One snowy day last winter, tramping through the white fields under a grey sky, the walkers of St Dié were all reminiscing about the bright colours and sunshine of Marrakech. They spoke with the proprietary air of ex colonialists. They’d all been there, and were amazed that we hadn’t. “Oh, you simply must go there!” However, “the police are very nasty”, was neighbour Pierre Laine’s reaction to our projected trip. “Like Algeria. I was there in the war”. One of his lengthier pronouncements!

We were curious as to how being part of an all-French package tour would influence our perceptions. Isn’t it wonderful the way the French spontaneously applaud when a plane lands! A real breaking of the tension and celebration. Then at passport control the queuing passengers left the “confidentiality“ distance normally reserved for banks, so no-one could hear vicious interrogations. Our passports received the first stamps they’d had in many years (most of the French passengers seemed to travel on their identity cards). On arrival at the four star Hotel Marrakech the tour representatives confiscated our return tickets (to be ransomed on the last day by payment of hotel tabs). They assured us this would avoid extremely unpleasant “misunderstandings” with the police over stolen and sold passports and also that, despite the late arrival hour (11 pm), dinner would be served immediately. The entire hotel was dedicated to French guests – and us. Continue reading →

Everyday life in Entre-deux resumed as normal (though what is normal?) at the beginning of February. John had returned early in January , but I’d stayed on in Nottingham after Christmas until my mother was making really good progress after her unpleasant bout of cystitis which had caused memory loss. Thank you to everyone who kept up my morale (and hence hers) with phone calls and visits. You’ll be glad to hear that she’s doing well and seems to have regained most of her old acuity.

After December’s candlelight and illuminated outdoor trees, January and February can seem very dull and grey here. A time for hibernation. The underfloor heating envelops us in warmth, the barn is stocked with logs and wine, and the shelves are temptingly full of books – old favourites and newly purchased. To which should be added TV and all the new information resources at our disposal: the new, faster computer, networked older computers, and the broadband link. These latter have been providing John with car reviews (but no decision). There are times when we really miss a large car with versatile extra seating or luggage space. Our Yaris, Snowy, has coped with our great move, but was originally chosen as a small second car. Sometime perhaps, Tintin will arrive?

We have also been reading up about Marrakech. Last Sunday was dull and grey, my mother seemed stable, and we’d long been wanting to visit Morocco Last year’s plans seemed inadvisable after the Casablanca bomb and with the Iraq war looming. So it was an exciting moment on Sunday when John found and booked us a last minute French package. We fly out from the regional Metz/Nancy airport on Wednesday. “Do not engage in political discussion” advises one web-site. And the guide books we hastily ordered from Amazon offer dire warnings about faux guides. But it will be interesting staying at a hotel geared up for French tourists – the food at least should be good! Watch this space. Continue reading →

Candles: years ago John bought some large “church” candles from a small shop in Loughborough, and stored them in his workshop here. Two of them provided our sole lighting in the farmhouse in December 1999, when the “tempest” brought down all the power lines for miles around. And on Saturday 8th November we lit another on the night John’s mother died. She had been quietly courageous for over ten years as she endured the spread of cancer. But after the death of John’s father eighteen months ago, she was ready to join him. Sunday, 9th November would have been his birthday. It was also Remembrance Sunday. We were so glad that we’d last seen her only a couple of weeks earlier when we visited in October. The scented candle flame burned steadily for several days until we set put for England for her funeral.

As we often remark, when you walk through the hills and forests around the farmhouse, you come across frequent unexpected reminders of the conflicts which have ravaged this tiny corner of Europe. On Remembrance Sunday we drove along a small road we had never explored; the map showed it winding up the hillside above the small village of Lusse, then stopping at the grazing pastures on top of the high ridge overlooking Alsace. A perfect place to catch the last of the autumn forest colours. We drove through Lusse, through the last hamlet of Trois Masons (which has a tiny chapel, more than three houses, and a garden with mechanical water-driven fantasy contraptions) and past the huntsmen in trilby hats (taking liquid refreshment at their hunters’ hut, Sunday being a permitted hunting day). We parked at the top where the road ran out. Shafts of sunlight lit up the autumn leaves and forest tracks. A small notice on a tree identified the spot as “Gare Lussehof, 820m”. We wished that we had our large dictionary with us to find a secondary meaning for “gare”, as this seemed too deserted and inaccessible a spot for a railway station. An equally small notice high up on another tree shed some light, labelling Le Tacot, where a certain M. Jean Joseph had discovered traces of the Lordonbahn narrow gauge line which ran, during the 1914-1918 war, between Villé and Wissembach to supply the German troops. A third tree was labelled “Terminus téléphérique “Eberhardtbahn” venant du Petit Rombach”. The internet has so far provided pictures of Lordonbahn locomotives, but I would like to find someold photos of the cable car from Petit Rombach. It is hard to visualise the substantial engineering projects to put in place for defences on the mountainous eastern border between France and Germany. Continue reading →

