Bad Language

We have to be honest. When we came over here to live in 2002, we over-estimated, by a considerable margin, our abilities with the French language. True, we had both done a year on a fairly intensive conversation course with the Alliance Française in 1990 but thereafter we had limited our use of French to holidays. It has to be said that sailing through three our four weeks of holiday each year, when the most complicated thing you have to do is order two beers, is no preparation for the demands of living here.

Imagine the things you have to do in the course of your life wherever you live. These will probably include shopping; getting your car repaired; dealing with your bank; responding to the demands of the Inland Revenue and your local authority; explaining your needs to builders, plumbers and electricians and trying to understand their explanations as to why it’s not as easy as that; visiting the doctor and the dentist; ‘phoning your ISP help-line to seek assistance from some spotty teenager who understands IT but not people. Now, think about the French or Spanish or German you learned at school and imagine how you’d cope.

By comparison with many of the British people we encounter, we were pretty well fixed when we arrived. We never cease to be amazed by the number of people who come out here to make their permanent home – and it must be noted that this is not Paris or Lyon where you stand a good chance of finding French people only too pleased to speak to you in English. This is deep, rural France where almost no-one speaks a foreign language - without a word of French and without any intention of learning. Leaving aside the communication needs listed above, isn’t it polite to try to speak to the native inhabitants in their own language? And bless them, they love it when you do, no matter how badly you do it.

Well of course our French has improved greatly since we came here and we both claim to think in French now. No longer do we stand outside a shop rehearsing what we’re going to say before entering, although sometimes we wish we had. But there is a downside to this. We find that increasingly we’re losing our English vocabulary faster than we’re replacing it with the French. So now we find ourselves struggling to communicate in not one language but two.

Right, I’d better go down to that room where the cooker is and switch on the thing that boils water so we can have a nice container of tea. Arrivederci.

Daily Bread

Think about France and sooner or later you visualize the baguette. Like hoopy T-shirts, twirly moustaches and Gauloise cigarettes, the baguette is an icon of French life.

Let’s face it, the French eat a lot of bread and it is a very important aspect of French life. There are even laws governing bread and baking. For example, there is a law which states that fresh bread must be available for purchase in every commune (roughly the equivalent of a parish) a certain number of days each week. A further law requires that each boulangerie must close for at least one day each week.

The baguette (with its bigger siblings) represents only one of the many sorts of bread widely available in France. Pain de Campagne (a coarser white bread), Pain de Seigle (rye), Pain au Cinq (or six or dix) Céréales, Pain Complet (wholemeal) are only some of the bread varieties, which come in a dizzying number of shapes and sizes, available in most boulangeries. If in your country you’re used to buying your bread from the supermarket where you live, or if you buy one of the mass-produced national brands, you may have slipped into thinking that bread is homogenous, that wholemeal bread is more or less the same wherever you buy it, that one baker’s white loaf is much like another’s. Not a bit of it. There is a noticeable difference in the ouput of different boulangers and each attracts his fiercely loyal customers as well as vehement critics.

Sadly, the availability of much cheaper bread in supermarkets, together with the reluctance of younger people to opt for a career which involves rising in the small hours of the morning six days each week and working until mid-afternoon, means that the number of boulangeries falls each year. To fulfil the law governing the availability of bread, communes have to arrange for mobile bread shops to visit several times a week or for bread to be delivered to a Depot such as the local bar.

Of course, the French aren’t the only bread fanatics in the world. I’m reminded that the Welsh are so obsessed with the output of one baker that they sing a song about it at virtually every rugby international. You may have heard it :

Bread of Evans
Bread of Evans
Feed me ‘til I want no more…..

Well I must finish now. I’ve got to bake a loaf in the bread machine!

A Shared Obsession

It’s been quite wet here recently: 44mm of rain fell during one particularly moist 24-hour period last Thursday/Friday.

I write this not because I think you will have any particular interest in the climatic conditions in our part of the Limousin at the end of the second week in September. Rather, it’s because I am British and obsessed by the weather, unlike our French neighbours. Right? Wrong!

Before leaving the UK for France at the beginning of 2002, we believed that the weather was a peculiarly British obsession. In the UK we are always telling ourselves that we usually open any casual conversation with comments about the weather and that we are unusual in that. Certainly, nothing in our many holidays in France had led us to believe that French people are similarly obsessed. In retrospect, it seems likely that because most of our holidays were in southern France, we gained a false impression. After all, on the Côte d’Azur, other than “It’s turned out nice again,” there’s usually not much to say.

We were soon disabused of our misconception when we arrived here. Apart from the language difference, we could be anywhere in Britain when it comes to weather obsession. If casual encounters in the street don’t begin with a commentary of the weather, they soon get there. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, we get a lot of weather here. Summers are hot, winters are cold, very cold, (and long) and rainfall is quite high. Because ours is the first high ground – we’re at an altitude of 431 metres – the moist winds from the Atlantic encounter, we get about a metre (39 inches in old money: think ‘Manchester’) each year. So, generally there is plenty to talk about.

The second reason is the general uselessness of French weather forecasts. Meteo France, in common with much of the French establishment, appears not to recognise the existence of those parts of the country that are not (a) Paris, (b) the major towns like Lyon, Bordeaux and Marseilles or (c) the coast. Add to that the absence of forecasts for the period between midnight and 8 a.m. and the general incompetence of both the forecasters and TV weather presenters and you can imagine that whatever the weather is, it’s a bit of a surprise to everyone around here.

Well, it’s a lovely day so I’d better get out into the garden and do something productive. Of course, according to the Meteo France website it’s currently pouring outside. No wonder we talk about the weather a lot here!

Our Opening Shot

After years of publishing three or four newsletters a year for friends and family we've now decided to join the information age. In this blog we will share some of our impressions and experiences.

Welcome to Life in the Middle of Nowhere.