are eaten off the same plate with the same knife and fork. The plentiful French bread helps you to clean your plate between courses. Dessert is eaten with a teaspoon and you save this to stir your coffee. Bottles of vin de table, always red, are included and replenished throughout. There is no choice – this is a set meal. Small bar restaurants are usually family run with family members taking the roles of chef, waiter and dish-washer.

All this comes for the modest sum of, typically, 12€ (slightly in excess of £8). There is always sufficient food for seconds, if you can manage it! Restaurants at lunchtime are full of workers and “ordinary” folk. I asked someone in the band how people were able to go back to an afternoon’s work on top of such a big meal. He didn’t understand the question. He caught on when I explained that all I would want to do is sleep and replied, c’est l’habitude – it’s what we’re used to! Despite my best efforts, I’m not yet used to it, but enjoying getting there.

Before we leave the band, a few words about playing music in France. Music is music; so reading it is no more of a problem than in UK. The level of sight-reading expected, especially in the Dordogne band, often pushes me beyond my ability – which is no bad thing. But when we come to talk about it, it’s all in a foreign language!

As some instruments in the band are in concert pitch, some (like my own) in Bb, others Eb, it’s essential that we’re all playing in the appropriate key. The problem is that the notes are not named A, B, C etc.; the French use do, ré, mi, fa, sol, la, and si. We’ve met sol-fa before, but a tonic sol-fa, where doh is the tonic or first note of the scale. Here it is a fixed do: always C, no matter which key you’re in; and ré is always D etc. The word for sharp is dièse and flat, bémol. Hence my tenor sax is in si bémol. None of this comes easily; so when the chef asks me what note I’m playing, it takes a while for me to translate F# into fa dièse.

Add to this the confusion that a quaver is called une croche and life doesn’t get any easier. Incidentally, a crochet is une noire (a black) and a minim une blanche (a white), so there’s some logic there.

On the positive side, bar numbers have done wonders for my mastery of the number system (I won’t go into how weird that can be, e.g. 99 is four twenty ten nine) and many remarks on the score are in Italian. The chef once asked me to play a section legarto. “Do you understand legarto? Is it the same in English?” “Yes,” I replied, “it’s the same in English, and in Italian!” While we're on the subject, their Italian accents are rubbish!

Our chef, Olivier, is not a great wordsmith, which is good for me, because I don’t have to translate lots of flowery language as he describes how he wants us to play. Instead it’s lots of hand gestures, onomatopoeia (oops, there I go with my own flowery language!) and other noises. I usually get the message.

If you want to play in golf competitions in France you need to obtain a licence from the French Golf Federation (FFG), which cost around £30 this year. One of the main benefits of this is that you are then insured against what you might do to someone else or their property with your golf ball. Part of the affiliation process is that you have to provide a medical certificate attesting to your physical fitness to play the game. (How fit do you need to be to “spoil a good walk”?) So I took myself off to my doctor (nice lady) to gain her approval. Unfortunately she was not on duty and I saw her locum. He seemed keener to test me than she had been last year. Having checked my pulse, blood pressure and listened to every square centimetre of my chest and back, I was then asked to do 20 squats (accompanied by “Faster, faster”). This set the old pulse racing and blood pressure was retaken. I don’t remember this sort of cardio-vascular distress on the golf course, but assumed the doctor knows best. The fact that I could barely lift my thighs to walk upstairs the next day threw some doubt on his approval of my physical condition.

(As a post script, I also found that our friend Brian (see below) who plays boules or petanque in his local town has to have a licence to take part in competitions and requires a medical certificate for this too.)

This visit to the doc’s cost the usual 21€ of which 20€ will be returned to me after 3 pieces of paper have been separately posted around the departmente, and 2 bank transfers made (see my letter of 8th October last relating the wonders of French administration).

The results of each competition are sent electronically to the FFG and handicaps (or index as it’s called here) adjusted accordingly. At anytime I can log onto ffgolf.org and check my current ranking. You may be interested to know that last time I looked I was 13th in the club (out of 98), but put this into the perspective of 23,454th in the whole of France (out of 141,000 odd). Some room for improvement.

At last we have done it: something we have been threatening to do since we arrived here. Now we live on mainland Europe we can travel to its corners, if we wish. We finally went to visit our friends Howard and Sue on the Algarve. (See my blog – Iberian Diary)

We had never visited mainland Spain before and headed for the bottom left-hand corner of France to cross the Pyrenees. The 935-mile journey there was relatively easy – around 900 of it on motorways so we averaged around 65 mph. Then we gained an extra hour when we crossed the border into Portugal (whose clocks are set to GMT). We enjoyed some good weather and some excellent company at Casa da Musica.