“Of course,” observed my neighbour to our left rather patronisingly, “you would only find this in the countryside”. “This” was an awning beneath the trees with a huge trestle table littered with the remains of crudités, barbecued sausages, pork chops, and empty wine bottles. On wooden benches round it, gesticulating with their plastic forks or shouting for more mustard or bread, the pensioners of Sainte Marguerite were putting the world to rights, and speculating as to where the approaching huge black cloud would release its rain. In the background was a shady fishing pool inherited by one of organisers of the Thursday gym, scrabble and other social events. The lunch started with a bracing (wine, port, rum, and fruit juice) punch (!) around mid day and was drawing to a conclusion by 4.30 when we left. It was designed as a bucolic “prolongation” of the long summer holidays, before the start this week of the winter programme of activities. However, so successful is that village’s programme of activities, that surrounding villagers (like ourselves) participate, as do some elegant “ladies who dine” from St Dié. These ladies are distinguishable at gym session by their shiny leotards (as opposed to our leggings) and at table by their linen jackets and heavy jewellery (whereas fleeces and tracksuits were the village attire).

The conversation round the table got louder and more animated as the meal progressed. After huge slabs of brie, generous portions of charlotte, and black coffee in plastic cups, various odd bottles of home-distilled concoctions were passed around the men – John sampled a plum eau-de-vie. Then an accordion was produced and the singing and dancing started – and even conga chain. One of the St Dié ladies whispered disdainful comments to her friends after being pressed to dance by a flushed villager. It was whilst those at table linked arms and sang lustily, swaying in unison from side to side, that our bench collapsed. Despite my undignified descent with it, I was delighted to see my patronising neighbour on her back waving her legs in the air. Of course it could only happen in the countryside! Continue reading →

Most of our recently acquired French vocabulary seems to come from DIY emporia (John) and Scrabble sessions (Helen). However “canicule” has come from bitter experience! For anyone who fears that we might have dropped them off our mailing list, or for those who anticipate that we have been off exploring exciting, remote areas, we should explain that our silence has more mundane roots. The first two weeks of August were too scorchingly hot to contemplate any action, and so there was no news. All communication was reduced to the one liner: “nothing to report apart from temperatures of 40 degrees”.

Do not think that we were just being feeble. And yes, we know that you were experiencing record temperatures in the UK, so were suffering too. But you have to add the effects of those first two weeks in August here to those of the preceding two months. Water supplies were already alarmingly low in Entre-deux-Eaux in early June, when the mayor banned watering, filling swimming pools, and washing cars. During July Farmer Duhaut was having to take pumped stream water and supplementary feed to the cows in the fields as the grass was too dry to be nourishing. On the plains of Alsace, the trees were already looking scorched and starting to shed their leaves (in an attempt, an informed friend pointed out, to conserve water). The last forest walk that was bearable was to the attractively named Hunters’ Fountain in the midst of the forest. Sadly the fountain was just dry mud. Continue reading →

As I start this newsletter, thunder is rolling round the valley. I am torn between longing for rain now for the parched fields and gardens, and hoping that the storm will pass before John’s Ryanair flight back from Stansted tonight (following a short pre-birthday visit to his mother).

The mayor had just delivered his ban on using the commune’s rapidly dwindling water supply for gardens, cars, and swimming pools when we last wrote. So since then the value of the old ways has been fully demonstrated. Most of the old farmhouses still have their alternatives to tap water. We, for example, have two underground tanks beneath the first and third barns, filled from the roof down-pipes, which would have been used for the animals. Other old houses have stone troughs alongside the road filled from underground sources (even before the drought one old lady regularly filled her buckets and did her washing at her trough). Monsieur Laine in his more modern house has in the past weeks enlarged his water hole filled by a muddy hillside stream, and now pumps water from it for their garden and animals. So our evening ritual now includes pumping water from one of our underground cisterns into buckets and cans to water the vegetables as the sun sets. All visitors, including my 92-year old mother, have been roped in to help at various times.

Leisure activities in the Vosges department have also been affected. At the beginning of July a departmental edict prohibited fishing and swimming in three-quarters of the rivers and streams of the Vosges (salmon streams). Oddly enough canoeing and kayaking is not affected. Nor is economic and agricultural activity. The huge wood-yard piles of tree trunks, which fell or were felled following the tempest of December 1999, continue to be sprayed night and day by water jets, being kept damp and awaiting sawmill capacity. And watering of the corn fields is still permitted, as is fishing and bathing in the glacial lakes and reservoirs. Continue reading →

It isn’t just the occasional strikes (teachers and public servants) and the holiday-makers (Dutch caravans are on the move in the sunshine) which currently make the villages and towns seem full of idle people. It’s also the great public holidays of Ascension Day and Pentecost which have added to the bustle and festivity.

Ascension Day, a Thursday, hummed with the sound of the baler on the huge field immediately to the north of us and another to the south of the road in to Entre Deux Eaux. Farmer Dominique Duhaut and his farming partner Olivier had cut their hay a few days earlier, and our neighbour Pierre Laine had been roped in to help them turn it daily. But with storms forecast for the day after Ascension Day, it was all hands to the tractors to bale the hay and encase it in plastic (white this year, followed, when the white ran out, by a tasteful shade of pale green). However, they and the patisserie shops were the only people working flat out on this public holiday. In Nottingham it was tough luck if your rubbish collection day fell on a public holiday. So on Ascension Day we weren’t quite sure when our bins (including that of our departed visitors) would eventually be emptied. Our plastic bags used to be collected by the commune employee on his tractor and trailer, but we now have a commercial firm, who prefer real dustbins (on a canoeing trip a few years ago John and Alistair fished our wheelie bin out of a Staffordshire canal, cleaned off the slime, and we used it as a large suitcase in our next car trip out here!). I was amazed when I looked out of the bathroom window at 11.20 p.m. the following evening to realise that the noise I’d heard was created by the dustmen. They waved cheerfully. (I now have my answer to John’s question “But why do you want a bathroom blind – who can possibly see in apart from the cows in the field?”.) Continue reading →

Last week we returned from two weeks in the UK. It was on the same date as we made the Great Move just a year ago. We’d got up and left Broadstairs early with the intention of catching the 7.45a.m. boat and were feeling slightly odd about this, until we turned on the car radio for the 7 a.m. news. This provided us with more serious grounds for unease. We were by then only fifteen minutes from Dover Harbour. The newscaster reported that another French strike over proposed pension changes meant that Calais Harbour was closed until that afternoon (as were French airports). Whilst I had some sympathy with the workers, this was rather a blow, as we needed to be back in Entre-deux-Eaux within 24 hours for those other French workers – the kitchen installers.

We continued the journey to Dover harbour. The sun was shining, the lambs were frolicking on the North Downs, Dover castle looked magnificent against the blue sea – and the lorries were filling up the available quayside waiting lanes. Not many cars in sight, though. Our hearts sank. At the P &O booth, the nice attendant got our booking on screen, smiled and said “Oh. You’ll be alright, I’ll arrange a voucher for you for the Channel Tunnel. Just return to the travel centre and collect it on your way out”. Amazing! Was this the reward for frequent travellers or for being stockholders (even more bemused as we’d only actually paid £7 for our open-dated return trip, having used up our accumulated motor points – which, in itself was something which has not, for quite a few years, been possible for stockholder rather than full brochure fares) ? We were off like a shot, after passing Go and collecting our voucher, we drove along the cliff top towards Folkestone, and were driving onto a train which edged into the tunnel only 45 minutes after our ferry would have left. It was all very efficient and peaceful. Who remembers the more aggressive strikes with farmers and tractors blockading Calais? (And were those firms with defrosting refrigerated lorries ever finally compensated?) Continue reading →

Greetings on this sunny Easter Sunday. For weeks the shops have been full of chocolate eggs, hens, rabbits, hares and fish. And Jean-Robert’s patisserie shop window also includes his pride and joy, a huge and hideous chocolate racing car (which will no doubt be melted down, unsold, after Easter and turned into individual sweets). Traditions vary in Alsace and Lorraine (and we’re right on the border) as to who delivers the eggs. In Alsace it is the Easter hare who hides the eggs (traditionally hard boiled and hand painted) in gardens. But in Lorraine it is the Church bells which leave their towers and go to Rome to visit the Pope (which is why you don’t hear bells ringing in the days leading to Easter Sunday). They then return on Easter Sunday to their own village carrying the Easter eggs.

As I walked back from the village shop with the newspaper this morning, our neighbour, Danielle Laine, in a smart lime green tweed suit, came bounding out of her house. “I thought, as I saw you going to the village, that you were on your way to mass,” she said. “It’s not just Easter, it’s the golden wedding anniversary of Jacqueline and Roger. Come quickly and join in”. We only have three services a year in the old church in Entre-deux-Eaux (the remainder being shared between the post-war churches in Saulcy and St Leonard). I’d quite forgotten that it was “our” turn, let alone that it was a golden wedding anniversary. The village electrician and his wife, M. and Mme Fresse, who used to own our house, had five daughters (who are also cousins of Danielle Laine), the second being Jacqueline. We’d met her twelve years ago at the formal signing of the house contract between ourselves and all five inheritors, and later on in the afternoon when she and her husband and various other relatives arrived to bear off battered furniture and planks of wood that they’d suddenly remembered were family heirlooms. Jacqueline and Roger had been married fifty years ago at Entre-deux-Eaux church, and today’s mass was celebrating that. So although I wouldn’t have recognised them again after twelve years, I did feel that the old family house should be represented. So I hastily changed out of jeans and into a suit and high heeled shoes (dusty in the cupboard, unworn since our arrival) and drove back to the village. Half the village was at the Church (which must have heartened the priest who is used to an audience of ten), and Jacqueline and Roger had special seats of honour at the front. The Resurrection and fidelity in marriage were linked in a masterly way in the short address, holy water was sprinkled on all the congregation, and mass celebrated by the faithful few. As we came out onto the steps and looked out across the village, the bells pealed out long and loud (Having, obviously, delivered their eggs earlier.)