Tossa de Mar is not the high rise, lager lout resort you might imagine

Rather than drive the same route back we thought we’d see a bit more of the country so came back along the Mediterranean coast. We visited the Alhambra Palace at Granada (it rained) and some of the Costas (we had lunch on the beach). Our journey round Barcelona included two attempts to rob us. We had been warned about driving a foreign registered car in this area, so didn’t fall for the scams. First, I saw a large Audi coming up in my rear view mirror, but he didn’t pass and seemed to be behaving a bit erratically. Then he pulled alongside and a young lad in the passengers seat leaned out and gesticulated at my rear wheel. The car was cruising along happily enough at 125 kph, so I ignored him and he quickly accelerated off and took the next exit. About 5 minutes later a Mondeo came alongside and tooted. The passenger flashed what looked like a police badge and signalled for me to pull over. A swarthy dago (excuse the racism, he deserved it) carrying a fake FBI badge cuts no ice with me: he got the finger and a few well chosen Anglo-Saxon curses. They then dropped back and again pulled off at the next exit. Had 3 sets of friends not warned us that this sort of thing happens around large cities, we may well have found ourselves on the hard shoulder and the victims of thieves.

We followed the coast road, with spectacular views, back into France and visited Kate and Brian (from Stonesfield) in the Aude who retired to France at the same time as us. It was interesting to compare our experiences in these two different parts of this large country (known to the French as le hexagone – look at a map).

All the time we were away the grass took the opportunity to grow, so I’m off to mow it now. I’ll invade your inbox again in the summer.

À bientôt

du Barry

Iberian Diary

2007-04-03T01:43:00.000-07:00

IBERIAN DIARY

Tuesday 27th February 2007

Left home around 9 am and headed for the motorway to Bordeaux, then on to Bayonne and across the Pyrenees into Spain. It was amazing how much different it was! The French side was very rural, but the outskirts of San Sebastián was a huge urban sprawl of high-rise buildings – and lots more going up. We got to our selected overnight stop (Valadolid) by 4.30, so pushed on, eventually covering 900 km in the day. We were able to average around 100 kph (and 50 mpg), as the whole journey was motorway. There were lots of roadside hotels – until we wanted one! Eventually finished up going into the little, walled town of Ciudad Rodrigo and driving around. Most hotels were still closed but we stumbled across the Hotel La Llave del Campo, which had written on the side “Demandez-nous en français”; so we did. Pleasant enough and we dined in the restaurant.

Wednesday 28th – Monday 5th March

Ciudad Rodrigo was only 35 km from the Portuguese border so, after filling up with fuel (90 cents a litre) we crossed into Portugal and continued towards Lisbon. We gained an hour at this point, putting our watches back to GMT. The new motorway from Lisbon to the Algarve is fantastic with lots of viaducts flying over valleys and great views. Cost 20€ plus.

Got to Howard and Sue’s by 2.45. The extension to Casa da Musica is very well done and a wonderful improvement to the property. Settled into our en-suite accommodation.

Had a great few days here. Went to the beach at Quarteira. Visited and had lunch with Terry & Barbara. Lunch at Oliveira’s. Went to gypsy market and Loulé’s indoor market (revamped) for some pottery. Had breakfasts outside and sunbathed by the pool.

Tuesday 6th

Left Casa da Musica after breakfast and took the motorway into Spain. Arrived at Granada mid afternoon and went straight to the Alhambra to get our bearings. It’s described as “the most exciting, sensual and romantic of all European monuments”. We looked forward to our visit the next day. Later found Hotel Calderón at Cenes de la Vega just outside Granada. Had dinner at the hotel near the palace.

Wednesday 7th

Woke up to find it raining. Didn’t look like much so didn’t even bother with an umbrella when we got to the Alhambra Palace. We were amongst the first visitors with an entry time of 9.30 for the Palacios Nazaríes. The internal decoration, stone carvings and tiles are stunning, but by the time you get to the fourth or fifth room you feel a little punch drunk with it and it becomes harder to be impressed. One of the most striking sights – The Court of Lions – was being restored, so we didn’t get to see that. While in the palace the rain started in earnest. Wandering around the site seeing the Alcazaba, the Generalife and the beautiful grounds, we just got wetter and wetter. All the photographs I took are dull and we never saw the snow-capped Sierra Nevada as a backdrop. Perhaps we’ll come back, one fine day.

So we left around midday and set off towards Barcelona. The weather didn’t improve and we drove through low cloud (with all fog lights ablaze), again missing some great views. Then the wind started, blowing down form the mountains, creating dust storms. We drove past Benidorm: a sight to behold, with high-rise hotels, one shaped like a rocket ship. We considered spending the night there to see a little more of it, but it was still early and we had a long way to go to Barcelona (900 km).