“Fifty years is a long time”, I mused. “Well, I shan’t make it” said our neighbour Gerard sadly (his wife having run off with a dentist). “There are three marriages which have lasted fifty years in this village”, announced Mme Laine, as she passed John and I in the evening, “my parents, my uncle and aunt (Jacqueline’s parents, who lived in your house) and finally Jacqueline and Roger themselves”. (There must be others, surely, outside of her family?).

The other half of our marriage had meantime spent Easter morning in his dusty old overalls sorting out last bits of wiring in the kitchen via the attic. Our many visits to Cuisine Schmidt (last newsletter) resulted in our finally placing an order for base units (mainly huge gliding drawers), cooker, hob, oven, and work-surface. This must be our greatest expenditure since the boiler and underfloor heating. Poor Muriel, the kitchen designer, was too exhausted to look relieved when we finally signed the contract (all forty sheets of it – every page of two copies!). Various visitors had successfully taken our minds off this investment for a couple of weeks, but with their departure, John’s mind reverted to wiring and plumbing diagrams. Our electrician came over last Sunday to discuss changes necessitated by the new kitchen layout (his partner – small world – is a niece of Danielle Laine, so stopped off there with their toddler for a chat, whilst John and Fabrice talked wiring). We’d originally had to guess where we wanted the sockets for the dishwasher and oven when the wiring was put in a couple of years ago but they’ve ended up on completely different walls. And then there was the need for wiring for the extractor, under-shelf lighting, and different ceiling lighting. However, Fabrice, who always seems to be suffering from a heavy cold, is behind with the re-wiring for a shop due to open on 25th April having been off work for three weeks, so couldn’t do anything for us until the beginning of May, when we want to be in England. However, the chat clarified things for John, who has now completed the re-wiring himself. Nicola’s plumber has installed the copper pipes for the bottled propane gas for the hob (to keep in line with regulations), and John has plumbed in the water and waste pipes for the sink and dish washer. So all the plasterboard is back in place, ready for the joins to be plastered. A luxury would be to paint the walls and ceiling before the units arrive – if there’s time!

Some of our recent visitors were gravely concerned by the number of visits we make to IKEA in Strasbourg. They assure us that there is treatment available for addictions like this. However, we’ve been very pleased with the IKEA book shelving, wardrobes, and glass light shades that we’ve bought on various visits, not to mention the two red sofas which were delivered before breakfast on the morning critics were due to fly home). So it was with high expectations that we set out last Wednesday to select some ceiling spotlights for the new kitchen (which would enable John to position his wiring.) In the end we chose three fluorescent lights, which should give even better lighting from the sloping ceilings. So after Kitchen Installation Day on May 14th we should be able to eat food straight from the new kitchen (rather than food cooked in the old farmhouse kitchen and carried across two barns and upstairs to the new dining room). For that matter it may soon be warm enough to eat dinner outside on the new balcony (perhaps balcony is rather a posh word for the slab of un-tiled concrete without any railings – but it does have a lovely view of the sunsets! And it’s been warm enough for lunch out there the last week. And it will be prettier with a few geraniums and bay trees).

Not all our “retail therapy” involve the international chains like IKEA and Cuisine Schmidt. There is also shopping village-style. The village shop, which nearly died a few years ago when the old proprietors retired, now flourishes – more on the bar takings than shop sales, I suspect. A few elderly ladies still pedal up laboriously on their push-bikes, take their time over their weekly purchases and gossip, and have their euros counted out and explained by the vivacious shop-keeper. And the shop keeper must have heard somewhere that the English like to talk about the weather, as she now usually tells me what weather is predicted (either in the newspaper I’m about to buy or on last night’s TV). But for every person in the shop, there are four or five men in the bar (and yes, it does seem to be all men). The shop no longer runs a bread delivery to remote parts, but there is a weekly fish van, whose nearest regular stopping place is outside Danielle Laine’s. Flashy mattress and linen salesmen call from time to time, sounding like con-men. And Beatrice sells more patisseries from her old yellow van parked at weekly markets than she does from the St Die shop. When as I child, we lived three miles from the nearest shops, I remember the weekly excitement of the small battered van that called. I never knew how it’s owner’s name was spelt, but it sounded like Mister Geekie. He sold earthy potatoes, liquorice boot laces, mounds of spring greens, seed packets and sherbet dips. Those were also the days of onion sellers and knife grinders on bicycles and gypsies with little log baskets filled with primroses – not to mention the rag and bone man.

So has been a pleasure to discover the local modern French equivalents. The Red Cross collects old garments, children sell wild daffodils from the hillsides around Gérardmer and, on May 1st only, posies of lily of the valley, and most exciting of all there are several hardware vans that tour the villages. These hardware vans turned out to be enormous articulated lorries carrying huge stocks. The postman distributes their catalogue stamped with their nearest venue and date and time. Whilst our English visitors were with us, we had an unusual occurrence. Both enormous lorries were due in Saulcy on the same date and time! The men all bundled into one of the cars, and I leaped in at the last moment as I saw then setting off (this was man stuff, but I was allowed along as the more fluent French speaker). One lorry was spread-eagled in front of the Mairie, but the other was harder to find. Its scarlet bulk was wedged between old cars in a garage off the busy main road. It was a masterpiece of parking, and we wouldn’t have easily spotted it had it not been for its flamboyant scarlet livery patterned with yellow and blue spanners. Getting across the main road on a busy Sunday evening was another matter. Our purchases were most satisfactory. We bought an awning for the terrace and two garden arches and Alistair bought a case of spanners. Then in a rash moment John asked if I wanted to look at their weather vane. As we were by now major purchasers, the driver obligingly unpacked his boxed-up copper weather vane. This was perhaps not quite as fine as the hand-made-by-small-artisan one which I’d coveted months ago, but it was a tenth of the price and most handsome and gleaming. Next morning Alistair and John were to be seen on the workshop roof fixing the cock on the ridge and positioning the arrow and directional arms (disconcertingly spelling NOSE, rather than the NWSE pictured on the box). It’s very soothing to stand by the window watching it twist and turn, but I hope that it is never subjected to a wrenching gale like the Great Tempest of Boxing Day 1999.

Its been lovely having recent visitors from England and from Germany. The cheap Ryanair flights make popping over for a long weekend from Stansted, almost quicker than driving through the Black Forest and over the German / French border at the Rhine. And perhaps we should point out that the highlights of their visits were more varied than just a trip to two hardware lorries! With our Nottingham visitors, my main memories are of a Saturday investigating (in the rain) the sculptures on the storm-devastated Col de Mandray, walking (through the snow) and picnicking above the frozen Lac Blanc, wandering through the sculptures, paintings and altar pieces of the Musee Unterlinden in Colmar and ending up sipping coffee outside (in the late afternoon sunshine) in a Colmar square. A day of all-weathers! Then there was the Sunday morning stroll for the newspaper (and beyond), followed by lunch at the packed Auberge in Le Valtin, then the Art Exhibition at St Die Museum which included two of Nicola’s paintings. With all the hot weather, there wasn’t enough water in the rivers to make canoeing interesting (or dangerous), but the shady forest walks were agreeable, if strenuous. Who will forget the views from the orientation table at the Sapin Sec (or Alistair hanging dangerously from the tree at the summit – surely not the original dry pine?). Or scrunching through the crisp autumn-brown beech leaves to the foot of the Nideck cascade (in the forests where a mediaeval Saint Florentin lived alone with the wild animals, and where robber baron castles were built on rocky pinnacles).

And of course there were the long leisurely evening meals over which John had been slaving (voluntarily) whilst we were often out gallivanting. And then there were the expeditions with Margrit – several of them re-visiting places she’d previously enjoyed, like the book village at Fontenoy la Joute and the Celtic hill site at La Bure (another lovely forest walk). The visit to the local farm museum was a success as was the Monday lecture on Byzantium (as Margrit is an ex Latin teacher with a good historical background and could date all the Emperors mentioned).

Since our visitors left, one final piece of retail therapy has entailed a surprising amount of work. John can never resist a free, no-obligation competition and he’s often been lucky in draws. So it was hardly surprising when he won second prize in a beauty contest ( or was it a garden centre) draw for which he, Nicola, and I all submitted identical entries; however, justice was done as it was he who’d looked up the answers to the three questions about the early history of the Truffauts who founded the garden centre and completed the entry forms. I think second prize was best, the first prize being a year of beauty treatments, the second a year of garden plants (four quarterly vouchers totalling 300 euro), and the third a year of jams. The garden plants have to be chosen each season and the voucher spent in one visit. For Spring John chose a quince tree, a thornless blackcurrant, and some herbs, and I helpfully added an old fashioned scented rambling rose and some packets of sweet pea, French marigold, sweet William, rocket and dwarf bean seeds, and some potting compost. This prize has resulted in the total re-organisation of the herb garden. All the black plastic has vanished, metre square plots surrounded by paths created and the herbs divided and replanted in orderly squares. I’m always taken by the French potagers with their colourful flowers surrounding the vegetable plots and strips. So I was rather surprised when Farmer Duhaut (who’d come to make peace and agree which bits of our meadows he could cut and graze this year) asked whether the English always made so many paths round their plants. Mme Laine was more understanding when I pointed out the advantages of the cook being able to gather fresh herbs in his carpet slippers in all weathers! The arches from the hardware van are in place down the central path, and the rambling rose planted out (in one of the herb squares, with some strawberries).

Planting out the blackberry was not a simple matter of digging a hole, as the space intended for it still contained roots and the stump of a Fresse family Christmas tree that had grown huge in the middle of the vegetable plot and we’d felled five or six years ago. And we still have to agree a spot for the quince tree! However, in the meantime, I’ve also been able to take advantage of the light and sunny potting area which John has created for me behind the boiler in the middle barn. Sowing seeds in trays in there has felt like playing gardens! I’m not sure what we’ll want to buy in summer, though! And then there’s still the Autumn and Winter parts of the prize to come.