Around 6.30 we pulled off the motorway to search for a hotel. We searched two small towns without success and got back on the autovia and pushed on towards Valencia. Heading into the city looked rather daunting so again we searched some small nearby towns, notably Torrent and Monserrat; again no luck. We stopped at a restaurant and asked (with the aid of the phrase book). We were directed back into Torrent (where we’d already spent an hour looking). Once there I asked for help at a pharmacy. The pharmacist spoke French and sent us to a hostale. When we found it, it was full. The receptionist sent us to a neighbouring town. The hotel there was full too. Their receptionist phoned through to the Hotel Lido at Vedat de Torrent and reserved us a room there. We had failed to follow the signs to this hotel an hour or more earlier. This time we made it and checked in at 9.30 – three hours after our search began. It was an excellent hotel and we were glad to get something to eat and collapse into bed.

Thursday 8th

The wind was still with us the following morning and driving was difficult, but not as bad for us as for lorry drivers. We saw several that had been blown over. Our journey towards Barcelona on the autovia included two attempts to rob us. We had been warned about driving a foreign registered car in this area, so didn’t fall for the scams. First, I saw a large Audi coming up in my rear view mirror, but he didn’t pass and seemed to be behaving a bit erratically. Then he pulled alongside and a young lad in the passengers seat leaned out and gesticulated at my rear wheel. Our car was cruising along happily enough at 125 kph, so I ignored him and he quickly accelerated off and took the next exit. About 5 minutes later a Mondeo came alongside and tooted. The passenger flashed what looked like a police badge and signalled for me to pull over. A swarthy dago carrying a fake FBI badge cuts no ice with me: he got the finger and a few well chosen Anglo-Saxon curses. They then dropped back and again pulled off at the next exit. Had 3 sets of friends not warned us that this sort of thing happens around large cities, we may well have found ourselves on the hard shoulder and the victims of thieves. We went on to make a complete tour of the inner ring road. We didn't know where we wanted to get off or where we were heading. After the previous night’s experience, we thought that our chances of taking a turning off into the city and finding a nice hotel with secure parking within walking distance of a Metro station were close to zero. Basically, we were under-prepared and felt outside our comfort zone. So we got back on the motorway and headed north. We decided to do something we are more familiar with and went to the Costa Brava. The weather there was warmer and sunnier and the wind subsided. We finished up at the Hotel Excelsior at Lloret de Mar. The resort was much smaller and nicer than I had expected, although there were discos and casinos in the roads behind the front. No doubt in the high season it is heaving with holidaymakers, but in early March there are many pensioners around – many no doubt coming towards the end of a long, winter stay. So we fitted in well!

Friday 9th

We took the coastal road on to Tossa de Mar, which was probably even nicer than Lloret. We bought ourselves a picnic and eat this on the beach reading our books and soaking up some warm sunshine.

Continued on to France via a mix of the coast road and motorway. Made the border crossing on the coast. The border post was long since deserted so we ignored the STOP signs. The wind returned. Made a short stop at Banyuls-sur-Mer then continued along coast to Argelès-sur-Mer where we bokked into the Hotel Astoria, described as “carefully renovated … in flowery surroundings”. It was run by a German couple who, we thought, were former hippies. All the rooms were bright colours – ours was a deep blue and the dining room was orange. The flowery surroundings didn’t seem to relate to the grounds, but to the flowery wallpaper on the ceiling of the bathroom.

It was nice to be back “home” and able to speak the language, having struggled with Portugese and Spanish for the last couple of weeks. Had a great meal in a small restaurant in the town that evening and were able to tell the waiter how much we’d enjoyed it.

Saturday 10th – Sunday 11th

We had most of Saturday to kill, so had a bracing walk along the promenade in the morning. The wind was still very strong, but the sun was out and there were good views across to the snow-capped Pyrenees. Then we went on to Canet-en-Rousillion, where we had a great family holiday in 1989. The beach is vast and there has been considerable development over the last 18 years. On to Narbonne and spent the afternoon exploring the town. Then arrived at Kate and Brian’s house in Canet d’Aude as planned at 6 pm. They came to live in France at the same time as we did, so it was interesting to compare our experiences. They are very involved in their French town and have little contact with ex-pats. They belong to the third-age group, where Brian is i/c son et lumière, he plays petanque with the locals and Kate is a member of the quilting group.

There’s a lot of land with their house and much work to do there! They’ve been working on the house and putting in a swimming pool (with a removable cover); so can now concentrate on the garden.

We were able to enjoy watching England beat France in the 6 Nations on their 40-inch television after lunch on Sunday.

Monday 12th

Left after breakfast and headed home on the A61/62. Ran out of motorway near Agen and most of the remaining 130 km was on single carriageway. Arrived at Leclerc at Ribérac for shopping at 3pm and safely home by 5.

Total distance driven 4,100 km.