With all the work on the kitchen and garden involved as a consequence of our purchases / prize, it will be quite relaxing to leave it all behind for a week or so in England at the beginning of May. Exactly a year after we made the great move, it will be lovely to spend time with our mothers, Toby, and friends and contemplate with them our first year in the Vosges. We’ve also promised ourselves a few second-hand bookshop visits, culminating in a weekend in Hay-on Wye … we’ll soon be needing a trip over to IKEA for some more shelving!

Just imagine, by the time of the next newsletter, we’ll be into our second year here. A la prochaine!

A week or so ago, we were standing outside our elegant village hall. We were, accidentally, half an hour early for the great village event, the Accordéons de Nîmes, having thought the event started at 14.00. Now I’ve discovered that it’s usually a good idea to arrive early in time for social events anyway, as it gives you time to circulate the other participants, shaking hands with or kissing everyone you know. This happens before keep-fit and before the summer walks (and in fact it’s very disruptive if anyone arrives late for keep-fit, but can’t bear to forgo the ritual politeness). However, we realised how few of the village “ancients” we even recognised. Standing outside in brilliant sunshine, we greeted the former shop-keepers and were relieved when Danielle Laine and her sister, Giselle Duhaut, turned up. The change in the weather brought forth comments on spring having arrived – and they seem to have been true.

The hall, a lovely light, airy modern building with a high roof (supported by the laminated wood beams so often used here rather than metal joists) and pine clad ceiling, had been laid out with long tables. Some tables had names written on their paper tablecloths. Later it turned out that these were the tables which had been set aside for a large contingent from the neighbouring village of Mandray, most of whom arrived late, thus delaying the start. “Don’t know any of them”, sniffed Mme Laine, despite being married to someone who was born and brought up in Mandray. There seems to be a degree of rivalry between the two villages. However, Entre-deux-Eaux has a better village hall and so President of the Mandray group had proposed it to the Accordéons de Nîmes as a venue, and our Mayor had kindly offered to waive charges for such a cultural event for his community.

Marcel, our former shop-keeper, had been known far and wide for his accordion playing on Saturday nights in his village bar (the centre of village social life before the building of the village hall) and at weddings, and clearly the ancients of the village were expecting a jolly event, with plenty of dancing and drinking (with the bar staffed by the several ancient barmaids/organisers – after all, they had to cover cleaning and other costs).

After the Mandray contingent had been specially welcomed by the Voluminous Lady draped in black silk, velvet and chiffon and our Mayor had been thanked for generously donating the hall, the accordions (who included violin and percussion) broke into a foot-tapping medley to break the ice. The most sociable of the farmers’ wives and a lady-friend took to the dance floor, old village women circulated the tables taking orders for bottles of wine, squash, and coffees, and a party of children dressed and face-painted as clowns, tiger cowboys and a diminutive scarlet and black ladybird also arrived. The costumes were because it was also Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Carnival. The event seemed poised to be a great colourful social success.

But then the mood changed. Voluminous Lady clapped her hands and hissed, insisting on silence, as she introduced her young soloists, all of whom were medal winners and accordion or violin prodigies, and announced they would all be giving individual contributions. Baptiste, aged fifteen and three quarters, was particularly special, she announced, as his voice was still that of a soprano and he would give us a particularly beautiful rendering of Ave Maria, accompanied by his big sister. So Baptiste put down his violin and, with a soulful expression, took the microphone. The ancients of Entre-deux-Eaux continued, unmoved, to order their drinks and converse, despite appeals and ssshing noises from Vol. Lady. After all, Baptiste wasn’t an accordion, his half-strangled voice hit a few odd notes and anyway you couldn’t dance to Ave Maria. Partway through, Baptiste’s Big Sister, in a fit of artistic fury first thumped the piano keys, then stopped playing. Bar orders and chatting continued. Vol. Lady requested silence and no movement. The bar ladies continued to ferry drinks and collect money. The group President from Mandray stood up and imperiously told the country bumpkins of Entre-deux-Eaux that this was a concert and that they should be quiet, sit down, and appreciate the beautiful music in silence. This did not go down well. The reproved villagers glowered. The elderly barmaids were crimson and mortified. Baptiste resumed his soulful expression and his singing. The Mandray contingent applauded loudly, to make up for the peasants of Entre-deux-Eaux. After a while the clowns, cowboys, and ladybird started sliding on the floor, the visual highlight being when the scarlet ladybird swapped headgear with one of the clowns. Despite the earlier set-back, Baptiste was later prevailed upon to undertake the role of Carmen, though it was very hard, as he again looked soulful, to imagine him in a flounced skirt and with a rose between his teeth rather than as the bespectacled fat boy we can all remember from schooldays. The villagers were beginning to wonder about the promised dancing, as the interval approached. However, they’d paid their ten euros, so were going to make the most of it (and show Mandray that they could be cultured too). Fresh bottles of wine and crémant were ordered. We had no such qualms, and slipped out into the sunshine at half-time, muttering that we had a lot of outdoor things to get on with in the sunshine.

There are times when the highlights of our week seem to be the visits to local bricolages or DIY emporia. This week we seem to have been haunting the local pharmacy. “They’ll think we’re hypochondriacs”, I murmured as Snowy pulled up Pharmacie Barthelemy Bombarde (splendid name). But perhaps we’re just becoming integrated into the French way of life, which seems to involve large quantities of prescriptions. You can’t buy aspirin and the like in supermarkets – French pharmacists have a monopoly – so, if you have the time, it is easier to get a prescription from the doctor. There are no shops like Boots, only para-pharmacies which seem to sell slimming compounds and beauty products.

Nicola has experimented with various GPs including the rugby playing one who took out Toby’s stitches (following a painful encounter with a soap holder when he slipped in a shower) and the orchid fancying one in her village who always insisted on hugs from Nicola as part of his payment. However this doctor struck her as more serious, as his huge study is lined with medical books. You don’t need an appointment; as most GPs work on their own there is no receptionist unless it is the doctor’s wife. You can just turn up, ring the bell, usher yourself into the waiting room and wait for it to be your turn. (Who said the British were the masters of the queue system!). Actually, there are so few people in the waiting room that it isn’t a great problem deciding whose turn it is! We suspected sometimes the doctor might do as much waiting as the patients. But perhaps the two sunny days we chose were untypical, although one was only an hour into Monday morning surgery.

Doctor Tarralle’s study was huge and imposing with dark heavy furniture, his desk was like an old fashioned solicitor’s desk but littered with computer equipment, and his couch reposed in splendour in the middle of the floor, with illuminated panels for viewing X rays behind, and cupboards containing packages of common drugs (and there were indeed medical volumes on the glass fronted bookshelves). He spoke very quietly and very fast, and wrote prescriptions in a small, apparently neat hand (however he must have been to the usual doctors’ school of illegible handwriting, as later his prescription had to be passed around four assistants at the medical specimen analysis centre and then a phone call made to him for interpretation). It still feels very odd to hand over money at the end of a consultation, but he had his machine handy to scan our Carte Vitale, which will enable us to get an automatic refund! And consultations are unhurried with hardly any other patients waiting.

Following our visit to the centre specialising in X-rays, echograms, etc. (now there you do have to make an appointment and there are several receptionists and a maze of examination rooms), the conclusion is that there is no longer any trace of a kidney stone identified when John went for a check-up last March; he just has a bad back. Is that really good news for someone who enjoys DIY? However, after taking the x-rays back to Tarralle, he collected three more prescriptions (including the aforementioned one for urine tests) before passing Go, and will probably get a massage prescription next time round. We’ll need a new filing cabinet for our medical records; the x-ray plates are ours to keep – in France you can go to any GP so need to hold onto the evidence. And also a computerised medical accounts system will be needed to track our payments and repayments from CPAM (Social Security) and complementary medical insurers for the doctor’s, x-ray centre, medical analysis centre, and pharmacy bills. And the pharmacists now greet us as regulars!

In between haunting medical establishments and pharmacies, we’ve continued to make plans for the new kitchen. When Danielle Laine came with the lady selling accordion tickets, she prefaced the sales talk with, “I’ve come to look round”. I think she far prefers the heavy oak “rustic” look in furnishings to the light and airy birch/beech look that we have. But what left her speechless was the lack of a kitchen. It fully confirmed her long held opinion that the English do not know how to cook. Otherwise, how could John possibly cook down in the farmhouse kitchen and bring the food up on a tray? It must be inedible. In the days when she looked after the holiday lettings of the farmhouse, we used to bring her typically British presents – marmalade, pickled walnuts, Scottish shortbread, gingerbread. She never made any comments, but once when I asked if there was anything she’d like me to bring, she looked at Pierre and said as politely as possible, “well anything, except food – we didn’t like any of the English food, it’s too sweet for us” – which is surprising, given the sickly- sweet cream of the standard French Christmas log.

However, I think it was a casual visit John made to the new showrooms of Cuisine Schmidt (handily situated between our supermarket Cora and our builders’ merchants Gedimat), rather than Mme Laine’s distress at our lack of kitchen, that prompted our latest thoughts on a new kitchen. John was impressed by the extra-wide work surfaces and some of the fittings inside the Cuisine Schmidt units, especially the enormous smoothly gliding drawers variously adapted for foodstuffs, bottles, pans, and cutlery (no more rummaging at the back of low cupboards). We’ve already written about the difficulty in obtaining unit prices for shelving and other furniture, and Cuisine Schmidt’s catalogue and sales persons were no different. So before he dragged me in to look at the range of units, we decided that if the routine answers of “we’d need to come and measure up before we can give you a price” were given, despite John always having a plan with accurate dimensions in his pocket, that we would resign ourselves to the French way of doing things.
We were indeed pounced on by the young kitchen designer and salesperson, Murielle, as soon as we were inside the showroom doors, and again after we’d looked round, so we acquiesced to a visit to measure us up and propose a fully costed design. Thus it was that Murielle, accompanied by a bumptious young man who lectured John at length on how to Measure Up Properly (and survived to tell the tale), arrived a couple of days later to look at our blank space (well, perhaps not blank, as the floor was covered with John’s tools, though he had hastily done a lot of tidying up so that they could actually reach the walls to measure up). Murielle filled in her questionnaire about our requirements and a few days later we received a phone call to say that her proposals were ready.
When you see things in a 3D computer representation, you begin to see the things that won’t work well with the way you’re used to moving around a kitchen (in our case the master chef in front of a broad surface, with the washer-up/assistant peeler safely out of the way in a corner). As we suspected, the total came to a lot more than we wanted to pay. So negotiations started. The patron brought us coffee; a 7% discount was offered, John asked about the “magic prices” advertised for the next three weeks (one could hardly fail to notice in the entrance the dummy dressed as a fairy with a huge magic wand), but it is hard to see what the magic prices are when no starting price is given! So le Patron was consulted and offered 10% on the electrics and 20% on the fittings. We took the plan away to reflect upon and went back with more suggestions, which Murielle patiently incorporated. However the price hadn’t come down, as, despite removing the expensive upper shelving, we’d added other options. Poor Murielle began to look desperate as we said we’d continue to think about it. “But why can’t you decide now?” she pleaded, envisaging le Patron’s wrath as she yet again failed to sell us a kitchen. At one point the brash young man muscled in to give us his opinion on what we should buy – a rather counter-productive tactic. Exasperated, he looked John in the eye and demanded what his profession used to be, as if that would explain all. A vague response about IT did not satisfy him, a programmer or system analyst would not behave thus. However “chef de bureau” worked wonders and he nodded as if to say, “I thought as much”. It’s a bit hard to know how far to push the discount system – it’s not as obvious as haggling for carpets or trinkets in craft markets in India or Africa, where you get to know the rules as you go along. (And cabinet handles seem to be ridiculously priced compared with the same items at local bricolages.) Negotiations resume next week.
However, in all our preoccupations with tailor-made kitchen solutions, we haven’t entirely forsaken IKEA, and made a trip over the hills to order a couple of sofas, and to buy another light and a duvet cover. The sofas will be delivered mid-April. Unfortunately we’ll need a return trip as the duvet cover has been unusually very badly cut and sewn in some sweatshop in India.

Our UK plug mountain continues to grow. The number of electrical appliances John has had to fit with new plugs is surprising, indeed horrifying. John now reckons there are more than thirty standard UK plugs in the mountain; and that does not include non-reusable moulded plugs which have gone in the bin. Nor have the computers been converted – they still have UK plugs but are plugged into multi-way adapters with a French plug at the end. Then there are items like the mobile phone transformers which plug straight into a mains socket so will need plug adapters until they die. Recent unpacking and re-organisation of yet-to-be unpacked removal boxes has highlighted more appliances which will need re-plugging, including some for the new kitchen.

It seems very frivolous writing all this house furnishing stuff on the eve of a possible war, with the television on in the background, giving all the latest details of war preparations and diplomatic manoeuvring. However Nicola and I have not been entirely passive. We were contacted by Françoise, the organiser of the St Die anti-war march we went on, proposing that we took part in an interview with one of the local newspapers for International Women’s Day. We assumed that the focus would be on women’s attitudes to war against Iraq, so duly brushed up on our vocabulary for that. I felt that the insults of the British gutter press had bewildered the French (“why do they call Chirac a worm?”) and Nicola wanted to explain how she felt that the American public (including women!) were being brainwashed with fear tactics. We were thus surprised to be asked bland questions like “what differences do you notice between French women and the women in your country?”, “who is the woman you most admire?”. Françoise tried her best to focus the discussion back to the proposed war. However the next day’s half page report, which included interviews with a Venezuelan and a Russian woman who also live around St Die, was an odd and bland mixture of views, hardly mentioning the war, and unlikely to sway Bush or Blair should they chance upon “Liberté de l’Est” in their perusals of the world press. (And it was not a flattering photo! Hopefully no one will have recognised me).

Given all the difficulties and days of delay that Leila faced in trying to fly from Stansted to Strasbourg, it was ironic that her flight with Zöe from Heathrow to Bangkok went so smoothly. They’d prudently booked a hotel for the first couple of nights, but soon met up with seasoned back-packers and at the end of the first day bumped into some former university friends of Zöe, found a cheaper hotel, and planned the next leg of their journey, southwards by bus and boat to the island of Ko Pha Ngan. It sounds as if they’re thoroughly enjoying the beaches there!

It’s now getting dark. Our new sitting room has windows which face south and west and we have a spectacular view of the mountains blue against the red sunset. Au revoir!